Chirp, Chirp

Or is it Peep, Peep?  Anyway, this birdie has the metal loop in his back because he's going to be suspended from a tree branch somewhere in our neighborhood.  His wing area is textured but I'm not sure I'm going to do that again.  But I like the way his beak turned out.

From the Smithsonian Craft Show, an interesting ceramic artist, Paula Shalan.  I'm always attracted to ceramic artists who focus on hand building their work.

Recently our Netflix choice was Alpha House. about 4 Republican senators who shared a house in Washington DC.

We laughed out loud at some of it and shook our heads at parts that accurately depict some of the political dysfunction we see today, even though it was filmed in 2013.  We'd like to have seen Season 2 but Amazon, in all its wisdom, won't let Netflix have it and won't let you stream it unless you sign up for Amazon Prime.  If I was an actor in that show I'd be a little ticked off about that.

Anyway, there is no Season 3 and I'm guessing it's because the show hits a little too close to home for those politicians who don't have a sense of humor and have no idea about the concept of satire. If you do watch it, look for bad-boy Anthony Weiner in a 3-second cameo appearance in the last episode. He wasn't listed in the credits but there he was.  Actually, there are a lot of cameo appearances in this show.

Bye Bye Birdie

Here's looking at you, kiddo.  I used dimensional accent glaze for the black and white dots.  Eventually he will either be left casually somewhere in the neighborhood or maybe go for sale at the Student Art Show at Christmas.  Right now he's just keeping an eye on me.

When we took our big road trip in April/May we made sure to schedule in time in Washington DC for the Smithsonian Craft Show.  We collect cards from the artists whose work catches our eye and then we come home and dump the cards in a pile and  they just sit there.  OK, Susan is gradually looking at them and telling me to take a look at their websites.   And she's promised to eventually share them with you.

This guy fascinated Susan:  Phil Feinberg of RockinOneKnives.   Here's a picture of one of his incredibly elegant knives.  One of her favorite movies is Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson, and I'll have to admit it's a pretty good movie.

She tried to explain to him that Lucy/Scarlett whipped out knives in the movie and really did a number with them but I don't think he got it. If you watch the movie look for the knives in this scene (but they aren't as good as Phil's):

Celeste

This is Celeste, the lab tech/assistant in our ceramics department.  She gives me positive support, thoughtful critiques, and good suggestions about the work I'm doing.

Yes, she wears orange clogs.

People

Hec says hi. I've been making people lately.  I like to give them little birds to carry. Hec is named after the character in the movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a 5-star movie.  

Lily has her own bird.

Lily has a tattoo.  Susan and I plan to get tattoos when we can take the time to decide the best place to get them.  Anyone young can easily get a tattoo anywhere but for old geezers like us finding a spot for a tattoo where there isn't sag or wrinkles gets a little bit harder.  Ok, TMI.

Thanks to Seth Apter

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Obviously I didn't become a better person, because it's been a long, long time since I've updated this blog.  Can I blame it on my blog Wrangler?  Well, only a little.  She's fighting battles with a cranky old computer that has a hard drive that freezes up on her, a Photoshop Elements program to edit pictures that refuses to save her edits, and a new computer with Windows 10 that she's having to transition to very gradually.  I try not to disturb her, she's reading a book about Windows 10 that has 981 pages. And then there were taxes.  We do our own.  Correction:  She does them for us.

Seth Apter is my long-lost brother, and thanks to him I've had a rude awakening that tells me people notice what I do.  We got together last fall at the Cooper Hewitt Museum where we decided to interview each other, after getting matching haircuts.

I have been working on a people series with movable arms. The bottom picture shows that I'm trying to fasten the arms with a button and wire.

James Tisdale is a great mentor for me.  We work together loading and unloading kilns at school, I feed him a breakfast and in exchange I get to watch him work.  Way cool. His people are sometimes 2-3 feet tall, mine are all under 12 inches tall.

When I'm not working on my own stuff, I'm contributing to my environment.  My neighbors, Dina and Frank, gave me a little Snoopy dog.  I decided it needed to be permanently glued to an appropriate object out in front of our building. So far (3 weeks) it's stayed there.

Your Blog

Oh yeah, Susan knows this one and even posted this outside our apartment door so I'd see it every time I came in. She reminds me at least once a day that I need to not only look at blogs from other people, I need to comment on them.

OK, what if I try to be a better person next year? 2018 has to be better than 2017 is going to be, if you believe everything the talking heads tell you in the media and TV coverage.  You know, those talking heads that predicted the results of our election... not! Anyway, I do see other blogs and am appropriately humbled by not only the stuff they make but the fact that they blog - a lot!

When I made Susan's Esther Williams figure I used some of her buttons to fasten the arms so they moved.  (Susan: You took buttons from my button collection?!?!) I then decided to make some of my own buttons out of clay.  I think I got carried away.

Big Guys, Little Guys

These guys were big, about 12 inches long.  There are sturdy because Regina puts them out in her yard.  She lives in an almost-country area and has raccoons hanging around her pond (her pond fish long since disappeared, they were definitely a canape for some animals' party).  

They went to Regina for Christmas gifts because Regina gives Susan an hour-long massage 3 times a month.  Unfortunately, it seems like every time Susan comes home from Regina, all mellowed out, a crisis of some sort has arrived on the scene.  Crisis? Like I can't figure out how to make the mouse work.  Why is the washer not draining? What am I going to have for lunch?  So she sighs and says "Well, there goes that massage payment down the drain."

Little guys? Have you ever seen carrots this small?  Felipe, one of our dining room managers, gave us these for lunch one day.  Actually they'd been part of a buffet line decoration but how do you even price something this size at the grocery store?

Happy New Year!

Let's hope this year does, or maybe doesn't, live up to your expectations.

Eddie says "Whatever."

Esther Williams!

Susan speaks:  Isn't Esther the best Christmas present ever?!?!  Don made her for me because I taught him how to swim.  She's about 12 inches high and her arms move because he's fastened them on with buttons.

She's wearing my Lands' End Tugless Tank suit (plain black, plain lining) and my Speedo Hydrospex Classic swim goggles and my TYR swim cap (lots of brand names there and no, I don't get any money by mentioning them).  Only difference is that I go barefoot to the pool but he's on a kick of making different kinds of feet so Esther got flipflops.

Here at our retirement community ("Geezer Village") we have an indoor pool, 3 floors down, 2 hallways over.  We have learned that if we get to the pool by 5:00 a.m. or so we are the only ones there.  We turn off the overhead lights and swim in our private pool, dimly lit as though it's a moonlit pond. Getting up that early 3 times a week isn't great but having the pool all to ourselves is a treat.  

Don really knew how to swim, sort of, if you call thrashing around in the pool like a wounded whale "swimming". I would watch him do a lap and then tell him what he might try differently to be smoother and he'd do it and now he's really good. I'm not the best swimmer myself but I had lessons as a kid and got a few lessons when I started swimming again about 10 years ago.  That was at the local Y, and having to share lanes and circle-swim wasn't my favorite way of swimming but I did it.  Now the two of us have a whole pool to ourselves.  Bliss.

Hope you all are having a Happy Holiday season, whatever your chosen holiday is.

More Members of the Juice Box Family

The Juice Box Family is expanding.  This is Hector.

Say Hello to Ralph.  I'm trying different ways to attach moveable arms, these are attached with buttons.  Soon I'll make some clay buttons, right now I just raided Susan's button box.  For the record, spellcheck doesn't like the word "moveable" but there are times when I think things look rightable and they'll darn well stay that way.  Ignoring of course, the typos and missssspellings.

Leonardo is looking out for you.

And Lucy, who you've seen before, is always having to track after her brothers. Everyone is about 6" high.

Lucy

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.  Well, not actually diamonds.  How can we afford to travel around like we do?  I was lucky enough to marry a woman who did not want a diamond so her wedding band cost me only $12.50. And best of all, she hates to shop for clothes and shoes!  Of course we do have a gazillion books in the house and her Amazon wishlist has over 90 books on it, all of which she has marked as "Highest Priority" in anticipation of the holiday season.

Lucy is about 9" high. She's looking out for you.

Here's another movie recommendation:  A Perfect Day.  Benicio Del Toro and Tim Robbins.  5 stars.

Boxes

I got on a kick of making little boxes for a while.  Why? I have no idea, they just happened.  This pattern comes from a placemat we bought somewhere in a museum store, it was gold and a really cool open structure and best of all, it was easy to stuff in a suitcase.  These are all about 4" high.

How about a movie review?  We love opening our mailbox and finding a red Netflix envelope.  Sure, we could stream movies but the tv is in the bedroom (slow reception) and it's so much easier to back up and re-play stuff from a dvd.  We also like to put captions on and sometimes that doesn't work well with streaming.  So what did we watch on Election Night instead of returns?  Weiner.  It was definitely a good portrayal of  the word "hubris."

We also watched Trash, set in Rio. The same Rio where we had the Olympics this summer....Hmmm.  We sure didn't see this part of Rio on tv. Excellent film.  We initially picked it because Martin Sheen and Rooney Mara were in it.  Interesting to see a film where the only two "Hollywood" names are somewhat pivotal to the story but don't dominate it.

Two Aren't Enough

Why make one armadillo when two will do?  Why make two when you can make a herd of them?

You've seen my bulletin board, how about one of my favorite shelf spots?

Those little skulls do get used sometimes. This (the moon shape) was one of my first attempts at sawing into metal stuff.  Susan had to physically restrain me from polishing it up and sure enough, she was right - the patina it has developed is perfect.

ACL Isn't Real

ACL (Austin City Limit) starts this weekend.  Unfortunately for us long-time Austin residents, the weather is projected to be absolutely great - cool evenings and only moderately hot days, with no rain.  Unlike the day shown above, where we were sure a spaceship would come out of that rain cloud.  Nope, within 5 minutes of that cloud forming we had the rain pouring in:  

These views are from our balcony.  That shiny stuff in the bottom right corner?  Well, Susan thought there was an ugly scratch on the railing so .... aluminum sticky tape like the air conditioner repair people use.  She thought about spelling out in morse code something really tacky but just randomly wrapped strips around instead.  Sometimes we have incredible sunrises:

Why do we care what the weather is this weekend?  We want it to be horribly bad so that all the people coming in to Austin for ACL will not say "Wow.  What a great city with terrific weather.  Let's move here!"  No, No, No.  Don't come.  We are full.  No Vacancy.  10th worst traffic in the nation for medium-size cities.  Stay where you are!

But if you decide to come, here are some bands you'll be able to hear:

Foals

Chairlift

Band of Horses (do they know Foals?)

Jazzy Ash & The Leaping Lizards 

Frightened Rabbit

St Paul and the Broken Bones

Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds

I have no idea what any of those sound like because I listen to Oldies from the 50's and 60's on Pandora.  But cool names!  I need to get more creative when naming my ceramic pieces, instead of calling these pieces "Bird 1" and "Bird 2".

Shuttlecocks and a Train

A fellow artist told me she liked reading about places we traveled to because she didn't get to travel that much.  So that's why I'm backing up to show you more of stuff we've encountered on our recent trips.  Actually Susan does hours of research to determine the bestest and mostest good stuff to see, so much research that by the time we get ready to go she complains she doesn't need to go.

A 17-foot high shuttlecock on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.  The good thing about this sculpture is that the bird poop doesn't show up. 

The sculptures were very controversial when first proposed, but, as usual, loud protests probably came from people who didn't bother to read the artist statement, here. 

Why were we in Kansas City? To see art, of course.  The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art had a special exhibit of 6 ceramic artists and the Nelson-Atkins had an exhibit of 24 different ceramic artists.  I saw so much inspiring stuff my head exploded. Both museums were within walking distance of each other and that made it nice.  Also nice was good weather so we got to enjoy the outdoor sculptures in a well-designed space.

At first it looked like a tree painted silver, but then we got closer to it.  Somebody did a lot of shopping at Home Depot.

We really liked Kansas City, easy to get around and the grounds at the Nelson-Atkins were a nice break from the heat..  A second reason to go to Kansas City was to see the World War I museum.  We'd been there once before when it just opened but only saw a small portion of the exhibits - we go slow and read all the signs. Hey, it's History!  This time around we still didn't see everything so we'll have an excuse to go back again. 

Watch the trains in your area.  There may not be many more carrying hitchhikers like this because they've quit stopping near where I live probably because of the nearby MoPac-olypse construction (2 years late, zillions over budget.) I'm under strict orders to avoid trying to put anything on a moving train