public seating 002

i'm a big fan of the library. i'm usually there at least once a week picking up new books, movies and music that i wouldn't otherwise have access to. and i have adapted more and more to the sensibility of being a "user" instead of an "owner". it has so many of the benefits, and so few of the drawbacks.
our local branch had been closed for the last few months while they relocated to their new site. the new branch just opened up and i stopped by the first day to check it out. it was a bit of a madhouse. as i stepped inside the place was filled with people milling around, exploring the new space. our old library was a fairly modest single story. this new one is a two story, and there were groups of kids trying the elevator out, riding it up and down. none of the checkout computers were working correctly and the library staff was noticeably overwhelmed. people were walking through the newly installed retail style sensor detectors setting them off. the whole scene had a kind of comedic sense to it.


although many of the kinks still needed to be worked out, i was impressed by the size and design of our newest public building. it sort of felt like getting a new car. the paint is fresh, the carpet smells new, and all of the furniture is immaculate. as i made my way through the different sections, getting the lay of the land i suddenly came across a bench style seating area reminiscent of a diner booth with a high-back attachment. it seemed familiar, but i initially could not figure out why. then it hit me. i was looking at the bix-lounge piece designed by my great friend jess while he was still working at metro. so cool to see it up close and in person. i sat down and tried it out. it felt great. i would be absolutely ok working here all day.


and this gave me a thought. as i am an appreciator of beautifully designed modern furniture, an enthusiastic amateur if you will, and not a man of means i look for opportunities to try out some of my favorite pieces whenever there's a chance. but again in my case it's a matter of being a user rather than an owner. and so as opportunity, location and circumstance offer new chances at getting a little "seat time" in places of discovery, i shall share them. a kind of spot device for wonderful public seating areas.
i'm already looking forward to spending some extended reading time at the bix lounge on my next day off. sneak in a cup of coffee, and i really can't think of a finer way to spend a morning.

now sing for beauty
and the broken promise of
endless happy days

i a camera

i a camera
recording images
of days lost past

moving forward
on a stand still
i openly shutter wide

focus quickly no time
child of light
f is stop film is life

shot now deny myself
who would care
to gaze at ancient portraits

the process repeats itself
the lens-man zooms
curling around history's reel

take up, fight, rewind

air cools the engine
of our desires transporting
the inward journey

the road diverged

i was thinking about choices the other day. in life when we look back it's sometimes difficult to spot the intersections that moved us from one road to another. unlike film or books, our lives don't always arrange themselves in neat chapter headings of a purposeful narrative. more often it looks to us in the present (and even in memory) as if we were the subject of a sayles brothers documentary in which the camera is continually rolling and no one ever takes time to edit previous footage.
certainly as we grow older though the bigger events of life serve as stone mile markers on our journey through the game of life. college or career. relationships and marriage. the birth of a child. the death of a parent. those are the big ones. and yet how many thousands of choices along the way, seemingly unimportant end up on the cutting room floor of our minds? maybe it's because i'm a man, i don't know, but i have always associated the passing of different eras in my own life by the vehicles i owned at the time, and the symbolic meaning they had as they transported me through time.
it was early summer of 1992 and i found myself living in the spare bedroom of my mother and new stepfather. i had already been out. first living in san francisco and then a traveler on the roads of america. back to san francisco, and now through a series of events found myself homeless and living in a condo bedroom in the town of my youth. the town i had sworn off so recently. i was working part time at the local blockbuster video and my life was a pattern of waking late in the day, hanging out with those friends whose schedule matched my own, working the swing shift, then taking the requisite two videos home each night to watch late into the night.
i had no vehicle, so this meant i was dependent on whoever could shuttle me from place to place. that or i was wearing out shoe leather. the part time video job was certainly no great career choice, and at the promptings of my mom i went looking for something more constructive to occupy my days. the best i thing i could find was a temp job which would have me basically copying real-estate papers for a loan office as there was a refinance boom taking place that summer. the thought of putting a button up shirt and tie on each day and working under the mind numbing fluorescence was hardly appealing, but as i mentioned the proposition to my mom she encouraged me to do it anyway. actually, let me be more truthful. she basically put it to me that i had been living the slacker life and that i had better do something, even this menial temp job or i would further spiral into a life of meaninglessness illustrated by the image 45 year old men sitting next to their mothers on oprah who still lived in the spare bedroom. well, maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but she did challenge me to work through this assignment, and i took the challenge.
still with no vehicle i hoofed or hitched a ride to the bart train each morning and took the train up to the next to last northeastern most stop on the line. the office was a short walk and there each day i fulfilled my duties in the obligatory white shirt and tie. and on each break i ducked outside to the fresh air and sat in front of the obligatory office fountain and counted down the days and hours until it would be over. and as i counted down time i also counted up the dough i was making whose purpose would net me a vehicle. my older friend and mentor had agreed to sell me his little motorcycle for the tidy sum of $300 and promised to hold it until i had finished the temp assignment and gotten paid. and it was the promise of that two wheeled fantasy that kept me going those dreary weeks. finally the job came to an end. i had copied and assimilated every backlogged freddie-mac and fannie-mae form to satisfaction, and caught the overwhelmed loan staff up. and apparently i had done so satisfactorily, because just a short time later i received another assignment from the same temp agency.
this one sent me out on a 2 day inventory job for one of the newly opened tower record stores in dublin, calif. and this was right up my alley. a complete contrast to the office i had just come from, housed with mostly middle-aged ladies in frumpy attire and manner. tower was full of young hipsters. wild characters with amazing mythologies, many of which bore testament by the newly mass-popularized totems of tribalism, tattoos and piercings that adorned them. here again, my faithfulness to completing the task at hand, steadfastly urged on by that original challenge from my mother, i was asked to stay on as a permanent employee. a position that would ultimately begin to cobble for me a creative career. for as i started as just a cashier, i eventually worked my way into the position of "store artist" at a time when i needed an outlet for the burning desire to make each day something with my hands.


and as i went to supply myself with a vehicle to match my new career, i ended up passing on joe's little yamaha. i stayed on 4 wheels and purchased my girlfriend's white 69 squareback instead. (she having just upgraded from this temperamental beast to a more reliable and bright orange 72 squareback) i did so because i imagined the wagon would be a better long distance champ riding the dublin grade back and forth each day. it turned out though to be a constant question mark as it's cracked case meant slow cancer and had other quirks it displayed as well. it would often leave me stranded until i learned to gap the spark in the distributor, and the primitive automatic shifter sometimes failed to make its connection through the sensitive transmission plates. ultimately, less than a year later i ended up selling it to another artist named falco. (more on him some other time) and upgrading to a 79 water pumper - the scirocco.
but even as i had passed on the little yammy that joe kept in his garage all those years, my friend todd would end up purchasing it instead. and ultimately through my association with he and his brother jess, i found myself one sunny sunday morning riding this little bike through the beautiful back mountain roads of mt. hamilton with a bunch of other sub 100cc nuts and thinking about the road not taken and the one that got away.

we both looked away
at the same moment but kept
each other in view

and now let's have a really big hand...

it calls you beckons
afar to gaze inside the
horror the horror

i awoke to find it's sunday once again. feeling a little sluggish today, so i'll just be hanging around...

sun shines down on leaf
receives life from light and grows
until it gives shade

weinermobile

this is the classic oscar meyer weinermobile whistle. the clarion that calls all classic kids everywhere to attention, to fall in line behind the leader (who incidentally, wields one of these) and marches them to the tune of the oscar meyer weiner!
by the way, i don't know about you, but i have questioned these lyrics over the years. i mean, sure i guess i'd like to be an oscar meyer weiner if it truly meant that everyone would be in love with me. but i'm not so sure about what would follow next. pictures of cannibalism come to mind. ah well, maybe it's like that old saying goes "you can't have your cake and eat it to".
anyway, if all of this still has you reading, and you'd like to see the weiner whistle in action, check it out here.

we meet in darkness
and pay our dues first order

chairman holds the floor

plugbot...meet plugbot

eye a camera
exposed negative image
captured and shutters

technicator

the ranks of the blogosphere are certainly swelling these days. and certainly no one has more time than they did in the past. from waking to sleeping our attention is being bartered with unending sources competing against each other. and yet, i don't know about you, but i really look forward to visiting some of these sites as part of a morning meditation or a break from the madness. a little sabbath in the day if you will.
and in that vein i have added a new cup of tea. my friend kyle, a long time supporter of the toastrobot has launched his own project under the thin guise of his alter ego "technicator". the parameters he has loosely set for himself are to document his daily travels (and mostly what he encounters on the short walk back and forth from work) and then share them with us with some artful tweaking. an example of the result is above. i'm really enjoying these daily offerings and invite you to take a look here and offer some words of encouragement as well.

meditations on
the written word offering
reflection today

down by the river

went down to the river today with my son. we parked our car across the river from the old downtown, cowboytown he calls it. the day started cold and foggy, but as we strolled across the golden bridge that crosses the river it was warm and sunny. once across we walked the rails like hobos on the high-wire, and criss-crossed back and forth along the wooden sidewalks. they have a great old toy and candy store there that are essential for inspiration.
looking down at the quick moving current of the river i so wanted to slip down the river bank and launch a small boat and be carried away to wherever the river would take us. i thought about the little dinghy in my trunk, but abandoned the idea as we had no life jackets. and then i remembered this, and laid a new seed of wish in my mind...

through all hard weather
i press on past obstacles
to end of journey

fire hydrant 004

the more i stare at fire hydrants, the more i see. countless sub categories with varied minutiae. this one falls into the domed hat category. these tend to be two toned but i've also seen them in one color or many depending. the yellow and silver combo here is nice. as you can see it comes up through a wooden sidewalk. it sits on one of the side streets in old town sacramento right across from the railroad museum which is interesting because it came all the way from elmira, ny.
i had thought there were certainly plenty of places here in california that still churn these out, but some research discovered like everything else in the world, a once thriving and regional industry has shrunk to a handful of conglomerate interests. but if you would like to see some examples of some beautiful old plugs take a trip here to fire hydrant.org. you'll never look at one the same again.

soul's bliss out of reach
familiar like a dream that
will one day walk through

embraceable

i really dig modern furniture. i mentioned chairs in an earlier post, but i'm wild about it all. i don't mean in some kind of intellectual high-brow snobbish way. good furniture like all good design starts as a philosophical, not a styling exercise. the designer sets out to solve a problem. they consider a need. they evaluate materials and ultimately create something that didn't exist before. and when what they have created reaches out to others in a playful and meaningful way as if to dance, the process is completed.
i was thinking about a stool. i like stools because they're humble, utilitarian. they don't get all the glamour chairs and sofas do, but i've had some of the best conversations on one. anyway, i was thinking about a stool. i thought it would be nice to have one made of bent plywood and a handle on the sides. something to perch on when bodies fill up our tiny apartment. maybe it could even double as a minimalist coffee table or footstool. i hadn't remembered seeing one anywhere, but i was thinking of something along the lines of this. (the platform, not the slide)

it's from ikea, so i thought they would certainly have something like my stool there. but on my last trip to småland i found i was out of luck. undaunted i kept searching. nothing. and then recently i discovered john green's embrace and i think it's absolutely brilliant. the more time i spend looking at it the more i think of it as art. two simple pieces of bent ply with a cutout that allows them to be joined together like puzzle pieces. it's a stool, a table and even a small bookcase. and it even has the handles. brilliant.


john green lives and works in england, and try as i did i couldn't locate anyone who sells his work stateside. and as much as i would love to support this young designer, the shipping quote i got is nearly as much as the piece itself. so for now i'll just have to bookmark this one and hope his rising star brings him to america some day. either that or i may just have to learn how to properly bend plywood.


and if you'd like to see more of mr. green's design work check it out here.

rocket man

just taking a little break from my 5 days a week job today. later i'll be returning to mars to visit my kids. if you want to take the trip check me here.

the link of our two
worlds stretched out for hands to touch
what lies beyond sight

Christmas toast

this last Christmas was wonderful, and part of what made it so special were so many handmade gifts like this present from my son jake. it's a tiny toastrobot! he had apparently been secretly whittling it down from a single block using a tiny band saw blade. the result of his patient artistry brought tears to my eyes Christmas morning. holding this little object i could literally feel the love he had put into it. the toast is even removable and slips nicely into the slots he cut on top. you can have your iphones, kindles and x-boxes. this was a finer gift to me than any of those.

the lineup stacks us
tightly against one another
while we all wait

favorite things 12

as the years roll on it is comforting to look at an object again and again and be reminded of the passage of time. this zippo and i have been tramping around together going on 22 years now. it was a long ago gift from a friend in my youth. we both had one, his a version of the art deco 1937 model, and mine the traditional plain brushed. they were our totems, our magic, the source of the mighty element - fire!
as you can now see mine has fallen on hard times. recently on another brain dead trip to work on my bike this fell out of my riding jacket. (it a recent victim of road rash) as i pulled into the driveway at work i heard a sound like metal clinking, and only later did i realize when i went looking in the jacket what had happened. i immediately searched the entire area with no success. i was heartbroken. so many times over the years i had almost lost this thing and risked life and limb more than once getting it back when it was thought lost. and now it seemed it finally was. but all things must pass as the song says and i gradually accustomed myself to the passing of this old friend. but not before making a plea through prayer that it might somehow be returned.
the following day i went back to work on my day off to pick something up, and as i made the turn, there in front of me on the street was my zippo! i had combed the entire area the day before and it had not been there in this spot where it now lay. i stopped the bike, picked up the battered piece of metal, put it in my pocket, and this time closed the zipper. as beat up as it is i have no doubt it will be reborn again. as any devotee or one who has made some casual study well knows these little lanterns have a lifetime guarantee against the destruction and abuse life may bring. and so soon it will be off to bradford, pa and the legendary zippo repair unit for some attuned metallurgy and voila, my shiny friend will once again be beautiful. (incidentally, everything still works)

we do the cha cha
together our eyes closed while
feeling the music

the dance

we recently changed out our album art. we have a couple of those frames that hold lp records, and thought it was time for a quick change. this was one of those that got changed out. we decided to put it on the turntable since it had just been hanging up there for 6 months or more. and what a great record. we played it over and over that night. when i do finally get my usb needle replaced, i'll definitely have to post this one.
but the other thing that's so great about it to me, and the reason it hung up there was the image. the happy couple dancing together. the other one that hung with it was a very similar image, only it was a photograph instead of a drawing. they looked as if they went together and made a perfect pairing. and on the back of this one there is a great dance diagram. i guess back in the day for young couples learning to dance together these records were a wonderful instructional or suitable accompaniment at home hosted dance parties.


one year we received in the mail a coupon for a free dance lesson at the arthur murray studio and decided to try it out. i always like going by the dance studio at night and peering in at the beautiful scene of lighted movement contrasted against a dark city street and sidewalk. our instructor that night was a latin man with a ponytail, tight pants and flamenco boots. he patiently guided us through a number of basic steps as we clumsily hoofed around the floor together. we laughed all night at our awkwardness and left wanting more. so many times we have been to weddings and watched as older couples gracefully slid by and so wanted to do that too.
and the dance serves as a perfect metaphor for our marriage. as the years roll on we have stumbled and stepped on each others toes. we have felt out of rhythm and lost as more graceful couples seemed to slide effortlessly by. but i think we are getting better at it. it takes time. and that is what we promised each other, the time of our lives.

the empty space of
loneliness in a young year
surrounding me now

pudding

there are only 2 kinds of people in the world. the ones that lick the lid of their pudding cup, and the ones who throw it away...