Bringing It to a Close

  

 

Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

Bringing It to a Close

 

So it looks like I'm on the home stretch done with this piece. Last Tuesday I got started  on the finishing work, sanding out all the tool marks, and stone bruises. The work went much faster than I had anticipated. I had it done by the end of the day.

 

This makes two stones in a row where I've been working around inconsistent quality in the material. This stone, like the last one I worked, had some firm areas, but most of it is just too mushy to hold much detail. Oddly enough, it can be more difficult working a stone that's too soft, than one that's too hard. I'm beginning to understand why marble is the stone of choice for serious sculpture.

The soft stone takes a gentle touch with the abrasives, but it smooths out quickly. After the second pass wet sanding the carving, I put it on the portable table, and washed it down with the hose. When wet, the stone looks like French vanilla ice cream with caramel streaks. But the wet, glassy finish didn't suit either the material, or the figure. The piece looked better as it began to dry.

I ended up wet sanding  up to only 220 grit, (rather than 2,000) and then rubbing it out with  #000  steel wool, and Simichrome. Then I hand rubbed it with more polish, and the soft cotton rags until I got this satiny, very slightly textured finish.

 

It's an odd, quirky kind of piece. There's a little story going on here.

 

 

 But I don't know quite what it is.

 I don't know what it is about finishing a project that leaves me so completely spent, and tired. The physical labor is not exhausting. But this is the fourth stone in a row where it's happened. Tuesday I worked until late afternoon finishing up the stone, and then putting the work area back in order.  I turned in early, but didn't rest Tuesday night at all. Woke up Wednesday morning completely exhausted. That would have been bad enough, but an allergy fit had my nose running like a faucet, literally dripping down my shirt.  Two benadryl left me feeling like a zombie, and then I got no sleep Wednesday night. Couldn't even get a nap Thursday afternoon. 

It's Friday morning as I'm sitting here letting the coffee get cold. I'll be back on my feet later. But this seems to be a pattern. Finish up a project, and then I'm on my ass for two days following. Welcome to post-middle age, I guess.

 

Next up, I'll begin work on the five Anza Borrego stones, beginning with this one:

 

This material is absolutely gorgeous, deep blood red, and milky translucent white when it's all polished up.

This chunk of rock has problems, though. A deep fissure runs along the length of the stone, and the largest surface on the boulder is the flat cut where it was sawn from  a larger piece. 

 

The flat plane is more difficult to work around than the fissure. If I bust out a chunk of the rock, I can compose something cool around the irregular contours of the broken stone. 

 

 The only way to get rid of flat is to pick out spots that will be high points, and cut the rest way.

 

I have one very heavy duty masonry chisel that I inherited with my late father's odd-ball tool collection.  I put the blade along the fissure, gave it  three good whacks with the six pound mallet, and just the exact section I had predicted would split, broke out just as I hoped it would.

 

 

Now here's a mystery. I thought I had completed a piece from what looks like the same stone when I was doing this twenty years ago. I found my old photo album when I was cleaning up the den, Wednesday, and sure enough there was a photo of a small carving done from what looks like the same rock. I gave this, and a bunch of other pieces away at  our wedding in April, 2000. I can't remember who got this piece. More joys of post-middle age, I guess.

 

 

    It is quite probable that the stuff came from the same quarry. US Gypsum has been working those beds since 1920. But how likely is it that they'd be pulling the same stone out for over twenty years? I'll probably never know.

 

Next up is the take-down. I'll drag the big stone out into the yard, bring out the angle grinder, and spit some dust and noise out into the morning. Maybe take a little revenge for the neighbor's tile saw.

 

 Back on the Learning Curve

The Skinamalink ignoring my work

 I mentioned in the last post that my sculpting skill-set was somewhat lop-sided. It wasn't that the work itself was crappy, but I was doing all the shaping with saws, and drills, then going straight to the rasps, rifflers, and files. Saws, and drills are just fine, but those rasps, and rifflers are refining tools, and shouldn't come into play until later in the process. Not only that, there's a right, and a wrong way to use those quite costly tools, and I was, uh- doin' it wrong. The consequence is that many of my older tools are quite dull. I wore them out too fast.

The rough shaping is done with a point chisel. I didn't even own one until last Saturday. I had two good chisels, a wide and a narrow blade, but I seldom used them.

Even so, I'm not beating myself over past errors. When I started this game in 1993, I had no experience,  no internet, and no teachers. Starting over, I have all those things. Saturday I took delivery of a set of four basic chisels, and a one and a half pound soft steel mallet.

Monday I put the rifflers aside, and set to work with the single point to excavate the material under the rim around the left figure. A pound and a half mallet gets heavy fast, but the point chisels seriously kick ass. It's going to take time to build up the skill set, but  I'm learning fast. I went from here:

 

 

To here:

..in just a day. This would have taken several days doing it the hard way.

 

Tuesday night I got into a violent disagreement with something I ate. Might have the Italian butter and Parmesan cheese. Hard to tell. Whatever it was it had me out of bed sweating and retching, and pitching up my dinner, instead of catching a good night's sleep. My best little pals, Buddy the Cat, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink both knew something was wrong with the big guy, and they were both there to help. 

I tried to curl up on the futon in the den. By the time I put my head down, Skinnies was right there to be my pillow. Ol' Buddy jumped up next to my chest. They followed me around the house until the nausea passed, and I went back to bed. Buddy jumped up on the pillow, and took his usual place, curled around my head. Skinnies sat on my feet. I fell asleep to both cats purring, and Mary breathing soft at my side.

 The bond between us and our animals is one of the small miracles of life. I recall (imperfectly) part of a John C. Wright story wherein Cat and Dog were the only animals to follow Man out of Eden. "He needed the company." was Dog's explanation. Cat came as well. He had to find out what was going to happen. Love my ol' cats.

Wednesday afternoon, and...

Whoever lives in the house behind us has been having an addition  put on the house, and now they're having the kitchen, or bath remodeled. Whoever is working there is running a fucking tile saw. This is the most evil, unholy sound in the universe. Or close to it, anyway. The shriek is continuous, and it's been going on for hours. Even with my shitty hearing I can hear it all the way in the den.

GODDAMN I HATE NOISE.

 This is one of the worst things about being hard of hearing. You lose the ability to hear everything but inhuman machine sounds. Birds in the morning are gone, but Skill saws, leaf blowers, and lawn mowers come in loud and clear. Noise pollution becomes more and more irritating the worse your hearing gets. The screaming, grinding, grating, set-your-teeth-on-edge shriek got annoying, then irritating, then insufferable. My temper broke, and I got so fucking furiously pissed off that I just wanted to break shit and kill things. I had to stop work, and go in the house. This went on non-stop until about six in the evening. They're lucky I don't have a flame thrower, or a hand grenade. 

 

I got an early start Thursday morning. A slow early start. The day started gray, and cool enough to need a sweatshirt. By nine thirty it was warm enough to shed the sweatshirt. I'm shaping in the teardrop between the two larger figures. The stone is coming to life. It's turning out much better than I thought it would. The mail came a little after ten, and brought two new point chisels.  I won't need these until the next project, but that's going to be coming up before long. As a side note, the bent tools at the right aren't chisels, but rather scrapers. They're finishing tools used to smooth out tool marks.

 

 Weapons of creation

 

I was just getting lunch out of the microwave a little after eleven. The tile saw started before I was done eating. 

[insert string of vile profanities] 

 

...and Friday afternoon arrived, suffused with autumn, and a good day's work on the project completed. That late golden light was glowing on the shaggy hedges bordering the yard, and a warm breeze was playing the wind chimes. 

 I'm getting near to completion, down to making some few refinements here and there on the stone. This part is pencil work: look,  draw, check, erase, repeat. Look...

Just in time for the tile saw to start. 

 

A sweet moment evaporated, and the anger  flooded in on a charge of adrenaline. I've been putting up with this shit all week, now. I want to nuke the bastards.

It isn't really the tile saw. 

 

The anger isn't coming from the noise. The anger is coming from a host of news items. The anger is coming from the theft of our nation. From the stupid and corrupt vermin who presume to power. The condescending scum who declare themselves our betters. The anger comes from  witnessing the spineless, sheep-like submission of almost everyone around me. The anger comes from the lies, the stupidity, the naked evil.

The mask. Every employee in every business is masked up and faceless. I cannot leave the house except that I see a good half the people on the street slouching along, masked up and faceless.  They don't know, or care that the mask is useless. They take great pride displaying their humiliation, their utter unquestioning submission to the authority of the Lie. 

Nobody stands. Nobody resists. They kneel, bow, and scrape. I see those worried eyes peeking over the edge of the paper. "He's not masked!..."

I don't have the words to describe how deeply I hate this.

Last week I wrote about how the September 11th attack on America showed me how little I understood evil. "You thought 9/11 was the apex of evil? Fuuuck, dude you ain't seen nothin'..."

 

 The hatred of Evil is righteous, but the constant anger is toxic. I can channel some of the anger into work, but the rest seems to metabolize into bleakness, or free floating grief. For that there is only prayer. Forbearance is like manna. You get exactly enough to get through one day with none to spare, and none to keep. Tomorrow there will be more. Or so we hope and pray.

 

 

 Second Week of the Ninth Month

Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

 

 

Here's the latest progress on the latest stone. More pics lower down:

 

Our monthly cycling event, The So Cal RatRod Ride fell on the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attack on America. 

The OBC custom bicycle convention is going on in Las Vegas, so a good many of our friends were out there. Our turnout was small, but our guests were  some of our favorite folks to ride with. I expected to see some rally, some demonstration at Huntington Beach pier, but no. There was some sort of marathon event being held at the beach. Coast Highway was closed to traffic. Both the highway and the bike path were full of runners. Some of the weekend motor home campers had "Never Forget" 9/11 displays, and American flags. There was some vocal group or other singing in the little amphitheater near the pier. That was it.

People used to talk about knowing exactly where they were, and what they were doing in 1963,  when they heard that John Kennedy had been assassinated. I do. 

September 11 is the same. 

Right here, I'm close to broaching a serious topic, and I generally try to avoid doing that. I'm not going to jump into politics and war. But I'm going to go ahead, and get serious.

I sometimes mention Faith and prayer, but only in the general sense of trying to lean on Faith, and being in the habit of prayer.

Many years back, I took the third of a dozen steps with all the sincerity, and honesty that I had to offer, and I placed my life, and my will in the care of God. As I understood God, then, anyway. This was the seed. It most certainly was not the beginning of a pious life. I still felt free to detest religion in general, and Jesus freaks in particular. But that was a long time ago, and the seed grew slowly. Now, nearly forty years later, half of the over sixty bookmarked websites, and blogs on my computer are religiously oriented. And all but a few of those are Catholic. Each day, in prayer, I open my heart to Jesus Christ.

I never set out to become a Christian. I do know that  Faith has taken root, and caused this seismic change in me. I have become a believer, almost despite myself. Go figure.  Does this qualify me for membership in the club? I'll leave that for God to decide.

 

How did this happen?

Evil.

On September 10, 2001 I believed that I had evil pretty well defined. Evil was guys like Charles Manson, or Ted Bundy. In its greater form it was guys like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

But the phone rang early while Mary and I were up in Possum Flats having our coffee. My mother told me to turn on the television, because a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I was thinking an accident with a private plane.

I went down to the main house, and turned on the tube just in time to see the second plane hit the tower. That hideous ball of flame and smoke. What I had just seen was impossible to believe.

There used to be a tabloid paper called The Weekly World News. It always had bizarre headlines about aliens, or bigfoot. They had a trick photo, in black and white,  that they'd put on the front page from time to time. The photo depicted Satan's face: horns, goatee, and all, being formed in a giant black cloud.

 

When I saw that plane hit, my innermost eye opened. I had the weird feeling of being able to see into a different dimension, or perceive some heretofore invisible wavelength of light. Now, don't get me wrong. I did not experience a hallucination. There was no a cartoon devil in the smoke. But I saw the face.   It was serene, almost child-like. It was immensely pleased at what had been done.

Remember, I said I thought I had Evil all figured out.  This was so many orders of magnitude above what I had conceived as Evil, that it undid everything I thought I believed in.
I got dressed quickly, and drove over to my mother's house. The news was all over the radio.  I got to my mother's house in time to see both towers collapse live on TV.

I had been there. I sat on the observation deck of The World Trade Center when I visited Manhattan in 1987.  I got out of the elevator, walked over, and took a front row seat looking over the edge.  That breath taking view. I remembered the words that popped into my head: "Airship altitude."

Like a lot of folks, my worldview collapsed with those two buildings. 

 

In the aftermath, the only person I could think of to listen to was Dennis Prager. I had been a fan for years. He always seemed to be the sanest voice on the radio. Perhaps Dennis could make some sense of this. I bought a cheap transistor radio, and listened to his show while I worked on the stones. One day, Prager interviewed Charles Johnson, whose web site, Little Green Footballs, was the hottest thing on the internet. I had just hooked up my first dial-up desktop. (Remember the long squeedleebeep sound?)

 LGF was the wild west of the internet, a total anonymous shit slinging free-for-all, and I recognized that it wouldn't last long. I made my first on-line 'friends' in those discussion threads. I also found myself "hanging out" with the people of Faith, especially a Christ believing Jewish woman who called herself BabbaZee, and a lightning witted punster, and free range theologian, Gagdad Bob Godwin. In those conversations I recognized my own spiritual hunger. BabbaZee often referred to being part of the Feral Remnant. Gagdad would refine his own take as the Raccoon Way. 

I asked BabbaZee for some advice. She told me to read the Book of Job. I did. And-  I,  "got it", is the closest I can put it. My resistance to religion broke.

Soon Charles Johnson discovered he didn't want to host a bunch of "right-wingers" on LGF, and purged almost everyone from the site. 

 

Gagdad started his own blog, One Cosmos, and I became a daily reader. I credit Bob Godwin  for being the most powerful influence, and the single greatest teacher in my growth in the Spirit. 

But it has been a slow process. I cannot pick a moment when some magical change happened. But the day came when I addressed my morning prayers to Christ, and not the vague higher power. Over time I noticed the proliferation of religious sites, and bloggers on my side bar. First one, then another, and another.  It wasn't that I sought out Christian, or especially Catholic venues. I bookmarked sites, and writers because they were superb writers, and clear thinkers who just plain made sense. None of them was trying to sell their faith.  So I read their stuff. I read scripture, too. 

It is the will of God that Life should flourish. There is a Holy Spirit. It will draw those who have eyes to open, and ears to hear. It may come to those who have a hunger for it, even if they do not recognize that inner grumbling as a hunger. So it was with me. God will use whatever medium he has available as a vector. Even the internet.

Just ask. 

 

So here we are, twenty years down the pike. And look. Just look. No further comment.

So where do we go from here?

Back to work.

The visit up to Ventura had some unexpected consequences. Maybe I should say benefits. I picked up a few hints talking to a couple of the sculptors there at Art City, and also a link to a Kansas based organization called 2-Sculpt.

Here comes the hard part. I am completely self-taught, which means my instructor didn't know shit. It didn't take much reading and study to learn that I've been just plain "doin' it wrong" as the good ol' boys say. I've done some good work, but I have only two seldom used chisels in my tool kit. I've been relying almost exclusively on the rifflers and rasps to do excavation and shaping that could have been done much faster with hammer and chisel, and without wearing out the very expensive tools. 

Your hammer and chisel-Fu is weak, Grasshopper.

 

I shall learn, Sensei.

 

 

 

So I bought a real hammer, and a set of basic carving chisels. I'm spending some time watching beginner videos on boob-toob.   I'm working on technique, and learning fast. Still a long ways to go.

 

Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

Travels and Tribulations

9/6/21 Labor day-

doesn't mean a lot when you're retired. We're not doing a party, but we are having a couple of friends over for ribs, and beer. So, anyway... 

Mon, 8/30

Mary had errands and appointments all day, so I had the grounds to myself. I took a re-heated cup of coffee out to the gazebo sometime around 8:30, and took my usual seat at the table. Buddy the Cat came out to join me, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink followed. The morning was clear and warm, the sunlight taking on the deeper tones of fall, just three weeks away. And the air had a hint of that back to school smell. Summer is over. There is always a sweet melancholy about it. I spent my working years in the school systems, so I have never grown away from the heart rhythm of a year that  begins in September, and breaks in June. The sunshine, the cloud scattered morning sky, the end-of-summer whisper in the quiet. It's easy to forget how beautiful So Cal is. The seasons abide, indifferent to our affairs.

My surfing career took up only a few sweet years in the 70's with a brief reprise in '82/'83. Nonetheless, I caught the nostalgia in the smell of the morning. Back on swing shift at last! Grab the wetsuit, and a bar of that grape-scented wax. Strap the 7' 4" diamond tail to the racks, and fire up the Volkswagen.

But that was... Don't even think about it. The daydream vanished, and the  chatter, and madness of the world rushed in.

This shit ain't gonna' stop.

 The endless roller coaster of my mental health is taking a nose dive again. 

 Every day I sit down at the desktop, and run through the long list of bookmarked sites. Some sites are just lists of links, each one leading to a new outrage. Other writers remind me that the world continues to go to hell. I haven't found anything that remotely resembles good news in a very long time. I don't have to add any details. You know.  

The best hope that I have right now is the hope that I'm wrong about our prospects for the time we have remaining to us. I'm not optimistic.

 It's one point on which the Catholics, and the free-range theologians seem to agree: the greatest, and deepest Hope also lies outside the boundaries of the time we have remaining to us. But that's how it always has been, and always will be.

The question remains, though: What to do? Right here. Right now. Sitting in the middle of the railroad tracks, worrying about the oncoming train is not a good plan.  I never thought I'd be the one to say this, but I'm leaning on prayer, morning, night, and much of the vagrant brain-time in between.

 Coffee was getting cold. Ol' Buddy jumped up on the table, and popped the bubble. I gave my  bestest old pal a pet and scratch, and got up to look at the stone.  My attention dropped in on the project, and reclaimed the morning from the troubles.

I  did some excavation in the places I plan on drilling.  The shorter the distance to drill, the better. 

 
Drilling a long hole in an odd shaped piece of rock is tricky. It's not too hard to get the drill started in the right spot. 

 

Hitting the target on the exit is the hard part. Of course, this isn't machine shop work. There's a generous margin for error on a piece like this one. I've done better, but these are both well within the excavation zone. They're close enough. Actually, they were just far enough off target to give ol' Carp a chance to have at it. "You're losing it. Too old, yep. Lost your touch for sure. This job gets a "D+"

 
 

Sometimes I take pleasure in telling Carp to piss off, and die. He never does, though.

(thu, 9/2): The drive from heck

 The town of Ojai is about fifteen miles inland from Ventura Beach, a little over a hundred miles north of here. Mary and I finished a great lunch at a Mexican restaurant there, and headed for home at about a quarter after two in the afternoon. Bad, bad timing. 

 It had been over twenty five years since I  last made the crawl in afternoon rush hour traffic through Los Angeles. There is nothing to recommend the experience. Traffic on the southbound 101 jammed up miles outside the city. We could have walked faster.

It took a couple of eternities, but we finally made it into, and out of downtown, and jumped off the freeway on Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles. I used to do this when I worked teaching school in Highland Park. The cruise through East LA was slow, but far less unpleasant than the crawl down the bleak eastbound 60.   

But that was back in the nineties. And instead of sliding down the off-ramp, and making a quick right on the boulevard, we joined a line of a dozen or so cars  dripping one by one into the equally jammed up boulevard traffic.

Back in the day, cruising Whittier Boulevard on Saturday night was a So Cal rite of passage. Even in the nineties, going through East LA was an entertaining drive.  The atmosphere was what my grandmother would have called, "gay", meaning bright, cheery, and colorful. Back then it seemed like every  group of store fronts housed a bridal and quinceanera shop, the windows crowded with mannequins in huge gaudy dresses. Other storefronts had windows full of stereo stuff, or cheap furniture. There were botanicas selling herbal cures, and party stores with pinatas hanging from hooks. Not to mention great little restaurants everywhere.

Now most of the store fronts are empty. The bridal shops are gone. The remaining stores are selling made-in-China shit. Instead of restaurants, the streets are lined with catering trucks. Eat a taco on a paper plate while seated at a folding chair on the sidewalk. The whole place looked third-world dingy, dirty, and dull. Everyone on the street was slouching along, masked up like a plague zombie. You couldn't see a human face anywhere. Instead of an easy cruise, traffic was  a creeping, bumper to bumper crawl.  This was no better than the freeway, and my truck is a five-speed. These are the very worst conditions for a stick shift, just a little too fast for first, but not quite fast enough for second. Third gear? Never got there.  We left Ojai, at about two-fifteen. It was after six thirty when we made it home.

So what were Mary and I doing in Ojai that left us crawling through East LA during the worst traffic of the day?

We drove up to Ojai for lunch, after a stop in Ventura beach. We went up to Ventura to visit a place called Art City Studios.

I spent the morning shopping in this pile:

 And came home with these:

It's just a little over four hundred pounds of alabaster. These five chunks range from  fifty, to about a hundred twenty pounds. They were quarried in the Anza Borrego Desert, right here in So Cal. I love the idea of working native stone. This stuff is just full of color: red, white, purple, gold, black. 

 

There's some pearly translucence in a couple of the pieces. This should keep me busy for over a year.