Artisans

Have been belatedly (as is oft my wont) reading the November 24^th  New Yorker, the food issue, and have particularly enjoyed the articles on the best barbeque in Texas and also the one on this Seattle knifemaker named Kramer, who is on a quest to make knifes that cut through bolts and floating silk and lamb bones.  On rare occasions, the old New Yorker shines through, the New Yorker from the days before Tina, when a journalist heads off into some weird realm of human experience and rides shotgun for a while.  This is the secret recipe of what’s his name on This American Life and the best of the blogosphere too:  capture the exotic individual down the block.

 

And it is also, in some ways, the hope of the American economy down the road.  Obama/Keynes can stimulate all he wants to, but if there aren’t reasons to hit the road, go to the mall, etc, people won’t bother.   There have to be ideas worth pursuing both as producer and consumer.

 

Niklaus was speculating the other night about the thing that supercedes Facebook, and, though I resisted the idea, he may be right.  After all, 2.0 blossomed from the dot com crash, and I’m speculating now that a big chunk of 2.0 (Facebook, Linkedin, Gmail/Yahoomail/Hotmail, MySpace, YouTube) won’t prove economical through 2010.  A new form may arise, and we may hope that it will grow from the great American garage and not from some faceless Hyderabad or Shenzen apartment complex.  In this regard, our surfeit of cheap real estate (once more, “wide open spaces”) may be our salvation, as entrepreneurial activity is much easier when one has A Room of One’s Own.