Sunday Post: Work « heartfelt imagesMay 18th, 2012All these images are from Bhutan, different types of work we observed on our travels there. In this marvelous country people still know how to do things themselves! The destructive practices of the western world are held at bay in favour of quality of life and happiness. Click on an image to see it larger and scroll through the photos.
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Posted in Information | No Comments » Amish Stories: The Traditional Family & The Amish: Part One: The …May 18th, 2012
There is much talk today about the importance of “traditional family values.” In modern society we look to institutions outside the home for education, religion, entertainment, etc. This series examines to what extent the Amish have been able to keep these functions in the home.
The Amish live among non-Amish in modern rural America. While they are more isolated in some areas, other communities interact daily with the modern world, perhaps nowhere as dramatically as in Lancaster. Here the Amish come into contact not only with their “English” neighbors, but directly and indirectly with millions of visitors from the United States and around the world. To the Amish, the idea of separation from the modern world and non-conformity to its ways are stated clearly in the New Testament—”Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed.” The Amish have adopted some facets of modern technology and shunned others. The fact that the Amish population is growing, and that the majority of their young people decide to join the faith through adult baptism, testifies that there are important values in this culture. This economic function, the family and its members working as a unit within the supporting Amish community, creates a strong bond and gives each worker a clear and vital ” place” through the work he performs. Most Amish are farmers, although in some areas of the USA barely half remain so. With an average of seven or eight children, each member plays a part in the family’s economic survival. It is likely that children are very conscious of this. Dr. John Hostetler, in his book Amish Society, notes the importance of all this when he says… “Like most parents in American society, the Amish recognize the teen period as critical. The Amish family needs the help of its teen-age child more than the typical American family, and the child feels the family’s need of him. the young person who works on the farm can understand and feel the contribution he is making to his family.” Indeed, Amish formal schooling stops at the eighth grade. From then on children are at home or on the farm, learning the tasks they will have as adults by working with their parents. The family and home become the place of “on the job” training. On a farm, your work directly affects you and your family. You are a member of this company (the family), and you have your job responsibilities. In simple terms, the cows have to be fed and milked so that food and shelter can be provided for the family. Your paycheck comes daily in the form of food, clothing, shelter, and affection. Children see their parents working hard every day and children want to help. Children often try tasks they are too young to perform, or mimic their parents when they play. I once saw a four-year-old Amish boy cry when he could not go along and help father in the field. (When I was a boy, I would sometimes try to invent ways of getting out of my chores.) At times, individual families become caught up in other “family economies”, as when three farmers get together to help each other fill their respective silos. In such ways, the family and community bonds are further strengthened. By the 1970’s, making a living from farming was becoming more difficult. The increasing Amish population, coupled with decreasing farmland and higher prices, made getting started difficult or impossible for some. Others found the payments on the farm, building, loans, mortgages, and interest a hardship. One alternative was to move to another area where farmland was available and cheaper. Others looked at ways to supplement their income by having a family member work out for others, sometimes on a carpentry crew, as a farmhand, or as a cleaning lady in homes of non-Amish. But of most concern to the Amish was the possible necessity of having to work in a factory, and whether or not such work really was necessary.
Posted in Information | No Comments » The Goodlife Centre » To DIY or not to DIY?May 15th, 2012To DIY or not to DIY? When to do it yourself and when to call in the professionals, that is the question. Having the confidence and the skills to tackle that bit of wallpapering, tile the kitchen or grout the bathroom usually requires a touch more than watching a half an hour of Nick Knowles . But not much more thanks to those folks at the Goodlife Centre, an independent learning space in central London dedicated to providing short and snappy daytime, evening and weekend classes for disastrous decorators and desperate DIY-ers. Getting your hands dirty Learning at the Goodlife Centre is very focused on the practical application of the lifelong DIY skills that are learnt here. There are no power-point-led classes, though apparently there is a blackboard, remember them? Tutors in DIY include experienced handymen and qualified electricians. Founder, Alison Winfield-Chislett explains why there is no substitute for hands-on experience: “Getting down and dirty with the toys is exactly what the Goodlife Centre encourages. Course members might arrive not knowing a power drill from a paint stripper. But they leave with new-found confidence to handle both. We make sure everyone actually gets their hands dirty and experiences using all the tools. The unknown is the most nerve-wracking part and we quickly get over that by providing a comfortable and safe environment to have-a-go, with experts on hand to demonstrate best-practice.” But it’s not all about power tools; hand tools and traditional methods are shown equal respect. Alison explains, “When to use what is just as important as how. And sometimes a traditional hand-tool is actually the right tool for the job.” There is ample opportunity to get comfortable with all manner of hand-tools and power-tools under the watchful eyes of the expert tutors at the Goodlife Centre, so no more excuses – go do it yourself. Go to The Goodlife Centre’s website at www.thegoodlifecentre.co.uk to discover a range of daytime, evening and weekend courses to learn life skills in DIY, decorating, basic electrics, plumbing, tiling wood working, carpentry, upholstery and furniture restoration . Summer School in the City: The Goodlife Centre is providing a range of diverse courses for adults and families to learn DIY, decorating, carpentry and pinhole photography. New workshops are added regularly, check back here for more details. Posted in Information | No Comments » Continuing Your Education With GI Bill Schools | FREE PRESS …May 15th, 2012Military degrees are one of the top choices for students who need an education and want to go into the armed forces. If you or someone that you know is a veteran who was recently discharged from the military and their looking to continue their education, then you may want to continue doing so through va gi bill schools. The post 9/11 GI Bill, which was signed into law in July 2008, provides education benefits to service members who have served in active duty for at least 90 days since September 2001. The benefit package that this bill provides money to discharged service members in order for them to continue their education whether they choose to do so through a traditional institution or by attending a trade school. If you want to get the most out of college after the military then trades schools are some of the best GI bill schools that you can attend for a number of different reasons. Take a look at the many things that you learn from a trade school compared to a traditional educational institution and you’ll gain an understanding of the practical, lifelong skills that can help you gain a career with a comfortable salary. Automotive Technology – With the number of cars that are on American roads constantly growing, there is an unending need for skilled technicians who can diagnose problems that occur and fix them accordingly. Building Technology – This field of study prepares you to work in the construction field. This field rewards versatility because it requires a number of different competencies like carpentry, millwork and roofing just to name a few. Combination Welding – Courses that teach you welding give you the skills needed to fuse pieces of metal together using heat, a skill that often supports many other industries like the automotive and construction fields. Commercial Truck Driving – In these courses you learn how to drive commercial vehicles, those weighing over 26,000 pounds, and earn your commercial driver’s license (CDL) as a result. Having any of these skills will allow you to work in a number of exciting, lucrative and constantly expanding fields where work is never hard to come by. By getting the proper certification and pairing that with your va gi bill experience and the work ethic that’s been ingrained in you because of it, you won’t have any trouble impressing hiring managers when starting the next stage of your post-military life. Not only does the post 9/11 GI Bill gives you money to attend the school of your choice, but it also covers related expenses like books and supplies as well. If you need it, many GI Bill schools can also help you with tutorial assistance that will be covered by the bill. About: Contact: http://www.militarydegrees.org
Posted in Information | No Comments » Harrisburg “trim carpenter” cabinet installation company | Carpentry …May 12th, 2012Trim carpentry, trim carpentry service in Harrisburg, Hershey, Carlisle, and York PA. Call the Harrisburg Trim and Cabinet Installation Company for all of your trim and cabinet carpentry jobs. We install kitchens and baths. We install every type of interior trim and install any type of kitchen and bathroom cabinets for homeowners.
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Posted in Information | No Comments » Explore the Real Secrets of Garden Workshops | Online Success …May 12th, 2012
The role of garden workshops is to keep your property shipshape at all times. Your home may be well-organized today but you will never know if it will remain like that in the future. As you can see, the rewards of decluttering your home will not depend on how much stuff you are keeping or regularly shopping for. The pile must be kept low regardlesss of how fast the fashion trend changes or the things you need double. If you love to collect things, garden workshops can make organizing easy for you without filling your house with junk. This article aims to explore the secrets that lie beneath garden workshops and clear any issues that might arise. • You won’t only have a space for storage but as well as a work area for you to do the things you love without being disrupted or concerned about messing up. Whether you’re into carpentry, pottery or painting, you could just leave your work the way it is and keep on working anytime you want. • The variety of models, materials and tools being utilized and the building process are somewhat comparable when you build a shed. You can easily assemble one with basic carpentry skills. Otherwise, you can develop it later on by spending significant amounts of time and effort doing research. • There are garden workshops which are structured for aspiring musicians, artists, hobbyists, gardeners and woodworking enthusiasts. Your options are in fact endless, you creativity is the limit. The suitable type of structure relies on each and every garden and the homeowner’s needs. If you love to explore, you could search for free shed plans which can accommodate multifunctional features with optional customizations. • You don’t need to worry about resources because there’s a great deal of information readily available on the internet. Just a few minutes of searching could uncover lots of ideas about garden workshops ranging from basic to complex styles. • You will be able to figure out which type of material is appropriate. Whether is it wood, brick, plastic, steel or non-traditional ones, there are solutions that can make any of them pretty durable. Just pick the most convenient one to get your money’s worth. An independent structure that is big enough for DIY projects, a comfy place to spend some “me” time or to have coffee and a chat with friends. With such attractiveness and adaptability, there’s without doubt in which garden workshops can make any home look much more appealing in spite of how small your space or budget is. Of course, researching about garden workshops can take time but you will in no way have trouble finding a suitable design that fit your needs. Good luck and do not rush. Take notes, draw a plan, set a budget and it will be easy for you to look for garden workshops that are of excellent quality.
Posted in Information | No Comments » Concept Art by Mark Nelson | Bon Expose | All About Art and DesignMay 9th, 2012Mark A. Nelson is an artist whose work has appeared in role-playing games and comic books. Artist StatementMy artistic journey has allowed me to research everything from the prehistoric to contemporary symbols and images from cultures around the world. It has also focused on our relationships with animals, their stories and fables and how they differ from culture to culture. The salamander during Medieval times was thought, “to be born of fire”, an amphibian phoenix. For many cultures, insects are the signs of rebirth and growth, but also the harbingers of death and pestilence. So, if I have to classify myself, it would be as an image-maker. My personal images are a collection of strokes and marks, made by various tools, to create a believable world linking these symbols and visuals together. The visual story can be simple or complex, humorous to mysterious, full of fantastic creatures or just one object, and in colour or black and white. All of these elements become the basis for my visual images. Sometimes they are a series of drawing and sometimes the statement is complete in one image. I cannot expect the viewer to know all of the symbols and their meaning in my work. Part of that is up to their personal interpretations and reactions to my images. We all know, as time moves on words and images change their meaning to each generation. But, I would hope that my love of the natural world, its mystery, its shapes and forms, its textures, and its beauty comes across in my work. Official Site of: Mark Nelson
If you would like to send us suggestions for these categories, please use the: “Submit Suggestions” form, on the right sidebar. And don’t forget to follow Bon Expose on Google+ to get our latest updates. Posted in Information | No Comments » The HAVET Cabinet by SNICKERIET » CONTEMPORISTMay 9th, 2012The HAVET Cabinet by SNICKERIETThe new Swedish furniture brand SNICKERIET, which is Swedish for “The Carpentry,” have created
. Description from SNICKERIET:
Visit the SNICKERIET website – here. .
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Leave a ReplyPosted in Information | No Comments » If we cannot frame the debate over traditional values in the context of …May 6th, 2012As an ex-pastor (before 30 years of carpentry), the reality that is "post-modernism" had a great deal to do with how my religious message (the gospel) was framed. Without going "religious" on you all, the ancient Apostle, Paul, … Posted in Information | No Comments » NT10: Ian Bogost (& Grusin closing) | immanenceMay 6th, 2012Bogost’s talk not being streamed (by his request). Ian Bogost, “The Aesthetics of Philosophical Carpentry” A talk about philosophy and the objects of which it’s made, in 12 parts (first 11 are pretend) I. Enjoying This Presentation II. The Things We Do: Airport tarmac. Philosophers in a lecture hall not unlike an aircraft approaching the runway. Multiple dancer airport performances. Air traffic controllers and graduate students. We do the things we do. Questions, comments. Thank you for flying. What do we do when we do philosophy. I am completely freaked out about it. III. The Non-Human Return: All the world’s Bogosts can be traced back to Milwaukee. Previous visits, family visits. Frozen custard. OOO is a reclamation of a sense of wonder lost in childhood. The rhubarb grown in the summer on Marion Street. Things. A re-turn to the things that were always here, waiting. IV. Carpentry, Part One: Alien Phenomenology advances “carpentry” as a theory of philosophical productivity. I’m performing the act I critique, the commitment of philosophical work to esoteric writing, professional validation, publication “to have been written,” inaccessibility. Problems: (1) Academics aren’t good writers. (2) Writing is dangerous for philosophy, because it’s just one mode of being. We underwrite our ignorance of everything else. We miss the Great Outdoors. V. Cows, Part One: Rejoinders against arm-chair cogitation of philosophers. One trend is experiemtnal, cognitive philosophy. Or field philosophy (Frodeman). Ethics is so far a field only for human interests. Is it daft to admit that the world is full of interesting and somewhat secretive things? The cows would make better field philosophers; they work in the fields. VI. Carpentry, Part Two: General carpentry extends woodcraft to any material. Special carpentry takes up a philosophical position, speculating about the experience of things. Harman’s “the carpentry of things” (Lingis), the way things fashion one another in (and?) the world at large. E.g.s of online things Bogost has made. Ontography (Latour Litanizer); metaphorism. Aesthetics as first and last philosophy. VII. Cows, Part Two: Custard-making. It trumps philosophy reading/writing. Video games industry schism (traditional developers vs. social game developers). “Social games on trial” game theory seminar. Theory-practice dialectic often more of a panegyric. Cow Clicker facebook game about facebook games; most successful work I’ve ever produced, more than 50,000 people played it. Cowpocalypse VR game. I’ve spent more time making & tending virtual cows than reading philosophy. VIII. Carpentry, Part Three: What does it feel like to make cows, custard, things? Consider books. Thacker & Galloway prototype print-on-demand Lulu book. [Mark Hansen is watching hockey on his laptop in front of me. (!)] We say we write books, but we write words that we send to someone to make books. Print-on-demand is even less design-controlled, like the lunch meats of publishing. Schaber/Yakoch book ‘Checking In/Checking Out’. Still a chasm between academic writing (to have written something) and authorship (to have produced something worth reading), and then to bookmaking. IX. Materials: Approaches: embracing the materiality of things; the use of computational models. Procedural rhetoric: making an argument out of a model. McDonald’s game: intended as a critique, but many students “really feel” for the corporate executives. “Oiligarchy” game. But if the game is incapable of doing that work, if traditional text media are better, then why make games? Purely aesthetic, an accessory? An orary (?), model of celestial motion. Contrast with Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” One page (with chart) stands in for the rest. Text message exchange with daughter. Tim Morton after yesterday’s talk: asked why did you do what you just did? But no on asked Shaviro: why did you do what you did (cited philosophers and commented on them)? We don’t question our materials. X. Cows, Part Three: Dedicated Cow-clickers. “2-1/2 Men.” “Shit-crayons.” Wole Soyinka in prison using whatever materials he could find. Cowpocalypse: they have been raptured. XI. Idiots: Winograd: photograph tells us how a piece of time and space looked to a camera. Gentle tragedy of carpentry: we somehow make things, and with practice make been beautiful things. I still like writing where the writing matters. The work I want to do with objects is metaphoristic; to write well rather than to write to completion. What if we took a break from philosophical history, from making arguments? The objects were there all the time, it was me who wasn’t. What if I listened to them? One day I hope this might be philosophy. XII. While You Were Out: The city (Seoul), underground travel, platform screen doors. The doors are raised on specialized farms, near a Buddhist temple. Woman, mourning her love, turned into a dragon. The dragons who move people. The transit system expanded beyond the city. [ai: I can't capture the exquisite literary craft of this section, so I won't try. Read it when it is published, which I presume will take an appropriate book-like form.] Q & A: Q @ object-formation in children: a bag of onions, to an infant, is a bag, but when opened they are astonished. Can grown childhood lead us productively to thinking this? IB: Yes. Harman’s “withdrawal” is that, that other-worldliness of things. Q @ Winnicott’s play and transitional objects. These theoretical concepts are play objects. Pushing in another direction is easy for tenured folks, but divisions of knowledge where tenure is given still require playing by the old rules. How do we change that? IB: Fear is the main problem. When you get enough attention, then it’s impossible to ignore you. Tenure is not about productivity, but impact. Those who achieve the goal the easiest are those who think the least about it. Q: OK, the objects were always there, but were the mental objects always there? IB: [missed, sorry] Q (tweet): The beauty of non-scholarship: you can just claim you just thought of it. My students do that all the time… IB: That’s true. So what? I don’t care about being new; it’s about what we use these things for. Q (Erin Manning): I get it, you’re a good writer, etc., but why so many mean tweets over past 2 days? Why shut it down. IB: My Twitter persona is different from me. What do we do about these intersecting worlds, me on Twitter different from me in this room? What if we took that seriously. EM: There are people who are insecure in academe and have lost jobs because they’ve pushed those positions. How many philosophers do you know who are in philosophy departments? Many of us have had to find our ways of living, through having children, writing, spending weeks crafting a concept and then watching it fall apart. In Montreal students are striking… Since there are so few places to have these conversations, don’t we want this to be a venue when we can have this conversation, rather than posing one way of thinking against another? IB: This (confernece) format of ours is broken. EM: People have been incredibly willing to have a conversation. I’ve been surprised by it, because I don’t go to conferences. We can continue to pose, or we can say “hey, you’re making a real effort here.” IB: I think you’re right, but we need to offload a lot of this stuff off of our persons. Try alternative formats: e.g., short statements, conversations, breaks. This is not a criticism of this event (Expletive deleted, from conference organizer. Laughter.)
Concluding comments by Richard Grusin Are conferences broken? This has been a great 2-1/2 days, according to what I’ve been hearing. Some shorter papers maybe even better than plenaries, for some. Many models for conferences. Erin, NAthaniel, Brian et al’s ideas for art, ThinkMakeDigital folks originally all wanted to craft the environment to break down those conferency things. Maybe that did work. Relationship between conference in this space and conference in connected spaces (Twitter, etc.). Some say “No Tweeting! Do you let your students do that?” All of us are in this room, but not all of us are in that other conversation. I don’t think it’s disrespectful (’cause I do it), but we’re going to have to think about it. But bringing people together physically is essential for knowledge. Online education is good for access, but for me education has been about sitting in a room with some quirky professor, some modeling, affective something-going-on. I hope we keep these things going in some fashion, and these universities. Maybe, despite hesitancy (because there’ve been so many), a different kind of conference on the future of higher education? Thank you, Mary Mullen. Thank you, everybody. Related posts:
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How you define work is really great here Christine I love all of it thanks for sharing
What gentle images of people making light work of their work:)