A Quiet Moment Amongst Friends

How to Make a Jam Band Out of Stuff You Have Lying Around the House

Anthropomorphic sculpture, digital photographs, 500x400 and 400x600 pixels, 2009 

My friend Amy D was bored yesterday and decided to make a jam band out of stuff she had lying around the house. You're probably thinking that making your own jam band takes days or weeks, but it doesn't. You can do it in 30 minutes! Just follow the five easy steps:

1. Grab anything you have lying around the house that has a face on it and that you can easily lift (like a stuffed animal or a cookie jar). These will be the musicians. 
2. Collect all of your real instruments (like drumsticks or a harmonica). If you don't have real instruments, make your own out of boxes, toothpaste tubes, or old cans.
3. Take each of the instruments that you've collected and tape them onto the musicians.
4. Make up a back-story about a sleazy traveling jam band in the 1970s. 
5. Sit back, have a beer, and watch your band have a fantasy jam session.

Here is Amy's band and their captivating story:

"The band was Vegetable Basics. The year was 1977."

"Raul 'The Boss' Estramado had a bad temper and a problem with authority. He also had a problem with methamphetamines. The other band members dubbed him the leader, not because of his middle-school education or because he claimed to be related to Ulysses S. Grant, but because he frightened everyone."

 

"The Albertini brothers joined Vegetable Basics straight out of an Idaho penitentiary. If there was one thing the brothers were good at, it was electric guitar and bass. If there was one thing they were bad at, it was saying no to dope and loose women."

 

"The band's distinctively heavy sound came from the keyboards and there was no better keyboard player in those days than Tommy 'One Ear' Ghiradelli. He was also the shy one of the bunch, but the other guys liked having him around because he studied chemistry in college and knew how to make his own drugs."

 

"Vegetable Basics had a mighty good run. They performed on Japanese TV and played festivals all over the world, but, like all good bands, they were eventually ripped apart in a tornado of booze, embezzlement, and venereal disease."

"The End."

How to Make a Potato Piñata

Piñata, paper-mâché, brown paint, 4 x 3 feet, 2009

Arts and crafts are blowing up right now! You can't go anywhere these days without stumbling in to knitting clubs, stencil parties, or people gluing googly eyes on to pieces of driftwood. To get in on the fun, Julia W and my sister, Anna U, created a potato piñata to honor the one year anniversary of Potato Champion, Portland, Oregon's premier Belgian Fry cart. (Potato Champion is owned by Mike M and a photo of the cart was recently featured in a Sunday New York Times article on Portland food culture.)

Completely by coincidence, the potato piñata design that Julia and Anna came up with is the exact same one that you would use to create a California Raisin. 

Here's how you can make your own potato piñata at home:

Step 1: Make the potato shape out of inflated balloons and cover the balloons in newspaper that has been soaked in glue. If you don't have glue, I don't know, maybe try raw eggs? (Optional: Paint it brown, attach eyes to it, and hide treasure inside.)

Step 2: Find a location where people are congregating and hang the potato piñata high in the air, but not so high that a regular-sized person can't reach it with a broom stick. 

Step 3: Destroy the piñata with a series of swift blows! (Optional: Use a blindfold and self-induced dizziness to increase the degree of difficulty.) 

There are other types of piñatas you can make, but if you haven't ever made one, I recommend starting with a potato or a raisin. 

[All photos were taken by Julia W. She also covered the event on her blog.]

UPDATE: Fun fact. My dad, John U the elder, helped build the potato cart. If you zoom in on the New York Times photo you can see the serving shelf that my father carved out of wood. That shelf is now internationally famous!: 

Edith Zimmerman's Food Friends

Food sculpture, fruits, vegetables, photographs, 2008-2009

Clockwise from upper left: "Velociraptor Skull", "Skeleton Man", "Mrs. Clemetine, with child", and "Nosferatu!"

 

 

Edith Z, a friend of my friend, Jessie P, recently discovered her natural ability to bring fruits and vegetables to life. All of her sculptures are featured on her incredibly entertaining blog:

http://www.edithzimmerman.com/blog/

There are other food sculptors in the world, but I haven't seen any examples that are as funny and technically proficient while seeming so effortless. You should definitely check out all of the sculptures on her site. 

Edith's food friends bring to mind the refrigerator claymation sequences on Pee Wee's Playhouse that I loved as a kid (Example 1, Example 2). 

Edith lives in New York and writes for magazines when she isn't sculpting food.