slop

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

“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.

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

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

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

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

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.