the hijinks of molly & tara

Reader FYI:

Molly is planning on coming to London in February! The two SCREWY ringleaders will once again unite to adventure through England, Scotland, Ireland, and (hopefully) France. There will be traveling, culture jamming, baking, videorecording, embodying imagination, adbusting, circusing, and unrestrained merriment… all well documented right here on make{shift media, of course!

LOVE, 

Molly & Tara

BUY NOTHING DAY is coming up!

It’s Fri Nov 28 in the US (also known as Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving when traditionally people take advantage of the day off work to go do all their Christmas shopping in one terrifying, annihilative swoop of consumerism), Sat Nov 29 internationally.

I will definitely be working all that day, but there’s a really cool event going on here in London: TOPSHOP SWAPSHOP. The instructions read as follows: “Simply turn up at TOPSHOP on Oxford Street wearing an outfit you wish to upgrade, then on the stroke of two o’clock, marvel as hundreds of fashion moguls offer to trade your clothes with you. Fancy that girls jumper? Why not offer to swap your belt for it? Nice skirt, fancy trading my t-shirt for it? After a hectic re-working of your look you can then walk proudly back onto the streets of London town with a new wardrobe, not having spent a single penny.” Their catchphrase is my favorite part: ‘You can buy lots of clothes but you can’t buy style.’

-Tara

This afternoon I went to THE GREAT CAKE ESCAPE. I was clued in to it by a little article about the guerilla cake-droppers in the free commuter paper The London Paper a couple of days ago. For about a year, two lovely twenty-something women have been letting loose batches of cupcakes in the streets of London, with little tags encouraging passers-by to take them! This afternoon they hosted a scavenger hunt and street tea party in Hoxton Square, which is a block from The Circus Space. Arrived just as they were packing up – it was FREEZING here today – but got to have a quick chat & a cupcake before they skedaddled, leaving a fountain adorned in free sweet goodies…

http://www.myspace.com/thegreatcakeescape  

I’d love to emulate them… Molly, shall we create some Mysterious Muffin Mayhem in Amherst?

-Tara

Yesterday I went to an incredible Mobile Clubbing event at the Royal Exchange. The plan was simple: show up with your iPod, CD player, walkman, or other portable-music-device with headphones, and at 6.20pm, turn it on and start dancing. I got there 20 minutes late, and there was a crowd of people bopping around, mouthing lyrics, and giggling… it was a pretty odd sight, and if you weren’t clued into what was going on it took a minute to realize that the group wasn’t just a group of people waiting around, not talking to each other. 

There were babies, and men in suits, and cyclists, and students, and hipsters, and hippies… they were swaying, and rocking out, and popping, and skanking. I really wanted to see a couple slow dancing, but no dice. An idea for next time, I guess! Every once in a while a spontaneous cheer would erupt, people would throw their arms up and whoop and dance harder for a minute. So much fun to be among city strangers, staying warm in the chilly November night, all boogying down!

I took two really short clips (no pics of me, sorry, but the camera ran out of memory). I’ll put them up just as soon as I figure out where to house them online… Mol, how do I make use of my Stout student space?

-Tara

(more about Mobile Clubbing)

this is insane! i love when a lot of people from different countries can come together and work for a common, absolutely ridiculous goal.

-tara

I just made my first pumpkin pie ever! It is also my first real pie of any kind. I dabbled in cheesecakes over the summer, but that doesn’t count – it’s called cheeseCAKE. (See picture below… what, aren’t your pies oval-shaped?)

The recipe I used for the pie can be found here; it’s quite simple and gives both US & UK heating instructions (though god knows about volume/liquid measurements). I used an actual pumpkin which was originally bought for jack-o-lantern purposes. Considering that I have about half a pumpkin leftover now (it was kind of an epic-size pumpkin; jack-o-lanterning it was just intimidating) later this week I plan to be trying pumpkin cheesecake and pumpkin soup, too. Maybe I’ll even make Molly’s pumpkin biscuits!

Baking for me tends to be a subjective activity, involving much tweaking of amounts and variations on a basic theme (terms like ‘20 minutes,’ for example, or ‘butter’ are frequently taken as suggestions).

I am also a space cadet. I don’t have a timer here, and remembering to check a clock isn’t my strong suit. Even when I DO have a timer, I frequently forget to turn it on. But I ALWAYS listen to music while baking, from getting out the ingredients to preheating to mixing to baking to cleaning up. It’s an intrinsic part of my process, the soundtrack. So today I had this great idea: making playlists specifically tailored to recipes. 

Certain songs could signal when it’s time to check for done-ness, and there would be really high-energy tunes at the end for dishwashing. Songs with a slow build for pulling out ingredients, and steady beats for minimal distraction while measuring and mixing. Alternatively, you could time a recipe to an already existing mix, just note around which songs landmark baking actions occur. A playlist for a pie would have an hour’s worth of ‘baking-time’ music, while a playlist for cookies would have groups of songs in ‘batches!’

-Tara