One or Two is Good

...and sometimes even three can make it perfect.  Wow, I always get an education when I visit my local Giant Hardware Store.  This is over 100,000 square feet "under one roof" and they have everything you might ever need to build or refurbish a house.  My kind of store.  They also have a "Junk Room" although they do not call it that.  It is their "up to 75% off" Room, pretty big too, maybe 60 feet by a hundred feet, all discounted, some damaged but mostly in perfect condition.  The kind of place where I can find mismatched paint for $5 bucks a gallon!  Today was "China Day" and not the normal import stuff, this was "China Art Day," or more exactly, Chinese Metal Art and they had over 100 feet of it, stacked up on tables and leaning against the walls, piled deep.  Like a garage sale.
     Chinese Wall Metal Art by the box load.  Trellis's by the rail car load and even row after row of little creatures (Chinese, I presume) with spring necks so their cute little heads bobble!  And about a million leaves from two inch to two feet, nicely shaped and powder coated!
    Everything 75% OFF. Such a deal.  This would be discouraging if these were the wares of an individual Chinese Artist but I would bet money these are from a Chinese Gulag, the work of beaten prisoners or the labor of factory workers at two dollars a day and they have to feed themselves.
   I know people buy this crap. I have seen them walk out with armloads of it at the Spring Home Show where vendors are allowed to sell anything that people are willing to buy.  I just do not know why?
I wonder if there is a book on compulsive buying?  or the buying of crap.  Stuff that will fall apart before you get it home.
   The funny thing is even at 75% OFF the store is still making a profit.  That should tell you something right there.  Like buying jewelry I guess.  The value is in the idea.
   This is the reason that I am not a fabricator and seldom make the same thing twice.  Three times and I am out of there and on to something else for sure!
   It was discouraging to see it.  I have seen paintings at Walmart, thousands of them against the wall, all imported and churned out like making butter.  Same kind of thing.

We Would Be Naked

If we were to remove all of the imported items from our life we would be naked, our houses almost empty and no automobiles in our garages.  It is interesting to me that we are so quick to point the finger of blame,
saying that regulations are the problem, maybe rich people or lazy people, greedy people or stupid people.
   Personally I think we are the problem, it is just not convenient to admit it.  Many of you have probably seen the television "news" story about outfitting the average dormitory room for a student going to college.

 More are being built!!!

Just in knick-knacks and bedspreads and posters, just basically crap it totals about $800 per student per year.  For the "average student" 100% of these items are imported, pushing our jobs overseas.  The "news people" discover (with some effort I admit) that these items actually made in America are available and cost about $37 less!  If, over campuses across the United States, all of these items had been made in this country, they estimated that it would have created 500,000 jobs!!!
   This is the boat that is used to get this imported stuff to us.  Well, a ship, huh?  Almost totally automated.  It has a crew of just 13 and can be unloaded in a mere two hours!  One THOUSAND, three hundred and two feet long.  And they are making MORE of these!  On their way back to China after unloading their gadgets on our docks, they return EMPTY!
   We are being conquered and they didn't fire a shot!  This is nuts.  We are like Heroin addicts who just cannot stop.  The pathetic thing about this is it is all crap.  None of this stuff will be antiques a hundred years from now, most of it won't exist a year from now.  A lot of it is broken before it gets out of the box.  But if the color is right, the style is pretty and it is cheap enough, we want it.  Addicts.
   You don't have to make any laws to repair this situation, no taxes are needed.  We need a new slogan.
How about "Just Don't Do It"?  Can you go a day or a week without buying anything imported?  There will be withdrawal symptoms.  There will be work on your part.
   Ask the clerk, "Where is this made?" and learn to say "No thank you".  Find it somewhere else or find a substitute.
   It seems that every year Christmas comes earlier and stores begin their holiday displays right after Halloween.  These big ships work overtime this time of year.  They can't build them fast enough.
Try something different this year, tell your friends, ask the clerk.  "Where is this made"?
   Maybe you could help create a job?

This is what I do: HERE

Value and Happiness

I had such a wonderful and provocative response from my friend Rama to my last post and I will attempt to answer her questions in today's post.  Basically she asks why I continue to belittle imports from China and not just concentrate on my art, saying that there is a market for both.  I agree with her 100%!!!  The people who buy imports are not my customers and for the most part, my customers do not buy imports.  So there should not be a problem there at all.  But I see two problems and they stay with me.
     The first is interesting actually.  Why do we buy things to make us happy?  I have spent most of my working life creating additions onto houses to accommodate more stuff.  I have seen four car garages so full of stuff that you can't even walk in them let alone park a car.  We don't use this stuff.  We accumulate it and store it, have garage sales and haul it to the dump.  It seems in my experience that the wealthier people buy less stuff than those with less money, but they buy things of better value.  Maybe that is a trap of poverty, always spending money on junk and never saving enough to buy something that might last.
     Food, shelter and medicine, these are things people need and for most of the world people spend every waking moment to secure these essentials and they are not given the luxury of wondering what would make them happy.  For others, "happiness" become a vessel to be filled.  We get the attitude of "make me happy"
or buying our way to happiness.  I am sceptical of all this consumerism.
     And here is the other thing.  I go to our local "dump", landfill/recycling yard at least three times a week in search of interesting discards, something I can make "art" from and I see what gets thrown away.  These areas are the biggest monuments in a modern city, taking up far more volume than the Empire State Building!
We don't keep things.  When they have lost their allure we toss them and most of us have no clue as to what happens to this stuff after we put in in our trash cans.  Most of it is buried, creating mountains, and covered in plastic, leaching chemicals into the waterways for thousands of years to come.  Buried and forgotten.
The steel is mostly recycled and that is a good thing.  More steel is produced today through recycling than from mining iron ore.  I have seen truckloads of brand new imported steel products, chairs and tables, trellis's
and exercise equipment that have been taken to the dump because of a slight defect, missing one bolt, or a chip in the paint.  From the beginning these are not worth repairing!
        Here is another interesting example of what I am trying to say.  I can buy an American or German grinder, a hand-held machine I use in my shop every day.  This might cost $100 and twice a year I will have to replace the electrical brushes, costing about $5. to keep this machine running in top form. These are repairable machines and will easily last ten years, maybe longer.  Also on the market (and I admit I own some) are cheap Chinese imports costing less than $20.  These will last, maybe, three months and are not repairable.  They are designed to be thrown away.  Which one is cheaper?
      We don't repair anything any more, from grinders to kitchen appliances to televisions and electronics, to Chinese "garden art" and paintings on the wall.  Everything has become for now and when finished it is tossed.  This has become normal.  I think it is all nuts, that is all I am saying.