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Wednesday, April 30  

Clingy

Here's one for the What in the Holy Hell category:Ulli's Roy Orbison in Cling-film site. Hunh?

Saturday, April 26  

Hoo-Boy!

Been a lot longer away from updating the blog than I'd planned. We had that great trip to NYC, during which I took careful notes, thinking I'd document all the great exhibits and good restaraunts we happened across. Of course, got back to the whirlwind schedule and never got around to it. The other main factor has been burlee.com, henchforth to be known as goddamn-burlee.com, since they sold out to a company called Interland about 2 weeks ago and ever since my site and email have been down more often than up. Grahhhh!! The killer is that I used to sing their praises to anyone who asked.. for 3 years they were just great. We'll see if things improve when the dust had settled, otherwise I'm gone.

It's another glazing day -- that's what saturdays are for, right? -- and I'm making pretty good progress. Since this'll be the last firing before the sale, I'm going pretty conservative on the glazing choices and letting myself off the hook with regards to testing new batches and combos. Just need to wrap up the package and deliver it, at this point. Looking at about 250 decent pots for the sale, if all goes well, which is about my satisfaction quotient: less than that and I get anxious that the displays will seem too spare or (gasp!) 200 people may come and buy everything; more than that is great, but a bonus. I think the most yet was a bit over 300 a couple xmas sales ago, but that was counting everything in the place, including the stuff that should remain hidden in the back room. It's abundantly clear now, I suppose, that I am an irrepressible counter - can't help it. I asked Clary Illian, last time I saw her, how many pots she has for her once-a-year sale and she had no idea. I suppose after 30 years and likely somewhere over 100,000 pots, the tendency would be to stop keeping track. In my case, I bet I'll still be doing it then. What a geek.

Thursday, April 17  

Wilco Wait

I just added the wilco movie to my Netflix list - sweet. "Very long wait" of course.

Thursday, April 10  

Trip

We're off this evening to NYC for the NY Film & Video Festival, where Cindy's video Residue of Memory is screening. To see her listing, go to their site (which uses frames - gads!), click "The Films" link and browse the R listings. Way cool!

Should be a fun trip: 3 days of indy films, museums/galleries and good food. Oh, and maybe we'll get some sleep for a change. (Not likely - we tend to overdose on culture anytime we're out of Indiana).

Wednesday, April 9  

firing follow-up

For those of you waiting with baited breath (as if), I unloaded that kiln I was lamenting over the other day and it turned out quite nice. A few new problems to think about that replaced the old ones, but seem to have solved the lack of reduction and mystery un-carbon-trapped carbon-trap glaze. Ahhhhhhh............... [insert large sigh of relief here].

I also just shot "slides" of the new stuff tonight for the upcoming spring sale postcard, with the quotes designating that my vocabulary still hasn't caught up with the reality, which is that I'm using a digital camera and downloading the images shot less than 20 minutes ago to my pc as I write this. Way, way, way cool. If you're in the market for a camera, the Sony DSC-F707 is pretty damn good.

I'll post photos to the St. Earth site soon.

 

Hey look - I won an auction:

Vacuum tubes over 100, small types

See, I've been dealing with this group of vac tubes I picked up at our local auction - I was actually bidding on the nice $5 wooden shelf they were in, but picked up 150 various tubes in the process - and in sorting them and learning the lingo and stuff, I've sorta gotten hooked! They're actually very cool little technology artifacts; I love the way that they are of a previous era, where they were such a breakthrough that they became ubiquitous, but couldn't be more antiquated in the era of silicon chips and fiber optics. But the twist is that they're living this vampiric after-life -- totally useless to mose, but still valuable to this small minority for use in vintage gear, like antique radios and tube amplifiers. Sculpturally, some of them are amazing.

Of course, like the fairydust hope-geek I am, I'm imagining some diamond in the rough factor coming into play... like the obscurely rare 7094, which runs a cool $125 these days, apparently. That'd be a nice find in my $12.95 + shipping box of crap from eBay. (Dream on.) Cindy is dismayed, not so much because I've picked up yet another interest, but to the extent that it's been spread out on the dining room table for a week or two. Gonna need a designated space. How does one fit 14 hobbies into one house?

Monday, April 7  

Steven Johnson article

Nice article on Slate by Steven Johnson (a very good tech writer, by the by.. here's his site) about the Google/Blogger deal. Sounds alomst likely to emerge, in one form or another. God knows I could use the memory upgrade!

I get a little post-post-dom-com squiggle in my stomach at the thought of the cooler than cool stuff going down at some of these companies, ready to crawl into the light of day when the time is right. What's around the corner that will be as much a revelation as Amazon or half.com or email? Even my mom was exclaiming the other night at how it seems like the web has been here forever and how would we live without it.... ah, technolust. Just like the old days of 1999.

 

Spike

So Spike Lee was here last week, as a featured speaker at DePauw. One topic was "rolling up your sleeves" to do the hard work required to accomplish anything in an art medium. Some of my students thought this was the same old same old, just coming out the mouth of a celebrity. And I have to wonder: does it make any difference who the speaker is, when giving advice on achieving "success"?

Someone in my class suggested that the advice would mean more from someone who had not "made it", more like a cautionary tale from the downside. That has some merit. The best conclusion I could come up with was that where someone started out - wealthy with many options, poor with few, born at the wrong time, wrong place, wrong genetics to get the job done - may make all the difference. I'd sit down and take advice from someone born without much who managed to move to the respectable middle, to make a place for themself.

But I guess in this case, I am more impressed to hear the "work hard" mantra from Spike Lee than I would be from the average Joe. For one, it's coming from an artist who has managed to succeed in almost any measurable way, but maintained a personal vision in the process. For another, he's seen and done things that I can only wonder at -- what's it like to work with some of the best people in your field? To conceive a major project and see it through to completion? To have the resources to make anything you want, and follow your instincts? And while it may not seem to be the most profound of messages, if someone with his obvious gifts and experiences thinks it's the worthwhile thing to say, maybe those who doubt it should listen differently.

Sunday, April 6  

Glazing day.

A task that is usually difficult becomes anxiety-ridden following a less-than-stellar previous firing. I even ran tests of some new glaze batches through a previous firing, and still am not very confidant in what my glazes are doing; watery celadon, very strange things continuing with my carbon-trap shino, a new batch that was amazing on it's test tile came out, mixed as a batch, almost nothing like it. Typical! So I soldier on, knowing that the only way forward is forward and that doing is the best cure for the misgivings I have about the whole process. Glazes, I'll say for the record, can break your heart.

I should mention that I'm pretty cautious by nature, and doubly so when I have a bunch of bisqued pots that are full of promise, but am faced with a line of glaze buckets that I have little confidence in. Dilemmas abound. Should I give in to the temptation of 'safety' and glaze them all in the reliable, old standby glazes? That means sacrificing experiment, the unexpected, the unknown. It also means a load of pots that, while good and sound, aren't exciting to me, the maker. I get bored with my glazes nearly as easily as I get frustrated by them.

The option at the other end of the spectrum is to just go for it -- try those glazes that have been misbehaving, do new stuff, risky stuff, stuff that my logical inner voice says will most likely fail. This would be the fast-evolution method, producing more failures and more successes. Has some appeal, in the abstract, but for me it would be nearly impossible to follow through. I'm doing well to go nuts on a small handfull of bad pots each firing! To do it the whole way would surely result in more failures than my motivation can withstand at one point. I'm a slow-evolution kind of guy.

Instead I'll likely trod the middle ground, trying some of the new ones on teabowls, going with the old standby's on pots that I just have to see turn out OK. More tests, of course. Tests, tests, tests. That's about the only risk management tool I know, dozens of carefully planned and documented test tiles, so I try to follow through as best I can.

So how will this episode of Pots of Our Lives turn out? I'll report post-firing... tune in to see.