shavings and dust

Celebrations

2011-10-11T09:18:00.000-04:00

This is our friend Dennis

when our second son was born this summer, a friend said to "there is a meadow on our land that we use for family occasions. We have planted some trees there to commemorate various important dates, and if you would like to plant a tree up there for Charlie, we would love that." Such a beautiful baby present, and of course we took him up on it.

It being only a couple of weeks after Charlie was born, Karen was not up to joining us, though she came to the house to introduce the baby. My mother was in town, and Thomas came along. Planting trees is such a joyous and hopeful thing, and it is always even more fun to do it with a group, so I was glad there were so many of us. And we are trying to teach Thomas as many different creative acts as we can, so I was especially glad he would be there.

And this is our friend Jeannie

On the kind of summer day usually reserved for movies and greeting cards, we went all started up the side of the hill behind their house. The woods and the landscape up here remind me so palpably of the landscape where I grew up, it is like putting on a favorite shirt. The woods we walked through had all been fields when our friends were young here, so this is a callow woods, lots of young, straight trees, reaching for the sun, the leaves a range of brilliant sap green where the sun hit them to the deep emerald of late summer. Because this had been farmland we walked past some apple trees, long grown gnarly with their twisted trunks but still bearing fruit.

Setting out with Boy and trees

We don't spend as much time in woods as I would like, partly a function of living in a city and partly a function of how tightly my time is leveraged, and it was a pure joy to simply be surrounded by trees. The air tastes different, the sun feels different on the skin. On a sunny day in the woods there is something that makes me feel so safe, so tiny, and so hopeful, I miss it.

We walked out of the canopy of trees into the meadow, the bright sun suddenly brighter, and talked a little about things that had happened here over the years; a marriage, celebrations of different kinds. We met the trees already there, a twenty-year-old maple planted for a niece when she was born, an oak tree planted as an acorn from the green at Yale University when my friend was a student there. Maples grow so fast, it was so much taller and broader than the oak at the same age, these memories and markers in time manifesting differently depending on how we choose to commemorate them.

I had brought two saplings, both seedlings that took root from the big silver maple in our backyard. One was from last spring and the other from this spring, one for each boy. I liked that they came from our home, and that there would be a connection, as the boys grow and play in tree houses that we build in the tree or ride swings hung from the branches, these two young maples will be quietly growing on a meadow at the crown of a hill. We have plans to visit them frequently, to say hello to help us stay mindful of different ways of celebrating new lives.

Thomas helped by putting dirt around the saplings after the holes were dug and by holding worms for us. Compared to planting trees in our backyard, which has seen a lot of use and is pretty tightly packed, the loose, lovely loam of the meadow offered little resistance to the shovels, eager to accept the new life of the trees.

The markers that I made to be with each tree will decay in time, as the trees themselves grow larger and stronger, and in a year or two they won't be needed at all, and the trees will have their own identities, as our two sons are starting to do already.

a new bench

2011-10-03T08:50:00.000-04:00

The old bench, rotted at the bottom of the legs and dusty

when we moved into our house there was a room in the basement that had obviously been a workroom or shop for many years. It is where I set up my studio as well, and for the first several months I piled stuff on top of an old workbench that had been left in the corner. The basement is pretty wet, and the legs of this bench had been standing in water for decades, slowly rotting from the floor up. The top, with its marks of saws and hammers, rings from paint cans and globs of long-dried glue, was a Dead Sea scroll of home owning and fixing, upgrading and making that had been happening at this bench likely since before I was born.

Various sizes of lumber, with huge screws

I have no idea who made this thing or when it was put together, but I am tied to that maker by geography, as it was obviously built in this room. It is too big to fit out the door as it is, so I am pretty sure it was built in here and has been here since. It was cobbled together out of pine, all construction-grade, all different sizes, and all obviously scavenged from some other original purpose. There is a row of holes drilled across the back, storage for screwdrivers and chisels all now packed and moved to where ever the maker now lives, if he is still living. There are the long straight lines incised into the top that tell me about many and many a saw cut with a handsaw, much like the saws that I use myself. It was held together with huge #12 screws, most of which were rusted in place. These screws were sunk into end grain and used in ways that let me know that this was not a woodworker, this was someone with a knack for making stuff and a need for a bench. This was not a woodworkers bench, smooth and clean and level, with precise and strong vises, ready to hold a piece of material for delicate planing in preparation for a precise and tight-fitting joint. This was a rough-and-ready mostly flat surface, built quickly to simply give a place to stand and work on a variety of projects from building a Boy Scout pinewood derby racer to rewiring a faulty light fixture. Of course I fell in love.

Grandfather's bit brace

I could not use it as it was, and I had designated that corner of the shop as the place for the outfeed table for the chop saw, so the bench needed a new home. And possibly a new identity. I started to take it apart with the idea that I might make it into a new bench, someday. Taking it apart was a journey in itself, as I could watch the maker trying to fit his scavenged lumber together in a way that would stand up. Some of the pieces were too short and did not meet quite flush. Some of them had huge nails augmenting the screws as they inevitably loosened over the years. Removing these rusty screws is not something one can do casually. It can not be done well with a power drill, no matter how careful one is. The best tool remains a bit brace with a good, sharp screwdriver bit. I used my grandfather's, and slowly and painfully removed the screws one by one. The rust was mostly on the surface, and I can use those screws again, as you can see, and I saved them all against that. They were remarkably well preserved down inside the ancient two-by-fours.

This resulting pile of dusty and rotting pine has been sitting in my shop now for over a year, waiting to be something one day. Other projects became more important, and the wood, which had been waiting quietly for so long after all, was content to wait a little longer. Then I read this post by my friend and colleague Niels about a little saw bench he had made.

The thing about a Western style workbench like the one in his shop and mine is that they are built to hold material while you plane it, at about 36" off the ground. If you use a handsaw at this height, all the power comes from your arms, which are comparatively weak. For longer-term sawing, and for greater precision, it is better to have the material below you, and use gravity to help you push the saw blade down. Especially if you are rip sawing, or cutting along the grain a long board. Shorter sawing benches like the one in his post help the maker take advantage of gravity and reduce fatigue. In addition, you are pushing in to the bench and thus in to the floor, a very stable action, as opposed to laterally across a bench, in which operation your bench wants to tip or skid across the floor. So I decided that I could use a sawing bench. In addition, it would act as a workbench for my constant studio mate, who is only about 30" tall himself and can't reach my bench yet.

I preserved the old marks of use

I had thought that I might plane all of the boards down until they were clean and smooth, but I could not bear to do it. It would be like erasing the names from the front of a family Bible, a negating of the service that lumber had done for decades. So in the end I just surfaced it enough to give me the flat and smooth surface I need to do my work well, and left the scars and badges of honor, the old paint and the odd nail still embedded. Even so, the lumber fought me: It did not like being meddled with. A hidden screw dulled my handsaw with a shriek. The old lumber split several times as I was cutting joints and had to be glued back together before I could continue. In the end though, we came to an understanding, the old lumber and I. In the end we have a wary peace, and are willing to try working together this way for a little while.

I drilled some holes for a holdfast, and a handle, all while my son looked on. He learned the word "holdfast" and what it does, he helped me file the edges on the handle. Next time we are in the shop, he will hammer nails at this little saw bench, and the next time I am hand sawing I will have a sturdy piece of furniture to assist me. And maybe I will make a second one out of the remaining lumber so that I have a pair.

tools and newness

2011-09-01T08:05:00.001-04:00

i haven't corroborated this but I was told a while back that the most common surgery performed in the world is one that is typically performed (in the U S at least) by the least qualified person in the room. Imagine this: a room full of doctors, residents, nurses, nursing students, one patient and that patient's family member. Now imagine that a surgical procedure needs to be performed and the job is carefully prepared and then handed off the the sleep-deprived, terrified family member of the patient. Sounds a little silly, but that is what the cutting of the umbilical cord has been for the birth of both of my sons.

At first I objected to the whole process on a couple of grounds: first, as I say, that maybe medical professionals should perform medical procedures, not furniture makers. Second, that it seemed a little patriarchal and condescending to me that the birth partner who has not done very much of the biological and physiological heavy lifting should, as a final flourish, perform this very theatrical act. It felt old-fashioned and arrogant in a "I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it" sort of way.

All of that said, I did cut both cords in the end and I am glad I did, though it is hard for me to articulate why I am glad about it. As surgeries go, it is a pretty hard one to screw up, after all. And it did sort of make me feel involved a little more directly. But it was not the act of the cutting that I wanted to write about specifically here. It was William H Ditmars, who I never met.

William H Ditmars was a country doctor in rural Michigan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I don't know a lot about him which is more my failing as a student than anything else. The person who does know a fair amount about him is his grandson, who is the family historian. He is also my father. It was from my father that I learned to be so sentimental about objects and to revere the stories that we layer on to objects and to do my best to pass those along. My father is the current curator of the Museum of the Collection of Leonard Family Artifacts, a duty which he is in the process of disseminating to those of us in my generation in the family.

My father and I share (in addition to membership in the Museum, of course) a love of tools. Not just wood working tools, though we both love those as well, but any tools. I am fascinated by the human drive to affect the physical world and by the lengths we will go to as a species to give in to that drive. Humans as tool makers have made such incredibly complex artifacts in our quest to give shape to our world and understand it, and it never ceases to amaze me. I love any well-made tool, whether it is for cooking or carving or looking or listening or fixing people or objects or making stuff.

It also interests me to look at the ways the tools that we use often evolve, or don't. There are wood planes from ancient Rome that are nearly identical to the planes that I use, for example. When we find a design that works it can stick around for millennia. Then again, we are still so unsure how we feel about talking to someone that is not in the room with us that cell phones are not the same month to month. The process of tinkering is innate in us as creatures, the need for constant refinement of our tools.

When I cut the umbilical cord on my first son, I was handed a standard pair of surgical snips. Just sharp scissors with short blades, really. The umbilical cord is rubbery and slick, and as I cut it sort of slid away from the blades, making for an awkward action that took longer than it needed to and scared me because I felt like I was holding things up and doing something wrong.

A few months ago, my father gave me these and asked what I thought they were. Obviously they are surgical snips of some kind, of course, and they are obviously quite old, as they have certain visual qualities that place them æsthetically in the first part of the twentieth century. They fit nicely on my fingers, and the curved blades still slide very satisfyingly past each other. Not being a medical historian I had no idea what they were for specifically, of course. My father said that they were umbilical cord snip and that they had belonged to his grandfather. You see where this going.

These purpose-made little snips, with curved blades that capture the cord so it does not slide away as you cut, were designed for one thing and one thing only. And I was going to be called upon to perform that act in the near future. How could I not ask the doctor if it was ok? His response was that there would be clamps on either side of the cut, and then another clamp at the baby's belly, so there was no risk of infection, so why not? We have a very patient doctor who is pretty amused by us as a pair, I think, and this was just another weird question from us. He is getting used to it.

Yesterday at about 10.20 in the morning, I used my great-grandfather's umbilical cord snips to cut my second son's cord. I had carefully boiled them for a long time and kept them in a sealed ziplock bag in my pocket for three days, as you don't get an opportunity like this often and I did not want the moment to come and have them lying on the counter at home. The moment came, I cut the cord, and they worked beautifully, performing the same action that they had been created to perform a hundred years ago. It is so satisfying to use a well-designed tool.

success story

2011-08-04T10:32:00.000-04:00

this is Alison. She was a senior last year in the program in which I teach. Like many of my students, she did not have a lot of experience fabricating, and like many interior designers (young and old) she had designed a lot of furniture on paper without a heck of a lot of understanding of what the lines she was drawing would translate into in real life.

As our world gets increasingly more fragmented (not just a doctor but a pediatric surgeon, not just a historian but a medieval European historian, not just a designer but an interior designer for office environments), the sheer amount of information we become responsible for often requires us to don blinders, to lose sight of larger contextual realities. As designers, especially, it is our job to not just remove the blinders, but to replace them with special lenses that allow us a 360 degree view of the world. Our job is to make connections, to examine relationships critically, to build bridges. The way that I try to do this in my teaching life is by enabling design students to also fabricate the things and spaces they have designed, to add a dimension to their design work; that is, to add designing with their hands to the designing they are already doing in their heads.

Every student I have worked with here has really taken to the process. Making is such an inherently hopeful and empowering act that it is hard to avoid getting caught up in the sheer joy and excitement of helping raw materials become an object through the use of your own hands and eyes and mind. This was the case with Alison.

Outside the faculty offices on the 6th floor of the Warehouse (the building in which the Design Department is housed) we needed a furniture object to give us a place to put pamphlets, to display new materials, and to collect student work and projects. This is exactly the kind of real-world opportunity that we look for, of course. Client-driven, a clear set of requirements (what we call a "program"), and a scale that is achievable in a semester. I asked around in our senior class and Alison leapt at the chance.

Over the course of the semester Alison submitted different designs and we talked about materials. Our department has a great interest in sustainable practices so she wanted to find a material that would fit within that thinking but of course "sustainable material" is a little hard to define. Where it comes from is a factor, as is the way the material is harvested and the way it is processed, shipped, and sold. Wading through all of this requires research and diligence, and eventually Alison found a local company that specialises in LEED certified materials. They had three sheets of a product called Plyboo, which is made out of bamboo (a rapidly renewable resource) that had been water stained and had been refused by a client. The company would not take the sheets back either, and they were sitting gathering dust in their storage. This kind of "front end salvage" plays a large role in my studio work, of course, and we were excited to be able to rescue it from limbo.

The linear quality of the material itself drove the lines of the design, and we ended up with a clean, simple form that really showcases the material well. Another former student (who is from Vermont where they have a lot of cows) serendipitously emailed me about a company called Vermont Natural Coatings that is making no-VOC furniture finish out of whey, a byproduct of the cheese-making process. They were very nice over there and sent us some sample finish, and I can report that it is very easy to apply and that it looks really nice.


The cabinet was screwed together with stainless steel screws

End result: A real-world student designed and fabricated object made with rapidly renewable material and finished with an experimental, renewable, no-VOC finish. That's a good day.

maker's guilt

2011-05-31T09:00:00.000-04:00

over the last few months I have started in on a side project making musical instruments, the beginnings of which I wrote about here. I have started a side blog about this project, which I am calling "Salt City Found-Object Instrument Works" and which can be accessed at that link. Syracuse got its start because of the salt flats here and so is informally known as Salt City, which I really like. It is gritty, just like the town is, and utilitarian, just like the town is. The new blog is really just a place for me to chronicle the instruments that I make, it is not too terribly deep an exploration into what they are conceptually, but that is okay, that is the kind of thing I reserve for this blog.

As I have been making more and more of these found object instruments out of tins and cans and sticks, I have been trying to approach the whole process by applying an absolute minimum of "woodworkeriness." Whenever I pick up a hand plane I stop and try to come up with a different way to accomplish what I am doing. Before I go to the table saw I ask if that is really necessary. The idea is that I want to make these instruments as accessible as possible, right down to the manufacturing of them. If I can really make a twenty dollar guitar using only the most rudimentary hand tools, then anyone can. Which means (I hope) that the ability to make music could be at anyone's fingertips. I have been working lately on a commission for a banjo, which I will write about over at the Instrument Works at some point, I think, that has turned into quite a wood working project, and I feel myself slipping away from the original roots of this endeavor. The next one will be more direct, I hope, and a little more basic.

The part of these that I have not tried to make yet is the tuning pegs. There are friction-fit pegs in fiddles and dulcimers, of course, but I have not yet broached that, instead going to the local music store to buy tuners that actually I can get on line. I have a couple of problems with this: one, that I should probably just order these, since it would be cheaper and more convenient, and two, that I am just buying pre-packaged tuners and that feels like cheating.

I have been noticing this phenomenon occurring more and more in my life lately: what I have started to call maker's guilt. Whenever the subject of buying something comes up, I have started to instinctively recoil and think "but I could make that!" It has started to seem counterintuitive to me to buy something that I could make myself. This is a relatively new phenomenon in my life and it has not started suddenly. Rather, it has been a slow washing in of a tide over several years as I learn the processes behind bringing objects in to being. Not too many years ago I thought nothing at all of buying Ikea furniture, as I like the æsthetic and it was cheap. Now the thought of doing that really gets under my skin, even though there is no way I could ever make it as cheaply or get it into our lives as quickly. Knowing that I know how to do it and that it is only a lack of will or desire that stands in the way of me making everything in our house sits poorly with me.

Obviously this is unrealistic. Obviously I can not make everything in our lives. It would take the fervor of an extremist to try to do so, and even then, I would not make very good shoes, probably, or particularly flattering clothes. Or a car that works. Or a stove or a computer or a bike. Or even guitar tuning pegs, really. There are things that it has to be okay to have other people do, there are objects that it has to be okay for other people to make for me or do for me. I have no trouble, for example, hiring electricians to do electrical work on the house, or plumbers either. And doing so keeps money in the local economy and allows those people to help provide support for their families. So it is not reprehensible, it might even be socially and economically necessary.

That knowledge does not change how I feel, though. I have felt maker's guilt rising more and more strongly in me in the last few months, and I have had to be pretty thoughtful about quelling it. It takes a real effort to let go, to not cringe when I buy something that I could make if I tried, even if I could not do it very well.

None of this is intended to be an apology for being a consumer. I think it is more that I am trying to figure out where I sit relative to the things that I consume and more importantly how to talk to my sons about that. They are coming in to a world on a precipice, and their generation will have to be so much more thoughtful about what and how they consume and about their responsibilities as denizens of an extremely rich country. I hope that I can help them find a meaningful and less damaging way to negotiate their world by thinking about how I negotiate mine.

birth. day.

2011-05-22T22:09:00.000-04:00

birthdays have always seemed more or less nominal to me. They are a marker in time that often does not have a lot to do with accomplishment of deed or of a meaningful place-marker in one's life. Twenty-one, for example, is supposed to be a big deal, but I turned twenty-one three days after starting a new job in a town where I knew no-one and spent the day completely uncelebrated. That rankled me a lot at the time. Now, eighteen years later to the day, it matters not at all.

That said, it is a useful way to take stock and to acknowledge that many ways I am fortunate. I use that word - "fortunate" - advisedly (or as advisedly as possible). I am not a fan of "lucky." Luck is arbitrary, the face value of cards dealt you after a shuffle, and I have to say that I feel that life is structured in a more meaningful way. Fortune, on the other hand, has more of a crafted implication, one makes one's own fortune, sometimes. My facebook page today is a massive list of well-wishers, and each one makes me smile and reminds me of stories and of a particular time or times in my life, like counting back the rings of a tree and seeing years of plenty and years of drought, moments of joy or sadness or love. Lots of love. I believe it was true when that person said that we come into the world with nothing and we leave it the same and what makes our lives matter is the people we impact along the way.

Given that rubric, I am massively rich. Today I have heard from people I knew twenty years ago and people I have met in the last month. FaceBook is good like that. I have had the good fortune to pass through the lives of a lot of people, and I am thankful for you all. I am thankful for your patience, your perseverance, your heavy-handedness when it was called for, your light touch when that was needed. I am thankful for students that heard what I said and for teachers that said what I needed to hear. I am thankful for musicians that played new chords and for singers that sang the words I knew. I am thankful for family and friends and for the fact that I am able to say today that I am making a difference in the way that I live my life, even if that difference is small.

I spent today exhausted and joyful and still learning, and I ate well and drank a lot and had a surprise cake and finished the day with family and a kiss from my son and a kiss from my wife. That is a good day.

I used to yearn for age and experience. I spent a lot of time wishing that I was older and knew more and had the cache that experience and wisdom bring. I know a lot of people that spend a lot of time and money trying to look or seem younger, thinner, sexier. Tonight, I am ecstatic to be just exactly where I am, who I am, as old as I am. If this is the beginning of 38, it is going to be a hell of a year.

in defense of a theater education (did I really just write that?)

2011-05-20T08:47:00.002-04:00

i remember very little about the beginning of high school. I am sure I was scared and I am sure that I tried to find my way in this new world. What I do remember is that early on I got involved with the theater crowd. In a high school that mostly served poor rural white kids and bussed in poor urban black kids, it is not much of a stretch to understand that drama was not a particularly high priority. The drama classes and drama club then were run by a singular person named Maggie Griffen. Maybe another time I will write about her, today I have been thinking about all that ensued.

Suffice it to say that she welcomed me and (along with the other drama club folks) nurtured me and brought me along. Eventually I started volunteering at the local community theater (beginning a relationship that lasted until I finally got out of the entertainment biz entirely almost twenty years later), where I was taken under the wing of the technical staff and trained in what would later become my vocation. This training was not, at first, a classroom training, but rather an apprenticeship of sorts. We worked in the shop two nights a week, and when we got closer to show time we worked more and more until we were basically there whenever we were not at work or at school. Then the show would come down and we would start the process all over again.

It was a magic time.

My jobs within that community started out as menial jobs, and as I learned more by watching and by doing and by being shepherded by very patient people I was given increasingly complicated tasks. These culminated in being in charge of whole groups of people and large projects by the time I was a senior. A senior in high school. I had apprenticed and learned on the job management skills, carpentry, electrician work, plumbing, upholstery, painting, rigging, all manner of jobs. I had learned these skills by doing, by using my hands alongside the hands of people who had been doing this since before I was born, by watching as much as by being told.

I went on to college, first at a state university and then at the recently re-named University of North Carolina School of the Arts (many of my peers are as unimpressed by the name change as I am, but there it is. Times change). At these schools I honed my skills, learning the "why" behind the "what." I grew up a little, I learned a little more respect (not enough, but it is a slow process for a 20 year old boy). Then on to New York to work in the field; cocky like a lot of young people, narrow minded like a lot of young people, self-absorbed like a lot of young people. Though it would be some years before I started to hone in on what was missing (a socially active component, and ecologically sound component), a lot of how I move through the world was already in place: a desire to work and work a lot, a need to use my hands, a passion for working with a group of people, the inability to sit in an office alone.

This all came to a head yesterday morning when I came in to the shop. A colleague had asked me to make something for him. A small project, very easy for me, just not as possible for him as he has a different skill set and does not have the equipment that we do. So first thing in the morning I started in on this little job. It was only after I was done an hour later that I realised that I had just reaped the benefits of my theater education: I had worked quickly but precisely, thinking on the fly and planning as I went - not in a haphazard way, in a very considered way but also very rapidly - I had moved material through the shop and executed the project at as high a level of craft as I could (which is certainly good enough for this project) and had, in an hour, finished and could move on to the next project.

This was only possible because of my theater training, and it was very satisfying. It made me grateful for my early apprenticeship and for my later formal education, for my journeyman phase in the City, for all of the teachers and mentors along the way. So I started to make a list of what I learned in the late eighties and early nineties in the course of all of this, the beginning of which is below. This is an incomplete list, but pretty impressive:

Manual Skills: carpentry, welding/brazing/soldering, upholstery, plumbing, electrics, tile work, furniture construction, painting, faux finishes, stitching, patterning, embroidery, rigging, leather work

Managerial skills: group dynamics, time management, interpersonal communication, budgeting (okay, I don't use this a lot, but I know how to do it if forced as I have been over the years occasionally), adherence to a deadline.

Life Skills: basic physics, basic geometry, problem solving, teaching, work ethic, finding joy and pride in my craft, respect for others, respect for and a love of history

There is more to the list, but that is a good start. This post has turned self-congratulatory, which is a little grating to read, I know. But this is meant to be less about me personally and more about the education itself. There is a lot wrong with the entertainment industry, as there is with just about every industry, but the education has a lot about it that is right, too. I have a zero desire to return to that field, but if either of my sons said to me that they wanted to pursue a theatrical education I would encourage that completely. And as they grow and develop, I think it will be important to me that making and using their hands constantly will continue to be central to their learning.

There is a bit of misdirection involved in this kind of education. The focus is often on completing the task at hand, the skills that are being learned may not be acknowledged or even obvious. But the deeper learning that comes from, for example, using a saw to cut twenty platform legs all to the same length does not leave one, even decades later. I am very fortunate for the education I have received. I am fortunate that I had the legions of caring and dedicated and patient teachers. And I am profoundly thankful for all of it.

making and community

2011-05-03T09:20:00.001-04:00

the State University of New York (SUNY) school of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) has been working on a biomass project with willow trees for about twenty years now. Shrub willow, it turns out, is a pretty amazing plant. Rapidly renewable, a good source of heat, a great candidate for phytoremediation, there is a lot to recommend it. It also grows long and straight, and is very supple, which makes it a great candidate for weaving into furniture and other things, which is what I spent yesterday morning doing.

We have an event on campus called S U Showcase, which showcases student work from all over the college that has happened this year. Last year, there was also an official opening of a rain garden that had just been completed on campus, that had been designed by ESF students. It happened to co-incide with the time of year that the Willow Project folks are cutting down, or "coppicing" all of the willow plants, so that they will grow back the following year. So we got some of the willow up here and I worked with faculty and staff and students to make a hollow form to celebrate the garden. We all had fun (though it was cold and rainy), and the end result was pretty good.

Alexandra Fiust and I getting the basic structure in place.

This year, Dr. Rachel May, who ran the Showcase, asked me to do another structure, this time on the quad. Of course I leaped at the chance to play with twigs again. I went down and got three thousand or so stalks of purpurea, a species that grows long and straight and makes great furniture as well as sculptural objects, and then found a willing student to come down and help me start weaving them together.

One of the things that happens when you are doing something weird in public (like on the quad of a university) is that passersby fall in to one of three general categories: 1) too cool to even acknowledge that anything is going on; 2) interested but unwilling to engage, afraid that they will be tainted somehow by the weirdness; or 3) interested and engaged and willing to jump in and be weird as well. It is interesting to me how many people fall in to category 2. We had a bunch of people who stopped and watched, but when I asked them to weave a twig in they backed away as if I were handing them a basketful of slugs. These folks are the well-trained products of a system and culture that teaches us that we can not be makers, that we have somehow been divested of permission to be a part of a creative experience unless we are specifically trained to do so.

But then there were fair number of people who fell in to category 3, who grabbed a twig and added it to the form. One only needs hands to make this kind of thing, so no knowledge of special tools or techniques is required. I tell folks that the only rule is that they weave the twig in , and if it stays, they have done it right. They usually laugh and say something about how they will probably ruin the structure, to which I usually crack wise and try to get them to laugh, so that they are more at ease. Some people actually get into the process and start to weave more and more twigs in, which is when I really feel like things are progressing well. I got to meet a lot of people on the quad yesterday morning, people I would never have met otherwise. I met a Spanish teacher, an art historian, a grad student who is the assistant coach for the cross-country track and field team, the administrative assistant of the math department. Once they understood that there were no rules, that the twigs just get woven in and that is that, they were a lot more likely to join in. Which was the point, after all.

This kind of project is always about community to me. The individual twigs are very supple and have very little inherent structural integrity. But as they get woven together, they start to support each other, just like people in a successful community. Like people in a successful community, the twigs come together to create something that is very stable, and that is stronger by far than any of the individual twigs. Like people, they all have to bend a little, but not break. They all have to interact with the other twigs to hold them up and be held up by them. And the material really dictates the finished form. Though I start out with a basic idea about what I want it to be, each stick adds its own voice, its own pressure, altering the whole a little bit. The finished form is actually quite strong, and may be close to the original idea, but is shaped by the multitude of voices of the twigs that make it up. Beautiful, really.

The finished structure.

information storage

2011-04-28T00:45:00.006-04:00

there is a cardboard box in my attic that I have moved five times in the last fifteen or so years. It is stuffed full of letters that long ago girlfriends wrote to me, answering letters that I wrote to them. The last time we moved I looked at them again and made the mistake of actually reading a couple of them. They were about what one would expect, I probably don’t have to expound upon them here. You probably have a similar box or two yourself. It is touching to look at these folded pieces of notebook paper, to vaguely remember a time in my life when I knew all of the answers and was so sure that I was right about everything I had an opinion about.

The names conjure images of faces and times, and even in this too-connected age I have not been able to find some of these folk again. Not that I know what I would talk about with them after twenty years. I hope that I am profoundly different from the person that they wrote to, I hope that I am more patient and more thoughtful and more aware of others and of the world around me.

I wanted to throw that box out when we moved, it seemed to have so little to do with my life now. I am not likely to get the letters out and read them again, and I doubt there is anything in them that would be of interest even to twenty-year-olds that wrote them, let alone to anyone else. But I could not throw them away. I held the box in my hands and I tried to let it and its contents drift out of my life, but then I thought “what’s one more box?” and packed the letters back up and brought them with us.

This whole series of thought came about because the New York Times ran an article about Friendster.

I was not cool enough to understand why Friendster would be attractive to people. When I first heard came across it I was skeptical in the extreme and mostly ignored it (ironic, as I am now an avid Facebook user). I had some acquaintances that were on Friendster, though, and when MySpace started up I joined that, which was the beginning of my life on social networks. I am not interested in making a value judgment about any of these methods of interaction, the article was about something more profound.

Friendster is apparently going to wipe its servers clean of a great deal of information soon. In the computer world it is ancient, almost ten years old. It has fallen out of favor and is trying to re-invent itself; as a part of that is dumping a great deal of old information, some of which has not been accessed for years.

But the article quoted a person who met and courted their spouse on Friendster, and who was saying that all of their early correspondence was through Friendster and was slated to be erased. I would imagine that person was one of hundreds if not thousands who met and courted that way, and who have been trusting the servers at Friendster (or MySpace or Facebook) to be their cardboard box in the attic. Even though we don’t access those letters often or ever it is important that they are there, that there is a record of our loves and losses, our triumphs and defeats.

The difference is that I am in charge of that box in my house. If I decide I do not need those letters in my life anymore, I can get rid of them consciously. I own those particular pieces of paper, I decide their fate.

The analog to this in my own life is the growth of my son over the last twenty months, all of which has been chronicled on Facebook, and all of which lives in some server somewhere in the world. The source videos and photos live on a machine at our house, but the way that they are strung together, the comments that we and our friends have made about them, the conversations that they have inspired do not belong to us in the same way. Should Facebook end, so too will we lose that particular way of remembering. And as impossible as it seems to us in the moment, Facebook is likely to end a lot sooner than a photograph is likely to disappear.

I am not sure what it is that I think should be done about this, if anything. I was just struck by the poignancy of the story of the person in the article. This record-keeping, this storing of the past in objects or papers has taken on a new identity. The memories are no less important, but somehow we have come to a place that we are trusting other people to manage their storage for us. In surrendering the responsibility for storage and management, we have also surrendered some of our ability to have a say about the fate of one of the most precious things we have: our memories.

craft part iii

2011-04-20T08:21:00.000-04:00

a letterpress designer, an itinerant copy writer, and a furniture maker are sitting around a fire...

This sounds like the beginning of an irrepressibly nerdy joke, but as it happens this was Friday morning last week. One of the things that I am profoundly thankful for in my life is that my path seems to cross others' in unpredictable and delightful ways. So Friday morning last week I ended up sitting and talking to two people that it is unlikely I would ever have crossed paths with about something that turned out to be a common thread and a common passion: Craft.

Casey McGarr, who has a truly dizzying array of old wood type (and you know how I feel about wood) told us that many people turn to him for letterpressed invitations or cards with the expressed explicit desire that the type be smashed into the paper "so people know that it is letterpressed." I can understand this thought process, I suppose. So many of these once-necessary-now-nearly-defunct crafts face the same kind of requests, this idea that the process should be evident in the product so that the user or viewer will know how the object was produced. I do this in my own work as well; leave plane marks evident, or celebrate jointery or hardware to make a point and to use my work as educational tools for the user.

The thing about that kind of approach is that it is actually antithetical to the traditional intention of artisans who use this technology. A good letterpress operator will know how to adjust the press so that the type just kisses the paper enough to transfer the ink but not enough to deform the paper. This is exactly the same as blacksmithing, for example. George Martell, the smith who gave me what few smithing skills I have, told me that a good smith never leaves a hammer mark, that a piece that is well made is smooth and straight and shows no marks at all of the process of making. Or of songwriting: if the lyrics are too clever (say Gilbert and Sullivan, for example) we become aware of the cleverness of the writing but can lose sight of the intended message.

Which begs a familiar question: What is the point of all of this, process or product? It could be both, I suppose, but this is another one of those root questions that I come around to now and then that does not seem to go away. How can I as a maker celebrate the process and materials in a way that feels honest and clear while at the same time creating an object of beauty and use? When am I smashing the paper, and when am I making a legitimate statement about my stance as a maker and about my respect for tradition?

When I wrote about Pye and his bowls not too long ago, I was trying to unravel a different part of the same question, which at the end of the day might be about means and ends as much as it is about process and product. Whichever way we come at this question, though, it comes down to intent, and to methods of work, and to choice-making. And it does not seem to go away, which I think is a good thing.

What a lovely way to start a Friday morning last week. And how lucky I was to be able to spend time with folks who are interested in asking the same questions that I am asking. And how very informative to have the questions phrased in unfamiliar language. The Texas trip was great in so many ways.

travelling

2011-04-19T08:26:00.002-04:00

this past weekend I traveled to Texas Hill Country. I spent four days under a cloudless sky out in the wilderness surrounded by (mostly) graphic designers. New territory for me in many ways; geographically, professionally, contextually. It was great fun, and the trappings were outstanding, of course. There was an obscene amount of Texas-style barbecue and other delectables, the country was beautiful in a rocky way, the accommodations were lovely, complete with a hat rack in the room (thank God for Texas and cowboy hats). But it was the contextual territory that was the most interesting for me.

I had been asked to lead a workshop about wood, giving it three times for two hours each. This is tricky, if the desire is to have everyone leave with something. I can spend two hours just turning a couple of planks over and over and switching them end for end to find the right combination of grain pattern and patina, of live edge and machined edge. In the end we decided to make lamps out of locally found dead-fall trees, which ended up being pretty successful.

When I have been involved with this kind of workshop in the past, many if not most of the participants have had some experience with making things out of wood and working with their hands in a particular way. That was not the case here. These people were (in many cases) very experienced designers with many years of professional accomplishment behind them, and some are even very used to making books or screen printing (a process that remains opaque to me to this day. Some day I shall have to remedy that), but that have little experience with wood or with wiring. Not that they should, of course, that is why they were in the workshop.

But by and large these are people who design digitally, and design for print. Their application of their craft and their design skills has a radically different user interface and a profoundly different expectation in terms of life-span, usually. As we all worked, and as they grew comfortable exchanging a mouse for a screwdriver, an amazing and heartwarming shift began to occur. As each person plugged in their nascent lamp to test it, their faces registered delight of a level that really moved me. Many of them went from "I am not sure I can do this at all" to "I want to make everything into a lamp!" And the really amazing thing is that by the end, many were helping their fellow students, showing them how to use the crimper or to wire in an in-line switch, people who two hours before did not know what an in-line switch was.

Some of the student work. Photo by Andy Birdwell

This starting to sound self-serving, which is not my intention. This shift that happened, this empowerment (pun intended) of all of these people, is less about any ability that I have and more about something much more important and profound: A willingness to learn. I have taught this information to hundreds of NYU students, only to look up and see them drooling on their t-shirts. It isn't about the information, it is about being receptive. The 60 or so people that I spent time with this weekend came to the class with something that can not be bought or sold, and that can not be injected from an external source. They wanted to learn. They were invested in their education for those two hours. They sat down from a place of "I'll try that" instead of "I can't do that." It was really inspiring. This experiment would have been a dramatic failure without that attitude on their part coming in.

It served as a real object lesson for me with regard to changing contexts. There is such a tendency on my part (and on many people around me) to approach the world saying "I know my place here and I know what I do well, and that is what I am going to do." This is often a reasonable approach, and certainly is a comfortable one, like putting on a straight-jacket that you know and love. Comfortable, but ultimately stultifying as far as growth. Change is hard, of course, and new experiences can be painful or scary. But I am inspired to adopt the attitude of the people I was so recently surrounded with to try to maintain that openness, that desire to learn new things, and the willingness to take on things that are likely to fail, simply because when they don't fail the triumph is that much greater.

tools

2011-04-06T08:34:00.000-04:00

most people that make furniture know who David Pye was. He was a Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art from 1948 to 1973, and in 1968 he published "The Nature and Art of Workmanship," which is still one of the key treatises addressing what we call "workmanship," or craft. I was turned on to the book by Craig Vandall Stevens, who told me that it was the single most important book in his life and that it was very important that I read it. With that kind of endorsement, how could I not check it out?

Photo: Phillip Sayer/Crafts Council

The discussion in the book is primarily about the place of machines in the making process, and their appropriateness given the desired outcome. Pye coined the terms (and I feel a need to acknowledge the implicit sexism contained in the word "workmanship." I will be using that word in this essay only because it is the word that Pye used) "workmanship of risk" (a methodology of making that requires a high level of understanding and craft on the part of the maker, and that can be at any time destroyed by the work due to inattention or callowness) and the "workmanship of certainty" (a methodology that is automated to the point that inattention by the worker has a minimal effect on the outcome of the process). It is important to note that this does not necessarily have anything to do with the machinery used, that depending on the context the machinery associated with workmanship of risk can also be used in a piece at the other end of the spectrum. Pye also points out that there are different levels of workmanship that are appropriate and that this appropriateness is also contextual. It would not make sense to apply the type of precision required to make engine parts to the practice of splitting fence rails, for example. Both endeavors require precision (just ask Abe Lincoln about fence rails), but the type of precision that is appropriate for one is not appropriate for the other.

Photo: David Pye/ Crafts Council

This is all an extremely ham-handed explanation and distillation of this book. I suggest you read it for yourself, it is life-changing. It was for me, anyway. What I wanted to write about here, though, was not necessarily that discussion (although one could argue that a great deal of this blog is focused on that discussion), but Pye's woodworking (above, pictured in his shop).

And this is the kind of work that he produced and was known for. He carved these bowls using a nineteenth century tool (I can't seem to find a photo of one on the internet, surprisingly) that made these beautiful gouges that radiate from the center and can be modulated in really breathtaking ways. There are a couple of his bowls in the foreground of the photo above as well. Not all of them are that big, of course, and he experimented widely with the shapes as well, but it is that interior texture that knocks me out. Ever since I first read the book that texture has stuck in my head. Recently I decided to do something about it.

I have had a couple of pieces of long-leaf pine kicking around the shop for a couple of years that are off-cuts from the end of some floor joists from a building on the campus of Trinity College. They are about a foot square, and extremely hard, and they seemed like good candidates for bowldom. The tool that Pye used to make his bowls left that signature tool mark, those radiating lines that start in the center and get wider as they get closer to the edge. I wanted to replicate that mark, and it was important to me that it be the tool that made the mark, that somehow inherent in the making of the object that mark was created. It also seemed to me that this would be a good excuse for me to familiarise myself with our CNC technology and to learn to use a new tool, the drafting program Rhino. Below are some process shots.

This is the raw material You can see the triangle-shaped area where the surface of the wood did not oxidise because it was set into the wall of the building.

This is the file in Rhino, which is the drafting program we use here.

I started by surfacing the material and getting all the sides square to each other and the bottom of the piece

This is the material on the CNC router table.

The machine started by surfacing the top of the blank.

The machine starts the way a carver would, by removing the bulk of the material quickly and roughly.

Lastly it takes a series of finishing passes. I was able to experiment with different settings to find a tool mark that was pleasing. You can see the scallops that reference the bowls that Pye made.

Those of you that work with wood will know about the heightened feelings surrounding CNC technology. CNC stands for Computer Numeric Control, which is to say that a computer tells the cutting head where and in what direction and how deep to make a cut in the material. A lot of people that work with wood say that this type of technology is the death of craft (well, of Craft), that it means that anyone can make fancy wood objects, that it devalues the work of people who do not use this technology and that it should be eschewed at all cost. Other people are saying that it is a tool like any other and that it merely needs to be treated like a table saw, a tool that can help achieve a desired goal, and that the object itself is not inherently bad.

I tend to fall somewhere in between these two points of view. Philosophically, this technology is no different from a table saw. It is motorised and can be used to create a very high degree of precision. It requires thoughtful attention to make it do what the user wants it to do, and in the hands of a less skilled worker it can be worse than useless. It makes repeating an operation easy and easy to do in a way that the finished product is identical every time. It (like a table saw) is a tool that gives form nicely to "workmanship of certainty." So why does it feel so different to me?

In no small part it probably feels different because it has become popular and readily available in my lifetime. The table saw was invented in the 1850's by a Shaker woman, it has been around as long as anyone I know can remember. When I started making things professionally, the table saw was already an integral part of the wood shop. I have never seen a professional shop without one. On the other hand, I had not even seen a CNC mill until I was in my mid twenties, and had been making things for a while. So there is that.

I am happy with the finished bowl. I feel like it is a craft object. I spent as much or more time setting up the file and then the machine as I ever did to mill and cut the wood for the table that the rest of this particular long-leaf pine became. I did a lot of thinking about proportion and line and form, as much as I would do if I were carving this bowl by hand. And the bowl sits on our dining table (the top of which I planed by hand in a very laborious way) and every night I enjoy its presence as we eat.

But for me something is lost in this particular amount of remove between the maker and the material. I am used to my interaction with my material being modulated by a saw handle or the butt of a chisel. I am even used to that interaction being filtered through a power tool, a router or a jigsaw (in fact, that was was a great deal of my interaction with material for the entirety of my life in theater). Having that interaction modulated by a computer screen, on the other hand, feels too distant for me. I do not think that having that amount of remove makes for a finished object of less craft or even that the finished object has less emotional resonance. For me, in my making process, it is important for me to have a specific relationship with my material, one that is not modulated through a computer.

Detail of the tool marks radiating from the center

This may change over time. It probably will. But as I think about my growth and about my making that is where I sit for the moment.

resources

2011-03-30T08:27:00.001-04:00

I have some traveling to do next month, and am going to be where I would like to have a guitar. But traveling with a guitar is cumbersome on a plane, and I did not want the hassle, so I thought maybe it was time to make a cigar-box guitar, one that I could travel with, that would fit in my suitcase and that would be strong enough to stand up to being thrown around buy the baggage handlers. And then it became a little bit of a game for me to gather the pieces as locally as possible. Here they are:

There is a cigar store around the corner from where I work that sells the boxes for a dollar and donates the proceeds to charity, so that seemed good. For the tail piece (that holds the strings and the end of the neck by the box) and for the nut (the piece at the other end that holds the strings up off the fretboard up by the tuners) I went five blocks away to the Habitat Restore and got a used hinge and an old bolt. The wood for the neck is this beautiful long-leaf pine that was salvaged from a building two blocks from here from support beams that have been standing in pace for a hundred years. I wrote about that here. The thing that came from farthest away was the tuners and the bridge, the piece of wood that holds the strings up off of the box. They came from Beat Street Music in Manlius, twelve miles away. Beat Street is a great local guitar shop, with some really beautiful old and new instruments, and they do repairs as well, so the owner had some old tuners that had come off of some other guitars and an old bridge from a banjo. The tuners don't match and the bridge is a little worn, but they all work well. Here is the finished guitar:

And here is a detail shot of the tuners and the nut (which is a bolt. Which makes me smile):

And here is what it sounds like, the twelve-mile, two-hour, twenty dollar guitar:

Obviously I have some practicing to do, I don't really play slide guitar. But I can learn, and now I have something that I made myself to learn on. I have been listening to a lot of Mississippi Fred McDowell, so we'll see what rubs off.

The other outcome of this exercise, of course, is that it has been a thought experiment about resources and where they come come from and how they are used. Everything in this instrument could have been seen as trash. No one was going to buy those tuners from Beat Street. The cigar box could easily have been seen as waste. The lumber was slated for the landfill and the hardware ended up at the Restore because it was not wanted. But put them all in the same place in a particular way, and they become something very useful, and maybe even desirable. The easy thing to do when looking for a travel guitar would have been to drop a couple of hundred dollars on some mail-order thing that was made in China. But there are alternatives, and they can be pretty cool alternatives, with the bonus that there is an added layer of meaning on the object, an emotional layer that is created by taking the time to source locally and to make the object myself.

knowledge

2011-03-29T08:27:00.000-04:00

i was sifting through my email this morning and came across a letter that I had written to a couple of my students at about this time last year (dated Feb 10 2010, or 02 10 2010, which is pretty pleasing). There are some references to things that were happening at that moment, which make it sound dated, but the gist of it is about right. Nothing that I have not written about before, really, but I wanted to put it here for storage, so here it is:

Our brief conversation this morning in the café has stuck in my mind, and since talking about things is how I get them out of my mind and into the world I thought I would give this to y’all and see what you have to say. You asked me how I know all of the seemingly unconnected little factoids that I know, and though it was probably asked rhetorically, I have been thinking about my answer, and it is a simple one: Knowledge is power.

Not “power” like in a He-Man “By the power of Grayskull I have the power” kind of way where your clothes disappear and you become a hilariously over-muscled super hero in a fur loincloth (fur? Really? Always seemed like a strange choice to me), more like the power to make one’s own choices and to make a positive difference in the world. Think about it.

The group that wields the sacred knowledge is always the group that runs things. In early civilisations this was the shaman or priest or whatever group member stood in in that capacity, the person that held the secrets to the power of the god or gods of the day. These were the decision makers, the rich and powerful, the people who made the rules and (for the most part) had all the money and the good stuff to eat.

Then there are the people who hold the military knowledge, about how best to kill the most people. These are often people who are in control in a culture. It is no accident that the U.S. President is the “Commander in Chief” of the armed forces. He (Hasn’t been a She yet, but I have faith. One day, one day.) is in control in part because he has the knowledge necessary to control the most powerful army in the world. General Mao. Saddam Hussein.

Then there are the more insidious kinds of knowledge that put the holder into powerful positions: How to steal legally (as the major banks did, causing the Recession we are currently enjoying), how to lie legally (as, for example, the corn syrup commercials who say that it is all-natural and good for you), how to disenfranchise legally (as in the misogynistic Superbowl commercials that got me all pissed off that I was railing about in Materials class until I realised you were all just looking at me in that way you do when you are just waiting for me to shut up and get on with it). These are bodies of knowledge that are pretty opaque to the average person, but knowing how to wield them lands one in a pretty sweet position.

So in a culture that has spent so much time and energy trying to breed people not to question, not to think for themselves, not to seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the most empowering thing I can think of to do is gather as much knowledge as possible, and to disseminate it to as many people as possible. And then to encourage them to do the same. U. Utah Phillips says “the histories we are given in schools is not the history of MY people. It is the history of the rich, the powerful, the greedy. The only way we can get a TRUE history of our people is to listen to our elders, and to pass on their stories.”

So how is the history of the Hudnoshonee people relevant to Interior Design? Because it is all connected. It has to be. Every choice that we make is made in reaction to what we know. Either what we know through experience, or through reading that we have done, or through stories that we have been told. The more things we know, the farther reaching our design work (and our lives in general) have the capacity to be. And the greater chance we have to make a positive difference in the world, to “play our part,” as Shakespeare says, and then exit the stage.

I have always delighted in knowing things. Any things. It is all relevant. And the best tools you have as a designer are your eyes, to see instead of just looking; your ears, to listen instead of just hearing; and your brain to synthesize it all. You short yourself as a designer and as a person and your society in general, if you do not use all three, all the time, in a thoughtful way.

Wow, this got longer than I intended. And I am not even through. We will have to continue this another time. Have a good weekend. For a gold star, bring me an extremely obscure fact on Tuesday and relate it to your project.

Zeke

postscript: Every time someone calls me “Geek” (which as I told Kennedy this afternoon has long since stopped bothering me as it has been happening since before you were born), I think of someone like this:

Geek

Look up “geek” and you’ll see what I mean.

z

ornament / structure

2011-03-25T22:33:00.001-04:00

there is a project on the bench these days that I am not ready to write about yet, but that has gotten me thinking about ornament. I waffle a lot when it comes to ornament, specifically about two issues, I think: What is “ornament,” and what is “function?”

The second question maybe needs to be addressed first as I think of my work as being “function-based” design. That is to say, that I eschew adding elements that are not in some way dictated by the structural needs of the object. Certainly structural needs are one compelling mandate, but there are other aspects that dictate functional needs, and that can influence the finished form.

In the current project, there are aspects that have no structural function, so they led me to question the “functionality” of them at all, and their necessity within the overall piece. In the recurring “form v. function” debate, I tend to think that form and function are like the chocolate and vanilla in a marbled cupcake, that they can not be separated in any meaningful way, that in the best design work there is nothing that one could remove that would not be sorely missed in the remaining piece.

There are, however, functions beyond the purely structural. As I was contemplating these panels and their place in the overall piece, I thought of the bed I made a few years ago and the oak branch that I found on the forest floor that became the lamp-post/headboard:

There are of course a variety of ways I could have kept that corner of the bed off the ground, and there are other ways to solve the need for a reading light. The structural functionality of the base of the oak branch as a leg of the bed or of the rest of the oak branch as a lamp-post are important, but the necessity of introducing an element that had the æsthetic function of providing relief from the relentless straightness of the machined planes is just as important, making the æsthetic choice a choice about functionality as well. Which brings us back to the first question, the question about ornament.

“Ornament” is a dirty word to a lot of designers that I greatly admire. Often it is to me as well. The idea of creating something that is ornamental not an appealing one, and often when I look at heavily ornamented structures or objects I feel that though I may admire the maker I do not want to live with that object or in that structure. That being said, there are of course ways to make necessary structures ornamental. To say the same thing coming at it form the other direction, there are ways to see the inherent beauty in the structure of an object. Japanese hand-laid "washi" paper is a good example of this:

The structure of this paper, that is to say the fibers that are the paper, can be presented as we are used to seeing them in a sketchbook; homogenized and bleached to the point that they appear as one solid sheet ready for the mark of a pencil. But in the paper shown above the fibers are not homogenized like that. They are allowed to have their own life by the maker, they have a voice and an identity. Though decorative, in a way, they do not strike me as ornamental. And they are integral to the paper, they in fact are the paper.

It is this parsing of the line where æsthetic function becomes ornament that I have been thinking a lot about lately. As I make the objects I make, as I develop my teaching, I am navigating the murky waters of ornament and trying to figure out what it is that really resonates, what it is that really needs to be there. I have also been re-thinking whether, in a basic sense, ornament is, in fact, a bad thing.

Because this is really about asking questions about my own life, of course. What needs to be here? What are the things that are (for lack of a better word) “structural” and what is “ornament?” What in terms of emotional and intellectual and physical needs must remain, and what can I strip down, strip away? As I build my life and the life of my family, are there things that are ornamental, and if there are is that okay? And what are the structural needs? Are there moments where emotional ornament is actually structural? And are there ways that I can make the emotionally structural necessities ornamental?

appropriateness

2011-03-15T08:09:00.000-04:00

as I age (I am occasionally reminded that I am pushing forty) I am mellowing. Though there are things that I believe firmly and fiercely, my overall world view is getting more relativistic as I wander farther into my time on this planet, and many of the things that I once felt stridently about are getting harder to parse, with "right" and "wrong" being less abundantly clear.

In 1997, as I was in my final year of my second undergrad, I took a class from a teacher and mentor and friend named Bland Wade. He runs the Theatrical Properties department at my alma mater, and in addition to being a great teacher (one of the highest compliments I can pay) is also a great designer and craftsperson. Though I have not seen him in a few years now, he remains present in my life in a number of ways, not least in this little footstool:

I took a class from him in my senior year called "furniture for the stage," in which one of the projects was this footstool. We carved the cabriole legs ourselves, assembled the stool, upholstered it, and finished it. Though it was built for the stage, I have kept mine all these years and it has seen some hard use, always being paired with a chair that belonged to my great-great grandfather, even wearing the same upholstery fabric for many years. But the legs have gotten loose, and the upholstery is sagging, it was clear that fifteen years later it was really time to attend to this little workhorse of our living room.

So I took it down to the shop and started to disassemble it. One of the first things I noticed was my signature:

I remember being so proud of this stool when it was finished, and thinking that it would last forever. In a way, I was right, to a twenty-two-year-old fifteen years is functionally forever, isn't it? I remember thinking that I now had the secrets to making furniture, and that this would be a family heirloom, and that my great grandchildren, whom I would never meet, would have this stool. See, I thought this way even fifteen years ago. No wonder I can not escape it now.

This is how this stool was put together:

Lag screws and drywall screws. Not a "for the ages" construction methodology, really. Wood, as I think I have written about before, expands and contracts with the seasons. In humid summers it absorbs water from the air and swells, in the winter when the air is drier it loses the water and contracts. When you put metal fasteners into the wood (which do not expand and contract with the seasons), they crush the wood fibers that expand around the fastener, so that when the wood shrinks again the hole is too big for the fastener. Over several years this can make the hole permanently too big for the fastener, and in this case makes the legs loose.

The important thing to remember here, though, is that this was intended to be a theatrical prop, not a piece of heirloom quality furniture.

Everything in the theater has what can be an interesting dual life: they are simultaneously used much harder than normal objects and used for a much shorter time than normal objects. There are no forces more destructive than an actor in the throes of a scene or a careless stagehand rushing to complete a backstage task in the dark. So objects get beaten up, clothing gets torn, doors get slammed much harder than in real life, even in a house with a toddler or a teenager.

So when we built this stool, the intention was to make an object that would stand up to that kind of use over the run of a show, not to the slow and inevitable wear to which the seasons subject it. Subtle difference, maybe, but important. Thus the lag screws.

Disassembling this object, seeing its guts again after fifteen years, has inspired me to think about these intentions, and about the ways that we choose what is appropriate. The construction and lack of refinement (there are bandsaw marks and file marks on the cabriole legs, for example, something I would not normally allow to remain on a piece I made now) were completely appropriate for the intended use of that object, and only seem out of place when looked at in a different context. In the same way, the methodologies that I now apply to my work would be completely inappropriate in a theatrical context, as they take too long and are too exacting for that milieu.

Which of course also gets me thinking about the relativistic nature of so many of my other beliefs. Obi-Wan reminds Luke that "you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view," which I find true more and more. With the exception of rules about hitting and hating and stealing, there are often more than one way to look at a lot of the issues in my life just now, and I am trying to be more mindful about the fact that alternate approaches are worthy at least of a thoughtful ear and patient consideration, even if they seem at the outset to be misguided or inapplicable.

on rituals and passing them along

2011-03-10T08:04:00.001-05:00

rituals are important, of course. As I raise my son, I am working to imbue in his life a number of different activities that are ritualistic to a greater or lesser extent, one of which is frequent and regular time spent actively making things. Impossible to tell if it will stick of course, but that is the plan as it stands. So weekend mornings we go down to the shop (which at nineteen months he pronounces as "shah") to make stuff. He knows that I wear certain shoes in the shop, and has taken to bringing them to me and saying "shah, dada!" Melts my heart.

Once in the shop, I sit him on the end of the workbench, where he pounds away happily as I work. As I can not leave him alone there, I have had to create projects that can be done entirely at the bench, which means that they have to be made entirely by hand. Over the last few weeks this has been a valuable way for me to reconnect with a part of my making life that I had been letting slide. Here is a photo of him on the bench:

The little mallet in front of him with the blue painted handle was a part of my first ever tool kit, which you can see here:

As you can see, the chisels were real chisels, the saw was a real saw. I used that kit to build all kinds of things for years, and still have (through the auspices of my father, the family historian) some of the tools from it. I will not give my son real chisels yet, of course, but he has a screwdriver that he calls his chisel, and he will very studiously hold it on a piece of wood and hit the back of it with his little mallet, copying in miniature what he sees me doing.

As this blog is mostly about making, I thought I would show what I have been making for him. He loves pounding and hitting right now, so it seemed to make sense to make him a pounding bench like the one that I had as a child. Good for teaching fine motor skills as well as giving him something that he can hit as hard as he wants, so it is a win-win.

I had some ash that was left over from a project several years ago. I don't use ash much unless I am bending it, so I have been carting this stuff around for a while, and I finally decided to use it for this. I did all of the work by hand, even cutting pieces to size, which is an operation I would normally do on the table saw. There are a couple of benefits to this:

First, I got to use my big bow saw, a tool I seldom use any more. I could almost feel it quiver with excitement when I took it off the wall. The blade is of course still sharp, and it sang through the wood, ecstatic to be useful again. Damn fine, clean cut. What a joy to shake hands with a friend one has not seen in a while.

Also, Thomas learned about marking and sawing. Every step I take in the shop I talk about with him, so we talked about pencils (which he calls "p'tiss" which is also what he calls his penis, which can be confusing sometimes. I often have to rely on context to know which he means. A little like speaking Chinese) and drawing lines on wood. Then we talked about saws, and about different saws (which he pronounces "Shah," again, very similar to the way he pronounces "shop.") He watched me saw the wood to length, and since then has used his little toy saw on all kinds of things around the house, saying "shah, shah" as he does so.

Now when we enter the shop he starts by sitting on the bench and pointing out all of the tools and naming them, taking great pride in naming each one as I point to them. He is learning that these things have identities and uses, and he is learning what those uses are as he watches me. I am working on what the next project will be that I can work on with him, for a couple of reasons. I love reinforcing in his little brain the import of making and using his hands, but it also is such a vacation to be making things at my own pace by hand in the shop that I really treasure my time in there on these weekend days. How lucky.

Here is the finished pounding bench and hammer that we made:

And here he is using it. I love that look of extreme concentration as he pounds.

Values

2011-03-07T20:47:00.001-05:00

a colleague of a friend of mine that teaches at Rhodes College did a project recently called "American Values." She has described it really well here: American Values

Though my photo was submitted after the deadline she was kind enough to include it anyway, for which I am thankful. It is an interesting question and an interesting idea, as we hear so much about values from the politicians and the talking heads. I am glad that she tackled the question and was happy to be able to participate.

I did not have to think long to find my answer to her question ("what is one of your core values?"). Working with my hands (in whatever capacity) is so important to me that I have a hard time coming up with what I would do if I could not. It is central to my livelihood and to my life. I play guitar, I make things, I cook, I plant things. I am working to teach my son to do the same, and as he sits on the end of my workbench and watches my hands work he tries to copy the actions I am making, so I have a feeling that he is headed down this same road. A couple of years ago I wrote this paean to my hands, and I still feel the same sense of awe when they do what I want them to and when I see what they can produce.

Working with my hands is important to me in another way: It is central to my politics. In my grandfather's generation, most Americans worked with their hands as a matter of course. Materials were precious in a different way, and most households had a saw or two, a hammer, a couple of hand planes. Not everyone was a furniture maker, of course, but everyone was able to use their hands to make things and fix things. My grandmother knew how to pluck chickens, and did so regularly. The objects in their lives and their homes were, for the most part, mechanical, and repairing them or improving them was within the average person's realm of understanding.

Of course, the average life expectancy for men was 43, for women 35. It is so hard for me to not dive headlong into the pool of nostalgia. But that is not what I was writing about. I was writing about politics.

We live in a very different world, now. a world in which the things that surround us are so complicated that even if we had a desire to fix them, the vast majority of us would not know how. This computer, for example: When it does not work, my ability to fix it is limited entirely to turning it off and then on again, in the hopes that it will magically fix itself. I might as well burn some sage and wave the smoke over the thing for all the knowledge I have with regard to repairing it. In almost every respect, this object, like my car and my television and even my alarm clock function for all the world like magic.

The same is true for the systems that govern my life.

Think about it: Do you know where the power plant is that makes the lights come on when you flip the switch? Or where the water comes from when you turn on the faucet (or less apetizingly where it goes)? What about the factory where the shirt you are wearing right now was made? Or the processes and machines that were used to make it? Or the food you ate for dinner? The gas that you put in your car?

We are surrounded by systems and items that, when examined, are pure mystery, and we are encouraged by the providers of those systems and items to keep it that way. I have a theory why that is, and it is pretty sinister.

The less we question these things, the more likely we are to just pay for them so that we can go about our daily lives. I would much rather pay someone minimum wage or less to pluck chickens for me so that I don't have to do that messy, cold, foul job myself. I get a plucked, skinned chicken breast for dinner, and I don't have to think about how it went from running around a henhouse to sitting on my plate. I also don't have to think about the person who raised it, and what their working and living conditions are, or the person who slaughtered it and how they live. Or even the person who packaged it, trucked it to the store (trucking accounts for over 25% of annual Green House Gas emissions in the US annually), took it off the truck, stocked it on the shelf, or rang it up at the cash register. I just get my chicken breast.

We can do the same thought experiment for anything, of course. Textiles and clothing is another chilling one. Or plastic toys. Or plastic anything, really.

The companies that sell us stuff don't want us to think about the processes of making the stuff, because if we really did we would be more thoughtful about the things in our lives and less likely to buy so much stuff. As long as we are told not to consider the processes and systems that run our lives, as long as we surrender that much of our free will, we willingly subjugate ourselves to the interests of large corporations.

Which brings me back to using my hands to make stuff (you thought I would forget that part, didn't you?).

When we wanted a coffee table, for example, we were faced with two basic choices: Buy one or make one. If we had bought one, my son (who is in a real phase of hitting things these days) would probably have destroyed it in a couple of years, and we would have thrown it out and gotten another one. Since I chose to make one, though (maybe I will do a post about that one of these days), it occupies a very different place in the emotional map of our lives, and we care for it more meticulously. It is a lot more likely to be a part of our lives until our son has a house of his own and needs a coffee table. The product of working with my hands will have a long and useful existence, and at least until I am dead will not be seen as an object that can be thrown away.

What if we could apply that to more of the things in our lives? What if we knew the farmers that grow our food? The folks who make our clothes? It is not particularly possible for all of us to make everything in our lives, of course, but what if we could make SOME of the things in our lives and the rest were provided locally by people that we knew and trusted?

What if (to flip it around) we chose NOT to trust large corporations, who have no allegiance whatsoever to my community, or to ecological or social responsibility? What if we all just started to choose to make more, buy less, and think often about how we live?

To quote Arlo, then my friends we would have a revolution. Not a bad idea.

So thanks, Dr. Johnson. What a great project.

happiness

2010-09-24T08:55:00.001-04:00

i just watched a TED talk by a gentleman named Nic Marks. He is a statistician, and he spoke about the "World Happiness Index," which is not what I wanted to write about here, but I highly suggest that you go watch the talk. It is so refreshing to hear someone be hopeful about the future. His group came up with 5 steps to a happier, and therefor healthier, planet, one of which was "Learn." He was talking about lifelong learning, of course, and about how people that continue to learn after they leave formal schooling tend to say that they are happier than people that don't. In talking about learning, he threw out a word, almost as an aside, that has bubbled up in my life a lot lately: curious.

He suggested that we stay curious. This is actually a pretty revolutionary (not to say incendiary) statement, when you think about it.

Most of the teachers that I have had have not encouraged this at all. The really good ones, the ones that I still remember, the ones whose work still inspires me, are the ones that encouraged me to be curious. Unfortunately, they are few. The bulk of the teachers that I had as a child (and in college, actually), though well-intentioned I am sure, were only interested in information transfer. They did not inspire me to learn on my own, or indeed to learn anything at all.

I am not the first person to say this at all. The general hue and cry against public education that is the subject of so much of my reading these days is full of people who are saying the same thing. At the end of the day, though, it is not about information at all; it is about curiosity.

I am lucky to have two parents who are naturally curious, and who encouraged me to be growing up. We used to talk about how things were made, and about why plants are the way they are. Walking through the woods, my mother would name the trees and flowers for me. My father made furniture and toys for me, and encouraged me to be a part of the process, instilling early in my life the idea that everything comes from somewhere, everything starts as raw material that is manipulated in some way to become a finished product. I always used to love on Mr. Rogers' when he would go to a factory that made crayons and we would see how that happened.

The result is that I have continued to be interested in all of that. I continue to want to know what things have been, and what they could be. I continue to ask how we can make change for the better, how our decision making processes can be healthier, how our making can be more responsible. I blithely assume that everyone else feels the same. This is often an erroneous assumption.

As I talk to my students, I am often caught off guard by how little they have an interest in questioning. They have been specifically trained not to be curious, to accept decisions made by external sources about what their opinions should be, what their aesthetics should be, what their desires should be. It is really arresting.

Our seniors are in the process of doing what we call their "thesis." This is a semester and a half long project that begins with self-guided research, which they are in the middle of now. The "self-guided" part of that is a real sticking point for them, and my colleague and I are trying to gently empower them to make their own decisions and to draw their own charts. It is harder than I thought it would be. Of course, this is really just a process to inspire curiosity, and the hope is that it is a curiosity that continues.

We are really getting somewhere with some of them, which is heartening. Some of them are really laying into this process of critical questioning and are directing their own research. The steps in many cases are tentative, and require a lot of encouragement, but they are happening. I have had several conversations in which I had to calmly reassure students that it is okay to deviate from the original thrust of their research when they find an interesting fact that inspires them, or when they realise that the question they are asking is actually parallel to the question they thought they were asking.

So one by one we are beginning the training that will lead (we hope) to an interest in life long learning. My question is this: How can we reach more people faster? How can we inspire more people to ask questions about their daily lives? And I am talking about hard questions, ones like "where did the plastic in this water bottle come from? What are the working conditions of the person who made it?" Or maybe "what is the effect that my buying this ninety-nine cent water bottle at Wal-mart? Does it have a better or worse effect than if I drink water out of the tap?" These are hard questions for many people, and as such they are often glossed over or ignored. Most people, I think, would not say that they want to oppress workers in foreign countries or engage in acts that specifically make our planet less habitable, but so many people are so used to not asking questions, to not being curious, to not making connections, that they do not even know that there might be another way to approach life.

Lest this get too preachy, I should hasten to point out that sometimes I do not ask these questions either. I sure as hell am not perfect. But I am often curious. And I wish more people were. And I would like to try to find a way to encourage more people to be.

information storage

2010-07-24T10:24:00.001-04:00

the main library at SU is called the Bird Library (named after benefactor E.S.Bird). It is facing a problem that many libraries across the country are facing, apparently: Storage. No matter how big you build your library, eventually it will be filled to the brim with books, periodicals, sound media, films, et cetera, and decisions will have to be made about which books are stored and how they are stored.

As early as 1869, a fellow named John Dancer was able to photographically reduce printed text with a ratio of 160:1 using daguerreotype, which was the first step to what eventually became know as microfiche. Microfiche always seemed so magical to me when I was young. There were WHOLE BOOKS printed on these tiny tiny rectangles of plastic, and when I put them into the machine I could read them to my heart’s content. It seemed like such an efficient way to store knowledge. No need for all of this heavy paper and cardboard covers! Just print the book once and photograph it, and the entire collected works of Shakespeare can fit into a box the size of a small paperback.

When was the last time you looked at a microfiche machine? I was in the bowels of Bird library with some students and explained what one was and not one of them had ever even seen the machine, let alone used one. They laughed at the antiquated technology, which is their right, of course. The future belongs to the young. And in their world, all of this information is stored digitally somewhere in the tubes of the internet, where there is unlimited storage. For them, the idea that they would have to go to an actual building to find information is tiresome.

In talking to the librarians it came out that all the microfilm and microfiche is being “deacquisitioned,” recycled to harvest the silver that is part of the developing process. Hundreds of 50 gallon drums of microfilm were packed up and carted off to the recycling facility, in order to make room. The same is happening to hundreds of thousands of slides in the slide library.

Apparently all of the faculty are up in arms about the slides being gotten rid of, but when they are told that they can take whatever slides they consider too useful or important to throw away, they seem to never be able to find the time to come and claim them. They seem to like the idea of having those slides there, but not to have a real use for them, like that tie-dyed shirt you wore to the first Dead show you ever went to, the one where you kissed that really smelly hippy girl and you had eaten a pile of mushrooms and her patchouli made you think of dirt and you thought you were being buried alive, remember that show? Not much, but you remember the hippy chick and there is no way you are getting rid of that t shirt, just like there is no way you will ever wear it again.

Same with the slides. And the microfiche.

Libraries in general are in the midst of an existential crisis since they are no longer the main repositories of information. The number of students who visit Bird Library has dropped sharply in the last fifteen years, as more and more are doing their research on line in their dorm rooms. I myself, a lover of books and libraries, go much more rarely than I used to. Even I do a lot of research on line and a lot of my reading digitally.

The intent of this post is not to write eulogy for libraries and books. I had started out to relate a pretty small moment from today, but of course providing the context for the moment takes some doing. And writing up this context stimulates some philosophical flights of fancy: As we separate the information from the storage method, interesting things can happen. We don’t get nostalgic, particularly, about computers, for example, in the same way that we get nostalgic for, say, that tie-dyed t shirt. Items like that shirt, or my great-grandfather’s handsaw are the totemic objects that (Bachelard would tell us) store information in a more abstract way than a record or a book or a piece of microfiche. For some reason, we hang on to the shirt in a way that I did not hang on to the computer that I used to write love emails to my wife when we were first dating and she was overseas for Christmas. I have objects from that time that are very important to me, but the computer is not one of them, which I find intriguing.

Why do we feel that some storage methods are important while others are not? Why can I not bear to throw out the journals that I wrote terrible poetry in in college, when I had no desire to keep the computer that I wrote terrible poetry on in my early adult-hood? Why did I keep the dictionary that I was given when I graduated high school but not the (much bigger) dictionary that came as a CD with my last laptop? Hard to say.

Today we were in the basement of the Bird Library, talking to the person who is in charge of “deacquisitioning” books and other media to make room for new books, a diminutive woman in her early fifties, friendly, obviously kind. We were talking about the microfiche (much of which is being saved for now) and how it is getting moved, and about the microfilm, all of which got sent off for recycling. This nice woman started to weep, standing there on the vinyl tile floor, telling us about how big bins of books were getting sent to the landfill when she first got here, and how the fact is that her job is to throw away (she tries to recycle as much of it as she can) books. Throw away BOOKS.

I was nonplussed to say the least. I wanted to give her a hug, to tell her it is okay, that the information will live on, that all will be well. But it does seem like a hard job. And it is a job that requires a constant awareness that time “creeps in its petty pace from day to day…” as Macbeth reminds us. The inexorable-ness of that is pretty intimidating.

So I have been thinking about books a lot today, and about other ways that we store information, and about how hard it is to let go of the object at hand. And I have been thinking about that nice woman who is trying to get the objects to go gently into that good night, and about how raw and powerful it was to see her overcome with love for these objects, these things, these books.

importance

2010-07-10T20:49:00.003-04:00

the daughter of a friend asked "what is the least important thing in your life?" I do not think I have had a harder question in recent memory. All sorts of glib answers of course spring forth: laundry, bills, plastic, socks. But when one starts to really chase down all of the ways that each of these things ripples through one's life, it becomes impossible to find anything that is actually unimportant.

Everything is so connected that to tease one thread out of my life to say "this I do not need, this thing is unimportant" is a massively daunting task, when I approach it thoughtfully. The easy target for me, of course, is plastic. But then, many of the things that made K better when she had those complications around giving birth were made of plastic. The rain barrel I am getting on Wednesday is plastic. My bike helmet is plastic. Much of this computer is plastic. So obviously it is not that.

I wanted to be glib and say underwear, but in truth Syracuse would be a pretty uncomfortable place for six months of the year without long underwear, I am pretty sure. Same for socks. I would like to say the television, but there are TV shows that I watch that I love, and that lend a rhythm and cadence to my life that are not unimportant, and there are movies that I watch repeatedly that are very important to me. I wish I could say my car was unimportant, but I need to move things from place to place frequently, and often those things are my son, and I do not think putting him on my bike in February would be wise. Or fun. So the car is not unimportant.

Every time I came up with something I realised I could not, in good conscience call any of them unimportant. I try to be thoughtful about the things in my life, and even though there are a LOT of things, they all seem to have a weight or an resonance that render them important.

What a wise question from a young person. Obviously this bears more thought, and a clearer definition of "unimportant."

shop work

2010-06-10T10:24:00.008-04:00

one of the things that I am still trying to learn to manage here at Syracuse University is the sheer number of very interesting projects that are constantly spinning through the atmosphere. One that came my way recently involves a garden, so of course I was interested.

Two blocks from the building in which the Design department is housed is a little cinder block building that used to be a woodworking shop. It is an uninteresting square of masonry that used to house a one-man shop that did what apparently was high end marquetry and inlay work. The remnants of ongoing projects were still in the building when I went in there, and the work that the owner was doing was at a pretty high level of craft.

What happened to the owner remains fuzzy. The roof collapsed in the building and the owner seems to have just walked away from the building leaving everything behind. I have inquired a couple of times as to where he is now, and each time the answer is non-committal and unclear. I am still trying to get to the bottom of that mystery.

The new owners of the space are a pair of local entrepreneurs that have an ethic and a world-view that are right in line with my own. Since the roof collapsed, they are the owners now of a concrete slab surrounded by cinder block wall that gets a lot of sun so they are turning it into a community garden. They contacted me, and I got a couple of students involved. For the planters we got our hands on about forty old tires, which the students and I arranged in a pleasing manner. It may seem a little low-rent as a solution for planters, but there a lot of old tires in Syracuse. They are not the kind of thing that biodegrades particularly easily and they are waterproof, so from a materials-usage standpoint, it seemed like a pretty responsible choice.

The owners also wanted some seating, and offered as material a pile of mostly Phillippine mahogany that had been left behind by the previous owner. Regular readers of this blog probably know how I feel about using tropical hardwoods and why I feel that way, but this is another of those situations in which my set of ethics has to remain flexible. Looking at that pile of wood sitting there, covered in dirt and getting rained on, I had to really rethink my feelings about what I knew was the provenance of that material.

Yes, it was cut down halfway around the world, very likely in a way that would lead to erosion of arable land, yes the person on whose land it stood probably got pennies on the dollar for cutting down and selling that tree. Yes, global shipping accounts for about 4.5% annually of greenhouse gas emissions. But it was here already. And if I did not use it, no one else would, either, and it would have been cut down completely in vain, and it would rot away into dirt over here. No matter what I think about what the material is or what its history is or the practice that this material represents, in that moment there was a pile of wood lying there in front of us, and I had to react to that. Once a tree has been made into lumber, once we have killed the living being that it was and made it into a commodity, we have a responsibility to be as thoughtful and as responsible as possible about what we do with that material. Leaving it to rot in a puddle is neither responsible nor respectful. So I agreed, and we picked up the slimy, dirty planks and brought them to the shop.

Tropical hardwoods tend to be a great choice for exterior applications. Teak and greenheart are two common examples. These dense woods are often made into boat hulls and decks as well as decks and outdoor furniture for houses. Mahogany is another one that is good for these types of uses. They tend to be rot-resistant and pretty stable, even when wet, and they tend to oxidize over time to that silky grey that cedar shakes do when left unpainted on the outside of a house or barn (This is why “Shingle Style” houses are what they are, after all, because the cedar shingles oxidize and stabilize and don’t have to be painted. Of course, culturally we have forgotten that, so everyone paints shingle houses these days, which I think is pretty weird, given that the paint has to be scraped and repainted every few years, where an unpainted shingle can last for decades. This has nothing to do with the garden, though).

So one of the students and I measured all of the lumber, and she worked up some drawings of ideas for benches, ideas that refer to the rounded top of the tires. This is her sketch. She had pretty good ideas.

I refined her ideas a little, based mostly on structural considerations, and came up with this:

Unfortunately the year had ended by the time I was able to start the build process, so the student was not able to be a part of the fabrication process, which would have been ideal. As it was, I did the fabrication alone. It was nice to move through a limited production run again, lately I have been working on one-offs, when I have worked on projects at all since I shut down my studio.

The process of doing a short run of furniture (which simply means building the same object several times by hand) has a component of dance to it. When you are doing the same operation to all four legs of a bench, and making ten benches, you do the same operation forty times. You start to look for the most efficient way to move the material through the machines, and simply moving the parts around the shop from one machine to another requires some thought. Here are the parts at one stage in the process:

Like most furniture, the front end of this project required a significant amount of work in terms of rough-milling, cutting to length and cutting the joints. For the first two days I really felt like I had not gotten very far at all, and was just moving piles of wood around the shop. But then there is the magical assembly day when after just a couple of hours there are ten (nearly) finished benches sitting on the table:

There will be no finish applied, they will just be left to weather. In all, it was a success, I think, and I am looking forward to seeing them in the garden. This project reminded me how important it is to keep making, even though the bulk of my endeavors now are in the classroom. The making of objects out of wood for people to use is near the top of my list of emotional needs, though it is easy for me to forget that and shuffle it aside. This summer is already proving restorative.

Memorial Day

2010-05-31T19:10:00.004-04:00

today is a day of ritual, and I thought I would share a couple of mine. We are moving into full summer, and being on the cusp of something new makes me crave ritual.

One annual ritual that I will perform today is brushing out and putting away my fur felt hats and wool caps and taking out my straw hats and linen and cotton caps. This is always a ritual of relief, for me, acknowledging that yes, spring is FINALLY here, that days are warm and long, and that the snow is behind us for a few months. I follow the rule set out by Truman, who though not a particularly good person to emulate in general had a pretty good idea about hats: Fur felt Labor Day to Memorial Day, straw or linen from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This annual changing of the sartorial guard makes me indulge in my other ritual.

Another ritual that I will observe is to acknowledge all of those Americans who have served or are serving in the military. Memorial Day, as you probably know, was created initially to honor Civil War vets, and has since been expanded to include all American vets and soldiers. Pretty good idea.

The high school that I went to was not a wealthy one, and there were many of my classmates who joined up right out of school because they could not afford college or had no expectation that they would ever go to college. This was during the first Gulf War, and many of them went over there to wander around in the desert and carry a rifle. A lot of the people getting killed right now in the Middle East are about the age that those kids were then: 18, 19, 20. Chilling to think about. Makes me realise how lucky I am and have been. There is that Vietnam-era song lyric "It's always the old who lead us off to war/It's always the young who die."

Which also makes me think about another kid, who joined up and went off to war. Found himself landing on a formerly insignificant beach in France that was literally strewn with the bodies of dead kids that were about his age. He drove his half-track from that beach in Normandy across Europe with the 796th Anti Aircraft Battalion and came home alive, luckily, or else he and his new wife would never have had Janet, who never would have given birth to my long-suffering wife. Which would mean no Thomas, of course. These accidents of history seem so inevitable from the remove of many decades, but really one stray bullet would have had me married to someone else, with a different child and a (probably) different life. Tech Sgt Charles G Simonson was more fortunate than many of his peers, he lived to a good old age, though he died before Karen and I met, and took care of his family well. We are extremely thankful that his wife is still alive and has had a chance to hold her great grandson, and will again in just a couple of weeks.

Now, I'm a pacifist. I think war is a stupid stupid stupid way to resolve conflict. I truly believe what Machiavelli wrote in The Prince about the effectiveness of brute force and violence, and I further believe that violence only ever begets violence. But regardless of politics, regardless of what you personally may think about the many conflicts in which we are engaged, think today about the actual soldiers with their boots on the ground wherever they are. They’re the ones who really make the history. Not the fat old white dudes that sit safely a thousand miles away, signing the orders to send American kids off to die with one hand while accepting corporate bribes with the other, but the kids like the kids from my high school, that are freezing, or sweating bullets, that are hunkered down getting shot at, that are wondering if that car coming this way is loaded with explosives. The history we get in school is the history of the rich and powerful, we so seldom hear the voice of the poor and disenfranchised. We seldom are taught in school about the terror, the misery, the true bravery, the real but small triumphs that make up life in a battle field for a Private First Class, nineteen years old and away from home for the first time in his or her short life, clutching a rifle and trying to believe the reasons their C.O. told them they were where they are. Remember those folks today.

This has gotten much longer than I meant for it to, all of this stuff gets me real pensive. All I really wanted to do was to share the poem below, one of my favorites. It is by Wilfred Owen, who himself was killed in the trenches in World War I very soon after he wrote the poem. This is one of those that has stuck with me ever since I first read it in 10th grade, and which still makes me cry when I read it. Seems appropriate for today.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

turning away and turning back

2010-04-30T14:51:00.004-04:00

i just got out of a meeting with the Production Manager of Syracuse Stage, a LORT C regional theater here in town. He's a nice guy, and we had a really interesting talk. He gave me a tour of their facilities, and there were moments that were almost overwhelming.

In 1987 I was taking an after school acting class at out local community theater, and they told us that some extras were needed for the mainstage play that was going on, which was "My Fair Lady." So I played a street urchin at the age of 14, and during the show I looked around and saw these people wearing all black (cool) with flashlights and tools and stuff (very cool) and hanging out with cultivated bored-but-superior looks on their faces smoking cigarettes outside the heavy green loading doors at the back of the theater (holy crap so very cool omigod omigod). I volunteered to be on the running crew, and to help build sets, and it changed my life.

Looking back, it is obvious to me now that I was at the beginning of exploring the line between the workers and the worked-for, somehow identifying with the people who do "real work" (not that I really knew what that meant, then or now) and the people who don't. And I wanted (and still want) to be on the side of the line where people are working. Even at parties, I tend to help clear dishes or play guitar, providing entertainment. When stressed, I find I have to do something with my hands, to tidy the room, or do dishes or make something. To relax I make things: songs or objects or occasions. My hobbies have often involved being on the "provider" side of the equation, most recently volunteering on a traditionally rigged tall ship as crew, instead of wanting to go aboard as a passenger.

This is not going to be a post about my relationship with the entertainment industry, however. There are things there that I do want to write about at some point, but suffice it to say that in 2006, nineteen years after I fell in love with live theater, I filed for divorce. I had been starting to form some ideas about objects and how I wanted to make them, and about my (very complicated, like everyone else's) relationship with them, and it became clear that theater was not what I wanted to be doing. There were other factors of course. I had also fallen out of love with New York City and was growing to resent it more and more.

So I turned away. I turned and walked away from eighteen years of a career and a way of thinking and a vocabulary and a set of norms, and decided to try something else entirely. It was not easy, initially. I had been in the entertainment industry longer than I had been out of it. I had never really had a job that was not somehow connected with it. All of my ideas about how to live and how to think and what to expect professionally and personally had been shaped by entertainment. Over the last three and a half years I have been navigating a new way of thinking, a new set of expectations. I have learned a lot, and am generally happier now than I was from about 2002 to about 2006, for a lot of reasons, both personal and professional.

Theaters, all of them, have a particular smell. No matter where you go, there is a "theater smell," the smell years of paint and lumber and super heated lights and sweat and laughter and tears. It is a smell of flame-retardant salts and tension, of several hundred people in a room experiencing a single moment all together. Maybe it is a vibe instead of a smell. It is unmistakable, though, and I bet if I were blindfolded and led into a theater I would be able to tell immediately. It is a smell that hit me in the center of the chest today, and for a moment made it hard to breathe.

Then I fell in to the comfort of jargon and conversation, of discussing methodologies and techniques and power structures. It felt strangely calming, like stepping off the deck of a storm-tossed ship on to the dock in my home port. I had just met Don but I actually knew him a great deal better than I know some of the colleagues I have been teaching with or near for the last two semesters. All of my shibboleths applied here, all of my assumptions held true.

It was an arresting experience.

Walking through the theaters and shops conversations started, conversations about integrating design work, about sustainable initiatives in the entertainment world, about the possibilities of making more responsible choices in the entertainment industry and in the design industry.

I do not think I want to return to the entertainment industry. I do not think I have an interest in being a set designer again. But maybe my new path includes working with some members of that industry to find ways of doing what they do in a cleaner, healthier way. Many of the lessons I learned in my former life have given my life a heading over the last few years, how interesting to think that this new way of thinking might turn around and help set bearings for my former colleagues.

spring evening

2010-04-03T20:49:00.003-04:00

it has been glorious weather the last couple of days. Sunny, warm-almost-hot. Daffodils are blooming, crocus are wide wide open in the way that says "spring is HERE!" The sun has been out, which has made me take the man-cub on walks and bike around town, and tonight the warmth made me have an extra beer and take a guitar out on to the porch and sit for a while.

On our porch are four of my "Notirondack Chairs." They were designed around three very specific behaviors: Playing guitar (you need a chair without arms), drinking beer (you need a place to put it if you are playing guitar), and being with friends. So these are chairs that have one arm (which also lets them be arranged as a loveseat when you are done playing) but a wide arm on the other side for the beer. The back has a pretty vertical attitude to the seat, which makes it perfect for playing music. After dinner tonight, in the gathered gloom of our quiet neighborhood at dusk, I finally put them to the test.

I have a guitar that I bought at Musician's General Store in Brooklyn. It is small, the size that the Martin guitar company calls "parlor sized." When you look inside you can tell that someone made it at home, there is glue running down the inside, and the neck is very wide, like a classical guitar. The tuning pegs are of a '5o's vintage, small and plastic, white in a way that is not even trying to be ivory. The sound is singular, if not great. I have a special spot in my heart for this guitar. It is the one that I always carried on boats, because it is small. To this day, the strap is a piece of seine twine, a tarred sort of polyester string that is ubiquitous on traditionally-rigged sailing vessels. There are many and many a good evening, rum-soaked or not, playing and singing in that guitar. We always made up with volume what we lacked in skill, and never worried when we forgot a verse.

So I brought the little guitar out on to the porch, and sat in the chair, and played (quietly) and drank a beer. The wind wandered by, my fingers walked up and down the chord for "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry," and the beer was cold. What a lovely moment, arresting to be physically in a situation that I had created theoretically. Nothing earth-shattering, just a happy convergence of time and intention.

2010-03-20T07:34:00.004-04:00

on a Saturday in early March 77 years ago, Franklin D Roosevelt stood behind a podium. In the face of a crushing Depression, he had been elected President, and was now facing a public that was skeptical about the government, that had no confidence at all in the banking system, and that was jobless and in some cases homeless in unprecedented numbers.

Sound familiar? It sure does to me.

FDR delivered his "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech, which is the part of his First Inaugural that people remember, when they remember anything at all about it. I was re reading that speech recently because a student of mine went to the FDR memorial in D.C. If you are ever in our Nation's Capital, you should go the FDR memorial. It is truly the most beautiful and moving memorial on the Mall, and I am saying this even though it is near the Lincoln Memorial, which might help put it in perspective.

As I was reading this stirring speech again, I was came across this:

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work must no longer be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they have cost us if they teach us that out true destiny is not to be ministered unto, but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men."

Change the "men" to "people" and this is a credo that we all could do well by adopting. Joy in the creative process, a feeling on everyone's part that we are all stewards of each other, and a disdain for simple wealth. If we could all think that way, this world would be a hell of a place.

Now we are being told that we are coming out on the other side of yet another situation in which the rich have lied and cheated, causing massive unemployment and the loss of homes and savings on the part of a great many Americans. The number of people that were surprised by the events of the last little while makes it clear that we all need to spend more time reading the story of what has come to pass already.

It also seems to me that it is usually the people who do no actual work that cause the problems. One does not seem to read about crooked carpenters or weavers or potters or writers very often. There seems to be something about people who make things that keeps them more or less honest. I wonder if there is something in the "thrill in the creative process" that Roosevelt wrote about, something in the work of turning raw material into a finished object or meal or house that makes one respect the person to who the finished thing will go enough that there is less impulse to lie or cheat. Maybe not. Maybe I am glorifying the worker for the sake of glorifying the worker, which is a tendency that I have, I know.

Either way, this weekend I intend to thrill in the creative process a little, myself. And to read some more of Roosevelt's words.

time passes

2010-03-09T20:46:00.005-05:00

The first college I went to was the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It is a medium-sized state school, neither good nor bad, just what it is. I went there for theater because a mentor and teacher and good friend of mine went there. I really had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Somehow my parents steered me towards this "alternative" program called "Residential College," which was about 125 or so students living in an old beautiful brick dorm on campus. There were "core classes" we all took (though, truth be told, I was awash in hormones and was not able to really appreciate what was happening around me), and then we pursued our major outside of those. This college was created (I think) and run run by two amazingly patient and kind people: Murray and Fran Arndt.

I had them both for different classes. Murray was interested in Grail literature, and that interest that has stayed with me all these billions of years later; Fran got me into Mark Twain. Being that I have a tattoo of Twain's words on my arms, I would say that she had a pretty deep effect on me as well.

I did not do a good job of being a student at UNCG, and I did not pay as much attention as I wish I had. I sort of exploded into my own sexuality and workaholic narcissism, in the way that a lot of college students do. The more I work on methods of teaching, and the more I spend time with my students, the more I remember with chagrin this time.

Fran recently stepped down as Director. She had her hand on the tiller for decades, and of course someone else should step in. In the newsletter that we get in email she published the following letter. Virginia is her grand-daughter, Emily was her daughter. She passed last year. I apologise if it is a little specific to a particular moment in my own life, as opposed to the larger conversations that I try to have in this forum, but it was so touching and so well-written that I felt a need to reproduce it here:

Dear RCers and ARCers,

Time brings changes in names and in directors. This

will be my last letter as such, and it is difficult to know

what to say. Keats closed his truly last letter with “I

always make an awkward bow,” but then he was John

Keats, dying at 25 with some magnificent poetry to keep

him alive forever. I seldom bow and have not curtsied

since I was in piano recitals as a child. But it is hard to

say good-bye with any grace.

You and this program have been a large part of my

and Murray’s lives, more perhaps than you can imagine.

The names of students and even faculty who were and

are friends often elude us, but the actual people are

always firmly imbedded in memory. Still, I am glad we are

all wearing nametags at the reunion. It has been a good

ride, and you have taught me more than I have you,

although I do hope that some of my favorite books and

films stay with you and are passed on to your children. I

have heard more than once that Grail Literature has

messed up someone’s ability to just see a movie or read a

book without always finding patterns. Sorry. But

sometimes some patterns are helpful. Some of them even

give us the faith and courage to endure.

I am now often reading with Virginia the books that

were once mine and then Emily’s. It is good to believe

that some experiences with literature are able to link

generations. Some of you earliest RCers may already

know this, and I really must leave before grandchildren

begin to apply. I do look forward to hearing from you,

seeing you sometimes at Valle Crucis or reunions.

In the last years I am starting to believe that nothing

ever really ends, it just changes form. Ashby Residential

College will change forms; it must to survive. But the

same truth and spirit that Warren, Dick, Murray, and I

have found so important will remain.

My love (when I bow or curtsy I fall down),

Fran

I hope that I have this kind of effect on my own students, this kind of deep effect that gets under the skin and stays there. The kind that manifests without thought. The process of inquiry that makes it possible to find joy in the support beam of an old mill, or in watching a leaf slowly change color in autumn in the way that makes the memory of an old poem resurface.

Teaching in the moment is hard. Teaching from a twenty year remove is genius.

we are all connected.

2010-02-16T08:12:00.007-05:00

there is building not far from the building in which I work that is being gutted. It is one of many venerable mills and warehouses in this area that were built along the Erie Canal over a hundred years ago when it was a thriving thoroughfare. Now, like so many of those buildings, it is a derelict relic of a time so far gone that many people don't remember it even existed. This particular building is slated to become condos and artist galleries, to be given a new life now that its former life has ended, which I think is great.

I was approached by someone involved in that to take some of the big old beams that are coming out as part of the demolition process and turn them into benches that will ultimately be put in front of the building. It is a great idea, and a project I am excited to be a part of.

I spent Saturday in the shop with two students who were interested in being a part of this process. We had a great time, and for me it was relaxing (though tiring) to be in the shop for a solid day of moving wood around.

We spent a little time before they started designing looking at the old beams, reading as much

history as we could from them. We talked about what the mill building was when it was built and thought some about the people who built it. Though the wood was obviously mill-cut, the final shaping for installation was done with hatchets, in some places, which speaks of a time when carpenters had hatchets in their tool boxes.

When I cut off a sample chunk and resawed it on the band saw, the beautiful grain of the Douglas Fir was revealed, and we spent

some time smelling it and looking at it, and talking about fir and

where it comes from and how it grows and all of the things that were made from it. We looked at the difference between the hundred-year-old patina on the outside and the fresh golden color of the inside and talked about that contrast. Finally, after all of this, they started to design these benches.

An interesting thing occurred: Though I was careful not to insert myself into the design process in any way, the design that the students came to looked very much like something that could have come off of my drawing table. Here is an in-progress dry-fit of some of the parts:

The lines are clean, the material is simply presented and the history of the wood is honored. These students have different design styles from each other and from me, so this turn of events was unexpected. Which got me to thinking.

Is there something inherent in a reverence for history and an excitement about historical material that has a universal aesthetic? Could it be possible that, given an appropriate understanding of the provenance of the material, there are design choices that everyone would make?

This is a dangerous line of questioning, of course, implying that there is a pre-determined design path. But I can not help but wonder. I can not help but wonder if we all took the time to really get to know where we came from, to really look thoughtfully at all of the processes and chains of events that brought us to this moment, this Now, if we would not stand in more of an accord with regards to where we are going. If everyone all together made themselves aware of the history of our making, of the history of our building, of our governing, of our belief systems, if that would not help bring us together and unite us in a more thoughtful process as we figure out what kind of world we want to move through, and what kind of world we want our children to move through. I think it might help, at the very least.

So this is my assignment to everyone I meet up with today: Find one thing that is near you right now and really look at it. Think about how it came into your life, and then think about how it got to wherever you found it. How many trucks across country, how many miles on a container ship from Asia? What are the raw materials? Where did the petroleum for the plastic come from? Who got it out of the ground? Where did the tree that provided the wood (or the paper pulp) grow, and who cut it down? What kind of processing plant created it, and who works there? How do they work? What is their life like? What about the person who sold it to you? What is their life like? What is important to them? After thinking about all of this for a few minutes about one object, look at all of the objects in your house and realise that there is a similar thought process about all of them. Even gum wrappers. Even dish soap.

Boggles the mind.

evaluation

2010-02-05T08:10:00.004-05:00

the least pleasant part of being a teacher is the ritual of grading. I have always made jokes about colleges that don't give grades, but as an educator there is some merit to the philosophy. The students here seem to be really fixated on grades, some of them so much so that when and "unfair" grade is assigned, it can prompt angry emails, heated discussions, even tear-filled office visits.

This led me to do a little reading about grade inflation, and about what people think about it. One of the colleagues that I am teaching with this semester said that he has even noticed it in himself over the past five years, that at some point a "C+" became a "B-."

I absolutely understand this trend. Never having taught a class in which grades could be evaluated by raw data, I can't speak to the process for grading, say a 100 level math test, or a "names and dates" type history test (though I do not know if such things still exist). All of my teaching is done in a studio setting, and involves in-depth, exploratory conversation with each student. While I love this process, a side effect is that I tend to get emotionally entangled in each student's journey, which makes me more compassionate toward them than perhaps I should be.

One conversation that comes out of this line of observation is the one about "process over product." Is it more important that the students learn to apply a critical, thoughtful design process to each design challenge, or is it more important that the end product look good? Depending upon which side of the bed I get up, my answer to this changes. And this is not what I am writing about this morning.

This morning I am more interested in evaluation in general. A grade is an evaluation on a really comforting level. We understand where "B" stands next to "A" after all. We understand that "Average" is perceived as "Bad" while "Above Average" is perceived to be "Average." This all makes sense. But these are all external judgments, and though they may apply within certain constructs, they are all pretty arbitrary constructs. I was reminded recently of how I felt about "success" as a set designer when I first moved to New York, that the yardstick went from "anonymity" at the bottom end to rave reviews in the Times and the Voice at the top.

It is a construct for evaluation that is as valid as any other, I suppose, but it was so freeing when I decided that it no longer applied to me, that I would rather be evaluated based on whether a line that I spliced held, or, when I got to graduate school, whether a chair held the person sitting in it in a comfortable way. In some ways it is a shift to a system of evaluation in which complete anonymity is at the top of the yardstick: If the user does not notice that they are successfully using the object, if it functions so perfectly that there are no issues at all, then it is at its most successful.

Of course, it is a little disingenuous for me to imply that I don't have an interest in being published or recognised publicly (I only just now notices that "published" and "public" share a root. I will have to look in to that later). And there are external evaluation processes that matter to me a great deal: Karen's approval being one, my student's successes being another. But I think I am shifting as I get older toward processes of evaluation that value experiential success over opinions of observers, for the most part.

I have been talking to a couple of the students here about how little their grades will matter when they get out and are working. A client is not going to ask what grade they made in Sophomore Design. Or choose another designer because that grade was a “B.”

The other side of that, of course, is that as we have no other commonly accepted evaluation criteria, a great many other decisions are being made based on a student’s grade. The most important of these is financial aid: In a time and at a university in which the price tag for an education at the collegiate level is sneaking towards $200 000, financial aid is a necessity not just for students from working-class backgrounds. Even the very privileged students that we tend to have here often rely on some kind of financial aid, which is often heavily dependant on GPA.

Which comes back to being emotionally tied up in the process of our students. And to what an education is really for. As a Program, the Interior Design faculty got together and re-wrote our mission statement. We talked a lot about what kind of graduates we wanted to produce. Not once did the subject of GPA come up, not once did we even think of using that rubric as a useful yardstick. We came to the conclusion as a collective that we want to produce “curious and critical thinkers.”

I love the process of inquiry. Most of what I do as I stand at a student’s drawing table is ask them “why?” They are beginning to notice that, too, and some of them are asking it themselves, which makes me very proud. I feel like the most important thing that I can teach them is to look in the face of all of the dogma that bombards them (religious, retail, political, social) and to question question question to make sure that they think it is valid. That is the real success as far as I am concerned. And in the end, that is what I want to evaluate.

But it is not something that one can do once and then be finished and get a grade. This inquiry HAS to be an on-going process. When we stop asking questions we stop thinking for ourselves. And this is what I am confronting in my students: That they do a great deal of work until the deadline, but then they want to stop and move on, to put the project in their portfolio and never look at it again.

So this morning I have been thinking about how to evaluate them in such a way that they continue to question. What system can I use as an educator that encourages a continued critical inquiry while simultaneously providing a useful and compassionate comment on a student’s progress?

I am still working on this. I have a feeling I will be for some time to come.

delight

2010-01-27T13:27:00.003-05:00

as most people do, I have a set of objects that are part of my daily accoutrements. Nothing earth shattering, most of it, probably very similar to the things that you carry. About six months or a year ago I decided I wanted one of those things to be a pocket knife. For many years a pocket knife was a standard part of my life, but I sort of fell out of the habit. It seemed a little too macho so I kind of let it go.

But I decided I wanted to carry a small knife, one that I could use to open letters, that kind of thing. What used to be called a "pen knife" in the days when pens were made of feathers or reeds and had to be constantly trimmed to stay sharp. So I started combing the flea markets and antique shops looking for the right pocket knife. Something small, with only one blade (maybe two), wooden scales on the handle. Something that is clearly a tool not a weapon, so that there is no false manly implication that I know how to defend myself. We get so specific with this kind of thing, and often I find that I get too specific and can not find just the right thing, so I never have it at all.

Karen found one for me for Christmas:

It is small, and I like the squared-off blade (developed by a Civil War amputee who needed to use the edge of his pants pocket to open his pocket knife as he only had one hand). The handle feels good in my hand and it is nice to have a good, sharp knife sometimes. So even though it was not quite what I had in mind, it has rapidly become a part of my daily coterie of objects. And it got me thinking about delight.

We all have objects that delight us, that have an emotional resonance beyond mere use. Many of the objects that I have made have this quality for me, that when I sit in them or hold them or stir scrambled eggs with them the experience is heightened and made more important and exciting, somehow, than they would otherwise be. I find that, for me, it is often objects that were made by someone I know and given to me that have this quality, though that is not true across the board. And though it is not true for everyone, I wonder how many people respond more to a made object than a bought one.

Of course, this gets into a bigger discussion about what is actually made and what is manufactured, and where the line is drawn, and whether there is any way to draw that line. This is a discussion that many much more erudite people than I are having, and is not really the thrust of this entry. I am more interested at the moment in celebrating the objects (bought or made) that bring me delight on a regular basis. The pocket knife (which is bought, after all, and industrially produced) is one. It is the kind of object that I enjoy holding in my hand, and that I enjoy using. And it has made me think about the objects that I have made for other people, and about whether they bring the same kind of delight to them.

What are the processes by which delight can be woven into the making process? How does an object move beyond being a mere object, and become my knife or chair or spatula or hat? Of course retailers have been trying to figure that out for years, and are not any closer to figuring it out, which makes me wonder if it is impossible to mass-produce.

Maybe delight is about stories. Maybe it is about memories that an object contains. Maybe it has to be about what the end user brings to it, and how the object gets woven into the user's lives.

This obviously bears more examination. In the meantime, though, it is nice to be aware of the delight that we feel in the world around us, even in carrying a humble pocket knife.

2010-01-04T07:51:00.005-05:00

among the many things that I love about my family is our unshakable need to make things. Yesterday in passing I asked my mother if she had any books that might have instructions for making origami animals. The directness of the making process for origami is so satisfying, the only tool used is one’s hand, the only material a piece of paper. I only know how to fold cranes, though, and it has become a nervous habit, I find myself folding cranes in the places I used to smoke: in meetings, in bars, sitting around the fire, watching television. I though perhaps I should expand my repertoire.

Thirty or so years of being teachers and artists means that my parents have thousands (this is not an exaggeration) of books in their house. There is no subject that can not be researched here: gardening, Lincoln, the history of surgery, food, and, as it turns out, origami. Paper folding books were procured, old magazines were culled, and square paper was cut (see below).

Last night we sat in front of the fire and folded paper. I started with a fish, which looked nice folded from an advertisment for pasta, and a "sleeping dog," which was not particularly satisfying.

My sister (who is also here for a few days) started with a frog, which was a little advanced, and did not, initially, seem right:

So I tried my hand at one, which worked out a little better. The interesting thing about folding paper shapes is that, like so many other things, there is a set of steps that must be followed, in order, and a deviation from that proves vexing.

My mom was working on a butterfly, so I joined her, and we had a pair of butterflies:

Next was a "star box," which needs to be made with paper that is solid on one side and colored on the other. Having the print on one side from the magazine took away, a bit, from the finished product. The curse of all that art school is the deeply sown habit of looking critically at every product of my hands.

Then my sister showed us how to fold little paper boxes, which were by far my favorite. Easy to make, very satisfying when finished, and infinitely expandable, so that a set of nesting boxes can be made with nothing more than a sheet of paper. I see a LOT of paper boxes in my future...

This is my kind of cold night, sitting in front of the fire with family, making things and laughing, (occasionally) not making frogs, drinking beer and telling stories. Though I am missing home quite a lot, having been gone for so long, and though I am looking forward to getting back in the classroom and back in the studio, this is the kind of recharging moment that is so vital.

gifts

2009-12-27T10:41:00.002-05:00

for Christmas my sister Sara gave me the gift shown above. It is one of my favorite gifts this year. When I opened it I laughed out loud as a swell of memories hit me right across the chest. These are, of course, action figures that I played with for hours upon hours as a youth re-contextualised for presentation in a grown-up world. I am really excited to hang this in our house, and to have these little objects in my life again after 25 years or so.

But of course, this got me to thinking. On the surface, of course, these are exactly the kind of thing that I rail about on a regular basis: Foreign-made plastic gewgaws manufactured and sold to make a profit for a big toy company (Kenner). Rubbish! But these objects contain the kind of emotional weight that pushes me back and back into childhood in ways that are only good. So how do those contrary experiences reconcile?

They don’t, really, of course. All dogma breaks down at some point, some sooner than others. These particular three action figures have many layers and many facets of memory:

-Star Wars itself was the closest thing to a religion in my childhood. My first imaginary friends were the cast of the movie, and I have a memory of laying in bed in our first house in North Carolina (I lived there from age 4 to age 7) and talking to them and really imagining I saw them. I grew as the movies came out, and the religious fervor grew deeper and deer. I was a Jawa for Halloween one year, in a brown cloak that my mom made for me and mirrored aviator sunglasses to be the light-up eyes of the movie character. After we moved to the new house, my friends and I played the parts of the characters out in the woods until it was almost too dark to find our way home.

-The toys themselves were status symbols, in their way, especially with me and my friend Sasha Clapper. When a new set of them was released, we would save our allowances to scrape together the $2.19 (not a small sum to a seven-year-old in 1980) to buy the Bespin Han Solo, or the X-Wing-Fighter Luke. Birthday and Christmas called for lengthy strategy sessions as to which of us would ask for the X-Wing fighter (me, because I had the Luke that went with it) and which would ask for the AT-ST (him, so that they could fight). All these years later, the names and styles of the toys come back effortlessly, the ritual symbology not at all distant, burned as it was into my memory by repetition.

-The action figures themselves were incredibly important to my making as a child: Block buildings and sand castles out in the sand box and improvised tree house villages built in dogwood trees out of twigs and vines. Spaceships built out of toilet paper tubes or scraps of wood. I spent countless hours fabricating worlds or components of worlds for these figures, often spending more time on making the toys than I did playing with them. I still have some photos of the intensely elaborate sand castles and villages that I made, often alone, but occasionally with friends.

-As I grew older, the toys finally became a marker of adolescence, when I finally stopped playing with them all together. I did take a choice couple to college with me, but they became tchotchkes, knick-knacks to remind me of a former time, not toys to play with, per se.

As is true for many people of my generation, Star Wars helps us to identify others in our tribe. One is either a disciple of the movies or one is not, and knowing which side of that line one falls on helps us to make decisions about how we interact. It is one of the things I nerd out on, like wood and American History and old Union songs. I don’t nerd out on it enough to dress up, any more, or go to conventions or play the video games. For me, there is a purity to the original three movies and the toys that accompanied them. They live in a time and a place in my life, sacrosanct, unmoving and unmovable. The newer stuff is just that, the “new stuff,” and does not have the same fuzzy filter over it that the original three movies do.

Given all of that, how does one reconcile the plastic, mass produced toys with the general theme of what I write here? How do they exist so heavily in the same world in which making brings us closer to the world we move through? I am not sure at all.

What I am glad about, though, is that my sister has brought these three back into my life. Mostly because they are such important objects of memory and joy and childhood, totems of no small power. But also because it is important, I think, to stop and realize that there are no absolutes. That mass-produced foreign-made plastic toys can be objects of great creativity, can foster enduring friendships and meaningful world views, even thought they are made halfway across the world from petroleum products ripped from the ground in extremely polluting ways. Lots to think about there, especially as our own son grows and has toys of his own.

Ah, the holidays. Hope yours were as good.

in other words

2009-12-26T20:00:00.003-05:00

one of the colleges at SU is the Newhouse School of Journalism. William Safire and Bob Costas are alums, along with a bunch of other folk. One of the grad students in the Arts Journalism program saw my artist talk and contacted me a couple of months ago asking if she could use me to fulfill a project. The students in the class were told to find a working artist and to do a three minute multi-media piece about them and their work. She did a great job of editing, I think, and managed to sift through all of my words to get at the heart of what I am trying to do and say. Here is what she ended up with:

Couldn't have said it better myself.

questions

2009-12-20T19:18:00.002-05:00

the proprietress of Waypoints wrote about artists operating at a remove, and it got me to thinking again about my relationship to the material I use and how I work. She was writing about the conductor’s remove from the music, in the sense that the conductor uses musicians who use instruments to make the music, and that there is a remove there that is not present for, say, a writer, who crafts words directly to give shape to thought.

What we are talking about, of course, is what filters we use to touch the divine, What lenses we employ to refract capital-T Truth, to portray capital-B beauty in a meaningful and honest way.

This conversation bubbles up frequently in the woodworking world as the conversation about dovetails. It is a conversation about the relevance of what is referred to as “hand work” in a machine age. One camp says that it is more honest and pure to use traditional hand tools and to lay out and cut the dovetails one by one, the implication being that because the tools are not plugged in they are more honest, more direct, and that they speak more about craftsmanship. The other camp says that the tools used are irrelevant , that as long as the end product fits tightly the methodologies used to produce it shouldn’t be questioned.

Both camps are right, of course.

The underlying question that is relevant to what Cheyenna was writing about is the question of operating at a remove from our work. How many tools have to be involved before the integrity of the work is compromised? If I use a table saw (which was invented in the 1850’s by a Shaker woman) am I at more of a remove from my work than if I write with a ball point pen (first patented in 1888)? How about if I use a computer to write, which is a device that is not only so complicated that I have no idea at all how it works, it stores the words I write in a way that without another computer they can not be accessed at all? If I cut my dovetails with using a marking gauge, a bevel gauge, a handsaw and a chisel, am I closer to the work than if I use a routing jig and an electric router? The electric methodology actually requires fewer tools, but is typically seen as being less “pure” somehow (especially by me).

This question of being at a remove, of operating from a distance, is central in my own studio work. The more we are aware of the origins of the things we make and their place in the “enormous long river” of history, the more thoughtful we can be about our own place in the same river. But it is interesting to me how selective I tend to be when choosing in which arenas I can be distant and in which I must be directly involved in all steps.

When I use a guitar to play notes and sing words that some one else wrote I do not feel at all that I am operating at a remove from the beauty of the song. Nor do I feel that I am not somehow making the song. In fact the sense of ownership over singing that song as beautifully as possible in that moment is incredibly raw, and comrades joining in the moment are bound very closely to me as the singer and musician, with them as fellow makers in a very real and relevant way. The fact that none of the craft involved is necessarily mine, that I neither wrote the music or the words, nor made the guitar, does not diminish at all the profundity of the moment nor my sense of ownership of and participation in it.

What, then, makes using non-electric (“olde-timey”) tools allow me to feel closer to my work? What is more “honest” about having to think about every saw stroke than about having to be thoughtful about how I set up a routing jig to make routed dovetails?

Part of it is that it is easier for me to connect to craftspeople that have come before me if I use the tools that they used. This is a limited view, though, as it is thinking about making in a physical sense only. Consider instead the modern cabinet maker whose livelihood is cranking out cabinets: This is a craftsman that has a clear and present need to produce as many cabinets as possible in as short a time possible, which connects him philosophically and practically to his forbears in a pretty direct way, which not only necessitates using power tools, it encourages it. My romantic attitudes about craft and its place in society is actually divergent from the day to day thought processes of the very craftspeople in the 19^th century that I wax so lyrical about.

Yet again, we are at an impasse. What it comes down to is value systems, and about continuums of honesty and where we make a stand relative to where others make a stand. And the landscape on which we make that stand is constantly shifting, making it hard to plant a flag anywhere with absolute conviction.

What is important as an outcome of this rather circular thought process is that as makers we have an obligation to continue to be thoughtful about what we make and how we make it. Though these are questions without answers, they are important as questions, and the act of constant questioning is what, in the end, makes possible the most relevant making.

bridges

2009-12-12T07:50:00.003-05:00

here at Syracuse University there is a college called the iSchool. It is officially called the College of Information Technology, but iSchool sounds cooler, so that is how it brands itself. Yesterday they had a get-together for people from their school and from ours ("art and design people"). It was organised by a Ph. D. student with a background in art who is looking at communication in ways that doing doctoral work in information technology makes sense.

She said to us that the iSchool deals with the place that “people, information, and technology intersect.” The assumption is that the technology is digital, which of course I find off-putting. As many of you know, my relationship with digital technology tends to be contentious at best, and there are many things about digital technology that I find downright offensive.

But then she said that phrase about “people, information, and technology.” Which got me to thinking about technology. After all, a hand saw is technology, in the common understanding of what technology is. The root of “technology” is the Greek word “techne,” which means “art” or “skill.”

Well, I am interested in art and in skill, that goes without saying. “Techne” is also the root of “technique.” And of “technical,” which describes a lot of things that also interest me.

So now I am intrigued. Because when seen in that light, technology becomes something altogether different. If it is about using art and skill to manipulate objects or materials or data, well, that is what I do too, isn’t it? As a maker I apply art (I hope) and skills (which I am still learning, of course) to materials to make objects that resonate in some way with the end user. That is an intersection of people and information and technology in some way, of course. As an educator, I apply art and skill to leading my students towards a larger understanding of the world around them and of the field into which they are going to go when they graduate. Which is absolutely the intersection of information and people and techne-ology.

I still find the interface difficult. The screen is off-putting. I worry that we as a culture are spending too much time living life at a remove, that we have lost sight of where things come from, how they get to us, and what happens when they leave our immediate sphere. I worry about relationships that exist only digitally, in which two people may seldom or never meet face-to-face, and what that means with regards to interpersonal interaction. But then one of my best friends lives in New York City, and I only see her regularly through the computer, and many of the conversations we have in the digital sphere greatly influence the way I make and teach. So even as I fret about the implications of an increasingly digital existence, it does enhance my immediate life as a maker and a teacher in (what I think to be) positive ways.

One of my jobs now seems to be to figure out how to reconcile my Great-Grandfather’s handsaw with my Macbook Pro. And how do I help my students navigate a world in which the effects of the first are just as relevant as the effects of the second in a way that is not tinged with Luddite rhetoric?

Matthew Crawford wrote somewhat glibly that if you are in the U.S., and need a wall built, you are going to have to hire a local tradesperson, because “you can’t hammer a nail from India.” In his defense of the manual arts, it was impossible for him to separate craft from making, but the implication in that book is that there is somehow less craft in the digital side of making than there is in, say, plumbing. I share that view in the broader sense, but conversations that I have been having here over the past few months have started me thinking more and more about the craft of manipulating data, and the close corollaries that can have to manipulating anything else, whether it is wood or steel or stone or plumbing pipes or a car engine. In the end, it is using tools to manipulate a raw material and provide a finished product. No difference.

This may seem self-evident. It is not, I fully understand, a ground-breaking realization. But it represents a huge step for me, somewhere in the realm of the Catholic Church finally grudgingly admitting that, okay, maybe the sun does not, in fact, orbit the Earth. There is a great deal of thinking that I will need to do now about making and about craft, about the relationship of all craftspeople to their tools and to each other, and how we can all work together to effect positive change.

New bridges all the time, here, and new boats landing on well worn shores, bringing emissaries from a larger world. How lucky to be here now.

shelter

2009-11-01T13:37:00.004-05:00

it rains a lot in Syracuse. Which we all know, and knew going in. But then, I have never had a big pile of hickory slabbed up and sitting in the rain before, so I have been worrying about that. There has been a constant hum in the back of my brain about what the water is doing to all of that beautiful wood, and how irresponsible I have been letting it sit under a tarp and stay wet for three weeks. This morning I decided to do something about it.

Getting up at 6 as usual was a special treat, because of course it was five, so I got a free hour of work. A lovely gift. I went down to say "good morning" to the lumber, which has indeed already started to show the effects of too much water hitting it. Not good.

I spent the next few hours erecting a drying shed. The place that I am storing the lumber had given me a rusty old steel frame to use as a structure, and this is what the tarp had been thrown over. But water pooling in between the steel had caused the tarp to sag to the point that it was sitting on the wood, and the water had condensed through the tarp, and part of the tarp had blown away, so all in all it was pretty ineffective. So I got some two-by-fours and some corrugated steel and set to work.

One of the things I love about building things is that at the end of a few hours (or days or weeks, depending on what you are building), it is possible to step back and see the fruits of one's labor. At around 11.30 I stepped back and saw this:

Feels pretty good.

Now all of that lumber has a place to slowly dry, to become stable enough to become usable for furniture and to move on to a new life. When the sophomores that I am teaching are graduating, that hickory will be ready to graduate, too. And it will.

hoosier cabinets

2009-10-10T09:01:00.009-04:00

we had some good friends over a couple of nights ago. One of them pointed at the Hoosier cabinet in our kitchen and said "that's a nice piece. Did you just buy it?" With a pride that surprised me I said "No, it was a wedding gift to my great grandmother."

I love Hoosier cabinets. They are one of the few distinctly American pieces of furniture. They were not made or used anywhere else in the world, but in the early part of the 20th century were seen in many (especially Midwestern) kitchens. Named after the Hoosier Manufacturing Company, they were already in major production by 1903, though some historians make convincing arguments for them being popular in the late nineteenth century. Other companies made their own versions of the cabinet, which is what we have. Ours is not a Hoosier Brand, but we love it nonetheless.

In a time before kitchen cabinets as we think of them, storage and work space in kitchens was scarce, which is weird for us to think about. Imagine a kitchen without the now-ubiquitous cabinets and sink, maybe just a table and a sink with a hand pump for water. Now imagine making dinner for a farm family of eight or so. No wonder these cabinets were so popular.

Like many cabinets of this style, Bama's cabinet has slide-out cutting boards just below the countertop, scored with years of slicing and chopping in the pursuit of dinner:

The counter top, incidentally, is a 1950's replacement. Originally this cabinet (like most Hoosier Cabinets) probably had an enameled steel counter top. When these got chipped the steel started to rust, which is probably why it was replaced with the Formica one.

There are also a bunch of

different drawers, with a bunch of different implied functions. We use the potato and onion drawer for its intended purpose, which it still fulfills all these decades later.

This is not a million-dollar antique. Even in pristine condition these are not furniture objects that fetch huge price tags. But this is where "value" and "worth" take on different meanings. Of course I would never sell the cabinet. It IS a million dollar cabinet to us, because it is shiny with thousands of openings by Bama, and by my Grandmother, and my father as a little boy, and now us. As Thomas grows, he will be able to use his Great-Great Grandmother's cabinet, and add the polish of his hands and the weight of his use. Eventually, I will repair the sagging middle drawer support, taking on, as I have, the responsibility of maintaing this particular object in the museum. And so the work of my hands, the love of my family, and my reverence for the past and the future also get woven into this humble cabinet.

Now, THAT is worth a million dollars. And I feel lucky to be the curator of this branch of the museum.

saturday

2009-10-04T08:44:00.015-04:00

i got this email from a colleague a couple of weeks ago:

Hello Zeke-

I had a large hickory taken down in my side yard today. My friend with the mobile mill could saw it up for you if you want to buy it. Don’t know how many board feet yet. It was a bit dark by the time I got home so I’ll pace it off in the morning.

Best-
Don

Well, of course I wanted to buy it. Last Friday night I went over to his house and helped him roll four huge chunks of tree down the hill around a couple of trees to an access road on his property. It was a solid couple of hours of work, freshly cut trees are filled with water and VERY HEAVY. We figure it was a couple of tons of wood at least. This hickory had been growing for a hundred years in a stand of forest, and had been reaching reaching reaching to get at the sun, so the trunk was long and straight as an arrow, perfect for making into lumber. When we got the four pieces of trunk to their final resting place they looked like this:

The place they came from is about halfway up the hill, which does not seem that far away in the photo, but trust me it was a feat to move these logs around. Yesterday I met George Chrysler. George is a tool maker for a local tool and die company, and "for fun" owns a portable saw mill called a Wood Mizer. Here is George having fun:

A Wood Mizer is a saw mill made by a company in Indianapolis. Their motto is "Making Dreams Come True," and they sure are doing that for me. A Wood Mizer saw mill is made to be towed behind a pickup truck, and George's can handle logs that are 30" in diameter and fourteen or sixteen feet long. Big logs. My hundred-year-old- hickory tree was not quite so big, but it was a pretty good size, about twenty inches in diameter at the base.

So on a beautiful, sun dappled, cool autumn Saturday morning, I meet George out in the woods, and we get started. We had a six hour conversation as we turned a tree into dimensional lumber, about the saw mill itself, about trees, about how I was going to use the lumber, about whether it was more important to get as much lumber as possible or to get more interesting boards. A good time was had by both, I think. And I got to be a part of choosing how the log was made into boards, specifying that some of it be cut for table tops, and other parts to be cut thinner, or thicker. We would turn the logs this way and that to get the best cut, or we would just start at the top of the log and work our way down, slabbing the entire tree into planks.

It was, I have to say, way better than a party. Here is a short video of one way to make lumber:

Here is a video from the other side:

By three o'clock in the afternoon, we had made quite a pile of hickory boards, with its white sapwood and fleshy pink heartwood seeing the air for the first time ever. Hickory has a slightly sour but sweet smell when you cut it, and that smell hung over the whole area as the sawdust swirled in the sun and the breeze and the stack of wood got higher and higher.

Next weekend I will move the pile somewhere that it can sit and season, which will likely take two years or more, unless I dry it in a kiln. Then it will be ready to make into tables and cabinets and benches and shelves, objects "of use" or of beauty that we hope will last another hundred years or more.

Throughout this process I could not help but be put in mind of the way boards were made not long before this tree was planted. The image of a man standing on top of the log and another standing underneath it and sawing by hand board after board was in the front of my mind all day, the realisation that what were doing with the Wood Mizer in forty five seconds at one time would have taken two men the better part of an hour. That looked like this:

I felt lucky to be where I was, to be surrounded by people that understand the importance of what Eric Sloan calls "The Reverence for Wood," to be given the gift of involvement in the process in this way. So few woodworkers or furniture people see the material they use as trees, or live with them through the becoming process, all the way down to the finished object. It is a special responsibility I feel, and a heavy one, to do this tree proud, now that I have been part of making it into lumber. The thing that I try to impart to my students is this, though: All the wood around us came from trees. Even the particleboard. Even the two-by-fours that you can not see behind the sheetrock in the wall of the room you are sitting in. All of the steel was ripped from underground. All of the copper in this computer had a genesis and a venerable life.

Losing sight of those beginnings, disassociating ourselves from where things come from, weakens our bonds to and our understanding of the importance and the impact of the things around us. Strengthening our connection to raw materials and their genesis helps us to understand how tenuous our grip on the world is, and helps me, at least, remember what my place is, and what my duty is.

class

2009-09-12T07:51:00.005-04:00

it has been a long time since I have written here. A lot has happened, and I have mostly been trying to keep my head above water. This has been (barely) possible. Now it is a cool early Saturday morning, and I am up, because this is when I wake up these days, and I have been trying to process everything and sort it all into the bins it goes in.

I thought I would write a little bit about the teaching, as that has consumed a lot of my waking hours. It has been grand.

One of my classes is a “Sustainable Furniture and Lighting” class. I am starting to hate the word “sustainable” almost as much as I hate the word “green.” Green, that is, as applies to design or to living. I have no problem with green as a color, or as a party, or as a way to be, if you’re a frog. But these labels get co-opted and twisted until even Wal-Mart is using them and they have no meaning whatsoever and are just words printed on plastic packaging that is shrink-wrapped and shipped from China.

So we had to start out by talking about what “sustainable” is, what it means as it applies to furniture, as it applies to life. We are still talking about it. I hope we will continue to talk about it. Lots to talk about, there. Then we go on to our first project, which is a lighting object. This is where it starts to get good.

Habitat for Humanity has a store here in Syracuse called the Habitat ReStore. If you are doing demolition at your house and have something that is still usable that you are getting rid of, you take it to them and they re-sell it and make a little dough and the object stays in use, rather than going in the landfill. Pretty cool. And people donate all kinds of things. Contractors will donate almost a full pallet of sheetrock, sometimes at the end of a job, or a pile of two-by-fours. Then anyone can walk in and buy the stuff for pennies on the dollar. Everything you can imagine gets donated: sinks, lighting fixtures, hardware, doors, windows, cabinets, anything you can think of. Pretty cool place.

The theme of this particular class, the way we are attacking “sustainability,” is through a process called “upcycling.” Most objects are downcycled, that is, the raw material is ripped out of the ground and refined, then made into an object, used, and thrown away. This is a vertical process that I think of as starting at the top and proceeding down into a landfill. Some objects are recycled, which means that some or all of the material is turned back into its raw state and then used again. I think of this as a more or less horizontal process, though usually the end result is that the material is eventually downcycled.

“Upcycling” is the process of taking an object that has been discarded and moving vertically back up to restore it to a useful state. This is what I have been trying to do in my studio practice, and now I have a captive audience of 20 Industrial Design students to do it with me.

It is, as we used to say, rad.

The project brief is to buy an item at ReStore (giving money to an organization that needs it and supporting the local economy) and make it into a lighting object (getting us used to the idea of upcycling to make an object instead of buying a lot of stuff). Pretty fun stuff, and the students have wholeheartedly embraced it, which is encouraging to see.

Yesterday we met in the shop and I gave a lecture and demonstration about how to wire a lamp. I have wired a lot of lamps in my time, and I feel pretty comfortable leading them through this process. Then I walk into the shop, and there are four IBEW electricians working on the wiring in the shop. And here I am about to tell a bunch of students how to do wiring. Hrm.

I go over to the electricians and say sotto voce “Okay, look. I am about to give a wiring demo to a bunch of students. Do me a favor and don’t laugh at me ‘till they leave.” And we all grin at the absurdity of it, and make a couple of jokes, and now I am just as nervous as I was before, but now they are going to surreptitiously listen as I talk.

Super.

It all goes pretty well. I show the class how electricity runs in a circle, and how if you interrupt that circle the light does not come on. I show them a bunch of different types of plugs and switches, and demo how to carefully strip the plastic jacket off of the wire and crimp a terminal on the end and screw it to the prong in the plug. We look at the insides of different plugs and different switches. We talk about “hot” and “neutral” and “ground.” I introduce them to my friend Teri’s two basic rules of lighting: (1) “Is the damn thing plugged in?” and (2) “Is the damn thing turned on?” They ask some good questions, and then class ends and they all go their ways, off to do whatever it is they do on weekends, which I do not ask about, because I (vaguely) remember my college days, and I figure I don’t need to know.

So I go over to Chad, who is the lead electrician on site, and say, “Well, what do you think? Should I get fired, or was that okay?” And he grins at me and looks at me sort of out of the corner of his eyes and says, “Sounded pretty good to me. I wouldn’t have told them anything different.” I felt ten feet tall.

What excites me about this is that the students seem jazzed, and they are the ones who are going out to design objects for the next generation. If I can get them thinking about responsible design here in school, If I can get it really under their skin and in their blood, what wonderful stuff can they bring to pass when they are out in the world? Super exciting.

hiatus

2009-08-23T08:21:00.002-04:00

i apologise for the long hiatus. Even today, I find I have little to write about that pertains to making, per se. As I had known would be the case, I have had to shut down my studio for a while in favor of other endeavors: being a father and teaching.

As I have written here before, teaching is really my calling, I think. I am looking forward to Monday the 31st, which is the first day of classes here at Syracuse University. I have been meeting with colleagues and talking curriculum and teaching style and it has really gotten my juices flowing.

The shop is not up and running yet, though I am feverishly trying to make it happen. As with any large project that is timed within an inch of its life, one thing after another has slowed it down. But it will get there. I am confident of that. When it does I will post photos and write about it. The massive yellow Powermatic tools are all sleeping now, waiting for the electricians to plug them in. Walking through the new shop I can feel the air charged with possibility. Great things will be taught here, and great things will be made.

The biggest thing that has kept me from writing for the last three weeks is the birth of our son and first child, Thomas Beaumont Leonard. He was born on August 13. It has not been easy medically for my wife (though that seems to have passed, thank god), nor has it been an easy transition for us, as all parents can attest. Lot of learning here, lots of change.

So I will write when I can. I hope to write more frequently as the year starts. I hope to make it a part of my professional life. In the meantime, you can see the new babe at methuselahleonard.blogspot.com.

containers

2009-07-28T08:59:00.004-04:00

i am packing our house in Providence. We had made a lot of plans for this move, but the universe is acting very strongly just now to underline to me that my plans, though entertaining, are not of particular interest to it. Karen and her mother are in Syracuse, and I am here packing. This is the first time in our lives that I have been more or less solely responsible for our collection of stuff, and though it is profoundly overwhelming, it is giving me a chance to ruminate about some things that have been long buried.

Bachelard writes about objects being containers of memory, and yesterday and today have been experiences that completely support that way of thinking. Our 11 year history together has imbued some objects with a lot of memories, years of use layered on to the object, causing it to become worn with the use like an old tool. And some of these are not objects that we handle, you understand. Use can be defined in a myriad of ways.

Yesterday I came across a little glass vase. We never keep flowers these days, as our cats treat them as snack bars, but there was a time that I kept fresh flowers in the apartment all the time. When we got married, Karen’s parents lived in Qatar, and brought these exquisitely delicate little glass vases to put on all the tables as gifts for those who came to the wedding. We have a couple left that we have (miraculously) not broken, and it was one of these that got packed yesterday. It has been living on our dining room table for a while now, and every time I look at it I think about our wedding, and our early years and who we were then and who we are now. Not, maybe, in a conscious way, maybe a more symbolic way, but truly, every time my eyes land on this little object these thoughts flash through my mind.

That is what I mean by using something without handling it. The house is full of objects like that.

Then there are the objects that had not seen the light of day in a long time, that bring back a flood of very specific memories. Deep in the back of the closet I found a pair of black leather pants. I know you don’t believe this, but I swear it is true. In about 2000 or 2001 Karen bought these and actually wore them. I remember this, clear as day. I remember standing at the top of the stairs in our apartment in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn and her wearing these pants. We were younger, of course, and in a very different stage in our marriage, and all of that was contained in these pants. I had supposed that they had been given away years ago, but no, here they were, stiff with non-use, but carefully preserved in the vault of the closet.

These memories, these histories of us are written in the everyday objects around us. Everything is a totem in our house, everything is a record-keeper. I am so careful about and enamored with the process of making because the objects that we make are not anonymous. They are not disposable. They are all endowed through their inclusion in our life with great import.

Of course I realize that the objects that are important to me are not necessarily as heavy with memory and meaning to others. My sister and her wife were here yesterday afternoon helping. This impromptu packing process has required us to lean heavily on the support of those who love us, and I have been truly thankful to be so blessed with loving family and friends. As they packed our kitchen and the stoneware that my mother made for us, I watched story after story get carefully wrapped and stowed away, realizing that in some ways it can be helpful not to feel the weight of the history in each object. For that reason (among others) moves are easier when someone else packs. They could wrap and put in boxes objects that I would have had to contemplate individually, a process that can take quite a bit of time.

Now I am moving through a maze of some of the most emotionally brutal objects: boxes taped shut.

They are the defining aesthetic feature of this space at the moment, and require a different system of navigation, both physically and emotionally. The speed with which this move came upon us has not given me time to grieve for leaving this space, which has been the most positive space in my life in years. I have loved being here, and have learned a lot and grown a lot here, all (I think) to the better. Providence is a good city, and this has been a good house. And I will miss it. We are moving on to great things, and an exciting new chapter in our lives, and I know that, but this has been a good chapter too, and I feel that it is ending abruptly. Too abruptly.

So I will put our memories in boxes, trying to be care-full and respect-full not only of the process of this transition, but also the outcome. I will do this with the knowledge that all of these objects are not leaving our lives, they are coming with us, supporting us, recording for us our paths toward parenthood and a new environment, a new space, a new part of our lives.

slop

2009-07-17T14:53:00.000-04:00

at the RISD library there is a room called the “Picture Collection.” It is one of my favorite places in the whole school, and I recently had an opportunity to show it off to a couple of visiting students, which brought it back to the front of my brain.

It is like the NYPL Picture Collection, for those of you familiar with that. It is a series of filing cabinets filled with folders, each of which if stuffed with pages torn out of magazines over the years. Every folder has a subject matter, so there is a “Sports-Cricket” folder for example. As well as an “Animals-Cricket” folder. And a “Furniture-Georgian” and an “Architecture-Korea” and a “Political Personalities.” The list goes on an on, it fills a 2” binder, neatly typed and cross-referenced. You find the category you want to look at and ask for the folder, and you can check out up to 50 images at a time to take with you. Pretty amazing. You actually get to take these laminated pages with you to use as reference or as inspiration. I used it all the time when I was in school.

Part of what I love about this analog approach is that it relies on my object recognition rather than a computer’s. I was talking with an acquaintance the other night about how we recognize images and objects, about the way that we are able to understand (in a way that a computer is not) that an image of a red vase is an image of a red vase whether it is a digital photo with the file name DSC_00000546 or an actual photograph or an actual object (a real red vase, in this example). The computer (so far) is programmed only to recognize files named “red vase,” and not to be able to see a red vase in an image of a dining table that is named “Dinner at Dave’s house.” (though my acquaintance is of the opinion that it is coming not too far off, a prospect that is intriguing and terrifying at the same time).

But the real thing I love about the Picture Collection is the sloppiness. As I am looking at these photos I often will see something in the background or in the corner of the page that is intriguing or helpful, something that sends me off down another path in my research. It can be linear, on the worst days when I am not paying attention, but it is at its strongest when it is circular or ovular or explodes out across a variety of fields and categories.

In the design process, as in life, an amount of slop is not only allowable, it is necessary. The creative process and the design process demand that our thinking be kept as open as possible for as long as possible, and they tend only to end in a pleasing and satisfying and thoughtful way when we keep away from the straight and narrow.

There is a similar amount of slop in the way that we are built, slop that allows us to stretch and contort in ways that are not in line, strictly speaking, with our direct biological functions. This lets us do things like yoga and gymnastics, but also allows us to squirm into the bilge to get at a recalcitrant bolt that is ‘way up in a tight little place, for example, or pick one very tiny screw up off the floor where we dropped it. It also lets us function with one kidney, and to learn to adjust to losing a limb. The physical slop allows us to learn new ways of functioning, and to constantly grow and adapt.

When Matthew Crawford talks about being a “knowledge worker” he recounts being forced to adhere to a “knowledge quotient (how’s that for a terrifying phrase?).” The system that he had to follow, which is like a lot of systems that a lot of us have to follow professionally, did not account for varieties in understanding and thinking. It required a codifying of thought and action regardless of the situation to the point that the actual product was not only negatively compromised, it was actually, in its way, harmful. What he experienced was an intellectual version of the Industrialist’s Creed introduced in “Cradle to Cradle:” If brute force isn’t working, you aren’t using enough of it.

When I am looking at the planks for a new project, I spend a great deal of time laying out the pieces on the raw wood, making time to try many different options before I cut into the raw material and start to give it a new form. I look at the color and swirl of the grain of the wood, flipping the planks again and again in an effort to give the wood the greatest possible voice, the most harmonious possible outcome. All thoughtful woodworkers do this, it is a common beginning step, one that enters into the dialogue with the wood that I am always writing about, and that ensures a beautiful finished piece. Industrially produced furniture often indicates a lack of sensitivity to this step, being more interested in fitting the largest number of final pieces into a given board and sacrificing a pleasing finished object.

The less slop that gets built into system, whether it is a physical system, an intellectual system, or an educational system, the less likely the system will be sustainable over the long term and the more likely that the end result will be less than it could be. In our desire to codify and systemise, we often lose the very thing we are trying to achieve.

a call to arms

2009-07-04T09:40:00.005-04:00

“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Two hundred and thirty three years ago a gentleman planter (who was also an inventor, an amateur woodworker, architect, musician, and goodness knows what else) who was all of thirty six years old penned these words. They were terrible and aggressive words, words that started, of course, a revolution. Now we call it the Revolution. Capital R.

From our remove, it is hard to comprehend what he and the other members of the Continental Congress were doing. When we hear or read the words “high treason” these days they don’t have a lot of teeth. There are not a lot of people committing it in our country, lately. At least, they are not getting prosecuted. But for these men (and yes, they were all men. And white. And rich. That does not diminish the enormity of what they did.) the act of signing their names to this particular document was unambiguously taking a stand for which it was possible, and in fact likely, that they would be tried and hanged.

They were putting their lives on the line to back up their convictions (some more quickly than others, we are moving to the only state that abstained from the first vote, New York. They came around eventually, though), which is another idea that a lot of us here have a hard time understanding. There are folks in other countries that understand it perfectly, and are doing it right now, of course. What would you die for? What would you risk loss of property, prestige and life to say publicly?

I have been thinking about revolution, lately. I have been doing a lot of reading that has got me in that frame of mind (Wendell Berry, McDonough and Braungart, Matthew Crawford, Walter Rose). The revolution that I have in mind is not a political one (though that may not be a bad idea, more on that another time), but a cultural one. And it needs to shake things up as completely as did that document two hundred and thirty three years ago.

What the Continental Congress put together as a result of their revolution was a completely unheard-of system, one that they believed to be better than any existing system. They did not have any examples to follow, all they had was their knowledge that the existing system was broken, and that something new was needed. That is where I feel that we are.

Ecologically, we are juggling bowling balls while treading water in a lake that is on fire. Many of the solutions that are being put forth involve putting on a fire-retardant suit, a solution that does nothing at all to change the basic situation, it merely keeps our hair from getting singed before we drown.

The system is broken. Something new is needed. That something new is not an object, I don’t think, especially as they tend to come wrapped in plastic inside a box that is shrink-wrapped. It probably won’t be political. I think it will have to be a major cultural about-face, a complete re-thinking, not of the system, but of our base-line expectations. And I think it needs to happen soon. It may be scary, it will certainly mean a complete re-thinking of how we relate to our surroundings and to each other, and it will have to be a huge.

I want to be clear: I am part of the problem. We have a lot of things. I am typing this on a plastic laptop, we have two cars, we buy things wrapped in plastic. I need to change my expectations and desires just like everyone else in this country, and I am trying to figure out how to do that.

So today, on this day when we celebrate family and country and history, I am thinking about revolutions: The ones that have been, and the ones that still need to happen. Happy 4th of July.

2009-06-15T22:11:00.008-04:00

we move every three years. The first three times we moved, though, it was in the same borough, we were just changing neighborhoods, which reduced the trauma slightly. The biggest move was three years ago, when we moved to Providence. Now we are gearing up for the biggest one yet, a move away from the coast for the first time as a couple, as well as a move away from being childless and into parenthood.

It is safe to say that I feel awash in a turbulent sea of change.

There is another move that is happening, a move from being a maker to being a teacher (and, perish the thought, an administrator). I love teaching. It really is what I do best, I think. My father is a teacher, and has been since I can remember. My mother is a teacher and has been since before I was born. Recently, in an effort to place the names of some of the long-lost high school folk who have been friending me on facebook, I brought back from my folks’ house my high school senior year yearbook. Because I am a narcissist, I read a lot of the things that people had written. Lot of the run-of-the-mill “Stay in touch” and “Drama Class Rocks!” Probably not too different from your yearbook. Probably the hairdos were taller in mine than in yours. I would bet that there were a lot more mullets. But the things that people wrote are the same across the country, I bet.

One thing I did notice, though, was that a lot of people said something like “you’re a great teacher.” This struck me, as I do not remember teaching anyone anything in high school. Except maybe how to roll a joint. I don’t remember knowing enough about anything to think that I should be a teacher. I wanted to be a rock-and-roll roadie at the time. So it is a bit of a mystery, but it struck a chord with me because I do aspire to be a good teacher. I am looking forward to having the opportunity to meet and work with the students in Syracuse.

Before I can start that life, though, I have to pack up my studio. I am almost done. I know that I will not really have an opportunity to make things on the level that I have been for quite some time. This has been tough for me to parse. I know I am moving into so many things that are going to be so good, but dismantling my workbench took a great deal of will. It was anticlimactic, of course. Four screws and four bolts and it was leaning against the wall, ready to go on the truck. There was no crashing of the pipe organ, no thunderstorms or rains of frogs. Externally the moment after was the same as the one before. But it was the act that officially indicated that I was no longer an active part of the studio. I have had a great time in this studio, the people are all people that I respect and admire and above all like very much. Dismantling my bench was a statement that I am no longer one of them, I now (for the moment) merely store my stuff among them.

Oof.

Below is a photo of the bench leaning against the wall behind the stacks of boxes of studio stuff. Tools, hardware, bits of wood, clamps. The box of hammers does not seem any dumber than the box of saws, no matter what colloquial wisdom indicates. The studio books are just as heavy as non-studio books. I have kept out a small collection of tools that will get me by should I have a small quick project, but all the rest are sleeping soundly in their boxes, waiting to see the sun and breathe the air and make shavings and dust in their new home.

I know I should be thinking about this as preparation for a great and good change. I know that I should be looking forward to what promises to be an exciting new time, professionally and personally. But just now, for these weeks before we get up there, I do not seem to be able to shake the melancholy. I am awash in memories, stuck looking back. And I am going to allow that for now. I do not have any choice. It is right to mourn for a time the passing of good things just as it is right to be thankful for the good things that are to come.

storage systems

2009-06-01T21:43:00.001-04:00

i love books. I always have. I love the heft of them and the smell of them and the theatrical act of opening one, whether it is for the first time or the 20th. The books to which I return regularly have what a friend called the “patina of Zeke” on them, dogears at the good parts, phrases underlined, worn covers. “Life on the Mississippi,” “The Dramatic Imagination,” “The Hobo’s Hornbook,” these are markers in my life and repositories of ideas or turns of phrase or images that are important to me.

When I started out as a set designer in New York I was not (to put it mildly) internet savvy. I still am not, maybe, but it is arresting to me what a difference twelve years can make. I did not even have an email address at the time, which seems outlandish to me now. And for years, every show that I designed would send me off to the New York Public Library and the Strand. I bought two or three books per show, and checked out several more, the big coffee table books with lots of photos in them, to use as research. Books about the wild west, and about the Louvre, and English Georgian houses. Figure drawing references. “How to Paint” this or that. As my library grew, moving became more difficult, but Karen and I both are comforted when surrounded by our books. In our last apartment, I built 150 linear feet of shelves for our books, which was not enough, as it turned out. We have a lot of books.

In preparation for our move, I have spent tonight going through the big books, pulling out ones that I have not opened in years to donate to the RISD library. I spoke to the head of the Library who said that any books that do not go onto the shelves will be sold to buy more books or other media. Many of these are volumes I have not opened since we moved here, and maybe not for years before that, and so I know that the appropriate thing to do is to turn them over to an institution that will use them, to a place where they will be opened and read which is what they are for, after all.

I have pulled out 88 volumes so far, most of them big picture books. It has been a hard process. Some of them are inscribed from friends along the way, some of whom have fallen out of my life, and seeing their handwriting congratulating me on an opening night or graduating from college or a birthday brought wistful smiles and floods of memories. Here they are, all bagged up and ready to move to their new home:

Books remain a favorite method of mine for storing knowledge and memory. Having now been on the creative team charged with producing a book, and having written and laid out and published my thesis, I have more of an appreciation for what a book is, not just what it says, for books as designed objects, which has given me another layer of appreciation. Cheyenna and I were talking about the need for each generation to produce documentation of some kind, especially, as with the Hobo Hornbook, the need for documenting the thoughts and history of the working class. In an age when so much that is written from person to person is done in a media that does not lend itself to being kept in a cigar box in the attic or pasted into a scrap book to be found and archived by descendants, it is hard for us to see what that documentation will be.

I am learning a lot about storing knowledge these last couple of years. I am learning (though I still have the clumsy absence of fluency that fades with practice when learning a new language) to read the knowledge that is stored in objects that are not books. I am learning to read the adz-marks on an old beam, or to decipher the logic in the way a line is rove through a block and around a pin, or to decipher the collective trial and error that led to a saw’s teeth being set in a particular way. I am learning to read the rings of a tree or the wear on an old tool or the construction of a piece of antique furniture. Pulling all of those books off of shelves and putting them in bags brought into sudden sharp focus all of the other methods of reading of which I am becoming aware. These other storage systems are gaining a credibility in my life that they did not have before, and it took the act of sitting down with books as objects, as “containers for memory” as Bachelard would say it, to bring that into sharp focus.

I will miss these old friends. I will probably regret giving them up. But I will know that they are moving to a new life, and that they will be cared for well.

to be of use

2009-05-29T10:01:00.002-04:00

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

-Marge Piercy

back to the shop

2009-05-25T18:28:00.006-04:00

we had quite a weekend this Memorial Day. Birthday celebration, wedding shower, and baby shower, a swirl of events. Since we both had family in town, we made the choice to forgo other activities like yoga in order to spend time with them, and I am glad we did. Karen used the word “homesick” to describe my feelings for the South, which struck me as particularly apt. I am also homesick for family. It is never easy to be surrounded by family, and can often be stressful, but the eddies of love and support were well worth the jetsam of long-held grudges and personal issues.

This does mean, thought that I was not in the studio for three days, which began to weigh on me by Sunday, yesterday. I got so twitchy that as Karen was unwrapping gifts, I was cutting the wrapping paper into squares and folding cranes out of it, just so that I had something to do. Though there are some who enjoy the craft of creating events, and there are many who enjoy experiencing them, I get more joy from making things, and my hands eventually decided that if I wasn’t going to use them to make anything, they would make something themselves.

This is not meant to indicate that I am not grateful for all of the work that everyone put into the weekend. It was astounding and lovely. But it was also good to get back into the studio today and to make a little sawdust.

My sister and her fiancé have trained their lovely hound Harriet that there is an invisible fence buried in their yard. She is getting pretty good about knowing where it is and about playing in the yard unchaperoned. Across their front walk they have strung an old dog leash, and she knows now that when it is there, the fence is on, but that when it is not she can pass through. Smart dog.

We were sitting at dinner and my sister was telling us about this and she asked if I had any ideas about a gate that they could use that would look better than an old leash strung across the front walk. Boy, did I?!? Put me directly in mind of Walter Rose, of course: “I would fain doff my hat before such a gate, for it speaks of the craftsman, a carpenter whose work is the expression of his life…” Gate building was, at one time, a very specific task, done in the way that carpenters had done it for hundreds of years, each component of the gate designed by generations of experience in a way that a pressed steel gate, such as you may see today, is not.

I began to think and to scheme about making a gate. Not a full on gate, not a huge farm gate, but a little ornamental piece that would be a symbol of a gate as well as an indicator to Harriet that the fence was on. I determined to use hand tools as much as possible, and to not get over-fussy with it, because as Rose says, “the carpentry of the countryside ought not to savor too much of the jointer’s bench.”

What a pleasant way to return to the workbench after a three day hiatus. I had made sure when I left that all of the planes and chisels were mirror-polished and sharper than razors, and walked in to a swept studio and an empty bench pregnant with possibilities. I had some Douglas Fir left from other projects, and laid into it. Fir gives such beautiful long curling shavings when planed by hand, and the smell that it lets off is intoxicating. I cut the joints and went over to the hardware cabinet to choose the nails. I still have a lot of the nails that I made a couple of years ago, and thought it would be fun and fitting to use clinch nails to hold the gate together.

Clinching nails is a practice that is for the most part gone, but it once was standard practice for a lot of applications. Doors, for example. Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by telling us that “Marley was as dead as a door-nail,” and goes on to remark in passing that he does not know what in particular is so dead about a door-nail. Well, anyone familiar with carpentry certainly does. Exterior doors (and gates) were often nailed together up until the last century, and because the nails were hand-forged and untempered, they were soft. So a hole was drilled, the nail was hammered home, and then “clinched” or bent over on the back side. So installed, it would never come out again, and so was “dead.” Doors made in this way have lasted hundreds of years in some cases, far out-living modern hollow-core doors that you buy at big box stores.

Of course clinching nails is now an exercise in nostalgia. But then, as Garrison Keillor says, nostalgia is my sin. And it is appropriate to clinch-nail a gate together. And I had all of these nails anyway, so it seemed like a good choice. And it is fun, so there.

So I made up the gate and the posts, and a little latch on the other side with a counterweight made of a big chunk of steel that I had around the shop. The hinge is one that I made as an experiment a couple of years ago, and is not terribly good as hinges go, but entirely serviceable. Better that it be used than sit in a drawer until it gets thrown out, after all.

Lugged all of this up to Sharon, Mass, where they live and went to hammer it into the ground. The rocky ground. Very rocky ground. There is always something, and this time the something was that. Rather than pound them 12” – 18” into the dirt, I was only able to get them to go in about 9”. Which is not far enough in my book, and makes the gate too high besides. So I am going to have to revisit this, maybe with a pick-mattock.

For now, though, the gate is there, with a little ornamental jowl cut in like on the gates that Rose shows in his book. A great project to get my hands working again, though, and it is always a joy to make something for people I love.

Here is a photo of the gate:

And a photo of the hinge which is also clinch nailed on:

Here is the other end and the counter-weighted latch. There is, I am sure, a better design, but this is what I came up with, and it works well enough:

This nice little project was the penultimate piece that will be made in the studio. The next (and last) piece will be a birdbath for our new house in Syracuse, after which I will start the bittersweet project of packing the studio to move.

rites of spring

2009-05-07T08:03:00.004-04:00

Spring has finally arrived. It has been getting very warm and then very cold and then very warm again over the past weeks, but that is not the indicator I look to. I look to the trees to tell me about rebirth and new life. And they have been. Over the last couple of weeks the tips of their branches have been deep red with tiny buds, portents of what was to come. And then last week the smallest of green leaves began to unfold.

On Tuesday, we had some driving around to do on a grey rainy day, and it was then that I realized that Spring is here. Grey and chilly, with a soaking rain, the kind that makes you want to stay inside and read all day, the kind that magnifies bright colors, somehow, and makes them stand out. And that is what happened, of course, with the leaves. They are all that callow spring green, the kind that you can only make by adding just a touch of sap green to a lot of hansa yellow light, if you are trying to make it on a pallet, that electric spring green that is full of hope and promise and that thinks it will never, ever fade into the world-weary heavy green of late summer, though we know it will. The trees know this, too, but are tight-lipped, enjoying the optimism of the new leaves and sighing with joy as the wind catches them and waves their branches, yoga for an eighty year old maple.

Up Hope Street is Lipitt Park, which is a riot of trees all showing off their new spring attire. In the grey rain it was just stunning, making me stop the car and hold the camera out the window, shielding it from the rain with my hat. Of course, in the photo the colors get lost, I can not photograph magic like this with something as paltry as a point and shoot, but you maybe get the idea.

Then yesterday I made the drive (lot of driving lately. Maybe this is something I should examine) out to Syracuse again. All the way through the mountains Ii drove under a flat-bottomed roof of cumulonimbus clouds, the kind that are piled high like grey whipped cream with flat bottoms like they are sitting on a pane of glass, pregnant with rain, though I saw very little rain on the trip. As I got higher in the mountains, of course, I drove backward through spring, back to the very first little buds on the trees, and then as I came down the other side I got to watch everything unfold in fast- motion, the car a speeded up camera recording what a friend called “the white-hot electric sex” of spring.

On the other side of the mountain, the clouds started to part a little. The blue dome never looks so blue as when see through grey clouds, and the spots of sunshine hitting the ground seemed that much warmer and joyous for the grey up above. By the time I stopped at a turnout by the Erie Canal, there was enough sun that I could eat my sandwich at a picnic table made of grey recycled plastic without a jacket on, warm and happy and comforted by the history flowing on the other side of the chain link fence. As I sat there in the sun a CSX freight train rolled ponderously by on the other side of the Canal, the same company that sponsors our NPR station, and I smiled as I thought about their claim that they move a ton of freight three hundred miles on a gallon of fuel. It made me think of home, where Karen and our unborn son are, and about the season of birth and renewal and joy in my own life.

Canals and trains, and sunshine and spring. Better than Christmas.

in memory

2009-04-27T23:28:00.006-04:00

i met Sasha Clapper in 1977 when I was four. I don’t remember a lot about it, but I have a distinct memory of my mom and his mom sitting in the living room of the rented ranch house on Polo Road in Winston-Salem, talking about who-knows-what, and Sasha and I playing with matchbox cars or something around the foot of the chair that his mom was sitting in. From that moment, we spent more time together than apart. His family lived on Crepe Myrtle Circle at the time, which was close to my parent’s house, and we walked over there many and many a time. Eventually I was old enough that I could walk there by myself, crossing Polo Road being a rite of passage that I did not appreciate at the time. I sure do now.

There were four of us: Sasha Clapper, Daniel Berry, Christy Johnson, and me. We all lived near each other, our parents were friends, and we all played together and went to the pool together and went to each other’s birthday parties. We all had other friends, of course, but the four of us were a unit, a group of friends that hung out all the time at least until we were twelve or so.

My dad had built a sandbox behind our house and a treehouse and a fondly remembered silver-spray painted rocket ship. Many and many were the adventures we had, running around the woods that seemed limitless to a five- or six- or seven-year-old but which in hindsight were likely not more than a half acre deep. Sasha had a treehouse too, and we spent a fair amount of time there as well. As I shake my head around and see what falls out, I have found a memory of being in his treehouse and him quoting Olivia Newton John singing to me “Do you know what I mean?” explaining “ I like to use song lyrics to say what I want to say when I can.”

Thirty years later, I do the same thing. To this day, I quote and quote and quote. Twain and Lincoln and Star Wars. Not so much Olivia Newton John, but that must be where it comes from. I thought him so sophisticated and wise to know the words of pop songs. He listened to Casey Casem, and knew who the hot pop singers were, a talent I still do not have. He used to be able to identify songs from the radio and the people who sang them, which always mystified me. For years I would try to remember to listen to the radio so that I could hear the same magical things, promising myself that I would tune into the oracle so I, too, could deliver the message. Every week I would forget, always lagging behind Sasha.

He was born on January 22 1973, four months before me (I was born May 22 of the same year). Somehow, those four months made so much difference to me, and made me feel inferior in age and knowledge. Again, I still fight this, wishing to be older and more experienced than I am. I am slowly learning to embrace the things I don’t know, but as a child and young adult I strove to be more knowledgeable, older, more experienced, even lying in order to appear that way.

Memories filter in, wheeling around like dance partners in a fevered dream: After Empire Strikes Back came out, there was a mail order offer from Mattel. Two proofs of purchase and a couple of dollars would get you a Boba Fett figurine. This at a time when no one knew anything about Boba Fett, and when he had all of the sexiness that mystique brings. Sasha sent away and got the figure when his backpack still shot a missile out of it. By the time I got mine from the Rose’s department store, the missile (which had been judged a swallowing hazard to young children) was firmly glued in place. Sasha’s had long been lost, of course, out in the yard, and the figurine’s empty backpack was a testament to the coolness of his version of the figure.

We had Cub Scout meetings in his backyard. His mom was the troop leader, I think. I remember filling soup cans with water and freezing them, and then using big nails and hammers to punch patterns of holes in them, so that when the ice melted away, we could put candles in them and they would be like the colonial punched tin lanterns we saw at the local museum. I think Sasha made it to Boy scouts, though he might have dropped out at Webelos. I never even made it that far, my interest waning early.

At some point, I think about when I was six or so, his family moved to Washington D. C., an unimaginably exotic locale. I have no idea to this day why they moved, though I reckon his father got a job there doing something. We went to visit them once, from which I have two memories: One is complicated, but it has to do with him having his fingers in a door frame by the hinges and me trying to shut the door and squeezing his fingers and him screaming like a fire engine and me just trying to shut the door and not understanding that I was causing the pain. The other has to do with assembling a model airplane and painting it and feeling so sophisticated because he did not want to paint it like the photo on the box, so we didn’t. Eventually, they moved back, into a house on Tangle Ln. This was where he lived until we lost touch, where his father told us about landing planes on an aircraft carrier in the Viet Nam war and we ran mission after mission in the woods behind his house.

When we were a little older, I would go spend the night at his house on a weekend and we would do mind-blowingly rebellious things, like watching Saturday Night Live. I never did this at home, not being allowed to stay up that late, but he knew all of the players: Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal. Gilbert Gotfried. Martin Short. This is the last time I watched this show, not really understanding a lot of the jokes but laughing when he did, excited about staying up so late with no repercussions. After Saturday Night Live, the kung fu movies came on, which we struggled to stay awake for, understanding that they were excellent without knowing why. Vivid Technicolor memories of “monkey form” and “drunken soldier form” still wander through my thoughts now and then.

When he and I entered eighth grade in 1986, North Carolina was rated 50th in the nation as far as public schools went. He and I were both in what then were called “gifted and talented” classes, thought the official nomer for us changed many times in our academic careers.

Eventually, we went off to high school. He went to the North Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Math. He had that easy savvy that allowed the “smart” kids to get ahead quickly in North Carolina in the early eighties, as did I. I remember when I realized I had to study in college and how foreign a concept that was for me. Sasha got thrown out of Governor’s School for manufacturing LSD in his dorm room and selling it. After that we fell out of each other’s lives. I heard stories now and then, but did not really follow his life that much. I was getting into theater, and that took too much of my time. I was too selfish to notice that I was turning away from a lot of the things that maybe should have been important.

We occasionally found each other here and there for the next couple of decades. He came to my wedding. He wandered through New York when I lived there. I heard news from my folks here and there, a couple of kids, a move to Alaska. When he came through New York that time, we had a couple of beers. He was a member of chapter 320 of the Laborer’s Union of North America, digging ditches in the summer, and saving money so that he could travel in the winter. We went to my brother-in-law’s birthday party where there was a belly dancer. Someone took a photo of him sitting on a bench smiling. That was the last I heard of him, maybe in 2003 or 04.

Last night my dad called me and told me that a friend of the family had called and left a message that Sasha had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Portland, Oregon. Since then a facebook friend sent me a link to an article in the paper saying that Sasha Clapper, age 36, died in a motorcycle crash at 1.15 am. The person who called 911 said that it appeared the motorcycle was speeding.

The thing is that I have not known him well for twenty years, really. He may have been a saint. He may have been the opposite. I would not know. Here is what I know: He had two kids. He was a person making his way in the world like the rest of us. He is gone, and that is irreparable. This is where I think a lot about how I regret losing touch with someone who was once so important to me. And where I hope he is resting easy, wherever he is. Here is an obituary by someone who has known him more recently:

Sasha McCarthy Clapper1/22/1973-4/25/2009
Sasha McCarthy Clapper died early Saturday, April 25th, 2009, from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.Sasha was born on January 22nd, 1973, in Columbia, South Carolina and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He attended the North Carolina School of Math and Science and Reed College prior to dedicating his life to adventure. Sasha traveled widely, visiting nearly every continent and all the islands in between. He cross-country skied to the North Pole and rode a camel in the Sahara Desert in full motorcycle leathers. However he considered Portland his home, and had recently returned there after seven years in Alaska. Sasha was passionate about the environment and was currently pursuing an engineering degree in renewable energy at the Oregon Institute of Technology. He loved bicycles, motorcycles, windmills, fireworks, neck tattoos and rock’n’roll (especially ZZ Top). “His mental state was totally related to the working condition of his vehicles,” says girlfriend Sophia La Valley. Sasha was known to express righteous indignation whenever a bar—no matter how fancy—did not stock Old Crow bourbon; he idolized the humble potato—calling it the quintessential food, spoke endlessly of his two treasured daughters, and took darn good care of his friends. The heavily-tattooed vegetarian heartthrob was adored far and wide by both men and women. His big heart, goofy grin and maniacal chuckle will be desperately missed.Sasha is survived by his parents, Jim and Debbie Clapper of Nashville, Tennessee; a brother, Evan Clapper of Moab, Utah; two daughters, Aria Watkins of Carolina Beach, North Carolina and Stella Speakman of York Beach, Maine; his girlfriend, Sophia La Valley of Portland; and several thousand close friends.A private memorial service will be held on Wednesday, April 29th, followed by an open reception and celebration of Sasha’s life from 5-8 p.m. at Plan B, 1305 S.E. 8th Avenue, Portland. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the Community Cycling Center, 1700 N.E. Alberta St., Portland, 97211. Tax I.D.: # 931127186. Condolences may be sent to 3826 Brighton Road, Nashville, Tennessee, 27205.

craft part ii

2009-04-25T12:23:00.005-04:00

spent some time last night with an artisan who works in a very different medium than I do. Mike Brusso is somewhat shorter than me, late twenties to early thirties, with black hair that stands straight up off of his head. Above an unshaven chin is a pair of thick black glasses, similar to the ones that I wear. He was wearing a black t-shirt that had a picture of a circle on it, under which it said “You know, for kids,” a reference to a Cohen brothers movie called “Hudsucker Proxy.” On his neck, above the t-shirt collar, on the right side is a tattoo of an upside-down horseshoe with a banner that says “Trying.” On the left is a tattoo of an old style butterfly. The right knuckles are tattooed with the word “coca” and the left knuckles with “cola.”

Mike Brusso is, as you may have guessed, a tattoo artist. I was there to “get some work done.”

As a craft, tattooing fascinates me. It is equal parts artistry and technical understanding. It takes the skills of a graphic artist, illustrator, painter and sculptor, but also requires a historical knowledge as well as the ability to maintain and use tools, and to understand the different qualities of the inks and how they will age. Every tattoo artist understands these things (and many more) to varying degrees and practices them to varying degrees. Obviously, there is just as much range of skill and ability in the world of tattooing as there is in every other craft. I was recently in a tattoo studio I happened to be near and, poking through the portfolio just for kicks, was appalled at what I saw. It is certainly possible for a tattooer to be insensitive to the shape of the body, disrespectful of imagery, and garish and thoughtless with regard to color. Those are folk to shy away from.

Brusso is on the other end of that spectrum.

Many of you are familiar with the process of receiving a tattoo. Some of the following may be over-explanatory for you, bear with me. The work that I was getting done was around a tattoo I already have, a banner that bears my favorite Mark Twain quote. I was getting a traditional style swallow holding the banner in its beak, that would balance out the swallow on my left shoulder, and then some flowers, et c. to fill out around the banner. Nothing too huge, but something that I have been wanting to get, and a way for me to document having lived in Providence for a couple of years. The thing that made this complicated was the fact that the new swallow had to balance an existing one on the other side of my body.

If it seems strange for me to say that a tattoo artist has to have the skills of a sculptor, consider the human body. It is an incredibly complex assemblage of planes and angles, intersecting curves and forms. We think of the human body as symmetrical, which, to a certain extent, it is. When you get down to it, though, it is not rigidly symmetrical in the way that a manufactured object can be. There is an art school project in which you take a photo of your face, cut it in half, trace half of it on tracing paper, and flip it over. The point, of course, is to demonstrate the assymetricality of the human face. The result looks an awful lot like a person, but there is something that is a little bit off, a little wrong, because it is too rigidly symmetrical. The rest of the body is like that too. We stand in ways and use our bodies in ways that make subtle but very present differences between our right and left sides.

Mike printed out what is called a stencil (which transfers the design onto the skin) and cut it out. He wet my shoulder with soapy water, applied the stencil, and stepped back, looking from shoulder to shoulder to check the placement. He squinted, and then reached forward and pushed down on my left shoulder, stepping back and squinting again. It was like watching the sushi chef in my previous post examine the hunk of tuna. I was watching an artisan at work.

“You stand with your left shoulder higher than your right,” he said. I did not know this. “Stand normally.” I tried. He shook his head and wiped off the stencil. With his right index finger he located the very front of the ball at the top of my left humerus, then located the front of the top of my right humerus with the other hand, sighting back and forth. He re-applied the stencil. I was in his shoes recently, laying out pieces of jewelry on a slice of long leaf pine, moving shapes around and flipping them so that the grain would be shown at its best.
It took seven tries to get the placement right. A little up, a little down, a little more forward. Time well spent, as once the decision is made, it is made. Like cutting into a piece of tuna, or making the first cut into a piece of wood. As long as it is just drawn lines it can be changed and changed, but once the needle is involved, it is there for good. Each time he would look at it, squint a little (a trick that my undergrad painting teacher taught me that I still use), and move left and right to see how things balanced.

Finally it was placed to his satisfaction. It was interesting to watch this process as the client instead of the maker. I am used to this kind of contemplation from the maker’s end, of course, but to see it from the other side made me appreciate the end product that much more. This was not something copied out of a book and slapped on the skin, inked in and forgotten. Even though this was not some glamorous tattoo on a rock star or in front of a TV camera or shown in a magazine it is still a tattoo. It is his work. It needed to be right.

I have written before about Bill Beadle. He has passed now, but he was one of those people who taught me things when I was too young to know I was being taught. We were working together on a set piece once years ago, I was probably fifteen or sixteen, and I wanted to get finished with it so that I could go outside and smoke cigarettes with the cool kids. I slapped a piece of plywood onto the scenic unit and said “there, that’s good enough.” “For who?” he asked. “No one will ever see this, it doesn’t matter.” “No one may see it,” he said, “but you will know that it is there.” It is an exchange that has stayed with me. Even when I do take shortcuts, even now twenty years later, I remember him saying that to me.

Once the stencil was properly placed, Mike drew in some flowers and the banner and we got started. The first thing that gets done in most tattoos (especially if they are “old-timey” which all of mine are) is the linework. A fine black outline goes around all of the shapes. This part tends not to hurt too much because you are so pumped about the process and full of beer and adrenaline. Fascinating to watch. The tattoo machine hums and the needle moves in and out of the skin, leaving a fine black line of ink and a slightly raised welt. Some ink pools on top of the skin, and gets wiped away with a paper towel, leaving the sharp line behind, the beginning of a piece that will be, as one of my favorite tattoo artists has on his business card “with you for life.”

The linework took about 40 minutes and looked like this when it was finished.

Now it was time for the shading. Brusso took up another machine that had been loaded with a shading needle, which looks like a bundle of three or five or (for a really big area) seven needles. This is where knowledge of the tools comes into play, knowing which needles are appropriate, and which tattoo machines handle which types of needles the best. Mike Drexler, who did the RISD pin up tattoo on my leg, actually has a side business making tattoo machines. These are custom machines made by hand and sold directly to clients. Not unlike what I do. We have had a couple of really interesting conversations about making tools, about enabling artists and makers to ply their trade with the fruits of our labor.

The first shading is black ink, and the basic idea is that the tattoo should look finished after the shading is done. Here is a photo after the shading on my piece was finished. Looks pretty good…

Now for the color. We were moving into hour 2 of the sitting, and now the adrenaline is wearing off. The piece starts to burn a little, and the continued passes with the needles start to really hurt. This is really the only scenario in my life that I get this physically close to another man, Brusso is leaning into my shoulder and turning me back and forth as he applies red and blue ink to the new parts of the scroll and pink and yellow to the flowers. There is an extreme intimacy to this act, a direct physical and emotional connection between the artist and the client. It is a connection inspired by trust, and by art, and (cheesy though it sounds) pain.

This is not a long “sit” as tattoos go. This is a small piece and a relatively easy part of the body. Lots of flesh, comparatively little discomfort. Those big back pieces you see in magazines, those can be two or three or four sittings of five or seven hours each. That is some pretty extreme discomfort, especially as the reciprocating needle moves over the places where there is nothing between skin and bone (like the vertebrae). What I experienced last night at Federal Hill Tattoo was several points below putting my finger into a table saw. Maybe closer to a burn you get from spilling scalding water on your arm. Pretty uncomfortable, but totally bearable.

As he worked, Mike and I talked about tattoos and tattoing, about art and history. He stopped at one point to pull down a couple of books of collections of old type faces taken from 19th century printed documents, as well as a reprint of an early 20th century Sears and Roebuck catalog. He showed me all of the filigree that adorned the banners and letters, and talked about how the early tattoo artists added that kind of ornament to their work because it was what they saw all around them all the time. Much the same kind of impulse that drives my design choices, a response to what I see around me. Now that kind of ornament is de riguer in tattoos, though the source is often forgotten. Like those horrible raised-panel doors in cheap kitchens, doors made of MDF that have a “panel” routed into them, even though there is not structural necessity. The aesthetic persists, but because the original reasons for the aesthetic are forgotten they seem hollow, inapplicable. Even to the uninitiated, they seem somehow “off.”

By the end of the session, I was ready to be done. This is my story with tattoos, generally. Right at the end of the session, exhausted and with raw burning skin, I just want to have a beer and not have needles jabbed into me. Then a few months or a year later I am raring to go again. The memory of the pain fades and the joy that I feel about the work grows. I love all of my tattoos. They are markers of events, of places, of important things in my life: my wife, boats I have sailed, places I have lived. When our son is born, I am sure we will both get tattoos that commemorate that event as well.

Here is a photo of the tattoo taken this morning. It is a fitting frame for the quote, and I think it came out really well. I feel fortunate to be the recipient of such artisanry and craftsmanship, and grateful to have three hours last night with someone who respects and loves history as I do, and who reveres craft and artisanry as I do.

things that take a long time

2009-04-21T08:33:00.008-04:00

the project on the bench at the moment is a gift. My sister is getting married (congratulations, Ellie and Kelsey!), and as a wedding gift I am making her and her fiancé a coffee table. The exact shape of it is a secret for now, as there are some surprises that I think I want to keep until the unveiling, but I can say that a part of it is a great big chunk of local red oak.

I have written before about South County Post and Beam, which is a post and beam building company here in the Isle of Rhodes. They are very nice, and they give me their off-cuts when they make beams. So I have kicking around the studio a couple of very big chunks of wood. Which I of course love. This particular piece is about 18” tall, and about 8” by 12”. Solid piece of wood. Weighs about thirty pounds. I have had it for a while, waiting for it to tell me what it wants to be, and now it has.

When a tree is cut down, is immediately begins to divest itself of water. The trunk of a tree, after all, exists pretty much exclusively to move water from the roots up to the leaves, and then move nutrients back down to the tree. That is what the trunk (where wood comes from) is for. I could do a whole post just about the beauty and sublime functionality of trees, but that will wait for another time. The point is, as they divest themselves of water, and as they do so, they shrink. And they change shape. So what had been a square beam now was warped and twisted, and I wanted to square it up. One edge and one face could be taken to the jointer, a big machine that does this kind of thing, but our planer will only accept 6” thick lumber. Somehow I had to cut two inches off the side of this thing in order to get it through the planer.

First I tried our big old 1912 Tannewitz band saw. Good saw, but the blade needs replacing, and that much oak was too much for it. Blue smoke started to pour out from the bottom of the work piece. Smoke, generally, is not good. Oak 1, power tools 0.

Next I took it to the table saw. The blade will only project about 3” from the table of the saw, so that was clearly not the answer, either. Oak 2, power tools 0. I knew what I had to do, of course.

I have been re-reading one of my sacred texts, “The Village Carpenter” by Walter Rose. Rose’s family had owned and operated a sawyery and woodworking shop for generations when he wrote about it in 1937. He writes incredibly eloquently about two large men using a saw between them to reduce logs to planks. Hard, sweaty, slow work. Slow but effective. The thing is, humans are not more powerful than power tools, but they are able to vary the speed and power that they have to accommodate the work piece in a way that a machine can not. That kind of approach was what was needed with this great big chunk of red oak.
On the wall of my studio hangs a rip saw (“ripping” is cutting with the grain of the wood. I also have “cross-cut” saws, which are for cutting across the grain of the wood). Well, more than one, actually, but there is one in particular that is special to me, as it is a family tool. As near as anyone can tell, it belonged to Gardner Greene, who was my great- great-grandfather. I was made in the late 19th century. Nothing special, really, not a collector piece by any means. Just a good, sturdy handsaw. Somehow it has survived the hundred-plus years and come to me in good shape, and intact.

There is a gentleman down in Cranston that is a saw sharpener. Used to be pretty easy to find a good saw sharpener. Harder, now, as saws, like so many things, are made to be used and then discarded. He is the only person in this state that I have found that does handsaws anymore. There might be others, but he is the person that I entrust my saws to. Took him old Gardner’s saw and he did a great job of setting the teeth and jointing them flat and sharpening them up until they were as good as they were the day the saw was sold. Rose writes about a saw “humming” through the wood, singing a song as it works. That is how this saw works. So I clamped the great big chunk of lumber to the bench and set to work. I happened to note the time, it was about 2.10 pm. At about 2.15, I thought I would take a photo of my progress.

Back and forth, back and forth. The saw made a tidy pile of sawdust on the far side of the workpiece. The tannin-y scent of red oak wafted out from inside the block, the smell of wood that has not ever been exposed to air. I have written before about how every wood has its own smell as you work it, and red oak (a studio mate of mine calls it “piss oak,” because the tannin smell can be very sharp and almost overpowering sometimes) always makes me think of red wine, that sharp taste that tannins in the oak aging barrels give it when you drink it. Here is where I was at 2.25pm.

Sawing and sawing. It is not about speed, this kind of work. It is about care, and about making sure that every time the saw moves forward, it is following the scribed line. It is about endurance. The wood has a lot of twist in it, and it started to grab the saw blade a little, so I rubbed paraffin on it and drove a couple of screwdrivers into the top of the block to take tension off of the blade. You can see them in this photo. At 2.35 I was here:

And here is a photo of me sawing. Well, actually, I had paused for the photo. I wanted to preserve it because of the resonance of this particular project. So it is staged, but truth to tell I was tired and wanted a break.

Finally, finally, the off-cut fell away, I was able to run the block through the planer, and get it very smooth and very square. It will likely not stay that way, but so it is for now. Here it is at 2.45pm, roughly a half hour of near continuous work after I started. Boy, were my arms tired. I was winded. And I had only cut through a foot and a half. Imagine using this method to reduce a whole tree to planks.

And here is a shot of the top of the block, showing the beautiful growth rings. Each ring, of course, happened over a year. I can count 70 years, from the pith (that is the center of all the rings, and is actually the sapling that this tree started from) to the far corner. And, of course, the tree was older yet than that, when it was felled. It was a baby before World War I. Maybe even before the dawn of the last century. It was a callow youth when Gardner Greene bought the handsaw I used on it today. It grew slowly and patiently through wars and unrest, through financial boom and bust. What is money to an oak tree? It grew as my grandparents were born, and as my parents were born. It was a good, sturdy tree when the first human footprint was made on the moon. It was older than I will be when I pass when I was born.

Now it will be part of a piece of furniture that my sister’s family will hand down to their children and their grandchildren. It will be with them through the many good times and the occasional bad. It can be handed down and used and loved for many years, and I hope that when Ellie and Kelsey and Karen and I are just faces in a yellowed photograph that that table will still be in some descendant’s home, and that Gardner’s saw will be hanging on some unknown wall, sharpened and ready for use when available modern technology is not able to rise to the challenge.

Whoever uses the saw then will be sawing with me today, just as today I was sawing with my father in the forties when he was young, and just as I was sawing with Gardner when he was doing the same thing. We are linked through time by family, by tradition, by labor, and by our impulse as makers. I am incredibly proud to stand in that line.

craft

2009-04-15T22:08:00.003-04:00

went for dinner tonight to my favorite local sushi restaurant. As I sat there letting the toro melt on my tongue, a worker emerged from the kitchen with a vacuum package of tuna and handed it off to the second-in-command sushi chef. He put it on his cutting-board, and after quickly removing the plastic wrapping, stood and contemplated it for a moment. Pretty much the way that I look at an old chunk of wood when I first meet it.

He spun it around, and turned it over, and looked at it again, weighing the options and the responsibilities. Then he got out a sharpening stone and took a few swipes with his knife.

Well, hell, I thought. I know what he is doing, absolutely.

With his left hand he lifted the beautiful deep red piece of meat over once, and then again. He rotated it end for end. He held his knife against it and then stood back. I had this very same moment this morning with a complicated piece of white oak. There is a moment of thinking “this is too much. I can not cut into this, it is perfect as it is.” Then “Well, I have to cut into this. It is my job.” A catching of the breath, diving in. He took a long lateral cut with his knife. Smooth, precise, quick, that oh-so-Japanese quality of speed and precision that is so prised in that culture, a quick, perfect movement that you miss completely if you aren’t watching.

The first cut is the hardest.

Once the maker has committed, every subsequent choice is easier. The tuna spun and flipped. He leaned in to check the grain, flipped the piece to check his instinct, and then made another long cut. Deep red fillets started to pile up, each showing the grain of the muscle perfectly, each one destined to be many pieces of melt-in-your-mouth perfect toro. Captivating to watch. Every cut was considered and quick. With every cut another piece of tuna landed on the cutting board. Every piece made me think of an old friend that sailed from South Africa to Brazil, and how he talked about trailing a fishing line and catching tuna, and having sushi that had been alive five minutes ago, and how I would never have that experience. I also realized that if I was ever in that situation I would be completely lost as to how to reduce that living thing to food.

Watching this master ply his craft was soothing and exhilarating. There is always that moment when you watch someone do their thing well when you think “well how hard can that be? Looks pretty straight forward.” I often feel this when watching a good musician. Then I go home and realize how completely flummoxed I am. This was the same way, the ease that this man felt was infectious, making me think I should get some tuna and give it a shot myself, but having a complete realization that I would never be able to do what he does, not with the ease and surety that he does it.

I resigned myself to eating the product of his labor, in the way that others enjoy the product of my labor. We each of us have a calling, and we each of should be comfortable in that. I am pretty glad that I get to do what I do, and pretty grateful when I get to watch someone else fulfill their purpose.

ezekiel saw the wheel

2009-04-11T10:30:00.002-04:00

barreling along the New York Throughway, listening to a mix cd that my sister made a few years back, something happened. I was driving through one of those cuts in a hillside, the ones where you can see the layers of rock, a snapshot of millions of years, a history written in schist and quartz pressed and lifted and pressed again, and only a comparative nanosecond ago blasted apart by insects that felt a need to lay a ribbon of asphalt just there.

These strata became threads in a tapestry, and then I realized that I am a thread, too, and then I was almost outside of myself, looking back at myself as a thread in this tapestry, my beating heart woven into the warp and my arms and legs stretching out as weft, reaching back, back, back, woven in with growth rings of trees and layers of rock, woven in with water wheels spinning wet around and around and with the lines hauling up the square sail on a trireme, woven in with hands and arms painting massive animals on cave walls and chipping flint arrowheads. Then I looked forward and saw my arms woven with Karen’s and with the arms of our son, and the thread weaving forward and forward through time that we can not know, to a time when our son is a great- great- grandfather, a time when we are impossibly far back, yellowed photographs that no-one really believes.

As I zoomed back and back and back, I saw the whole tapestry, stretching up and down and left and right, on and on and on beyond my ability to see, and lost my self in it, and lost everything that I could recognize, and just saw this massive, multi-colored tapestry that is all of us, those that have been, and we who are now, and those that will come, all here, all at the same time, and it was breathtaking.

In a flash it was gone, and I was barreling along the New York Throughway, listening to a mix cd that my sister made a few years back, driving through one of those cuts in a hillside. Tears were running down my face and it was hard to catch my breath. It has taken me much longer to write about this than it took for it to happen. It has taken you much longer to read this than it took for it to happen. It all was there in between two beats of a song. In between two breaths. But it was real, I felt it and saw it and am still trying to figure out why.

I am not a terribly religious person. If I was, I would describe it as a vision, in the manner of Old Testament prophets. I might call it a moment of clarity, a moment of understanding. I still feel it, a little, a day later. Like a bruise, sort of, but a bruise somewhere in my heart or (dare I say it) soul.

I know and believe that our knowledge of and respect for our history is the best possible guide for moving forward. I know that we are all connected and that we all have a deep and abiding responsibility to every other thread in that tapestry. I know that I will never be able to comprehend how far-reaching my choices can be, and that my life needs to be lived in awareness of all of this. I am not sure what to do with this moment, this vision. I am still working it out. But I am honored that I saw what I saw.

Ezekiel saw the wheel
Way up in the middle of the air.

on the bench just now

2009-04-06T07:43:00.006-04:00

i have been turning over a new project, lately. With babies on the brain, I have been surfing baby sites, as one does, and have been blown away by the truckloads of plastic crap that are offered up for sale. Not only is it offered up, there is the implication that if you do not own every last sickly-sweet petroleum-based product, you are a Bad Parent that clearly does not care a Single Hoot for the Safety, Well-Being, or Proper Development of your child, and probably would fricassee it at the first possible opportunity, you heartless, penny-pinching, terrible soul.

There never seems to be mention on any of these sites about phthalates, or the studies being done about their effects on developing nervous systems. Nor is there any mention of the studies that have been done about MDF and particle board and the off-gassing that comes from the formaldehyde-urea resin in these and similar products that not only does quantifiable harm to developing nervous systems, but even to adult systems. Nope, just an exhortation to buy the plastic high chair, the plastic bathtub, the particle-board changing table.

Christ.

So, as I say, I have started on a new project. It started with a high chair, which of course we “need.” It seems to be beside the point that for about 200,000 years the concept of a chair was unknown, let alone a high chair. It is really only in the last 4500 years or so that purpose built objects have existed for sitting on, let alone “high” ones for babies. There is not even reliable evidence of this furniture type until about 200 years ago, which, let’s be honest, is WAY after humans started having babies. Nonetheless, we “need” a high chair, or again, we are Bad Parents. So, okay, that I can make. I can even make it in a way that I like, that makes sense.

A woman in my yoga class came up to visit the studio a couple of weeks ago, and said a lot of very nice things, and as she was leaving said that she had a furniture object that had been in her family for quite a while that I might like and she would bring it in. Apparently someone in her family had made it years ago, and many and many a cousin has used it, and the food stains and pencil marks bear out that story (not that I would doubt her).

Well, goodness. Did I ever like it. Her generosity with this family artifact has been a real gift, and has given me a great project.

Briefly, it is a high chair that has a built in rocking horse and desk. The photos below make more sense of this thing than I can with words. It is exactly the kind of thing that appeals to me: Concise, straightforward, and rife with opportunities to play with shape and form. It becomes several things, it has a variety of uses, and it is small enough to be stowed until the next user needs it.

I played around with the shape for quite a while. The lovely thing about being in the studio that I am in is that there are a lot of folk around who have great ideas and opinions. So we have been going back and forth about it for a couple of weeks now, and the prototyping process has maybe gotten a little out of hand, but it has been fun. Today I worked on the final touch, which was the identity of the rocker part. The original had a horse, which was a choice that made a lot of sense. But then, I have never been a horse person, particularly, so the idea of putting a horse silhouette in the piece did not particularly resonate with me.

The first candidate was a lion. It seemed like a good strong image, and one that resonates with so many memories from my childhood. The Chronicles of Narnia affected me so profoundly that I spent years checking every closet I passed in the hopes that the back would open up into another world. Never happened, but not for lack of trying. Though conceptually apropos, it turns out that it is tough to make a silhouette of a lion that does not look sort of like Albert Einstein. And I do not want to paint details on any of this, I want it (like the original) to be clean and without too much cutesy adornment.

The next shape that I tried was a mermaid. An homage to ship figureheads, as well as a reference to a tattoo I got a few years back, I thought it would be fun to have a rocking mermaid. It took a while for the idea that my son riding a mermaid might be pretty dirty to work it’s way through my thick skull. Oh. Right. Maybe he should not ride a mermaid…

Finally I have settled on a goat. Goats are fun and funny. They are kid-sized. They are easy to identify. I have many a memory of childhood petting zoos, of cautiously holding out handfuls of alfalfa pellets through wire fences at goats, fearful of their perfect little teeth and exhilarated when the gently picked the pellets out of my grubby little hand. I have a particular memory of being a little older, seven maybe, and being at the Nature Science Center with my mom and seeing a baby goat, only a couple of weeks old, gangly and timid, following its mother around with those clumsy steps particular to hooved infant animals. In retrospect, I think I identified with that baby goat because I felt so similar in school, clumsy and awkward, a feeling that would not evaporate for a long time. Goat it is.

I am going to make my “high-brid chairs” out of Baltic birch plywood, which is very white and clean. I think I am going to paint the edges blue and sand them back so that the plys show, acknowledging the material, but bringing some color into the piece. Clean and simple, with just a clear lacquer coat on top. I am not particularly keen on lacquer, it is pretty VOC-heavy, but it is good and hard, and will withstand years of the kind of hard use that babies can subject it to.

The prototype is almost finished as you can see. I am off to sunny Syracuse again tomorrow, but plan to start on the final versions next week when I am back. I am going to start with two, one for us and one for Karen’s sister and her husband, who are also having a baby. And we can hand them off to other siblings when our kids to big for them, and take them back when we have kids again, weaving these clever little furniture objects into the warp and weft of our families.

nails

2009-03-26T19:26:00.002-04:00

so i was thinking about nails. Not the kind on your fingers, but the kind you hold things together with. Specifically, I was thinking about trunnels. "Trunnel" is a colloquial contraction of "tree nail," which is the name that was given to the wooden pegs that used to be pounded into post-and-beam houses to hold them together. They were of two varieties, either split out square from a tree branch or trunk, or formed round. The square variety used to be pounded into a drilled hole (which was round, of course), and the parts that did not fit sheared off, so that the trunnel completely filled the round hole. This is where the phrase "square peg in a round hole" came from. It's modern meaning is something that dos not fit, that is in the wrong place. The original application, however was using a context (the round hole) to make an existing situation(square peg) applicable. I like that idea more, myself.

Anyway, tonight I was thinking about trunnels. A couple of summers ago I was with a friend in a place that is the kind of place that people make things like trunnels. And there was this elderly gentleman sitting with a pile of "billets," which are the square pieces that have been split out of the tree, and a circular chisel, and passersby could try their hand at making a trunnel. Interesting to watch. My friend knew this guy, and he chatted for a minute and then sat down to pound a billet through the circular steel hole. Tap tap tap. Quiet little hits, almost timid. Took a while. eventually, a perfectly round trunnel fell out of the bottom. I was watching him thinking "man, you could really send that through with a couple of good hits. Why is he holding back?"

He looked at me and offered me a turn. True to form, I lined up my billet, and raised the mallet.

WHANG WHANG WHANG!!!!

Out of the bottom falls a sort-of-trunnel, rounded on one side, but only rounded on the other for an inch or so, and square the rest of the way up. My friend looks at me and says, "No, you need to tap it through, so that you can alter how you hit it, depending on it's angle as it goes through."

Oh.

So I was thinking about this today. About how misguided one's actions can be if one does not stop to fully grasp the nuances of a situation. I need a lot of reminding in this regard.