craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

its so funny that northampton is like 20 minutes away and a totally different world. i feel like a bumkin when i go there now. rich people! with little rich children in matching clothes! you can't get away with that in greenfield. if you are rich you still dress like a farmer. rich people in farmer drag. i love everyone though. except the co-op crowd. them i can do without.

I think I should move to Greenfield.

That's like the menu of 2 out of every 3 new restaurants that open in Chicago.

Or it says this:

Our menus are written by hand each day as we shop the markets, meet with our farmers, and develop new ideas.

can you buy a 2000 square foot house for $136,000 in chicago?

http://www.trulia.com/property/1040601802-31-West-St-Greenfield-MA-01301

Doubtful. Very doubtful.

Oh and I'm not saying the menus are a good thing. I mean the food is fine, but I'm sure they could have just went to the grocery store and lied about everything else and it would taste the same.

this one is a keeper. plus, has third floor apartment. you can stick your mom up there when she goes mad.

http://www.trulia.com/property/3080878664-38-Abbott-St-Greenfield-MA-01301

just going to note that the really annoying thing about the artisanal mayo place is that its only open a few hours a day and is mostly used for cooking/storage -- why are they taking up storefront space on vanderbilt for that??

hope & olive differs from a lot of more precious new-american locally-sourced restaurants in that its a big booming place. its fun. has a huge bar. you can bring kids. it's great.

http://www.hopeandolive.com/

silby, you also have to check out:

http://www.magpiepizza.com/

http://www.thepeoplespint.com/

http://brassbucklegreenfield.com/

One thing that occurred to me today is that the pair of Camper woodie shoes I have right now are definitely worth the relatively large amount I paid ($140? $160?). I got them a couple years ago, wore them maybe 1-2x week for about two years and now wear them every day to work and have done so since August. I did have a shoemaker add rubber to the soles and even out the heel at one point, so I guess that adds a little to the cost. Still, great shoes that are easily worth the extra money.

My experience with camper has generally been good except that I once owned a pair of pelotas with the bubble sole, and the bubbles wore out unevenly and then the sole couldn't be replaced.

http://timenewsfeed.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/dunkinartisanbagels.jpg

shut it down.

i paid $180 for three pairs of shoes last summer. all keen. store in brattleboro was having a half-off flood sale. keen kind of the equivalent to the subaru wagon around here. now i just need a subaru wagon. i got 2 pair allweather waterproof sneakers and a pair of walking shoes. very rugged. hope all three pairs last me for at least 4.5 years. or longer.

an authentic new way to start your day! xp

maybe that just means they don't make the scones and the bagels out of the same dough anymore

everything in a dunkin donuts smells the same to me

man scott Hope & Olive looks great. there's like…two restaurants in Northampton that aren't just ludicrously overpriced for what they are, as far as I'm concerned. Which doesn't stop me from eating out more than I ought to.

that is a solid comparison, scott. subaru wagons are like the genuinely useful unkillable car as far as i can tell

thx for the campers endorsement, Hurting. i'm looking for a good general use shoe that i could wear somewhere sort-of nice, to work, and just all the time and was looking at some. durability is key

man, i have this pair of born shoes that i should probably just swap out the laces and inner soles on, i wore them daily for yeeeears and they're still mostly good

being repairable is a pretty strong signifier of 'quality' imho but not without reason

yeah I have these:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.svpply.com/small/82057.jpg?1333635634

Dressy enough for work, easy to dress down, more or less oxford styled but have kind of a unique profile, great soles, very comfortable soft leather.

Kind of wish they didn't have the "camper" tag on them. That's one of my main beefs with camper.

whereas the cole haan oxfords I had, once they split at the seams, couldn't really be properly repaired (unless the shoe repair guy I went to was just very bad at his craft). But that was also before cole haan upped its brand, so maybe they're better now.

didn't they get bought by nike, though? I think some of their shoes are probably good but the more casual ones are like "woo we have nike air pouches in this" and I even saw a couple with the little window in the heel so you could see the air pouch and I was disgusted by the fact someone might think seeing that on a casual shoe or dress shoe was a good idea

haha mh, no love for the cole haan LUNARGRANDS?

http://unbiasedwriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/cole-haan-lunargrand.jpg

I fucking hate those.

those are still not nearly as bad as the generic dressy casual shoes with the fucking air bubble windows!

which says a lot

yeah this is a really fucking great idea
http://www.2blowhards.com/Cole-Haan%20Air%20Conneroxford%20-%20USD225.jpg

oh good god

those look like kmart shoes

oof

I know, right?

do those come with a pair of off-white compression socks because that is how i imagine them being worn

hot look: gym teacher at church

you've met my father, right? just toss on a pair of wranglers and a bugle boy polo and you've got the man

the clothes encircle the man

So, have we talked about this yet?
http://nymag.com/nymag/toc/20120423/

wow talk about threadbait. i'm gonna dig in with handmade fork and knife!

it is a lot of fun writing sentences like this:

"More than anyone else in the New Brooklyn artisan movement, they exemplify to an almost implausible degree the daguerreotype stereotype of the bristly hipster, in newsboy cap and tweed britches, pedaling his penny-farthing to a north Brooklyn industrial space to make handcrafted nano-batch sweetmeats."

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

not to be too confusing, but THESE Mast brothers are actually hipper. Singing ancient folk song while cleaning golf balls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00awt0q_iZc

where IS christopher guest during all this? he has really dropped the ball. allowing indie rockers to steal his comic thunder via portlandia.

"Plutocrats of a certain stripe like their baubles to come with meaningful, brow-furrowing backstories, and the artisans, with their small-scale production and deliberate inefficiencies and expensive ingredients, need the postindustrial wealthy to buy their $14 pickles and $10 granola. The buyer of $9 jam, after all, isn’t another maker of $9 jam. It’s the guy whose multinational robotic assembly line spits out jars of $1 jam. Or it’s his trustafarian son, the Global Jam Logistics heir. Or it’s the private-equity guy who just offshored GJL to a sweatshop in Bangalore."

they put a bird on it

http://www.greenspaceshome.com/storage/EarlyBird.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1238699245199

we did talk about it. itt I think. or another.

I bought my wife a Mast Brothers bar for Easter and now she's worried that there might be beard hairs in it.

oh right now i'm remembering that everyone in brooklyn hates the By Brooklyn thing. or people here do. or someone did. cuz you gotta hate yer own kind if you live there.

I realized reading this article that as much as I sometimes get grumpy about all this stuff, I kind of can't really come up with any well-reasoned critique of it. I mean ok, it's niche luxury goods with a vague moral veneer. But it also represents, at its best, genuine dedication to craft and meaningful, enjoyable employment for a good number of people.

At the end of the day I just can't afford to stock my entire fridge with this sort of products. I can pay a few $ more per pound for the locally roasted coffee, drink the locally brewed beer from time to time and maybe enjoy the occasional treat at smorgasburg. I'm not going to stock my entire condiment shelf with $9 mayo, $14 pickles, $12 ketchup, etc. I guess the gimmickyness of all of it gets irritating at times, as does the false nostalgia (it's not like 19th century craft industries operated with any special attention to morality, fair trade, fair labor practices, etc.). But whatever, if the people who can afford this stuff want to pay for it, I don't really see the loss. If anything, it goes with my general belief in wealth recapture via overcharging the rich.

p much

this country has never been very good at being european. but i guess ya gotta try. or move to quebec.

Something very American and un-European about this movement's heavy reliance on novelty, actually.

hurting consistently otm