Do you have any deformities, infirmities, calamities, contagions or afflictions?
Do you suffer from any shortcomings or long goings?
Place your hand on the Intertunnel and be saved. Save! Ed!
The man on the throne will put a thrill in your bones
He’ll cure your ills and give you chills
Don’t sit home alone with cold stacks of wax
Come down to the show if your warden gets lax
His dancing girls will wriggle and sway
Like politicians on judgment day
It’s easy to be impressed with manual dexterity. Play a piano. Hit a curveball. Pick up dumplings with chopsticks. Whatever. When you see a practiced hand do what it’s practiced a million times, fascination enters into it.
But there’s more. The fellow in the video is a scholar. What you’re doing is as important as how you do it. He’s copying another’s design — Duncan Phyfe was scads more scholarly than someone that can reproduce his designs, of course, but it may very well be that old Duncan couldn’t make the things he designed as well as the guy in this video can. Most all the big furniture design names people might recognize — Hepplewhite, Chippendale, Sheraton, Phyfe, Belter, Stickley — they were designers and directors and businessmen. They decided. Approved or rejected. They would seek out helpers whose skill exceeded their own to produce objects whose design was beyond the hands-on people’s ability to conjure.
Our hero in the video isn’t designing anything. But I imagine he could shake his sleeve and out would pop a ball-and-claw Chippendale leg, or a fumed quartersawn white oak mission table, or maybe a veneered Sheraton card table. He is a juke box, not an orchestra. It’s a different sort of skill, and a very important one. It’s not design.
Everyone thinks they’re qualified to design things. I hardly ever met an owner of a home that didn’t think they were qualified by their pulse to design a home. They’d ask you to produce bizarre and unlivable surroundings, and then excoriate you for listening to them. “That’s not what I wanted.” No, but it’s what your ordered. You went to McDonald’s but sent your meal back because you wanted Chinese food.
But the average person is capable of understanding good design in homes and furniture and soft goods and clothes and so forth. The problem is there are rules. You need to understand the rules before you can produce variations on them. The approach of understanding the rules first, and then using your understanding to work within the framework they produce is an alien concept, mostly because of the public school systems’ approach to learning. Drill in fundamentals followed by more sophisticated use of what you learned is verboten. You’re just supposed to morph over time into a good speller dropping subjunctives subordinate clauses here and there like a Rockefeller handing out dimes. They treat you like you’re a single-celled learning animal when you start, and the same when you end — you’re just bigger.
The idea that if they don’t treat you like you’re Shakespeare when you’re in Pre-K, you’ll never be able to become Shakespeare, is nonsensical to me. You need to learn to write properly first if you’re ever going to be able to write at all, never mind transcendently. (It’s useful to note here that the spell-checker for the utility I’m writing on doesn’t recognize the word transcendently I just used, and importunes me to spell it some other way)
Duncan Phyfe was an extraordinary person. Furniture makers whose style is definable enough to carry their name long after their death are very rare. And Duncan didn’t really invent anything. He was simply a very highly skilled syncretist (oops, confused the spellchecker again) of neoclassical forms. But there is no really new way to make furniture after a short while. If you’re making entirely new designs, they’re bad designs, because human beings have certain physical needs that vary very little. A square wheel is original, for instance; but it achieves its originality by being a bad wheel.
The turner and carver in the video isn’t making any square wheels. Good for him. The world’s chock full of square wheels just now. And they vote.
(Thanks to reader and commenter BJM for slipping the video into my comments the other day)
Way to go, kid.
And mom and dad, too. There’s the rub. I see the hand of mom and dad in that video, and the cold, dead hands of legions of moms and dads that came before them. Teachers, too; although sometimes they’re the same people. Some teachers still try under trying circumstances.
I was sick until this morning, and abed. That’s rare. We do not send our children to the petri dish they call a school here in town, and are spared a lot of such things. But I laid there like a casualty and got my information about things in the house second-hand. I heard all sorts of things.
I was unable to make a fire, but they got made all the same, as I have a family and we do things together all the time. I could do what my wife does, and she managed to tend the furnace. The kids help out.
I got all my information like a submariner would. Shut up, away from everyone, but still hearing the sounds of familiar things. My wife would bring me ginger ale and crackers and updates. Life, boiled down to short messages, can be wonderful.
The kids were on tenterhooks because their mom told them I was ill. Kids raised properly are attuned to disruptions in routines. Kids raised in unsalubrious surroundings are inured to most everything. Everything’s in an uproar all the time so they don’t notice, or care.
My wife was teaching the little feller. There was some discussion about his older brother, who will finish high-school level homeschooling this year. He had questions about what that meant. “Your brother wants to be a musician when he is a man,” my wife said to him; “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be a musician, too,” he said, though I wonder about that. He’s sort of a wunderkind in a small area of musicianship — he can do simple things almost effortlessly. But he has not shown the dogged determination that his older brother has shown at learning music. He is very young and might change his mind, and be one of those people I used to hate: people that could play music better than you could, but never had to try at it.
He wasn’t done. “I want to be a husband. I want to be a father.”
That is an astonishing thing to hear. Why should it be astonishing to hear a nine-year-old wants to grow up and be a husband and father? It shouldn’t be, but it is. If he’d uttered that in a public school, I imagine he’d be in a re-education camp by nightfall. And on the flip side, I don’t think the term “wife and mother” can be uttered in public school without a SWAT team of egalitarians being called.
My children don’t want to be musicians because they dream of drug abuse and licentiousness and a vision of being carried around on a litter chair by flunkeys. My older son was old enough to have come to my music shows and seen the real work it was. He still wanted to do it, because work doesn’t scare him. They both want to be productive citizens, useful to other productive citizens. They want to be husbands and fathers, with everything that means.
It is everything we’ve wanted for them. When the little one shows flashes of genius, I dread it. You do not want to be wonderful in this world, son. Wonderful is a big millstone in the swimming pool of life. I wanted to be normal my whole life, and during my lifetime on earth, being “normal” has gotten so strange that your mother and I are living on the edge of civilization hanging on by our fingernails.
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living. — Mark Twain
I want you to at least have a chance at being normal, if you want it. There are so few people committed to being useful, salubrious, and carrying on their traditions, and then having or supporting families that will rhyme down the centuries, that you’ll be wonderful enough if you manage it.
The Intertunnel is like my submarine, too. I get pinged, literally and figuratively, all the time. I feel the water temperature by putting my hand on the hull. Leslie from out west is kind enough to read, and comment, and buy furniture, and send the boys some shekels for their music videos. She is one of the many people I call my Interfriends: People I don’t know, and most likely will never meet, but they’re my friends. They know about me and mine, and I know something about them and theirs. If everyone that corresponds with me here were my actual instead of virtual neighbors, I’d live in the most interesting and pleasant town on earth. Leslie sent me a picture of her now grown, formerly homeschooled daughter’s work. She makes cakes. But saying she makes cakes is like saying Da Vinci was a housepainter. So I get to say something I’ve been dying to say since I was a little kid watching TV in the sixties: Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have a really big shoe.
My little son especially thought this was the bee’s knees. “It’s a shoe with a big upheel!” He makes up more, and better words than Chaucer.
Leslie’s daughter is grown up, and I’d tell you she’s beautiful but I’m an old man and not supposed to notice such things, so I won’t mention it; and her parents tried, and obviously succeeded in producing a fully actualized person, ready and willing to be a good and productive (and inventive) citizen, and maybe someday produce her version of the same thing all over again.
We are a merry band here at the Cottage, busy being normal. We know we’re not alone, because we hear the thrumming on our bulkheads. We know you’re out there. There are plenty of people still trying to be decent citizens, and produce some more, by hook or by crook. We need a secret handshake or something.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers –and sisters.
These people don’t remind me of the stall in the mall with anodized aluminum frames surrounding all the prints of women dancing barefoot on the beach in an evening dress while a butler holds a brolly over her head and a violin and rose petals and ballet slippers slop around in the foam at the edge of the surf. Our trusty frame makers in the video are competing with the painters for attention.
The shape of the main part of the frame is, I’m not joking, a Lesbian cyma profile. That’s usually called a bolection where I’m from. It has a back band along the outside edge, and the carving along the inside edge is sort of gadrooned water leaf design, which is gilded. I noticed they distressed the frame to make it fit in with the painting it adorns, like I do with furniture sometimes. Neato.
I’m fairly certain I’m going to go on some sort of law enforcement watch list for simply typing the words “gilded and distressed gadrooned water leaf Lesbian cyma with a backband” into the Intertunnel. I’m not sure what sort of trouble you might get in for just reading it.
The Chiri Chiri sisters are my new second-favorite band.
Chie and Risa are from Yokohama, and the planet Gene Vincent, by the sound of it. Of course I have no idea what the hell’s going on. That’s a feature, not a bug these days. I don’t want a peek behind the curtain. I want you to smile and sing and play your song like you’re enjoying yourself, or at least reserve a serious mien for serious music. Their giapponese webpages are Greek to me, but their smiles and Country Gentleman twang are not.
[Editor’s Note: From 2009. Alice doesn’t live there any more]
Back porch on cave broke. Again. Caveman broke again, too. But must fix. Cavewoman tired of ants massaging bottom of feets. Caveman fix once and for all.
Caveman fixed porch two years ago. Not caveman’s fault porch not last. Porch made from leftover framing lumber scraps from house because caveman never have budget. Caveman not know what budget is. Some kind of bird, I think. Lasted fifteen years anyway.
Must make mark in life. My mark is upside down, like everything else in Caveman’s life. Caveman is mystified by runes on unholy measuring tape. Only use if necessary.
Caveman have cave tan. Caveman asks reader to note that leg is moving too fast to be seen clearly. Caveman only has two afternoons and a few hundred bucks to finish. Make holes! Caveman qualified for that.
Caveman digs hole 30″ deep, where frost not go. Caveman tamps. Caveman either bending down or lost lower right leg in horrible tamping accident. (Caveman checks) Leg OK. No worry.
Gravel, precast concrete mushroom footing, 4 x 4 Pressure treated post. No one tell friend Gerard 4 x 4 is only 3-1/2 by 3-1/2. Upsets him.
No measure if caveman can help it! Use stick for straightedge and plumb with level. When level is plumb, post is plumb level. Caveman know what desk jockey thinking. What with Caveman wearing gloves? Caveman is caveman, not barbarian.
Make mark, use lumber for straightedge now. Like Caveking coronation, make sure crown of lumber faces up. Caveman is swaybacked, caveporch is not. Caveporch will be two times bigger now. Cavelady will forgive everything now. Cavecubs will have place to expose themselves to sun god now, but not in the mud for a change.
Caveman use something called newmatic or some other sorcery to pound nails. Must hurry. Have tables to make after dark.
Caveman has all the barbarian tools. Sawzall great for de-boning large prey and tax assessors. Caveman just kidding. Tool is too dirty to use on large prey.
Pressure treated wood used to scare non-cavemoms with scary arsenate word. Laws passed. Lumber now treated with other harmless stuff. Of course new stuff rots nails. Caveman shrug and back up everything with galvanized plates and hangers and double hot-dipped galvy nails. Big Cavecub bang many nails in hangers. Little Cavecub only one who understands runes on tape, so he measure:
Only measure first and last decking board! Waste of time to measure and cut all one by one. Install all crooked anyway. I show you what to do. You think caveman smart, but caveman just lazy and in a hurry.
Cut first and last with circular saw older than caveman. I changed the blade when Reagan was President, so saw is ready for additional decades. Use Speedsquare as fence for straight cuts.
Caveman told you: do not measure with runetape. Use prop and line things up. No understand measure twice cut once. No measure at all, be drinking mead and eating roasted grill flesh while Norm is still trying to finish in dark while mosquitoes feast on his flesh.
I tell you one last time: No measure. Nail first board, last board. Flop other 2 x 6 PT boards down. Shove 3-1/2 inch dipped galvy ring-shank nails between boards for spacers. Pound rest of nasty nails into boards at joists. Use big nasty framing hammer or you have no shot, because wood is like wet iron. Caveman not use newmatic gun because nails would rot, and newmatic would set nail in, making many thousands of little holes filled with water. Pressure treat cheap and no rot, but water in holes freezes and pulls boards to pieces.
Caveman turning into harpy: Do not measure. First and last board right length. Stretch chalkline string between them, snap it and cut on the line. Caveman use hot pink chalk because caveman is in touch with his feminine side.
Caveman lay bricks left over from demolition of gas station ten years ago in running bond pattern in sand from little cavecub’s old sandbox. Even caveman knows step should be very deep and wide outside, and land on transition to grass, not grass. Rake out soil, throw down seed and go make a table.
Caveman will paint entire thing when it dries out. Cavelady likes bigger porch. Maybe show Caveman her feminine side too.
As is occasionally the case, I don’t know whether to write about Ben’s Tiny House here, or on The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys. Ben belongs both places, I imagine.
Now, adults have lost their minds, and have started talking about how they’re going to live in a shed, or a phone booth, or an apartment it would be illegal to keep a death-row inmate in, because they’re going to save the environment — whatever that is — but Ben is talking sense. He’s got the urge. He wants to build shelter. That’s what a normal boy does. He makes things, and maybe dreams about making bigger things.
Take a big bite, and keep chewing, as the old saying goes. Building shelter is interesting, and important, but at its most basic level, it’s not rocket surgery. It’s amenable to plain effort coupled to curiosity. Ben obviously had help, but the Leaning Tower of Footings he’s got going on underneath his mahal hints that he really did do the work by himself, along with his mates, and wasn’t just posing for the pictures.
iPhone people constantly blog about their desire to mechanize the construction of home building. They figure everything they care about is made in a factory, preferably overseas where people they don’t care about as much as they protest they do risk getting Bhopaled instead of them. Why not houses? What they are really daydreaming about is not having anything to do with other people, especially people whose fingernails have something besides Cheeto dust under them . They’d prefer to order an Ikea house and have it dropped off by FedEx, like everything else in their life. That’s fine, I guess, but there’s an enormous flaw in their thinking: Building housing for humans is already one of the most efficient, mechanized, and orderly processes there is in the American landscape. It takes so long, costs so much, and seems so mysterious and infuriating to people with skinny glasses because the process is filled with people like them — clerks, nabobs, government officials, endless ranks of rulemakers telling the people that build shelter, and the people that occupy said shelter, exactly what they’re allowed to build and live in. All that foolishness, and more, will still happen when housing becomes all pre-fab; it will just be hidden from sight at a factory instead of on display where the house goes. Then a truck will come with your Ikea double-wide and plop it down and you can live in the shabby thing without talking to anyone with muscles on their bodies that aren’t the residue of mouse clicks.
That’s why Ben’s barn, or shed, or whatever you want to call it, is so wonderful. It is the essence of a house. It is shelter, in its simplest form — stripped-down, straightforward, homemade. It is not trying to do much besides keep the rain off your head, and the bears out of your food. It is as iconic as a crayon drawing of a house by a child. It’s an example of why the tiny house people are right, for the wrong reasons. Shelter for humans should be straightforward.
Ben has shown you something, if you’ll just see it. You’ve forgotten what you’re trying to do. Ben wasn’t old enough to forget anything, so he got it right the first time.
You must understand I am capable of galvanic rage.
That is probably news to most, if not all of my readers and friends. I’m not talking about cutting remarks on message boards after midnight, either. I mean real, bad, spittle-flecked rage. There are very few things that truly matter to me, but they matter to me a great deal. And I am very slow to anger, but there is no end to it when it’s unleashed.
I don’t act like that on the Intertunnel, and I try not to act like that off it, either, but I fail often enough. Many people are very blase on the Intertunnel, although they have very strong opinions. Often it is because they are shielded from real privation. They won’t miss any meals if X passes the Y law. Many bloggers have sinecures, and while it doesn’t always make them mellow, it does make them sort of ambivalent about the things that they rail about. I’ve observed outrage as a kind of hobby for decades now. It’s tiresome to me. The professional doesn’t listen to amateurs. Robespierre wouldn’t read Andrew Sullivan.
I live at the edge of the economic map, and several other maps, including the actual map. We’re cutting edge cave people here. People tell me that my life seems odd and occasionally wonderful to them. It seems that way to me, too, although it is too demanding on my wife and children to suit me. But I would not trade our life for cable TV. But if the DJIA or Congress sneezes, we get pneumonia.
I’d make an excellent Savonarola. I could build a pulpit and rail from it with the best of them. I’d give you the finger while you burned me in the Piazza della Signoria, too, because I’m an Irishman as well as an Italian. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I must not rage. I’m tired of manifestos everywhere.
My god, everything is a manifesto. You can read any innocuous news story on Yahoo and there are 3000 comments after it and 2500 of them are manifestos and the other 500 are plain screeds. Every gathering, real or virtual, is a pretext to launch into a description of the New World Order everyone’s going to install right after they’re made God-Emperor by acclamation, by virtue of the excellent manifesto they left in the comments after a story on The Frisky about this year’s bikini styles. Everyone so desperately wants to be Howard Beale. I really sort of am Howard Beale. I don’t want to be Howard Beale. I certainly don’t want to watch amateurs try their hand at it. I’m a pro. Born to the purple — prose.
I put my children on the Intertunnel. A thing fraught with peril. But they are the product of the best of my self, and my wife’s best efforts. They are a very long prayer released into the ether. One does not pray as if God is a vending machine; put a wish in the slot, and out comes the candy. You offer it up for its own sake.
My sons’ video showed up in so many places I’m afraid to start naming them because I’ll forget some and offer an unstudied insult to those omitted. I swear I saw them everywhere these last few days — almost.
Nowhere where bad people are. Nowhere where Howard Beale reigns. I saw them in places where decent, hard-working, put-upon people congregate. I saw them where people recognize something of the potential in persons not given over to the depravity of the general culture. People who know the difference between civilization and barbarism. People that value effort. Like progress. Think about the future.
I saw all the supportive and pleasant things that were said. The encouragement offered. The attention paid to two little boys who doggedly try despite obscurity and hardship. People reached in their pockets to help them, to support them, to let them know that there is more than a world of Howard Beales outside their practice room. I’m immensely grateful for it, but so much more than that. You’ve restored my faith in my fellow man, which I must admit was running on fumes. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.
There are nice people everywhere, if you will but look. I’m glad we did.
Reader and commenter and all-around swell guy Leon suggested we might like this video. We do, don’t we? It’s one of the better looks into real work in a real shop I’ve seen. There’s lots in it a civilian might not get to see much: steam bending, portable sawmill, and various other barbarous arts and crafts.
I love Mike Jarvi’s energy. That shop has elbow room I could use, too. And three-phase power, I think. He puts it all to use. There’s mad scientist/insane bartender finish mixing at the end too, which I like.
It’s funny that the bench is called “Contemporary” style. It’s like the appellation “Modern.” To me, it suggests a style about eighty years old. To everybody else, they just see the words contemporary and modern and think it’s contemporary and modern, not Contemporary and Modern. It’s just a few years removed from Victorian, really.
But I must warn Mike, I’m sort of a jerk, and I have an impenetrably high opinion of my own work, which boils down to this dare: I can make a bench faster than anyone that can make one better, and I can make one better than anyone that can make one faster.
Month: March 2013
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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