Naturally, when choosing his own jeans, Dorsey prefers pants that reflect that heritage. He is an aficionado of those made by fashion designer Scott Morrison. Dorsey notes that he plans to make a pilgrimage to Morrison’s shop in New York City’s SoHo district, where they sell jeans made from cotton handpicked in Zimbabwe and woven by craftspeople in Japan. Once, Dorsey says with quiet awe, Morrison provided rigid, unwashed jeans to dishwashers at a New York City restaurant. They wore them constantly in the filthy steaming kitchens, creating a bewitching pattern of wear that was painstakingly replicated by Morrison’s jeansmiths. It’s an elaborate process, all in the pursuit of wabi-sabi.
I wonder how the dishwashers feel about super rich people paying a ton of money to pretend they have a life as full as dishwashers.
A bit incredulous but bemused, I imagine. The world of so-called denimheads can be strange and fetishistic -- at its most extreme, it has a Zoolander Derelicte quality to it, where beat-up raw denim is left unwashed well-past its due date and the goal is to look like a merchant marine from 1920 or a railroad conductor -- but as someone who really loves his jeans, I can tell you that I derive a lot of joy from the fit, detail, style, and comfort of a good pair of raw denim that I've broken in myself.
It depends on where you live, how much you want to spend, and what sort of fit you're looking for. Barneys will have a selection of mid-range denim -- brands like APC and Naked & Famous. If you're in SF, NYC, or LA, there's Self Edge, which specializes in higher end, more obscure stuff but still carries great value brands like 3Sixteen. Also in NYC is Blue In Green, which carries a ton of stuff. You can always look at Revolve Clothing or Context Clothing online as well. There are tons of options, there are many local boutique places that will carry good brands, and it gets deep really quick. Let me know if you have any questions.
"'I wrote down everything that happened at Twitter, and we corrected all the mistakes,' [Dorsey] says."
This is kind of Zen. I saw this as an example of motivated and deliberate learning. I find that taking notes instead of winging it can lower the chance of making the same mistake twice. You miss and forget more than you realize. To put it another way, you forget what you remember and don't even remember you forgot.
No. A Haiku is not Zen. Haikus are influenced by Zen thinking or influenced by the same principles, but Haikus are not Zen. Rock gardens are not Zen. And tea bowls are not Zen.
Japanese rock gardens originate in Zen monastery practice in Kyoto. That is, Zen monks designed, built, and maintained them as part of their practice of Zen Buddhism. The best-known ones are all part of Zen Buddhist temples today. So in that sense, rock gardens are Zen.
The other two cases are not as open and shut.
Basho, who brought haiku into its modern form, was not a monk, but did practice Zen meditation as a layman, and lived as a pilgrim and hermit, teaching a circle of disciples, like an abbot. Issa, the second most influential haiku poet after Basho, was an honest-to-goodness Jodo Shinshu Buddhist (though not Zen!) priest. Furthermore, the haiku aesthetic embodies Zen's fierce focus on the ephemeral beauty of the current moment. I think that saying that the practice of haiku is "influenced by the same principles" is such an understatement as to be absurd.
Right now I am not going to dig into the history of raku.
I didn't say Zen monks didn't build rock gardens or haikus are not influenced by Zen aesthetics and thinking. Equating rock gardens or haikus with Zen makes one laugh. Mu.
Zen is a school of buddhism which focuses on enlightenment, with different sub schools that focus on different methods for attaining enlightenment (well actually it's not, but it helps seeing Zen practitioners goal as gaining enlightment). Zen is not rock gardens, wabi sabi or haikus. Christianity is not building gothic cathedrals.
Glad I have no clue about Zen, or I would need to slap you on your head with a stick.
Oh, I see where the disconnect was. You thought I was saying that the rock gardens were Zen Buddhism. I was saying that the rock gardens are Zen Buddhist, in the same way that the Gothic cathedrals are Christian or the Alhambra is Islamic.
Of course Zen does not consist of composing haiku, building rock gardens, or reading koans.
Can you explain in more detail what taking notes has to do with Zen? It seems like kind of the opposite, in a way — feeding the monkey mind instead of digging the experience.
I had heard from square, but never bothered to look up what they exactly do. I've been surfing through their wikipedia entry and website (very nice design!), and it looks very intriguing.
Now the question is of course, who has had some experience with it? Is this confined to SF, other american cities? Does it work as elegantly as it looks? Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.
> Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.
I don't think Square is confined geographically, at least within the US, but I have my doubts will help with the "processing at restaurants takes forever" problem. Most restaurants who plan to take cards already have merchant accounts; Square is most helpful if your problem is "I'm a person or small vendor and want to accept credit cards from other people, perhaps even on-the-go."
if your problem is that you haven't been able to find a workplace environment that's sufficiently uncircumspect about its place in employee's lives and the world.)
I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. There might even be incentives to do that: moving people faster means you can server a higher volume of customers. Whether that'd be enough to overcome Good Enough+Inertia is the question.
> I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table.
Pretty much every even slightly classy restaurant in Canada has mobile POSes the server brings to your table and you use to punch in your credit card PIN (or it prints the receipt for you to sign, if you have an ancient or American card).
It still takes too long and I wish the limit for RFID-authorized transactions was higher so I could tap rather than PIN, but at least the card remains in my sight at all times.
Using Square is faster and more convenient than cell-based (Nurit,
Verifone) processing: enter total, swipe, sign screen with a stylus or
finger, and, only for customers who have never paid with Square on that
card before: receipt via SMS or email (or none)? and enter phone number
or email address. Customers often got the receipt by SMS before leaving
the shop.
Using a Nurit meant total, swipe, wait for connection &
authorization, print paper receipts for merchant & customer, get
customer to sign and return merchant receipt, make sure merchant &
customer end up with the right bits of paper, credit card, and pen.
It may sound like a trivial difference in reading the steps, but when
dealing with a flurry of customers the ability to spend more attention
engaging with customers while still handling payments correctly is an
important difference.
We are on our 4th credit card processing technology in 8 years
(paper imprinter, pay by cell & numeric entry, Nurit, Square),
and Square is the best so far at making payments a trivial part of
the sales process instead of a minor hassle.
It's not just a Valley thing. A local corn maze was using iPads with them last year as the POS terminals for what would have previously been a cash-only affair.
We use square for somewhat large (10k-15k) rental transactions. They have always been really accommodating and even when we were newly using them released our funds far faster than anyone else would. Great service.
I wonder how the dishwashers feel about super rich people paying a ton of money to pretend they have a life as full as dishwashers.