Shop Class as Soulcraft

I bought a book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford, a while ago, a few months after it came out.  At the time, I was teaching in G.E.D. and job-skills training program for at-risk youth in rural Alabama.  At work, I was designing and building small pieces of architecture; at home, I was designing and building small pieces of furniture.  I got about halfway through the book, letting it lull me to sleep right before bed each night.  Worn out from the day's labors, digging fencepost holes and slinging around railroad ties and absorbing the resentment of angry teens, Crawford's words failed to penetrate too deeply.  I eventually gave up on the book, finding it too abstract and philosophical to handle at that hour of the day.


I picked it up again recently, determined to wade through his arguments.  It proved to be much easier this time, partly because I now deal with the metaphysical aspects of craft a little more directly in my daily work.  


The book began life as an essay, published in 2006.  Expanded into a book, and pushed into a wider, less academic realm, Crawford's carefully researched, highly personal story became a minor phenomenon.  He landed everywhere from the New York Times to the Colbert Report, frequently accompanied by the photo of him from the book jacket wherein he leans casually against a doorframe, left hand tugging the dormant brake on a motorcycle, right hand holding a crescent wrench.  His story was compelling; after completing a Ph.D in Political Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and landing a job at a prestigious D.C. think tank, Crawford abandoned it all and opened a motorcycle repair shop, Shockoe Moto, in a leaky warehouse in Richmond, Virginia.  It had all the makings of a classic fish-out-of-water comedy, some hapless Woody Allen-type fumbling around in a garage, lighting grease fires and busting ass on dropped ball bearings.  

Matthew Crawford, from the New York Times.

Facebook and the Design of Memory

Facebook's $100 billion IPO is just peeking at us over the horizon, inspiring floods of cheap ink and cheaper pixels.  A recent Huffington Post article recounted the key stats from Zuck and the gang's SEC filing: 845 million members; 483 million daily users; profit of roughly $1 billion on revenues of $3.7 billion.  Unlike competitors like Friendster, MySpace and Google Plus, Facebook seems to have found the hidden wardrobe into our minds, a backdoor to ubiquity.  These networks thrive on pervasiveness, and Facebook has won the all-important popularity contest.  


However, there are chinks in the hoodie.  Facebook has reached 60% market penetration in the U.S. and the U.K., a saturation level that may prove difficult surmount.  China, a tempting new market, is closed to them unless they submit to draconian censorship laws.  Advertising comprises 85% of company revenues, which is likely to fall as third-party sites use the Facebook Platform to allow users to interact with their content directly.  Zuckerberg's autocratic style and majority of voting shares has raised questions about corporate governance, especially after his questionable recent purchase of revenue-less Instagram for $1 billion.  And, the existential question: other than its size, what is to prevent Facebook from becoming MySpace once something shinier and faster comes along?


Some of the comment sections for these articles scroll on endlessly, a cross-section of complaint and bluster, wondering at Facebook's omniscience while simultaneously submitting to it.  I mean, after all, what does Facebook make exactly?  What does it all mean?  The Atlantic's Stephen Marche recently wrestled with these philosophical issues, writing:

"What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect."

The Zuck.

Working Bikes / Blackstone Bikes

I needed a new bike for the spring.  'Ol Blue was in rough shape after the winter.  The front chainring got bent; the rear wheel was bent; the frame was showing a lot of rust; and the gears stopped working.  The old-school caliper brakes were rough in any kind of wet, even just riding through a puddle.  But, mostly, I was tired of the weight.  It was so heavy.  People zipped past me on modern road bikes, smooth as you please.  One-speeds, fixies, all the snobby hipsters -- everyone was passing me like I was standing still.


Now, some of this had to do with my backpack -- drill, driver, batteries, block plane, square, tape measure, lunch, water bottle, lock.  But, I was getting stronger, and better at navigating traffic all winter, and I felt like the bike was holding me back.  

The new ride.  I've since added a rear rack and a tool bag.  The bicycling carpenter.

So I upgraded for spring.  I ended up with a 1987 Schwinn World Traveler, snappy in black with gold and pink accents.  It has new straight-across handlebars, new brakes, new tires, tuned-up wheels, and restored original derailleur.  The12 gears and shifter are SunTour, a solid, sought-after component group.  I added the bar ends and zip-tied flashlights for nighttime visibility.  The difference is amazing -- I felt like I used to be pedaling through mud, constantly uphill, wheels rubbing the brake and chain wobbling off the gears.  But the real story has less to do with the bike itself and more to do with where I got it.  

Page from 1987 Schwinn catalog.  My bike, same color scheme, is in the upper left corner.  Image courtesy of  bikecatalogs.org.

RX Workshops

I signed up to teach some of the ReBuilding Exchange's Make It-Take It workshops this spring.  Each Sunday for a few months, I taught two three-hour classes on how to make a simple home project -- a wine rack, a laptop/bed-in-breakfast tray, a bench, an end table, a kitchen blackboard, and a crash course in bandsaw taxidermy, creating a wooden facsimile of a mounted deer head.  Promoted through Groupon, we got a healthy turnout throughout, though we lost some folks to the wiles of good weather and playoff hockey.  


All the projects are crafted out of lumber from the vast RX warehouse.  For the wine rack, I wanted to go as simple as possible while retaining a healthy dose of visual theatrics.  Given the beauty of our source material, we didn't need to go too crazy -- the old-growth pine and fir speaks for itself, dense, rich, and finely-figured.  I settled on a slanted L-shape, punched with three holes, allowing the bottles to cantilever out into space.  This makes the bottles the centerpiece, leaving the rack to recede somewhat.  

Rack 'em.

Rabbit Island

I first heard of Rabbit Island on Cabin Porn, the sort of escapist, Instagram-tinged Tumblr that sets your mind adrift on a Sunday afternoon.  The island sits in the middle of Lake Superior, a few miles off of the Michigan coast.  Bought by Rob Gorski in 2010, the land was put into a trust, and conceived as an artist's colony.  The hope is to put up artists -- visual, performance, musicians -- for temporary terms.  


Some have already spent time on the island, finding inspiration in the solitude, spacious sky, and long water views.  At 90 acres, there is a substantial amount of land to explore; yet, as an island, edges are clearly defined.  The island, as archetype, fulfills a primal, childhood dream, same as a treehouse, or blanket fort, or backyard hideaway -- it limits the big, bad outside world, circumscribing a complex universe into a simple, manageable space.  What one of us didn't fantasize about having our own island as a child, filling it with pools and waterfalls and ziplines and basketball courts and video game caves?

All photos, except renderings, by Rob Gorski, available on the Rabbit Island Flickr page.

From the air.

Going Against the Grain

The ReBuilding Exchange, one of my places of employment, has a DIY fest, called Going Against the Grain, every year.  This past Sunday, a laundry list of hands-on crafters, improvisers, builders, and designers descended on the warehouse, fueled by the folks at New Belgium brewers.  So, like the good little green citizens that we are, we biked over a little after noon, skies threatening overhead.

The amount of bikes there was kind of out of control.

The lady and I, and some good friends, gathered much information on our nascent, studio-apartment-sized experiments in homesteading, home-brewing, bread baking, furniture building, and food growing.  Unfortunately, we don't have room for chickens just yet, but all in due time . . .


Right as we walked in, there was a badass rickshaw contraption by Alex Gartelmann and Jonas Sebura.  

Puts a regular 'ol Harley to shame.

The Neuroticism of Craft

Last year, I designed and built a series of six chairs from road signs, all nearly identical.  The chair shells were folded aluminum signs and the bases were made from good 'ol Alabama pecan wood, milled, sanded, and lacquered within an inch of their life.  They turned out pretty well. I wrote an article about them, got paid, and enjoyed them for about a week.  Then, one day after work, I sat down in one of them, and the two joints in the back legs blew out.  The chair collapsed.  I smacked my elbow and my head pretty hard on the way to the floor.


Time passed.  The rest of the chairs seemed fine, more or less; the broken one had a flawed joint in the back, which gave way once my weight was leaned back into the seat.  However, I was nervous every time I sat in one from there on out, and especially nervous that someone else, perhaps bigger than me, might sit in one and break it.  I'm fine with breaking my own creations, but the paranoia and anxiety and embarrassment around the idea of someone else possibly injuring themselves and thinking I was a moron was almost too much to handle.  


I had broken a cardinal rule of design -- putting form above function.  In my desire to have a sleek, light form, I had ignored some structural considerations.  The back legs were extremely slanted -- over 20 degrees.  That joint, where the cross-piece intersected, bit too deeply into those back legs, weakening the wood there.  The legs splayed in only one axis -- front-to-back -- which made the chair unstable side-to-side.  The stock for the legs, at 1" square, was not strong enough to resist the twist and tension in the folded aluminum signs, which meant the legs didn't all hit the ground evenly once the base was bolted to the sign.  The 3/4" dowels I used as cross pieces were also not strong enough to resist side-to-side motion.  The base was essentially a series of parallelograms, with no triangulation, which led to a lack of stiffness.

The original chairs, pretty as you please.