craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

woah, nice. i'm gonna need a while to digest that but i'm psyched to read that massive post, fiz

fpd u for cisword but when i get a chance i'll take that on (on phone atm)

a few more fps in there if you take the time to go thru tbf,

i look fwd to it

str8 fyre beautiful post fizzles

tho obv i'd contend that if you can't tell the difference in the pickle at the end of the day, yr process, however an interesting paragraph it makes, is a black box to which i am entirely indifferent

Pickle-Makers to Their Majesties, with their carefully seasoned oak-barrels, their vinegars derived of the finest vintages of Burgundy vinegars, their cucumbers grown in secret locations, specific leeward riverbanks that catch both the morning and evening light but are shaded from the midday sun by the dappled shade of sycamores, the secret timing of their preparation, ritualised as entire religions, dependent on the cycle of the moon, the mansions of the stars, and the aphelion/perihelion distances of the sun, their hieratic picklemaker robes. The contents of the recipes split between nine unknown pickle men, matching the nine wise men of the east, whose identities are a closely kept secret, and who only convene at intervals of prime-numbers in cloisters inaccessible to all but the very poorest and most humble. their pickles so refined that only a few may be allowed to consume it, they only know the secret words to be uttered at a certain few, shabby establishments that will bring forth from darkened back room the specific gherkin or cornicon required.

my eyes are filled with tears of laughter and wonder at this

it is so beautiful i'm swooning

yes, that was a truly incredible post

i would, in all seriousness, buy a book about yr picklemakers

yeah actually today i went off into a reverie about the selection process for the replacement of one of the nine, involving peregrinations across mitteleurope in search of innocent and brave males, and curious women of independent thought, from areas of recondite geography being given quests to prove the purity of their pickle-making credentials so they may become one of the nine guardians of picklemaking. I'm on fucking holiday, I can do this.

it could be parfum but vinegary

was thinking of making some pickles myself but now am intimidated

wdn't worry my dad used to make machine-age pickled onions that fucked your head in. used to sit there over christmas in front of the tv w acid reflux washing over us like fucking hallucinogens, watching 40,000 leagues under the sea or something, crying vinegar tears.

oh I've pickled vegetables, that's easy. no I mean actual pickles. you know, out of cucumbers.

thanks for all that fizzles, i will always stan for ilx posts that bother to quote braudel

this is excellent work on a subject with which i am unfamiliar although it reminds me of

i) a 2am l1bg3n braudel gotta catch em all session which resulted in reading a couple dozen pages of the book about the creation of the mediaeval world & being a little surprised by how lucid, pellucid he is &

ii) reading the historical glosses in clive coates book about burgundy the other week and being surprised quite how early the byzantine vineyard categorizations were being developed -- the interplay of church holdings, parisian merchants, royal patronage, this long prior to the esate-fracturing napoleonic code of inheritance and the 19th c appellation system, so that the same often tiny (<4ha) vineyards whose wines russian billionaires patronize today mostly had the same lustre many centuries ago (the extent to which these distinctions are auratic or merely real being another rabbit hole)

ah. you might be able to do an nvq?

tho it's kind of interesting in light of this thread how skilled manual labour has become part of the further education... industry. given part of i'd define it is *transmission* of knowledge as much of the practice of the skills.

oh that was an xp to Shakey Mo.

That's interesting, Nil - that's a subject you cd get lost in for sure. the vinegars bit was put into my head by tosches v amusing 'article' on opium dens in vanity fair:

How could so sophisticated a nose fail to detect the cow shit with which this most celebrated estate in Bordeaux fertilizes its vines? A true wine connoisseur, if there were such a thing, would taste the pesticide and manure above all else: he would be not a goûteur de vin but rather a goûteur de merde. But there is no true connoisseurship of wine outside of those who know that the true soul of wine, l’âme du vin, is vinegar. It is in sipping straight those rare aged vinegars designated da bere that one truly tastes wonders: the real thing, an ichor far beyond the jive-juice of that industry of adjectives and pretense which was once the artless and noble drink of artless and noble peasants—peasants nobler and of greater connoissance than the moneyed suckers of today who have been conned into believing that the tasting of wine calls for words other than “good,” “bad,” or “just shut up and drink.”

the industry of adjectives and pretense sometimes talk about cowshit in relation to fine burgundy

'farmyard'
A slightly dirty, earthy, manure-type aroma. In a young wine it may indicate poor (unclean) winemaking practices. In an older bottle of red Burgundy it can be a desirable, developed character.

I'm american btw

yes, i've heard that before - the mouldy cabbage and shit side of things. not sure i've ever operated consistently at a high level of wine drinking to fully understand, but i think i've probably had a couple of good burgundies that have had this. it's quite noticeable because, like Fernet, which does a similar thing differently, it's moreishly foul.

ah, tbought you might be. come to the uk SMC! we can have a pint of vinegar and discuss conceptual and actual pickling. seriously tho. pickling fapov. think it over.

I...

the heuristic seems to be.....if you think your wine tastes like shit, check the receipt and if it's less than £30 send it for a refund, if it's more then order a couple dozen extra before it's all shipped to moscow and hong kong

I'm reaching the part of Mason & Dixon where it vaults to the glory of showing its full hand (about 500 pages in), and Fizzles' incredible posts here tie in closely with its notions of trade, craft and ownership (it discusses Mason's weaver stock at length, and the violent horrors visited upon the upstarts who'd have the impertinence to claim some decisive stake in their own production). The pickle-making paragraph especially is probably the best Pynchon I've read by someone other than Pynchon (and even defeats quite a large proportion of the very man's own work).

Anyway, just registering my continued support for the Fizzles Exegesis Project. The most demanding of all possible sitemods would have permabanned everyone except you by now :)

Oh, I could rattle on at length about the wealthy folk (often Russians) whom I work for, and who tend to regard nothing as of any beneficial value unless it is absurdly marked-up.

xpost definitely. i did this once with a burgundy i bought off waitrose innit innit. it tasted fucking awful, and i don't mind fucking awful. took it back and they were all 'it's supposed to taste like that' (i'd checked on the internet about the farmyard, so i wuz ready for them so I said 'taste it!' and they can't so i won). it was horrible tho, not even farmyard, just sharp and nasty, cork wet as well. and the thing about waitrose is they give you double your money back in vouchers, something they don't promote. bought a handful of bottles of facile expensive red and a bar of fruit and nut.

aw imago you are really (definitively) too kind - closest to pynchon that gets is that some of it looks like it was pastiche put thru google translate, but it's fun to dick about.

how was the fruit and nut

the foodstuff I would like to take an amateurish interest in the production of is probably olives and olive oil. have you heard of the electrical supply store in clerkenwell that also sources by reputation the finest olive oil in london, from turkish cyprus? i've tried both their olives and their oil and while i can't say for certain their produce is better than the very best supermarket fare (or even the semi-decent EVOO), the massed power-tools and claw-hammers more than anything else gave it the most appealing essence, piquant flavour bursting unexpected from amidst burnished steel and chipped meshwork, and i returned there several times throughout my otherwise useless masters degree

incidentally, i chased down that coy WdlM riddle in Lispet, Lispett and Vaine i quoted in the earlier post:

The narrator interrupts - tho not before Maunders has has got in a riddle (again interrupted):

What's more, they knew in those days that objects are only of value when representative of subjects. Has it never occurred to you (no, I suppose not) that the Wisest's apes, ivory, and peacocks were symbolical? The apes representing, of course --'
'Of course,' I interrupted hurriedly.

Reading Waldemar Janson's superb Apes and Ape Lore, a book no house should be without, I found the argument that the ape represents luxuria, and that the typical gothic architectural representation of a woman on a pedestal above an ape being beset by serpents, was to indicate that woman's having overcome the sin of luxuria. This woman can be identified with Sheba, whose journey to Solomon was seen as typologically prefiguring the journey of the Magi to Christ, and exemplary of her overcoming her typically oriental sins. Since then apes have been traditionally associated with Solomon's court, and Janson notes:

The symbolic raison d'être of the animal, however, was quickly forgotten, at least in Italy, and the ape survived in these scenes only as an exotic luxury object)

...

In Northern art, on the other hand, the 'pilgrimage ape' retained its identity throughout the 15th century. Since the Journey of the Queen of Sheba was not a popular subject in Late Gothic art, we encounter the animal mostly in the company of the Three Magi. The number of examples is far smaller than in Italian art, but the role of the animal, generally speaking, is clearly symbolic, rather than incidental to the Oriental setting of the scene.

no idea whether this is what WdlM was referring to or whether he was just playing games, but there it is.

how was the fruit and nut

― his LIPS !!! (darraghmac), Wednesday, 11 September 2013 23:12 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

incapable of judgment d. it's the food of the gods.

fp rescinded, carry on

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/352312074/the-luddite-because-life-is-analogue

haha um.... nope

It’ll feature a first-person confessional piece about an hipster viking lookalike, Jay Williams, who turned to weightlifting to save himself from an early demise. The story covers themes of weight loss, consumption, grief, spirituality and mental illness in a way that connects.

unexpected lols @ "an hipster"

For the record, I think it's a pretty cool project, especially if the content is as worthy as the production values.

be that as it may i think they need to, uh... maybe work on their messaging a little bit

when the video zooms in on logo for THE LUDDITE over a soundtrack of chunky electric guitar power chords, i mean

an 'ipster

I didn't watch the video. I'm generally a supporter of letterpress printing, as I am a letterpress printer, but am constantly thinking about the way it's used/viewed. On one hand it's an old-fashioned process that results in a high-quality product that can't be replicated with cheaper/newer technologies. On the other hand there are people doing it just to keep an old tradition around.

an historic hipster

I assumed there were plenty of small, letterpressed journals floating around, am I wrong?

dan i have no problem with letterpress whatsoever! i'm just unimpressed with the too-precious gee-whiz novelty it brings to the idea of a print-only publication

anyway -- fizzle's suggestion of mobile phone companies being descendant of old textile houses reminded me in a circular manner of this photo that popped up on my tumblr dash recently, coming from a blog mentioned itt before -- itsworn.tumblr.com

http://24.media.tumblr.com/f7350181588b3dd42ed693ffdd38bb08/tumblr_mrjcmnwQJ61qdbn9do1_500.jpg

leather iphone case! with indigo stains from raw denim! ah, the patina of a year's worth of use really adds character to your phone... which you probably won't own anymore past the next 6 months

There aren't that many fully letterpressed journals. It's too much work and too expensive. Only bigger shops that have hot metal equipment and large enough presses can do it in anyway that makes sense.

also using kickstarter to fund a letterpress only journal is a little like being helicoptered into an authentic wilderness experience

this is a dude i know that has his shop right by my house, and i think its super cool in there

http://nomadicletterpress.com/

thx to the minnesota center for book arts, we have a bunch of letterpress journals etc floating around town actually.

http://www.mnbookarts.org/

my boss brought me a bamboo iphone 5 case from shenzhen but I haven't used it yet bc let's face it it's not gonna offer much force absorption in a drop.

and a panda might eat it

Eat it while shitting at the same time. Disgusting creatures.