Nathalie Lecroc

Nathalie Lecroc. Petite Anthologie de Sacs et Sacs a Main. No 432. After yesterday's post where I was in danger of boring even myself with its drear subject matter, I've gone back to the list of vaguely interesting but essentially lightweight things that sometimes come my way – fashion and such.

Now, tell me how Keifer and Nathalie Lecroc can exist in the same world, never mind the same sentence.  Lecroc draws, for considerable fees, the contents of people's handbags.  Can you imagine the panic that your handbag might not be good enough to be immortalised?  Do people go out and buy a lot of iconic pieces of chic or do they just hope that when drawn out in a fey and whimsical manner on a decent piece of Arches that their things will look okay?  It is rather like the panic that someone might catch you on Skype inadequately dressed in a t-shirt from Joe, rather than from Stella. 

Calgary is increasingly a city where such things count.  No credit given for creative shopping at Zellers, no, we have the largest and newest Holt Renfrew in the country.  The Sartorialist last week reported about cool young Russians who have turned away from cashmere and bling toward anti-fashion fleece.  This seems a very interesting move.


small investments

Unilever India. Lifebuoy soap There was a thing on the radio this morning: BBCs Global Business, talking about a campaign to get everyone in the world to wash their hands after using the toilet.  Diarrhoea kills a million children each year, preventable by simple hand-washing with soap.  So Unilever, Proctor & Gamble – all the big corporations that make soap were approached and a strategy to provide both soap and initiative launched.

One of the most interesting things was to do with the size of the bar of soap.  The standard 500g bar is too expensive for the world's poor: it isn't that the soap is too expensive, but the investment in a large bar is impossible if one's income comes in daily and is spent daily.  By experimenting with 100g and 50g bars, it was found the the 100g bar of soap was both affordable and purchased.

This is an example of C K Prahalad's theory that there are vast markets at the bottom on the economic scale: sell millions of small things cheaply for much the same return as selling a couple of large expensive products.  Two loaded Ferraris or 2000 Tatas.

Prahalad felt that the poorest of the poor, who have ambitions and aspirations, make deliberate choices about where they put what money they have.  Their capital may be small, but it is capital nonetheless.  Discounting it because it is small and erratic, denies the poor access to many of the products that could improve their lives in terms of nutrition and health – the poor are denied any agency that their small incomes might give them.  Prahalad's view of capitalism from the bottom was tied to the issue of human rights.  He died a couple of months ago; he was only  68.

eikonostasia

Rutger Huibert. Ekklisakia, Greece, 2010

Evangelos Kotsioris and Rutger Huiberts, Rutger studying architecture at TU Delft, and Evangelos at the GSD, sent their survey of roadside eikonostasia in Greece for On Site 23: small things.  These are little shrines placed where someone has died in a traffic accident and Huiberts and Kotsioris talk about the transition from hand-made to manufactured shrines. 

We have roadside memorials here in Canada, in increasing numbers: mostly bunches and garlands of plastic and silk flowers tied to crosses, or telephone poles, littered with stuffed toys and scraps of paper – unruly, angry, sad, unresolved.  We didn't always do this.  I remember the first time I saw a roadside memorial when I drove to Kansas in the mid 80s: crossed the border into the States and there they were.  Had I ever seen one in Canada I would have taken them for granted, but I'd never seen such a thing before. 

As Huiberts and Kotsioris point out, they also act as road warnings.  In Montana, again in the 80s – don't know if they still do this– highway fatalities were officially marked by small white metal crosses: not memorials, just markers.  On the famous and very beautiful Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier Park every time you came around a sharp corner to find a fantastic view of yet more mountains, the foreground would have a flock of crosses where cars had taken the corner too quickly and someone had died.  It was very sobering.

Roadside shrines and markers are now the subtext to travel by car — a dark chorus to the freedom of the road.  Are our highway verges littered with wandering spirits consoling themselves with teddy bears and wreaths?  I'm not sure about this – not the spirits, but the need for flowers and toys.  I would hope that they have moved on.

chanel povera

Tommy Ton. Jak & Jil, 1/05/2010from Jak & Jil this week.

cat's eyes

We don't see these cat's eyes road markings here, but they are used throughout Britain.  Two mirror-backed glass marbles reflect headlights at night and mark centre lines and road edges.  They can be white, red, yellow, green or blue indicating different road conditions.
They were invented in 1933 by Percy Shaw, who patented them and then set about manufacturing them.  The glass marbles are set in a rubber block mounted in a metal casting embedded in the road.  If a car drives over it, it is pushed into the road and the rubber decompresses after, raising it up again.  There is a small reservoir that collects rain which washes the glass marbles keeping them clean. 

In my youth I spent a summer in England with the Commonwealth Youth Movement, and we were billetted with various county families as we travelled about.  Staying somewhere in Yorkshire and driving home after some do we were at, no doubt at an army base, I noticed that my billetter turned off his headlights whenever we went through a village or small town, and then turned them on again when on the open road.  Not on full, just on dipped, which shines about 5' in front of the car.  It all seemed quite dark to me, not to say dangerous. 

However, then, you didn't put on your headlights while going through villages as they would shine into people's windows and disturb them, besides there were dim streetlights or light from other people's windows to give enough light to drive by.  On the open road, the cat's eyes caught even dipped headlights far enough ahead to be a sufficient guide.  Cars didn't go fast: small winding roads and small engines did not allow it, also the phrase 'mustn't frighten the horses' comes to mind.  Life was deferential, quiet, frugal, measured.  People invented things.  They were allowed to be eccentric, as evidently Percy Shaw became. 

I doubt that any of this exists anymore in our over-developed OECD countries, however, one could travel the world looking for quiet, frugal, measured, polite societies where life is slow rather than headlong, and I expect one would find people inventing things of great usefulness – an eccentric concept in itself.  

voiturettes

Iso IsettaThere used to be an Isetta parked on my street, perhaps the most minimal car possible.  Generally known as micro-cars and big in postwar Japan and Europe, the Daimler Smart is our current version, which, no surprise somehow, was originally developed by Swatch in the late 1980s and taken to Mercedes-Benz.  Smart fortwos are okay, but lack the charm of the Isetta, which was at least pretty.  Isetta was originally developed by Iso SpA in Turin in 1953, and then licensed to other manufacturers such as BMW.  They are 90" long by 54" wide, 770 lbs. 
Best site for pictures is the Microcar Museum

The micro-cars of the 50s used 2-stroke motorcycle motors and were essentially enclosed motor scooters, but with a steering wheel rather than cycle handles.  One got in and out of the Isetta through the front which was one big door with the steering wheel and dashboard panel attached.  Gina in Heartbeat used to have one before she got her pale blue VW Beetle.
The Isetta had four wheels, but there were many other lines of tiny cars with three-wheels – reportedly the earliest of cars from the 1880s.  Three wheels have a few stability problems, this is why the Isetta put two wheels quite close together at the back.   Three-wheelers are still being developed, including the Campagna T-Rex in Montréal which is too obviously a muscular motorcycle with a ghastly fibreglas carapace pulled out of a computer game. 

Much has been on the news lately about speed, accidents and Calgary roads.  I would hesitate to take a microcar onto Deerfoot Trail, in fact I don't even take my very nimble, very fast saab onto Deerfoot Trail – it is a suicidal road.  But there are plenty of other roads with less pressure on them.  Speeds are 50-60 rather than 110; you get there.  Although contemporary microcars have normal-car running speeds, little cars like the Isetta had 50kph as their top speed: they are cars for cities, which, last time I heard, most of us live in.  

the Holzweg

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg, 2008Arndt Menke's wood bike uses wood as a sophisticated material, rather than a low-tech material that shows its vegetative lineage.  There is a standard set of images of the Holzweg, found on several design websites, that show its details, parts and assembly.

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg. Laminated bentwood back wheel strut.It is possible that this too is mainly a bamboo bicycle as the photos show wood tubes for the frame pieces.  Reamed wood wouldn't be as strong as bamboo with its hollow integrity.  The most interesting part, a bentwood, laminated back wheel strut, is not, as far as I can find, discussed at all. The bentwood piece is laminated from four shaped pieces and then shaped to fit into the tubular metal lugs.  This would give it both strength and spring, giving some suspension movement in the back wheel.

Arndt Menke-Zumbruagel. Holzweg. Forming the bentwood back wheel strut.The frame weighs 2.3 kg.  A comparably responsive ride, a full suspension frame, ranges from 2kg to 5kg (2.8 for aluminum might be typical). 

We've gone through a long period of time where as individuals we have been told we can't make anything ourselves.  We certainly can't fix our own cars, where once everyone was his own mechanic.  What I like about all these wood bikes is that one could actually make one without a metal workshop, without welding equipment and a welding ticket.  These bikes are about assembly of parts, rather than sealed monolithic units, bought ready to go and only repairable by professionals.  That just seems so disengaged now.


bambucicletas

Having been away from my home and native land for four months, in my other home and native land, I have been surprisingly disoriented since being back.  After looking at  a small house project Saturday in the far south west, I came back with the contractor I generally work with when I do such things so he could collect his old Sawsall which I borrowed four years ago to hack out some joists set too high for a floor I was replacing.  It was a long story and brute violence was needed to solve it.  Anyway, my front room was a mess: half unpacked, stacks of papers everywhere.  I bleated 'magazine', 'moving', 'ill', 'too much', etc.  and then spent the rest of the afternoon simply clearing my work table.  I now have a tidy stack of little notes of ideas.  I have similar stacks in each room – neat things I read, or hear on the radio, or think of, fascinating bits of news.  What to do with these little notes, each worthy of a dissertation at least.  If I work through them here for a bit, I can throw them away.  It won't be a series of dissertations, but I can air them and let them go.

This is the danger of misc files: they are brilliant, and unwieldly, and provocative, and oppressive, inducing much guilt that one is not pursuing them, working them out, making connections.

So.  Bamboo bikes

First patented in 1894, bamboo frames are lightweight, responsive and quiet. Bamboo is evidently 17% stronger than steel in certain directions.  Craig Calfee in Santa Cruz has been producing high-tech bamboo bikes for several years and is the acknowledged expert, although bamboo bikes have long been built in China.

Calfee Bamboo Cargo bike, built in Ghana. The back wheel is bamboo-reinforced and capable of carrying 640 lbs.The straight pieces are heat treated bamboo.  Instructables has step-by-step  instructions on how to build such a bike: it mortices the bamboo together at the joints and then makes hemp and fibreglas reinforced wrappings around the joints.  Better pictures are here.

The other way to join the pieces is to use carbon fibre, steel or other metal pre-formed lugs into which the bamboo poles fit.  Otherwise, one needs all the rest of the parts: chain, wheels and brakes recycled from ordinary bikes.  The front fork is often metal it seems, rather than bamboo: something to do with stability.

The Bamboo Bike Project in Ghana, Kenya and other African countries was started by several people in different research units at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. BBP is setting up bamboo bike production in local workshops, with local bamboo, that are sturdier than metal bikes and more suited to carrying loads over rough roads. 

There are, of course, obsessives who are working to make everything out of bamboo as a kind of pure design exercise.  Flavio Deslandes is a Brasilian industrial designer living in Denmark. His bike uses a back brake which is much more elegant than all those cables.  Evidently there is much research into bamboo spokes, but couldn't find any pics except for the bamboo reinforcing on the cargo bike above.

Flavio Deslandes. Bambucicleta. Rio de JaneiroIt's all quite exciting, and there are pages of websites, so it must be quite a common project.  I just hadn't heard of it. 

Fairey Marine hot-moulded hulls

Fairey Marine, Hamble, England. A hot-moulded mahogany hull.

Back to plywood.  In the next issue of On Site: small things, we have an article by Charles Lawrence who writes about Fairey Marine which took Fairey Aviation's wartime wood laminate experience in making aircraft to the making of powerboats in the 1950s and 60s.  They built up a monococque hull with six layers of wood glued in cross directions over a solid block form, and then the whole lot was baked at boiling point in an autoclave, producing a lightweight nearly indestructible hull.
 
It was in a white Fairey Huntress that James Bond chased his enemies, in Fairey Huntsmans, in From Russia With Love.  Wonderfully evocative names for these boats: Fantome, Swordsman, Spearfish.  Fleet and nimble, slicing through the waves, many are still in the water.  

The hot-moulded Fairey hull, like the moulded Eames chairs, eventually went over to fibreglas and, I expect, much of the magic was lost. 
  

the monobloc plastic chair

Simon Palfrey. 8-year-old Kunde boy with ruptured appendix, being carried 12 hours and 25 km in this chair to local airstrip for evacuation to Kathmandu.While looking for an image of the original Eames splint used during the Second World War, the technology of which led to his chair experiments, I came across this use of an ordinary plastic lawn chair in Katmandu being used for emergency transport.  Its light weight and rigidity would be key here.

Jens Thiel, who is working on a book, a documentary and an exhibition on monobloc plastic chairs, has a website full of pictures of these chairs in all settings, in all variations, all kinds of repairs and uses. 

designboom.com has a short history of monobloc plastic chair development.  They are cheap – $3 to make, and they are made all over the world. Although polypropylene is recyclable they are too big for our blue bins and are often found in fragments set out with the garbage, and living in the rich west as we do, we rarely see the inventive uses found by Thiel or the repairs and re-use.  Thiel points out that inexpensive as they are, they are still equal to a day's salary in many places, and so are valued, helped along when they get elderly, repaired lovingly.

Jens Thiel and Daniel Spehr. Rapaired backrest, sewen with wire.

on being amused

Gabriel Pazzini. Orion suitcase for Hermès, 2010there was a thing on the radio yesterday, in anticipation of today, about jokes and how there were only basically 7 jokes; someone else said there were only two.  One kind of joke always deals with the gap between reality and aspiration, or concept and reality.  Hilarious I guess, although in my experience I rarely find that gap funny until about 40 year later, if then.

I get various press releases about art and design from all sorts of odd places.  One is Duende Studio in Paris who sent a new Hermès suitcase today.  Well, not the suitcase unfortunately, just the pictures. 

It states:
Orion suitcase in aluminium and natural cowhide by Hermès
. 'Created by Gabriele Pezzini, Hermès Design Director, this extremely ergonomic travelling companion has exceptional functional and aesthetic qualities. Its brushed anodised aluminium shell, the interior surface of which is reinforced with carbon and Kevlar, provide unparalleled resistance to wear and tear.
'The luggage is subtly highlighted with two natural cowhide handles - an unmistakable reference to the Hermès travel world. The bag's technical allure elegantly contrasts with the sensuality of its interior, cased entirely in leather. Its two handles allow for it to be carried horizontally or vertically, whilst its multidirectional wheels make for incredible ease of use.'

It is, no doubt, a beautiful thing.  The leather on the outside is a bit odd: a sign that this is really a classy piece, in case anyone thought the suitcase was just full of camera equipment.  The inside is constructed like several very old leather suitcases I have from the 1910s with horizontal dividers, envelopes and leather straps to keep everything in place.  Not sure about the wheels, they look quite ordinary, but maybe this is the humorous bit, the gap between the concept in aluminum, kevlar and leather handles and the reality of four nasty little functional wheels on the bottom.

Gabriele Pezzini's website is a masterpiece of non-information.  Perhaps this too is meant to be very funny.   But according to my new tool of analysis about jokes I don't get it.  The concept is very cool, the reality is very cool but actually quite boring.  The gap isn't wide enough perhaps.  Clearly I lack a sense of humour. 


pocket books

Victorian books were often very small, soft-covered and portable.  The original pocket books, for the pocket.  I once read that Leslie Stephen sometimes walked 40 miles in a day, books in his pockets, reading while he walked.  I had a grandfather who would walk out with gun, dog and book across the prairie from the last street in Calgary, 18A SW, where he lived.  He was born in 1875, came to Canada in 1908 bringing with him his violin, his patent-leather dance slippers, his school blazer and his Hardy fishing rod.  Things were different then.

Books were one's companions in one's solitary pursuits.  Books of poetry were high on the list, perhaps because poems then often had a walking rhythm, were episodic, compressed, gave one lots to think about.  Wilfred Owen took his Keats to the Front in WWI.

We resist, today, being left alone with our thoughts – there is certainly a lot of stuff that rushes into the void, sort of as if we don't have any thoughts of our own really.   Maybe we don't, but if my head is an empty desert I would prefer it be filled with Yeats or Heaney or Hughes.  personally.  Unfortunately I hardly have the time to stroll about, book in hand.

MEND, New Zealand

Rob Buchanan, founder and director of MEND: Mobility Equipment for the Needs of the DisabledA couple of years ago one of the World Challenge entries was by MEND which had set up small workshops in very isolated villages in Nepal to make artificial limbs out of aluminum cans and discarded plastic.  The mandate of MEND – Mobility Equipment for the Needs of the Disabled, is 'to help disabled children and adults become mobile, independent and trained in skills that can lead to employment, and so achieve dignity in their communities'.
Imported prostheses are  too expensive and too rare, generally children in remote areas who lose limbs are left just to get on with it.
 
MEND is based in New Zealand and now has workshops and centres in Nepal, India, several African countries and Fiji, all to do with achieving mobility by local initiatives and means.    The brief video on the World Challenge site shows a pile of cans being fed into a mould where they will melt and come out as a leg: lightweight, with attachment points for straps and attachments.  Could it be simpler? yet how much invention and testing went into this process so that it was safe for the people in the workshop.  There is a committment to these low-tech manufacturing processes that are sophisticated beyond anything we make in our wealthy country.   

In this next issue of On Site, which is about small things, we have one article by a young architect, Peter Osborne, who, in building a folding bookshelf/storage unit found himself limited not by his imagination, but by his skill with plywood and saws.  The other is by architect Ron Wickman who, because his father was in a wheelchair, sees all architecture in terms of its accessibility.  He makes the very valid point that in handing out awards for amazing buildings, we never let a ramp get in the way of a grand entrance. 

So, two issues: appropriate technology and human rights.  Is this about architecture?  Absolutely, it is about design.  Our culture medicalises disabilities instead of seeing them as opportunities for useful design thinking.  When I was pushing my elderly aunt up and down hills in her 2-ton wheelchair – it was practically uncontrollable – it occurred to me then that surely there was a better way to do this.  Watching the amazingly designed and engineered chairs and limbs on display in the Paralympics right now, it is evident that there is.  Now this engineering and manufacture has to be made accessible.  

Barefoot College, Tilonia

The Barefoot College was entirely built by Barefoot Architects. The campus spreads over 80,000 square feet area and consists of residences, a guest house, a library, dining room, meeting halls, an open air theatre, an administrative block, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher's training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, STD/ISD call booth, a Craft Shop and Development Centre, an Internet dhaba (cafe), a puppet workshop, an audio visual unit, a screen printing press, a dormitory for residential trainees and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank. The College is also completely solar-electrified. The College serves a population of over 125,000 people both in immediate as well as distant areasBarefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan trains illiterate or under-educated women and men in practical engineering.  Women do 70% of the domestic and agricultural work in India, however Barefoot College has, since the early 1970s, been training women in what are considered technically challenging men's professions such as solar engineers, handpump mechanics, computer instructors, masons, night school teachers.
 
The College does not prioritise literacy, but rather problem-solving skills such as basic law, making women aware of the Right to Information, minimum wages, violation of human rights.  This, along with their training and employment, give them a way out of the sheer, numbing drudgery of rural life for women in most of the world.
 
Having solar lamps allows night school and less use of kerosene, toxic in closed spaces.  Having rainwater harvesting systems allows women more time to do other things than walk miles each day collecting pots of water, or firewood, or candles.
The mandate of Barefoot College is very much about the empowerment of rural, barely literate women caught in a caste system and rigid social roles.  At the same time it has trained 15,000 women and installed thousands of solar lighting units and rainwater harvesting systems.

Barefoot College does not give out degrees or even certificates that could perhaps become a kind of currency leading to migration. They do not want their trainees to move to the cities, but to stay in place, in their communities.  Plans are to extend Barefoot College to Africa and South America.  Bunker Roy, the founder, says language isn't a problem.  Sign language will do.
 
I suppose that one solders a circuit plate the same way no matter what language is spoken.  This in itself is a revolutionary idea.  We are altogether too logocentric here.

dunce caps

1906 staged example of a dunce cap

Was this ever real? or was it seen in a cartoon and taken for fact.  Whatever, it is appropriate for a week spent not being able to get things off ftp sites, not being able to understand pieces of impenetrable text wanting to be articles for the next issue of On Site.  There is something about academic writing: when you are doing it, and I certainly have done my fair share of it, the mind is so full of theory, concepts and ideas that this strange kind of prose siimply unravels of the end of the pen, with its own syntax, vocabulary and density.  A year later and you yourself cannot even understand it. 

I always wondered if foolscap, that archaic size of paper we used in school when I was in the little grades, was the kind of paper used to make fool's caps, but evidently not.  Totally different etymology and something to do with a jester's cap watermark on the original paper.

Odd how the head is the place where so many signifiers are placed.  Perhaps not so odd, we are our visage, and hats and haircuts top off that visage, telling everyone you are not just a pretty face, but a rich pretty face, or a silly pretty face, or a rich not-so-pretty face.   god, life is exhausting.   

Geles

So there it is, how to tie a gele.  The material is either aso-oke – a Yoruba hand woven cloth, silk or printed cotton, but heavily starched.  How starched is subject to fashion, evidently they don't make them so stiff these days, but I found that on a Nigerian website so not sure how straight or cool that comment is.  Many of the commericial sites show them in rayon and quite floppy.

They are outstandingly beautiful when you see them on new Canadians parading down the horrible strip that is 17th Avenue SE in Calgary.  The women are like tall flowers, and I'm not being patronising here, they really are stunning.  The dresses and matching or contrasting geles are stately, calm, solid and absolutely individual.  I'm sure there are nuances in how one pulls out the top of the wrapped material, invisible to many of us, but again, subtle indications of class, wealth and self-worth. 

One does wonder how long it takes for such subtleties to disappear when there are so few people to take account of them.  Or do they become frozen, unable to develop with fashion trends in the original culture.  I remember hearing of people who had emigrated to Canada and, on going back to England, found that the England they had known was completely gone, and they appeared as relics from a bygone era.  It does happen. 

Fascinators

A Fascinator, ready to wear.

There is a kind of English hat called a fascinator, generally worn on the side of the head.  There is no hat part, usually just a little disc or a comb with strange feathers attached.  
Camilla wore one for her wedding to Prince Charles. By Philip Treacy, it was an aureole of feathers trimmed close to the quill so it looked like a halo of wheat.  A mystical sort of crown to say 'take that!' to everyone who doesn't want her to be Queen Camilla.
I find this kind of hat as bizarre as the makaraba, but not as much fun.  It really does smack of 'society' and general uselessness, part of an ethnic dress code that means much to those who wear them.   Sarah Ferguson wore one to Diana's funeral – black, gay, defiant; Sarah the renegade princess who escaped. Her fascinator was a little black box with thin black feathers shooting out of it, worn over her ear.

It is all seriously  frivolous, and as we here generally only wear hats when it is freezing out — thick, woolly things – I do wonder where it is that Canadian society allows frivolity.  Certainly not in its dress.  Hats have traditionally been indicators of social status, the best hat being the crown.  Indeed, the top of a hat is still called the crown.  In Canada, and in the US, supposedly we do not have a rigid social hierarchy revealed through sartorial codes so perhaps the hat as a defining moment is no longer readable.   Something must have replaced it, I don't believe there is such a thing as a non-hierarchical society.   Just can't think what it would be right now.

Makarabas

Makoya Makaraba. design 3: Look at the Score. The Makoya Mararaba website is subtitled 'the genuine south african hand painted fan helmet'.   Makarapas are plastic hardhats usually worn by miners, cut, bent and painted to make soccer fan headgear.  The original makarapa was produced in 1979 by Alfred Baloyi at Evendale as protection against flying bottles during a match.  He has parlayed this into Baloyi Makarapa, which also produces well-decorated vuvuzelas, the football trumpets.  He seems to have a trademark on 'makarapa' with a 'p'.

Michael Souter, a Cape Town graphic designer started Makoya Makaraba (with a 'b'), a township community project near Cape Town at Diep River that trains unemployed people in makarapa production.   
One senses a lawsuit in the offing, as Baloyi's story on his website ends with 'Baloyi's authentic Makarapas will now be marketed under the name Baloyi Makarapas (TM) ensuring that not only is his role as the originator of these unique creations recognised, but that his hard work is rewarded and his intellectual property protected'.
But, but, Makoya Mararaba is a community project, and its website states, heroically, 'We are a small company that train and help uplift the people from the Township communities on the Cape Peninsula ... We strive to create permanent and meaningful employment for individuals from previously disadvantaged backgrounds'.

Ha!  However, FIFA's website ignores these two projects and presents Newtown Projects in Johannesburg, part of an urban regeneration project.  Newtown Projects is going into high production for FIFA 2010.  They 'stumbled' upon a robotic arm from the automobile industry.  Paul Wygers, an architect who started Newtown Projects makarapas says, ingenuously, 'there are two pinch points in the process; cutting them and painting them.  If you can get rid of the pinch point of cutting them, which is the most labour intensive part of the whole process, you can up the numbers'.  They can do 1000 makarapas a day: huge employment opportunities for painters.  They too employ the underemployed, about 35 painters on a production line, some of whom just do the base, some brushes, some airbrush.  
Baloyi started by doing 2 a day, who knows how many Makoya does in a day, maybe they too have a robotic arm but somehow I doubt it.  Makoya's makarabas start at R270 (CAD36).   Baloyi's basic makarapa is R99 going up to R299.  (CAD13-40).

There is such an exuberant graphic sensibility at work here, hardhats become fantastic, towering sculptures absolutely integral to South African soccer culture.  FIFA 2010 is a powerful endorsement of South Africa's survival, its culture and its future —attention will be diverted away from corruption, poverty and South Africa's support of Mugabe.  These enormous sporting events, like the Vancouver Olympics, really seem to propel both cities and their regions into some other stratosphere for the duration and when it is all over, so many things have changed. 

small tools held in great affection

my all-time favourite tool: little hammer, hatchet, screwdriver, nail puller, wire cutter, pliers and whatever that top bit is called that cuts the heads off nails.  Sturdy, dates from before the 1950s, a novelty item perhaps, but surprisingly useful it has been.  And it is so tiny.
 
Is there a name for tools that combine many functions?  where something can be a hammer and an inch later a wirecutter?  It is the opposite of that other attitude: the proper tool for every job.  That is what Lee Valley is based on.  No, this little handy dandy does not expect anyone to use it with great finesse, its function is to be helpful as one is muttering and banging around in the basement and hey presto! there it is, a tiny hammer to knock out a cottar pin wedged in the handle at the back of a clock, as happened this morning.  

Humour me, I'm on my holidays and such things loom large.

small objects of absolutely no importance at all

There are small objects in the landscape of one's daily life, so small as to be invisible, yet one misses them when gone.  Pen knives are one such item.  I'd always had one in the car, but when my car was broken into last year it disappeared. 

No problem I thought, I'll get another.  Well, they don't exist anymore it seems.  None at the hardware store, and I had to explain to the clerk what they were.  At Canadian Tire I was taken to a locked cabinet of fearsome blades, each capable of skinning a moose.  The Knife Store had Swiss Army knives but nothing with just a simple blade: the basic Swiss Army knife seems to necessarily include scissors.  There was one lovely slim knife but it was $65 and the blade was very thin.  Good for — what?  committing murder?  not a sturdy pocket knife for peeling oranges in the car, cutting cheese at the campsite, whittling bits of wood for some obscure reason.

I found above penknife, two blades, nice pearly handle for $6 in a junk store, which had many.  A bit rusty, but that can be dealt with.  I mention this apparently insignificant and quite mindless expedition into pen knives and their disappearance on the occasion of the iPad -- a lovely thing, I would dearly love one although they won't be in Canada till the summer.  I'm certainly not against new technologies and still have one of the early iPods which has a physical presence that is as smooth and heavy as any hand held artifact in a museum: it is like a chrome pebble in the hand.  As is this penknife, worn absolutely smooth in someone's pocket over many years. 

What I find so interesting about the present is that while we live with mega-technolongical advances, the small sensuous qualities of objects are holding their own.  Although we could live our lives as avatars in cyberspace, it is still important to touch beautiful surfaces.