Whoo hoo! Kalamazoo!

Here I sit at the Kalamazoo Water Street Coffee Joint biding my time until the train leaves for Chicago while easing back into the wonder-filled world of wireless after escaping to rural America for a few days. Thanks for the comment by anonymous! Maybe it’s August, that month of moving and leaving, visiting and reconnecting, though hot as hell all the way around, that forces one to be vehemently self-critical to elicit any kind of blog response. Anon is has a good point, and to some folk I’ve used the following analogy to illustrate what “homemade” means in the context of record covers. I hope Anon doesn’t mind that I get philosophical as I think about what homemade means and take this analogy a little too far.

Pies, to an extent, are like record covers. And I’m not talking about pizza pies, though pizzas can be made in a factory by machines or entirely homemade. However, pies make a more apt metaphor for record covers because they are known for their artistry as well as content (deliciousness).

Pies can be commercially produced and they can be made from scratch. The interesting part is that just like record covers, there are a million steps between scratch and commercially produced in both instances. Homemade, in the world of pie-making, could mean anything from milking the cows for cream to turn into butter for the crust, milling the flour and picking the berries, etc. to buying ready-made Pillsbury crusts to house the canned cherries. In the same sense, homemade record covers can be made from bug juice drawn on paper made from your neighbor’s tree that you pulverized into pulp, or, from sharpie written on computer paper. The assemblage of commercially-produced materials is just as homemade as the stuff made “from scratch.” Hold on to your butts because I’m about to take this way too far and talk about punk pies.

I think a parallel can be made between the record cover and the pie in terms of the punk philosophy/aesthetic dichotomy as well. The most philosophically punk/DIY pie would be the one that is made from scratch: all ingredients were harvested, collected and processed by the baker, down to the lemons used to tart up those super sweet blueberries. Perhaps the most aesthetically punk pie would be the hobo pie: canned pie filling sandwiched by two pieces of buttered bread grilled between two iron plates baked in an open fire.

Anon also makes the distinction between “the way” things were made and “how [the artist] went about making them.” I hope I am correct in interpreting this as meaning that there is a difference between the method of assembling the pie and how the baker prepared the crust and filling. If not, please correct me. Is it about the process, then, as Anon writes, and not about the particular method or medium that makes something homemade? I'm glad that people are picking up on this distinction, however subtle it is. Keep the discourse coming! And vote! one day left!

Laters, gators,
James