Cartoon't

Do I have a problem?  Let me know.  I am in the middle of a hectic time right now.  My wife has a brutal cold and it is spring break so I have the kids to keep happy during this particularly rainy week here in Portland.  Suffice it to say, I am on my toes keeping things in order.  I'm no Nadya Suleman, that's for sure.

There were a few minutes when my angelic neighbor took both of my kids for a play date (Hate that term) to give me a chance to take care of some of the things on my long long list.  There are dishes to do, laundry in every stage, food to cook, stuff to put away, a HUGE yard mess, etc...(not to mention paying work) with about an hour to do it.  I had to choose my task with my poor, sick wife's needs in mind.  To instill confidence in her that the house is in order, is to expediate her healing process by giving her peace of mind.  What is the first thing I do?  I slither like an eel through a keg of oysters down to my basement and draw this picture.  

Is that really the best way to use my time?  I mean, what is that?  It isn't even a real cartoon, it is a plan for a cartoon.   As if someday I am going to go back and do the real cartoon of the guy walking out of the store with the toilet paper.  I am not even sure if anyone thinks it is funny seeing someone walk out of a store with just toilet paper.   Can I garnish this indulgent act with some valuable verbal vegetable?  Is justification attainable?  

some people have crazy noses

I was in a grocery store with my kids yesterday and Leo said to me:  "Did you see that guy's nose? It went up at the end!"

I was immediately taken by the opportunity to teach a lesson to my 4 year old.  I said, "yes, everybody's nose is different."  trying to downplay any exceptional characteristics this guy's nose might have boasted.  I guess it has been drilled into me by a culture that seems to strive towards becoming a land of grey hermaphrodites, denying any acknowledgement of uniqueness for fear of offending a single individual.  It would make the designer's job a lot easier.  

Anyways, Leo said, "yeah but some people have really crazy noses."

I can't agree more. There are indeed some very crazy noses out there.

Brian Paul Beidelman R.I.P

I found out that a childhood friend died today.  He didn't die today, I found out he died, today. He actually died in July.  That is me and he on Santa's lap in NYC Circa 1976.  I am on the right. Our moms were buddies back in '69 in Boulder, Colorado.  That was back when there was only one street light in Boulder at Baseline and Broadway.  At least, that is what I think.  We were kids at the time.  We thought Flagstaff was our mountain and as much as it mattered, it was.

My mom decided to move to NYC in about '75 and her friend from Boulder, Margaret decided to move too.  They were both single moms with a boy each.  Brian and me.  We lived on the same block in Boulder, 6th and Marine.  Anyway, my mom and I moved to the West Village into a little one bedroom rent controlled apartment on w12th and w4th st.  My mom's sister snuck out and we snuck in.  Brian and Margaret moved somewhere  like... East 10th and 1st ave or something like that.  Brian and I were best, if not only, friends.  We got into all kinds of innocent trouble together and I want to let you know that the Violent Femmes and the Talking Heads weren't the only ones tearing up the east Village under Ed Koch's nose.

Brian was diabetic.  I think that is what eventually killed him.  Being diabetic, he was always flush with hypodermics.  I used to get syringes from him to play with.  I know, it sounds weird, but don't let the stigma of the syringe dilute the joys of squirting.   Anyway, I enjoyed playing with the syringes.  Shooting lighter fluid and setting it on fire, squirting invisible streams of water at kids across the classroom...regular stuff.  But I have to say that one of the craziest jokes I have ever played was with my old dead pal Brian Paul Beidelman.  We filled up a few syringes with Tobasco sauce and  injected oranges that were outside the Korean deli. We thought it would be so funny when someone took a big slice of orange and burned their face off with Tobasco sauce.  We prolly injected 20 oranges and went home and laughed.  

I remember one time when I was coming home from his apartment in my Grace Church School uniform (blue Oxford, blue and red striped tie, Penny loafers or maybe Wallabees)).  I got on the 14th st bus heading west from 1st Ave.  I was trying to pull my bus pass out of my pocket when all of the sudden 3 or 4 syringes fell on the floor right in front of these little old ladies in the front few seats.  They were horrified.  I remember picking them up and thinking to myself, "if they only knew that I was only using them to inject Tobasco into oranges and not to do heroin..."

And the fire crackers we used to be able to get!  Holy Shite!  Brian and I managed to find our twelve year old,  green-down-vest wearing ways into these funky mafia back rooms in Little Italy around the 4th of July, where we could buy Pineapples (1/2 stick of dynamite) for $4.00! One thing we did was to take a cigarette, break off the butt, stick the fuse of a M80 or a blockbuster into it and light it.  We would put it in a garbage can or something and sit across the street on a stoop and wait.  I remember shitting bricks one time when a little old lady came crawling by.  I was so scared that it was going to blow and she would have a heart attack.  Fortunately she made it down the block before the top of the garbage can blew 15 ft up in the air and crashed down on the sidewalk.

Memories of my relationship with Brian Paul are perfect Jim Carol and Mark Twain.  We were a real team.  Two 11 year olds fresh from Boulder, both with single moms, living in NYC feeling it out, getting in trouble, having fun.  

Not that anyone reads this but the Boulder paper's obituary said any donations to the American Diabetes Association would be nice.  (I paraphrase) 

Pneumo, the table

Here are a few sketches of a table I am working on.  The client lives in a little apartment and wants a round coffee table that can be raised up to the height of a dining table.  I am working with the idea of going from 18"-30" or so.  I thought of a few ways to actuate the movement but the winner is the gas hinge hidden inside a telescoping pedestal.  Like a task chair.  

I think I am going to buy an existing base and build it out.  I'm going with a carbonized bamboo plywood countertop material for the top.  Maybe powder coat the base white.  I need to have a really sexy solution for the action.  The act of raising and lowering the table is kind of intimate.  I need a mechanism that engages and disengages with sufficient tactile sensitivity... if you know what I mean.  What do I mean?  I mean it is an opportunity to make an impression.  The feel and the ease of the motion and the sound and the whole experience should be in tune with the other  design elements.  

That reminds me of a table I spent some quality time with back in '97 when I worked at Carlton House Restoration.  I actually drew it with the hopes of someday making one with a Lexan top and leaves.  I wanted to show the awesome gears that opened the table up when you spun the top.  I always thought that it was a shame that the coolest aspect of the whole table was only enjoyed by the maid  or whomever is the fortunate one with the task of changing the table diameter.  I have posted a drawing of the table top with and without it's leaves.  I hope I can find the ones I made.  Shite.  Where are they?

Peas 'n Carrots 'n subversive activities

Being 41 with a family and a lawn to mow, my rebellious acts are not as obvious as they were back in the day. Besides the infrequent Vesuvian outbursts, I have to mine my daily activities for acts that might be explained as rebellious.  The raised beds idea got me a few emails but nobody actually went for it. I did manage to put in some beds in our back yard. I am looking forward to stickin' it to the man by growing my own beans. 

It may well appear to the passer by that I am a balding dad raking some soil but what is really happening is much different.  I am pioneering a movement towards off the grid urban existence.  There will be networks of urban CSA gardens providing greens to the neighborhood, pulling the rug out from under the system  that brings our garlic from China and our apples from New Zealand.  Crazy.

We had some lavender in a big planter that died so I dumper it out.  I figured out why it died.  The root ball took on the exact shape of the inside of the planter.  There was no soil, just a serious  spaghetti of roots.  

Meanwhile, my daughter has discovered her favorite place to sit in the morning when the heat comes on.

Urban Hoes: An Agricultural Movement

You can call me "Raised Beds" Charley.

As the apartments I have been working on are winding up, I am thinking about what to do next.  I scheme all day long as I caulk baseboard and fill holes.  I came up with a plan that has legs.  Jessie and I are planing to devote our back yard to some raised beds for some serious urban agriculture. They call our neighborhood urban.  

Why don't I offer to build raised beds for people?  That explains the poster up above.  I put one up at a coffee shop. It occurred to me, however that this was a much bigger idea than me running around dropping boxes in people's yards.  It is a movement!  Urban agriculture is something that makes so much sense and it is timely.  This economy is a perfect setting for flat packed urban farming products!  Think of all the roof top square footage that could be producing yummy healthy local grub.  Sell them through the dreaded Home Depot or some massive box store.  It could be the new fondu set or exercise bike.

***I am going to post a few ideas on this blog.  If you want to poach one, please consider hiring me as a consultant, at least***

I thought Urban Hoes could be a good name.  It is very dynamic.  It reminds me of the ButtJoint Studio.  My old place on SE 26th and Division.  That is Scott, the guy I shared the ButtJoint Studio with, his mother and his sister.  I bet his mother was proud of him, standing under that logo.  

Fewer But Cooler Things

I caught myself doing something that I think I have been doing subconsciously since I was a little boy.  When I rinse my mouth after brushing my teeth, I made a sound like a ricochet.  As if my spit were a bullet that is bouncing off the porcelain.  Ptweeing!  I am not sure but I think I have been doing it forever and have just not noticed.  I have no recollection of when it started. It feels very natural to me.  I would have to try not to do it and I have other fish to fry.

I just sent a box down to a new client in LA.  It contains a little Parsons table and bench for a kid's keyboard.  I made one for my kids because we got them a keyboard and we had nothing to put it on.  It is a challenge to have a kid and keep your place looking good.  The tidal wave of crap that flows through the doors opened by the arrival of a new baby is something they don't tell you about.  We shoot for fewer but cooler things.  

This thing took me longer to pack than to make! Another reason why you have to make k.d. furniture.  I hope it makes it down there with no problems.  I have posted a pictu

re of my packing and shipping department facility in action.   It doubles as our dining room.

That is Madeleine making some heart shaped Valentines cookies.

Be Warned! Posting exposes a dark underbelly.

I mentioned earlier that I am and have been interested in the concept of palimpsest.  I like the idea of manipulating something to create a history.  Seeing the history in an object lends dimension to it.  It begs questions and causes subliminal assumptions. Take a scratch  or a dent on a table leg, for example.  It got there somehow.  It was probably a careless maid wielding a vacuum, or some reckless kid crashing his scooter.  Not that every blemish is considered so thoroughly, of course, but the accumulative effect of these micro stories carry undeniable aesthetic weight.  

In NYC, I loved checking out old apartments and seeing these weird things like a truncated door jamb or a seemingly random piece of trim disappearing into a wall.  Walls that have been painted and patched and repainted and repatched for a hundred years get richer and more interesting the wonkier they become.  The corners of the rooms are actually rounded, having been filled with multiple layers of paint.  Imagine the interior square footage lost to coats of paint on Manhattan Island alone!  At $700/month for a parking space, all that paint could be significant.  And how much does it weigh?? Gads.

I want to try to reproduce that 100 year old tenement look with new construction.  I call it Tenement Chique.I did it with furniture and it looks and feels great.  It would be a lot of work but one could do it.  The tough part is to make the layers of history seem appropriate and natural rather than contrived and forced.  I find inspiration for this stuff everywhere.  As a matter of fact, I took a picture

 of something that I will probably not use but it tells a crazy story.  The picture is of a bathroom door in a house I am helping fix up.  Those two gray spots on the door tell a dark and sordid tale of distilled crapsmanship and laziness.  What I think happened was that the last guy who painted this door just painted around the towels that were hanging there rather than taking them down.  I wish there was another answer but the forensic study I made revealed the cold hard facts.  My homage to history shall be temporarily sidelined, for this palimpsestic aberration should not be preserved and celebrated, nor should it be studied and discussed. As a matter of fact, I am going to deny it ever happened.  I almost fear posting such information.  People don't need to know about these things.  

Humbler

It is not an infrequent occurrence.  I love getting my eyes opened by my kids.  I spent a long time this weekend making a bunch of blocks.  They are pretty basic shapes.  My thought was to just make all the dimensions double starting from 0.75".  That way all the blocks would stack up nicely and walls will be nice and straight.  Lemme tell ya, making blocks is not a lot of fun.  It is all milling.  Loud, dusty and boring.  But with thoughts of my kids creating long beautiful Bauhaus block buildings in my mind, I forged on.  

I fashion myself to be a lateral thinker but leave it to the kids to really tear preconceptions down without a hint of concern or remorse.  Leo, my 4 year old, built this structure first.  

I don't actually have a shop right now.  I had a fun furniture studio around the corner from my house in se Portland but I had to give it up in July for a variety of reasons.  It was called the ButtJoint Studio.  Since then, I have been surfing my friends shops, jumping on their table saws or dulling their jointer blades.  It is pretty pathetic.  It ends up taking me about a year to make a cut.  Below are a couple of pictures of my home workshop.  The clamps are on a little keyboard stand and bench I am making for a client down in LA.  The router is my set up to take down the 300 miles of sharp edges on the blocks I made.  These pics are from today and yesterday.   I am shopless and I am saying "yes" to all kinds of projects right now.  

Palimpsest

Joke:  

How do you restore an American Antique?

Put a velvet rope around it!!!

My looney friend Zack introduced me the concept of palimpsest a decade or so ago as we were looking at what is left of the old raised train tracks going through the meat packing district in NYC.   It has become a consistent source of interest for me.  I love the idea because it is like a still picture that contains a whole movie.  A sort of transdimensional section of time embodied in the physical traits of an object or place.  

When I used to do antique conservation we would sometimes add piece of wood to an old piece of furniture.  I would take great pains to match the wood grain and create an invisible seam so that the finishers could then beat it up appropriately to match the old patina.  As a matter of fact, during the 1980's there was a movement to dip and strip antiques and refinish them to try to achieve the look the piece might have had when it first left Duncan Phyfe's shop back in 1845. 

Suddenly everyone came to their senses and realized that all of the character and history of these important antiques were in the bumps and dings.  They would send the pieces to us at Carlton House Restoration and we would spend many expensive hours essentially faking 200 years of history into 40 hours.  

Armed and Dangerous

I feel a little better now that my kids have bows and arrows.  Of course, the arrows have suction cup heads but they will leave a mark on your forehead if they are suctioned on there long enough.  To be specific, a perfect circle hickey bruise will appear and will not go away until everyone has seen it.  

I have made my kids a ton of toys.  I do it for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is this big pile of wood I have in my side yard.  They are pallet stickers from overseas and the wood is unbelievable.  I am limited by the dimensions (3.25" x 2.5" x 6.6') and the fact that there are about 16 different species, so it is hard to find two of the same for any given project.  I have managed to crank out a lot of stuff.  

I bought the wood through Craigslist from a guy in WA just outside of Vancouver.  It was in a huge pile by some train tracks.  He lived in the house there sandwiched between the highway and the tracks.  He looked like he used these boards to pick his teeth.  His neck was as thick as a stump and the heels of his hands could be used to resole my work boots.  

The Right To Bear Arms

 My wife works at a really sweet toy store called Spielwerk.  They are the exact type of retail business that is about to get squashed by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.  From what I understand, if nothing changes, all toys that do not carry the US lead inspection sticker will be illegal to sell.    Because of this, my wife is concerned not only about her job, but the availability of these German suction cup arrows!!  She was going to use her discount and pick up a couple of toy bows and suction cup arrows before they are black market material.  As a matter of fact, if you want some toy bows and arrows you had better git on down to your local toy store and load up before The Man takes them away.

This reminds me of what happened here in Oregon when it was announced that Obama won the election. There was a run on gun stores and huge sales at gun shows because people are afraid Obama is going to take away their bang bangs.  Now it is happening at toy stores!  What next?

I think I am going to make the bows myself, anyway.

Beautimportificant

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Koview kevy butt ding-ding.

What?

Koview kevy butt ding-ding.

I can't even say that.

Say "koview".

Koview.

Say "kevy".

Kevy.

Say "butt".

Butt ding ding.  Got it.  Koview kevy butt ding-ding  who?

Poo in your shoe.

My kids (4 and 6) hit me with this knock knock joke today and I thought it might be a keeper.  Leo told me that koview kevy butt ding-dings are monsters that poo in your shoe when you are not looking.  They are mostly pirates' pets.

Of course, I am thinking there is something beautiful about this joke.   Something important and significant.  And it isn't just because my kids did it either.  Something Eastern, something big.

Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act

I am not a very political guy. I pay attention, I vote, I am overwhelmed, so I think about furniture design or something.  Since I have had kids, I have been inspired to create things for them.  How could I not?  As a result I have had several products that I thought had legs and might work for me.  Jumping into the kiddie product market is no picnic.  I got bullied and spanked and sent to my room with no dinner by the industry and that was before the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act!  With this bill, we are looking at a major change in the proliferation and availability of any toys outside of the big hitters of the toy industry.  Guys like me will no longer be able to offer products for the under 12 year old set.  If you want to buy a hand made toy car you better be prepared to pay the $1500 it is going to cost the groovy toy maker to get it inspected for lead, even though he whittled it out driftwood.  The other option is to head to the seedy part of town and get them from some creep in an alley.  

"Yo, Psst... handmade wooden animals from Germany, check it out."

That Was Quick

So much for my job in the manufacturing sector.  I quit.  It was hell.  I quit in a blaze of glory. Sometimes it feels really good to just say exactly what is on your mind.  I realized the uniqueness of my situation and completely indulged in behavior that would only work in that situation or maybe in a Patrick Swayze movie.  It was awesome.  I pan out on me triumphantly walking away from the plant with my middle finger held high.  I wrote the whole thing down but I think it is too long to put here.  Maybe I can post a pdf if you are interested in reading it.  

So my daily inspirational bike ride is not happening and I am back to where I was last week but with a more commuter friendly bike, a freshly sharpened set of chisels and one less company I have to worry about working for.  

Just so you know, I am a designer with two kids.  I have some experience in the juvenile products industry and I am a little nervous about this bill that seems about to pass that will make all child related products have to prove that they are lead free.  It is a bad bad bad bill for a bunch of reasons.  I feel powerless against it so I have been thinking of ways to circumnavigate the system.  I don't do toys anymore.  I do sillyfunctional sculptures for small handed people.  Think it will work?

I got a job in the manufacturing sector!

Everything is going to be different tomorrow.  I am starting a new job as a lead cabinetmaker (or something)  at a boat interiors fabrication shop (or something).  I am sort of surprised to have gotten the job seeing as how I felt like the guy was going to fire me at the interview.  It was a very strange interaction that lead to my new position which I start tomorrow.

My guess is that it will take 1/2 an hour to get there by bike.  When I lived in NYC I commuted by bike over the brooklyn bridge from Greenwich village to Fort Greene for school.  Then I commuted from our apartment in Cobble Hill to my studio in Long Island City.  Those were about 25 minute rides too.  Besides the obvious blood pumping goodness of a bike ride, I always had at least one or two interesting thoughts.  

I am going to write about the thoughts generated during my commute.  If not, I will make something else up.