Picture Notes

This silver is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is a vignette on the silver makers over the past several hundred years. This display is a discussion of the maker’s mark and how it’s changed over the years and what different numbers and marks mean. Before the industrial age everything was made by craftsmen in their own shops, one at a time, and the maker’s mark identified the piece and was probably a little bit of advertising as well. I’m sure there are a few silver smiths who didn’t really need a mark, that their work was so beautiful it was recognized by people who loved the craft.

The industrial revolution brought on thousands of mass produced goods made in factories by anonymous people using molds and Henry Ford’s ideas of the assembly line and today we have plastics being pulled out of molds in countries we’ve never seen by people we know nothing about and it turns out that these people are polluting their world the way we polluted ours.

Mass production is a cheap fix and a way to produce goods at a lower cost and sometimes they can be of better quality, and some things like silver serving spoons, should continue to be made in shops by craftsmen and women. There is no reason to flood the market with expensive items that last forever, it’s best to leave the most beautiful items as the rarest.

Is it too late to argue for a craft based industrial movement?

Does this look good to eat?

The photograph is of candied fruit from the 16th century, I don’t think it lasted this long but was re-created so we can see what they ate.

A National Disgrace

People coming to America from Europe can’t really believe all the homeless sleeping on the streets of Washington, DC.  In the UK they call that sleeping rough, and there are none.  In the UK homeless people are given services and a place to sleep.

In the United States we’ve spent over 400 billion dollars on the “Bush” war and for a fraction of that we could get the homeless people off the streets. Doesn’t anyone else find this unbelievable? We are worse than a third world country because we have the money and we do nothing.

The photograph is of a homeless mitigation project. There was a homeless person who slept on this ventilation grate on winter mornings. Instead of helping him, the powers that are, spent money on a fence around the grate and on welding steel pieces to make it uncomfortable to sleep on. It all didn’t matter, the man figured out a way to sleep there. The area is in one of the Washington, DC tourist areas, down the street from Air and Space and other high profile museums.

I vote to not spend anymore money on the war in Iraq until we’ve taken care of those who are sleeping rough in our “modern American cities.”