culture – Amory Starr

The Case for Conspiracy Theory

2 January 2022

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.

Authenticity

4 March 2021

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.

New heroes … New masculinities …

23 June 2015

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

Lech Wałȩsa and craft labor

14 September 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.

The Home Project, Berlin

7 August 2014

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

Sunshine, my beloved

6 August 2014

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

Helmut Menzel porcelain at the Berlin Make Markt

3 August 2014

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

Prinzessinnengarten

26 July 2014

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

Markthalle Neun

24 July 2014

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”.

Winterfeldt Market Berlin

12 July 2014

This market was so movingly delicious to eye and sense, that I had to just enjoy it rather than documenting it. Produce, baked goods, prepared foods,

“To hell with the market” …. visit to my hero F.E. Trainer’s sustainable world

15 June 2014

“Composting and growing carrots is a nice start, but we need to get rid of the growth economy, make the global economic system work to meet needs, and replace capitalism with a different economic system that works for people. Most Green people are stuck at the level of compost heaps, which don’t have a chance of saving us. We don’t want to be a society full of compost heaps heading for disaster. Growing carrots locally is just the first step to changing the economy.”

Andrew Calabrese on food and media justice

13 June 2014

Andrew’s comparison of the global consolidation of media with the global consolidation of food, gave me an idea! I’ve been applying the model of the

heartbroken consumer

31 May 2014

Today my beloved MacBook Pro fried its logic board…Why is there so much consumer choice but not what I want?…But my real question is why aren’t companies somebody refurbishing the beautiful, solid old hardware chasses of these classic designs. Convert those BMWs and Mercedes to electric systems? Design lightweight guts for those beautiful PowerBooks and Communicators. If corporate design can’t match vintage classics, then innovative small companies should be designing custom kits to keep these beauties on the road.

of meat and videogames

23 May 2014

Both vertical and horizontal integration being tedious, the new business model is getting out of the business of making things and into the business of

I want a Lab

30 March 2014

LAB lab A Lab for Interventions, Innovations, Iterations to facilitate: Local Food, Objects, and Quality of Life – Artisan Economics and Meaningful Work – Biospheric

RootStock: natural wine pairing for local food movement

16 March 2014

“People see eggs and they ask ‘are these barn raised or free range raised?’ ‘Are they organic or not?’ It baffles me that wine is not the same. Where did it come from? How was it grown? Is it organic? People should be interested in the process and provenance of wine, the same way they are with food.”

About [high] fashion

8 March 2014

I’ve never written, or even articulated, anything about fashion before. But we just saw Mademoiselle C, which displays the eccentricity and waste of high fashion

DIY Economics

8 July 2013

Gold bugs, income-tax-is-illegalists, illuminati cogniscentis, federal reserve suspicionists … get a bad rap from the left, who rebuke these analyses as “conspiracy theory”. We are

Googlemaps make me feel stupid and sad

1 July 2013

Ok, so we’re cyborgs now. This means that we will start to notice performance differences among us which are based on purchased augmentations. If you

John Talbot Woodworks (and Poetry)

1 July 2013

I was a contractor. I bought a hobby lathe on sale. I burned out the motor in 6 months, so I knew I had found

Wendy Neale on Sustainable Furniture

1 July 2013

At the centre of my design interventions is the idea of working in the margins, on the edge, in the spaces between. “Embodiment” refers to

human intelligence and energy

3 October 2012

We have a story that people are lazy. They’d rather watch TV. I don’t think this is true. I think the truth might be the

on not having to play dumb, and other things about AU and NZ

19 September 2012

I’d been living abroad for more than a year complimenting people on what good vocabularies they had and how everyone I met seemed to be

Vision, story, and the future

5 August 2012

Last night I went to see some art, without knowing the topic in advance. And it was another post-apocalyptic.global-warming theme. It was indeed frightening. (Fake

How a dinner party can change the economy … Underground Restaurant: Local Food, Artisan Economics, Creative Political Culture

6 June 2012

Table of Contents An Underground Restaurant: Local Food, Artisan Economics, and Creative Political Culture 1 Not a potluck: is it food? is it performance art?

Category: culture

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