Blog of Wade Making Connexions

Human Creations

We’re alive in the most wonderful of times, a time where world-class design is infused with even the most humble of items, the toilet brush.

At Target, you can also buy an $8 toilet brush designed by acclaimed architect Michael Graves. And if you’re really a showoff you can try Excalibur, the $32 toilet brush by French designer Philippe Starck. — Salon.com

Excalibur, the $32 toilet brush, by Philippe Starck

 
A designer toilet brush is an interesting place to start writing, but it’s also the end of a very long what the fuck. There’s 2 issues with this:-

21% of the world lives on less than $1.50 a day, and society’s focus is on making mass producing designer everything. This is part of my general awareness. This is really important. I’d like to point it out for now, just to raise the W T F, and move to where I’m wanting to take this. It’s somehow connected. Feeding people, instead of companies.

 
Over the last year, I’ve been lucky enough to find some lovely people making real-world things by hand. Things they care about and want to share. It’s refreshing and warms my heart.

Ex-a-Sketch – “we put together all of the drawings done at the pub and make a zine!”

To me, creativity is about coming back to our self, about becoming real. Zines, What ever the form of expression, it’s the output of something both personal and deep. Some call that place God, others call it stillness, or The Void. Regardless of what it’s called, in each of us it’s expression is both the same and unique. We are all different manifestations of One.

Through these differences I feel something. It both enlightens and reflects within me. It’s through this personal expression I find myself, and my humanity. This is where the toilet brush comes in. Mass-produced goods are generally, as emotionless as possible. In the industrial era, goods were functional, today, they must be designed. Yet mass-produced design goods are still alien. They rape and pollute the planet and under pay workers. No where in this process is there any signs of humanity, in the production or the item.

Consumption eats self-esteem; creation makes it grow…Making things makes up happier, more whole people. — Callie Janoff, Handmade Nation

Almost typographic, Zine love by Pashrash

Judging by the huge resurgence of DIY and Zines over the past few years, I’m not the first one to discover the joy of being human. I’m sure the internet’s played a role in re-starting this scene. Once isolated creators, are now an army of talented peeps over on websites like Deviant Art and Etsy.com.

I think that handcraft is popular right now as a reaction against a whole slew of things, including our hyper-fast culture, increasing reliance on digital technology, the proliferation of consumer culture, and even war. — KnitKnit, Handmade Nation

Felt Grump by The Fetus

Having a recent run-in with the law for my preferred form of expression, coupled with a move to San Francisco, I’m waiting to see what bubbles to the surface to get creating again. Whilst waiting for something to manifest, if anyone’s got some Zines they’d like to share with me, I’d love to read them…

I Read Zines

Hard Karma

Bruce Sterling’s State of The World 2009 is one of the most amazing things I’ve read online in a long time. It touches on politics, economics, environmental/global warming, humans/social topics, and The Commons/Copyright. Some of it was really scary, some really exciting, some really interesting. All of it, however, was different to anything else I’d seen on the net.

I suggest reading the whole thing, it’s a 2 week long online conversation. One section discussed the online/offline dichotomy. It hit that spot.

Okay, brother, I hear you. As a former denizen of a small Texas refinery town, I know where you are coming from. I have a solution for you. It’s kind of a hard karma, but I can promise it will work.

I would urge you to travel. Put the computer down, get out of the house, and get out of the town. Go to weird cultural events, go to conventions of mutants. Travel cheap if you have to, but make a point to spend a lot of time on the road.

You wanna go accumulate a tonnage of stimulating stuff in two or three days. Then take your loot back to the crib, and think hard about it. The joy of living outside the hipster circuit is that, unlike them, you can get some serious perspective on all that noise.

You will never be able to singlehandedly transform your small town of retired people into an ashram for happy mutants. I would not urge you to try that. It’s neither practical nor necessary. But: if you keep your secret hacker personality entirely hidden on a screen, you will come to feel unhappily schizoid.

So: venture out in the open air. Break your routines, and go mix it up with the weird people. In a spare, calculated, fully-planned fashion.

When you start to feel like your boring little burrow there is actually your “safe and secure base of operations,” then you’re on the right track.

On Anarchy

Anarchy’s got a really bad wrap. There’s a lot of FUD, and general misinformation about the meaning of the term. In Decentralism: Where It Came From–Where Is It Going?, I found a great section discussing Anarchy:-

“Examining the root meaning of ‘anarchy,’ we find that ‘an’ means no or none, ‘archy’ means rulership. Thus ‘anarchy’ means no rulership or enforced authority. Anarchy does not mean chaos and disorder.
…
Today, the terms anarchist, anarchism, and anarchy have been used so loosely that their specific meaning of no enforced authority has been obscured. Anarchists do, of course, believe in authority, and in leadership, and in organizations—all voluntary and unimposed. It is an error to use ‘anarchy’ to mean chaos, or hostility to the status-quo.

True anarchists hold that individual choice is primary to maturity, and responsibility. For this, they hold that private property is essential, ie, for courageous dissident beliefs or actions, a person must be a beholden to no one—neither to employer nor group or government. For such independence, he needs a place of his own, inviolable and private to himself, from which he can produce his own survival, and from which he cannot be excluded for speech or actions that harm no one. To ensure widespread private property, individualist anarchists work to remove all forms of privilege and monopoly which centralize property, ownership, and control into the hands of a few people.”

Good Job