Sippican Cottage
Donate

If You Make Things, You Are My Brother. Except This Guy. He Was Apparently Adopted By A Super-Race Of Polymath Alien Artists

March 13, 2013 14 Comments

My goodness, isn’t John Mayer a douchenozzle? A raging douchecanoe. A big, steaming bag o’ douche. I need a new monitor, because I punched mine thirty or forty times trying to get him to shut up. My son had a several-month-long interest in his music, which was the longest ten centuries of my life, but it went into remission, and my boy listens to proper records now, and I wander the house contented once more.

But credit where credit is due: the douchebag had the sense to hire David A. Smith. He can’t be all bad. I’ve featured lots of people making lots of things on this blog, but I can’t recall another person that seemed to be playing not just in another league, but playing alone in a league of his own making. I have met a fair number of sign painters over the years, back when I worked at building and renovating restaurants and so forth. Many struck me as quite talented. Many struck me, period, after a few pints. But they were all primordial ooze compared to this guy.

My little son and I watched this video on our TV, using a Roku box, instead of watching reruns of How It’s Made for the umpteenth time. By gad, the future is a wonderful place. I know, I’m living in it.

(Thanks to old friend Rob C. for sending that one along)

A Born Lever Puller

March 11, 2013 16 Comments

I must admit I look forward to these videos overmuch. The boys do them entirely by themselves now. Sometimes I hear them being made, and get a good idea of what the finished product might sound like while it’s still an unthrown pot. Other times, I’m working in the shop with everything humming and banging, and I get it sprung on me the same way you do. I have to remind myself not to meddle. It’s deuced difficult. I got out of bed this morning, eager to open my browser and see this video for the first time. The Heir compiled it last night, after he and his brother recorded it yesterday afternoon. I do believe a stranger could be entertained by them.

The little feller is still only nine. He deserves ever so much less credit for his efforts than his big brother. Big brother has painstakingly learned everything you see here, on his own, mostly. The little feller is just a wonder. He can play the drums as unwaveringly as a professional adult can. This is not a father’s opinion. I played for money with lots of professional drummers. Maybe one or two of them were better than he is right now, in the only way that matters: the ability and willingness to play something suitable, steadily, while accompanying other people. When you see videos of really young drum phenoms on YouTube, they’re generally playing along by rote with a (bad)recording, not other humans. That’s data entry, not music. Not many of them, and even fewer of their parents, have much of an idea of them ever entertaining an audience by being musical. It’s just Can You Top This. Music is not weightlifting. The world’s gone crazy and The Gong Show has replaced Carnegie Hall. You’re supposed to be entertained, not impressed, anyway.

I do believe the little feller deserves to be called a musician. His big brother certainly does. Their father and mother are very proud of them.  There’s a PayPal tip jar in the right-hand column if you want to show them some love. But I’m warning you right now — no matter how much money you send them, I’m not buying them saxophones.

[Update: Barbara M. sent along a generous donation to buy saxophones for the kids. Oh Jayzuz, not saxophones. A saxophone is just a flute with emphysema, and I don’t like flutes either. But I love Barbara!]

[Upside-Update: Dave R, who dared the kids to start this whole thing, is very generous with his moolah and his suggestions and expertise. Many thanks! Kathleen M is relentlessly generous. Many thanks! Melissa K is amazingly generous and we’re very, very grateful for it. Many thanks to everyone that watches, and comments, and hits the tip jar]

[Once Upponna Update: Thanks to Sarah R. for helping the boys out! ]

It Does, Indeed, Sound Pretty Snazzy

March 10, 2013 7 Comments

My nine-year-old is unusual.

He does get up to things. He has a force field when he needs one. Look right at you and betrays no emotion if he feels like it. He goes and finds things. He makes things and I don’t know how he did it. I ask him how he did it, and … oops — force field. He’ll offer explanations of very complex behaviors as things like,”I just thought of it in my mind.” Oh.

I’m trying to work all the time, and so he is mostly like an asteroid that whizzes by. He’s my Van Allen Belt and suspenders. I hear his beeping, Dopplering past me. When I capture him and question him closely about anything, it’s always worth the effort.

There was music coming out of the dining room this morning. It’s the only warm room in the house in a shoulder season morning. He sits at a little desk and constructs universes with Minecraft and eats a muffin his mom made him. He’s fashioned a little soundtrack for himself that plays along in the background. I think it’s Spotify, but what the hell do I know? I found it amusing to hear Dave Brubeck come out of there, then The Mayor of Simpleton, of all things. Then something funky and greazy and infectious and sophisticated and adult and borderline decadent came percolating out of there. Jayzuz, son, what are you up to in there?

-What is that music you’re listening to?
-It’s the Italian Secret Service.
-Who told you about the Italian Secret Service?
-I was just looking around and it sounded kinda snazzy, so I saved it.
-Did you just say it sounded “snazzy”?
-Yes. Do you want to watch the fireworks display I put in my Minecraft build?
-No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, sure. Where did you learn the word “snazzy?”
-I was just looking around…

Greenville 1969

March 10, 2013 5 Comments

Greenville, Maine 1969.

Treat yourself to the rest of the Flickr Photostream slideshow.  It’s a stone groove.

Greenville’s northeast of where I live now. It’s on the shore of Moosehead Lake. Never been. It’s Piscataquis. I’m an Oxford man. Next to no one lives in Greenville year-yound, but there’s resort getaways for bug bites or chill blains to taste.

I’m old enough to be one of the small children you can see in the pictures taken earlier in the evening, but the age is all we have in common. They watched a super 8 movie, projected on a bedsheet. Then they got put to bed, and mom and pop partied hearty. It’s New Year’s.

These are wealthy people. At least that’s what they seemed to people like us in 1969. Those are dentist’s sons and car dealership owner’s daughters. Things have changed and people on the dole own snowmobiles now, but it wasn’t always thus. Rich people skiied and we went sledding. They played tennis and we played hockey on the corduroy ice on a pond. They drove Citroens while we sat four across in the back seat of a Dodge Dart watching the road pass by through the rust holes in the floor. They let their hair down on New Year’s Eve, after the children were snug in their beds, at a modest lodge in the middle of nowhere Maine, while my parents watched Guy Lombardo on a black and white TV.

Maybe ten, fifteen years after that, the world opened up and everyone had nice cars and big houses and their kids wore what they liked instead of what was left over from a cousin’s closet from the previous decade. Regular people went to the hairdresser and bought their clothes instead of making them from patterns at the Newberry’s. Ordinary people ate strawberries out of season and vegetables that weren’t from a can. It became quotidian to fly on planes and go to movies. The dentist life was there for pipefitters. The pipefitter’s kids got braces and the dentist kids went Gekko.

And now, for reasons that can’t be explained, except to say for no good reason, regular people are plunged back into a dark age; back to pressing their snotty noses to the window for a peek at the dentists. Back to Greenville, 1969.

If You Build It, They Will Come. Or They Won’t

March 8, 2013 6 Comments

I very much like the internal gyroscope that hums away in people like Dimitrios.

He doesn’t seem to have ever done anything else in his life except carve wood. He’s done it on two continents for fifty years or so, so I don’t imagine he’s going to become a race-car driver or astronaut anytime soon. His mind must be as well-ordered as his shop.

When the layman sees people like Dimitrios, they can’t imagine that there could be a set of circumstances where he wouldn’t be in demand. A: He can do marvelous things. B: People who can do marvelous things are in short supply. C: People will make it pay for him.

C’s the tricky bit. And in it lies a lesson. Dimitrios has to begin on faith. He cannot know in the 1940s in Greece that he can make a go of it in Hampden, Massachusetts fifty years hence. He begins his monomania strictly on desire. He wants to do it. He trusts in something — God, man, commerce, luck, himself, perhaps; whatever — and he begins. His persistence was rewarded with a life-long livelihood.

The trickiest bit’s trickiest bit is the faith part. Life’s losers have the same faith in themselves. Insane people, for instance, usually have an impenetrable carapace of self-possession. Hell, business is a kind of insanity, considered dispassionately. I had a friend that ran restaurants and nightclubs. He once explained his work to me. OK, throw the best party you’ve ever been at. Now do it every night.

You have to go insane first, and then get people to go along with your delusion. Dimitrios has to say: I am a woodcarver, and say it before he is a woodcarver, or he’ll never become one. The deranged chicken must lay the crazy egg, and vice versa. There’s a guy on your bus that wears a prom dress and thinks he’s Marie of Romania. He has made the same kind of decision. Then again, it’s entirely possible that a guy on a downtown bus in a prom dress will make more money by holding court, and an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup, than Dimitrios makes carving.

In business, we all have to wear the prom dress on the bus first. The fickle public will raise their hand to let you know when you’re Marie of Romania. Or they won’t.

[Merci beaucoup to Kathleen M. and Karen O. for supporting this blog]

Month: March 2013

Picture of sippicancottage

sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

Find Stuff:
Archives
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Tags