I took the dog out to the garden late last night. She turned left to bark at something in the forest. I turned right to escape the canopy and look at the stars. Despite the accessibility of this treasure,
Farmers blockade highways, ports, and retailers in half the nations of the EU since 20.January. A French farmer explains why: https://amorystarr.com/farmers-in-action-europe-2024/
By the end of 2021 a great deal of unrelated material had been collapsed together in an attempt to discredit any and all points of view divergent from public health policy. Derogation and censorship have forced intimacy upon subcultures that might otherwise have remained separate. Thanks to the wholesale vilification of “vaccine hesitancy” pacifist alternative health movements find common cause with Trumpist militants and European neo-nazis. They deserve disaggregation.
As they have delivered work from labor and industrial logics, artisans have likewise redeemed materials from their status and calculus as “inputs”.
What I’ve learned from a year of pitching… So one question that comes to me is that if I’m going to have to do most of the promotion anyway, why would I give the publisher 85%? For what? The imprimatur of a “real” publisher? Let’s cut out the middlemen and the gatekeepers. And for me, the freedom to write what I want to, design the presentation, and launch it promptly is as important to my creative process as getting paid.
People who are afraid that their governments withhold information are factually correct. People who are afraid that government programs might sacrifice certain categories of people in service of an undemocratic notion of “the public good” are validated by historic and recent events. People who are afraid that for-profit corporations could sell known harmful, addictive, or unsafe products have plenty of case data to underlie their concern.
Around the world is a crisis of modernization in which younger generations do not want to inherit the farming and other artisanal work of their families. At the same time, a subculture is burgeoning of young people and ex-office workers who want to work with land, agriculture, food, and traditional production methods.
“It feels like now we’re competing with the entire finance industry… engaged in the process of trying to flip Wall Street… ”
What Italians do not seem to know is how profoundly revered Italian cuisine is in the US, and particularly in California. I could recognize my compatriots easily in Napoli. They were silent, faces upturned, eyes half-closed, eating the pizza as if they were receiving communion.
My anger is abating. I’m refocused on wondering how to buy as many good car bodies as possible and where to put them for a few years while the kits proliferate, mechanics streamline their methods, and countries improve their incentives.
Most of the R&D for our sustainable future was self-funded and unwaged. As part of our transition, we need to recognize the people who refused to be discouraged, who kept the possible viable.
Impossible is the perimeter guard of the contemporary paradigm. We know that paradigms are generally under assault by research, adventure, invention, and culture, and that they are often superceded.
People who make guitars and surfboards, bread and pants, are driven by the pleasure of manifestation, the urge to work with their hands, and the need to work autonomously. Artists too, most artists, forego security and luxury in fealty to that same urgency. Filmmakers indebt themselves to the story that compels them. Not because it is a good investment. Farmers take second jobs so they can keep their land in production. I did not know that journalists who provide the food of democracy, also do this.
There is no justification for the throughput of materials involved in junking cars less than 20 years old and encouraging people to buy new electric/hybrid. Even if the old car are purportedly “recycled”, metal recycling produces really terrible jobs. As does mining (often illegal) for e.g. cobalt and lithium needed for electric car batteries.
Greetings from Wailuki, Maui, Hawai’i. I am very fortunate to have been passing through Hawai’i when the travel restrictions went into effect, and to be
We cannot wait for or depend on government and experts to save us. The economy is made of our labor, intelligence, and skills. It belongs to us and we can and must take care of it.
29.November-5.February, 2020 [A prescript about photography:I felt very uncomfortable taking photos of people, as if zooifying their daily lives,and I was also uncertain about taking
20 Years After Seattle: Call for Reflections by participants in N30 WTO manifestation.
Supermarkets are machines to betray farmers, consumers, and ecology. Farmers need reliable sales at the highest possible prices. Supermarkets buy whatever they can find at
To be an ecological society we have to stop the whole habit of living despite nature. We must take our pleasure and inspiration in seasonality and ecological particularity.
Let’s just be perfectly clear exactly what is going on. I am crossing town, via two buses, in weather below freezing, for a bunch of
In 2018 you can build your own website in 5 minutes, with no technical skills. You can edit video in your phone. You can do
They were wearing [mostly] black. After 10 minutes in the room I asked myself “is this the new left?” I was pretty sure they wouldn’t
Syntax of Power is a well-tested method for finding Power and Pleasure in every aspect of life. It’s not about politics. It’s about creativity and
“I worked as an art director inadvertising for 29 years. First as a consultant and then for more than 10 years in Sennheiser. On my 10 years anniversary, they gave me candlesticks as a present. This was too much. I had saved a lot of holidays, so I used them to go study ice cream in Italy and then I quite and opened Favvo Glass. I used to have sleep problems and pain in my body in my back, arms. Now I’m on my feet all day, but the physical pain is gone.”
I had written my dissertation about this seeming convergence of movements. Everyone thought I was completely crazy. I didn’t think it would happen so soon.
Nutrition “science” is so unreliable that it can hardly be trusted, and for this reason, I sympathize with people who resign themselves to mystery unaided
1. what is economics.
TOOLS
HISTORY
thingsto track
EDGE
how do we find these? history, institutions, ideology
As part of the ETH World Food Systems Summer School 2016 I had the honor of 3 hours tour of the Fintan farm and Sativa
I’m hanging out with my friend Aimée Schreck at the ETH World Food Systems Summer School, discussing symbols and certification schemes for packaged food. Her
So the topic of this session is innovation and social change in the food system. I’m going to start with some examples of innovation. There
A few days ago I was sitting at Maso A Kobliha in Prague (at the recommendation of the excellent Taste of Prague Blog), savoring a plate
“We try to keep the distance between the customer and the workshop as short as possible…These are objects that I want to be used. And it should be used hard. That’s what they’re made for…Buying a table takes a long time. It takes months….Most of these people are buying the last table for their life…For me it would be a success if the grandchildren still like the table.
Interview with Stefan Schridde, founder of the Murks Center against planned obsolescence. Murks means “botch”, or “bad work”. “Products designed with planned obsolescence don’t meet the needs of the society.” He sees cheap consumer goods as “lonely” and the alternative is a “durable” future.
Dinner at Zagreus. Best €36 I’ve ever spent. Every bite was so delightful. Zagreus is an art gallery owned by a chef. Every exhibit inspires
1. Why Street Protest
• a fundamental right and contribution to democracy is to express our dissent
• collective manifestation of dissent creates news, encourages others, threatens elites
• the way to win (reforms) is to raise the costs of the current way of doing things until it becomes in the interests of the elites to do it our way
• threat/promise to take over
“You have presented things I have never seen in the same chain of meanings.”
Lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 5 February 2015.
Historical evidence insists that oppression on its own does not produce social movement reaction. In places with little culture of resistance, there will be little social movement reaction to social problems, or occasional outbursts may not be sustained. San Francisco has had, regularly and recently over the last decades, a series of effective and sustained street manifestations, so there are people, organizations, networks, systems, etc. to make the next ones bigger and more robust.
If Disneyland had a farm (and they probably do} it would be The Grounds. It’s farm aesthetic as money machine. And swarming with spenders sucked
So what is the cosmology of food sovereignty? Food is a community, not a commodity… But how do we turn this idea into culture? Alberto Melucci explains how it is that we create culture… through creating new spaces, identities, meanings, identities, commitments….
Lecture to “Plants and the Environment” course, University of Sydney, 7 October 2014.
His explanation of his strategic capacities is “I am an electrician.” This reminds me of Matthew Crawford’s painstaking work on the “cognitive riches” of trade labour. (Summary here.) Crawford’s point is that trade work is satisfying. Wałȩsa’s point is that it is also a form of analytic training.
Bibliography with notes about readings mentioned in the lecture. Alternatives need to focus not just on innovating, but on decommodifying and building community.
The Mehl Stübchen is a flour factory which creates flours for many specific uses. They sell to home bakers, rather than to businesses, providing advice
Walking through Kreutzberg/Neukölin I was drawn to another minimalist window display of an unlit store in a residential street. Like most entrepreneurs of shops with
There’s a tiny chill in the air in Neukölln where my friend deposits me for the best burger in Berlin, Schillerburger. I can’t get past
I was going in a different direction, on an arbitrary itinerary when I saw a poster for the Berlin Make Mrkt and figured out that
My favourite reading is food blogs and my favourite Berlin food blog is Stil in Berlin. The author gets around, and reviewed the food in
In a less gentrified yet part of Kreutzberg is this market described by my favourite local food blogger as “the most interesting food in Berlin”.
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