11/10/25 - A Magic Carpet Ride...of the Intellect!

Happy November everybody! I'm not sick anymore, if anyone was worried. Like Christ from the Sepulchre, I have risen from my sickened station and found new health. Verily, verily.

I tried making Cacio e Pepe! It tasted good and also the cheese didn't melt right. Next time I'll remind the Pecorino to pick itself up by the bootstraps and get to work.

Speaking of work, I'm going to be talking about one of my many previous jobs today. I know kids I used to work with read these sometimes which makes me wildly uncomfortable, but if you are a child and you happen to be reading this, let me offer you a piece of advice; while there's no shame in dropping out of college, unless you're already a billionaire tech margrave, doing so will mean you work shitty blue collar jobs for a few years. Perhaps many years.

That is what I did after I dropped out at twenty...I jumped from paycheck to paycheck, finding every possible context to make my back sore. I was a petitioner, a baker, a call center agent, and, at one point, a rug man.

What's a rug man, you ask? Why, my good, sir, a rug man lifts and sets, you guessed it, rugs. I worked for a month, at the age of twenty-two, for a Persian rug store. It was right down the street from me. I remember walking in, dropping off my resume, and getting a call an hour later telling me I got the job. Only job I've ever gotten with no interview.

You might be saying to yourself, "Did I read that right? Is he really writing a blog post about a place he worked at for a month? A month feels short. Heck, if James Spader was only on The Office for a month, his character might've been upsetting to a level that isn't fully intolerable." And you're right, although I'd argue that character deserved an episode's guest appearance at most.

Anyways, I got fired. It should go without saying that anyone who's gonna make a blog about Teletubbies and Folk Music probably isn't very good at lifting things. But I spent a lot of time around these carpets...the cheapest ones in that store were around $800, the most expensive, upwards of $25k.

They were made of silk, and wool, and a map of their countries of origin would feel like a Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game that could only afford encyclopedias on the Middle East and south-central Asia...there were a few from China and indigenous groups of the western hemisphere, but largely, they were Turkish, Arab, Amazigh, Indian, and, of course, Persian. Mostly Persian.

I'm gonna preface all of this that I was only there for a month. I barely learned anything about these works

of art, and if I'm being honest, most of what I know about rugs comes from relearning things specifically to write this essay. I remember, though, being astonished by the fact that, despite how beautiful and high-quality the rugs were, the other employees tossed them around flimsily and haphazardly like how I imagine Blacklist readers go through scripts.

They kept them in ten-foot-tall piles at the center of the showroom or coiled in dusty corners. I remember tiptoeing around a rug rolled up on the floor on my first day, only to get yelled at by one of the store owners that they were designed to be stepped on.

Because they are. They are not fragile; they were invented to act as nomadic flooring. They are meant to be touched and walked on. To care for a rug is not in its preserving, but in its maintenance. That's why the various Shahs of Iran shelled out so much money to these ancient workshops...it sends an entirely different message about your empire than a big painting. A painting, you hang on the wall and make sure nobody touches it. If you have a perfectly preserved painting after three hundred years, it means you had three hundred years of soldiers making sure people looked from a respectful distance.

A rug's different. A rug that's still beautiful after three hundred years means three centuries of attention. Of organization, of cleanliness. It doesn't just mean you've maintained power, it means you've maintained order.

The store I worked in only dealt in handmade rugs; the founder was from a family of Iranian rug merchants, and he took deep pride in the integrity of his stock. But it wasn't just a store, it was also a rug cleaning service, and so many of the rugs we got in for cleaning were machine made, and let me tell you, they were fucking ugly.

Okay that's an overstatement. But they're so, so much worse than the handmade ones, in general. And it's not just a matter of being worse. You know it's a machine-made rug the moment you look at it. There's a few reasons why.

The first one is simply the quality of ingredients...handmade rugs use high-quality silks and wool, while machine rugs use artificial silks and acrylics. Machine rugs use harsh chemical dyes while handmades use softer, natural, vegetal dyes. Additionally, the cheapest machine rugs are bound by a glue skeleton...not only is it uglier, but it falls apart after a few years. Handmade rugs can last centuries with proper care, and are a single, bound structure made of opposing warps and wefts.

You might be wondering why machine rugs can't just be made of higher-quality ingredients. As it turns out,

they can, and many are.

Secondly, the fringes, arguably the most nameable part of a rug, aren't produced naturally in machine rugs. As I mentioned earlier, rugs are made of opposing warps and wefts, warps being the lengthwise vertical strands that the weft is passed crosswise through, back and forth. There is an inherent unevenness to this process, and the result is the fringes, which are the excess bits of a rug's skeletal structure that are tied off at the end.

Fringes are very pretty. They also only exist due to human imperfection...the power-looms which produce machine rugs can measure their fabric perfectly, hence no fringes. All fringes you see on machine rugs are either sewn or glued on, and they look worse for it. The highest end machine rugs tend to not even pretend they have fringes, instead going for this rectangular modernist look.

But why can't they have natural fringes? Why can't a machine measure imperfectly on purpose to produce the necessary fabric? Well, that's due to the manufacturing process. There are two main methods of producing machine-made rugs: the tufting machine and the Wilton loom.

Tufting machines produce the vast majority of carpeting in the US. The reason they can't produce fringes is

simple...there is no warp and weft. There's a backing material, usually made of plastic, that has yarn tufted through in little bunches and then glued together with an adhesive. It's where shag carpeting comes from. It's not attempting to be handmade by any means...it is, however, quite useful if you want a rug with a Pikachu or perhaps My Little Pony on it.

Wilton looms, unlike the tufting machine, do contain a warp and weft. High-end machine rugs such as the Karastan pictured above are almost always the product of a Wilton loom. A form of Jacquard Loom, they were first invented in the mid 18th century for velvet production, and utilizes multiple yarn frames to produce full-sized rugs in as little as an hour.

If you watch the shaky-ass YouTube video below, it becomes fairly obvious why it can't produce natural fringes.

The warp and weft are part of a continuous loop within the machine's framework, rather than operating as individual threads as in a handloom, and are cut precisely at the loop's end. And there's no work around to this; to the machine, the rug doesn't exist outside of the computerized design transmitted to it, it adds fabric through its framework until the design is complete. And, unlike a handloom, it doesn't produce individual rugs...it produces many rugs as a continual stretch of rug fabric. The yarn is held in suspension until this task is finished: if it measures the wrong amount of fabric on either side, the whole integrity of the rug fabric can come undone.

Industry is synchronistic. It's why the symbol of post-industrial London is a big clock. Industrialism depends on many moving parts, whether machine or human, being at the right place at the right time. There is no room for fringes.

The third and final reason that machine rugs are uglier is because they lack an abrash. What's an abrash, you ask? Well, my dear, dear reader, an abrash is the natural color variation produced in a handwoven rug. You see, while a Wilton loom can pop out a copy of a Heraz once an hour, it may take a weaver anywhere between weeks and years to produce a handspun rug. In that time, they will go through multiple batches of dye, wool, and silk. Seasons will change, and the same ingredients and processes will produce slight differences in color. This results in a complex and rich texture of colors in handmade rugs. That's an abrash.

Adding to this color variation is a visual effect produced through imperfection. Unbinding a rug to correct a mistake can be tedious and costly of time, so rug makers will, when a mistake isn't too grievous, instead elect to work around it, producing a sort of visual harmony by adding colors, shapes, motifs, and designs which work the mistake into the design of the rug rather than remove it.

I think we in the developed West often carry a bourgeois interpretation of the phrase, "it's about the journey,

not the destination". The way people usually talk about it, I think, stems from the context we usually tend to travel for, which is vacation. We're saying that if you need to wait in line for three hours to get into Disney's Rise of the Resistance, you should at least enjoy the lore-accurate architecture and immersive character acting offered by Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge.

The point is, we think about it in terms of enjoyment. That reaching a goal isn't as important as appreciating the steps it took to get there. But that's not really where the aphorism comes from, and I don't think it's even really a call to action.

It comes from a time when to travel anywhere required tedious effort. In this context, not worrying about a destination makes no sense...what's the fucking point of traveling from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley on an angler's salary, your friends dying of dysentery and only able to carry a hundred pounds of meat from an 800 pound grizzly when Oregon isn't even better?

Obviously, the point is the destination. The aphorism isn't saying that the journey is an end unto itself, it's that the destination doesn't even exist without the journey. There's nothing left for you in Missouri. There's a lot for you in Oregon. And the only way to get there is by turning your covered wagon into a boat and dodging through the rapids.

There is no way to produce a handmade rug without making it by hand. That's my point. Both a rugmaker with a handloom and a company with a Wilton start with a design, but a rug isn't a design. The best machine rugs still come with big chunks of solid color; even when they attempt an abrash, it's still an obvious and calculated effort. The sort of spontaneous beauty of an abrash, or fringe, or worked-in asymmetry is just that; spontaneous, and spontaneity can't be systematized.

So...I use ChatGPT when I write. I don't use it to produce anything, but that's not out of moral luddism; it's just because it doesn't make anything that's all that good. But it's good for proofreading and checking factual accuracy. It also doesn't hurt that it's basically programmed to constantly tell me how good I am.

I will never be afraid of machines replacing people. The fact is, there will always be a market for handmade rugs, and most people buying machine rugs wouldn't have been able to afford a handmade one anyways. It's not that I don't think machines are capable of producing anything good. It's because I don't think that people really care about art and objects very much, anyways. The thing that makes us capable of connecting to art is the humanity inside of it. And I will always bet on people.