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Brad's(reverse)Blog May 2005
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May Day, 2005
There's this tree down the road--it's a maple, never shaped
or disarrayed by human activity. Right now the leaves are coming
out.
I take photos of it most times when I walk up the hill--like
Monet's haystacks it's always different, always beautiful. Besides
the hill is sort of steep and it gives me time to get my breath...
When I was growing
up in Iowa, my high school (Ames) had a small patch of virgin Prairie.
Only tiny patches of the original prairie that covered Iowa were left.
At the time, I wasn't too interested, but my interest in nature has grown
through the years. Now I'm beginning to feel that our own local Rathdrum
Prairie could use some of the same sort of protection, as development is
growing fast, and when the houses go in, the wildflowers disappear.
Already the best places to find the wildflowers are on the rocky ridges
in areas too steep for cattle to have trampled it. Invasive species
conquer more and more area, driving out the indigenous flowers. Roadside
spraying destroys the native flowers while only briefly stunting the tougher
invaders.
So I love spring
in Idaho, but it's got its issues.
May 3, 2004
My son Birrion
and I saw the movie "Kung Fu Hustle" today. If you don't mind absurd mindless
ritualized violence (and I for one don't, which explains why I also watch
football), it was great fun. The movie toyed with conventions such
as who the protagonist is, but managed to connect you emotionally with
the right ones in the end... I've liked a lot of the Hong Kong movies
I've seen, including as many Jackie Chan as possible (who based his some
aspects of his physical comedy on Harold Lloyd, a great silent comedian).
Both Hero, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, were very good movies, but
I prefer comedies such as Chan's and Kung Fu Hustle. The Hustle seemed
to include homages or parodies of Roadrunner cartoons, Batman, the Matrix,
and Kung Fu movies in general. The only question at the end was why
they called it Kung Fu Hustle. We decided it was because of the dance
scene with axes carried on by the Axe Gang...
May 4, 2005
While I'm on
a movie kick, as Star Wars Episode Maybe Last nears its opening, fans are
all atwitter over what it is that makes Anakin became the evil henchman,
Darth Vader. In the trailer the Emperor tells him: "You cannot
learn it from a Jedi."
So I've picked up the clues, and
postulated the following dialog:
"No, Anakin, the secret comes from a race long in the future and far away. To thoroughly activate your metachlorean cells, you must take these 'Anabolic Steroids.'"
And thus the wimpy Anakin is transformed
into the heavily muscled Darth Vader. But there are side effects.
In some of the movies, Darth is 7 feet tall. In others he is only Luke
Skywalker's height. And it causes unsightly facial blemishes, and
breathing difficulties. May lead to participation in major league
sports... Should not be taken unless under the care of a physician...
May 5, 2005
So
what I thought was a bit of clever pop humor yesterday I posted to a past
movies newsgroup, with the heading: Star Wars Emperor's secret. I
posed the rhetorical question, how else could Darth Vader be slight and
shorter in some movies and 7 feet tall in others. I got only two
responses:
One way is to have yer legs
hacked off and replaced with bionics that add two feet to your height.
You notice that there is no smiley face attached to that last statement.
I kind
of took that as a veiled threat, but since the internet is a big place,
I'm hoping he won't come to visit me in Idaho. I'm also hoping he
can lighten up his world view.
The
other person told me I was off topic and stupid.
There are some
fairly nice newsgroups on Usenet. I'd better stick to posting on
topic to them...
May 6, 2005
I'm collecting stuff for an upcoming History of Bluegrass lecture (May 14 in Spokane). Never having done this before, I'm combining visuals of old LP record covers with audio of 100 years of recordings, and my own Wikipedic brain (a lot of loose thoughts and some outright wrong ones, tenuously connected). Okay, I did read 5 or 6 books to get a better handle on it. 150 years in 150 minutes. Should be fun.
May 7, 2005
From my latest webpage on organic
gardening tips.
When we first moved
to North Idaho and tried to garden, we thought we needed soil. What
we had was gravel. We spent a lot of time running our "soil" through
a sieve to get piles of gravel out of it. Then we started adding
leaves and horse manure. The leaves go on in the fall, and the manure in
the spring (whoops, my wife just cut out an article saying this isn't a
good practice--needs 60 days to get over possible pathenogens). We added
enough material that now we're gardening mostly on top of our original
soil. Except for root vegetables like carrots, we don't need to till
the soil, unless tree roots grow in too much. (We never have had a rototiller--just
hand turning with shovel or spade fork) Our garden is planted mostly
in the top layer of composted horse manure. In case you didn't know,
horse manure is less likely to burn than steer or chicken manure, and has
proved to be good for all the vegetables we grow. Carrots,
though they like loose sandy soil and don't need so much nitrogen, do well
if the soil is well turned with a spade fork and not compacted.
All this is possible through having
a good source of horse manure. We've got one, though we have to wait
until he's ready to clean his horse enclosure, so it's nice to have an
area to start on earlier. In our case we have two gardens, at our
two residences, and this year we're going to see how the old garden does
without a yearly dose of manure.
In case you're not so blessed with
manure as we are, you can also plant in clumps or rows, putting the manure
you have right where it will be used, instead of the traditional way of
spreading it over the whole garden... I did that at the new garden
last year, when it was in fairly bad shape. This year I'm hoping to not
just put the manure in rows, but it did work...
(to the
whole page with pictures)
May 8, 2005
I'm convinced that getting a yard in shape, like cleaning a house, is a fractal experience. Fractal in this instance means that as you do it more levels of complexity unfold, making the goal impossible to attain. I'm also tempted to blow it all off as a cheap opiate of the people that middle class homeowners do to avoid thinking about our foreign policies or what day it is we are free of taxes for the year. On the one hand, it is manual labor in a society which has avoided manual labor to an unhealthy extreme (reminds me of seeing all these kids on motorized scooters and bikes that should be peddling for their lives). On the other hand, at my age doing serious yardwork means facing serious aches and pains in an unfair physical hangover on the next day. I mean is it fair that I'm being good and working on my garden and the result is I feel stiff the next day? This year, for unknown reasons, my wife and I have been working harder outside than I can remember in the last 20 years. But the weeds seem to be working just as hard, and steadier. It seems the only time you catch up is when the frost kills everything, by which time you're ready for that to happen... But of course actually about June I sort of get settled into a summer rhythm and hit an enjoyable pace. Well, this pace wouldn't be bad if my body would just cooperate...
May 9, 2005
Today I worked on building a tool shed. It's the third project this spring to encorporate lumber which would have been burned in a big bonfire if we hadn't salvaged it. Although some other materials had to be purchased, the salvaged lumber contributed the impetus to make the new chicken coop, greenhouse, and now the tool shed. Years ago some similar wood was the inspiration for our treehouse, since the 2 X 6's were long and strong... When I finished siding it, there was only a small pile of kinding left from the salvage wood. I think this is kind of a Bauhaus concept of utilizing all the materials, but then what do I know of Bauhaus?... A couple sentences in an Art history class...
May 10, 2005
You have to wonder how important brains are... We have a lot of "snowbirds" around here that drive to Arizona every winter and back every spring in their RV's and would probably not be able to make it without Interstate highways. On the other hand monarch butterflies, insects of very little brain, migrate every year to one area of Mexico for the winter. Even more amazing are the Painted Lady butterflies that start north every spring, stop on some convenient foliage, lay eggs, hatch as caterpillars, metamorphose into adults, and the new generation migrates south again to the same area their parents came from. They're probably mostly male, as they don't ask for directions...
May 11, 2005
Today
was a great spring day. I made a hundred pots in the morning, then
weeded some areas in the garden. In the afternoon the horse manure,
which is the lifeblood of the garden arrived--two dump truck loads. So
after supper I stayed out until dark spreading it in the garden.
I also tried making some rhubarb-strawberry jam, but I think as usual it
didn't gel. I think I don't like following directions well enough...
Maybe I'd better
say more about the 100 pots. Since this is around the start of my
30th anniversary as a professional potter, I've been wondering how many
pots I've made. A few years back I bought a price thingy that sticks
stickers on the pots, and since then I've used about 5000 stickers per
year. 30 years times 5000 pots is 150,000 pots. I'm making
more pots per year now than when I started, so I'm guessing a fairer estimate
would be 100,000 pots total. I'm mentioning this because it helps
put in perspective that a day of making 100 pots is not as interesting
to me as a day when two dump truck loads of manure come. After all, the
manure only comes once a year.
What made
it especially great is that I'd been anticipating the manure delivery for
weeks, but it wasn't happening, and I thought I'd have to call the supplier
and harangue him. I don't like to call anybody, much less harangue
them. So while I was weeding in the perennial part of the garden,
I get a phone call that the manure is on the way! Hooray for the
manure! The broccolis and melons and tomatoes are eager to
leave the greenhouse.
Speaking of
greenhouse and manure, the new greenhouse that I built this spring was
sited on an existing cement pad, that had a 3 inch gap in it towards one
end. I had the idea to plant some greenhouse cucumbers in the crack,
so today I stuffed the crack with manure and transplanted some cukes to
the space. The idea was to let the cuke roots never get crowded as
they would in a container. I'm hoping it will be easy to water as well.
May 12, 2005
Q'emiln Park in Post Falls, Idaho,
is a great combination of a very tame park with swimming beach on the Spokane
River, and a very wild park where you can still see the way the land was
100 years ago. I noticed very few invasive species of plants... I
got a chance to explore a trail there while waiting for a car to get fixed.
I'm looking forward to going again soon...
May 13, 2005
First a minor update. The strawberry jam I made a couple days ago did gel, which is about a first for me. And the manure is getting spread, and smells considerably. Today I spent about 5 hours getting ready for a two hour lecture on the History of Bluegrass tomorrow. This is in addition to 4 or 5 books I've read, and a lot of websurfing for dates and information. As an interesting diversion, I stumbled on a site that dispels rumors that Bob Dylan was booed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival for playing electric guitar. If you can believe this source at http://buffaloreport.com/020826dylan.html , they were just booing because he played a short set (and only booing Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was emceeing, for saying he had to play a short set), and he switched to acoustic because that was all the songs he'd worked out with the members of the Butterfield Blues band that were backing him. It still represents a watershed moment in the history of American pop music...
May 14, 2005
I think part of being an introvert means that even when you go to a party and have a relatively good time you still feel bad about it afterward. In this case I delivered my History of Bluegrass lecture to about 5 people, two of whom were killing time waiting for their banjo playing teenaged son. And then I joined the instructors for the impromptu instructors concert. I admit to liking to be over prepared, which I knew I was for the lecture, and actually I didn't expect many more than those who showed up (and several seemed quite attentive...) But the nature of an impromptu concert is to be barely prepared, and I'm likelier to goof in those circumstances, and I did, a bit. Everyone else in the group was in bands that play regularly--I'm lucky to arrange gigs once a month... All that whining out of the way, the day was quite satisfactory--for an introvert...
May 15, 2005
The pottery guild I belong to put up a display in the Post Falls Library (there through July). Although it does give us all a bit of publicity, the stakes are not high, and about 8 of us worked together pretty smoothly, considering the only thing we have in common is pottery, and our tastes in even pottery are diverse. The predetermined theme was to show the process of pottery, and several of us showed the steps that go into the things we make. I chose to show the procession of my career, reflecting a bit on 30 years, and included my first pot in the exhibit, which many of the newer potters no longer have, but I've kept in spite ( or perhaps because ) it was a very lopsided failure... I grew up reading Scrooge McDuck comics, and he always treasured his first dime, and this probably influenced my keeping my first pot (there's a lot of other stuff that's disappeared in 30 years...).
May 16, 2005
Today the garden went forward by leaps
and bounds. The manure is always the key. My wife pointed out
an article on how it's potentially bad to use fresh manure in the garden
(as some pathogens may survive), so although we've had no problems, we're
moving to storing our manure for a year in a pile, allowing it to compost
thoroughly. I mention the compost at this moment because once you
have a couple dumptrucks' worth of manure piled in your garden, it
becomes the biggest obstacle to planting the garden (unless you want to
try terracing ;-) ). So the last half week or so has
involved moving lots of manure to everywhere in the garden and the flowerbeds.
As soon as it was done, the whole garden was planted in a couple hours.
And then the rains, that have been frequent lately, returned, to make sure
the little seeds know it's time to grow.
One final manure note: by piling
the manure ahead, I won't have to be longing for the manure delivery to
get the garden rolling, and it may allow a month earlier planting.
Some springs that's not a good thing, as it can frost till the end of May,
but this spring the lows have been only in the mid 40's...
May 17, 2005
May 18, 2005
May 18th is always Mt. St. Helens day for those of us who lived with its ashfall. At the time of the eruption, we were living outside Chelan Washington, and my wife had taken our baby to visit her parents in Spokane. The gray ash coated the nearby apple orchard (and everything else) with only a thin layer of dust in Chelan, but Spokane was hi heavier, with 1/2 inch or more. The dust was said to decapacitate automobiles, and so my wife was stuck until the roads were cleared. Our separation at that time was very stressful. Although after a week or so things settled down, it felt the first day like a gargantuan bomb had laid the whole Northwest low (which, in equivalents, it had). The event had no equal in my life until the destruction of 9-11...
May 19, 2005
I went to see Star Wars Revenge of the Sith today. It was okay, but moved more like a Greek tragedy than a typical movie, in that alert viewers already knew what the outcome was going to be, and we were just there to see how it all got to be there. Also I have to concede that I was wrong about the steroids (;-)see May 4), and the hostile person who responded to my post was more right than he probably knew... Still in all, it was a feast for the eyes, hardly a square building or spaceship or straight line in any scene, except for the traffic on Coruscant... It is ironic how what started out to be a campy version of the old Saturday afternoon serials became this multibillion dollar conglomerate... I remember seeing some of the serials rerun in our local theater at the Saturday matinees in Brookings, S.D. in the early 1960s. Like Star Wars, in spite of having rocket suits to fly to the moon, they inevitably slugged it out near a precipice at the end of each episode.
May 20, 2005
May 21, 2005
One of the advantages of being an
artist is taking advantage of artistic license. Today's exercise
in the creative is making a 6 foot inflatable pot out of evening gown type
blue glossy material. This was an image I had last winter to replace
last year's display idea of a fountain, which died when its pump did.
Although the pot is now mostly sewn, there's no photo yet because the "surplus"
fan I bought was apparently designed to suck rather than blow, so I'm still
working on some technical details.
Back to the artistic license.
There is, of course, no such thing as an artistic license, but artists
get to do all sorts of stuff and call it art, and only occasionally are
called crazy for it. That's the essence of artistic license.
Of course technically I renounced art back in college in favor of craft,
but there's no existing phrase like craftspeople's license. Included
in the license is a right to spectacularly fail, so I'm already imagining
what to do with a limp 6 foot pot if I can't drum up a sufficient blower
for it.
May 22, 2005
First, I wish to accept acclaim for successfully predicting that the inflatable pot might fail. It lay limp on the floor as an unwatered houseplant, when I tried another fan in it. When my wife first saw the cloth it was made from , she suggested I make her a dress from it for the places I never take her. So when it flopped, I suggested she could wear it as a dress, as long as she didn't mind looking like a pot. I might still try stuffing it with balloons to make it a sort of lumpy soft sculpture pot. Later I was researching awning materials on the web and found the material used to make commercial inflated figures, so the idea might resurrect itself still...
The family went to see the movie Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy today. When my kids were young I read them the Hitchhiker series aloud at bedtime (occasionally bowdlerizing it a bit). Thus it was like seeing an old friend (so, for that matter, is Star Wars, although the friends are possibly more disfunctional there, at least in the "Revenge of the Sith"). While Star Wars follows the traditional plot path of trying to save the (fill in the blank--Republic--world--universe), Douglas Adams thumbed his nose at convention while his characters thumbed lifts onto Vogon deconstructor ships. In the Adams universe, the earth is destroyed as a byproduct of an unnecessary galactic thruway bypass project in the first minutes of the film. In his Restaurant at the End of the Universe book, the end of the universe is turned into banal lounge entertainment. Intelligence is not valued--Marvin the robot is the brains of the outfit, although generally ignored and always lost in his own chronic depression. Nor, in the books, is romance a key element. At least in the case of the books, the old cliche, "If you were the only girl in the world, and I were the only boy," becomes valid, but no sparks fly between the last two humans. The movie has made an accommodation to moviegoer sensibilities (i.e. "where's the romance?"), but the changes made still produced a pleasant simulacrum of the original.
May 23
Being a potter means handling a lot
of pots, generally carefully. Then again, there are those days when I say
that my "K" factor is up (K for klutz). While glazing a large bowl
this morning, I squeezed the glazing tongs a bit too hard and the pot sort
of exploded into the glaze vat, splattering glaze all over, and making
it necessary to resieve the glaze to remove the shards. Later while
loading a kiln I forgot about the old enemy, gravity. I had a board
of pots set partially on top of a kiln, and took off pots from the part
over the kiln, leaving the last one (another large bowl) to discover GRAVITY.
I suppose there's hardly a day goes by when I don't break a pot at some
stage, but some are messier to clean up than others.
Being the kind of day it was, the
inflatable pot project meandered along. Here it is stuffed with balloons:
Although Claes Oldenburg (soft sculptor) might have loved it, I didn't. So I went to plan C:
May 25, 2005
The internet has so many things on it, that,
like a library, it's great to locate new pockets of useful information.
If you have a broadband connection, you can view some free movies on relatively
small screens, but with good sound. I haven't explored this a lot.
The first place I encountered this was some Addams Family like animations
called "Making fiends."
There are 17 short episodes--by the end you'll be singing along with the
theme song. But today I found a great movie on a folk potter in Alabama
and others on folk life at http://www.folkstreams.net/
If you see a login screen, just close it--it's not needed to view the films
(Real player is needed, which you may have to download). Anyway,
I thought I was a folk potter until I saw the movie on Jerry Brown called
Unbroken Tradition (last one on the page).
May 26, 2005
Today in my spare time I listened
to samples of my MIDI music, now all about 10 years old, sifting through
it like old photos, this time in search of melodies that would work with
a string band. When I started with MIDI, I was at first amazed at
all the different voices (100+) that could be used to make the sounds.
The more I worked with it, the fewer of them sounded good. When I
finally converted them to files anyone could use and put them on my web
site, I didn't realize different computers make them sound different (read
that as "bad"). So for a big project I need to play them all through
my synthesizer and record them digitally, but they inevitably sound a bit
cheezy anyway. So this project will likely languish. As a musician,
though, MIDI's are great for recording tune ideas, harmonies, and stuff
like that. A magnificent project would be to play them all with genuine
musicians, so today is a modest start to that...
May 27, 2005
Spring
is the thing with wings. I saw quail, ducks, geese, and lots of other birds
today. My wife and I walked along a part of Spirit Lake we've walked
many times, and saw rock penstemon in full bloom. In order to really
catch the spring flowers, you need to walk at least once a week to
see how they change. But more than that, you need to find places where
native plants still predominate. Later in the day I walked along
the Spokane River at Sullivan Park. Once you get downstream from the bluegrass
and picnicky stuff, it rapidly becomes a profusion of native blooms, including
lupines, two kinds of rose, penstemon, and this, which may be a kind of
penstemon:
May 28, 2005
Today while sort of watching the pottery
sales shop, I'm recording my MIDI compositions so they will sound better
and be usable on CD's and the web (yes, I just predicted last week that
wouldn't happen for a long time..). This involves setting up the
keyboard and running wires hither and yon, combining the keyboard, computer,
and stereo system. Enemies of dust will rejoice when all appliances
are wireless (at least for the connections). As it is, I've got a
rat's nest of wires behind the stereo and computer that makes me hesitant
to make any changes.
The music is around 10 years old,
and represents the majority of my original songs and melodies. MIDI
made it so that a musical illiterate like me could begin orchestrating
songs. Unfortunately a lot of it sounds a bit dated and amateurish
even to me now, but the tunes are the key regardless of the awkward settings.
(Whoops, I've just moved into rerecording my second collection and the
mixing and arranging have improved--maybe I'm being too hard on myself.)
MIDI's were sort of the original mp3's
as well, small files that would sound relatively well on a computer, used
mostly for background music for games as well as orchestral musical arrangement.
May 29, 2005
Today the best thing that happened
to me was thinning the pear trees. I suppose that may sound to some people
about as exciting as washing your hair. But we only got these pear
trees with our new house a year ago, and last year there were only a couple
dozen deformed pears on the trees. This year, after pruning (can pruning
alone be responsible?), there are hundreds of little pears, clusters of
8 or more on each bearing stem.
A few years back there was a
bit of a news flurry when Washington fruit growers were denied use of a
thinning spray, which removes most of the extra apples or pears.
Being dedicated to growing organically, that means ignoring the possibility
of sprays, and thinning them by hand, which takes longer than picking the
finished fruit. I think it's worth it, since although the trees thin
themselves to an extent, the final fruit will be small and require a lot
more peeling for canning than would be true otherwise.
So what made this a nice part of the
day was that the weather was perfect--blue skies, 80 degrees, breezy, so
it gave me a perfect excuse to be outside doing something constructive.
I removed about 3/4 of the little pears, leaving two in each cluster.
In a few weeks I'll thin again, trying to remove those with codling moth
hits (a black mark showing a codling worm is inside).
It all seems to be a lot of labor
for what will probably be a couple boxes of fruit, but to paraphase Robert
Frost, one can do worse than be a thinner of pear trees...
PS--I've since learned that leaving
two to a cluster is a bad idea--gives codling moths something to push against
when trying to lay eggs in the fruit... Next year, one pear or apple
per cluster...
May 30, 2005
It would be nice if the rhythms of
life produced whole new vistas daily. When you're tied to the seasons
through gardening or nature watching, it certainly happens, but not on
a daily basis. There are new little carrots, chard, and corn
plants in the garden. Instead of thinning pears, today it's apples,
but the view's not that different.
As I'm celebrating 30 years as a professional
potter, I think part of what helped me make it this far is a personality
willing to stick with seemingly boring repetition. I've mentioned
working in the fields as a field worker in high school. While most kids
did this one summer and looked for anything better the next year, I did
it through 4 years of college. Although weeding was the main activity,
there were changes week to week, including planting, thinning, pollinating,
and harvesting. The hardest job was pollinating, as I have allergies
and the pollen was a definate factor in my itchy eyes and runny nose.
So I guess I could tolerate not only boring repetition, but adverse conditions
as well. So I'm thinking an aptitude to boring repetition and enduring
adverse conditions might be an important part of struggling to become a
potter.
On the other hand, both being a potter
and keeping the same summer job meant not having to apply for a new job,
so one could as easily make the case that it was just the path of least
resistance. I guess it's all a matter of "spin."
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