craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

that reminds me of this movie. wish i had it on dvd. so good.

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

darragh it's a french movie from about 10 years ago about a parisian who tries her hand at farming. it's v good despite the premise!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/repair-cafe.html

If you’ve ever despaired of getting your vacuum cleaner fixed or thought that your broken lamp was a lost cause, there’s hope. A worldwide movement is trying to reform our throwaway approach to possessions.

The movement’s foundation is the Repair Cafe, a local meeting place that brings together people with broken items and repair coaches, or volunteers, with the expertise to fix them.

There used to be vacuum and general appliance repair and rebuild shops in my neighborhood, they closed. But I'm sure volunteers will be as good.

I've been to these repair cafes, and things do get fixed. Almost took my portable CD player in, thinking it probably had a bad belt, but when I tried it in anticipation of opening it up to verify a bad belt I found that it worked. Maybe it was just a bad power connection when it stopped working a couple years ago.

my friends have a bread maker machine and opened it up to replace a belt over the weekend

There used to be vacuum and general appliance repair and rebuild shops in my neighborhood, they closed. But I'm sure volunteers will be as good.

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Wednesday, January 18, 2017 8:01 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i live in a neighborhood where there are still a ton of these little shops. it's nice. i hope they stick around for a while. my previous neighborhood had a few of them too but you could tell they were struggling

I liked to ogle the professional-looking gas ranges in the window of the appliance shop. RIP

there is a typewriter store here in town. their sign still has "adders" on it. and they ain't talking about snakes.

Behold "The Adder":
http://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/Adder_UK_1.jpg

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/310635/teres-cache-the-most-singular-and-sleek-coin-exper

or you could just throw your coins on the ground or into the nearest tip jar

but that wouldn't be a seamless coin experience

Is there a thread for linking terrible ideas on kickstarter/indiegogo? There are so many.

maybe Yancey can start one.

"Teres accommodates coins of various shapes and sizes from all around the world. "

so good

Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy - Richard E. Ocejo

How educated and culturally savvy young people are transforming traditionally low-status manual labor jobs into elite taste-making occupations

In today’s new economy—in which “good” jobs are typically knowledge or technology based—many well-educated and culturally savvy young men are instead choosing to pursue traditionally low-status manual labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft looks at the renaissance of four such trades: bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering.

In this in-depth and engaging book, Richard Ocejo takes you into the lives and workplaces of these people to examine how they are transforming these once-undesirable jobs into “cool” and highly specialized upscale occupational niches—and in the process complicating our notions about upward and downward mobility through work. He shows how they find meaning in these jobs by enacting a set of “cultural repertoires,” which include technical skills based on a renewed sense of craft and craftsmanship and an ability to understand and communicate that knowledge to others, resulting in a new form of elite taste-making. Ocejo describes the paths people take to these jobs, how they learn their chosen trades, how they imbue their work practices with craftsmanship, and how they teach a sense of taste to their consumers.

Focusing on cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole-animal butcher shop workers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Masters of Craft provides new insights into the stratification of taste, gentrification, and the evolving labor market in today’s postindustrial city.

Were butchers ever really "low-status" jobs? Not counting Jurgis on the slaughterhouse assembly line, wasn't it always kind of a skilled and, comparatively, well-compensated occupation? Barbers, too, for that matter - not like they rolled in dough and ran the town but it's kind of a solid sole-proprietor mom-and-pop gig, secure a decent little livelihood, people did not cross to the other side of the street and hide their children's eyes when they saw a barber coming. Feel like there's a sloppy flattening-out of any social classes below those occupied by lawyers and tech entrepreneurs.

another book idea stolen from ILX

The romanticization of the blue-collar job

"bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering."

"how they are transforming these once-undesirable jobs into “cool”..."

not exactly making coal mining sexy. maybe nobody ever truly desired a job in a butcher shop but the rest are pretty normal occupations.

in other words, i agree with doctor casino. undesirable to dweebs who would have gone white collar ten years ago.

wait, are there hipster shoe shine stands in brooklyn? there must be.

coal mining has been devalued, romanticized, tokenized, and objectified in nearly every way by this point

are there hipsters who run around on the street with those little boxes and say "shine yer shoes, mister?" if not, there is work to be done.

kinda the best gig if you like being outdoors. plus, you could sell weed.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9a/76/61/9a76613f9c8374f78b9a55430f2f569b--cheap-designer-shoes-designer-shoes-online.jpg

I have a HS/college friend who is currently a butcher-in-training (sous-butcher? butch-prentice?). He was a longtime bartender and bar manager, and he had a weekend hobby of bacon-making (no doubt these would be classified as artisanal, small-batch bacons). It made sense for him as a career move. I'm genuinely happy for him, in a way that is neither cornily envious nor (I believe) condescending.

blessed are the cheese makers

a brooklyn couple moved here and opened a really nice store. its not like there was a glut of fancy butcher shops around here. there are a couple of sausage places for the Polish crowd.

http://www.suttermeats.com/

old school kielbasa in deerfield...good stuff.

https://pekarskis.com/products.html

Every town used to have at least one butcher before mega super markets took over. I got no beef w that biz. My hometown grocery store reached an interesting solution where the multi-generational butcher family moved into the big supermarket but they have a dedicated meat counter with staff within the store instead of their own storefront. Seems to be working out fine, has kept the trade in the community, and customers can still place special requests for types or cuts of meat that they don't normally sell. And you know that the packaged meat in the cold case was hand-cut and packed by people you know and not on a truck from Missouri.

the old time market i shop at near my house has the best meat in town. they make stop & shop and big Y look really bad. what supermarket/grocery store butchers used to be like.

they run out of hamburger by the end of the night. stop & shop never runs out of anything. they just thaw more of it.

Ugh exactly.

It's really kind of quaint and wonderful to me but normal to, say, my mom: the knowledge that if you need a rack of lamb or 48 Frenched lamp chops or a boned and tied pork roast for 24 ppl or whatever special occasion thing, you can call up the meat counter or just stop by while you're doing your shopping and leave a message for the guy and he'll order it/cut it and have it ready for you.

Were butchers ever really "low-status" jobs? Not counting Jurgis on the slaughterhouse assembly line, wasn't it always kind of a skilled and, comparatively, well-compensated occupation? Barbers, too, for that matter - not like they rolled in dough and ran the town but it's kind of a solid sole-proprietor mom-and-pop gig, secure a decent little livelihood, people did not cross to the other side of the street and hide their children's eyes when they saw a barber coming. Feel like there's a sloppy flattening-out of any social classes below those occupied by lawyers and tech entrepreneurs.

― ✓ (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, May 3, 2017 2:47 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's really messy isn't it? it reminds me more of fetishisation of a Deadwood vibe. I am kind of interested in the 'how they learn their chosen trades' bit, because presumably somewhere in that chain is someone who has actually practiced whatever it is as part of a continuous tradition.

As always i find myself falling down this rabbit hole of revival and tradition and what distinguishes it. For instance, there's comparatively recently opened rather bougie butchers and deli near me (they all seem like very solid people and it's attractively called Dugard & Daughters, rather than sons), and at the other end of the area is a traditional butchers who've been around for ages, who supply restaurants etc. i know it will be impossible to get scrag end of neck for a hotpot from the newer butchers. this isn't to do with craftsmanship etc, but it is to do with expense. It's not worth selling and there's no one to buy it anyway. It falls beneath the worth of 'crafting'. and it seems generally the case (as i think has been discussed multiple times on this thread) that the new artisan tends to be selling at a premium, to a premium-buying crowd, who at least in part are buying the 'craftsmanship' aspect of the thing as much as the thing itself.

While I can see it is skilled, I don't really buy butchery as a craft tho tbh.

picked up from an unenviable situation, for whom its a central interest. i'm not sure i entirely *get* what An Unenviable Situation is saying either, and so i circle warily around what they mean. certainly they're extending the notion of craft well beyond its commonly understood regions, in order to support a wider philosophy of engagement with the world to do with physicality, what they've called elsewhere the 'initimate empiricism' of art, art as craft, *everything* as craft, against commodification and fungibility. if i've got it right.

the whole instant expert thing is always gonna bug me. i don't know if that's an inherently american trait. brew beer for a couple of years and all of a sudden start talking like you're a 500 year old monk. even people who homebrew for a couple of years end up doing this. i don't doubt that people can learn stuff and get good at something and i also get that the language and appearance of expertness/attention to detail is a part of the marketing/experience but it gets to be a bit much. but that's what the thread is about. calling something a "craft butchery" is definitely a thing. i guess you are crafting cuts of meat? eh, whatever. good luck to them!

people these days acting like they invented coffee or something is all i'm saying....

black and white photo of a guy with his arms folded, sleeves rolled up, tattoos, maybe a beard, possibly an apron or a smock -- and he installs blinds

haha, yeah. a heavy leather apron of course.

btw the bad south park joke about des moines being several years behind is right again
https://www.facebook.com/pg/fontenellesupplyco/photos/

also saw a restaurant reopening as new american modern food and it has all the white subway tile decor

heavy leather shoeshine boy pretty badass.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/bb/dc/e8/bbdce8c2923f81dd9f15d746f949c83f--man-magazine-dress-shoes.jpg

i don't even own a pickaxe :(

there must be an artisanal type volunteer firefighting crew out there with a biodiesel truck and handmade axes.

Unlike a traditional firehouse, where the firemen might spend most of their time playing video games, talking sports, and eating frozen pizzas, here you're more likely to find some of the men sitting in a circle discussing politics or playing a board game (Carcassonne is the current popular favorite), while others are busy in the kitchen making adobo bowls laced with kimchi, seaweed, fish sauce, and soft-boiled eggs. A vinyl record player sits in the corner, playing the first album by Fleet Foxes while an ELO album sits in the queue. And here there are no fire poles, but slides reclaimed from an abandoned playground.

This preempts my idea for an artisanal software shop. Old mail carts full of hand-carved wood-block ones and zeroes. Citizen-coders tenderly arranging them on racks. In the back, a side business doing punch-cards for elite customers (using reclaimed crochet hooks). In the corner, a lovingly restored PC Junior - backed up using magnetic cassette tape - for client demos.

Magnetic tape backups still as good as it gets tbh

It's so much warmer than digital.

artisanally handled by robots

Nomar please tell me you made up that firemen story because it made me immediately want to punch someone.

Paper tape backups. With handmade paper, of course.

this has probably been said upthread but this urge to feel connected to objects by understanding/feeling close to their production makes perfect sense for a post-industrial/digital/hyper-real society in which it's easy to feel alienated from labour, your environment and the economy. localism ties into the same thing, as does minecraft