These Are a Few of My Favorite Strings

I think of a time, less than 7 years ago, a time when I knew no note or chord or, lyric in its entirety. My apartment seemed a bit bigger back then. As I was straightening up my disheveled domicile this morning it occurred to me that my pad's beginning to look a lot like a second hand guitar store. Of this small army of stringed musical devices, I actually only own one, a very so-so Washburn which I had first purchased in the beginning of my musical foray. Friends periodically leave their instruments in the safety of my musical haven and a fair sum of this grand plethora have been donated ensuring that the chest, so to speak, has more tools at hand. All axe's swing, so often so many in unison. With every guitar that magically appears, a little more of my living space vanishes in the wake of the instruments mass. It's a small price to pay for how my home so often sounds and for the beautiful visiting musicians whom I've been lucky enough to count as some of my dearest friends, without whom none of this would be.

Living Room/Show Room/Music Studio

I remember, one day, in the first year of my taking this apartment, I sat with my buddy Eric, chatting. I was working with StudioEIS at the time, a most noted studio in all of the world. I was telling him about what I had been working on there and he asked  me when am I going to have my own studio again. I told Eric; when the time is right. Back then the apartment was quite different. It was still full of wonderfully wacky stuff but, almost none of it had anything to do with music. So much has changed since then. As it would turn out, in many ways, we were sitting in the very place that Eric was asking me about.

As is evident in these photos, I'm in possession of more things than one might think to fit in to a 400 square foot space but, thanks to some simple, inexpensive devices, my eclectic menagerie works quite well. Shelving was key in this. I had just closed a studio space in Hoboken and would apply all of its shelving and its army of brackets to my new apartment. Knowing that I had more objects than the floor space would accommodate. I put the shelves up before I moved in and, as I moved in, books and large object were placed immediately up on them. Aside from the space savings, the shelving created a valance around 3/4's of the room's perimeter thus dividing the rooms verticallity with continuous horizontal planes. It's actually a Frank Loyd Wright Usonian home trick. Most of those homes were modestly sized yet somehow seem heroically proportioned. They all employ tall ceiling and low valances horizontally breaking the ceiling's height. I then broke the room into a third horizontal by placing table height shelves around the room's entire perimeter. That allowed me to reclaim much of the space taken by the room's dozen amplifiers while providing my guests with many more places to set their drinks. The shelves on the most eastern wall are deliberately set a couple of inches lower in order to force perspective and fool the eye into believing that the whole wall is a bit further away than it actually is. Of the 3 shelves on the western wall, the lowest, directly above the sofa, received lower hinged doors and now serves as a 12 cubic foot cabinet that runs the wall's full length. Half of it contains Sonia's clothing, the other half, guitar cords, mic stands and other musical regalia and paraphernalia. The coffee table is a small Odyssey in and of its self but, it's basic construction was pretty simple and it holds an additional 10 cubic feet of storage. With absolutely no floor space left to accommodate the keyboard on its stand, I created a simple "T" out of iron pipe and cast fittings from the hardware store and attached it to the wall with conduit straps. I used those same straps to attach a shelf to the T's horizontal length. The keyboard now lives effectively cantilevered on a 36" hinge hovering above the astro-turf on the window seat and simply swings out to be played. Even the painted floors along with the carpets work together to visually  increase the rooms size beyond its actual parameters.                                                                                       

During my divorce, I decided to move back to New York City. I was born and lived my first 6 and a half years there(the following 12 years were spent divided between 3 suburbs of Norther N.J.), and briefly had an apartment with a friend on the upper east side when I was 18. I had not lived in Manhattan since my teens. I was now returning to my home town as a man in my 40's. My sister Alisa was working for an apartment rental agency at the  time. Knowing my intentions and price range, she showed me this unit first, believing that it was the cream of the crop. I hated it! I thought that it was dark and ugly and hideously crafted. The entire place looked as though it hadn't been painted in a quarter of a century. The floors were covered from wall to wall with an exhausted dark russet, high pile shag carpet that no longer possessed a life energy to cry for the shampoo that it could have so desperately made use of. The western walls were exposed, varnished bricks as brown as the carpets and blades on the ceiling fan which were so thickly covered with fuzz and funk that it appeared to have been employed in the fiendish slaughtering of little gray kittens. Of the sheet rock and plaster, monkeys or, marsupials would have done better. The carpentry and finish work was of an equally loathsome, sloppy standard. In short, I was repulsed by the sub-simian carelessness of it's craft and quality, so much so that I was blinded to the merits of it's ceiling height, french doors, precious balcony and stellar location. It did have a full bathroom rather than a toilet at one end of the apartment and the shower in the kitchen, a configuration not uncommon in East Village tenements but, I saw it as having little else going for it. These views would only be held before my learning a new basis for comparison. After having seen half a dozen other apartments in my price range, one more ridiculously atrocious than the other, choosing this was the only logical option.

Before I moved into the apartment it was painted white form top to bottom, one end to the other. The carpets were pulled up and the patched, planked floor was painted battle ship gray. The windows were replaced as well. I was amazed by how little work would be required in changing the space's basic vibrations. With its new pristine coats of gray and white neutrality I was able to see past the boogered corner bead and bad finish work. I saw the room as if a Chinese box puzzle comprised of components that were equally cartoonish and classical in natures had exploded and distributed itself across the walls like a Piet Mondrian, camouflaged incognito but ever present in its balance and underlying elemental geometric order. To shed more light on this arrangement, I stripped the transom above the french doors. That small change allowed the sun to come in, in a way that the space had not known in what seemed like a hundred layers of paint.

Beyond the artworks and hand carved, foam furnishings, toys abound, occupying just about every available nook and cranny. Most of them have come to me over the years as Christmas and birthday gifts from my daughter Sonia. I love what they bring to the spirit of our home as much in many ways as I do any of the things here that I've made with my hands.

If living rooms are for living, this living room has seen a lot of life. It has heard hundreds of jams and hosted thousands of guests. It has absorbed as much positive energy as it has spirits spilled and given a stage so often to the soaring talents whom I so humbly count among my friends. Through it's french doors, from out on the balcony I've seen myriad processions, parades, protests and demonstrations as the seasons have rolled past and the years have gone bye. My balcony is like a tiny, first class box seat from which I'm able to leisurely observe the theater of the street's ever changing carnival and clanking cacophony of ebb and flow. No room other than the delivery room has changed me more.

Would you like to see more? The following links all pertain to my home, furniture design, interior design and architecturally related projects.

The Prince of Saint Marks Place

The Penny Throne

Sculpture Chairs 1, 2, 3

Sculpture Chair 4

Poster Chair

Beaded Chair

Sofa

Guitar Stand

Coffee Table

Kitchen Clock

Sonia's Loft

Sadie's Loft

Opening Up Spaces

Container Home

Horton

La Bocca Della Verita

Did She Eat Her Babies?

Crocodile Sans Dentada

Statue of Liberty SLS Out Put

Chrysler Building SLS Out Put

Abstract Scrap

Deco Parallel

Framed Fragments

Ice Cream That You Can Sit On

Architectural

Office/Bed Room

In an earlier post about Sonia's loft, I wrote about the psychological damage that can be wrought by making your child sleep in something other than a bedroom and, what that might do to her self esteem. I'm sure that in many situations these may be seriously legitimate concerns but, to be honest, I was just having some tongue in cheek fun. I am reminded of a man I knew. His quandary was about; weather or not to circumcise his new born son. On one hand, he felt that at it's core, circumcision was a barbaric primitive ritual of mutilation designed more to be a mark or a branding to identify and differentiate their tribes of peeps and, in so doing, hopefully remain unadulterated by those who chose to believe something different. How well has that worked? He further went on to scoff over the health benefits of circumcision as it was a practice begun more than 5,000 years before any true, evidential science or real medical knowledge existed on this planet. On the other hand, he earnestly worried about the possibilities of his son being irreparably screwed up by identity crisis issues as he grew older...Why doesn't my penis look like dad's. It must be an impossible thing to explain to a two year old and how will it manifest it's self when puberty rears its throbbing head? Though the comparative of primitive male genital alteration(think sharp stones or, sea shells when they began doing this) and making your kid sleep in the kitchen may seem on the opposite end of the parenting spectrum, there are clear parallels. As for those concerns, I had none as in building Sonia's loft, I had created for her a baby bear version of the papa bear configuration. She was delighted.



Among the many reasons I have for loving my apartment, it's consistent saving grace has been its ceiling height. Though the apartments plan is just 400 square feet, by it's ceiling height it has a 600 square foot apartment's equivalent of cubic foot volume. Fully realizing its value, I've tried tried to exploit it where ever I could. As a result, objects and art work rise to almost every wall's tallest dimension.
When I first took the apartment the loft existed as an opened platform that was strangely an inch and a half shy of being wide enough for a queen size mattress. Fixing that issue of width was as easy as an extra 2"x4" upon which I screwed a length of 2' plywood shelving so as to create the blind. The blind not only serves to prevent me from rolling out of  bed to the certain probabilities of being killed or crippled, it also gave me a perfect wall to hang the Ichthyosaur fossil. Some might feel that the visual pun of sleeping with the fishes, a la Luca Brasi may be a bit on the ominous side of macabre but, to sleep like the dead is only meant to describe a deep and undisturbed slumber. And, perhaps one needs to remember, the Ichthyosaur isn't really a fish.



Access to my loft is by what an old girl friend coined as the sladder (part stair, part ladder). I pried it from the wall to which it was attached and moved it a foot further toward the center of the room so as to create an extra 2 square feet of platform. In a small space those couple of square feet may often represent the difference between awkward and comfortable. Moving the sladder did eat 2 square feet of floor but it gave me an extra 10 cubic feet of storage. That may not sound like a hell of a lot for all of the effort but, in a tiny pad with only one real closet, it's a hallelujah moment. The trade off was a no brainer, 2 wins to one loss.
My office is in what was once a dressing area and closet. My desks are made out of same re-purposed shelving as Sonia's. Beneath my computer, the floor is a block of stone baring evidence that in its earliest iteration, I would be sitting in front of where the stove once was.

About my bones; I am not ghoul. I inherited these bones from my dad. He had a real appreciation for their shapes and nuances. Having studied anatomy I loved them as well. I find the divergence of their morphologies stunning. I think that most figurative sculptors have a bone thing going on. In fact one of Henry Moore's  most prized and inspirational objects was an elephant's skull. The prize of this fleet is the human skull. My dad told me that she was 1,500 years old but, didn't know where she came form. She lived to be approximately 28 years old and remarkably has all of her teeth. Before she died she went blind. Evidence of this is found in a large convex deformation on the left side of the occipital plate. The brain tumor that would eventually kill her blinded her first by its origin in the part of the brain reserved for vision. My dad used to call her Alice. I have no idea why? Who was Alice? What did the name mean to him? Was she a lost love? Was she a woman for whom he had affection or, loathing? Alive or lost, another mystery about my dad, another thing that I'll never know.
 If you possess an ostio-intrigue or are bent to the point of paleo-curiosity, most of my specimens can be found for surprisingly reasonable prices at uptown N.Y.C.'s Maxilla Mandible, just north of the American Museum of Natural History or, down town at Evolution. They are both absolutely fascinating stores.

Interestingly, for all of the objects that this small room holds, very little is actually on the floor, 2 chairs(one carved from an Indonesian Teak root ball), a dresser and the space beneath my desk tops which is mostly used as storage for guitar cases.

Kitchen Clock

Finding living space for Sonia in our tiny pad was well and good but, there was an aspect of perilous psycho trauma regarding the configuration of the apartment mandating that she had to sleep in the kitchen. If I close my eyes and listen very hard, I can almost hear the therapy sessions. In order to mitigate the possibility of my child's self esteem being destroyed by her being relegated to sleep in that which is truly not often considered a room for sleeping, I told her to pick the colors for the kitchen as if it were her bed room. She ran with the colors in the clock and the wall behind it. The kitchen was painted that year as one of her Christmas presents. The clock began life as a couple of pieces of 3/4" birch plywood. I had just bought a new hole saw set and wanted to take it for a spin, so to speak. In drafting directly on to the plywood, I drew on a number of different inspirations. I've always been drawn to the cleanliness of Art Deco geometry and how it handles it's relationships with large, simplified shapes. When you study it from that perspective, it really is a celebration of circles and triangles. I've always gotten an enormous kick out of the humorous evolution of Art Deco into the 1950's space aged promise of the future. Flash Gordon meets Raymond Lowe. How many lighting fixtures from that time look like stars. How many appliances looked like rocket ship parts? Lastly at the time, I was just discovering the mid 19th century Biediermeier furniture style which often mixed light veneers contrasted by dark lacquer. In it's first iteration the clock hung on a white wall. The blue was sprayed gloss black. The orange was Mahogany and the clocks ring was black. In the clocks current chroma, it more closely resembles Gulf Oil's racing livery.

Kid Couped In Kitchen, Sonia's Loft

                                                                                                                                                           

I enter my apartment through an 18 square foot alcove in the kitchen. As the door swings opened, it consumes half of it, leaving 9 square feet of usable space. I used that space for hanging coats and a couple of bicycles for me and Sonia but, I'd always felt that the space had the potential of being put to greater use. Sonia would end up taking a tumble on her bike in traffic. It scarred the hell out of me, filling my head with horrors of what could have been a scenario much worse than her sprained wrist. I didn't want the bikes anymore. That decision led me to the alcove's re-purposing.
 In measuring I realized that the alcove wasn't quite 6' but realized that neither was Sonia and as such, she would fit above the front door, thus taking back the 9 square feet taken when the door swings opened. The rest of the space would end up being taken up by 5 shelves and my dad's old foot locker from the second world war to which I'd fitted a set of rolling casters. The largest shelf would act as her desk to support her computer. Access to the loft
was provided by the creation of a contraption akin to a library ladder that when not in use would slide neatly between the refrigerator and her desk. The ladder itself is a simple construction of 2"x4"s, corner braces, chrome nosings and a couple of fixed rolling casters. I drilled 2 holes at the top of the ladder, through which I slid a length of electrical conduit that would be captured at either end by large screw eyes. When the ladder is rolled into its climbing position, it pulls with it a saffron colored Tibetan silk curtain to offer a modicum of privacy which in and of itself is a valuable commodity in a space that's so small. When Sonia first left home, I would take back her little office space and use it as a small work station for building and finishing small prototypes and use her loft as my guest bed room. When Sonia returned home, she got her loft back but, I've managed to keep the little work station for myself, which when not in use is simply hidden by a window shade.

La Bocca Della Verita Green Man Hybrid

My Father had a propensity for collecting odd artifacts and nick nacks, some extremely fine, some extremely not. Among his marvelous menageries was a reproduction of a Green Man keystone. He told me that it was the mouth of truth and if a person put their hand in it's mouth and told a lie, the sculpture would bite off the hand. It was an intriguing tale that made an intriguing object more intriguing. Years later, I decided to make a larger version that would take up a greater piece of wall and perhaps imbued with a greater capacity to detect bigger lies. The piece pictured here is 4 feet tall, carved from Styrofoam and coated with joint compound.

As it turned out, a number of cities during the middle ages employed similar carved quasi contraptions to rat out wrong doing and doers. It was a cowardly snitchy thing, a means by which accusations could be cast anonymously to the authorities. I'm sure that this thing must have screwed up the lives of many innocently accused while protecting the anonymity of many atrocious liers. Its quite the twist on its original intention.

When Leonardo was a very young man, he fell prey to such a device. Some one employed a similar mouth to accuse him of consorting with a younger male prostitute. Florence was reputed for being pretty gay back then. It's no big wonder. There are penises everywhere you look. One might call the town penis proud with its plethera of pollished peckers poised for presentaion. Gay or straight matters not, the fact is that Florence is littered with statues of fully frontal male nudes. Be that as it may, being found gay back then was often punishable by death. In the end Leonardo was vindicated though the allegation was probably true. It makes me shutter to think that the world could have been deprived of one of the greatest minds by such an ultimately stupid thing.

At the time that I had carved this, I had never seen Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, a movie by which the Bocca Della Verita became most famous. In my post carving research I've found that it was not a keystone but, rather, most probably first intended as a manhole cover.

There is more. To learn the legend further and, find out how the stone's power came to pass, please click HERE

Did She Eat Her Babies?

Imagine if you will, a quarter of a billion years ago, a clap of thunder so colossal that it sounds as if the clouds are made of mountains. A great volcano has erupted, ejecting cubic miles of hot rock and ash into the atmosphere. In the distance, in the wake of the Earth's inner mechanical conflicts manifest as the release of it's bowel's most devastating hell fire, ancient creatures congregate at a withering water hole as it absorbs the scorching dust and fat ashen flakes of a crumbling heaven, heavily laden with more silica than air in it's upper reaches. In this apocalyptically doomed environment, the babies died first. Would an ancient carnivore unbound by such human notions of morality not resort to desperately devouring the flesh of her fallen offspring for the life giving moisture contained therein? Two hundred and fifty million years later this callous cannibal mother would be unearthed to tell her grizzled tale. Her bones, now stone, bare the evidence of a clutch worth of tiny, infantile skeletal remains where her stomach once was. But wait! There are more bones there than her tummy would hold. The truth is that she died on top of them. Click HERE for Wikipedia's excellent analysis of the alleged crime scene.

I had originally purchased this cast from PaleoSearch, a purveyor of incredible fossils and casts since 1983. Their catalog offered Coelophysis Bauri as an excellent fiberglass and resin cast, framed and painted. I custom ordered the piece without it's frame or paint. It arrived as a cast white panel. I then cut it out of it's rectangular matrix so as to more closely follow the creatures shape. I built up the edges with a sculpting epoxy and painted it with a faux bronze finish. In the spirit of Rock and Roll, she seems poised to take a bite out of the Yamaha as she ballances on her tail like Tigger the Tiger.

Guitar Stand

Once upon a time, I bought a guitar believing that I might actually be able to learn how to play it. I didn't but, I was so enamored of it's shape that I was compelled to carve the  lively, funky stand seen in this photo. Years went by. A dear friend asked if I would like to give learning guitar a try once more. I jumped at his kind offer and became addicted. Learning guitar introduced me to multitudes of musicians and many aspects of my life have been forever transformed in the process. If it were not for this stand, carved at a time when I didn't know a note, my life would be very different.

Chinese Dragon

The Chinese Dragon pictured here is easily the largest single foam carving that I'd ever had my hands in. It was created for the Fun Town Splash Town amusement park in Sacco Maine. I based the design on a China town bit of kitche, a small, resin dragon statuette with exceptionally good details. The back was perfectly arched so as to serve as a portal through which park goers would enter the attraction. Aptly named Dragon's Descent,  you're strapped into it's specialized seats and harness system and the 220' tall tower slowly begins carrying you aloft to one of the highest and most majestic panaramas in all of Maine, before brutally hurtling you downward at speeds greater than the gravitational pull of the earth could achieve without the colossal, maniacal mechanical assistance of this terrifying towers sadistically concocted inner workings. I cut off the statuette's head and turned it inward to face the guests whom would be passing under it's belly. Once the model had been modified, it was photographed and 1/12 scale drawings were made from those photos. The drawing were then projected onto 3/4" plywood. The shapes would be cut from the plywood and the plywood was scabbed together and joined by flanged steel pipes to serve as 2' wide hollow, structural core, upon which would be mounted a total of 36 2' x 2' x 8' EPS foam blocks for carving. The dragon was so large that it had to be designed in 4 sections that would be craned together on site. In fact, it required 2  40' flat bed trailers to safely transport its separated components to the park. The full sculpture would be 18.5' tall, 32' long and 12' wide. It's eyes and throat glowed crimson red with inner lamps as smoke would billow out of it's nostrils and mouth via Rosco smoke machines and an inventive PVC plumbing system. The dragon also had a sound box with a proximity switch inside of it, allowing the dragon to growl as guests approached. A lavish Chinese garden was planted as the attraction's setting to complete the visual spectacle.

This story wouldn't be complete without a word on Maine lobster. Everything that you've heard is true. It is orgasmic. We were tied to the installation for the better part of that week and enjoyed lobster rolls every day for lunch. There was simply nothing better. On our last day we went to a local lobster shack right on the water. The lobster was so fresh that we had speculated that it was being pulled in fresh from the shack's kitchen window. I had a lobster bisk, velvety red with roe, so thick and rich and chock full of lobster that my spoon  actually stood up in it. That course was followed by a "Lazy Man's" lobster, which consisted of 2lbs. of shelled lobster claws and tails in an earth ware bowl that had been broiled in a bath of butter and bread crumbs to beyond what mere mortals could describe as perfection. There is a heaven. My taste buds call it Sacco Maine.

Horton

Being my age, I had the luxury of growing up with Suess & Sendak. So did my daughter and it's my hope that children do for as long as there are children but, I grew up as these books were just hitting the book store shelves. At that time most of my toys were made out of wood or metal. I think that the quality of a toy may have been determined by how much injury it could inflict upon another child if it should be used as a weapon. I remember my father telling me that when he was a child he knocked out his little sisters front teeth with a toy fire engine. Those were the days, when toys were toys and child psychology didn't exist. If I'm to believe my pop's story, my grandfather put his cigar out on my pop's prepubescent nose for his dastardly dental deed.
 Of all of Dr. Suess's characters, Horton was the one that most impressed me. To my young mind he was as big as a T Rex but he was gentle and kind and generous to a fault. He meant what he said and he said what he meant and his mind was opened to possibilities out side of his norm, 100 percent. Imbued with those fine qualities, I thought that he would make a great sample and studio mascot. I carved Horton using a tiny Christmas ornament as my reference. Ear to ear he may have been an inch and a half across. As he hangs on my wall he's five feet wide.

Little Airstream

A seriously fun project for an amusement park attraction, entirely carved from 1lbs. EPS., including the wheels and tires. It was very easy to dream variations on these happy simple shapes. I would have loved to have built a mold of this and cast a Fiberglas shell that could be bolted to a landscape trailer. In the bottom photo, I wanted to present the door both opened and closed. When the 2 photos were together, they were so close in terms of color balance and exposure that I couldn't help but, to join them as one.

Sofa/Work Bench/Storage

Finding a sofa that is not only just the right size but, one that does all that it has to above and beyond merely being comfortable, is easier said than done.

I needed a sofa that could seat 4 at the same height as the rest of my chairs (a guitar thing) and sleep 2 when the need arises. I had a tick over 6' to work with, meaning a sofa with arms was out of the question. I also was and always am in need of storage. Further, I didn't want the black shadowy dust trap that is comonly the big gap between the sofa and the floor. Lastly, sofa's tend to project further into the room than this room could afford. Every square inch of floor space is at an absolute premium. That meant that the back cushion would have to move as close to the wall as possible. In that I realized that if hinged, the sofa's back could serve as a work table. A mirror would solve my black gap issues, visually extending,the carpet beneath the sofa and in so doing, camoflage 12 cubic feet of storage.

Painted Floor

When I first saw the apartment, the floors were covered wall to wall with a brown high pile shag carpet that did not appear to have been shampooed in many a year. When the carpets were removed the acutely dilapidated, planked floor beneath it would be painted battle ship grey, as it had apparently been many times before the shag. As the apartment evolved and carpets were chosen, the grey began to represent a design void. It seemed dreadfully bland and incomplete and obviously the cheapest of all refinishing solutions. I decided to take the abstract geometric motif's of the carpets and apply them to the painted floor from one end of the apartment to the other. It not only tied the place together very nicely, it created a playful contrast between the saturated colors and their monochromatic counterparts. There's a bit of Tromp'e L'oeil to it. By varying the thicknesses of the black shapes, an illusion different shadow weights is created, suggesting a staggering of plane heights. the border around the living room carpet narrows at it's furthest end in order to force perspective and, in so doing, subliminally suggest that the room is longer than it actually is. There also seems to be a Wizard of Oz thing going on in the floors transition from black and white to full Technicolor and in the black and white, some 50 Shades of Grey. Over all, I might describe the floor as Modern Deco Fun House.

Ceramic shape studies

Some of the earliest artifacts left by man have been clay pots. They mark the beginning of civilization and stand as a testament to man's constant quest for industry and technology. As such I thought that this would be a good exercise, not so much for turning shapes as these are all fairly elemental but, more for extracting shells with determined wall thicknesses for the purpose of manufacturing. I also wanted to explore the use of gray scaled photographs as alpha masks through which I could extract mesh and raise the brick and weathered wood textures in order to contrast the smoothness of the ceramic. Further experiments with deformations led to near hallucinatory variants.

Cephalopod

An 18 foot long, 24 inch thick, polyurethane hard coated, carved, spackled and sanded, EPS foam cephalopod, painted with purple polka dots, a perfect complement to any Christmas window display.