Toys, Junk and Culture

This article, by Paul Trachtman, published more than eight years ago in the Smithsonian magazine, has a great deal of insight to give us about the connections between child-made toys and man-made culture:

"Every culture seems to have toys that reflect its way of life," he writes. "...Miniature clay knights on horseback entertained children in medieval Europe, and child's play during the French Revolution included little guillotines that beheaded aristocratic dolls. In this century, the culture of television images and other mass media is reflected in the reign of the Barbie doll and superhero action figures.

"But in many parts of the world, it is the toy pieced together from the things made for mass consumption that turns out to be a symbol — albeit an ironic one — of late 20th-century life....With imagination, ingenuity and skill, a toymaker in Haiti transforms a plastic bottle into a helicopter, armed with ballpoint pens for rockets. In Mexico, a boy uses flattened and folded bottle caps to make miniature sets of tables and chairs. Other toys are made of wire coat hangers and telephone wire, bits of metal cans and bicycle chains. The universality of commercial brand names and logos that turn up in these toys is evidence of an increasingly global village. As if Coca-Cola and Nestlé and Mobil and Gillette have become icons that know no boundaries of culture or geography."

And neither do the human capacities for creating junk, know boundaries of culture or geography, and neither do our capacites for transforming juunk into things of art and inspired playfulness.

Hardware Chess

If you are interested in learning the nuts and bolts of chess set-making, here is where you should most definitely start - Claude Rieth's complete chess set, completely made out of nuts and bolts.

Thanks to Mr. Rieth, the beginning of your personal path to chess-like glory is as close as your local hardware store.


via Makezine