music and community

not sure you have any reason to know Steve Wishnevsky.  I sure do, he has been a part of my life in various ways for about twenty years or so now.  Ex-hippie, musician, maker, grump, writer, community builder, crusty old fart that he is, he helped shape who I am pretty profoundly.  I met him in the early ‘90’s in Winston-Salem at a jam session that he was running.

I had only recently figured out that the long skinny end of a guitar went in my left hand and the big round part went against my body on the right.  It was through the extreme patience of Wish and the community of musicians at the weekly jam session at a little restaurant (now long gone to make way for a freeway overpass) called the Rose and Thistle that I slowly started to figure out that a guitar might be used as something other than a prop to attract young ladies, it might be used to, you know, make actual music that some people might even want to listen to.  This was a revelation to my twenty-year-old self.

I have played at a lot of jam sessions over the last couple of decades.  I have played in front of people as well, alone or with bands, as a regular member or as a guest, and I have learned a lot from a lot of people, but it was the initial welcome into the world of making music that Wish and the folk at that jam session extended that made it possible.  It remains to this day my favorite way to play music.  That is, with other people also playing, playing to and for and at each other all at once, with many voices rising and many hands working, joyously creating together something that is so much more grand than the sum of its parts and that transcends music and the act of making music and becomes the act of creating community.

Among the things that Wish makes and has made for much of his life is musical instruments.  Some of them are pretty strange, and they all bear the mark of a mind that, as we used to say down where I grew up, “ain’t quite right.”  In this case, Wish ain’t right in all of the best ways.  He experiments with woods that most luthiers would turn up their nose at.  He makes odd contraptions like harp guitars with experimental tunings or ten-string classical guitars.  I would not even know how to play most of what he makes, to be honest.

For the holiday this past winter I wanted to get a Wishnevsky guitar.  I have been making a lot of cigar-box guitars with a tenor scale, and have been getting pretty comfortable playing at that size, and I wanted a “real” guitar that had that scale to play around with.  One of the things that Wish has been doing a lot lately (well, for a long time, really, but lately I have been more aware of it) is re-using things that otherwise might not have much of a life left in them.  Of course this resonates with me.  He has also been getting locally felled wood for his instruments.  So the proposition that I could own a guitar made of wood from my hometown by a maker who lived in my hometown proved too irresistible a draw for me to pass up.  It finally arrived this past week, and it looks like this:

The back is just crazy, wormy box elder, which is not a wood one would typically use to make a guitar.  I am sure glad that he did, though.  It looks like hot rod flames drawn by fungus that get in to the tree, spreading the red pigment that can be typical in box elder.  In time this redness will fade, which means that the guitar itself will change identities visually as it ages, in the same way that all guitars change tonally as they age and the cells of the wood get older and more mellow.

The top of the guitar is made of cedar salvaged from the firewood pile and has the high-contrast flecks of red and white that mark red cedar.  The fingerboard is dogwood, a very hard wood that makes me think about climbing the twisting dogwood branches in my yard as a youth.  The dogwoods were the most accessible trees for a young climber, low to the ground with a lot of branches of a size that was good for small hands.  They provided a different kind of lesson as I grew, eventually occasionally breaking beneath my weight and teaching me about gravity and pain and the need to respect the natural limits of trees and people alike.

Needless to say I have been really enjoying playing this guitar, and I look forward to playing it with others in the very near future.  When I play it I am making music with my hometown and my childhood.  The trees that gave their lives to make this instrument grew up breathing the same air that I did, they felt the same sultry heat of North Carolina summers as I did, they absorbed the same sunlight as me.  I feel connected to this instrument immediately, and it is a real joy to play.

In an important way this is what powers me.  This idea that we can be a community of makers, that we can make what we make in a way that is heavy with meaning and that builds community and uses objects or music or movement or even just a way of thinking to create ties that are positive and supportive helps me get out of bed every day.  Most of the people who have been important to me in my life over the years have been community builders each in their own way, and this idea that together we can make the world better is a primary motivating force in my life.

It is a pretty fortunate place to habit.  I am thankful.

Celebrations

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.

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.

coming and going

i have been doing a lot of traveling back and forth from Syracuse, New York lately. There are some pretty exciting things happening over there, with regards to design education and how it is carried out. They also have an inspiring commitment to sustainable practices with regards to design, and seem to be embracing our responsibilities as designers and makers and our abilities to positively affect consumer culture for whom we are designing and making objects. There have been some very good conversations, and, as I have been writing, they are not only tolerating my relentless exuberance with regards to the water wheel, they are actively encouraging me. It has been fun.

The drive out there has started to get familiar in a comforting way. It takes me through the Berkshires, which are beautiful, of course. This past winter there was a huge storm, though, and the highway is lined with trees, some of which are pretty venerable for second- or third-growth trees, that got snapped like matchsticks. They stand broken sentinel along I 90, mute evidence that the forces of nature are as violent as they are benevolent. The beauty of the vistas glimpsed through the trunks contrasts with the melancholy of these broken giants in a way that is profoundly touching.

Coming down out of the mountains, 90 follows the Erie Canal for quite a while. I drive by Lock 14 and then Lock 15, then 16, before the Canal winds away for a while. It eventually meanders back, wide and flat and pregnant with stories and traditions. I have gotten into the habit of listening to Tom Waits as I cruise along the Canal, hurtling along at a rate that was unthinkable when the ditch was cut. Something about the poetry of his lyrics (especially Rain Dogs) and the jangly, chaotic music seems to fit nicely with the ghosts of the bargemen plying the water outside the window.

Just before I get into Syracuse, the drive is through flat land populated by callow young trees, all slim and straight and growing on land that is free for the most part of underbrush so that they make a staccato picture of lines picked out by the sunlight. When there was snow on the ground, these black lines were grounded in a white field, which enhanced the straightness and blackness of the trunks so that they looked more like a stage set than a forest.

Also along this drive here and there are train tracks, many of which are still used, which thrills me. I love trains. In addition to being a more sustainable way to move stuff around (still fossil fuels, of course, but more efficient, at least), they are so romantic and such an icon of American History and such a provider of so many of the songs and stories that I love that my heart beats a little faster whenever I see them rolling ponderously along.

This last visit, we were driving around Syracuse with a friend who is a brilliant photographer. He was taking photos for a publication that is being put out by the interdisciplinary design center that I am working for, and we came upon some rusted out boxcars sitting on a siding. It is impossible for me to help myself, I got out of the car and went down and started running my hand over the huge couplings and the brake rods and the door locks. Such an eloquent contraption, a box car. Beautiful in its decrepitude, a wholly American version of wabi-sabi, the Japanese idea of beauty in decay.

The miles and miles on these old cars, the places that they have been and will go, the hands that built them, the hands that loaded them, the people who have climbed into them and have coupled them together and unloaded them on the other end, who sprayed graffiti on the outside, the power of all of those lives colliding in this one object washed over me. For a minute, it was hard to breathe, even, swept off by the weight of the pictures in my head.

I looked down at the gravel at my feet. I love the road bed of train tracks. It tends to have captivating detritus, bits of iron and rusted steel, massively strong tie rods impossibly twisted into knots, the kind of stuff that makes me swoon. I found some good bits of junk, but there was something more interesting: coal. This particular bed was littered with coal. It must be coal that fell out of hoppers coming from a mine, somewhere, as it is not likely that it is still lying there from the days of the coal-fed steam engines. It put me in mind of the Utah Phillips lyric “When I was just a kid/living by the tracks/us kids would gather up the coal/in a great big gunny sack,” relating in verse a reality that was known everywhere there were train tracks at a certain period, and where money was often scarce. Coal that fell from the tenders would be gathered up to be burned in the coal ovens that wer so ubiquitous then. On the ground around my feet was enough coal to heat a house for a whole winter. I picked up one piece and kept it. I am looking at it now, the deep glimmering black remains of thousands-of-years-dead plant or animal life, that we still depend on for so much of the power the we use to do things like run this computer. Seems so old fashioned, that we should be so dependant on coal still, after all of these years, and after all that we have learned.

And here I am, back around to the water wheel.

sudden thoughts

i feel like ebenzer scrooge. Right at the end, when he wakes up and it is Christmas morning and he is giggling and spinning around and cries out "I am as giddy as a schoolboy!" That Scrooge, that is how I feel.

See, I had this sudden realisation, and boy, it has me all fluttery inside.

I have been working for Syracuse University, setting up a wood, metal, and plastics shop for them. I have been doing layout drawings and talking to architects about dust collection. I have been inventorying tools in existing shops and talking to faculty members about what kind of usage these shops get and about what kind of usage the new shop might get. It has been fun, in a geeky-tool-using kind of way. I mean, I am having conversations about the role of making in a design curriculum, and about its place in the design process, and these folk are really listening to me when I talk about how important I think it is to have the ability to teach making in a well appointed shop. There does not seem to be a tradition of that, here, and it sounds like they want to change that a little bit. That is not the sudden realisation.

The building that the new shop is going in to is called the Warehouse. It is not on Main Campus, it is downtown. Isn't that a nice photo of it all lit up? It is what it sounds like, an old warehouse that has had a lot of work done to it and is now going to house all of the Design programs at Syracuse University. Interior Design, Industrial Design, Communications Design, all of it. All under one roof, with a wood and metals shop on the first floor and a plastics shop and a spray booth in the basement. This is all just background. It is not the sudden realisation.

So in recent conversations I had been talking about putting a Vertical Wind Air Turbine on the roof to run the shop with. Seems like the wiring would support it, and there is something undeniably sexy about running a TIG welder off of air power, you have to admit. The problem with VWAT's, and, indeed, with air power in general, is that if there is no wind, there is no power. So maintaining a steady stream of juice to the shop or the building is hard. There are a lot of really smart people working on this. And we could set up some kind of augmented power plan, but that is sooo not as cool as saying "Yeah, we get all the power for our shops from the wind." The folks here are open to the idea of a VWAT on the roof, but they want to wait until the technology is all figured out, which is still a ways off. There are, in fact, a couple of buildings on campus already with versions of VWAT's on the roof, so the University is definitely open to the idea. This was not the sudden realisation either.

What you can not see in the lovely promotional photo above is that on the side of the building there with all of the windows runs the Erie Canal. I mean THE Erie Canal. Like "I've got a mule and her name is Sal." That one. The water road that opened the American Middle West and made Chicago what it is and made it possible for the Nation's Breadbasket to be built into what it is (even though we now realise, of course, that industrial farms like that are rife with problems but since this has nothing to do with my sudden realisation we will talk about that another time, maybe).

The Erie Canal. I had been staring out the window at it a couple of days ago, watching the water rushing along, looking at the fine lace of ice along its edges and thinking about what it must have been like to ply that water in flat bottomed barges from the mighty Hudson all the way to Buffalo. I know very little about the Canal, really, and am excited to do a little research.

In 1993, I think, the summer, I was in college in North Carolina. A friend there had been working for Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY, and got me a summer job in the prop shop there, making props for the summer season and then being on the running crew back stage. I was not very good at it, I now realise, and a lot of people were very patient with me for which I am somewhat belatedly thankful.

I did a lot of rock climbing back then, and a friend and I used to drive about 45 minutes to Little Falls NY (I think, memories are a little hazy) which had a nice little wall that we spent a lot of time climbing around on. This is a photo of me doing that. Anyway, it was right on Lock 17, which at 40 feet high is the tallest lock on the canal. If you have ever been on the fourth floor of a building and looked out the window, that is what we are talking about here. Your feet would be wet. Pretty tall. I remember watching the boats slowly slowly rise up from way down below as we were resting or setting up a new climb. The wonder of that achievement was lost on my callow little mind. I would like to revisit that lock with a slightly more open prespective. One day I shall have to.

So I was standing in the Warehouse in Syracuse, looking at the Canal and thinking about it and about Glimmerglass, and my friend Kate who got me the job there, and watching the water run, and that is when I had my realisation. You know what it is by now of course. It was that waiting for new technology to be developed makes so much less sense than using technology that we have understood and harnessed for hundreds of years.

Water power. I want to run the shop off of water power.

The building is right smack on the Canal. The water is not frozen. It seems to constantly run. All it would take is a generator of an appropriate size and a hole in the side of the building. It is completely sustainable. It is brilliant. It is simple. There is no good reason not to do it.

I mean, I am sure there are a lot of reasons not to do it, and I am going to have to do a lot of convincing, but damnit am I excited. We are going to run a 21st century wood and metal and plastics shop off 500 year old technology that we put into a monument to 19th century ingenuity.

The poetry of the whole thing just knocks me right out of my socks.

I am trying not to brag too much. I know it is unbecoming. But it is so rare that I have an idea that feels this right and this good and seems this achievable that I have decided to let myself revel in it for a little bit.

geography

a friend of mine sent me an email with the phrase "if geography allowed." It was such a nice turn of phrase that it got me to thinking about what I would do and where I would go if geography allowed.


Sequoia National Forest. Sometime soon I need to go and stand in the presence of trees that are five hundred years old. Trees that were saplings when Europeans first washed up on our shores. Trees that were already hundreds of years old when my grandfather was born. I think I need to stand among them for a little while and see what they have to say in person.

The "Floating Torii" gate at Itsukushima Shrine in Japan. And other Japanese temples, of course. It is such a different tradition of timber framing than the one that I know here. It must be magical to stand next to one of these massive structures. The woodworking tradition that goes into them resonates with me almost as much as the oone that I am heir to.

While in Japan, I would visit a Minka House. Again, a different style of timber framing, and the jointery is really amazing. I have been looking at this stuff in books for so long, but to be there in person, to smell the wood, that would be amazing.

Pisgah National Forest. After our walk in the woods recently, I am really itching to get back to my old stomping ground. The mountains up here are so similar (they are the same mountains after all) that it made me really homesick for the stretch of them that I used to walk in.

New Zealand. I hear it is just incredible. I always like to quote Douglas Adams, "The scenery in New Zealand makes one want to break into spontaneous applause." I happen to know someone who lived there for a while, and the reports are pretty good.

Of course sailing on the Lettie. Every time I see photos of her latest exploits, it makes me jealous. She is tied up in New York right now, but there are so many times I wish I could jsut transport myself to wherever she is and sit on the cross trees and listen to her sails full of wind.

This is a short list. There are more. Perhaps this will be a running exercise. It is fun to take these little trips in my mind, trips that I would take if geography allowed.

a walk in the woods

we went for a nice walk in the Berkshires this weekend.It has been a while since we went walking around in the woods. Much too long, in fact, given how much we both enjoy it.

It was a cool, crisp morning full of sunshine, with that bite in the air that says that it is not winter, yet, but it sure will be soon. The shadows of the trees were etched in frost on the ground, and as the Earth turned and the shadows moved their ghosts were still on the grass in spiky white crystals that melted slowly in the morning sun.

We started up through a meadow and then were in the woods, following an old rusty barbed-wire fence that marked the edge of some long-gone farmer's property. By and by we came to some persimmon and crabapple trees along that fence. I imagined the farmer's family planted them as little saplings and nurtured until they grew fruit big enough to make into jellies and put up for the long winters. Now they continue to make fruit, though only the deer and birds and squirrels enjoy the harvest, these days. Huge old twisted apple trees like those always make me think of Prince Caspian, and how the apple trees at Cair Paravel must have looked when the children returned after all those generations.

Up the hill from the fruit trees we came on the Appalachian trail. I have walked very small parts of this same trail, hundreds and hundreds of miles to the south, and could not help feeling a southerly pull standing looking at that sign. So much more impressive (or maybe poignant) somehow than an interstate that plows through hill and dale traveling the same distance. Here is a quieter highway, one that was made by people working together across vast distances to make a free and open way to walk these mountains. Down in Georgia there are folk who were on the same trail that we walked yesterday, maybe when we were on it. And in North Carolina. and up in Maine. Nice to have that company for a little bit.

The hills and woods looked almost exactly like the woods that I grew up walking in. The calling cards of the local denizens littered the forest floor, announcing the presence of the same trees that I knew as a child: oak, maple, sycamore. The smell of the cycle of birth and death and rebirth assailed our noses, that utterly healthy smell of forests and outdoors and walking in the woods. We both miss it, and know we need to do it more.

There were a few trees still hanging on, still with vibrantly colored leaves, still living in the fall for a little longer. They greeted us with gently waving arms in the bright morning sunshine, and told us to come back soon, this summer if possible. We promised we would.

Often, I look at a tree and think about the lumber that is inside it, and whether it would be nice to work, or have some great figuring or strange grain pattern. This trip, though, I was happy to just be in the presence of these trees, who are so generous about letting us occupy their space. I did not think about them and how they could enter my world, I was happy just to be in theirs. It was so calming, that shift of view. It has been a long time since I looked at a tree and did not think about it slabbed up like a corpse on my workbench, but really and truly thought "that tree looks great right where it is, and I am glad that it is there and that I can see it there."

Different ways of thinking about wood. Always something to learn.

chestnut

i love chestnut. It is just a gorgeous wood, honey brown, with big, open pores like oak but much much softer and kinder to edge tools. I have made a few projects with it, like the chairs at right. A dream to work with. Thought I would tell the story of chestnut, since it has been on my mind, lately.

In early America, chestnut made up between 15% and 50% of all hardwood stands in the Appalachian mountains. From Georgia to Maine, there were towering chestnut trees. They grew higher than a twelve story building, and the largest recorded was seventeen feet in diameter. Seventeen feet. That is you and two friends standing with your arms outstretched and your fingertips touching. Backpacking in the mountains of North Carolina I have seen stumps of chestnuts that were felled that are bigger than our old bed room in Brooklyn.

Big trees.

Because it was so plentiful, and so big, it was used for everything imaginable, siding (it is rot-resistant), beams, barrels, caskets, furniture, you name it. It isn't great for any one thing, but it is better than average for almost everything. And because it grows quickly (an inch in diameter per year in it's youth) there were more than enough to go around. In addition, the nuts were great food for pigs, which in Appalachia were often let loose to roam and forage for themselves during the summer months. And tanneries used the bark to tan leather hides.

In 1904 (the same year that the Crescent Tool company patented the adjustable, open-ended box wrench, or "Crescent Wrench") a fungus was brought into the US from somewhere in Asia. It was first noticed at the Bronx Zoo, and most people think that it came over on an exotic species that was installed there. By 1915, it had spread to Connecticut, and by 1940 almost all of the really big chestnuts had been felled. In 36 years, the tree that was once a staple material for so many industries was gone. The aftermath of the blight was wide ranging. An important source of food (for both animals and people) was lost. As all of the dead trees were cut down and made into lumber, mountain sides eroded in a big way. The tree trunks glutted the saw mills, which depressed lumber prices in areas that for the most part were already existing at near-subsistence levels. The tanning industry up in the mountains collapsed.

Chestnuts still try to grow in the mountains today, but when they reach a few inches in diameter, the blight grabs them and kills them off. Some work has been done to combat the blight, but so far nothing has really worked. The only place to get wide chestnut lumber now is by reclaiming it: it can be harvested from old floor beams and floor boards, from barn siding, and sometimes from posts and beams. And every piece now is a signifier of a different time, and a reminder of how precariously we are balanced, how easily things can collapse if a single link is removed from the chain.

Historic information in this post came from the article "Chestnut: Salvaging the Blighted Giant" by Victor Demasi