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.
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
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.
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”.
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,
“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’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
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.
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
LAB lab A Lab for Interventions, Innovations, Iterations to facilitate: Local Food, Objects, and Quality of Life – Artisan Economics and Meaningful Work – Biospheric
“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.”
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
I’ve been receiving calls and emails lately from friends who think I should get back to the US and participate in the Occupy movements. I
In early 2010 we’d been living in Argentina for a few months and I developed a cough. I wasn’t sick, I felt fine (anyway when
I haven’t been on a university campus in a long time. But I just moved near one, and my daily rounds often take it across
As usual there was a righteous hubbub when the terms of service changed. And as usual both the analysts and those who routinely trivialized their
…The German government’s “official submission” to the Oscars… / “official story” of this period. On general principle, it’s probably not a good idea to go
This is written in the context of my summary of social movements literature questions: how shall we understand politicized consumption theoretically. for example, Melucci requires
By Christine Petit LOUDmouth 12 Spring 2006. According to activist scholar Amory Starr, she was politicized pretty late in life. She was 20. As an
Last weekend’s otherwise visionary annual Denver Pan African Arts Society Film Festival included a pre-release screening of Crash, honoring actor and producer Don Cheadle for
Note: Not so long ago, ecological economics and alternative models were anathema to the US Left. In 1998 I tried to show how various movements
