Category: arts and letters

rDay One Thousand One Hundred Thirty-Seven: Artificer Forge

Yesterday, season opener for the Downtown Farmers Market in WaWaWA.  About two or three times larger than similar events in LaG City.  Not a broad range of produce (yet, I’d guess), but lots of plants and other growables, wine tastings, jewelry and other artisan creations, and made-on-the-spot food (mostly south-of-the-border kind of stuff).  But one unusual exhibit/booth caught my eye: Artificer Forge.  Here a young man displayed his blacksmithing artistry, with a live forge, anvil, smoke and fire.  He started with a blank length of metal, then proceeded, step-by-step, to fashion it into a stylized bottle cap opener.  At every stage, he explained the physics and chemistry involved, along with his actions to transform the blank into a special object.  He plunged the metal bar into the fiery coals, then pounded and shaped it at the anvil, one bit at a time.  After each step, he held the changing object in his hands, walking around the the edge of the crowd to show his progress up close.  In about twenty minutes, he had transformed the blank bar into a functional object d’art.  Some pics of the process:

You can see more of Benjamin’s work at the Artificer Forge website’s gallery.  I was especially taken by his wall-mounted wine racks, one of which is is shown below:

Vine Wine Bottle Rack by Artificer Forge

Okay, OK …

A little something captured from the NYT this morning:

Back Story
It’s a shortcut used the world over — and even beyond, having been uttered at least once during a space mission.
On this day in 1839, The Boston Morning Post published “O.K.” for the first known time, using the abbreviation next to the words “all correct.” (It’s not written “okay,” The Times stylebook says.)
It’s all correct.
It’s all correct.
Frank Duenzl/Picture-Alliance, via Associated Press
There have been many theories about its origin, but the most likely is that O.K. was an abbreviation for the deliberately misspelled “orl korrect” (all correct), and the expression gained prominence in the mid-19th century.
Allen Walker Read, a longtime English professor at Columbia University, debunked some theories in the 1960s, including that the term had come from Andrew Jackson’s poor spelling, from a Native American word or from an Army biscuit.
Today, O.K. is “an Americanism adopted by virtually every language, and one of the first words spoken on the moon,” the Times obituary of Mr. Read noted in 2002.
The professor didn’t “appreciate having ‘O.K.’ overshadow the hundreds of other etymologies he divined,” it continued. He also tracked early uses of Dixie, Podunk and the “almighty dollar.”
In the 1920s, Mr. Read hitchhiked through western Iowa hunting down the word “blizzard.”
“A man called Lightnin’ Ellis had first used the word for a snowstorm in 1870,” he learned. “Within 10 years, it had spread throughout the Midwest.”
Charles McDermid contributed reporting.

Joe Frank, R.I.P.

Joe Frank passed away last month. I have been re-listening to much of his work since then and am now ready to share it with those of you who don’t know about him.

I discovered Joe in my pre-Kim days in Los Angeles, where he did a late night broadcast from a local public radio station, KCRW in Santa Monica. When I partnered in the 80s with my computer programmer/consultant friend Richard, who once lived in Washington, DC, I learned that Richard had encountered Joe then, doing radio and standup.

His storytelling was like no other, and it was required listening for me for many of my L.A. years. Here is a tribute from a writer at a local Venice newsite:

https://argonautnews.com/in-memoriam-the-real-joe-frank/

Today I also came upon a remembrance in a recent RadioLAB podcast:

And a sample piece:

https://soundcloud.com/thejoefrank/no-more-my-lord-from-bad-karma

 

To explore Joe Frank’s full body of work, visit joefrank.com.

Kitsch and Deculturation

An article on The Conversation website raises questions about the “predominant aesthetic of the twenty-first century”.

A quote from the piece:  “Humans have always needed truths to believe in. Whereas in the past those truths tended to be transmitted through cultures, they are now increasingly produced instantaneously without cultural mediation. Kitsch employs this mechanism in the realm of aesthetics. In today’s world, kitsch is redefining our perception of truth; it is a truth devoid of culture or context.”