Das Wochlisches Update
I had to work yesterday, which sucked with in certain respects. My job is so physically demanding that I tend to need my three day weekends to have a decent weekend, because day 1 of my weekend is kind of spent recovering from my week, falling asleep a lot; day 2 is a full normal day with a recovered body and mind, and day three is a truncated day where I have to turn in early to try and get some sleep to get up at 345 am for day 1 of work week. So my weekend will effectively consist of days 1 and 3. Its suckitude was alleviated by my being on overtime all day, and going out with another driver, Ernie, who is basically a superhuman working machine, the brother of my brother's GF, and does a disproportionate amount of the work, so I ended up with far easier day than I would have if I were doing it all by myself.
Yesterday after work I headed over to Shelburne Falls to get some excellent pizza over at buckland pizza, and try to chill some, to get something of a saturday out of my saturday. I watched a glass blower make some christmas ornaments and that reminded of me of the artistic career i have thus far have not had the balls to really go for, unless you want to count my having taken on the Coke job so as to (hopefully) get the four day work week to allow me to attempt to make some art. At least do a little photography. Anyway, right near where you can watch the glass blowers in shelburne falls you can find for sale various works in glass by a local artist by the name of Josh Simpson, this guy who literally started out living in a tent in the woods next to his glass blowing furnace, and is now a millionaire, by the work of his own two hands. So in a certain sense I literally have no excuse for not having attepting to do what he has done. I tell myself it would be too hard to get rid of my mountain of excess posessions; I live a shitty life for the sake of keeping all this stuff. For health insurance. I may well have written of this before, forgive me if I repeat myself repeat myself.
Was thinking that maybe the difference between modernity and the pre-modern is that in that latter things happen because someone does something, whereas in the former case, things happen because someone has official documentation that something is going to happen. So if you want to be a blacksmith in 200 bc you take some Iron and coal and heat the iron up and whack it into useful shapes with a hammer. But by the time you get to the medieval period you're starting to run into guild systems where the artisans of a given type are networked in such a manner as to control the running of that particular craft. Nowadays you can have a forge in your backyard if you want, but if you want to sell anything you need a business license and you need to report your income and pay taxes on it or men in suits will send men in uniforms a-calling to stop you or throw you in prison or whatever. Another dimension of modernity is that medicine is very advanced but priced so as to extort the savings of the work of a lifetime out of you in exchange for the care to save your life. So in one sense if you want to do glass blowing or pottery, if you aren't super successful, enough to afford health inusrance premiums, especially if you grow ill, you're kind of gambling on surviving in a pre-modern mode of living where you don't have health care and you live until your body gives out; but on the plus side you can thusly give yourself the opportunity to do something that at least feels like it's worth doing. I think one way my dad really messed me up years ago was by creating a false dichotomy, saying that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. I think that's wrong; some people need to be working both body and mind, to be fully themselves.
One thing about crafts is that they are essentially a silent process, to work with a form is not about working with words that correspond to a form.
I've also noted that work is very much like alcohol. A little bit of it is good for it, but too much of it will wreck your body and kill you.
Lately i've been wrestling with obsessing over the the DSLR i want to get which has not yet been reviewed at dpreview.com, much to my vexation, and knowing that it will become obsolete very quickly and cost me a lot of money at a time when I don't know that I'll physically be able to continue with the job I'm in, and really not alter my state of mind much if at all. One thing that vexes me though is that my 35mm film slr cameras don't have mirror lockup, which is very necessary when you're into the sort of macro photography that I do. The dslrs have it, which makes it hard for the desire for one to entirely go away, among other reasons why. A couple weeks ago I dropped off a roll of 120 color film that i shot through my mamiya c33 a couple of years ago, and after a frustrating time waiting for it to get developed I'm really impressed by what medium format color film will do. I never gave it much thought before since i don't have a color darkroom. Anyway, now I get why people like holgas so much. The mamiya is an incomparably higher quality camera than a holga, but i get how the low-fi of the holga would combine with the clean appearance of a 120 color neg to produce a really cool image. So I'll have to get out and shoot some spring greens in 120 color.
tchuss
liz
I had to work yesterday, which sucked with in certain respects. My job is so physically demanding that I tend to need my three day weekends to have a decent weekend, because day 1 of my weekend is kind of spent recovering from my week, falling asleep a lot; day 2 is a full normal day with a recovered body and mind, and day three is a truncated day where I have to turn in early to try and get some sleep to get up at 345 am for day 1 of work week. So my weekend will effectively consist of days 1 and 3. Its suckitude was alleviated by my being on overtime all day, and going out with another driver, Ernie, who is basically a superhuman working machine, the brother of my brother's GF, and does a disproportionate amount of the work, so I ended up with far easier day than I would have if I were doing it all by myself.
Yesterday after work I headed over to Shelburne Falls to get some excellent pizza over at buckland pizza, and try to chill some, to get something of a saturday out of my saturday. I watched a glass blower make some christmas ornaments and that reminded of me of the artistic career i have thus far have not had the balls to really go for, unless you want to count my having taken on the Coke job so as to (hopefully) get the four day work week to allow me to attempt to make some art. At least do a little photography. Anyway, right near where you can watch the glass blowers in shelburne falls you can find for sale various works in glass by a local artist by the name of Josh Simpson, this guy who literally started out living in a tent in the woods next to his glass blowing furnace, and is now a millionaire, by the work of his own two hands. So in a certain sense I literally have no excuse for not having attepting to do what he has done. I tell myself it would be too hard to get rid of my mountain of excess posessions; I live a shitty life for the sake of keeping all this stuff. For health insurance. I may well have written of this before, forgive me if I repeat myself repeat myself.
Was thinking that maybe the difference between modernity and the pre-modern is that in that latter things happen because someone does something, whereas in the former case, things happen because someone has official documentation that something is going to happen. So if you want to be a blacksmith in 200 bc you take some Iron and coal and heat the iron up and whack it into useful shapes with a hammer. But by the time you get to the medieval period you're starting to run into guild systems where the artisans of a given type are networked in such a manner as to control the running of that particular craft. Nowadays you can have a forge in your backyard if you want, but if you want to sell anything you need a business license and you need to report your income and pay taxes on it or men in suits will send men in uniforms a-calling to stop you or throw you in prison or whatever. Another dimension of modernity is that medicine is very advanced but priced so as to extort the savings of the work of a lifetime out of you in exchange for the care to save your life. So in one sense if you want to do glass blowing or pottery, if you aren't super successful, enough to afford health inusrance premiums, especially if you grow ill, you're kind of gambling on surviving in a pre-modern mode of living where you don't have health care and you live until your body gives out; but on the plus side you can thusly give yourself the opportunity to do something that at least feels like it's worth doing. I think one way my dad really messed me up years ago was by creating a false dichotomy, saying that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. I think that's wrong; some people need to be working both body and mind, to be fully themselves.
One thing about crafts is that they are essentially a silent process, to work with a form is not about working with words that correspond to a form.
I've also noted that work is very much like alcohol. A little bit of it is good for it, but too much of it will wreck your body and kill you.
Lately i've been wrestling with obsessing over the the DSLR i want to get which has not yet been reviewed at dpreview.com, much to my vexation, and knowing that it will become obsolete very quickly and cost me a lot of money at a time when I don't know that I'll physically be able to continue with the job I'm in, and really not alter my state of mind much if at all. One thing that vexes me though is that my 35mm film slr cameras don't have mirror lockup, which is very necessary when you're into the sort of macro photography that I do. The dslrs have it, which makes it hard for the desire for one to entirely go away, among other reasons why. A couple weeks ago I dropped off a roll of 120 color film that i shot through my mamiya c33 a couple of years ago, and after a frustrating time waiting for it to get developed I'm really impressed by what medium format color film will do. I never gave it much thought before since i don't have a color darkroom. Anyway, now I get why people like holgas so much. The mamiya is an incomparably higher quality camera than a holga, but i get how the low-fi of the holga would combine with the clean appearance of a 120 color neg to produce a really cool image. So I'll have to get out and shoot some spring greens in 120 color.
tchuss
liz
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P.S. Some might consider me insufficiently adventurous, but I really like having health insurance. One of the benefits is that the insurance company negotiates with health providers for lower rates. So, if someone doesn't have health insurance, not only do they have to pay all of their own medical bills, which would be bad enough, but the rates they're changed may be much higher. At least that's my understanding.