29. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

A potential customer, who shall remain anonymous, asked me to design a mid-century modern looking table base for a kitchen table.  He wanted a darker color and a sleek minimal look. I did my research on mid-century modern and actually came up with a design partially based on that feel and partially based on some scraps of walnut I had around.

Needless to say my uninspiring drawing capabilities did not win me the day. But I liked the design so much and had most of the wood available, I decided to build it anyway.  I had enjoyed the challenge of accounting for a customer’s desires, keeping true to my own design sense and using available materials.

The legs to the table are what led to part of the design because they were the negative waste, if you will, of a long curved bench I had made. I had to smooth out the curve on the inside of the legs but other than that I used them in the shape that had come out of the bench. I think they look like rocket fins, which makes perfect sense for a mid-century jet age look.

 The remainder of the design was  aimed at keeping it simple and sleek. I think the spindles reaching up from the square base to the apron achieve elevation in a minimal way. The other option was to have a single larger column rising up from the middle, but since I had the thinner spindles as waste from the bench, they won the day.

So this is my version of modern.

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28. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

Not sure even how to describe the band I saw at the Cedar Cultural Center on Saturday. The Nordic Roots Festival brought over a Swedish group called “Detektivbyrån”, I believe Detective Bureau in English.

The easy part to describe would be how they looked. Imagine if the Ramones’ parents had given them a glockenspiel, an accordion and sampling keyboard instead of guitars and drums. Exactly. Just imagine Joey Ramone rocking the accordian with one hand and playing the keyboard with the other and throw in some head thrashing and you got it.

How do they sound? Infectious, energetic, and great deal a lot like you would expect a glockenspiel, an accordion put through an effects board, some sampling and a drum kit would sound. I know that watching and listening to them made me smile. I noticed it made many people around me smile too.  Except for the guy down the row who plugged his ears on one song, though that may be was because of the piercing loudness of some of the higher pitcthed glockenspiel notes.

Anyway, you can listen here  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLTS0tcqgZE to one example.

I think the thing that sealed the deal on the concert was when the drummer played a scissors as the percussion instrument through an entire song. And it did actually sound like a scissors snapping shut. Snip snipsnip, snip snipsnip, snip snipsnip. Ya, baby.

The wonderful creative minds out there. Which reminds me the other day I saw an ad for “Dancing with the Stars,” which I have never seen, but I thought it said “Dancing with the Bears.” Now that would be cool. Just try to look sexy doing the tango with a bear, assuming it will dance a tango. I can just see this giant Russian Bear standing there with his arms crossed saying “I only dance Mazurka.” Contestants would be more worried about being thrown off the stage than thrown off the show.

I’ll have to name my first recording, “If You can get a Bear to Tango” or maybe “Songs to get Tossed By.”

But back to the Detektivbyrån. Oh, just go listen to them. You’ll get the idea.

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21. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

I was at the Weisman Art Museum last Friday for a fundraiser for the Twin Cities Music Foundation. They were having a silent art auction to benefit the foundation and I had donated two pieces. The lamp I donated actually sold so that was good for the foundation.

I know that sounds very generous of me but my real motivation was to have some exposure for my work. I think it worked. What was more fascinating to me though was to not only  watch the silent auction process but but to ponder the art and the artists.

I don’t usually consider my furniture art though some of it can be sculptural in nature, so maybe it’s unintentionally art. But there the lamp was surrounded by paintings and photographs and sculpture and more. My friend Linda and I tried to contemplate the amount of effort and creativity and inspiration that went into the pieces (most of them anyway). I wondered what a strange process it must be to try to price art.

Maybe my challenge is that I look at it as having to make a living making art or making something, anyway. And in thinking of it that way perhaps I am doomed to not understand. I know it is often a labour of love that does not always have measurable financial gains.  I know also that some people only do it part time or have other financial support. If I was a real artist maybe I could get a patron, like some Duke of Chutney or something.

Where was I going with this. Oh, yes. The difficulty in pricing art. At the silent auction you could see the minimum bids (which I understand are not entirely reflective of what one might typically sell it for) and the prices ranged from $50 to $1800.   I looked at them and thought, having some reasonable knowledge of the effort involved, this artistry stuff pays somewhere below minimum wage. No wonder there are starving artists.

But I know also that artistry must follow the same market pressures as other things. Supply and demand, perceptions, brand recognition, credibility, death, etc. So I know that just like  for every 1000 bars of soap that sell for $5 there’s the one that sells for $100 and so the same is true for art however much we may not want it to be that way.

Or as Hamlet would say, It’s just a lamp, take it for all and all.

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16. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

I just stopped by the Edina Art Center to pick up some pieces I had entered in their fall juried art show.

I was walking with the woman helping me find my pieces when I saw one of the lamps and I said, Oh, there’s one. And she says. Well, that’s in the show. You don’t want to take that.

I didn’t even know I had made it into the show. So what  pleasant surprise. I guess I hadn’t heard from them so I figured I hadn’t made it. But these assumptions will kill me one day.

I didn’t win a specific award but was one of the judges’ selections. So if you want to go see the lamp and other good art, the show is on exhibit through the end of October. The website is http://www.edinaartcenter.com

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16. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

As some of you may know David Foster Wallace committed suicide recently. Wallace was the author or “Infinite Jest,” a highly acclaimed novel and considered a bright star of the current literary generation. A very sad passing.

I read or I tried to read “Infinite Jest” several times. The novel is War and Peace in it’s length and so when I say I only managed to get through about 250 pages each time you can see I only had begun reading it. But I just couldn’t do it.  I could see that the prose was well crafted and the many themes were woven carefully through the story. But it did nothing for me. It was like reading literary oatmeal, I knew it was good for me but I couldn’t find the flavor to keep me going.

Fortunately, my conclusion was not that it was not any good. My conclusion was more like I had lost my taste for it. Kind of like when I have yogurt for breakfast everyday for too long and finally really don’t want to have yogurt again for a very long time.

In analytical hindsight I suspect that my thought process, consciously and subconsciously, went a little something like this. I have obviously lost my taste for “serious” literature” and the disaffection comes perhaps from a knowledge that I wanted to stop reading about people living and doing and actually start living and doing myself. So Wallace in writing a book that bored me to death actually brought me to life. I guess I owe that debt to him and am sorry that he had to pass for me to grasp that.

It reminds me of the final meeting that drove me out of the corporate world. A Project manager, we’ll call her Sarah, held this interdepartmental meeting to try to help improve communication and cooperation between the departments. Despite some passionate and conflicting view points it was oddly a very enlightening meeting that did help the departments understand where each was coming from.  Everybody thought the meeting went well.

The meeting was critically successful but at the same time it was terrible and crushing. I had just spent all this energy on something that I hated. I went back to my desk called someone to meet them for happy hour and left. And though I had not technically quit when I left that day, I was done. This awful meeting had given me the inertia to break free.

To end with a literary reference, these two events are like the intentional fallacy: the successes or motivations I took from them were probably not what the authors intended, and in fact once the works are placed in the public domain, the authors lose all control of whatever intent they may have hoped for.

And so thank goodness for failed intentions.

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10. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

I usually don’t dwell on my dreams too much. Not to say that they don’t have meaning, but that I don’t make any real effort to recall or analyze them. But, sometimes they do shed some light into the darkness of the soul. I don’t mean dark as in evil but dark as in shadowy and hard to see.

And now it sounds like I have some dark secret to reveal, which I don’t. But on to the dream.

So I have this dream where I have made a large quilt for someone, except that it’s a unique quilt in that it is made of wood, kind of like a butcher block but not glued but sewn together, kind of like those seat covers you see that are a bunch of wooden balls threaded together except in this case the balls are square. So several of us are moving this obviously heavy quilt up the stairs and it starts to fall apart in spots and I’m trying to hold it together and hoping no one notices so I can fix it later but it keeps crumbling and soon I am trapped in this now cargo nettingesque quilt and can’t move and fade to gray.

Really, it’s not that strange of a dream. I knew immediately where it came from. I just finished this headboard and footboard where I used dowels to attach the legs to the headboard and footboard. I had never done that before and was not sure how many dowels I needed, how big they had to be, how I was going to accurately thread them and secure them and so on. And last night I was showing some friends the bed and talking about the dowels and how I hoped it was strong enough.

It was this lingering doubt that  manifested itself in the dream. I was disconcerted to find out these doubts where so embedded in my subconscious. The good thing I took from it though was that the doubts were about mechanics and not about the design.  Mechanics can be fixed.

So hopefully no dreams about failed designs though it may be interesting to see what kind of dream manifests as a design doubt. Something tells me there would be pigs or bears in it.  

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3. September 2008 by Joe Gergen.

Lately I have this bee in my bonnet or maybe more like a bug in my shoe about comments posted by readers on news sites. I like to go to a couple different news sites to get different perspectives on stories and for some reason I am fascinated not only by the comments people leave but by the comments that are allowed. So I have researched comment behaviors at a handful of news outlets, though certainly not expansive enough to be scientific it did allow some insight. 

You might think that reader comments would be akin letters to the editor, but from what I can tell that is not true. Letters to the Editor appear to be controlled. For example, a paper wouldn’t typically print multiple letters to the editor that say essentially the same thing. They are edited for content and grammar and other journalistic standards.

But not comments. They are a free for all. The only thing I can tell that is not allowed are offensive words. (Granted there was one news site that appeared to apply Letter to the Editor standards to its comments).

Of course there are different types of commenters. The serious commenter tying to make a point about an article, pro or con. The Class Clown who just belittles everything in the article in an effort to be funny. Mr Sarcasm who just mocks the other the other commenters. The Fencer who likes to spar with other commenters. The Politico who turns every article on anything into a comment on either republicans or democrats. And of course for sports articles the Monday Morning Quarterback.

The deafening amount of noise and chatter just washes away in a  tide of blather any earnest commentary. So in effect the comment feature that the news outlets tout as valid reader response becomes just nonsensical.

Now there was that one site that seemed to control reader comments (or their readers were extremely disciplined and courteous, which I doubt). But that means that some employee was monitoring and making decisions, the type of employee that probably doesn’t exist anymore at most news outlets. Though perhaps the news outlets that choose not to have comments at all are the ones I should be supporting since they are clearly not trying to convince me that these reader comments have any journalistic value. But maybe comments are like publicity.

As a last point what seems to be interesting is that if you go out and look at numerous blogs (not associated withe major news outlets) you seem to find that comments seem to stay on target. But perhaps that has to do with the volume of readership and the more targeted audience.

That being said, I will accept no blathering comments on my blog. Unless of course they are really funny.

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29. August 2008 by Joe Gergen.

I was just driving home from picking up some wood, and I got behind this panel van with logo with a globe that I thought said “SeverWorld.”  (Actually said ServerWorld, which I thought was kind of lame)

So I’m thinking “SeverWorld”, what kind of company is this. Obviously not in the business of decapitations. Maybe they help relocate you, thus severing you from your old home.  Or maybe they help sever you from your crappy life, like a mobile band of roving interventionists hired by you or a loved (or more likley unloved one).

Maybe they are like the privatized version of witness protection. You pay them to create a new life for you somewhere else after you have effed up your current one. Maybe money can buy you a clean slate.

Or maybe you can hire them to sever someone out of your world. Need to get rid of loser husband, call SeverWorld. Annoying co-worker or boss, call SeverWorld. It’s like calling out a non-lethal hit on someone. Instead of killing them, they get relocated to Bolivia or Zambia. And by he time they get back they are so traumatized and emotionally wrecked they just fall off the radar.

Call today.

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25. August 2008 by Joe Gergen.

I know what the world needs now is not a another blog entry about the MN State Fair but for selfish reasons I will write one anyway.

First, I have a chair and a lamp on display there in the Creative Arts Building. So I’ll take that as a positive. I think they each were fourth place. Though the dark spot in the bottom of my heart that is still filled with, well, you know, dark things, is telling me that the pieces probably got into the show because that’s all that was entered. But we’ll squash that thought back into it’s cold dark corner and move on. So, if you go out to the fair, you’ll know the pieces because they are the ones with curves. Though I give credit to the items that received higher awards in that they had higher degrees of technicality and execution than mine, I believe my designs were slightly bolder and more original.

I will give my one fair highlight, though. We were waiting in line to ride the sky glider across the fair.  It’s basically an open chair like a ferris wheel.  Well, standing in front of us was a couple, a loaded couple. Bumbling, stumbling loaded. Lil Pammie Anderson, as we will call the female of the couple, was being held up by Bubba, the male. One of the ride supervisors tried to convince them it might be dangerous to go on the ride in such condition, but since she was arguing with loaded Bubba I can’t see how she felt that she was going to win the argument. My only hope for the situation was that hopefully one of them would puke or stumble horribly as they got off the ride. Alas, neither happened. You’ll notice I did not wish for one of them to fall off the ride while it was in the air. That would be terrible.

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18. August 2008 by Joe Gergen.

Packing peanuts, that is.  If you ever order anything online, you know that everything is sent to you with packing peanuts. I ordered a book. It came protected by packing peanuts.  I appreciate the effort to ensure the safety of my book, but really. I ordered some supplements online.  Two little bottles came in a 10×10 box filled with peanuts.  Would you like some product with those peanuts or are the peanuts just fine? I was tempted to order some circus peanuts online but was afraid I might eat the wrong ones.

It’s an inundation of peanuts. Soon they’ll take up more room in landfills than disposable diapers, which may or may not be worse than incinerating them.

But unbeknownst to me there is an underworld of Styrofoam scrappers (metal scrappers are a whole other story) out there who want your peanuts. My friend Linda gets kudos for pointing this one out to me.  She was cleaning out some old boxes and packages and had all these packing peanuts. So she went out to Craigslist and informed people that she had several bags of packing peanuts for free. Apparently she got all kinds of responses and someone who sells stuff on ebay came and picked them up.  What other subcultures are out there on Craigslist? Hmmm.

So all you people ordering things online and especially you ebay addicts (you know who you are), save those peanuts.  And when you have a couple bags full, let Craigslist know and we’ll save the planet one peanut at a time. 

Too bad there’s nothing to be done with those disposable diapers. Unless there’s some strange world of diaper scrappers out there that I don’t know about yet…or maybe I don’t want to know.

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