TIONS

You are invited to join us on a regional tour of Japan through a multisensory celebration of tea and clay. Take in the comfort of a warm beverage, the subtleties of scent and flavor, and the physicality of each handmade vessel as you travel through our curated pairings of tea and craft.

Visit Tokoname, in Aichi Prefecture, and notice the slight grittiness of the unglazed iron-rich red clay. Enjoy the lightly sweet umami taste of fine gyokuro leaves grown in nearby Mie, brewed in a delicate shiboridashi to extract the maximum complexity of flavor.

Travel then to Uji, Kyoto, and feel the thick, foamy texture of bamboo-whisked matcha as the frothy beverage touches your lips. As you consume the tea, slowly, mindfully, give yourself space to get to know the handcrafted chawan.

Breathe in the light, floral scent of tamaryokucha from Kagoshima and taste the mellow, nutty flavor of hōjicha from Shizuoka. Admire the beauty of intricately painted porcelain from Arita and feel the weight and presence of thick stoneware from Shigaraki. Each pairing will open a portal to new localities through the regional diversity of Japan, transporting us away from our current lives, even if only for a moment.

Welcome! Would you like something to drink?

The empiricist philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, in his 1754 sations, proposes a thought experiment. Imagine a statue of a human being set in a room, a statue that can think but does not move. Imagine that she will acquire the faculties of sensation one by one, from the most distal to the most proximal. Which sense will be primary? Condillac thinks that the statue will smell before she hears, hear before she sees, then later taste, then feel. Before she moves or touches anything at all, she will have been awash in sensation. She will experience smells and sounds as if she were those smells and sounds, because how can she think of them as separate from herself when she doesn’t yet know the boundaries of her own body?

In fact, we feel long before we think. We are born empiricists, sliding into the world swamped in sensation. Our closely held ideas about mind-body division waft away, leaving us tethered to the earth. Drifting in the breeze, our minds could dis miss our bodies with a curt wave and turn to face the golden dawn, but instead we feel the light waves move among our skin cells, the dawn washing through us with a slight burn and a sweet aftertaste. A liquid surge of light.

Wine flows from glass to glass and sweeps us along in its stream. Michel Serres, philosophical champion of the collective, has recommended that we pool our re sources. Wine moves from bottle to mouth, but it pauses briefly first in that small cellar, the glass. “We need intermediate stockpiles. Small lakes of memory: goblets. No, time does not flow, quite. It is extremely rare to have a pure channel, a perfect corridor, with neither sidings nor bottlenecks.” 1 Let’s start with a drink, shall we?

Making Broken Bread

∞ 1000g (graham flower) (or some other measurable quantity)

(plus the working of the soil, using clean hands made dirty, while sun gleams)

∞ ask after they who turns the mill; feed that body when the urge strikes

∞ fill a pair of cupped hands with water & carry tentatively across a room decorated with obstacles know fear

∞ (repeat) when the feeling is inescapable

∞ distill ocean’s living soup into salt brine dried on a ship’s hull, rocks ashore, or the same wood marked to record knowing

∞ *yeast lives on the flesh of all life-- sense oneself; cause an environment fit for survival which mimics one’s own health

* grow dig a well; rely on it light flame using the connective spark of shared meaning & that woody memory, initials carved without & fat skimmed from bone to reveal ancestral shape and origin, an eternal sameness when all is glowing coax the incorporated form into being with gentle pressure & fold with inherent need repeat process across disciplines of the familial hand and time just until a historiography of knowing, putting up, preservation a helpful tool (yet not required) to produce consumable matter identifies itself; nurture this submit contents to flame divide and consume a matter of results

For Emmanuel Levinas, ethics comes before metaphysics and food comes before sight. He takes Martin Heidegger to task for describing the world as a toolbox. Long before we codified a system of utensils for dining, we already had food to eat, and what is a utensil for except to separate your skin from the task of feeding? The separation soon becomes pointless as nourishment washes through your digestive track, melting into your body. Are you made of anything but food? The mind-body problem comes from our inclination to believe that we are not co-determinant with the substance of our bodies—we are what we eat, but surely we are not only that. Levinas says that when the thinking subject eats, “it is the absorption of the object, but also distance with regard to it.” 2 We are food, but we are also the being that consumes food; some frisson divides us from the world.

If Condillac’s statue thinks before it eats, Levinas’s subject eats before it thinks; we learn who we are by eating. As David Goldstein comments on Levinas, “Eating forms the basis of ethics because food teaches us about our complex relationship to objects, in preparation for an acknowledgment of other beings.” 3 Our relationship to objects, and in succession our relationship to other people, is found through our foundational relationship to eating. Were we to be unaffected by hunger, like Condillac’s statue, what would we feel? What would we know? When we see the face of another person, we know that they feel hunger just like we do—the face of the Other is the beginning of our reciprocal responsibility. For all of us who break bread for our companions—Levinas makes a meal of the etymology of “companion,” from the French com (with) and pain (bread)—we must take the bread out of our own mouths and give it to the other. The world asks nothing less of us.

I realize that this is an abrupt demand! Here, have a drink, please sit down. Be welcome. There’s no bread on this table yet, but we can get to know each other before we eat. Light is its most golden and diffuse at cocktail hour. A smooth, hospitable gradient. Let it roll through you like wine. * * *

The man at the counter of the coffee shop delicately tore the top off a packet of sugar and poured it directly into the center of his cup. Placing the empty packet on the counter, he opened another in precisely the same way, each movement of his arms and hands identical. His unblinking gaze followed the path of the little white packet from the basket on the counter to the space above the cup, then to its resting place atop the previous packet; his head, rather than his eyes, moved as he tracked the object, like some sort of 20th-century animatronic. 1

“You’re staring,” Emily chided me in a whisper.

“I’m allowed. We’re in public. No expectation of privacy.”

Emily was embarrassed that I had said this out loud, a refrain from our private conversations that felt more confrontational now, uttered within earshot of strangers. I hid my embarrassment by doubling down.

“I just think they’re fascinating.”

“Jesus, Tom, would you say that about someone who was different from you in some other way? Like, someone...”

I cut her off. We both knew where that thought was going, and that her intention was mainly to signal that she—unlike me, evidently—was not a “technophobe.”

Sonder explores the nebulas beyond. Simone Leigh’s Jug (2014), an unfired, thumbprinted Lizella clay jar, ignites my curiosity in the anonymous labor of Black couriers from the first African American collection in 1894 to today. How did they maneuver insurance, Jim Crow, and sundown towns?

—Chenoa Baker, intercessor and curious interlocutor

Not (Yet) To Be: A performance installation meant to help Kentuckians dealing with the employment effects of automation think about their future relationship with robots and their place in the future of work.

—Sam Ford

Wanted: project proposals with/in a new craft center being built on the horizon next to Paul Preciado’s apartment on Uranus. Submissions will be considered by the person(s) who write the queer version of bell hooks’ All About Love, by Alanis Morissette with Jagged Little Pill angst, and by all available willful subjects.

—matt lambert

Dear Cornelius #10 (my overhead projector): I long for the days when we used to perform paper theater together. Though you’ve burned my hands many times, I will always forgive you. I still have all our props, if you’ll take me back.

—Lauren Sinner

A list of domain names purchased in the last year that remain dormant on the web. Some are holding space for a future project, others are retaliatory, and at least one is the product of a boozy late-night lark. In order of acquisition: prototypingutopia.org; changeberkshireculture. org; highdesignpod.com; shophighdesign.com; centerforshakerstudies. org; quaaludetourism.com.shakermodern.com;

—Sarah Margolis-Pineo

A post-it that flutters to the studio floor regularly, always retrieved—“the inherent vitality of asymmetry requires participation in the experience of form—by suggesting, by directing the mind to complete the incomplete”— finally goes missing. Seeking author, full text.

— Heather Stewart Harvey

Looking for: Land; rural, minimum 1 cuerda. Family constellation detective, being-becoming archaeologist of own family system, inward research. Retracing, decoding, detangling, un/re- weaving a blueprint/pattern from the network that gave, conditions, and sustains our life—honoring and mending what came before; nourishing what is yet to emerge.

— Zaida Adriana Goveo Balmaseda

From the digital dustbin of my desktop, here is the title of an essay that was supposed to get published but never did: The Past Is the Future: Toward Radical Indigeneity.

— Alpesh Kantilal Patel

7 Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement , chap. 7: Knapping Intentions and the Handmade Mind.

4 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , chap. 3: The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility.

5 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , chap. 2.3, The Dialectic of Objectification and Embodiment.

6 Heidegger, Being and Time , chap. 5a: The Existential Constitution of the “There.”

“No, they just have a fascinating way of moving around in the world, and I’m curious about it. That’s all. No judgment.”

The Android Act had recognized “artificial intelligences”—a passé term now, I was constantly being reminded—as equal in every cognitive, moral, and humane capacity to us so-called “biofolk.” And yet their carefully calculated movements still struck me as otherworldly, at least by human standards.

The sugar packet man turned away from the counter, walking toward the table next to us with slow, measured steps. His walk was like that of a lead-footed Fred Astaire, graceful flourishes accompanied by a heavy mechanical stomping. 2 These early models learned exclusively through imitation with no hardwired mechanism for feedback from the material world, 3 and this one had clearly been impressed by someone with quite a fancy walk.

This café was just like every other one in Camberwell now, with little tables lined up across a long bench at one wall, spaced so closely together that anyone in an old-fashioned body would feel severely outdated. Packet man politely squeezed in next to me on the bench seat, whispering a tiny “pardon me” barely audible above the whir of his hydraulics. He came to rest with his left hand roughly an inch from my thigh, which struck me as surprisingly flirtatious. “I’m sorry,” he said, noticing me glancing down. “Would you like me to move my hand?”

“It’s ... what?” I stammered, thinking this might somehow be turning into a confrontation. After a second of unblinking eye contact, the man took initiative on his own, lifting his hand as if it were an unfamiliar object. 4 The hand shifted onto his own thigh, closely approximating a relaxed pose.

Emily fumed at me silently from across the table, pleading with her eyes for me to stop making a scene—which, of course, I would later adamantly deny doing. Her expression broke with a jolt, however, at a minor cacophony from our neighbor’s table, where the ceramic coffee cup now lay overturned, its dainty handle still squeezed tightly between packet man’s pointer and thumb. His face showed a flat, neutral expression as he scanned the room, presumably calculating how one should react in such novel circumstances. 5 After a moment his eyes lit up in surprise, although his posture remained unchanged.

Several people around us whispered to one another, and packet man seemed keen to fit his behavior to the altered mood of the place, 6 leaning toward me slowly as if to share a secret.

“It has broken,” he whispered, oddly confident in the assertion.

“You broke it, ” I whispered back, still unsure if he was looking for a fight.

“It wasn’t right for my hand he replied, his crystal eyes locked with mine. * * *

See Folk, “Out There” (throughout).

Works cited

Aalten, Anna. “Listening to the Dancer’s Body.” In Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress, and Prospects, edited by Chris Shilling. Sociological Review Monograph. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

Ingold, Tim. “Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011.

2 See Aalten, “Listening to the Dancer’s Body”; Potter, “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer.”

3 Downey, “‘Practice without Theory’: A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied Learning”; Ingold, “Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill.”

1

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. 1972. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Downey, Greg. “‘Practice without Theory’: A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied Learning.” In Making Knowledge, edited by Trevor Marchand. London: Wiley, 2010.

Folk, Kate. “Out There.” The New Yorker, March 16, 2020.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. 1927. Reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. 1945. Reprint, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002.

Potter, Caroline. “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer.” Ethnos 73, no. 4 (December 2008): 444--65.

In November 2020, during the height of the pandemic, artist Theaster Gates posted on Instagram: “Remembering dinner parties. Grateful for vessels and gathering. I’ll always keep the infrastructure for good times.” The image was of a large, darkly stained wooden hutch, beautiful glass windows revealing a collection of mismatched plates, pots, bowls; differently sized cups stacked precariously; and pitchers, serving dishes, casseroles. Gates is a potter, among many other things, and I imagine that these are all dishes he’s made and kept. The number of plates in this cabinet would be enough to set a table for 30, 40 even. This image and his phrase, “the infrastructure for good times,” are things I often return to in my research into craft and social spaces.

Infrastructure: the physical and organizational structures needed for social activities. It’s a word often used to describe roads, buildings, plumbing, power lines— things built to support social activity. In my research, I look at street fairs, festivals, hootenannies, dinner parties, discos. I look at these moments, “good times,” and the ways that craft comes to life here. I look at Gates’s collection of dishware and think that if ever the chance of feeding a group of 40 people arises, he’s prepared.

In September 2021, I worked with my friend Tommy Carroll, a blacksmith, at the Maryland Renaissance Festival for three weeks. The Renaissance Festival is a contemporary craft fair that reimagines a medieval marketplace in a modern setting. White pop-up tents and folding tables, so ubiquitous a sight at the contemporary craft fair, are swapped out for something more permanent here. Festival time is time outside of time where people gather and take pleasure in their surroundings. It is a time to feast, to imbibe. To take joy in abundance. Extra-ordinary time. And yet, for Tommy and many other vendors I interviewed, this extraordinary time of feasting and abundance is in fact “everyday” and routine.

During the weekends, when the fair was open to the public, Tommy and his boothmates would operate the forge, giving demonstrations to visitors while I stumbled my way through selling their work, answering questions, and taking payment. This experience, along with conversations with Tommy and other vendors, gave me insight into the particular infrastructure of the Renaissance Festival. The following interview is taken from a longer conversation where I spoke to Tommy and his partner, Sam, who also works on the Renaissance Festival circuit. They were between festivals and in the middle of moving into a new house and workspace. Since they were between jobs and houses, the conversation turned to some of the particular ways they have confronted the limitations of the infrastructure typically afforded at the festival, how they’ve manipulated or added to it for their own benefit, and how, despite this difficult and burdensome labor, they still consider this work “good times.”

Tommy: Yeah, it’s an ongoing process. I screw up all the time because I’m, like, oh crap! Now I need to get onto the roof of our house and I left the 10-foot ladder at Maryland. Traveling with a lot of stuff gets exhausting. Traveling with a lot of heavy stuff gets exhausting. I brought way too much to Brevard, where my trailer was weighed down so much that I bought brand-new trailer tires before going and they already need to be replaced.

Sam: And also the back tires on his truck were angling out! We went to pull out of the vendor campground and I called him and I was, like, stop, your truck looks like it’s about to hit the ground! Something has to change. So we had to move a bunch of coal around.

p Lexie Harvey

Tommy: Yeah, it’s an attempt at making travel easier that’s constantly changing. But for Maryland, I bring all of my coal from North Carolina, just because I’ve learned there’s a lot less soot in it. I bought from Pennsylvania before and the coal was just, like, hard to crack into, smaller pellets, a lot more debris. It was a significant difference. So I just bring my own. I never thought I’d be coal picky, you know? I didn’t think that was a thing. But the coal is probably the biggest source of weight, and hassle, because I need to bring essentially two to three truckloads full of coal to Maryland over the course of the year just to be ready for the festival. We went through it all this past year.

Lexie: I remember you saying you were on your last bag and it was the first weekend of October.

Tommy: Well, I had some stored on my trailer, but that was the last bag in my shop. But we still went through everything. Even everything that was on my trailer, we went through it. Yeah, I built the forge and just left it in Maryland because it’s just so heavy and unwieldy that I’d just rather have two. That’s another thing I learned— make things easier on yourself. If you can afford to have a set, a shop, at Maryland and then one at home, do it. The anvil, my anvil, the one on the wooden platform, is too expensive to buy two, so I take that with me. The biggest one is like 250 pounds or something like that. It isn’t the nicest, so I want to get that to Maryland and just leave it there full time and not have to worry about it again.

Sam: How much does an anvil cost?

Tommy: My favorite anvil, the one I take with me everywhere, is $1,400. Some people were making fun of me at Brevard where they were, like, why are you locking up your stuff? You think someone’s going to steal your anvil? If they knew how much it cost they might.

Lexie: So you take multiple trips to Maryland throughout the year, and your family lives up there, right?

Tommy: Yeah, so far it’s worked out to where I’m going to Maryland anyways for a holiday or to visit or something, or my brother will come down to visit me and then will bring a truckload down. So it’s worked out, but it’s getting to the point where I think it’s going to be more, “this is a planned coal drop-off trip.” I used to ship artwork out to Arizona, and I did that for two or three years, and it was alright. It was successful. But one year I shipped almost everything out and nothing showed up for like, half the festival. It wasn’t until the post office found out that I had insured everything that they actually looked. It didn’t show up and it ended up back in Georgia, it was supposed to end up in Arizona, and so then once they knew how much the insurance was for, they went and found the box. It was insured for half the price it was worth, which was kind of nerve-wracking for me, but it was still insured for something like $5,000. It was like $250 to insure all that, so, just to ship it out there, it’s a lot. For Brad [Tommy’s apprentice] shipping blacksmith stuff to Maryland it’s a little different ’cause those items are not going to break. They’re all metal. There’s no bone carving or anything like that, so if he wanted to ship stuff out it would just be standard shipping rate, and that would be fine. But I stopped shipping stuff out to Arizona because it was more stress and money than I thought it was worth. * * *

Where “made” stands for “arrived at”: the fumbling that moves me as I manufacture a contribution to this zine across different reproduction technologies. I realize, on the way, that “making do” does not adequately describe the motivation behind making my own tools—after all, I own a smartphone camera, a scalpel, many potatoes, an excessive amount of ink pads, and have easy access to mid-size companies that are happy to turn out any rubber stamp I might wish for in less than three days—but I do appreciate that the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, by Christine Ammer (2003, 1997) illustrates the expression “making do” with We’ll just have to make do with one potato apiece [c. 1900], thus bringing my errant thoughts about home-bound resourcefulness in pandemic times—something of a tired magazine topic, these days—to a stop in front of the passing train of many (possibly) related topics: The second Irish potato famine and ensuing boycotts to assert the rights of tenant farmers; the weird fact that the two more obvious materials used to print this one-liner— potatoes and rubber—both originated south of the Mexican border; Spanish historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s digressive celebration (was it in Cuatro Manos?) of train drivers, teachers, and back-of-the-kitchen printers as the prime movers of revolutionary insurgency; and, finally, the late 70s and early 80s mini-surge of feminist publications on how best to (re)write herstory from behind the printing wheel, including the following out-of-print book, which, like the publication you are currently holding as you devise your own tactics to navigate postTrump America, centers pleasure and self-determination: Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributors (1981), by Eileen Cadman, Gail Chester, and Agnes Pivot. * * *