Kyoto, Japan. with pictures now

either I'm getting smarter about how to travel out of the country or I'm getting mellow with relative age. I can't remember the last time I planned something to death and it all fell through, only to find that what is happening is much more enjoyable than the alternate. I certainly did not plan on editing the short application from the director of the Hagi museum to have his town accepted as a cultural treasure. I did not invite myself to macha tea in the tiny tin shack of the keepers of some obscure temple.
I can't anticipate talking about "god" with a yellow-fingered acid freak at the epicenter of the bomb blast in Nagasaki, nor happily suffering a crush the night before on the shark sent to me by the bar-maid to play out a few rounds of billiards.

No amount of cajoling or subtlety could get my college friend in Kyoto to guess his travel budget three months ago so I had a clue of how far we would venture together or for how long. nor could a simple sentence reveal his state of mind at this time, so different from the tattered hat under which he found himself the last time I saw him. And I could not guess that I would find such kindness in the hands of one couchsurfing host in Tokyo, and dislike the other as much as I did. I did not expect to spend such a lusciously large portion of my time here meeting new people of all colors and creeds, relaxing with them, eating, enjoying more, and again, invitations unfolding like so many wrappings on the secret contents of bento

boxes on the super-fast trains that I take from Kyoto to everywhere.

Japan is not all that beautiful in winter. The heavy lines of all those roof tiles, the stubble of fallow fields, the milky gray pollution, the pallid, ubiquitous concrete. at least the weather has been kind to me. sun in Tokyo and many days besides. only in Hagi was my umbrella blasted inside-out. only today, december 26, are my hands so cold as they grip the handlebars of a bicycle that I feel sure that I must stop or they will fall off. But here we are, warm among friends at Christmas. The dessert selection says it all- marzipan from Barcelona, rum balls from Isaac's mom in Minnesota, intense fruit cake to impress the Brit, macha suger-bombs, dutch licorice, a soft tiramisueish custard from the neighborhood baker..

I have seen many amazing ceramics, of course.
even though I end up in Hagi on a monday (museums closed), and the two around here that I most want to see are in winter renovation... bah-... but my eye is not so finely tined as to see a difference between museum quality and the kind that sells at high-end antique shops. it's still not my personal aesthetic inspiration, but my appreciation expands..

Not to mention awesome wooden creations of all sorts, boxes, tools, lacquerware, temples, faceted glass, silk kimono, tranquil gardens, beautiful women (geishas in the streets!), food-art, mirror-shine wooden walkways for socks (surreptitious running and sliding), paper lanterns in the doorways, and a man who still walks through the neighborhood tapping sticks to remind people to extinguish their hearthfire in this town that has burned so many times..

feathers flying

the vacation I had planned started five days ago when my plane didn't take off. Pop and i had been in contact, he in Thailand, I in PDX, about the situation with the rebels in the Bangkok airport- they took it over to protest the puppet government of a man they had ousted a few months ago. for a week, a few ten thousand travellers were stranded trying to come or go, shipping came to a halt, millions in revenue was lost each day.

I was kind of excited for a revolution occurring in the little country that I love, until I talked to my Thai friend- it's useless, the government will just reform under a different name. He was right. and once again I am thwarted from sailing on this lovely school-ship whose construction plans beckoned from the wall of my concrete and flourescent studio in grad school as I left a term early to join the sailing journey from Thailand to France. two years later, the King's Cup off Phuket (west side): 200 sailing vessels divided into 34 classes racing each day for 5 days. Pop says come aboard. Rebels in the airport say not this time either, honey.

I went back to my studio- all tidy, no food, bills paid in advance... and opened a thick book. Dogs and Demons, by Alex Kerr, recommended to me by Mr Neely. I had asked him for a book that would clarify for me Japan's remarkably opaque culture. he said don't be scared, but here you go... it effectively debunked all assumptions I, and apparently most of the world, made about this golden string of islands. Culture in shreds, economy full steam towards the rocks, environment decimated by the cake make-up concrete. Education nationalist propaganda, borderline pedophilia, etc. Horror. He traces it through the psyche of control, militarism, and the amazing ability to shift vision away from reality (delusion, in my book)... and to give every last drop of blood to be the best. it's bitter, for sure. I devoured it with side-dishes of various periodicals.

The rebels are gone now, along with the prime minister. Pop calls me every night. they won the first two days of racing, easily, with their long waterline in heavier air (basic hydrodynamics says that the longer the waterline, the more efficiently a deep-v hull will move through water given x power input. this is different from planing hulls that don't have to cut the water but skim over it). on the third day, last night for me, he calls with a slightly quavering voice- he rolled his ankle on something loose in the navigation station, and was now pop on ice. I told him that I had managed to change my ticket and would see him in Bangkok in a few days.

In the days of my vacation in portland, I spent a delightful one making pots! what a joy! a studio just over there, six feet from where I lounge on the couch dreaming of geishas... I have all these ideas that had been shelved in the interests of dishware for the big kiln... two earthenware bottles grew out of my wheel- one more top-heavy, one low in the belly. low boy grew a pendentum out his head. she in turn, a receptacle. they leaned towards each other, soft, and indented each other. His spout hovers without giving. she can just barely stand without him.

this morning I wake in the sun and wind, spend hours writing in my journal. catch the news, as ususal. and purchase two tickets. a two-week train pass on the Japan Rail line, and ticket to the place to be on new year's eve. in college I had travelled new zealand for a while before meeting an art exchange group from my college for a semester program. I flew from NZ to rarotonga, cook islands on my birthday, crossing the international date line. when I woke up, it was my birthday again. I woke up in a little cabin run by a swiss woman. the air was much thicker in the pacific jungle, and the flowers were out of control. there was an oven, and I decided to make coconut bread. I vaguely remember that the thing wasn't plugged in or some such, and I remember the bread was good. but I couldn't figure out how old I was. anyhow, for this trip, I thought the smartest thing in the world would be to party like a banshee in Tokyo on new year's eve, fly across the date line to San Fransisco, and end up here the next day, which would be new year's eve! I could have if only flights from NRT to SF left in the morning... but they don't. try to tell me that isn't brilliant- I don't think my knees could have handled that much dancing!

why would I want to be in the us when i could be in mad japan? why would I want to party with my own kind when I could have a wild unusual experience in such an amazing place as japan? believe me, the decision was long before dogs and demons... what are we really talking about here? I didn't go to a lot of raves when I was in college, but I remember one in particular- an art group had gone to chicago for the pier show, and I being the smoking self-described reject or some such rot, had collected a few of the group to go separate in my little vw fox. we wanted wheels to hit a party. we found one. chicago, south side, in the basement of a bowling alley, 1997. House was big by then but breakbeat was just finding it's ahh.. jump-track? It was hot, it was messy, it was the razor's edge. there was a fight in the girl's room, there were boys breakdancing in the back, it was grit-fabulous. I was just an overgrown girl on acid wearing someone else's wide velvet corduroy, and the lady dancing in front of me was kicking ass. Her moves were all right- not amazing except for these quick drops all the way down and up again like she was a rubber-band puppet. but she schooled me in how to go like I meant it. after she left, I danced so hard that one of the b-boys smiled and ran his finger down my sweating back as he walked away. yum.

that was my taste of the underground. there were maybe twenty of us that went till dawn- mostly jungle-style breaks. we knew each other as we passed, watched each other's smoking styles, curious at a distance about the other, but sort of not really smiling much. we obviously didn't live there, but that was all right. in the parking lot they invited us to breakfast at the diner. we couldn't hack it, got lost trying to find the interstate, got followed by some boys in a hoop till we were out of their hood, and somehow made it home. so,...what happened? an odd little community. we were outsiders invited in. I mean, we paid our five dollars but that doesn't get you IN. you're in when you give, when you appreciate what is given. you're in when you enjoy/ interact with what is so vibrantly there, whatever that means to you, just don't hit the crack pipe and blow the smoke at me as if you think you could cool me off, loser.

so, .... why do i want to party in my own country when I could be jumping around in Tokyo? both are going to be a ruckus. But I want to make some noise, and I ain't talking about my mouth. in the years since that party in chicago, I ended up at other raves, other clubs, but not often. when I saw the kids sucking on pacifiers I realized it wasn't my game anymore. MC's started babbling over the flow of my favorite drum and bass, and by then I was in the woods, later, in the also metaphorical desert state of utah (can you fucking believe they threw so much money behind the CA ban on gay marriage- oh, it just boils my blood, after all their polygamy, telling people how to live and love-rrrrrg)... thailand full moon parties were fun ...

so I moved to portland, a stray cat. hungry for love, action, movement, culture, life! give it to me now!! I'm thirty years old- and the breakbeat scene is small to non-existant in this town of ragga and teckno. not enough critical mass to support the community. community. the kids dance, sort of, they're all so much younger than me. they're into the eighties. bah! terrible. I have no interest in the revamped eighties. But Bassnectar's good energy and noncorportate nonego attitude is infective! not to mention the breaks, his lovin genius for break. and Thievery Corporation embodies a movement for social change that it so so very necessary. ...oh please, oh please, after all this searching, I want to be a part of this, I want IN, I want to give this all my wild energy. I know it's just dancing. but just try to tell me it's just dancing. tell my mangy boney body it isn't conjuring revolution.

it's my little energetic delusion. can i have one? we did it, you know. how many years have so many people fought and despaired that we were all going to hell and the big boys in charge were just going to ride us to the ground. NO! Fuck no.. let me be the crazy artist, high on love and visions of a new tomorrow. I'm ready to shed the anxiety, the attachments, the drunken despair. I'm ready to be shamelessly in love. and I know that so many people out there are right with me- I want to be in the throbbing heart of them... all of them dancing... all of them... in my tribe, my community, my country, my vision of the world. NOW! GO!

ya!

hey- look at this!
good. if anyone out there is equally interested in this exact kind of technology and knows of a company in which to invest PLEASE tell me!

raw rxn to garth clark

the lecture itself, here in pdx, was full to capacity, i couldn't get in. but the podcast is available, as is the q&a. ....
... and so, in true journal style, I am responding sans structured thought. for one thing, it seems he's right on. damnit. because, selfishly, it relegates my m.o. to "lush" if I am to continue on in the delusion that this is somehow even vaguely financially viable: I cannot pare down enough to make it work. I cannot live much smaller witout moving back to the sticks (shudder). I invested thousands in this wonderful kiln that runs on free fuel but even that will last only until the green revolution picks up speed. I am in a state of financial lush: determined to do what I want to do, blind to its economic absurdity. But there I go dragging my lead foot of money guilt, and I have known this for years. between garth and the economy such as it is, the last nail is in the coffin, to continue his analogy.
so step back. do I have art envy? sure! who doesn't want to be a rock star? (I partied with rock stars the other night, and they make less money than me! but look how they are dealing with it!) wait, do I have art envy? art is more about ideas. craft is, by clark's definition, materials-intensive. for me, than means, I fucking live to TOUCH clay. I want to interact with this medium. not as in, I have this great micheal jackson and bubbles idea that is most appropriately expressed in the medium of porcelain. that is art's purvey. excellent. I can have great ideas too, and execute the ones that are best expressed in clay, but I am selfish. I want to bathe in the stuff for the rest of my loving life. whatever art I may happen to make will come out of my gut touching the material. ok, so if I am an Artist, and separated from my medium, I would no longer have art envy, I would suddenly have craft envy. but i follow his autopsy, and i'll have to take his word for it, because I wasn't there in NY when they had their bickering. I appreciate him laying it all out on the table for someone like me- I knew I was in a losing battle, but I didn't really realize that neither was there contnuity from "the establishment"- I thought craft was, albeit the ugly stepchild, at least given high-end support from museums and organizations like the ACC. ok, thanks garth!, now I know who not to assume has their act together. his answer to the etsy question was brilliant.
SO! now what?

.......long pause.........


and as I have never tried to hide, I am not a unicorn. my parents support me. before I quit my job at mt hood college (due to delicious redhead), I earned about half my life/studio expense without health insurance. maybe, maybe, if I'd kept that job, and worked as I do, and growing gallery sales, I could see supporting my lifestyle, even in this market. I've been smart. but I can't be smart enough now. Clark is talking about free design, in NL! design in general, divested of the baggage of sentimentality and academia (I'm not sure I follow or agree with that part, but..) ... the sentimentality, for sure. I think there's a lot of romanticizing the potter's way. a lot of misconception of what our lives are really like (one of my dearest friends still thinks I get to sit down and just make pots whenever I want to). But I wonder if more of what he's referring to is that loopy doodad way of making pots, like trills on mingei, as if it needed enriching.

... I got on a thought tangent about the hyper-ethics of "digging-your-own", like Josh Copus, Micheal and Naomi. This spring, at Penland, I had a complicated reaction to the class upstairs. It was all about working with locally-dug materials (and wood-fire, of course)... that in order to have the most intimate connection with the work, one needs to look to the materials that compose the clay. dig it up, yourself. do the chemistry, love the labor. zen-style, in a lot of ways- this is the history to the pots that you make. this is the history to the love that you give... it was moving, it was of a particular time and place, audience, and level of physical health. I remember meeting Ruggles and Rankin and learning that they had eventually switched to electric wheels for certain tasks. because after a while, the body just couldn't take it anymore.... but I get ahead of myself. my point is that the love is glorious, the amount of energy devoted to this sweet little mug that I use so often is breathtaking to behold. But Clark's point, I surmise, is that their example is perhaps the most anachronistic of all. as in "how stupid could you get??" the market is so small. the craft market is small, and then the market that is able, willing, and interested in reading that level of intimacy with the material is even smaller. the math does not work. according to clark. but micheal and naomi are, I think, unicorns, situated in a part of the country with a strong support of the crafts. as are, incidentally, Kent and Suze. but they are a bit older, had established a clientelle, their share of the pie. this is a real pie, and we are not lutherans saving one quarter of the last bite for the next person.


so return. what next? clark says go design. ok, i have design ideas. I love Eva Ziesel. but I want to interact with CLAY, not paper and plaster. well, I love making books, but that's another story. is this one of those junction points where I have to buck up and say ok, for two days out of the week, i will make moulds and create designs, then another day to market them. in exchange for the rest of my lush week fucking around with porcelain? well, I exchanged two days of mixing glazes and cleaning buckets at mt hood for 11 an hour...


I don't know. I could wait for the devil at the crossroads. I got skills.
or I could train to be a geisha, amerika-style. as in, I'm hot. you want a piece of me? lick my plates.


I think I'll do that. sounds like an equally misplacedly-romanticized career as mine.

deluge

of portland, with Kidd Pivot, with Bassnectar, with an amazing man, with blues and brilliant improv jazz, with lovers, with friends, with strangers... i am finally, infinatelly, here.
not to imply that portland is a place. it's a state of mind. it is the journey, for me at least.
I must have accumulated a hunger for the social arts, visual, visceral, ephemoral, in the years that I rampaged in the woods and desert. now that I am here, I find myself on the pendulum swinging from long periods of my own making to long periods of soaking in the delights of so many other makers. Halloween saw the close of a long period of work-related stress, and I sailed into a long weekend of woodfiring with a light step if heavy eyelids. The workshop with Lindsay was just brilliant. that chicka knows her bizness- what an inspiration... I saw an unusually well-organized workshop (thank you Chris Baskin!) glow with good cooperative energy and great communication. and then, selfishly, I got to spend beautiful long hours with the dear lady, on her birthday. after election day!!! Fuck Yea! I spent a good portion of that day after listening to all the jubilant voices on the radio, looking at photos on the huffington post- dazed. delighted. porous. (tempered now by doubts over his cabinet choices, but, yea, um- I guess it was a short hunnymoon- but I'm still in love)
so, Kidd Pivot. Kidd Pivot! brainchild of Crystal Pite. maybe I just crave more in the way of emotive qualities in dance. well, there's lots of expression, of course everywhere, there's also a most beautiful rarefied sometimes jaw-dropping but still distant entertainment quality to certain performances. I want to be punched in the gut. I want to be quivering in my seat. I got what I wanted. seemed like every delicious articulation of toe and every elation of breath gasped out the intensity of life in the face of death. we social, competitive, manic, ebullient and empathetic individuals seemed condensed in her choreographic vision- I have never before so strongly identified with a space and movement. I sat in the audience calculating just how impossible it would be for me to leave behind 15 years of ceramics and dance all day for her instead. I'm too old. but maybe? maybe? until I found myself engulfed ... oh!
and then a few days later it was Bassnectar! coming at us with his constant good juju jujitsu. more friends and a soul shakedown party. You should look him up, regardless of whether or not you like the phat break-bass, because he is slowly, lovingly, gathering steam, and the man is making some big political statements. He doesn't do it with a sledgehammer, he does it by tuning in to the vibe of the crowd and getting all of them dancing- all of them. the whole wonder ballroom was, if not dancing, at least swaying. me? you know me. accidentally jumping on people's toes and apologizing.
a few nights later than that, what should happen- a tour kickoff show by the Blue Cranes. pdx brilliant jazz improv, one of the saxes a carl grad that i enjoyed at some of the finer parties of my college daze.. so tight now, aiee! recorded, in a little gallery, with two drunk girls who didn't have a clue how loud they were but hey. a few of us had escorted them out, and the Portland Cello Project joined the cranes at the stage, what a treat- and one of the ladies returned, sang along with the lead cello, then demanded a dance partner. at that point, it was laughter- not derisive. a silly duet, interactive art, one seemingly desheveled medium materializing into another. and then off they go, looping around the post and off into the backalley.
I am full. and broke. and going travelling for almost two months. this is rediculous. it's fucking beautiful... long live the end of the world as we know it!!

avaaz.org

an excellent organization asking us to vote!

love -C

good credit, good loam

"In return for its infusion of new money to bolster bank balance sheets, Treasury will get preferred shares paying a 5 percent return initially and warrants to purchase common shares, allowing taxpayers to benefit once the banks' recover. However, Treasury does not get any voting rights with its ownership stake and will not be able to have a say in choosing the bank's board of directors.

Treasury has also given the go-ahead for stronger banks to use the money it receives in the rescue program to acquire weaker banks, drawing criticism from those who say the government should not be financing the consolidation of the banking system _ in effect helping to choose winners and losers." huff pots

so I am educating myself. and I don't have time to write a lot, but I'm reading more about how everything is going to hell BUT, within this mayhem, any good news is great news, so they mention it when they might not have before-- they mention today that there was a slight increase in single-family home sales in sepember, assisted by so and so deal on new construction whatever, and of course that was before the worst of the crunch crunched but it got me back to this place- ok, everything slows down if not grinds to a halt. that means people stay where they are and make do. maybe they make do by stealing my truck (scrap metal on wheels), or maybe they realize that we've all got to pool our resources to pull ourselves out of this mess- what did Mark Twain say? "buy land, they're not making any more of it"

I'm thinking of a community garden. yes I know this is an absurd amount of work. I've been doing this kind of work on rental property for years now- might as well do it on a piece of my own land. but more than that- how are we going to start reshaping our vision of a healthy future? SOIL! nutrients in the soil. education of the children.

I really have to get back to work- more later

OPEC slashes production of oil, has little effect

"This slowdown in demand is serving to exacerbate the situation in a market which has been oversupplied with crude for some time." (OPEC statement)
the news was not well-greeted by the white house, as one might imagine."It has always been our view that the value of commodities, including oil, should be determined in open, competitive markets, and not by these kinds of anti-market production decisions," -don't get me started, you panderers to the monopolies
so OPEC shows its stripes, if we had not noticed before. but slowing production will only postpone awareness of peak oil. the lifeblood of easy global consumerism (and commuter culture) is cheap plentiful oil. .I wonder how long and in how many ways we will resist the inevitable. we must scale down, buy local. it is not difficult but it is far outside of our paradigm. thank holy god for Obama- oh, I know, he isn't a magician, reality still applies, but I tell you right now, I will be dancing in the fucking streets on election night! I may even invest my hard-won dollars in alternate energy and engineering geniuses- genii- genies-- we got to get some clay minerals back into the roots of the system.

In other news, I'm a little dizzy. Immediately after the firing, some potter friends and i drove up to Seattle to the Seward Park Art center to meet and hear the tales of Mister Al Tennant, who lives on Bainbridge Island and used to teach at the university of Alaska. man, did he have some doozies. I mean, I've heard some good stories in my day... -- get this visual- those of you who work in school clay studios know that there always seems to be a plethora of (unfinished student pots) bisq-ware at the end of each term. One evening Al and his TA had a mite too much whiskey and played baseball with the bisqware, havign taken precautionary measures beforehand. namely, duck-taping a bowl over their heads in order to protect themselves from the projectiles. Al managed to remove his helmet before passing out in his office. the TA snoozed on the table. in the morning, the janitor nearly called the police until she saw the TA's feet. I tell ya- they just don't make schools like they used to. - sigh -

Then I unloaded the kiln, and you know all about how that went. I must apologize for any horrified gasps you may have emitted upon reading that I lost most of the load. A large proportion died. however, I was able to re-fire the serviceware in a kiln at Mt Hoodie (!thank you again, Stephen Mickmaster!), in a soda kiln, so they are pretty close to the look I'm going for. I have decided to abandon the reduce- cooling for the next firing. The dishes got messed up because I relied on an old standby glaze that I used in Utah- wrong answer. it was fine in reduce-cool there, but not here. odd. I will focus for the moment on a good soda-fire, since my interest is more towards functional work. So inbetween weekends of that studio tour, I re-fired. which involved propping open a back door and dodging security so that I could sleep in the warm classroom and wake up every two hours to baby through the first part of the firing. this is just after I got some great press, so thank god, I was able to salvage a good bit of the load and have more confidence in presenting my work to the public. It was really excellent to welcome people to my studio. Here there is context, people see the intention of the maker and her space. My action is evident all around me, so I can simply gesture in a direction instead of stringing together a mess of shy words.

With the seconds of the firing, I made an installation among the delicate money-plants that volunteer to rattle in the wind under the stately fir trees:
.

At the end of the last day, we dismantled the installation and the people who had lingered over it returned to collect larger pots for their garden. I am delighted to have met so many of the people who came to visit- from potters to shrinks to mathematicians, this is truly the stuff of the good life.

And Mama came to town after that. We went out to the ocean, and along the Gorge. We had fresh oysters and sweet dungeness, and shoe shopping. she's a good egg, my mama. my biggest fan, and loving patronesse. what would I do without her--

so next up is a workshop with Lindsay Oesterriter, a fellow grad of Utah State. I have to say, of all the people with whome I went to school, Lindsay is top on my list of those I want to see again. she is high- energy, big love. and talented too. we'll be firing the small anagama at Mt Hood. reduce cooling, of course.

and? Halloween. my favorite ruckus.

hope all are well. I'm going to Japan for a month over xmas. any suggestions?

Second Firing Results

I just lost about four thousand dollars. no, not in the market crash, just trying to make real things, for chrissake. I made a lot of mistakes for this firing, simple ones like trusting a new idea, gambling ones like praying a trusted glaze will react well with different color, stupid ones like not washing plates before glazing them, but I felt confident that the big pots would be all right. Tested clay, well-constructed, no glaze, all that. My dear friend and firing partner took them out at about 500* by suddenly going 200* an hour. Every single fucking one has the surface stress cracks that might look great on the craggy pots that get hammered in long woodfire but on my simple forms- unacceptable. I am sick about it. They were going to go to the only gallery that sells my work- a good one in the art district.
There's nothing to do but let go. It is all gambling, the first few firings of a new kiln, we're firing greenware, and cooling in reduction, there are many places where it could all go to hell. It is life on the high road.
The most important thing is that not only does the kiln fire BEAUTIFULLY but that Tin Man out there just lavishes affection all over the bare clay. I am delighted to report that the scum problem seems to have been solved by Joe at Clay Art Center by re-pugging the whole ton of it in Barium water. Thank you, Joe! Really, the kiln is a great pleasure to fire, most of the excitement of woodfire with a fraction of the work. You don't experience the wild intensity of stoking the front of an anagama, it's more like side-stoking, but it's lots of fun. Basically, we figured out in the first firing that the coals built up in the first part of the firing, done this time in little bourry-boxes, get shoved into the heart of the long firebox and act as a wick for the oil. With the pyrometer reading about 1000* this time, I turned on the oil and kept the coal bed healthy by side-stoking. The oil droplets sprayed into the coals and it was quite simple to find the right balance of oil, air, and amount of wood. It helped a lot to have the coal bed good and hot, though. To experiment, this firing, I established a good fire in one half of the kiln first, good hot coals, but then on the other side, I pushed in a few paltry coals and turned on the oil just to see if it would catch. It did catch but not very well. That side limped along for a while, the oil burning poorly with an acrid smell. I was worried about too much reduction, actually, but of all the problems, carbon core doesn't seem to be among them. I will rebuild the bourry-boxes a little smaller and with a proper door now that we've figured out how big they don't need to be...
As far as even heat goes, the back is still cooler by a few cones. This time I built a trick brick in the flue so that I could open it more. At cone 7 in the hottest spot, I pulled it but I think it was too little too late. Next firing I will have air openings in the back of the floor only, none towards the front. And as far as reduction-cooling goes, I think it effected a small area of the kiln, the front, and closest to the firebox, even though I had flames reaching through all upper parts of the kiln and few low places in front. The celadons show a surface puckering only there, and the same eggshell glaze that I used with success in grad school foamed in the front of the kiln but not the back. (even on the inside of boxes, interestingly). I think I do definetly need to tune clays to this kind of firing- Timmy had some gorgeous test tiles showing the black and iridescence with yellow and red reflashing that I remember from my best firings at school. I put a large bowl of "coot" clay in also, and it showed the same potential.
What else to say? I'm going to refire the dishes in a soda kiln. Pdx open studios is coming up this weekend. I got written up in the Portland Tribune, the article will come out in a few days. ironic, eh? well, with my sick sense of humor, I popped a bottle of champagne last night and shared it with Jack and April.
and the world keeps turning.

good morning backache

Once again, I have just found my body's limits- I knew I was pushing too hard. but it only proves, somedays, you just shouldn't get out of bed: I lifted my head one inch from the pillow and immediately let it drop as a pain shot through the entire back of my ribcage. ok, don't panic. I can breathe, mostly.

so it's a big kiln!, especially without any bag walls. the footprint of the stacking area is three by four feet, and that goes up an average of three and a half feet... that's 45 cubic feet when you count the nooks and crannies! I would not have dared build a kiln this size if I hadn't been given free materials. but there it is, and it's in my backyard

this is one half of the pots. Jack and I will finish the rest today. notes on stacking.. the kiln was very uneven last time- why? I had opened most of the openings in the floor at the back. two at the front. I think the front was less densely packed, for one thing. it was all little pots on shelves, whereas the back was tumble-stacked big things. this time it'll be more symmetrical. I have made a few other changes. Olsen's "runaround" fastfire kiln has a low bag wall integrated into the shelving- he blocks the most direct path along the floor from firebox to flue. so see those little square bricks on the floor of my kiln- those are serving that function. maybe it ought to be extend higher. He makes a stong point about the need, therefore, to leave adequate gaps between the shelves to allow for that flame to move- an inch. so I was careful about that.
The other thing is that I figured out how to make a trick brick to open the flue in the wall during the firing if need be... to move heat toward the back, and will cover floor holes in the front with fiberboard instead of plugs so they can be pushed aside if heat is needed in the front....

I consulted with Nils Lou about bourry-boxes. He thinks a two by three foot area is necessary, with a little over half of the space below the grate bars. This would be needed for bringing the kiln up to temp with wood. But we're not really trying to do that, exactly, so I went with two smaller boxes. hopefully enough space for the wood to burn well. if these are indeed the right size, I imagine that I'll rebuild them nicely. as it is, it was a two-day slapdash affair, enough to test it and get by with wombly red bricks made by hand in the 1920's.


Candling tomorrow! I need to buy some food for the crew-

pins and needles

entropy. broken saw, broken bike, broken economy. batten down the hatches, me hearties! there be a red sky this morning-
actually, I'm really looking forward to a barter economy. I put in an honest day's work. it's worth something. what's it worth to you? I might even make more "money" in a different economy, getting away from this evanescent green paper would sure make a lot more sense to me- we need food and shelter, companionship. I make dishes, you grow food. lets talk. let's not haggle over who's worth more, that's an old paradigm. Let's break bread over a well-worn table, laugh and trade. trade stories, trade goods. trade real things for real things, not annuities and fisa-fickle options for fizzyfuzzy nothing paper. of course, I'm sitting pretty, with no debt, no kids, and mad skills. but we are a resourceful creation, we humans. I'm sure we'll do our god proud.

where have I been? sorry, those of you that have been wondering- after the firing, my social life (hey! i have a social life! fan-fucking-tastic!) decided that it was feeling neglected and for a while there it seemed like i was out just about every night- craziness- did I mention that I am in love with pdx? I am in love with pdx. it did take a while to adjust to life in a city. I had to learn all those genteel languaging things, all those mello make-nices. layers of the onion, you know. it's still savory. and I was looking at the calendar at the timing for the next firing- I'm a part of the pdx open studio tour- link http://www.portlandopenstudios.com/ actually, I seem to have become the little poster girl for them this year, being interviewed for the city paper and all that. (I did some work for the publicity comittee and the woman in charge decided I was a peach). so I wanted to fire before the tour (so I have something to show for all this work). which means I had to get a move on. pronto. it's been working- I would work most of the day, party at night. then the Time Based Art Festival happened. www.pica.org/tba/
and this is Exactly the kind of event that pulled me to sunny pdx. the time-based art festival is this fabulous ten day breathtaking extravaganza of international performance art. brilliant. they publish a small book as a guide to all the happenings, there are so many (on the radar. I also attended one that was sort of off the radar- link here- http://hexhexhex.blogspot.com) .
conjuring: "mamalian diving reflex" "when will we learn that time is a set of training wheels (we don't really need them)" "Derrida '...at the end, we know, all this will end very badly! there is no way to reach the absolute good. presence is always divided, split' " ... these bits are from the handbook and website... "dark heart of america, in search of the answers of what it means to be secure, and the price we are willing to pay for it" "explanation of the world as if for (or by) a child, a psychotic, or a martian" "against all odds, exposes the human experience behind hip-hop" "disinfromationalist storytelling", and the one that moved me the most, a dance duet by Leesaar the Company- a tense, riveting performance of a new relationship. she, gripped by fascination and frustration. he, with similar gesture that fit better on her body. open and close, open and shake... I saw many powerful performances. I'll try to imbed a video of a site-specific performance done at the keller fountain, designed by an architect whose wife is a dancer- Anna Halprin. one special sunday they turned off the fountain and the dancers emerged, moved, splashed, played, and submerged again.. Pica filmed it- I'll try to get it to you- I was jealous of those (albeit cold) dancers- I would do that- I would love to get involved in this kind of art- maybe next year.
so that's what i did for a while. and pretty much after that I holed up and finished my clay-working time. thats' over, now I'm glazing and building these cheap but kinda un-aesthetic bourry-boxes on the kiln- they look like weird red-brick mittens on the front. I don't love them, but what's a girl to do? I didn't think through the wood-fire part of this kiln at all. now I'm having to deal with it- maybe they're way too big (asked Nils Lou for advice)- we'll see- maybe I'll re-make them later..
So life is great, life is flippn busy at the moment- going to fire early next week (oct 1), then seattle for a wkshop with Al Tennant, have to buy a bisq kiln cuz mine is about as dead as they get. (entropy, anyone?), and hopefully get to visit with some friends up there, and then unload, and the studio tour for two weekends, and a cash job repairing gutters and clambering around on a roof, and then Mam is coming to visit and we'll go out to the ocean (!!!!!!), and by then it will be raining constantly, so I'll be making pots again. and STILL not riding a motorcycle. good things come to those who wait, right? (my sweet ride has terrible compression, apparently, so it's not worth the many hundreds needed for an eletrical fix- sad sad potter with itchy feet)

much love-
C

skuzbucket

Sorry, I unloaded a little before I remembered to snap a photo. the kiln was loaded pretty much as tight as possible given the way the dome curls downward at the arch- which is a slight pain in the butt but not horrible. certainly I was able to sneak pots put tight to the arch even at the top of the front stack... so there were two distinct sections to the stack- the back half like this:

and the front half composed 2/3 of pots on shelves with those two tall pillars off to the side- the front was the portion that got the most hot- was it stacked to a similar tightness as the back?- I pretty much think so, but the nature of the spaces was totally different- lots of choppy ones instead of tall columns as it was in the back... anyway- the front was massively more hot than than the back- cone 12. the back top was at about cone 8, bottom more like six.
this is so you can see what I'm talking about with the flue openings- lots in the floor, and a lot in the wall- so for this first fire, I had all the wall closed off, and most of the floor open. it was closed only on the right side near the firebox, because I anticipated using only one side of the kiln's potential fireboxes. but that's another story.

so it is clear that simply having most of the floor openings open in the back is not enough to move the heat back there-- ok, now we know. you can see what was open in the second photo. and remember that I yanked out the bag wall, which was a triangle-shape, taller in the back of the kiln. this would have been even worse, in hindsight. Stephen Mickmaster came to the unloading and suggested a small bag wall at the opposite of where I had had it even temporarily- a little deflector triangle at the front of the kiln- I may do that yet, but I like the rest of his suggestion better- open up some ports in the wall portion of the flue- and figure out a way to slow the flame- more of a skateboard of a target brick, or a rubble by Richard's idea, and of course more focus on air to the back in terms of flue openings... What I'll probably do is load a super-dense load of pots at that place where the bag-wall should be-

But here's the current bane of my existance: SCUM!! scum started when I asked my clay company to ad 5% redart to a "takamori" blend of porcelain. I had done this in grad school without problems.. big disclaimer there- so I had no qualms about ordering half a ton of the special blend from the clay company. they mixed up 2800 lbs for me, which I should have noted to them at the time... as it happened, something about the redart is causing a migration to the surface of the soluable calcium- as the pot dries, any oils on my fingers are making - not a resist- the opposite- a magnet for a scum to form. it shows up in the firing as a thin but distinctly gray layer. flowerpots below are from this firing. color is a little wacked but unintentional surface design is evident.

Below is a pot from a previous firing at Mt Hood college- in a salt kiln, and reduce-cooled, as this one was. Neely thought that perhaps the salt was aggravating it, essentially giving a light tacky surface on which the soot would settle and integrate with the surface. (I hope I got that straight- it was over a year ago). but there was no salt in this kiln... may I draw attention to the orange flashing at the center of the frame- I sanded some of these pots before firing them, to see what would happen- that orange is the most clean clay. then there's the scum, and an inbetween zone.

one photo shows the marks from my rubber rib- there at the top of the left-hand pot is where I pulled the rib upward. lower on that cylinder is a big gray band- why there and not elsewhere? anybody??


so here's the left hook: while I was at Penland, a friend used my studio, making pots with her own porcelain. here's one of hers:


there's no glaze on that pot. there is pretty much no chance for soluable soda ash or any of those quirky elements to be responsible for that mark. turn the pot right-side up in your head- looks to me like water dripping from the lip, absorbing into the clay, like she had washed the rim (with water from my tap...!), and then trimmed it- trimming off the bottom half of the "active ingredient"-- anybody? does this make sense? clearly, the marks on her pot are not scumming but flashing. but is is possible that the minerals in my water are reacting to the redart in this batch of clay to create an unusually subtle problem?? comments, please?!
I'm going to throw with distilled water for a while and see what happens-
next firing scheduled for the end of september.

Ist firing- Aug 2, 2008

Damage assessment reveals that a mere 20 gallons of honey-gold veggie oil, not more than 1/2 cord of wood, and 33 beers were consumed during the first firing. Given how little of the first two were used, I am forced to assume that the primary fuel required for this firing was alcohol. This is not a boast. The first firing tested all manner of variables. One of them was how I lead. I was sober, of course, as was the person "on shift". beyond that, it gradually turned into a fuzzy line- there were hangers-on who made themselves useful in a time of need and we could not have done it without them... I prepared as best I could given the wide array of unknowns, but we suddenly needed a pile of side-stoke wood, and lo! it was created, without loss of finger. Later in the firing, we needed to carry on side- stoking wood, and helping hands were still there. My gratitude to all who helped in many ways... Richard, Jack, Jamie, Oliver, Tim and Travis. hats off, my dears-

The first firing was excellent. Not at all how I expected it to be, excellent in its own way. It helped enormously to spend a few hours warming up the chimney before beginning the candle. most pots were green, large, and porcelain. six hour candle, slow rise to 900*, and about 100*/hr after that. this made for about 24 hours up to 900, 12 hours to cone 04, six more to cone 12, and four in reduction cooling to 1850. There was a certain point in the evening when Timmy and I were puzzling over the correct path and Richard confirmed what was becoming a growing realization: this kiln really loves the woodfire. But he loves the oil fuel too. we found ourselves side-stoking, directly into the firebox, through a port I had imagined would be used mostly for soda, or reduce-cooling with wood. it was remarkably painless, for woodfiring.

The whole story: Here's a photo of he floor of the kiln, from the front.there is a firebox channel 9x9 in cross-section that runs continuously from the front of the kiln to the back. at one opening, we stoke wood. at the other is an oil burner. the kiln is symmetrical- there are two such channels at each side. there are vertical dampers that control the opening to each fuel source, and a space by which the channel opens into the chamber. In the center are also two parallel 9x9 channels of floor flue, making it a downdraft kiln. those channels are spanned by these huge bricks with holes in them. there is also a large opening in the wall of the chamber so that the entire floor flue area can be closed off, including the place where it enters the chimney, and the whole kiln can be fired as if a crossdraft (except it isn't really a crossdraft since the fuel sources are more like a downdraft configuration- from the back sides and exiting the back, but it might give a more crossdrafty look than not)

I think that bit about the wicking action of the bed of coals was accurate. in the pre-firing, I had managed to turn on the oil when the chamber air temp was about 600*, meaning much much lower than that at the point where the oil burner was located. of course I was hugely excited and watched the temperature soar as I turned on the air and oil together. I managed to find a setting that was about 100* an hour, a safe heat gain for the hypothetical pots. I watched it as such for about an hour before heading to bed, thinking an hour was sufficient proof that the burner worked at that temperature because of its efficiency among other things... all well and good.

BUT the coals had not fully burned off in that baby firing. I think now that if I had observed the oil burner for two hours instead, I would have seen what we saw during the real firing: as the coals burned off, the wick burned away. the sudden temperature soar was the sudden rush of air from the burner over the coals. the slow gain was the adjusted air flow but basically still the same action. without the wick of coals, the oil could not burn properly at lower temps?? something- it needs a porous craggy surface from which to burn. maybe a rubble of soft brick would work as well. but i think it's not just a wick but also a radiant heat action taking place-- what we observed, to our dismay, is that at 600*, at 1100*, at 1600* on the pyrometer ( located again, far away from the burner port,) at every point, we would switch on the oil, observe a sudden spike in temperature, a gradual tapering-off, and then a slow but inarguable decline --as the coals burned off---. at 1700* we tried yet again but by this time, night was falling, we would have kept the ladies of the house awake with any more wood splitting- (oh- yes, so up until 1700* we basically gained temperature by side-stoking wood.)--- so we stood around staring at the pyrometer like some folks stare at a television set hoping and praying that the oil would catch and stay caught. But before we dared find out that it wouldn't, we just kept on with light side-stoking while keeping the oil on.

so, to be clear, before about 1700*, we gained temp with wood, occasionally trying oil, finding it ineffective, and shutting it off, resuming wood. by 1700*, we'd pretty much realized what was going on and decided to keep up a light side-stoke for the primary purpose of maintaining a proper bed of coals into which the oil would spray. It was as if the oil was super-charging the coals, and the amount of wood required to gain temperature was minimal- 3 or 5 short sticks every few minutes for a cyclic gain in temp as woodstoking tends to show.. Oil flow to each burner was at full throttle. air passing through the blower was at about 2/3 open. we figured out a pattern that seemed effective, averaged out the heat gain at about 80* an hour including all the noodling around and failures, and calculated that we were only three hours behind an optimal schedule without mishap. at 12 am, I took a cone reading in which 1s were down, and passed out for three hours, anticipating a long and intense night. Richard closed off the last 15 square inches of passive damper and wakes me up a bit later- "um, we have good news for you- cone 12 is down almost everywhere..." -- the consistently cool spots at about 9. so Jamie and Oliver took off (thank you two ever so much!) as Richard and I sealed up the kiln and began reduce-cooling. he slept for a few hours as I continued, and the firing was complete at about 7 am monday morning.

other tidbits: 1: at a certain point mid-afternoon, we had tried the oil for the second time (1100*), and found it was smoking badly, acrid smell, as if a heavy reduction. kiln was behaving as if he were choking. I leaned a ladder against the chimney and removed the piece of expanded steel that I had installed on the suggestion of a fire marshall. it was about 3/4 blocked off with soot. I added a foot onto the chimney. I will add another foot, for a total of 14 from floor level. I've decided to do this because through out much of the firing, we pretty much had the active dampers wide open and the passives all in. I would like to have a little more elbow room than that.

2: for this firing, the "cross-draft" flue opening in the kiln was completely blocked off, and 10 of the 12 "down-draft" holes in the floor were open, primarily on the left side of the kiln, and towards the rear. this would make for 70 square inches of flue opening in a 65 cubic foot kiln, about twice what Nils Lou suggests in his book. I opted to double it for two reasons- mostly being chicken, and wanting the control of quantity of air flow to come from dampers which could be changed during the firing. but those holes in the floor intrigue me- how to move the heat more forward or back by which ones are open-- as a side-note- no bag walls in this firing. I loaded about 40 cubic feet of pots into the space, densely packed.

thoughts for the future: build an after-market bourry- box on each side of the kiln for more effective and physically comfortable wood-stoking in the beginning of the firing. a fine idea from richard. the only catch is that we need to be able to push the coals into the channel near the oil burner so that we can use them as the wick. I'm sure I can figure that out... one big question is this- what if we push coals forward at, say, 1000*, and continue to "side-stoke" above them lightly as the oil droplets soak into them. will it work? or will we need to continue with wood somehow. next time, we will find out! same bat-place, same bat-channel......

roll the drums

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Tin Man

Meet the TIN MAN....he just passed his most difficult inspection. THREE CHEERS!!!

what's happening these days is that I did indeed need to employ a third party inspector, partway because of tightening permit requirements and partway because we are a specialized bunch, us wiley potters who make their own kilns. we are a blur on the screen, electrons of questionable location. they just can't keep up.
so we passed! a slightly elder statesman named Sandy trundled into the back yard with his computer and a suitcase full of gadgets and gizmos, surprised that it wasn't running. Running! this might be a three-day process, I can't just flip a switch! but we met in the middle, me explaining the ways in which I had incorporated an afterburner, how I had designed it, and how I expected to fire it, and we looked at the burners and took them apart a bit, changed the power cords to ones compliant with UL listings which involved a little bike ride to the hardware store, and over the course of the day ended up trading all kinds of great stories about fire and boats and treasure hunting. then we let the burners run without flame for a while while he gave me a great idea for a cheap oxy meter, and told me to look into creating a reduced atmosphere by replacing some of the gas inside with nitrogen... and suggested thinning the oil with alcohol in winter. (so long as i can get a stir-stick into the tank somehow.) He was impressed with the design and construction... so I'm gloating right here.
SO! I'm going to fire it up, empty, tomorrow. Sandy doesn't buy it that the oil wouldn't ignite below cone 08, so I'm going to try. a potter friend of mine says they do it in Japan.. he says that it's only at first that the burn would be at its least efficient, and that is when it would be producing the most carbon monoxide. then we'll load on monday, tuesday, fire uh, friday, sat? I'm all involved in the Portland Open Studio tour, interviewing people and going to meetings, so there are two of those events in the middle of all this, but that's the idea...
and I still have to get 70 gallons of oil in the bed of my truck into the tank in the garden. Jack and I spent all day battling two shitty hand pumps from harbor freight- trying everything, plan f, plan t, plan x, y, and z, plan arrghh!- so I think that until my new 12V pump that I eventually forced myself to order arrives by stork, I will indeed be siphoning it out a few gallons at a time- if it will out of such a tall tank, and pouring it into a funnel. I suppose there are worse ways to spend a day. this is how people get buff without meaning to..

one ox-cart, a middle-aged horse, and a sword

I'm having engine troubles. This is my incredibly useful truck, ie ox cart, shown here transporting two barrels of honey-gold fry grease to the kiln. .....but every trip to the gasohol station costs seventy dollars now. so obviously I drive only when I need to move something other than my own little tush. thank god I live in Port-land of bike lanes and kneeling busses. if I played the oboe, even the bassoon!, I could live without any vehicle whatsoever! But how to visit Brenda or Robin, nestled with their families among the fields and fens? What of the ocean? two hours and a hundred dollars away... or, heaven forbid, I get a steady job teaching somewhere? it came down to blind passion. last summer, in a fit of crush, i bought a horse. I'd been stuffing the paltry earnings of my so-called business into a bottle for a year. my kingdom for a horse! I made the man who sold it to me break the bottle over my table to get the bills out:

he's kinda old. not a pretty boy, i mean bike. tempermental. solid.. I love him. but yes, it's a little scarey- there are still lots of suv's out there, left over from the old days... so there's the crux of the debate: we are at the tipping point- oil is not going to get cheaper. the culture of oil is dying- all the petroleum that goes into the production and transportation of beef, the availability of strawberries in january, felling trees in Canada to build homes in Houston, boiling and refining tar mixed with sand(!?) to feed our ignorant demand for everything, anything, and NOW. the suburbs will be abandoned and recycled- who can afford to drive to them? or they will become townships in themselves- an autonomous ship of a town, economy once more localized, part of a flotilla, serviced by carriers of goods whose oars might be oxen... probably segregated, but that's another story. do I digress? I was just on this fabulous road trip all around the east coast, carried aloft like a dankity queen on the sound waves reverberating off luxury speakers in a luxury car. I lived luxe, i burned a lot of fuel (and I bought a lot of pots- he he!). and I knew it would probably be the last time I had the chance to be so carefree before the hammer really fell.
so what do you do when the gavel falls? is this the story? have one last blowout and then buckle down? is buying a motorcycle a luxury of romanticized freedom or is it a transportation necessity? is it somewhere inbetween- a new paradigm for the shifting times? a new horse? or is it just dangerous and irresponsible and I ought to take my pop's suggestion and run it off a cliff (presumably I would be strapped into a hang-glider at the moment of take-off) - wasn't there a winged horse in greek mythology? Pegasus: it sprouted from the body of the gorgon (not gorgonzola) Medusa when some handsome man named Perseus cut off her head- I think the gorgons had snakes for hair and one could not look into their faces or else be turned to stone- Perseus looked into a mirror instead. how apt. we must look inside to make the changes. we must act differently.
Now I will deliberately digress: really fastinating article in the new yorker called "the itch"- did anyone read that one? the nerves that register itch are not necessarily nerves, but often memory without connnection to external stimuli. the itch is mental. same as phantom limb pain. there is memory that gets shorted out, creating physical sensation. a remarkable therapy places a mirror edge-to the body axis of a person with phantom limb pain, mirror side on the half of the body that has a full limb. then, wave the arms, conduct an orchestra in the air- look at the limb in the mirror as if it were on the other side. the memory gets a shock, a scrambling- new information, new limb, new paradigm. the train of old thinking about pain jumps a track.... me, I've been experimenting. every time I'm lonely at night and want a drink, I reach for the new yorker instead. I'm just trying to not look the gorgonzola in the face.

and what of the sword? I killed my chainsaw the other day. oh fool, how could I? put generic two-cycle oil into my fuel instead of brand-name. and not quite enough of it either... my trusty sword, smoking hot! which would be sexy if it weren't also a problem. so here is a tear-streaked eulogy to this chivalrous knight's trusty damascus. I place it in the stone: "he who so pulleth out the sword from this stone and anvil is the rightful king of all england" .. maybe I'll pull it out this winter and teach myself how to fix it. yea, right- I'll probably end up turning it into yet another useless art project: "Mechanisms of Chivalry: an mobile of Irreconcilable Ideas". hot air rises and makes smog about this. and this.

prickly pear

I decided to stay. a few factors weighed in- not so much formal obligations but more like self-perceived nebulous ones. basically, I can't stand to be quite that irresponsible. I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so is whether or not I am irresponsible, but since it's my life and my perception, I'll just blame my lutheran roots and carry on working...
really, no-one would have missed me at the special exhibit of woodfire work that brought together all the local characters with some international flavor, but it was great to see people that I love and like to fire with... it's an excellent community I've fallen into here- it's great to be home. that's what it comes down to- it's great to be home- I actually would much rather be here now, learning how to fire my kiln, this summer, than anywhere else in the world. grease fire in portland beats out flame trees in Fiji. my heart is here. ...not to mention that pop wouldn't have been captaining her- I'll gamble for the day that I can make such a remarkable passage with him.

And SO! I have been insulating the kiln. have I mentioned that I am in love with my kiln? god, I hope i did a good job designing it and that I don't gett shut down via some mishap with a neighbor. I'm famous for mishaps, so I'm nervous. but as much as i can comply with city code, I am, so there's little to complain about. other than the plumes of smoke that smell like fish and chips, perhaps. my landlady is amazing. and so is stephen mickey for giving me all those awesome bricks.

more free materials came my way in the form of many random scraps of insulation- so random and so valuable. I used to do thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles when I was a kid, so this was nothing. just itchy like fingers on a chalkboard. it all worked out to a solid four inches on the dome roof:

and a layer around the walls, backed by about two inches of mineral board ripped into lenghts on a slight bevel so they'd make a relatively seamless curve. chicken wire to hold it all in place:

Lady Linda has most graciously agreed to let me borrow her burners while i wait for mine, so I am in bizness!!! I am aiming for a firing in two weeks time. but there is much to do including final inspections by the city. (chief dude knows me- he saw the kiln walls but no roof)

I like Jack's comment: looks like an engineer did the front and a boy scout did the back.

much love from the great northwest-
C

prickle fish

I don't know what to do. I flew home to portland three days ago. Today Pop tells me that the Seamester program that is now running aboard the Argo is only half-full and would I like to join for the trans-pacific crossing? Tahiti, Rarotonga, Fiji, Australia. leaving in three days, back home in two months. I know I'm not staff, since I'm not qualified to teach anything. And of course I'm not a paying shipmate- I'm dead weight. Live weight- I'm eating food and taking up space. But this is almost exactly the kind of voyage I was trying to join two years ago that didn't happen. I busted my butt to leave grad school a term early so that I could join this exact ship on a beautiful sailing voyage from Bangkok to France. she stayed in Thailand the whole time. Not that I'm complaining about also being stuck in Thailand, but it did turn out to be kind of a strange trip.
it doesn't seem like much of a debate except that here I am doing just about everything I can to be a professional potter and the last thing I need to be doing is running off to the south pacific! I feel like I'm in such a precarious position, trying to establish myself in this town or get a small teaching job, or at least some kind of income, as a carpenter, if need be. I've been accepted to the Portland Open Studios and I have obligations there, I have work in a gallery downtown, I'm trying to get this kiln up and running (but irony of ironies- I still don't have any burners that were ordered in Taiwan six months ago!) so that I can get some pots out into other galleries... am I being impatient or paranoid that I'm losing a toehold on something that hasn't even happened yet? do you think I'm just insane for seriously considering not taking advantage of this amazing opportunity?