"Successfully marketing a product so that it feels local everywhere is an art. I’ve started calling this crucial step in a product’s development 'smallwashing'..."

"... i.e., when a brand positions itself as a small business and shows up on shelves as if it were small, even though it has probably been through at least one comfy fundraise and a hotshot General Catalyst VC sits on the board.... It’s up to the actual companies to decide on their values — Will the jarred condiment be woke, aligned with a cool chef, or 'artisanal' in some way? — but regardless of the chosen messaging, Instagram then takes over, drilling its users with targeted ads that help build a company’s story (Omsom lets you cook faster, for example; Momofuku’s noodles let you cook like David Chang). By the time a customer discovers an Instagram brand in a shoppy shop for the first time, it may even feel like a mirage: This chile crisp really exists just for me — it’s not only a story on my phone!"

From "Welcome to the Shoppy Shop/Why does every store suddenly look the same?" (NY Magazine).

The term "shoppy shops" refers to shops that sell these "smallwashed" products. We're told that the packaging is often designed by this place: Gander. Should you click and take a gander at Gander? Yes, the design of the design firm's page includes big pictures of everyone on The Team, and it seems oddly humorous, like a Wes Anderson movie credits sequence.

Accidental abstract expressionism — phase 1 and 2.

The accidental abstract expressionism of an unfinished paint job.

 

Aesthetically pleasing incompleteness.

"When you operate, especially if the operation is dangerous, you live very intensely. You live entirely in the present..."

"... and the world outside the operating theatre simply disappears. You are never bored. You cannot afford to make any mistakes. And making a mistake with your hands – your instruments slipping, for instance, or your hands shaking – is incredibly rare.... Working on the doll’s house in my workshop is a very different experience. My mind wanders and I often struggle against boredom, especially if the work is very repetitive, such as making multiple bannisters for a miniature staircase. I often get things wrong and have to saw up a new piece of wood and, cursing myself furiously, start all over again – not a luxury you have when operating."

Writes Henry Marsh in "After a long career in brain surgery, I’m trying my hand at making doll’s houses/To my surprise I don’t miss neurosurgery now I’ve retired, but still find joy in making things for my grandchildren" (The Guardian).

"After the Americans leave, what will happen to Afghan artists and performers, cultural workers, and nongovernmental organization staffers engaged with heritage, traditional crafts and preservation?"

 Asks WaPo art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott.

A young man who leads the local offices for an international cultural heritage organization said he was determined to stay in Afghanistan. “I am checking every day, and right now, things are normal and safe,” he said....

Some arts, including ceramics and woodwork, are passed on through a deeply conservative master-apprentice system which is embedded in traditional Afghan culture. Miniature painting, which has roots in Persian culture, too, is more fraught because it includes representational imagery and the human figure. During the Soviet occupation that began in 1979, rug-making — one of the most pervasive and revered Afghan crafts — morphed from an abstract craft to a field of resistance, with individual craftsmen making “war rugs” that recorded the brutality of the Russian war effort.... 

[One] leader of an organization that does cultural work in Afghanistan said...“Was everything we did for nothing?.... You can think of it like a building, a Jenga tower, and it all just fell down. But this is also about human capital. Millions of people got 20 years of relative stability, and freedom, and perhaps they will do something for their country. Maybe they will come back.”

"He appears to be a machinist, at least by avocation and possibly professionally. He has access to very good tools: a lathe, a sandblasting cabinet, a milling machine, drill bits he keeps intimidatingly sharp."

"He must have obsessive tendencies, but somehow he wears them lightly, at least onscreen. (We never see him except for his hands.).... He abhors any rough edge.... We periodically see him heat brass parts with a blowtorch (captioned '300°C,' in case you needed to know the exact temperature) and then dunk them into oil to give them a smooth brown-black coating. Most significant of all, though, are his level of craft and his eye for the smallest detail work. If a part is too far gone, he will often give up on straightening it out, and reproduce it exactly (and I mean exactly) out of a billet of brass or steel. In the brief explanatory captions he adds to his video, he usually shows the wrecked piece, explains that it was beyond fixing, and then appends the phrase 'I make a new one.' (His English is the only thing in these videos that is the least bit bent.) Those words have reached the catchphrase level; he now sells T-shirts that read I MAKE A NEW ONE."

From "Watching Perfectionist Restorers As They Work Is Incredibly Soothing" (NY Magazine). 

Example highlighted in the article, which I watched in its 17-minute entirety is "Rusty Deadlocked Vise - Perfect Restoration":

"I would like to talk about ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Swan Lake,’ about my battements and my handsome partners..."

"But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics and Stalin’s terror," wrote the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has died at the age of 89.

Her father was shot to death in 1938 in Stalin’s purges. (Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only in 1989.) Her mother was arrested and sent to a labor camp with her infant son, then exiled to Kazakhstan....

Ms. Plisetskaya was... restricted by the Bolshoi’s rigid Soviet guidelines on choreography, which viewed the very movement of dance through the prism of ideology, yet she was able to infuse stultified, literal movements with much deeper meaning....

“I danced all of classical ballet and dreamed of something new,” she said. “In my time, it was impossible.”

I'd like to hear more specifically how ballet movements could be thought to contain political ideology. I once met a woman in Madison who had learned a difficult craft that produced a type of ordinary object — a lovely version of something quite utilitarian. She expressed anguish in not yet having found a way to make these objects political. I said I thought that loading politics into art tended to make bad art. I dreamed of interesting conversations in Madison. Many years later, I started this blog.

ADDED: I don't like tag proliferation, so I'm using my "merging politics and showbiz" for this. It seems wrong to call ballet "showbiz," but think about it. Why is it wrong? It isn't!

Ah, but I remember I also have an "art and politics" tag. I remember that tag as I think of the conversation with the Madison artisan. Why did those crafted objects prompt me to think "art" when ballet did not? Because I thought of art school.

"I was happy with his work — and even happier with his presence in the house because he was a great moral force."

Said the great writer Joan Didion about Harrison Ford, who worked as a carpenter on her beach house in 1971.

Imagine having a beach house in 1971, being 37 years old, having a 29-year-old Harrison Ford, doing carpentry work for you and experiencing him as a great moral force.

Didion was married, you should know. She married John Gregory Dunne in 1964, and they remained married until he dropped dead in 2003. I say "dropped dead" because I read "The Year of Magical Thinking," which begins with that scene.

But how was the young carpenter a moral force? Here's a little song:

Floored...

... by floor details. I was surprised by the all-wood vent...



... and by the entry to the stairway, otherwise known as the gaping hole in the floor:

What did Jesus do during the "unknown" — or "lost" or "silent" — years, between the ages of 12 and 30?

Here's a Wikipedia article on this gap in the Biblical record, which seems to invite speculation:

Some Arthurian legends hold that Jesus traveled to Britain as a boy, lived at Priddy in the Mendips, and built the first wattle cabin at Glastonbury. William Blake's early 19th century poem And did those feet in ancient time was inspired by the story of Jesus traveling to Britain. ...

In 1908 Levi H. Dowling published the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ which he claimed was channeled to him by a supernatural being called "Akashic Records" as the true story of the life of Jesus, including "the 'lost' eighteen years silent in the New Testament." The narrative follows the young Jesus across India, Tibet, Persia, Assyria, Greece and Egypt....

The usual story is that he "simply lived in Galilee during that period."

"With this kind of work it is not push, push, push; you need to relax... you have to massage the stone rather than push it."

Said Jacob Arndt, one of 2 men doing the stone carving restoration work on the University Club building here in Madison. Arndt has been working alongside Gayal Oglesbay since last fall.

“I really rarely find someone who carves stone,” Oglesbay said. “A lot of people will putz around or use machinery, but people who carve it originally with hammers and chisels and use math and come up with the exact product are hard to find.”

There are 50 to 90 stone carvers in the United States, according to Walter Arnold, treasurer and past president of the national Stone Carvers Guild, who says the number depends on what standard you apply: "if you limit to those good enough by 1913 standards to have held down a job in a good shop back then, the current numbers are significantly lower."

***

I'm making a new tag for this, artisans. I almost went with one of my old tags: art, sculpture, architecture, careers. Those are all almost there, but they are off in a way that amplifies the very problem the article is talking about. I also have a tag I'm not making a tag for this, but I could make a second new tag I am making a new tag for this. Having made the new tag, I wish I could go back and add it to all the old posts where it could have been used. I'd like to be able to see what has come up over the years, discussing the highly skilled work of those who produce beautiful things but do not think of themselves as artists. Or perhaps some of these people do think of themselves as artists (and maybe some painters and sculptors don't like to think of themselves as artists). I'd be interested in pulling together all that old material. If only I'd had better blogging craftsmanship.

UPDATE: The Blogger software changed and tags stopped working properly when I had more than 5,000 of them. Systematically eliminating tags, I got rid of "I'm not making a tag for this" and "I am making a new tag for this." So don't go looking for that now!

"This guy is the Bob Ross of brick laying."

"They do not show us his face, because he is all of us on the inside."

"It's oddly mesmerizing to watch a pro at work. (In this case, masonry blocks.)"