from Machine:

Short Version: Sara and Christy are turning Machine into a complete forest set, and we are having a volunteer meeting for those who want to participate this Thursday March 12th at 8:30pm.

Long Version: When we last saw Christy McCaffrey and Sara Newey they were making the Heavy Metal Gothic Arch at the LACMA show. They are returning to Machine this month to turn the entire gallery into a forest for a month, during which time we will be hosting all kinds of forest related activities. If you’re trying to imagine what that looks like, check out this here link…

http://machineproject.com/events/2009/03/27/magicforest/

This is a fairly epic project, even for us, and so we’re putting the call out to see if anyone would like to be part of making this happen. This is a great volunteer opportunity if you are interested in building very real looking fake forests, learning about how set design and set dressing works, and being part of a epic Machine Project project. The meeting to hear more about volunteering is this thursday night at 8:30pm, right here at Machine Project. Beer likely.

From the reprinting publisher’s site — NYRB Classics:

The One-Straw Revolution
An Introduction to Natural Farming
By Masanobu Fukuoka
Introduction by Frances Moore Lappé
Preface by Wendell Berry
Translated from the Japanese by Larry Korn, Chris Pearce, and Tsune Kurosawa

Paperback
May 26, 2009
200 pages
NYRB Classics

Masanobu Fukuoka (1914–2008) was born in a small farming village on the island of Shikoku in southern Japan. He developed what many consider to be a revolutionary method of sustainable agriculture called no-till cultivation. He received the Deshikottan and the Ramon Magsaysay awards in 1988, and the Earth Council Award in 1997.

Call it a Zen and the Art of Farming or a “Little Green Book,” Fukuoka’s short volume about gardening, eating, and the limits of human knowledge is as startling today as it was 30 years ago. “It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.”—Wendell Berry

Masanobu Fukuoka’s book about growing food has been changing the lives of readers since it was first published in 1978. It is a call to arms, a manifesto, and a radical rethinking of the global systems we rely on to feed us all. At the same time, it is the memoir of a man whose spiritual beliefs underpin and inform every aspect of his innovative farming system.
Continue reading →

From The New York Times – March 8, 2009…

For Sale: The $100 House
By TOBY BARLOW

Detroit – RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. Continue reading →

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