craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

that's not true across the board, there's not a plow on the wrapping for taco bell's dorito-shell tacos or whatever

like I would imagine that the farm imagery has a pretty high correlation w/ actually-less-scientifically-fucked-up-food

yesterday i saw some plastic garbage bags for sale that said they were made from "100% recycled farm plastic". farm plastic! REAL plastic made on farms. not that bullshit chemical plastic you get in so many places these days.

... increasing use of farm imagery in an age where fewer and fewer people associate farm machinery with drudgery, isolation, prickly heat, pig shit, or their drab relatives.

iatee I think that's kind of getting away from Berry's point, which I probably didn't make clear. I don't think he literally means that the further something is from the farm the more farm imagery it has, so that skittles come in a package that looks like a corn husk and is stamped with a cattle brand or something. He just means that you didn't have farm imagery as a marketing tool until people were no longer getting most of their food from a farm or one step removed from a farm (e.g. a farmer bringing the food to market). Like "farm fresh" isn't an exciting concept when it's what most food actually is, and a lot of food that was described as "farm fresh" when Berry wrote The Unsettling of America (1977) was not literally farm fresh.

And then, you know, when most people had American-made goods and took that for granted, "imported" was a big deal and a sign of wealth. I mean certain specific kinds of imported shit can still be a sign of wealth, but now most cheap crap is imported, so the mere word "imported" is hardly a luxury signifier anymore. And for the same underlying economic reasons, "local" is.

fruit pops - with 10% real fruit!!

i actually saw that once

and in my mind i basically typed out a certain percentage of this thread

Yes!

Which also reminds me of Clorox's new "Green Works" brand, which advertises stuff along the lines of "96% naturally derived"

although I guess that's getting a little off topic

"The ‘alternative’ ideal of a life based on the art of ‘getting by’ is also disappearing. Small-scale handicrafts, little self-produced undertakings, the street selling of objects, the necklaces... Infinite human tragedies have unrolled in dingy, airless shops over the past twenty years. Much really revolutionary strength has been trapped in illusions that required not a normal amount of work, but super-exploitation, all the greater because it was tied to the individual’s will to keep things going and show that it was possible to do without the factory. Now, with the restructuring of capital and the new conditions resulting from it, we can see how this ‘alternative’ model is exactly what is being suggested at an institutional level to get through this moment. As always, they see the way the wind is blowing. Other potentially revolutionary forces are now shutting themselves up in electronic laboratories and burdening themselves with work in dark, stuffy little premises, demonstrating that capital has won over them yet again."

from where?

Although I don't really buy this:

"illusions that required not a normal amount of work, but super-exploitation, all the greater because it was tied to the individual’s will to keep things going and show that it was possible to do without the factory"

because that seems to equate any kind of hard work at all, even entirely self-directed, with "exploitation"

i'm not necessarily in agreement, by the way. i just read it recently and thought it fit in with this thread.

(and btw, it was written by the infamous Alfredo Bonanno, an Italian anarchist).

this was touched on in MAN BRANDS, I think, but crafting is a scary word for dudes (and I bring it up here because all the words in the title are basically dude catnip) and this has fallout where most DIY/craft mags and things like Pinterest are either aimed directly at women or wind up being heavily populated by women.

Is there a verb that could be synonymous with crafting that lacks the gender baggage?

Sympathize lots with that paragraph - I think a lot about how I could probably get by with my skills (broad construction knowledge, but I'm not a master carpenter or anything of the sort; lots of experience with design and computers) as long as I could content myself with living in a cheap location and not aspiring in any way to normal middle classdom (ie kids).

i sympathize with it because i would like to live in a world where our projects and our dreams are not innately tied to an economical structure. what he seems to be saying, thus far in my reading, is that the problem is not that people desire to make things away from factories and other means of mass production, but that even these handicrafts and 'artisanal' pursuits (or whatever) are innately tied to a capitalist economical matrix that is exploitative. the branding of such pursuits as 'anti-corporate' is, in his eyes, recuperative and self-exploitative, and will eventually be subsumed by a culture of capital anyway.

ok.

i mean, i think one's sympathy with his ideas is directly proportional to one's personal distaste for/disgust towards capitalism.

Capitalism wrecks people, man. I know this b/c I just saw Death of a Salesman starring spiderman

Think Biff Loman would move to North Dakota but tbh this belongs in the limbo thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/t-magazine/culture/inside-the-world-of-sound.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1334175867-EONRKO+YJKDAcMPl2nP4/A#

“In the ’80s, things just literally fell off a cliff.” Or, as he states pointedly on the O.M.A. Web site, “People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.”

I am about to hear it, through the Imperias, which go for $175,000 and are tall like basketball players, each speaker horn cut from solid Pennsylvania black walnut, polished to a vaguely midcentury West Coast finish.

Fuck you, clown.

High-end audiophiles always strike me as the sort of people who would never ever go to a concert.

they can't afford to! they spent all their money on the vaguely midcentury west coast finish.

I am pretty sure half these dudes own four albums, and three of them are different remasters of Dark Side of the Moon.

is 'midcentury' code for craftsmanship? lol

oh, lol, they actually mention that on the second page

can't read the article, gfy nyt

you got greedy and wasted all 10 already???

i love when ned swears. meanwhile, the first person to buy a pair was his HERO anton corbijijn!

from dude's website

There was a time, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, when the creation of horn loaded loudspeakers, field coil and full range speakers, tube amplifiers, and analog reproduction represented the highest technical challenge and achievement. As time went on, every new innovation in sound, from solid state to digital to file sharing, turned out to bring the overall quality of sound in our lives to a lower level. People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.

meanwhile, the first person to buy a pair was his HERO anton corbijijn!

More money than sense, that man.

xp that is some straight up bullshit. There is no way that a turntable, amp, and speakers from 1950 sounds better than even it's 1980's equivalent.

I wonder if the early Misfits still sound like they were recorded in a bathroom on $175k speakers

would be fun to invite this guy and his pals for a weeklong sound tasting and then just play Miami Bass 24/7

I am sure the best equipment from 1975 sounds better than laptop speakers, yeah

old speakers do sound heavenly. to me. i will say that. i mean for analog sound i would definitely prefer older speakers. they were made for it. not so nowadays. unless some freak like this makes you a custom pair.

xp that is some straight up bullshit. There is no way that a turntable, amp, and speakers from 1950 sounds better than even it's 1980's equivalent.

yeah, wtf? the 20s-50s as the golden age of tru audio fidelity? complete bullshit.

I think it was scott who had some pioneer speakers in a pic that I have -- I got lucky and finally grabbed my dad's 1972-vintage ones. Which, sure, old.. but I think he paid $1k for two speakers and a receiver back then. I think you can get some pretty fucking nice speakers for the 2012 equivalent of $1k.

ya'll ever listen to those 78rpm discs they were making up into the mid-fifties? those things sound gorgeous! way better than any lp from the 1980s that i can think of.

hell, even crank victrolas with one-use steel needles playing electrically recorded discs (the nice ones like victor scrolls, columbia vivatonals and okeh electric's) from the late 20s sound better than a lot of records from the 1980s imo. but that is a contrarian position perhaps.

to clarify the first part of that post, i mean 78s produced in the mid-fifties not everything leading up to that point. duh. they really had it down by then! and the faster it spins, the better it sounds..

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-150557.html

faster spin = better sound is true, but beyond that...

disagree about steel needle crank victrolas of whatever sort sounding better than even midrange quality amplified electromagnetic speakers

imo there is a liveness to that sound that makes up for the lack of definition--which has more to do with the way it was recorded than the way it's being reproduced. idk, i don't think abt it much, but listening to mid-50s 78s is a good experience for someone who wants to hear an obviously 'better' sound than their mp3s or ipod can provide. just ranbling here.

http://nymag.com/news/features/artisanal-brooklyn-2012-4/

ffs.

like 2/3 of all nymag cover stories are trollgaze.

eh seems mostly fine to me

it would.

weren't you mourning the death of american manufacturing jobs in another thread?

right. so everyone should just make some overpriced fucking pickles and yuppie bullshit chocolate blogbait. great plan adam smith.