craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

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

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.

especially this. back in the 80s, the yuppies had the brilliant insight that we could all live basically as wage slaves no matter how much we happened to make, so long as our sense of "the necessities" were properly calibrated to our income bracket.

that's why i said this country has never been very good at it!

x-posts

people can't just make their lovingly crafted stuff and be quiet about it. gotta have an angle and a little razamataz. hotchacha!

gotta hava gimmick!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jakehimself/flint-and-tinder-premium-mens-underwear

"flint and tinder"

would set fire to all this menswear

which part is the flint and which is the tinder?

i'm guessing the penis is the tinder. and flint balls.

Incidentally, can someone explain kickstarter projects to me? Like why do people "pledge" money for someone's for-profit venture?

Well they often get products in return for one thing.

yeah but in this case it's like $5 or more for some matches.

Some projects make sense -- they take a certain amount of money to get off the ground, so you're basically paying for the first round of a product in advance for a discount, or you want the product to exist so you throw in a few bucks.

The ones where there's a ton of levels of funding but you don't get anything are... more nebulous

louis black on the daily show yesterday touched on this artisanal thing.

pretty good routine: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-may-1-2012/back-in-black---artisanal-foods

tbf that's more about the "artisanal thing" being picked up on by industrial food than about the "artisanal thing" itself.

A sour grapes review of Googa Mooga that doesn't really say very much:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/05/the_great_googamooga_and_elitism_what_brooklyn_s_food_festival_says_about_foodies_.html

Hmm, sour grapes...artisinal food light bulb!

http://brooklynintegers.com/

http://remodelista.com/img/sub/uimg//11-2012/barn-the-spoon-at-work.jpg

spoon carver Barnaby Carder "sits in the window at 260 Hackney Road carving spoons for eight hours at a stretch.

http://remodelista.com/posts/a-spoon-carver-in-spitalfields

Dude is making me nervous.

some of those are plainly spatulas

does he use an entire tree for each spoon he makes? i'd like to think that he does.

"When I've made a good spoon I feel good within myself"

lol burnout

probably doesn't make forks and knives because they contain hostile energy

it's kind of remarkable how handcrafting have been come to be so revered, in part by disregarding the grinding physical labor that a lot of it consists of

in 30 or 40 years, will this generation of artisans display their arthritic hands, hunched backs, and ruined eyes as badges of authenticity?

has^

he's called Barnaby.

sorry guys, i can't go out tonight, i'm making a spoon

he's on his third set of hands this week

wooden leg fits real nice now, doesn't chafe at all.