Today I am in the Ft. Lauderdale Florida area to prepare for my weekend class. Tonight I will give a hour long presentation, and then tomorrow will begin class in the box making shop of a friend, Don Boudreau. I'd written about Don's box making back in 2007. My class, sponsored by the South Florida Woodworking Guild will be held in Don's new and larger workshop.
At this point the blog goes back for a number of years of reflection and examination of how wood working can fit in schools, and one of the important areas of past discussion was how the making of an object helps the viewer to understand in greater depth the huge range of objects that comprise our human culture. Our human history is about much more than words and language. If the process of making beautiful and useful objects is not made available to our children, they will not know the cultural value of the objects that inhabit our museums. They will have little or no curiosity about how those objects were made. They will be diminished thereby in their understanding of self and be held at arms length from the rewards of their own creativity.
This earlier post explores an interesting resource for readers who might be interested in how wooden objects tell the story of our humanity.
On the same subject, I want to share an interesting story about a fiddle made during the darkest days of WWII. This fiddle is currently on display at the WWII museum in New Orleans and has an Arkansas connection in that the grandson of its maker plays part-time in the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.
Make, fix and create...
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Objects of today have obsolescence buit in. When you buy a printer, you don't buy a printer, you buy a licence to print, let' say, 200 000 pages. There is a counter in the circuitry and when you reach the 200 000 th page, the printer refuse to work. Further the plastic casing is built in such a way that you can not open it without breaking the small plastic hooks which keep it toghether. And the electronic components are englued in such a way that you can not change them. Any product relying on electronics can now be made life limited. I have heard that a well known smartphone had a non replaceable battery having a life much shorter than 2 years.
ReplyDeleteImagine you buy a mallet with which you can only give a limited number of blows...
This is not only a great source of frustration for the consumer, it is also an immense waste of resource and enormous source of pollution. At that level, isn't it a crime against humanity?
At least in Europe, by law, anything should last at least 2 years (which is really a minimum).
Sylvain