chicote

People might be disappointed to see you come and go on something other than a motorcycle… edit: but to give you a serious answer I find diagonal zip jackets have quite a different shape when worn open, that would be the main difference imo and is overall a matter of taste and coherence with the rest of your wardrobe (although a leather jacket is about as versatile as it gets imo!)

I’ve been nerding out about sign painting this week, after finishing a big series of signs for a farm on the Oaxaca coast I’ve been working at since January. Here are a few of those: Afterwards I rode up to Oaxaca on my way to Mexico City, stopping at a postal museum on the way that happened to have a small sign painting exhibition: And last night got to go to the opening of an amazing show featuring dozens of sign painters from around Mexico, including some who work in near-forgotten styles, such as the man who painted the signs on the right side of this pic: I love the top right one, it says: “Life is a popsicle; it’s melting whether you suck it or not”! The artist of these signs was in attendance but had a mob of people around him asking for pictures, lol … surely enjoying the resurgence in interest in sign painting, i hope! A close up of some lettering done on a small mirror, maybe 50cm across. i actually didn’t get any other photos besides these, but will add some more on a different day as the show will be up all month. Anyway, thanks for looking!

That ramen looks amazing @Geeman, and so cool to walk through and give equal attention to each of the many laborious parts of ramen making as part of the class. Reading your descriptions reminded me of the movie Tampopo, I imagine you’ve seen it perhaps?? If not it would be a perfect follow up!

^ So true.. when i lived in Canada ten years ago (wow) my go-to outfit was a thermal t, thick flathead flannel, and denim jacket over that… and i could be out in the snow for ages!! I never expected denim jackets to be so versatile but i think they work really well with a thick heat trapping layer underneath.

That’s an extremely powerful pre-soak fit bartles …. though the post soak is excellent too. Really all of these fits are great, you’re all getting things off to a tough start for the judges…

Quick update on my 132D, which are still pretty filthy after their first machine wash in a few months … it’s interesting how different the colour is coming out compared to my previous Tender jeans, all of which were washed biweekly at least throughout their life cycle. These have probably five months of wear now.

I’d bob for apples in those! Or maybe go on a hay ride; I think apple bobbing might not have survived post - covid …

The options are the same as they have always been: accepting that most people, the vast, vast, majority, share the exact same base desires as we do — to love and be loved, to live a fulfilling life, to be appreciated for their contributions and achievements, and to accept and learn from their mistakes. These same people, without exception, are going to have painful experiences from their upbringings, to be hurt when trying to be vulnerable, and to learn to react with fear, withdrawal, anger or violence, and in doing so they’ll also cause pain to other people. The choice becomes available when we realize and accept that about others — and just as importantly, about ourselves — and choose to meet people’s pain, struggle and difference with understanding and compassion. The choice to “go NC” (no contact) with somebody is valid when someone, in very rare cases, proves themselves pathologically incapable of meeting you halfway in your process of healing. But in the vast majority of relationships today, people can and deserve much more understanding and commitment than they get, even from close friends, partners and family members. To not offer them that opportunity is a failure to fully respect the complexity of the human condition, in my opinion. And it’s a root cause of the epidemics of loneliness and division I know we are all experiencing at this moment in history.

I’ve been thinking often recently that the highest form of “education” a society can have is shown in its capacity to accept, and live with, differences and contradictions both within and outside of itself. To that end, I see many rich, college-educated liberals in Seattle being stuck in the same backwards state of mine as the proverbial backwater Southerner: distrustful of outsiders, intolerant of difference, to the point it’s become a trend to even cut family members out of your lives who voted differently than you. It’s a problem both sides of the political & socioeconomic spectrum are really struggling with. I finished reading a wonderful book a couple weeks back, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. There’s a passage in it where he discusses arranged marriages, often seen as antiquated, backward, even barbaric in the West (and surely there are elements of this when there are huge age discrepancies, etc — that’s beside the point for the moment). But in fact, he argues, a high percentage of those in this arrangement report themselves as quite happy. Why? Because, contrary to the modern social narrative that you’re meant to “fall in” love, which itself presupposes chance more than effort, he says people enter into arranged marriages understanding that they are building a loving relationship together, basically from scratch. That from being more or less strangers, perhaps with nothing in common beyond some shared cultural understanding, they work to find their common humanity, their capacity for care and empathy, and develop a lifetime commitment to one another, which forms the basis for their, not instant, but gradually developing, love. In contrast, the West’s “modern” love ideas are far more transactional. Do you and your spouse feel the same burning, passionate connection after 5 years that you felt as new lovers? Perhaps not, and so one or both partners may just abandon the relationship to search for another, in hopes that this time, that initial feeling of love won’t fade away (it almost always does). That this dynamic has now stretched to include family and community members, and become codified in the act of “cancelling”, “ghosting” or otherwise abandoning people who don’t easily and comfortably conform to your ideas of acceptable, pleasing behavior, is to me one of the most concerning and notable elements of the decline of contemporary society in the West. It’s interesting to consider that behavior such as inviting a stranger in for tea or offering a ride to someone broken down on the side of the road are now seen as risky, perhaps intolerably dangerous, though our grandparents may have thought nothing of either one. In fact, where I am living in rural Mexico, these are still normal, even socially expected, behaviors today. Why we have gone down the path of separateness I think has many factors, economic pressure and social media being some of them, but those are factors all over the world, and some places still stubbornly continue to embrace one another’s differences and embrace contradictions rather than turn away from them. So I don’t think those factors alone tell the whole story. Anyway, sorry for the long ramble, but this conversation about cultural difference & isolation has felt increasingly relevant this past decade and I am always wondering where it comes from and what can be done about it.

Holy shit, that’s one of the most amazing pairs of jeans I’ve ever seen. Beautiful work and repairs @crownzip!

I love cinches they’re so cool! I don’t know if I’ve ever cinched any of my pants up tight enough to do anything to the fit, but for me that was never the point. Bonus points if your jeans and jacket BOTH have cinches.

Happy birthday @mlwdp! I also see Minnie Riperton’s Adventures in Paradise up on @fabes wall… a great one!

Not to go too heavy handed into this, but you’re absolutely right — that idea is foundational to our whole economic system. The whole principle of an “employee” is somebody who produces something (shoes, coffees, tattoos) for their employer, and who in return receives something (a wage). But the workings of the system require that the employee’s wage be overall less valuable than the labor they provide for their employer — the difference between the value an employee produces and the money they actually earn is, to the employer, the basis of “profit”. Foundational economists working in early capitalism understood that the easiest way to maximize profit was to maximize the number of employees an individual employer has, because each new employee is a new source of profit. And as employers obviously prefer employees willing to do the same amount of work for the lowest wage, this formed the basis for the formation of multinational corporations, leading to the modern trend of “offshoring” jobs from Europe and the US to parts of the world where standard wages are far lower. Because this all began in a time when the world’s economic systems were not yet interconnected, it gave rise to the myth that businesses have the capacity for endless growth, and therefore that their profits could increase endlessly, year after year, as their markets expanded around the world. This is the basis for the principle that profit-driven businesses will always tend towards becoming monopolies. It’s also the driving myth behind the stock market, which forces companies to find ways to earn higher and higher profits every year in order to attract investors — an investor, themselves, being a mini-employer of a sort. The alternatives to this business model are more commonly found in small businesses, but not always. The tattoo industry, at least in my experience, has trended more towards “collectives”, where each artist pays a flat rate for rent and supplies each month, and keeps all the rest of the money they earn in the shop. (This is compared to a more traditional model, where 30-50% of each artist’s earnings go to the shop owner, who ends up making far more than any of their employees before doing a single tattoo of their own.) And on a larger scale, we can look at cooperative corporations like Mondragón of Spain, which employs almost 80,000 people, yet pays the highest-earning worker no more than 6 times the salary of the lowest-earning ones. There is a lot to learn from these examples, and though they’re difficult to implement when in direct competition with huge multinational corporations, like your post mentions, I think the ethical position that cooperatives advance and the standard of living they provide are really worth supporting and adopting in larger sectors of the global economy.

Update on my 132s, they have been washed four times now i believe and worn close to four months. Got bitten by a german shepherd a couple days ago, fortunately not hurt badly but the dog did tear a good hole in the left thigh. You can see how little the indigo has faded compared to the fresh hem scrap i patched it with. In the mountains of Veracruz, super beautiful and not too hot this time of year! Riding south this morning:

Or have a tailor make the pockets a little longer! I don’t blame repro makers for not catering specifically to the phone industry… it would be kind of antithetical to the whole idea imo. and phone sizes are getting out of hand anyway! but that’s another topic