...in an alien landscape populated by squawking bipeds (not featherless).
I did finally get packed, though not, I'm afraid, without abusing several friends and using up my last bits of moving-karma. To give you an index, I disassembled my potter's wheel between about 3 and 3:30 AM on Saturday the 20th, and left for the post office and the airport at 4. Argh. Some debts are difficult to repay, but I'll find a way, somehow.
I am now an artist in a garret (well, a technologist in an attic -- not all that much difference, is there?). The squawking bipeds are a green-wing macaw who is not used to anyone but Doug and perhaps Lisa, and who is therefore not to be approached too closely; a Goffin's Cockatoo named Luna, who is very sweet (cockatoos, I am informed, generally tend to be friendly critters); and a slightly larger Umbrella Cockatoo named Shiro (also female) who is extremely friendly, though a bit neurotic.
I am generally a bird-friendly person, and I am finding them very amusing. I use the word squawking advisedly -- macaws sometimes get very shrieky, but this one most certainly does not seem to be so, and the cockatoos aren't particularly loud either. In fact, from my little eyrie up here in the attic I can hear the crows outside but not the birds in the house.
Doug and Lisa have lots of interesting glass and pottery around the house, even including two Fiesta-ware pitchers, one of which is orange and may possibly be covered with the celebrated uranium glaze. At some point maybe we'll take Doug's counter to it and find out.
I have seen The Warehouse, which is likely to be the center of mass of most of my reports for the next while, and it is a kick in the head. My tiny corner of it is huge, and I anticipate making much joyous damage therein (and out behind the place as well -- forges and smelters are probably best operated in very open areas, at least on the scale at which we expect to be operating here). I will confess that I saw The Warehouse on the way back from the airport; some things are of sufficiently large import as to merit prompt attention, what can I say? No, really, this is a stiff case of Nerds "R" Us: not only was Doug really up for giving me that part of the tour as soon as was humanly possible, but I was most certainly up for it myself, despite being fairly wasted after being up all night and flying all day.
The air here smells very different from the air in the Seattle area. Very fortunately, it smells good. It is unseasonably warm and seasonably sunny, and so am I. I think this research gig is likely to be A Very Good Thing, indeed.
My first order of business is going to be to get used to the house and help Doug reorganize the kitchen, and to find out about pottery classes at Glen Echo, which apparently used to be an amusement park and still has a merry-go-round. Then I will commence to fiddling with forges and kilns. I've brought a copy of Nils Lou's excellent book, "The Art of Firing", and will be studying it carefully. The author is very thoughtful and highly expert in this area, and the book is going to be my main guide, I think.
Things happen most peculiarly here. Today I got a more complete tour of the warehouse from Thalx (Chris Daniel), after the 9-watt Argon laser arrived. (Ahem.) I also got a cardkey, ran into Mike Grant (whom I hadn't seen since about 1986) and identified a plant in his yard in Grenoble (France) from his description of the flowers (a peony), met a bunch of new people, and got to go dumpster-diving.
Someone came up the stairs and mentioned the fact that there was all sorts of novel technoid material in the dumpster across the street. Thalx and I proceeded to investigate, and were fairly astonished to find all sorts of signal generation and analysis equipment, Tektronix oscilloscope CRTs, power supplies, wire, Keithley and Fluke meters, and so on. I found and took at nice old 20-amp Variac(tm) in a half-box (no back, but the front with the switch & fuse & meters & knob was intact) and some nichrome wire.
We left a bunch of stuff, intending to get back later with Thalx's van. When we returned, there were two guys standing next to the dumpster talking. They turned out to be the people who had filled it, and were happy to point out to us which pieces were in good shape, what was wrong with the FFT analyzer plugin that I was considering taking (known bad chip in the power supply, and the guy had actually taken the trouble to put it into a socket, so it will be easy to replace), ... It turns out that the older of the two is partly retired, and has been running a small instrument calibration and repair shop, from which he must now remove himself because the owners of the building want to do something else with it.
He's about ready to retire in any case, so he isn't as perturbed as he might be, and he doesn't have a whole lot of room at home, so he's pitching many wonders and a whole lot of junk. He gave us a tour of the remains of his facility. It was pretty nifty, even in its desolate and mostly empty condition. He also offered to check out my Tektronix 7904 mainframe when it arrives (!)
By the end of this, I was in a daze. Thalx drove the van over and we put some things into it as the light failed. Then we trundled off with Mike to a rather pleasant Indian restaurant. I am at something of a loss for words; the aggregate price of the stuff we skimmed off the top of that dumpster is in the tens of thousands of dollars. True, most of it is out of date, and can be had surplus for somewhat less than that, but it's quality stuff and can be hard to find. (Not too many FFT spectrum analyzers lying around in dumpsters in my old neighborhood...)
Things seem to operate here on a scale that is larger and faster than what I'm used to. I may take a while to settle in.
Here are some of the last pieces I did before I trundled off to the east coast. The first two photos are by Andy Hickmott, taken with his trusty Mavica 91; the ones of the bowl are by me and my Nikon FE2, with the remarkable Vivitar Series I 90-180mm flat-field Macro Zoom. Yes, it's out of date. Yes, it's heavy. No, I don't care. It works. I could, however, wish that it would open up wider than f/4.5... except that it'd be even heavier.
As usual, the little pictures are links to midsize ones. As usual, I've tried to get the color as close as I can, but that's only on my monitor under weird lighting, so it's guaranteed to be a bit off. One does what one can...
Teamug, 5 and 1/2 inches tall, collection of Emma
Bull and Will Shetterly. Photo taken at OryCon 21,
Portland, OR.
I don't usually do much stoneware; this one is slightly shorter than the teamug, and is glazed in Bruning Pottery's Mahogany, with a splash of their Opal Blue across it. Collection of Claire Eddy. (Also taken at OryCon.)
This bowl, in the collection of Don Simpson, is another happy example of the rutile blue in its current incarnation (as is the teamug above). As I mention elsewhere, I have to spray the glaze on in order to get it to do these effects. As I also mention elsewhere, it's one application of one glaze: the stuff just does all these nifty things.
Larger image, if you want one...
Here's a shot of the interior:
Again, here's a larger image, if you want one...
I'm sorry, btw, that the bottom is missing off
the interior shot. I'm pretty sure it's present
on the negative, but it most certainly is not
on the print, and I don't own a negative scanner.
Such is life.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [I’m a dot] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:09:55 PST 2001
