Militant Minimalism and Lost Treasure

Life in New York City is the definition of expensive, no doubt about it. The taxes are staggering, prices at grocery stores mind-numbing, the real estate prices practically unspeakable. Space itself is at a premium here and I'm talking about apartment buildings where the hallways and elevators are so tiny that it's common practice when moving to a new apartment to hire a complete stranger to come over, literally hack your innocent sofa into several grisly chunks, transfer these traumatized fragments into your new home and then reassemble the poor bastard like an upholstered Frankenstein... simply because you can't fit it through your own front door.

A potential victim

Having lived in sub-400 square foot apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan for the last five years, we have thus developed a strong aversion to oversized furniture and "extraneous" items, shall we say. You almost have no choice but to GET YOUR ZEN ON unless you are comfortable living in cramped squalor, no disrespect (thick New York accent) to those who do so. Alternately, if you really like your stuff and don't care to constantly crawl over it to get around your apartment like a drunken Periplaneta Americana, another option is renting a warehouse to store your precious knick-knackery in – until you can afford a real apartment (you keep telling yourself, anyways). It's disconcerting, because those matching collections of oak veneer furnishings all seemed perfectly sized back when home was a 2500+ square foot 3bed/3bath apartment in the suburbs of Dallas or Cleveland:

This is now an obscenely massive pile of particle wood shit collecting dust at Manhattan Mini Storage.

When it comes down to it, though, I just can't handle paying rent for boxes of junk when rent is already so expensive for my own physical body. Therefore, over time we've slowly disposed of and/or replaced many of our belongings with smaller sized versions, carefully choosing the most well-made, attractive, and versatile that we can afford. "Smaller" and "versatile" is obvious, "attractive" because it's probably hanging on the wall or sitting out in plain view, and "well-made" because it will be used constantly. For example, we have very few kitchen knives. A pair of classic 10" chef's knives, a paring knife, and a small serrated knife for tomatoes and bread - that's it. They are all attractively designed, simple and well made, Henckels brand so a bit expensive but we use all of them on a daily basis. Since there are just a few, we can hang them on a magnetic wall strip, avoiding the typical wooden knife block setup and saving some precious counter space. This philosophy adds up to a lot of extra space when used across the entire spectrum of objects in your apartment. Generally speaking, if something is unused long enough to collect dust in our home it will soon be disposed of unless it is an item of utmost sentimental and/or aesthetic value, simply because we'd rather have a tiny bit more open space, a little more visual tranquility, and enough damn counter space to chop up and prep dinner!

"Now, I can appreciate owning a few finely crafted cutting tools, but this is getting a little ridiculous..." -Edward Scissorhands at Macy's

It may come as no surprise that I also have a very strong tendency towards obsessive compulsiveness. I LOVE to organize, to create order from chaos, to analyze the usefulness of individual material objects with ruthless, unsentimental standards. All these habits, this Militant Minimalism if I may, have started to spill over into my digital world as well. I've collected a digital ocean of files over many years of scouring the internet for interesting, shiny, useful things, and lately I have started to pare that down as well. Most of my time is spent throwing things away, which gives one a certain sense of satisfaction, but it can get boring after a while. However, I am occasionally rewarded when I come across some long-lost treasure:

While attending Pratt, I scanned a huge assortment of vintage insect illustrations and fiddled around with them for some project that I just didn't get around to finishing. (If you look closely, you can see some freaky bug parts lurking in the details). Rotate+copy in Photoshop honestly can make almost anything look neat and it's a procedure so simple that a monkey wearing thick plastic designer eyeglasses could execute it, but who cares? Must the atom be split before declaring something beautiful has been created? I think not!

Anyhoo, one of these days I'll incorporate them into a pattern for wrapping paper, a shower curtain, or maybe wallpaper (stay tuned). In the meantime, here's the entire collection for your perusal: ENTOMOLOGY STUDY.