the making of, by greg allen
Yesterday Paul Soulellis posted “I feel so free,” the opening track of Madonna’s Confessions, time-stretched 800%, and now he’s posted the whole album. It runs 8.5 hours. I’m less than an hour into it, and Stretched Confessions is already album of the year.
Which makes the 500mb 01-Stretched-Confessions-800.m4a file of the year.
Muji announced a car collaboration with Nissan in 2001, the 「MUJI Car 1000」.
The Muji Car 1000 was a debadged and stripped down 2-door version of the Nissan March, with the smallest engine, an automatic, steel wheels, and A/C, available in one color: white. It was sold only online at muji.net, in a limited edition of 1,000.
According to the seller of this Muji Car 1000 in Kanagawa, though, there were only around 170 actually sold. And this is one. It’s in pretty remarkable condition for a 25-yo car, with only 100k kilometers. At 710,000 yen, it’s 2-3x more expensive than comparable Nissans, but still only like $US4,400.
If you’re a Muji compleatist who likes extremely basic, internal combustion cars which exist only as marketing experiments, with only the thinnest veneer of design innovation, but that will only get rarer over time, this may be your best chance.
Visited Hiroshima #neverforget
There’s a house I pass on the way to my mother’s, which had an incredible front yard. When the guy’s wife died, he apparently threw himself into the garden they’d tended together. For years he crafted a kind of freehand Chinese landscape in front of his 1960s ranch house. There were these incredible trees, some kind of pine, I don’t know, very long, droopy branches like willows, windswept like Van Gogh cypresses, with long-needles, and then some rocks and bursts of tall grasses. It felt a bit idiosyncratic, but an obvious masterpiece, especially amidst the generic lawns or Sketch-up xeriscaping.
Then the house went up for sale, and the buyer ended up scraping the whole thing. Whatever’s there now is irrelevant, and I wonder how many people driving by even remember what was created—and what was lost.
I thought of that garden when I saw this bonsai forest in the auction of Jonathan and Margaret Chen’s collection at LA Modern. JF Chen is one of the biggest, most influential antique and furniture dealers in the modernist world. The Chens seem to be going strong, inshallah, and their store on Melrose is in their daughters’ capable hands, but it does seem like they’re paring back.
Maybe this bonsai forest is a product, assembled and cultivated by Chen’s bonsai whisperer to the stars. Or maybe it’s been on the back deck for forty years, I don’t have the skill to tell. But I do feel like buying a bonsai tree is a multigenerational commitment of care, like taking in someone’s dog–if dogs lived to be a two hundred years old. And this is a whole forest. The chances of someone screwing this up feel very high.
Lot 159, 5 Mar 2026, Bonsai Forest, est. $4-6,000 [update: sold for $3,810, be a good steward!][lamodern]
I misremembered the connection, and thought that Jane Birkin had originally sold her original Hermès bag to benefit Médecins du Monde. But no.
I just looked it up, and Birkin put Médecins du Monde stickers on her Birkin to show her support. But she donated her original 1985 Birkin to an auction in 1994, “Les Encheres de l’Espoir,” to benefit Association Solidarité Sida, the leading French AIDS support charity. Whoever bought it sold it in 2000, and whoever bought it in 2000 sold it last year at Sotheby’s for EUR8.6 million, all proceeds to them.
It came up because Médecins du Monde is one of 37 international aid groups Israel has now banned from operating in Gaza.
Maybe it’s because it’s an online sale in January. Maybe it’s the no reserve, low estimate, leftover furniture from the third guest room. But lot descriptions of American furniture at major auction houses used to overflow with material detail, construction analsys, and connoisseurial judgment behind the dating, attribution, and origin of an object.
But now, literally the only thing that matters about this “elder’s desk” Christie’s says is made in the “19th century,” “possibly” by a cabinetmaker, at an unidentified Shaker community, is not those shockingly lyrical, but also justifiably structural, curved leg braces, but that Mr & Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3d bought it, and their daughter is selling it.
13-27 Jan 2026, Lot 842: A SHAKER PINE AND HICKORY ELDER’S TALL DESK, POSSIBLY BY THOMAS BISHOP, 19TH CENTURY, est. $US 5-10,000 [update: sold for $9,525][christies]
previously, related: Protect me from what I want [an Appalachian painted twig side table]
I have no place for an Appalachian twig side table in my house or my life, but I am woefully tempted to find a place for this one in my storage. Or in the trunk. Instead I am posting it here, so that I and you and everyone else can appreciate its elegant simplicity, and its details—like the notches in the top to hold those three twigs. And maybe bringing other peoples’ attention to it will thwart any notion I might have to impulse bid on it.
29 Aug 2025, Lot 2106: Appalachian Painted Twig Stand Table, est. $50-80, currently $20, less than the price of a pound of cheese [update: I did it! I did not buy it for $150!] [jeffreysevans]
From UVA anthropologist Ira Bashkow’s commentary on Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman’s “Decolonizing US Anthropology,” published in American Anthropologist in Feb. 2023:
In the late 1940s, anthropologists came into the sights of the anticommunist crusades known as McCarthyism. The AAA formed a committee to protect the individuals targeted by the McCarthyist witch hunts, but it was quickly undermined by the ultraconservative anthropologist George Peter Murdock, who got himself appointed as chair.2 Murdock denounced his own colleagues in a letter he wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to David Price’s (2004) historical research, we now know the identities of ten of the twelve anthropologists Murdock betrayed: Irving Goldman, Jules Henry, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Oscar Lewis, Richard Morgan, John Murra, Morris Siegel, Morris Swadesh, and Gene Weltfish. All but one was Jewish, and all were involved in antiracist activism, either by public writing, speaking, and broadcasting or by political advocacy and direct service (e.g., Gene Weltfish wrote an antiracist pamphlet with Ruth Benedict that was mass distributed and adapted in a union-produced short film; Richard Morgan, an archaeologist, was an NAACP member and active campaigner against race-restrictive real estate covenants in Columbus, Ohio).
The McCarthyists and FBI also persecuted Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Clair Drake, along with many other white anthropologists, such as Robert Armstrong, Cora Du Bois, Kathleen Gough, Jack Harris, Ruth Landes, Ashley Montagu, Philleo Nash, Marvin Opler, Paul Radin, Jerome Rauch, Earle Reynolds, Vera Rubin, Bernhard Stern, and George Stocking. Many lost their jobs and left anthropology. Many suffered distress, humiliation, and often financial ruin. Armstrong and Swadesh emigrated from the United States. Their examples spread fear, leading other anthropologists to censor themselves and steer clear of activism. This is undoubtedly part of why antiracist causes were largely “silenced” in US anthropology for years to come (Price 2004, 64, 71–75, 79, 110ff., 344–45; 2019, 15; see also Maxwell 2015; Stocking 2006, 129–31, 158–82).3
Remembering this can help us grasp the importance of preparing now to protect our fellow anthropologists, this time skillfully, from the neo-McCarthyist attacks being launched today against antiracist initiatives and teachers in US schools, universities, and companies. [paragraphing added to lure people to read it]
I’m trying to modulate the moral, ethical, and spiritual effrontery associated with the upcoming auction at Sotheby’s Hong Kong of a collection of around 300 sacred Buddhist relics which were extracted from the bones and ashes of a person believed to be Siddhartha Gautama. They are being sold by the descendants of the British colonist who excavated the Piprahwa Stupa in Uttar Pradesh in 1898, an Ashokan-era gravesite that some scholars argue was created to hold the eighth portion of the Buddha’s remains given to his Shakya clan after his cremation.
The Buddhist practice of relic, or śarīra, worship holds that visiting relics of the Buddha gives merit, but also that offerings of carved and natural gems, beads, gold, and other precious objects become “contact relics” by being mixed in with the Buddha’s remains. The Sotheby’s lot essay reads like a legal brief arguing for these objects’ unparalleled religious and historic significance, while also laying out the case against the extractive colonialism that stripped them from their religious context:
Continue reading “Whither The Gem Relics of Piprahwa?”The first contact relic to be revered was the clay pot retained by Brahmin Drona after the subdivisions. Gem relics donated as relic offerings by Buddhists seeking merit, became contact relics after being mixed in with the bone relics of Shakyamuni Buddha. For Buddhist pilgrims, to visit the sacred landscape of places where the Historical Buddha had passed through and lived was also as much a part of this cult of relic worship as the veneration of relics themselves.
In January I was watching an Hermès making of video for something I don’t remember in the Necessaires d’Hermès collection, I think, and there were brief shots of this incredible-looking object. I scoured the website to figure out what it was, and it looks like it’s not available in the US, which serves us right, frankly.
But it turns out to be an ottoman, but it also has storage, and a handle. The whole top slides off, and it can hold a blanket, as these screenshots show. For something that doesn’t seem that capacious or actually portable, it sure is beautiful. I will keep it in the necessaires column.
Weirdly, the ottoman gets kind of lost or ignored in the Salone 2013 debut of Philippe Nigro’s capsule collection, les Necessaires d’Hermès.
OK, it was a Necessaires video, which is on the product page, and I had to have been watching it for the Groom wardrobe stand, or the Long Bench, a name which loses the sense of the French: Cheval d’Arçon, pommel horse.
Les Necessaires d’Hermes Ottoman, by Philippe Nigro, $CA19,100 [hermes]
In June 1844, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, where they were being held in jail for treason. [Joseph, who in addition to being the founding president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was also the mayor of the Mormon-dominated city of Nauvoo, had destroyed the printing press of an anti-Mormon/anti-Smith newspaper and declared martial law. This led to his arrest for treason against the state of Illinois, but somehow none of that is particularly important to this blog post.]
The bodies of Joseph and Hyrum were brought back to Nauvoo, 22 miles away, in hastily constructed coffins of oak lumber. They were buried in a Smith family home, then moved to another site seven months later.
The blood-soaked wood from the temporary coffins was cut up and distributed to a few church leaders and friends of the Smiths by their widows, to be made into canes. When the bodies were reinterred, clippings of the Smiths’ hair were collected, distributed, and incorporated into the heads of some of the canes. These canes became known as Canes of the Martyrdom, and in a religious culture that officially eschews such things, they have become ersatz relics.
Continue reading “The Canes of The Martyrdom”
This couture cape in peach paduasoy and the sequin and crystal embroidered chiffon gown are both from Jeanne Lanvin, circa 1961. The cape, at least, is attributed to Oscar Renta Fiallo, who that year left his apprenticeship with Cristóbal Balenciaga to work with Antonio del Castillo, the Spanish designer brought to Paris to revive Lanvin. Both garments belonged to Baroness Aino de Bodisco.
I had to look up paduasoy, which is maybe a Spanish term for peau de soie, a variant of silk satin. Which is absolutely the least important thing in this situation. Because the auction listing of these two items also includes a copy of the mindboggling, handwritten pledge the 24-year-old man who would become known as Oscar de la Renta made to Bodisco in June 1956.
As I try to manage my news intake, I have been rescued and refreshed by First Light Radio, artist Man Bartlett’s monthly music show on East Village Radio. It’s live on the third Friday of the month, from 8-10AM, and the archive is growing, but it’s still early, so it’s small. Fortunately, there is a whole discography to fall back into. I confess, I’ve never opened my cassette tapes of any of the Space On Earth recordings; I just use the mp3 technology.
First Light Radio With Man, 3rd Friday, 8-10AM [eastvillageradio]
Man Bartlett [bandcamp]
James Bridle responds to the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s rescinding of an award because of Bridle’s public support of a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions that support genocide.
Getting Hannah Arendt quoted back at you should be a wakeup call for Germans, but I guess not yet.
Germany is far from alone in this situation. The far right, and the denial of genocide that accompanies it, are on the march everywhere. But the logic of Strike Germany is simple: if it is illegal in Germany to call for cultural change in Israel, then it becomes necessary to call for cultural change in Germany itself. Late enough to be ashamed, but never too late, I sign my name.
James Bridle: ‘The Denial of Genocide Is on the March Everywhere’ [artreview]
I learned of David Simonton’s photographs of a disappearing North Carolina on tumblr, where I noticed the caption of this picture first , “Nahunta, Wayne County, NC” and the details of the image second.
Because we have some people from there, a ways back. And when a name like Mozingo turns up in Nahunta in your family history, it sticks in your mind.
And now I want to make Nahunta: Mi Gente t-shirts, which me and maybe like one cousin would appreciate.
Or maybe I need to make a new visit. Maybe the Nahunta Pork Center is just the most front-facing participant of a larger hardworking community of pork processors and their families. They are no less me gente than the farmers I came from.
