Cathousin'

My Grandpa Hahn built this house from a 1937 Popular Mechanics design ("Build your Daughter This Dream House!"). Kind of ironic, considering it was the midst of the Depression, and a swanky art moderne dollhouse was about as close as they were ever going to get to a dream, but this was the result. Dee is the little girl with her head turned away, and her brother Ron, my father, is the little boy. It was Dee's fifth birthday, and Grandpa had also built a garage for Ron, which you can see next to the house.

When my cousins, Ruth, Alan, and Sheri, were growing up in Daly City, they spent a lot of time being baby sat at Grandma and Grandpa's Sunset District (art moderne/art deco) house, and the dollhouse made it through their childhoods as well, until it sat for a couple of decades with Sheri's stuff piled up around it in Grandma's garage. After Grandma died and I was stumbling around trying to figure out what parts of her packrat life to keep and which to ditch, I found the dollhouse gathering dust down there and my dad and I packed it up for the trip to my apartment in New York.

Where, mind you, I didn't have much space. So it perched on the windowsill for a decade and both my cats, then kittens, spent time in and around it, clearly not interested in re-arranging the minute wooden furniture Grandpa had made for it.

During the decade in which it served as a cat house, my cousin Ruth had two more little girls, for a total of three, so my father and I agreed that we should deacquisition it back to California to Ruth and Mike so their girls could "grow up" with it, as we had. Ruth was a little more ambivalent--musty old things are not her style, and for about five years, it has sat in splinters on their living room, walls asunder, furniture perched on the chimney (youngest child Becca has a wrecking ball sense of home decor). They finally tidied up the house for a Bat Mitzvah and the dollhouse is once again packed up somewhere with Ruth hinting that one of these days somebody is going to spruce it up with a coat of fresh paint (!!!! please God, no!!!). Bailey, the middle child, got a school project out of it ("MY GREAT GRANDFATHER BUILT THIS OLD DOLLHOUSE...") and the poster sits above her desk two years later, so we're still getting some mileage out of the little metaphor. More than just the cats fit in that little place.

SPACE CADET CENTRAL, HERE

What a slug I am! No new posts since February--Hal's off chainsawing a one man tea party out there and it's mid August! In the not so funny news category, alas, the Woodman dropped a log on his foot earlier this spring, resulting in a crush injury to the third metatarsal. Should have been healed by now, blah blah. Not easy when your job involves climbing trees!

He wasn't able to do much wood turning--too much weight on the injured foot, which he was sposed to stay off of (but didn't, cuz he needed to keep trying to make a living). He was finally able to start making some of the gorgeous maple cutting boards like the one he gave me last x-mas--pictures TK--but what I've posted (Ms Tangential, here) are some wooden doodads from my father's 30's childhood. The deer napkin holder adorned Grandma Hahn's breakfast nook for decades, and who knew they really gave "space cadet" Scout badges!

You Take Sugar With That?

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They had the annual ice carving contest in downtown Kingston the other day and Nancy Donskoj sent me these photos of Hal's contributions from last year (ice tea--get it?) . I'll do this year's in the next post....

'S no Joke

I love Shoshana Snow's ceramics. I got on etsy originally to try to help my brother, but I ended up being a consumer of etsy goodies. Even now, when my credit card should be in the freezer in a plastic bag, stuck to a bag of frozen peas or otherwise hard to find, hard to use...I am lusting after THINGS.

Fortunately, etsy offers many THINGS, and even just looking makes me happy--I've bookmarked a few faves some of whom I've bought a doodad or two from, but it's nice just to go back and see what they're up to. Or even look to see what they've made in the past. Never know when I might need to buy a really cool gift for someone...or unfreeze that card and cheer myself up with some little splurgette.

Those tripod dishes are ten dollars each and offer such a graphic punch--look at the little feet! She always does the underside of her work as well. So much zing: shape, design, color..

No Beating Around the Bush...wick

So Hal and I made it out to Austin Thomas's Etsy show at Pocket Utopia in Bushwick, aka East Williamsburg, this Sunday (in the first little snowfall of the year). Hal, in classic Hal fashion, pulled this sassafrass bowl he was working on out of his backpack (they take around a year to finish curing--he never knows if a bowl will survive or crack while drying) and after we made the subway trip from the Yupper West Side he mentioned he had a [heavy, possibly frozen] butternut squash from Jenkins and Lukins Orchard, near New Paltz, where he used to work. He threatened to give it to me at the opening (he did, actually, and I de=acquisitioned it to Austin).

The sassafrass bowl is amazing--those legs are not joined--it's all one piece of wood. Like Indian or African cultures that take a log and just subtract, the elegance is in what's not there.

SHOW TIME

Hal has been invited to be in a group show for December at Pocket Utopia in Bushwick (aka, East Williamsburg). The show goes up 12/2 and we will be there!

He brought down some things I hadn't seen in a year. I'd forgotten the scale--the hemlock platter was larger than I remembered, the yew bowl was tiny. The hemlock bowl was a million times better than this picture, the space-ship-y thing was huge and sleek. The chainsawed chair was miniature, and a newly chainsawed pie crust table is amazing ("I am intrigued by these delicate Colonial forms--a pie-crust table! Windsor chair!").

Heavens to Etsy!

Here, in the shameless brother-promotion department, is what I saw on Etsy a few days ago. They had a contest to produce 20 user-curated posters of the best things on Etsy. There were a thousand entries, of which sixty were chosen (they couldn't stop at 20!). Each has sixteen products, so that's a fair amount, but out of the these were, as they said in announcing the winners, the best of the best. For those playing at home, that's Hal's bowl on the right. And in a nice bit of symmetry, the silver bracelet with a hickory bark design is from Honeybee, who some people (including me) think is one of the most talented people on Etsy (I'm waiting for her to make these budding twig earrings again--I'm in a twig mood lately, speaking of handmade and vaguely wood-themed Etsy things).

And speaking of shameless relative promotion, let me do it up right: I woke up this morning to my cousin Kitty Cahalan's new blog, Dog Pancake, in which she explores motherhood and other strange territories. I have been following Kitty's photo journal of her two babies for the last few years, and have lived vicariously through her wry captions (having no kids of my own). Kitty is a walking quirkfest (not unlike our mothers, who were the original funny-smart quirkfest sisters, and who Kitty and I did and do adore).

May All Nations Be Free

I saw this at my uncle's house when I visited in the spring. I was intrigued and asked him what he knew about it--not much, just that his mother, my maternal grandmother thought it came from her father's side of the family--the Klingensmiths. Her Pennsylvania grandfather had been in the Civil War, but it looked to me like it was even older than that, so I googled my way around and it turns out it's English enamelware, circa 1780-1810. This particular kind, as you can tell by the patriotic slogan, was made "for the American market" (by our old enemies, the Brits--kind of ironic). I thought it was a snuff box, but because it has a mirror inside it turns out it was a "Patch box," made for ladies to keep the fake little moles they applied as beauty marks in. Which seems too weird for my farmer-ish German immigrant ancestors--beauty patches? I think not. But I liked finding this little box (it's about 1.5 inches across, not very big!) and wondering who had it, where it's been...it looks like it's seen some wear, but you'd look a little beat up, too, after 200 plus years.

This site had some interesting examples of simliar pieces--everything from "humorous mottoes" to sneaky Regency era porn, but I like this funny little statement--we were so proud of ourselves! Anyway, I'm using it as my screensaver (had a picture of Hal's bowls, but needed a break). This way I can be reminded every day that I am VERY LUCKY to be free and wish all others could " be happy as we."

Ghosts

When we were kids, the whole house was ours. This may not sound like much, but since we came from a tract house in California, a house in Kingston with a BASEMENT, a SUN ROOM, TWO FIREPLACES (one in the formal dining room, one in the sun room--and oh, that one? It was a huge stone one), a formal dining room with a chandelier...where my mother died, one night in 1972. So...sorry if I sounded like Ms Real Estate there for a minute, I actually do have some deeper connection to it than that...anyway, we had come from California in 1969, for IBM, aka I've Been Moved, where my father worked. We had lived in a little modern tract house with a huge back yard (2 lemon trees, 2 plum trees, two apple trees, a veritable Noah's Ark of fruit trees...and a patio, with a sliding glass door--so 1963!) and now we had moved to this 1928 art deco /art moderne kit house.

At some point, we had explored everywhere we could possibly explore, and we found a crawl space under the house. In the crawl space was...Dr Stern's silver headed walking stick. He had lived in the house 1928-1952, and I always wondered what happened to the walking stick, so the other day, I asked Hal.

"I put it back where we found it, " he said. "It needed to stay with the house."

As does some tiny spirit of my mother.

Home Run

Hal lives in a house across the street from where we grew up, in Kingston. The owner of the house I (we) used to live in is the president of the Hudson Valley Maritime Museum, and I haven't met him, but I hope he likes it. Here's what I liked about it: it's a Dutch Colonial revival style, built in 1928, from a design in a magazine (might have been Popular Mechanics--my brother Hal says it was "Sears kit house" and he just ran into the identical version in another Hudson valley town--local historians give 28 President's Place as the best of several versions around-kinda cool!). The original owner was a Doctor Alexander Stern, who supposedly planted 6000 tulip bulbs in the woods (now our woods, since when my father sold the place in 1985, he kept the quarter acre of woods and the garage/apartment). There was a CEE-Ment pond with a surrounding rock garden, once home to goldfish, in our childhood time home to a hornets' nest and a frog or two until a neighbor's kid decided to spray DDT--that was the end of the frogs, at least.

Things I loved about the house: it had a formal dining room with a chandelier, a kitchen with a butler's pantry, CEDAR CLOSETS (!), an art deco stained glass window in the dining room, a formal living room wainscotting, beamed ceilings and a fireplace, a sun room with a rock fireplace...even the maid's room, where I lived for a few years, had its own little porch. Oh, and the heaters had mahogany covers carved with grapes and the letter "S" (Stern, I guess) and in the entry, next to the beautiful curving stairs, was an oak wooden heater cover of carved INJUNS--I mean, folk art, no-waisted, fanciful head-dress, tomahawk wavin' INJUNS, about four feet high by five feet long.

From my parents' bathroom window there was an incredible view out over the Rondout to where it met the Hudson.

I miss it.

LET'S DISH

I loved this piece so much I tried (several times) to buy it from Hal. It's hand-turned Black Locust, about 10 inches across and 8 inches high. My friend Sumo thought it had too much shellac on it, which I think he slathered on because the wood would split as it dried (my husband just added that he, too, thinks it's too new looking--he doesn't like that turned thing on top--"too manufactured--I want it to look more old-shoe like"). Personally, I don't mind the shininess--it seems to show off the golden color and ripply patterns in the wood. Anyway, it was a wedding present for someone who had worked for him in his tree-cutting business, but she and her husband had moved out of the area and he didn't have her address. He kept saying he'd get it to her eventually, and I kept, well, wanting it.

This is the piece (I think I mentioned it in here somewhere) that's based on an Okinawan black lacquered wooden bowl with a vivid red interior--same basic shape and size--that my parents had from Okinawa, where we were born while my father was in the army. I knew when I saw that ziggurat-y cover that I'd seen the shape before, and I had. Maybe the Okinawan bowl was also the genesis of the little hand-turned feet (hey--"hand-turned feet"--snert!) that have made their Saturn Space Ship appearances in some of his work. But it was Hal's interpretation--I think--of something iconic that we had grown up with, and maybe because my brother(s) and I all have such a vivid memory for our childhood (which vanished overnight when our mother died at 39 in 1972), I, like Hal, have a hard time letting go of ANYTHING connected to her and to the past.

Anyway, after asking Hal about this covered dish again the other day and having him say he couldn't sell it to me, it had been promised to his friend...I said I would find her. A little directory assistance and lo, it will get to her. He was happy to know she was doing well, and glad it would be on its way. I will miss it, but I hope she will be happy to have it, and I am, as they say, glad to have known it.

I keep HOLDING on...

My photo doesn't really show this well. The more dramatic side is the one with the elongated spiraling rift, that spotlights the utter strangeness of a wooden bowl that shouldn't quite be. If it's a bowl, it's more the idea of a bowl--if it's a world, it's barely held together, more by imagination than reality, centrifugal force keeping it from splitting away completely, whirling off into the void.

It's actually "NFS, " and I think it's the one piece Hal really can't part with. But if we don't stop reading ourselves into each of these things we'll never part with any of them!

what planet are YOU on?

Going from my weekend in the rain on a tugboat back to my brother's bowls, the ostensible reason for this site, I call this one "Saturn," for its [vaguely gnawed-on] planetoid aspect. It's the one that sold to one of his treework customers the night of the show, which was nice for Hal.

He's contemplating what he can make right now, which is hard if you're Hal. Georgi Donskoj had suggested that he needed things in different price ranges (ie, not everyone is in the market for a chain sawed Windsor chair--more in the $100-200 range, he suggested). Little beautiful bowls with nearly closed tops? Sounds strange, but I have learned from Hal to move past my idea of conventional beauty. YES, Hal, please just make them.

GOOD DOG!

It rained like hell the whole next day. Oh, did it rain. It let up in places, but basically, it rained so hard in the morning that when R and I were off the tug in the afternoon, the Rondout flooded and we couldn't get back till the tide went down again. And when might that be, I gently enquired of R around 5ish, when we were sitting down by the old Freeman building and watching the water still rising. Dunno, she said. Some time tonight. Or maybe not tonight--who knows, she added. Oh, great, I thought, glumly. Holiday Inn in Kingston at best, and all my stuff is back on the tug.

R was not that worried, though, so we went to the Ulster County Mall (sterile, but *warm* and light) and watched "The Departed," which was snappy and nicely distracting for our poor flooded selves. I had not called Hal to tell him I was coming up (I admitted it later, we laughed about it--but this was an old friend weekend, not a brother weekend). Anyway, I was half afraid I'd run into him, this being the apparent Saturday night hotspot of Kingston (he said he was there the following weekend, actually).

At 10:30 we were back down at the river's edge, where the access road was now just a shallow lake instead of a mile long deep one. Her husband came out at the cel phone's ring to guide us back on the labyrinthine adventure back onto the tug (which was even less fun in pitch darkness with just a flashlight's beam between you and a drop into the river).

R's husband "dogged down the hatch" (shut the doors firmly, turning all those latches in the picture above) and we sat talking for another hour in the now warm tug or so as the dog turned and curled in onto herself.

tugging at my heartstrings

This is from Shaun O' Boyle's Modern Ruins website, from the Boatyard Project. Twenty or so years ago, he and a friend photographed the tugs rusting away off Staten Island. They went back a year or two ago, and most of what they had documented--disappearing then--was gone.

I've always been drawn to old things--when I first came to New York: the cast iron architecture of Soho and Tribeca, the fact that NY's newness could never completely erase the old--all the GAPS and Starbucks still couldn't paste over the ephemeral discoveries still out for the taking. Like my vicarious thrill at what these photographers found, poking around in places they probably weren't supposed to be, jumping from one abandoned ship to another.

A few months ago, a friend from childhood announced that her husband had bought an old tugboat, it was docked on the Rondout, and would I like to come up for a weekend? I hadn't seen her in many years, so I said goodbye to my husband (who guessed, probably correctly, that it would not be his cup of tea) and left to join them for a weekend last fall.

The cabdriver who picked me up at the bus station looked like a typical hardluck local (I was probably one of his three fares in the last two days), but, God bless him, he knew what "past the old steamship building & across from the sewer plant" meant. I wouldn't have, and I was arriving at dusk, on a riverbank, basically.

My friend, R, was waiting for me outside. I knew her immediately, even though I hadn't seen her in at nearly 20 years. I leaped out of the cab to hug her, a real Kingston girl, finally, to the cabdriver who wasn't quite sure. He drove off and we picked our way way towards the tug in the fading light. We crossed a narrow gang plank, walked along side a six inch path along one tug (harder than it sounds: we had to scrunch along with our backs to the boat and our feet inching side to side), walked along another narrow gang plank onto another tug, walked the length of that tug, climbed up and over onto another, across a foot or two of nothingness, the bags slogging me far to one side. It was scary, and cold and strange. "OK, be careful, " R said, having now climbed onto the [huge] tug that was theirs. She reached out a hand to help me over and---I was on it. We made our way inside, where it was rather ominously dark and cold ("my husband will be here tomorrow, but in the meantime, I haven't figured out how to fix the heat, " R said). It was also--and I guess this is classic boat life: cramped (the boat slept "16" but more about that later).

We sat around the small wooden table in the middle of the cabin and talked for a few minutes as her old dog stirred fretfully in a corner by the galley ("We should have put him to sleep, but we haven't, and we couldn't leave him back in Rhode Island"). She got us each a glass of white wine, and we wrapped ourselves in blankets to go sit outside on the deck chairs. It was actually quite comfortable out there, staring at the dark contours of the boat, and the sprinkling of lights along the river. R smoked, and we drank our wine, the boat rocking gently in the quiet waters, spilling out 30 years of our lives in the dark November night.