Intentional Observation: Working retail 3 December 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Handmade, Intentional observation, Modern culture, Personal reflection.2 comments
These are a few observations so far from the part-time retail job I took a couple months ago at Kohl’s.
Wastefulness: Kohl’s gives stewardship of our environment a lot of attention. They recycle cardboard, paper and plastic, lights are on timers or motion sensors and a number of stores run on solar power (all of which is not just good stewardship, but smart business). However, as a highly trained professional [box unloader] I get to see first hand how ridiculously some of the merch is packaged by the manufacturers for shipping to the stores.
Some of the objects I so professionally unbox — though not most in my opinion — warrant very careful packing. Damage during shipping is not good business. There are a select few of the items I so professionally unpack that are wrapped in plastic, inserted into styrofoam, taped together, put in a box and then put in another box represent what I’ve come to see as an endemic wastefulness in American culture (Granted, some of these things maybe packaged in China.).
What I can’t figure out is why a manufacturer would do this. A company would be more profitable (which of course is the end-all in our corporate cultures) if they didn’t purchase superfluous packaging and then pay wages to the person who’s packing up the products. I don’t understand; any company worth its salt will have researched just how many packing peanuts or layers of bubble wrap are required to protect their products during shipping. So maybe I’m wrong about these objects being excessively wrapped and taped and styrofoamed.
But I don’t think so.
Management: Management and coworkers make all the difference, and Dilbert is much too close to the truth in so many of our workplaces. I already knew this and so did you, but it’s worth repeating. So many people I know work retail jobs they are not very happy with, mainly because of the attitudes and ignorance of their managers and coworkers. The people I work with happen to be very easy to get along with and quite helpful, to customers and other employees. Proverbs chapter 17 reminds us that “Better is a dry morsel and quietness with it than a house full of feasting with strife.”
Consumerism: The retail world screams materialism, consumerism to me. It’s somewhat ironic in my mind that I’m working retail at all, as an aspiring artist who plugs all things handmade.
In and of itself, mass production — and big box retailers which seem to have grown out of the assembly line — isn’t evil. Finding ways to work more efficiently is, I think, virtuous. So much of the industrial and technological revolutions, though, end up as integral parts of our daily lives before any of us stop to think about how they will change us as individuals and as a culture. Any potential consequences be damned in favor of progress (whatever that really is) and the almighty dollar!
Buy-in: As a bit of a side note, I’ve been surprised that nothing has allowed me to really buy into Kohl’s as an employee. I suppose this isn’t something a lot of people working part-time retail jobs expect at their workplace, but I’m learning that I’m the kind of guy who wants to be involved mentally, not just as a grunt.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the grunt work. It’s actually nice to be on my feet a little after a few years behind a desk for eight hours a day. But I’d like a deeper reason to be involved with the company, and so far it hasn’t presented itself.
Life itself is grace 30 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Advent, Personal reflection.add a comment
Digging for our advent devotional yesterday I also found my friend Joel Armstrong’s recent book Wired (most of our books are still packed for lack of shelving). I kept it out — I’d been thinking of the book the previous week anyway — and thought this quote was good for the season.
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
The Adam Sandler movie Click was on last night, which I’d seen at some point in the past, and it reinforces Buechner’s point that even the low points in life are worth savoring, as difficult as they might be.
Life itself is grace.
Sacrificial generosity 29 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Advent, Modern culture.add a comment
I thought this post card from Post Secret was a fitting way to mark the first day of this Advent season.
I must admit, though, that I wish this person’s generosity was not a secret to his or her friends. In my opinion, we need more people in our culture setting an example of sacrificial giving.
Bloggy behind 23 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Personal reflection.add a comment
My WordPress dashboard now has a list of 25 drafted posts, most of which I’ll never get to. The list is normally six or seven long. Some of the entries have little notes or outlines, but they aren’t enough to remind me of the thoughts driving the idea in the first place. Life this year just hasn’t been very conducive to blogging with the move, job search and now a new part-time job in retail during the holidays.
I wonder what next year will look like.
Commemorative exhibit of, tornadoes 19 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Central Nebraska, Grand Island.1 comment so far
Yesterday I briefly shared an idea with the local arts and humanities council, Moonshell, at their monthly meeting. I didn’t have much time (and wasn’t too coherent still recovering from a weekend cold), but the chair had already conveyed most of my thoughts after our phone conversation of three weeks ago.
Even though I wasn’t asking for anything specific yesterday, there seems to be interest from a number of people on the council in the idea of an arts festival to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Night of the Twisters. My hope is for an exhibit of the plastic arts that focuses on severe prairie weather and the community building that follows devastating storms such as the one in Grand Island, Nebraska on 3 June 1980. Ideally, the entire community would be involved in some way and film, drama and music would also be involved. Maybe we could even get the Dominator to stop by if it’s a slow chase day and involve the National Weather Service out of Hastings.
In all likelihood I won’t be able to move much on the idea until January, but I’m glad the ball is rolling in the right direction.
Networks cutting all the best TV shows 11 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Modern culture.7 comments
Why does it seem like all of the more artistically brilliant TV shows are getting cut?
Most of the TV I watch ends up being what my wife watches. She has a knack — at least in comparison to me — for finding good new shows. One of the more recent ones we started to watch was Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. Whedon is also the creator of the fantastic western sci-fi series Firefly.
We learned today (via Twitter) that Dollhouse has been cut. Whedon has had terrible success with Fox; Firefly was also cut after one season. Dollhouse isn’t as good, in my opinion, as Firefly but it’s still some of the more brilliant television on right now.
What is it with networks cutting the best shows? Pushing Daisies is another example of an incredible show in concept and execution, and it barely made it through two seasons (the writer’s strike may not have helped that). Chuck is still another (although it may be getting a second chance), as are Joan of Arcadia and Veronica Mars.
Not all good shows get lopped. The Office, Psyche, Monk and Bones are still around and are all worth watching. However, none of these are as stretching or imaginative as Whedon’s shows, or Pushing Daisies.
I’m trying to think of something concrete that links the shows I like that get cut together in order to compare it to the characteristics of the shows that are given longer runs. Why do the shows I’m most in tune with seem to be the ones that are cut? Some people suggest that a lot of these shows end up being cut because they are more intellectually engaging — they have “smarter” writing than your common prime-time fare.
Seems to me that’s a sound assessment. Heaven forbid we should want to watch TV that’s intellectually engaging.
Anonymity in handmade 9 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Ceramics, Handmade, Sculpture.1 comment so far
An observation from Julie Rozman’s Design-Realized blog, The Anonymous Pot:
After eating from handmade pots two or three times a day for the last five months and drinking handmade far more frequently; after beginning to consider making some functional work to add to the cupboards; after using a friend’s collection of handmade pots; in handling and re-handling literally hundreds of pots while helping glaze, wad, and load them into a kiln: I realized my appreciation for the anonymous pot.
It’s just a good, beautiful object. Doesn’t matter who made it, just that somebody did. Doesn’t have to shout the name of the maker. Maybe better if it doesn’t. So the functional object is the foundation for a composition. If it’s a composition that stands alone, so much the better. (Possible? Very architectural question, that.)
My thought in response: It’s more important for the artist to take pride in his or her craft than to desire credit.
New clay forum 7 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Business of art, Ceramics.add a comment
Matthew Katz of the Slipcast blog bluntly encourages ceramic artists to talk amongst ourselves in a new clay forum, PotteryChat.org. Katz laments the lack other such useful discussion forums; there is just one other that I know of — which he eludes to in his post — which has been around for many years but is dinosaurously archaic and therefore very difficult to use.
PotteryChat is very new and thus kind of slow at the moment which is partly why I’m posting the news again (even though you might have already seen it). Go join the forum! And visit it regularly. It has the potential to be a great resource and networking tool if we make use of it.
Also remember that I’m moving most of my studio related posts over to the blog on pcNielsen.com. I may cross post for a while so that everyone has a chance make note of this.
Art collectors buying locally 2 November 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Business of art, Intentional observation, Modern culture.1 comment so far
From a recent Wall Street Journal article titled Local Artists Are on the Rise:
From Bloomfield Hills, Mich., to Turin, Italy, contemporary-art collectors are passing on works by international art stars and skipping far-flung art fairs and auctions. This year, they’re buying local.
In Detroit, major collector and steel company executive Gary Wasserman says he’s stopped buying works by England’s Anish Kapoor and China’s Yue Minjun so he can focus more on buying “powerfully Midwestern” art by artists like Brian Carpenter, whose $1,000 photographs often feature images of dead deer, Lake Erie nuclear reactors and snowy footprints.
This is encouraging to me. It harkens back to my interest in seeing local art and artists working and making a living (or at least part of a living) from their work in a local context. There’s nothing wrong with marketing and selling art nationally or globally. However, there’s good reason for artists to work out of their immediate environment both by allowing it to influence their work — artists are by nature people who observe their surroundings — and allowing their work to influence the local culture. Incarnational living is the phrase I’ve used to describe this kind of attitude in past entries.
In her book Dakota, author Kathleen Norris laments how few artists were living and working in the Dakotas in the early 90s. She worried, rightly, that their Plains culture would be lost without poets and painters working out of and in the midst of the people there.
Prominent collectors purchasing from local painters, sculptors and architects helps validate local cultures in a day and age when said cultures become more and more muddled. From the Old World Swine blog last week:
The problem with American culture is that it is built on relativism that says any culture is as good as the next, and all the cultures have been banged around together for so long in the relativistic Melting Pot that they are hardly distinguishable from one another. They have been ground to bits, and the distinct edges worn off. Rather than inheriting a coherent and organic culture, each individual makes his or her own culture by picking and choosing whatever broken bits of other cultures they find appealing at the moment.
While I would change the terminology in his first sentence to say “any culture is the same as the rest” — which is what I think he meant — writer Tim Jones’ point is well-established. There is still color in local cultures if you look hard enough, but big business in America has worked tirelessly over the past few decades to root it out. Big-box retailers, fast-food franchises and our own insatiable consumerist pursuit of the latest factory built goods has left us with a largely monochromatic national landscape. “Haven’t we been here before, Rocky?” Bullwinkle asks as the two cartoon characters drive across America in their most recent film. I can understand why you’d think that Bullwinkle.
Let’s hope the trend to buy from local artists continues and isn’t simply a reaction to an art market bubble.
New blog at pcNielsen.com 31 October 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in In the studio.add a comment
I spent quite a bit of time today working on the website showcasing my sculpture. It’s better organized, at least according to the scheme of the theme I’m using. And I’ve also added this blog. The tentative plan is to post studio related entries there and reserve The Aesthetic Elevator’s space for more philosophical meanderings. In all likelihood activity on the Elevator will lessen while the overall depth of the subject matter hopefully deepens.
Keep up with the most recent posts on both blogs by subscribing to their feeds via an RSS reader, such as Google Reader.
