Filed under: The Great Outdoors, Uncategorized | Tags: Country Bizarre, wild eating
The Country Bizarre was a magazine started by Andy Pittaway and Bernard Scofield in the early 70’s which was a collection of poems, gardening advice, and other outdoorsing how-to’s. Brought to my attention by a new favorite blog My Proud Mountains, all of the issues of this great magazine have been carefully archived and made available via Caught by the River. If you need a good distraction you should check this magazine out.
All images were beautifully scanned by Caught by the River, there were to many good ones to post…
I didn’t receive many gifts on my birthday this year, which is fine, but I was gifted some beautiful hand tied flies. My good friend gave me this set of various types of dries, nymphs, and some streamers all tied by a local fellow. The kit even comes color coded for which season the fly should be used on. Now if I could just find a free moment to go fishing.
Filed under: Architecture, Art | Tags: A Mystery In Common, Free Life Center, Mark Warren Jacque, Seth Neefus
Our friends over at A Mystery in Common are working on a collaboration for a T shirt with the Free Life Center out in Portland Oregon. Consisting of two artists, Mark Warren Jacques & Seth Neefus, the Free Life Center will tour around the Pacific Northwest later this month.
The endeavor is probably best described as follows, “Mark Warren Jacques & Seth Neefus are two Portland-based artists embarking on a dream and you are invited to join them as they take their mobile art center on a nomadic journey.”
-Leslie Miller
Pacific Northwest College of Art
Description from their site:
-Free Life Center is a hand-crafted, one room structure, viewed as and art installation as well as an experience.
-Built primarily of reclaimed / salvaged materials (thanks ReBuilding Center), the structure emanates the artists’ homespun aesthetic and commitment to a high level of DIY craftsmanship.
-Within the building viewers are encouraged to explore every nook and cranny; finding that each element (painting, drawing, video projection, sound, performance) has been considered as a part of the construction and experience in whole.
-As a modularly designed structure (i.e. designed and built in movable pieces) Free Life Center may be modified in size to be shown in a wide variety of viewing contexts including gallery, venue, and natural environments.
-At its largest configuration the structure is 12ft width X 16ft length X 10ft in height. (24 person capacity inside structure)
Filed under: Books, The Great Outdoors | Tags: Art and Nan Kellam, David Graham
A new book has been published about Art and Nan Kellam, who married in 1935 and moved to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine in 1949, where they remained together until 1985. The book, We Were An Island, tries to tell a more complete story of the Kellam’s existence from letters they wrote to family members and by using a manuscript the two were working on at the time of their deaths.
David Graham’s photos of the Kellam’s house are all over the place, but I can’t get enough of looking at them.
Been working on the new house this week, building a fence and also packing things up in the old house. Here are some images I have been collecting from Lloyd Kahn’s Shelter II, inspiration for our own home. If you aren’t familiar with Kahn’s Shelter I highly recommend it, also check out the Dome Book.
The rest of the images here.
Filed under: Eats | Tags: barbecue, barbeque, BBQ, smoked chicken, smoking meat
With warm weather comes the frequent ability to cook quantities of meat over an open flame and during this past warm weekend I did just that. My favorite technique for this, as taught to me by my father, is not simply cooking meat over flame but rather bathing it in smoke.
Now I am no barbecue pit master, in fact I keep it pretty simple. I like to use apple wood and a bit of mesquite mixed in for a slightly stronger smoke flavor. For the chickens themselves, I go with an overnight brining and then a homemade dry rub.
And because one has to go through a bit more trouble to smoke meat, you can’t simply smoke a chicken, rather you must smoke chickens. And allow them to take a long nap in that smoker for about 4 hours, remove and enjoy with lots of beer.
Been pretty busy as of late – new house, new job – however I came across this book recently. Its a collection of string figures and their origins in native American and other indigenous cultures. I never realized how complicated the cat’s cradle could be.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Wildwood 
