Last Week
Monday Link Drop
You could waste hours, beautifully
When flying was something altogether different.
Always fun to see this brand in the movie 2001…
Friday in Santa Fe
A seed becomes a tree. A small thought becomes a big thought, a few paragraphs turn into a novel. Quarters become dollars. A bubble grows in time. I feel that Twitter cuts off that process, for me. By giving in to the temptation to tweet brief thoughts, I jeopardize the possibility that the small thought can ferment into a better thought. The small thought remains a small thought. Words don’t grow beyond one sentence. The bubble bursts too soon. 140 characters can stunt my thought-growth. Fast food for thoughts. More self-reflection, more monkey-chatter (((a Buddhist term for the constant self-reflection of the brain))). Your milage may vary, but in my case, I am glad I stopped tweeting and don’t miss it. When I notice something on a walk through town, I no longer feel the need to pull out my phone and communicate it. In fact I might turn my phone off altogether and enjoy an hour of not being connected.
And when I walk here, in the Mountains, I don’t get reception anyway:
This week I spent several days cleaning my garage – got rid of 500 lbs of stuff… then I couldn’t stop there and cleaned out my closet. Then started on the studio…
I am trying to remove disposable items from my life. Pruning and paring down.
I like a well-made item. I don’t need ten items in various colors. Just give me the one, made with the right attention, the correct intention, with dedication and expertise. I don’t need ten or thirty or a hundred guitars. I don’t need lots of clothes. Just ones that were made by people who enjoy their work, instead of in a giant factory under horrific work conditions. I discovered that I like clothing that is somewhat atemporal, not made for today or imagined for tomorrow, or retro – just well-made and functional. To hell with Fashion and their seasons.
Here is a very good sentence from William Gibson’s new book “Zero History”:
She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.
That sentence is brilliant and says so much. Patination is a fake story, a fake history. Distressed clothing delivers a false story… acid wash, stone wash and so on…
No, I live my own story, thank you very much. Serious denim, long-lasting denim, raw denim, Japanese denim, clothing that will outlast the less expensive, giant factory-made fashion.
I like small restaurants where the chef is also the owner, and preferbly is a person with no interest in creating a chain or franchising. We ate in such a restaurant a couple of days ago, the tiny “La Boca” on Marcy Street. Specials created from fresh local produce, like a grilled peach, wrapped in ham and cheese – well, the ham was probably from Spain, but the peach was local.
There is a theme here, somehow. Maybe it’s simply “real stuff”… handmade, preferbly local, from people with expertise, items that are lasting, things that can be cared for. Somehow my rejection of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and all of the other social media, my enjoyment of real denim, and small restaurants, it all fits together somehow. It makes sense to me, but maybe just to me.
Thursday Link Drop
Very nice video about Raleigh Denim and the last real denim made in the USA, at Cone Mills in Greensboro: Raleigh Denim: Handcrafted in North Carolina (Vimeo)
This looks promising: Roy Denim
Tokyo at night, on Vimeo
Check out the planes landing one after another – about 3’30” into the video.
There are some fundamental principles regarding the construction of an acoustically healthy society, one where we can exist within the sounds of life. Respect towards voice and words, sonic awareness, the awakening of the sense of hearing. To preserve the sounds that tend to fade out, while remaining open to the sounds that spring out of each technological stride.
Pants Size Chart – Mens Pant Sizes by Brand – Esquire
Are Your Pants Lying to You? An Investigation
(Via Daring Fireball)
What BS! I measured my jeans and they are indeed 34″ while the label says 32″. And Old Navy apparently tries to charm men into buying heir jeans by making pants a full five inches larger than the label:
However, the temple for waisted male self-esteem is Old Navy, where I easily slid into a size 34 pair of the brand’s Dress Pant. Where no other 34s had been hospitable, Old Navy’s fit snugly. The final measurement? Five inches larger than the label. You can eat all the slow-churn ice cream and brats you want, and still consider yourself slender in these.
Tuesday Links
Japanese Synchronized Walking on YouTube. Stay with it… gets really interesting around two minutes into it.
Nice Tokyo video
How to make custom earbuds on your own. Hm, no, I don’t think so. I would suggest going to a professional for this.
Beautiful new Puma cargo bike.
To start the process I quiet my mind until I see a persistent image or, as Philip K. Dick might say, something that doesn’t go away when I stop believing in it. I improvise the first marks – holding the subject in mind and allowing the drawing to flow. Intuition guides the lines and colors. My drawing practice often involves trying to intensify fleeting sensations. These states of mind seem to have more dimensions than I can simultaneously grasp. Making the marks on paper flattens the experience into a picture. Some marks diagram geometry while some describe change.
