Browse Items

A dedicated chess machine inspired by Belle, the first computer to earn a master rating. Play against it. It will beat you. That's the point. Learn from losing.

6 practice locks from simple to complex. I was fascinated by locks -- the engineering is beautiful. Pin tumbler, wafer, disc detainer. Legal to own, useful to understand, excellent for developing mechanical intuition.

Good trail runners. I nearly qualified for the 1948 Olympics with a 2:46 marathon. Running clears the mind better than any computer. Take them for a long run and think about impossible problems.

A piece of wire exactly 11.8 inches long. The distance light travels in one billionth of a second. I hand these out at lectures. Hold it. Feel how short a nanosecond is. Now multiply by a billion. That's one second. Never waste a nanosecond.

Small tin sheets, oil paints, fine brushes. Everything for painting retablos -- the small votive paintings I collected and was inspired by. Paint your miracle, your gratitude, your survival. The format is tiny. The feeling is enormous.

Forget flattering yourself. Paint what's real. The scars, the joy, the fury, the love. We work in oil or acrylic on small canvases. I'll teach you about color symbolism from Mexican folk art -- what red means, what blue means, why I put monkeys and parrots in my paintings. Bring a mirror. Bring honesty.

I don't teach technique. I teach seeing. We go outside, we look at the sky, and I show you that it's not blue -- it's cobalt and ultramarine and violet and green, swirling. The color is the feeling. The brushstroke is the heartbeat. If your painting looks like a photograph, you're not painting -- you're copying.

MIG welder, 200A, gas/gasless. Good for steel, stainless, aluminum with the right wire. NOT for beginners -- you need to know what you're doing or book a training session.

Mike Kenel

🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇮🇹

French box easel, oil paints (18 colors including chrome yellow -- my obsession), brushes, turpentine, linseed oil, and 6 pre-stretched canvases. Everything you need to paint outdoors the way the Impressionists did. Go to a wheat field. Set up. Paint what you feel, not what you see.

Four hearing devices from different periods of my deafness, faithfully reproduced. From the early brass cone to the elaborate conversation devices Johann Maelzel built for me. A sobering reminder that the most famous music in history was composed in silence.

I'll teach you to paint a face that looks like a person, not a photograph. We work in oil on canvas, natural light from one window. The secret isn't technique -- it's empathy. You have to love the face you're painting, even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones.

Lead white, yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna, vermillion, bone black. The exact palette I used. Six colors. That's enough to paint anything if you understand value. Modern cadmium substitutes included because lead will kill you.