craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

my fiber journey is currently involves an exploration of an iron age weaving technique, namely tablet weaving (also known as card weaving). from what i understand, most people who tablet weave these days are into creative anachronism and/or reenacting viking battles. i don't do those things but the weaving is fun.

tablet weaving is mainly used for making patterned bands and braids, which can be used as straps, belts, or garment trim. it's an interesting technique to learn because it doesn't require a loom at all (though it can be done on many types of conventional looms). all you need is a set of cards (square, with a hole in each corner) and yarn (threaded through the holes); as you weave, you turn the cards forward or backwards, changing the position of the warp yarns. depending on how the cards are threaded and the sequence of card turns, you can make make extremely elaborate patterns. it's pretty neat.

anyway, here's the latest thing i did. about 2 yards in an advancing wave pattern

http://i.imgur.com/ChpnSFA.jpg

I probably have more to say about my handicrafts and how i think of them in relation to the titular focus of this thread, if anyone cares -- but just for right now I'm thinking about how (typically white) people will describe or market certain handmade goods with fucked up quasi-racist terms. pinterest & etsy are truly minefields of suspect language.

"ethnic" "tribal" "gypsy" "primitive"

okay, maybe those are just straight-out unqualified racist.

whenever someone describes something as "tribal" or "ethnic" it's like -- what tribe? which ethnicity? rhetorical questions, of course, since they all seem to indicate an undifferentiated kind of "exotic" non-whiteness.

a nice little wage

I guess this is as good a thread as any for this, but one category I find really head-scratchy is artisanal junk food. E.g. I just tried Doughnut Plant for the first time (and I've had Dough a few times), and honestly, it's really delicious, but it came to almost $9 for an iced coffee and a big donut square. They seem to be doing well - they've expanded, but what is the market for eating stuff like that on a regular basis? It's expensive enough to only be for the affluent, but unhealthy enough to not seem like something most affluent urbanites would eat often.

whenever someone describes something as "tribal" or "ethnic" it's like -- what tribe? which ethnicity? rhetorical questions, of course, since they all seem to indicate an undifferentiated kind of "exotic" non-whiteness.

otm, and really, hasn't this been par for the course since, like, Marco Polo? How much worse was understanding of Chinese culture to a 13th century European than to a 21st century American? 10%? less?

http://www.typeeast.com/collections/typewriters/products/hand-typed-letter

I don't want to get too down on these people ^ because they seem like an OK bunch but still

Using a typewriter would still be my favoured writing tool, at least for initial composition. In fact, god, I might have to go along there, having lost my olivetti portable a few years ago. Maybe I will set up a hand-typed letter service. Thanks TH!

"hand-typed" oh ffs

keys lovingly pressed in sequence manually by Mavis Beacon herself

or Jack Webb
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/Mark_VII_logo_1953(1).jpg

So glad I have prehensile toes with which to type at my computer.

35 pounds for up to 200 words holy fucking shit

Couldn't you buy a typewriter for like two letters at that price?

seems an appropriate place to discuss bogus chocolate hipster liars

http://qz.com/571151/the-mast-brothers-fooled-the-world-into-buying-crappy-hipster-chocolate-for-10-a-bar/

http://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behind-the-beards-confessions

BOGUS HIPSTER CHOCOLATE LIARS
BOGUS HIPSTER CHOCOLATE LIARS
BOGUS HIPSTER CHOCOLATE LIARS
BOGUS HIPSTER CHOCOLATE LIARS

hmm. It sounds like a lot of the supposed "fraud" was early? I've tried a bunch of kinds of mast brothers chocolate and I mostly thought they were delicious, and I didn't find the flavor/texture at all like what they say in the article. $10 is a lot to pay for any kind of chocolate, no matter how good.

http://dallasfood.org/wp-content/uploads/blame-it-on-the-rain1.jpg

https://i.imgflip.com/vyl7u.jpg

Rebuttal:

https://twitter.com/JaredLeto/status/677619136407724032

But this does feel like the Stephen Glass of the artisan movement.

lol regular things "made 'the right way' by guys with beards and tatoos"

I think we've found our investor!

It's expensive enough to only be for the affluent, but unhealthy enough to not seem like something most affluent urbanites would eat often.

Many young people are under 35 and still eat crappy food.

I mean many rich people.

hmm. It sounds like a lot of the supposed "fraud" was early?

uh in reading the whole thing it seems like as of now they're not stating origins and not being transparent in their production processes while saying they are in interviews in stuff.

i don't really care about chocolate or this story but seems pretty obvious what they were planning all along.

https://twitter.com/extramsg/status/676935067864858624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The only thing shocking there is that they were using the Gallagher brothers as style icons in 2007

The idea that someone would play fast and loose with the truth in order to enhance the price of their luxury-market products is far from surprising. It is the American Way. It's fine with me to expose them as frauds. That also is a fine old American tradition.

It's just that outside of the few people who pay super-premium prices for ultra-high-end chocolate bars, nobody else cares.

bushybearded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the chocolatey dynamo in the machinery of beans

i had one of their bars once, my wife included it as a stocking stuffer. i enjoyed it but i also don't have a refined chocolate palate.

their brand feels like part of this more recent movement, elevating this kind of food to artisanal status. for example god knows how many overpriced grilled cheese restaurants opened in the past few years around here.

Would rather have $10 worth of dairy milk than one bar of that, however nice the wrapping is.

I mean the bottom line for me is I think their chocolate is very tasty and different from other chocolate I've had, and I'm also very rarely going to spend $10 or even $5 on a chocolate bar. I rarely even buy a chocolate bar. As far as whether they're lying, I have mixed feelings about that sort of lie, because it's very part-and-parcel of story marketing. I mean the whole bushy beards, we brought cocoa beans on a sailboat stuff, it's the kind of stuff that, if you're the kind of person who wants to buy into it, you might suspend disbelief a little. It's a narrative, it's a fantasy, etc. A lot of luxury products offer that. A lot of "traditional" high-end chocolate makers also offer a semi-bullshit story about craftsmanship etc., it's just usually couched in terms like tradition, family, history, decades/centuries of experience, etc.

i think the bean-to-bar thing is a lot less of a gray area than you're making it out to be

In truth, despite their claim that they “had come up with how everything is done every step of the way,” the Masts picked up at least some of their knowledge on the thriving online community of chocolate makers that has existed for more than a decade. A public website, Chocolate Alchemy, is a hub of information, where chocolate makers could trade tips and advice for making small-batch chocolate.

Does the "authentic, artisan" thing lose some cachet in this era where you can learn all this stuff on the internet and not have to hunt down rare books or elderly craftspeople? Does it matter to consumers?

elderly craftspeople = traditional apprentice situation etc

i guess that's separate from the "wide-eyed, lone wolf / mad scientists" thing

i think the bean-to-bar thing is a lot less of a gray area than you're making it out to be

― call all destroyer, Friday, December 18, 2015 4:14 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes and no. It's still a story about how a thing is made rather than a property of the product.

linguistic turn gone mad

My favorite part of the story is the before photos of them. "BUSTED! Mast Brothers grew their beards and were not born with them."

Ppl judging on any aspect of process or back story will continue to be mugs and long may they remain so

i remember when i found out my favorite ice cream wasn't actually from sweden. broke my heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEJI4Ffr9xk

and then when i found out that Häagen-Dazs didn't actually mean Joyful Cream Bowl or something and was just a made up thing? i never trusted again.

let's not lose sight of the fact that allegations of virtual bean mistreatment have been made in this case

I lost any sympathy I may've had for the marks brother when I saw that picture of him wearing a T-shirt with his own name on it.

HD has a good story behind the name fwiw -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4agen-Dazs#Origin_of_brand_name

Scott DFW from Dallas Food Blog previously took down NoKa chocolate, for similar reasons of style/packaging over substance, and deception around their chocolate-making process (plus in NoKa's case, an absolutely insane markup in their prices):
http://dallasfood.org/2006/12/noka-chocolate-part-1/

NoKa went out of business in 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBb9O-aW4zI