Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

For the past year and several months, I’ve been working at ReadyMade, editing stories about DIY projects and cruising the internets in search of things that other people made.

One of the projects that I liked enough to want to attempt myself someday was the black pipe furniture that Mike Perry and his office-mates built for their new workspace in the Monti building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

(Building A Desk from Michael Perry on Vimeo.)

In a cheaply ironic fashion, my year of covering the DIY world left me with little time to make things on my own. But I’m changing gears now, getting ready to shove off on an almost year-long writing and research project—and getting back into the swing of working in my own space, too.

In the course of rearranging home to make room for this mental project, I finally took on a physical one: I designed and built my own desk from ¾-inch black plumbing pipe and a section of Ikea Numerar countertop (solid oak version).

Part of the inspiration was the need for a desk that would fit into an odd space that was constrained by a radiator. Done!

In the final tally, it took five trips to hardware and plumbing stores, one trek to Ikea, ample opportunities to remember how ridiculously heavy solid oak is, several anxious moments with a wrench, and more money than I would have guessed in the beginning, but this is it. It’s done. It’s sturdy. I love it. And I’m already planning design updates—such, I think, is making things.

I wrote the home story in the August/September issue of ReadyMade. It’s a tour of designers Tony Moxham and Maurice Paniagua’s truly surreal Mexico City apartment.

I sort of wanted the piece to be titled “Rumpus Rooms,” but ReadyMade EIC Andrew Wagner says he can’t stand the word “rumpus,” and that seems fair enough.

Read the whole story (and see more of Stephen Karlisch’s great pics), here.

More for GOOD. I contributed a handful of pieces to the GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods, in GOOD 19 (the neighborhoods issue). It’s all online; my bits include:

How to Throw a Block Party
How to Meet Your Neighbors (Without Seeming Like a Crazy Person)
How to Get a Billboard Taken Down (Or at Least Complain About One)
How to Get a Stop Sign or Crosswalk Put In

…and most fun of all (for this reporter), a little feature (and how-to) on communal living.

Researching it gave me a chance to learn about cohousing, a form of fairly low-intensity communal living (residents own private dwellings and jointly own indoor/outdoor common space), which arose in Denmark and has been attempting to put down roots in the U.S. since the ’90s. Since 2007, this new urbanist has been trying to bring it to New York.

Four authors from GOOD and three from ReadyMade, of whom I am one, have teamed up to write a special section in GOOD’s Winter 2010 issue. The GOOD (and ReadyMade) Guide to Slowing Down is online now, and if I say so myself, it’s a fun read.

Two quotes I liked from Adam Gopnik’s article about van Gogh’s ear in the January 4 edition of the New Yorker.

On art-making:

“Where art since the Renaissance had attempted to limit luck in a system of inherited purpose and patterns, modern art demands that you press the pedal as hard as you can, and pray.”

On van Gogh’s dream of creating an artistic community in Arles:

“You always begin with a dream of community—Braque and Picasso in the bohemian hermitage Bateau Lavoir; the handful of painters brave enough to go abstract in the Cedar Tavern—and end with a reality of competitiveness and assault, suspicion and estrangement. …
…The real community is not that of charmed artists living like monks but the distant dependencies of isolated artists and equally isolated viewers, who together make the one kind of community that modernity allows.”

The one kind of community that modernity allows? Discuss amongst yourselves.

When I get up to the seventh floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, I inhale and think, “grandma’s house.” Not my grandma, though not unlike my grandma—it’s the essence of grandparents: dark, out-of-date colors and most of all that smell, like baby powder, Neutrogena hand soap, and something else—is it aging wallpaper paste? It’s been two months since my last visit, and I’m so glad to be back.

I love it here. I love the mottled green carpeting, the luxurious down-at-heel-ness of the rooms. The way it’s hard to find the light switch and when you do there’s the floral bedspread, the wallpaper with its ticking stripe, the few spots of rust on the sliding door of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I have waited all day to take my things out of the green backpack, hang some of them in the closet and spread the others out on the luggage rack. To take my toiletries out of the ziploc bag; they’re all in tiny little bottles (thanks, Muji); I’ve gotten so good at traveling in the last eight months, shuttling back and forth from New York City to Des Moines, and a few other fun trips but this is business. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun too, unloading the books and folders and power cords from my handbag, placing things in neat stacks with plenty of right angles before going downstairs for dinner. The guy at the front desk greeted me in the fashion of someone who isn’t overtaxed by human interaction, and I appreciate that after New York. He has short hair, wears tiny studs in his ears, and seems genuinely pleased to welcome me.

There’s a storm front coming across the country. My weather widget warned of a Wednesday low of zero degrees. It isn’t that cold yet but the snow is expected. I am a little frightened of the possibility of intense cold but maybe excited even more than that. I unpacked the black long johns that I can wear under my jeans if necessary, set them on the luggage rack. Walking home from the office, the lights of town and the Christmas lights look sensational in the cold. Our courtesy driver from the airport says the only sign she’s had of global warming in her own life is that when she was a girl there were municipal skating rinks at some lagoons downtown, and that the same lagoons no longer reliably freeze. Yesterday in New York felt seasonably cool but it’s been a sickeningly warm November. And so the cold is bracing, seems right. I read the paper on the airplane and I’m thinking about Copenhagen, wanting to read more, trying to hold onto a diffuse sense of hopefulness.

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I was just on the adorable looking British website Smallholder (in the UK, a smallholder is someone who lives on and farms a small parcel of land), and came across this banner ad.

What is this magical spray that alleviates stress, and why is it being wasted on animals? I want a spritz.

My essay, “Scattershot, Desperate and Sleazy,” is up now at the n+1 website. It’s about everyone’s favorite topic, online dating, and was originally written for, and read at, the Spring 2009 installment of the Brooklyn Rail’s Rant Rhapsody reading series.

If you read it, let me know what you think.

Update: It got published in n+1 number 8, with an even better title that I did not give it, “R We Going 2 Dai Alone?”