While I gather my wood, wits and courage to begin my next big project (a pair of small writing desks for my next-door nieces), I’ve been getting my shop kicks by building little doo-dads that stretch my abilities. A “case” in point is this little box to hold the tea bags we use at our school. It ain’t much and it’s built with scraps, but the case is put together with mitered full-blind dovetails, a joint I have puzzled over for many years in The Bible (otherwise known as “Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking: A Step-By-Step Guide to Essential Woodworking Techniques”). The joint is actually not as hard as I thought it would be since, 1) sins are basically hidden, and 2) I used nice squishy softwood. Is it perfect? Of course not. Still, a nice little box, methinks. And more to the point, so thinks Mika.
Of all the arts, perhaps music is the most primal, most intimate, the one we participate in at the deepest levels of our being. It literally animates us, fills us with spirit, and it both lifts us out of ourselves and returns us to our truest selves. The big re-set button, hard-wired deep in our mainframe:
… and, just for future reference, Mika, this is what does it for me:
Got to spend a few days with Charlie up in Kanagawa. Visited Kamakura, Enoshima, Hakone, and downtown Saturday night Tokyo… and lived to tell the tale.
Here is the finished project. For the two side doors, I used draw-bored mortice and tenon joints and discovered, to my dismay, how little an offset is tolerated by such softwood. (Yes, I cracked some joints. Ouch!) Anyway. Done. Ish.
The original indoor toilet here was a two and a half holer (two stalls and a urinal). I don’t know if this was common in a private home or not, but it had a certain usability to it. But the holes were just holes over a common pit and uhm… no. Just no.
When we converted to Western Toiletism, one and a half holes were removed and half the room given over to a wash basin. The sink counter is out of a rough slab of teak and the little washroom is quite lovely etc. etc. but there’s a problem illustrated by the piling up of assorted crap that tends to collect in such a place.
That’s right, Sparky! No storage!
I thought for awhile about building a large medicine cabinet, but there’s not really wall space for a full sized proper cabinet. Here is my solution. The overall design is sort of my take on Greene and Greene and points a way forward for me. I really like this period of design and it’s a natural fit with this house and this occupancy. The Arts and Crafts movement took inspiration from traditional Japanese architecture and this house was built about 1912, near as we can figure. The vibe is right. But even more than that, I think the aesthetics click. This house is all about rectangles. The dragonflies break that of course, but I think I did a fair job of balancing the asymmetry.
One hint that maybe I got it right: Mika’s sister, Rumi, assumed it was a genuine Japanese antique cabinet that we’d bought online pulled out of storage. Har!
A while back, I wrote about the distinction between an artist and and artisan, how one elevates ego over work; the other work over ego. I explained that I try to infuse beauty in the functional objects I make–not because the object itself requires it, but because I do–and that this consciousness defines me as an artisan.
However.
In the BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters”, Roger Scruton makes remarkably similar points and illustrates them in gory detail. He goes on to argue that while beauty has no utilitarian value itself, it is “through beauty that we shape the world into our home.” In other words, a purely utilitarian object is essentially useless to human beings becuase of our spiritual need for beauty. (He goes on to say that the worst offenders, modern architects, have filled our cities with ugly and unlivable spaces that graffiti finishes, rather than defaces.)
He defines the conflict in traditional terms, between our higher spiritual selves and our baser animal instincts. I would argue that the struggle is less spirit/instinct than human/cog. But it’s a mere quibble. His main point, that the creation of beauty is key to the retention of our humanity, strikes me as profound. I stand corrected.
I hadn’t heard this fellow before, but he’s amazing, and the fellow he’s got riding DADGAD shotgun is right on the money as well. The two of them make a case in point about just playing the damn tune. There’s plenty of variation and ornamentation in this fiddler’s playing, but it never gets in the way of the tune. Lovely. Forced me to visit emusic.com and bump up my monthly subscription (I was down to $2 and needed another three to get the album.)
All well and good. We internet users will pay for content if a) the price is right and b) the quality is there. Check and check.
Many years ago in Grandpa Days, somebody (I’m looking at you, old man) was inspired to convert a traditional ohi-ire closet into a modern unit closet, complete with a lovely set of “plood” folding-doors that while in addition to being awkward to use were also as out of place as dive fins at a bowling alley. At one point Mika and I decided to put the TV in the closet–because we’re insane–and only open the doors when we wanted to suckle the “glass teat”, as Harlan Ellison would have it. It worked well enough, but I came back from camping to find that Mika had ripped out the damn ugly ape doors. She found a couple of spare fusuma that sort of but not really fit, but that still left a gap. I had the idea about the same time she did to make a sliding door to cover the gap.
And so, there’s the thing. I don’t know what to call it exactly, but it works. The frame is out cypress and the panels are out of cedar. I got to make extensive use of my rabbet and router planes. The through tenons are foxed and the panels are screwed into the rabbet from behind.
Make of that what you will. Personally, I keep waiting for Kukla, Fran and Ollie to drop by.
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is not the best book I have ever read. Certainly not the best writing nor the most interesting characters nor the most gripping storyline. But it is a book with real ideas about so many things–physics, time, mathematics, narrative, mysticism, poetry–that it’s actually hard to stay focused on the plot. I had to stop and read aloud portions just because the ideas tickled my brain.
Even so, it’s an epic story that stands out as one of the greatest encounters I have ever had with a book. A parallel cosmos in which the Academy has turned into a cloister of sorts just to survive, and where the brightest minds have had the technologies they’ve created over millennia, repeatedly stripped from them by the outside, Sæcular world, and… well…
Here’s a thoughtful bit that spoils no plot line but which I stopped and read aloud because it nicely sums up something I’ve been feeling for awhile:
…Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. that was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of stories. If their employees came home at days’s end with interesting stories to gell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without stories had been driven into concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed is why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle and an end in which you played a significant part?
Which could explain, in part, how it is I come to the end of a 900 page story (not counting the glossary and supplementary math lessons at the back) and just want it to go on for another 900! Thanks, Neal Stephenson, for a trip around the cosmi.
For the past several millenia, the Roubo benchtop stood on end in my shop, a looming white monolith ready to teeter and smash my puny human bits. I dared not lay it down on the floor since I dreaded the deadlift. And it was nearly impossible to do any work with it sitting atop my saw benches. So there it stood, whispering, “Daaaveeey… you’re not fiiiiiniiished….”
I had a three-day weekend. Put a check in that box.
Did it all go smoothly? Oh, of course not! Is each leg at a perfect 90 to the top and in perfect parallel with its mates? Oh, fiddle-dee-dee! What’s your bet? But it is together and as solid as a boulder. And while I can scoot it about, it’s decidedly at rest and unwilling to dance.
One thing of note: While this bench is, of course, a child of the Roubo-Schwarz family, I did not fix the shorter bottom rails with pegs or glue or anything. They are just there, tennoned deep into the legs. The width of the top should essentially be in constant motion, cycling in and out with the seasons and gradually shrinking over the years. Either the joint should fail or the top should crack, no? The longer rails, of course, are drawbored into the legs with oak pegs I made from a stick of firewood retrieved from Ishizuchi-san.
So there.
Oh, and yes, I think the deadman’s shape is a dud. Reminds me of the 70′s, somehow.
