Furniture Music

Satie.


One of the pieces of music featured in one of the best and most effective soundtracks ever, accompanying Peter Sellers’ best work. Seven lousy bucks for the movie at Amazon. Deuce Bigalow is eighteen bucks, proving, finally, that there is no God.

No Biggie. They Play Football With Their Feet, Too

Marvelous fun to watch. My good Interbuddy Gerard sent it to me. He always finds interesting things by the carload. If the Internet needs an editor, (it does) Gerard should be it.

To people unfamiliar to woodworking, this will seem even more marvelous than it is. That’s this fellow’s version of a pole lathe. People have been using people power to do woodturning for a very long time. The person making the video takes it closely framed, because he thinks that the man is using his foot to perform the cutting, but he’s just using them as a steady-rest and manipulating the chisels with his hand like any other turner would.

He’s turning very soft, very dry wood or this method would be physically very demanding. He can only cut on one half of the stroke, and the bow he’s got with the string has to be returned for each stroke to start again. He’s very sure-handed and efficient. He uses the skew to make really finished work without sanding.

The western version of this was a fellow called a bodger. He’d go out in the woods and make chairs. He worked on green (freshly cut, undried) wood mostly. The bodger would fell and split the tree into usable baulks, then shape it roughly round with spokeshaves. You can see the Morocccan fellow roughly shape the blank round before he put it in the lathe. If you have a powered lathe you might not bother; it would be just as easy to do it with a gouge, but would require a lot of turns on a pole lathe to accomplish.

A Windsor chair is the bodger’s ultimate accomplishment. There are still guys around making them without power tools. They make the different parts from different types of woods, each suited to the needs of the component. They steam bend the big curves.

I turn legs on a lathe now, and I recognize everything the fellow with the mighty foot was doing and the tools he used. I was mostly impressed with what was possible when you did the same thing over and over again, as this fellow has evidently been doing. His efficiency and skill was wonderful to watch. The motifs he used were traditional, but you could tell he applied them in his own way.

One dreams of finding some niche item you could make over and over like that, and make it pay, and become known for it. I’ve run my hand over the piano of possibilities of handwork in my life and never come close. I’ve ended up having to offer all sorts of things and efforts to make a living. The modern world doesn’t like repetition not performed by a machine much. But we react instinctively to it when we see it — a craftsman is working.

Ultimately, I just noticed that a guy crouching in an alley in Marrakech and making trifles with his feet was wearing better clothes than I was.

My Friend, If He’ll Have It


I’ve met a lot of nice people on the Interchunnel. I’ve actually only met a few of them in person, but that’s the beauty of the thing. It keeps you in touch with the far-flung, even if they were far-flung before you knew them.

It’s really presumptuous of me to say, but the Bird Dog from the excellent Maggie’s Farm is one of my best friends. I doubt he’d say that in return, because he barely knows me and if he knew me better he wouldn’t even like me much; but the beauty of blogging is you can write what you like and then turn this damnable silicon box off and not hear yourself being contradicted. It’s like inscribing your own stone tablets and then breaking them right away. So Bird Dog’s my best friend, and someone tell Tom Brady’s wife to stop calling me, because it ain’t gonna happen. Click.

Bird Dog is profiled on Normblog, which is like an Internet Mount Rushmore, only more crowded and made from chewing gum from under a grade school cafeteria table, not granite. He deserves all such encomiums, and several other words I don’t really understand but can find in the thesaurus. He really is a most excellent fellow.

Month: April 2010

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