A year in The Boulangerie
The unbaked bits from 2023, reviewed and refreshed. An experiment in "curation," as it turns out.
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Blurred car colors in the not-so-distant past.
Fardier à vapeur! — I said primary grade pupils would happily shout.
Dancing Lego men in the 1970s.
Such is a selection of the first “unbaked bits” in January 2023, the initial entries in Technocomplex’s Boulangerie.
A year ago, I opened the Boulangerie, which I then envisioned as a counterpoint to my regular longform-ish posts. “I think I’m going to put together much, much shorter pieces, perhaps even just photographs,” I wrote. “Half-baked? Discards? Compelling sentences and paragraphs? Random thoughts? Whims? Attempts at humor? Sure! And I’ll group them into a section called ‘The Boulangerie,’ since after all, they’re half-baked ideas.”
I planned to post the brief entries unannounced, more or less, in that they’d not be sent as emails to Technocomplex subscribers, since I figured that hearing from me once a week was all my readers could stand.
I initially thought that the “unbaked bits” would appear once or twice a week, but that proved unworkable. Even though January 2023 racked up six “unbaked bits,” February chilled out and chalked up only half that. In total for the year, 29 various unbaked bits rest in racks in The Boulangerie — short of my plan, but still I count the project a success.
The unbaked bits were the residues of my usual web browsing, part of the way my day begins around 6:00 am after Rosie the dog and I have completed our walk. She scarfs her breakfast, and I fondle my internetted slab, a Samsung tablet that’s getting long-of-tooth and occasionally cranky.
Doughy “curation”?
In an unbaked bit from May 2 about Daniel Pinkwater, I drew from Kelsey McKinney’s article in Defector, “The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small.” (Her article was mainly about Bluesky and Twitter replacements, but my mind wandered to Pinkwater for whatever reason.) McKinney commented that the internet
wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.
At that moment in May 2023, I thought that Daniel Pinkwater seemed to have the spirit that McKinney desired. He still does. I just checked to see if he was still alive and kicking. He is and now is well into his eighties. Who knows where? New York Hudson River Valley somewhere, I believe, most appropriately outside of Poughkeepsie or … Hoboken (New Jersey, I know, but Pinkwater and his late wife Jill did write about a “chicken emergency” there).
Looking back, I realize that the Boulangerie was a really, really small collection from the pockets of the internet, including a couple of enchanting forests, little glimmers of surprise and connection and delight. When I set forth on the project in January 2023, that was what I hoped to capture. A little bit of it at least.
You could call it a curation project, though not organized or directed in any meaningful way. Curation increasingly seems to be a thing, perhaps because there is so, so much on the internet now that few can shuffle through the rubbish. The Boulangerie has been my curated collection of surprises, carefully isolated from the internet rubbish pile.
There’s certainly more than 29 non-rubbishy pieces out there, but that’s all I shoved into the Boulangerie last year.
Unbaked bits, like lumps of dough, have to rise a while
Let me wander through the bakery a bit below, but you can wander through it all here.
I did have a purpose for grouping unbaked bits, I should add. On my old Samsung fondleslab, I flagged candidates for the Boulangerie, and some entries become part of ongoing compilations that I collect in Zotero, my ever increasing (and needing weeding?) bibliographical database. Right now, my Zotero’s Substack quarters include ten waiting rooms for references that might make their way into full-blown posts in coming months. Sometimes an unbaked bit makes me set up such a place in Zotero. For example, on April 11 last year, a post by
caught my eye. It was on tipping and the problem of unjust pay inequality in the US, a topic that has simmered for some time and that has become ensnared in the technologies of payment for services. (Recently, an electrician gave me an opportunity to tip him for some work; or more accurately, the payment system that he used defaulted to a tipping opportunity.)
Since that unbaked bit in April’s Boulangerie, the Zotero folder on tipping has gained some references and notes, though not enough to try to bake them into a batch for a good post. The collection must rise and mature.
Photography and photographers caught my eye, unsurprisingly. I’ve long been amazed by creative photography. Two of my book reviews have looked at photographers and their work — Hold Still, a memoir by Sally Mann, and a celebration of John G. Zimmerman’s car photography which is replete with selections from his car-related photojournalism and commercial work.
My web browsed meanderings in March led to another treasure that I kneaded into shape for display in the Boulangerie — Carol Highsmith’s “Cowboy at the Funky Cadillac Ranch, U.S. Route 66, Amarillo, Texas.”
And Georgian photographer and essayist Beth Lilly’s wonderful collection of highway “portraits” appeared in November’s batch of Boulangerie bits. She contributed a piece to Blind Magazine which I linked to in the November 24 entry:
Photography has been an abiding topic, of course, going back to Technocomplex’s initial posts in 2022.
Last March, by the way, was an eclectic month for the Boulangerie with entries on the “einstein” monotile, wonderful drawing in a Moleskine notebook (a Youtube video), a historic tuba museum an easy drive from my home, and a drawing of a “homunculus.” The “Penfield homunculus” got baked into a regular post that appeared in March.
So, photography and cars. Horses, too, it turns out — and horses with an artistic flair as well.
Again from Blind Magazine, I included a piece about Tony Bonanno’s and Jodie Willard’s work photographing the “horses of the sea” in the Camargue Delta, France. Great photography, sure, but also horses, who are captivating by nature.
July’s collection also included a delightful story of schoolchildren in the UK who sent a pastry to space. Really! And their pastry beat a Duke Blue Devil bobblehead by ascending higher. Pictures of the space-bound pastry and the (decapitated) bobblehead are included, of course.
In February, horses appeared … at least by association. Pictures of a medieval saddle held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art looked like “hard on the nether parts but decorative.”
And, in a sadder note, the close relationship of Cody Dorman and the horse named Cody’s Wish appeared in the November Boulangerie. The source for this entry? A New York Times obituary. Cody died at seventeen-years-old from complications of Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome. It’s a touching story, and shows a complexity and richness of the relationship between horse and human. Actually, between many animals and humans.
You’ll note that there is no June collection in the Boulangerie. I must have been lazy or otherwise occupied.
Closing the Boulangerie, but you can still visit
This round-up closes up the Boulangerie project. I’ve decided that I’ll claw back some time I spent preparing the posts. It was good for a year. I figured I’d send out this post to Technocomplex readers because the Boulangerie entries were largely unheralded, so not often viewed.
There’s some good stuff in the Boulangerie, and you might want to take a look. The entries will remain under the “Boulangerie” tab on the Technocomplex website.
Got a comment?
Tags: boulangerie, photography, horses, collections, links, curation
Ah, Mark, this kind of captures what I like about your writing: the sprawling curiosity, the willingness to go anywhere. We were big Daniel Pinkwater fans, and fans to of the Internet back when it was weird. There’s still a lot of weird out there, isn’t there?