Wednesday, February 2

Bulldog Engineering

Imagine finding a vintage motorcycle club down the road in another old farmhouse . Michael Sharratt is a sailor and British motorcycle racer who happened to settle in the countryside here where he fabricates custom racing bikes, and then travels around the country racing them. He holds Vintage motorcycle club meetings in his shop, an old barn packed full of classics. This is a photo of a restoration project he has underway.



the roadside shop is in this barn

K2 skis that glow in the dark...

LED light fixtures are the next big thing apparently.Solar powered LED lighting...
how about some LED nightlights? security. motion sensitive.
Still, I'm interested in knowing how to assemble these "parts" as a kind of modern craft object emerges.

http://members.misty.com/don/

http://icc.skku.ac.kr/~won/electro/lights.html


I remember my thrill at starting off on the torch light parade, skiing down from the top of Telluride high on Jaegermeister and seeing the red LED "damping indicator" on my K2 ModX skis light up...it was very unusual to ski in the dark of course, so this was a rare opportunity

skiing at night in Telluride

artisian culture vs mass produced

having thought about old snowshoes...I got into a little critical theory while working on my thesis in media. Frederic Jameson and Baudrillard...I don't know much about it and less about philosophy, they make me start to nod out. But I do like the occasional difficult text, it makes us work a little. Here, in an old essay, jameson is talking about how the modern world has lost its depth...the objects like those pottery bowls or the snowshoes aren't as prevalent and so much of the world is becoming plastic and two dimensional. He later theoried about post post capitalisim...what will the future be like in a "corporocracy" ( my words) where capitalisim has morphed into the nect thing, most likely darker.

This quote is from a critical theory website called http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/02/jameson-jumping-beans-and.html

"The privileged objects of Surrealism – “mysterious pieces of junk, inexplicable artefacts which seem to bear some hidden message, the lettering that leaps out from a shop window in passing as a miraculous coincidence or a thinly disguised omen, the store windows of inner passageways, now long since torn down..” – these, says Jameson “Are immediately identifiable to us as the products of a not yet fully industrialised and systematised economy. This is to say that the human origins of the products of this period -their relationship to the work from which they issued – have not yet been fully concealed; in their production they will show traces of an artisanal organisation of labour while their distribution is still predominantly assured by a network of small shopkeepers…“We need only juxtapose the mannequin as symbol, with the photographic objects of pop art, the Campbell’s soup can, the pictures of Marilyn Monroe, or with the visual curiosities of op art; we need only exchange, for that environment of small workshops and store counters, for the marche aux puces and the stalls in the streets, the gasoline stations along American superhighways, the glossy photographs in the magazines, or the cellopane paradise of an American drugstore, in order to realise that the objects of Surrealism are gone without a trace. Henceforth, in what we may call post-industrial capitalism, the products with which we are furnished are utterly without depth: their plastic content is totally incapable as serving as a conductor of psychic energy.. and we may ask ourselves whether we are not here in the presence of a cultural transformation of signal proportions, a historical break of an unexpectedly absolute kind.”



Continuing apropos of nothing, but somewhat relative to your gasoline buying awareness, Starbucks, a plastic invader of the artisianal psyche if ever there was one. ( A man told me last week of finding a starbucks at the fourth gate of the forbidden city of Bejing)
But here is starbucks trying to do some good in their own way, or are they? Maybe they just want capitalism to be more effective...since they are the very model of a globalized, corporocracy power, transnscending human values for the good of the global corporate "it" that cares not for the environment, the local or humanity in general.

From http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002014.html
For the next couple weeks, every cup of Starbucks coffee sold in America will have on it the following words written Worldchanging ally Denis Hayes:

Zeroes are important. A million seconds ago was last week. A billion seconds ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools. America's national debt is now $7.5 trillion, and it's skyrocketing, even as America's population ages. There will never be a better time to start paying off this crippling debt than today.

My friend Peter raised the idea that if those gas companies that DONT buy middle east oil were to grow, then they would...at least thats what I think he said. This Denis Hayes dude says

Warren Buffet has begun purchasing foreign currencies. Why? Because the dollar is plunging in value. Japan and China, which together own about $900 billion of our national debt, have sharply slowed their purchases of Treasury instruments in recent months. Why should they continue to buy American debt when the dollar is declining sharply against other international currencies? Around Davos and the other watering holes of the international business community, there is a growing fear that America is heading toward a monetary collapse that could take down the global economy.

My question is.... who fucking cares about the global economy but the corporocracy? Sure, a financial collapse will hurt, but what will the long term effect be? Good or bad?

wow, back to the woods. I got that book "the shell collector" today.

Hand made objects

underside of bowl showing makers mark and craftsmanship of the potter

Thirty year old bowl made by Peter Moore at the Loon mountain pottery in Lincold NH. My family used these bowls every day and they strike me as a good example of an "Artisian" object Posted by Hello