going nowhere, seeking no victory

saturday, before dinner at 900 degrees in manchester, NH—a pizza parlor with no similarities to this new york museum of pizza diversity other than the name—we saw japanese swords at the nearby currier museum of art, which also contains a stunningly difficult laminated desk by jere osgood.

The narrow view of natural farming says that it is good for the farmer to apply organic material to the soil and good to raise animals, and that this is the best and most efficient way to put nature to use. To speak in terms of personal practice, this is fine, but with this way alone, the spirit of true natural farming cannot be kept alive. This kind of narrow natural farming is analogous to the school of swordsmanship known as the one-stroke school, which seeks victory through the skillful, yet self-conscious application of technique. Modern industrial farming follows the two-stroke school, which believes that victory can be won by delivering the greatest barrage of swordstrokes. Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhere and seeks no victory.

fukuoka masanobu, one-straw revolution

more fukuoka here. context is important: the pizza would have been better had greatness not been keenly anticipated.

snow

if on a winter's night a traveler, this morning he would be a little bump in the white and smooth expanse. the mayor of new york city says BLIZZARD2013 is a good opportunity to catch up on some much-needed sleep. for some others of us, it has been a time to stretch out, guilt-free, with a good book and a hot beverage. in connection with this state of affairs, it should not go unremarked that rex stout's very first nero wolfe book, fer-de-lance, contains thrillingly specific uses of the words "myrmidon" and "excelsior." love of language is always a pleasure.

fencing

Over the years I've probably put up two dozen fences of one sort or another. And since I started from a state of ignorance which farmers' sons usually pass beyond between the ages of five and six, I have made every mistake but one that it's possible to make. I've put up a fence without bracing the corners. Strung barbwire from the bottom strand up instead of the top strand down. Put the small end of a post in the ground instead of the large. The one thing I haven't done is to use white or gray birch for posts. And there it was poetry that saved me, not common sense. Long before I thought of being a farmer, I had read most of Robert Frost, and could quote from 'Home Burial': Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build. It's not even much of an exaggeration.

noel perrin, first person rural

11/29, 8pm: fun with joints

jeremy's second speaker bailed on him, but he knows i'm always good for a disquisition on joints. so join us next monday at middlesex on mass ave in cambridge for nerdnite's november edition. come for david craft's talk about urban foraging, stay for my talk about joinery.

david craft: “city hauls: foraging for wild plants and other foodstuffs within the city limits” 

me: “fun with joints: what you probably want to know about how wood gets connected to more wood and other things”

monday 11/29, 8pm
middlesex (map), in central square
315 massachusetts ave
cambridge, MA
$5

all the details at nerdnite.

lifebox

a few weeks back, paul stamets wrote to the scifoo mailing list to ask if anyone wanted one of the first run of his lifeboxes. these are cardboard panels seeded with tree seeds and symbiotic fungal spores that improve the growth and development of the seedlings. i wrote to say i wanted one but never heard back. i forgot about it. then, today, a small box appears on the front step.

which is nice.

that's a good point

after a long hiatus:

that's a good point, 2008/2009

laminated eastern white ash with milk paint and gilding, tung oil finish; black cherry with lime wash and waxed red linen cord, tung oil finish; poplar with milk paint, tung oil finish.

(yes, i know it's a terrible photograph)

table and ham

i went over to love+butter tonight so we could discuss the fancy new segmented table they would like to have built. we've probably worked out a rough idea of what they need, with a few neat little bits here and there from my thought-experiments with tables over the last 6 months of not having shop access. i'm pleased at the prospect of being involved (however minimally) in a table that uses steel as a main structural element, will break apart easily for reconfiguration and transport, and doesn't look like it came from ikea--in other words, what you get when modularity isn't a design afterthought. then they gave me some home-cured ham because i'm a starving student. nice.

empirical research update: the ham is superb thin-sliced across the grain, with cabot 1-year sharp white cheddar, cayenne, black pepper, and dijon mustard, grilled on iggy's sweet white.

craft in america

so, jason schneider, the boss-type from anderson ranch, has a bunch of pieces in a really sweet little show at the boston society of arts and crafts. i went to the opening last night and he'd come in from snowmass with erin and was there with a vast number of his family up from new jersey. the gallery was full of people who were actually buying pieces (noticeably, the functional pieces sold quickly, the sculptural ones did not). craft in america: a focus on wood was a little uneven, but had way more nice pieces than not. the ones which particularly appealed to me were:

• jason's wall cabinet (i forget the name). it looks simple and goofy but is very complicated since it is a volume (with 9 inclusions) that curves in 2 or more planes simultaneously. it's one of his line of pieces made of laminated corrugated cardboard pieces that are then shaped and (sometimes, like in this case) filled with encaustic medium or plaster. the cabinet is a billowy-looking mass with sides that curve away from each other; there are 9 drawers whose faces are flush with the curving front (all made of ash, and the ones i sneaked a peek at were each perfectly-made). more of his stuff is visible here, though not the awesome cabinet.
  
• matthias pliessnig's line of little doodads of wire, snapped and bent wood, thread, and other detritus. i passed these by the first time, but they repay extended contemplation and have a really marvellous sense of tension and whimsy in them. (see the range of them here.)
• a strange ladder-like sculptural piece by ashley jameson eriksmoen. i don't know what it is or what it's supposed to do, but any piece that uses lap joints and secures them with rawhide and features unpolished brass has me at its mercy.
  
• christine lee's three windows full of assembled shims. i like pieces like that, which make use of masses of similar objects. she flew in last sunday and began assembling thousands of these little wedge-shaped wood pieces on monday morning and finished the installation minutes before the show opened last night. more on her shim work here.
• mark gardner's boat form. this was really remarkable: black walnut, turned first and then cut, polished, painted, and carved. the carving especially was tremendously repetitive and perfectly-done. beautiful from 5 feet away, 3 feet, and up real close too. (check out this detail of one of his carved bowls, and the rest of his portfolio).

change

the last time we had a snowstorm, the internet went funny too. just another excuse to hate on comcast. in any case, the year in review:

i was back in the motherland for over a month last november. for the first time in several years, enough of my family (ie, one) lived in the same country that it made sense having a permanent place to live. we were close to a rainforest and, in the mornings, a cool mist would sometimes drift in through my window. that was nice. i was working mountain view hours while in singapore, so i woke up late, walked out for breakfast at the town center, and harassed people into meeting me for beverages in the afternoons. i got books out of the library that i didn't have time to read in san francisco and read them all.

in my second week home, i started reading the steep approach to garbadale and doing my annual re-read of i heard the owl call my name. one day that week, i woke up just as the sky got light, and had an epiphany. it felt exactly like what w.s. merwin said, that this life does not go all the way. the goog was a sweet gig, but it didn't go all the way, not in the least. it didn't even go another full year. the prospect of still being there at the end of 2008, to be honest, was terrifying in a completely benign-seeming way. it was a variety of low-level existential dread, the kind frogs purportedly don't feel when they boil slowly to death. not to put too fine a point on it. occasionally, everything snaps into focus; maybe it was intuition, or the steep approach to garbadale, or i heard the owl call my name. in any case, before coming back, i'd begun to think about more school but did nothing about it. within an hour of waking up, i'd emailed the usual suspects to ask them to write letters for my applications.

after that, time passed rapidly. even before i heard back from schools, i'd begun making alternative plans, just in case. having spent a year making things on the weekends, i thought perhaps it would be a good thing to do that more of the time. through john grew sheridan, i contacted susan working at anderson ranch and put in an application to work the summer session in their wood/furniture/sculpture program and, bizarrely, got in. andy and susie magdanz, friends of glenn and ilene's, offered me a place to stay in cambridge for the first couple of months. it turned out to be an enormous victorian house down brattle street with two cats and two dogs.

at the goog, i ramped up the nonprofit earth and maps work, and got the climate project connected to avenue A | razorfish, and google connected to cleanuptheworld.org (the little thing steve and i dreamed up last year has now turned into this). i went to iceland with a fancy new gigapan robot and, with fulbright ben, drove around the island making ephemeral sculpture out of snow, ice, and rock (more on iceland here, here, here, here, and here).

in march, i decided i couldn't wait any longer and gave notice. then, through a truly perverse turn of events, dan janzen and winnie hallwachs (from the ACG) showed up at google to give a lecture about genetic barcoding and emergent biological data. through them, and through brad, i got the chance to work on a genomics and structured data project at google--something i'd been trying to do from the time i started (efforts that resulted in the ill-fated visit by ed wilson, jeffrey sachs, and harold varmus, and in miscellaneous attempts with my favourite partner in crime, joel finkelstein, to get google involved with the encyclopedia of life project). with the international barcode of life folks, we went to costa rica to try and save the world (yes, really), with a large list of assorted googlers in train. i extended my time at google as long as i possibly could, then everything came to an abrupt end in may. last day at work on friday, then i packed everything up, sold a stack of books and my burning man tickets, dropped off two large boxes at the salvation army, drove the desk to halsey's house, sold the car, got a valedictory latte at ritual roasters, and had people over for a 36-pack of tecate. i left for colorado before sunrise the following monday. it was epic.

anderson ranch was, mildly put, a complete change. nestled in the mountains south of aspen, with bright sun, thin air, no cellphone reception (for me anyway), and internet access whenever we got to the shop computer. when i arrived, the aspens carpeting the mountainsides had just begun to put out the first tiny leaves. we got up at 7am when the sun came in through the apartment windows (not even hiding under the blanket would prevent it from doing so), biked up the mountain to the ranch for breakfast, and usually rode down through the sprinklers in pitch darkness after midnight; our apartment got into the habit of early morning pasta meals.

the maloof wood barn at the ranch. here, we spent all our time.

having 24-hour access to the biggest, best-equipped shop i'd ever been in made me want to try all sorts of hare-brained things. i got into the groove of making things and watching them fail, then trying again. i made pointless things, like clouds. i painted things weird colours and also no colour. i stood around in classes learning things i never really even thought about. some of the lectures were really great (like this, and this). the people i worked with were bizarre and marvellous, and made magnificent things--staff, students, faculty (there was a marvellous run of weeks with paul bowen, wendy maruyama, merryll saylan, and tom huang that will stay with me for a long time), and especially my fellow peons whose work i'd link to if only they had online portfolios. local art patrons had us over to marvel at their collections. when we could get away on the weekends, we took the free bus into aspen to observe the lives of the wealthy and tasteless, avail ourselves of a magnificent library built with their tax dollars, and get mildly discomposed at the local (only) dive bar. i left only twice, once for for catherine and zach's wedding in sundance, then again for sci foo camp (hitting up quince along the way). four months later, we were all wiped out and ready for the summer to end. it was getting cold again and the aspens were beginning to turn.

after the last class of the season, it was like the ranch took a deep breath and exhaled everyone to much needed time away. my last weekend there was strangely quiet after many weeks of the opposite. the holiday messed everything up, and my stuff followed bland to jackson hole before getting shipped out east. i showed up in cambridge with just a backpack on one of the hottest, most humid nights of the summer. the house on appleton street had high ceilings and tall windows opening out onto trees. those first two weeks before the start of school were full of leaf-filtered light in the mornings, and waking up with a cat on the bed. i developed a fondness for almond butter and honey on a freshly-toasted english muffin. ami came out to visit and we ate at craigie street just before it left craigie street.

school started in mid-september and i saw the sociology department for the first time ever. in october, i moved into a house down the street from william james hall. 3 storeys with 9 other people in it, and minimal insulation. the house runs as much like a well-oiled machine as a house containing 10 people can be expected to do. there is a lot of cooking, mostly of lentils, and we wear sweaters often. there was a backyard party to celebrate the end of the fall; matt made 50 pounds of slow-roasted beef brisket. classical social theory, economic sociology, stratification, the social psychology of organizations, and a class in letterpress printing by michael russem of the kat ran press (more here and here) somehow ate up the last 14 weeks--i don't know where the time went. they keep telling us that we'll be with our colleagues for the rest of our professional lives. for a surprisingly large number of classmates, i'm glad this is the case.

sabeel says graduate students are the only professionals whose labour isn't alienated. i'm not sure that's completely true, and ritual roasters is 3096 miles away but, even so, the best ice cream, pad thai, and sandwiches in the world (well, maybe not the sandwiches, but they're still pretty damn good) are within walking distance, i've seen ferran adria speak in person and tara donovan's retrospective at the ICA, and they pay me to think about stuff i care about. it hasn't always been a great year, but i'd say things are pretty good.

happy new year.

an unusual compliment

so, i'm trying to get this project off the ground.

Max: youre a little model-happy2:16 PM me: hey?

Max: im reading your document carefully

me: oh ok

Max: its um modelicious

2:17 PM me: i was trying to convince an originator

outside at this very moment

you know what's really spectacular? when the skies are the grey of galvanised metal and it has just rained. at this time of year when the leaves on the sugar maples are between green and burnt orange, their trunks become a dark brown-black and they look like paintings of themselves.

type, the web, and the crystal goblet

"the crystal goblet" by beatrice warde (a short read available here) is a crisp exposition of invisible typography, the idea that the design of the page should be transparent rather than calling attention to itself. content should speak for itself; bad content can infrequently (arguably, never) be saved by good design:

Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The 'stunt typographer' learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

the same can be said of the web -- good content and good design that enables good content to be parsed easily are paramount. flash-heavy, content-poor sites may launch with a big splash, but are generally assured of rapid anonymity. the same principle also applies to all sorts of domains in which craft is applied to raw materials of varying quality: food, furniture, education, etc.

you get what you pay for

you get what you pay for

poplar, milk paint, red oak

18" x 5" x 2.5"

things+

the last few weeks have been really packed at the ranch. we had tom huang on bamboo, wendy maruyama and judy mckie teaching the maruyama variations, merryll saylan on metamorphosis and fragmentation and, this week, a master class with david ellsworth. the variations class has been particularly tremendous -- a full week of projects that must be started and finished within the same 24-hour period, followed by a week-long major work. one of the students has been making bizarre one-offs, including a basswood curling stone in the national colours of sweden, a combination splitting maul and eggbeater made of beeswax, and a box for preserving eyes in sweetened condensed milk sealed with a cork and boiled pine pitch. other things being made: a shelf in the shape of the path described by a baton conducting in 4/4 time and a medicine cabinet made of poured concrete and stuffed with q-tips.

i also went to a concert on saturday at the aspen music festival courtesy of a student from the bowen sculpture class and got, as a result, to sneak into the last sessions of the brookings blum roundtable on climate change adaptation the next day. an unexpected opportunity to hold the door for madeleine albright. interesting and relevant in about a month, but it wiped out the entire weekend.

new from colorado

cloud 1, white ash. approx. 39" x 27" x 30"

this is the first of the clouds.

more new stuff

the slide from the grew-sheridan studio late-nite photo session in may with joe schopplein finally arrived, so new photos are up on my slowly-growing portfolio site:

1. we want you to focus is a work chair with a wood spring that pushes the backrest gently into the small of your back. the seat is hawaiian koa with some really beautiful figure in it; john had a few boards left from the 1970s and he gave me one. the backrest is a piece of shaped black walnut connected to the laminated, curved oak backpost with a double sliding bevel.
2. famous among the barns is what happened to the piece of white oak that jini and jess brought back from san diego. i turned it green many months ago, watched it warp out of shape as it dried, then brought it to colorado where it warped even more. the inside is milk paint, the colour i imagine dylan thomas had in mind when he wrote fern hill.
3. a box for holding contentment has no bottom and irregular dovetail construction -- the dovetails are cut in cherry boards milled to a taper (you can see this in the detail shots) and their size and placement vary on all four sides. the shaped ash lid, when closed, casts a shadow that hides the bottomlessness of the box; it is shaped out of a solid plank almost an inch thick and so is more massive than it looks and has some wild grain on the underside. it was diverting to build this and confound the trained furnituremakers passing through the shop with its sheer impracticality, so this may be the first in a series of boxes for holding intangible things.
   

from the land of casual elegance

having all-hours access to a fully-equipped studio and machine shop is the closest thing to perfect. in between working on stuff, i'm working on Stuff. this is a pair of not-yet-finished round-bottomed bowls that don't yet have names, turned green out of silver maple. 

and here is a box for holding contentment. the case is made of irregularly dovetailed cherry and the lid of shaped flatsawn ash, painted with casein-based paints, carved, then finished with a danish-style penetrating oil.

chair update: it's alive!

i've been trying to finish this side chair before leaving for aspen and i spent all of last weekend shaping the seat and back, then sanding them down. the back post and seatback are separate from the rest of the chair, so i glued those up last sunday and then started on the rest of the parts this week, finishing all of the pre-glueing sanding before getting into the shop today. i was all ready to glue, and then realized that i'd have to make clamping blocks for almost every piece since nothing in this chair is at right angles with anything else. after making those, i got ready to glue again, then remembered that i'd have to make the wedges for all the through tenons. i started glue-up around 3.30pm, beginning with the two sides of the chair frame, then connecting those with the midrib and the footrest. the seat is attached to the legs with mortise and tenon joints, two of which are fox-wedged. those last were fiddly to measure but worked out beautifully. here is the chair in clamps:

new from the lathe #2

a few weeks ago on a sunday, jini called me from atop a mountain in san diego and asked if i wanted some lumber. the next day, i went to jess's car and beheld, in the back, an assortment of huge logs. i brought one back on the shuttle, breaking the luggage compartment in the process, and sliced it up into an assortment of small pieces, two large bowl blanks, and a pile of sawdust. two of the little pieces went back to gainesville, where dina even now is using them as rustic bookends. one of the two blanks is now a bowl. this was the palest white oak i'd ever seen, so i figured i'd make it look as unlike wood as possible:

i look like ceramic

5.5" dia., 6" high
spalted white oak

keeping it together

so, i see tiffany on gchat and i show her a photo of my favourite piece, a small, round-bottomed bowl turned from freshly-cut copper beech and then allowed to dry. this is what it looked like fresh from the lathe:


while drying, it warped out of round and cracked slightly, but retained the marvellous shading it had before. this is how it looks today, after being finished with blonde shellac and rubbed-out varnish. the crack was highlighted with black dye and then tied together with copper wire. it's a bit wonky:

keeping it together

and tiffany said it reminded her of this new yorker cartoon by ariel molving:


which is exactly right and made my day.