The Real MichaelWC

January 15th 2010

2011-04-14T01:08:00.001-04:00

4:30p - Traffic at the counter is starting to pick up. The first few of the after-work rush are arriving for the cup of coffee that will get them through conversation over dinner and evening news. Of course, the regulars are already here and they’ll probably be here long after I’m gone. This place is still pretty new so the smell of fresh carpentry and paint mix with that of the coffee. I’m told it’s Peruvian.

At the big round table near the bookshelf a guy everyone calls Boris is talking to Jesse, dressed as usual in khaki coveralls, another guy I don’t know with large earrings, long hair and a flannel shirt, and one other who looks like an orthodox rabbi. Boris looks to be about 25 and is dressed in brown pants and a cardigan with large purple and black diamonds that looks like something out of my grandfather’s closet. Boris has a rather full beard that grows only below his jaw line and a moustache about as thick as his eyebrows that does not extend past the corners of his mouth. His curly black hair billows out from underneath his white paper straw fedora. It looks like he slept on it. I imagine him popping his flattened cap back to full height with a flick to the inside like in old cartoons. I can’t account for the impossibly flat brim though, but he looks like he needs a cigar.

In the corner in the back the guy with the long strait gray hair is talking philosophy to someone new. Every few weeks he seems to have a new pupil but he never seems any less pretentious. I’m told he has a bad habit of hitting on the girls -who work here. They all say he’s creepy but that he tips well. In the foggy front window an older woman sits at the bar reading a book. It’s a paper back and from my seat I can’t quite make out the title but it has a large gold embossed letters on a glossy cover. I can tell it’s a real page turner because she hasn’t touched her muffin in a half-hour. Behind her, two men probably in their 70s silently play chess. Black is winning.

5:20p - The rush is in full swing and Mike and Nate have clocked in for extra help at the counter. People in suits and work clothes stand in line waiting for their fix. The high-pitched roar of the espresso machine and the buzzing of the grinder are almost constant and make it impossible for me to hear what Boris is saying. Book lady still hasn’t touched her muffin but white came from behind for the checkmate.

5:30p - There is a tall man in a leather fedora taking too long to order. He’s wearing mostly black under a brown corduroy jacket with a scarf, black frame glasses and long sideburns. The determined look aon his face and the way he’s scratching his stubble tell me that he takes his coffee a little too seriously. Boris excuses himself to get a refill and Jesse continues the discussion while the rabbi strokes his beard thoughtfully.

6:40p - A lull in the evening affords Nate a chance for a snack and he sits down next to me. “It’s rosemary and cheddar,” he says, offering me a piece of his scone. I politely decline explaining that it probably wouldn’t taste very good with my coffee. “You’re right,” he replies, “it’d be better with tea.”

7:15p - Scott arrives just as a man, about 50, is setting up a mic stand near the front. “Are you ready?” he asks. I nod my confirmation and glance quickly at Boris who still has the three captivated. Book lady seems to have snuck out without my notice; no one can tell me if she finished her muffin. A few guys with acoustic guitars have started to assemble by the mic stand. “Yea, lets get out of here,” I continue: “my drumsticks are in the car.” We have our own music to make and no time for this nonsense.

Have Couch, Will Travel Pt. 1

2010-04-27T01:01:00.004-04:00

“…bacon and eggs” the voice faded in.

“Wha-?’ I replied. My eyes weren’t open yet but the morning sun through my eyelids was blinding and warm on my face. The birds were chirping and there was a faint whisper of a just-right breeze coming through the open window near the head of my bed. I could feel the blue of the sky and the wisps of white that striped it. I was lying on my stomach, left cheek smooshed into the pillow while my right arm came from underneath my tangled sheet and dangled over the side of the bed.

“…bacon and eggs for breakfast” the voice said again. I was only slightly more coherent but willing to overcome that for bacon and eggs. At that unreasonable hour I didn’t have much of a grasp on reality but I fully understood hunger.

“You’re going to make that now?” I asked deliriously, eyes still closed, face full of clean cotton sheets. I don’t know how she understood me; the pressure of the pillow had distorted my mouth so that only my lips and tongue were still able to form anything that resembled language.

“…after church.” The words came through the shapeless void like the beam of a lighthouse passing over me. And, like a lighthouse, I knew exactly the doom they told of.

Somehow, I managed to swing my legs over the side and carefully, I used their weight to rotate myself to a sitting position. With my feet on the bed rail I fought the lightheadedness I’ve been feeling every morning for the past few years and rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

Easter Sunday. One of two days when even the most wayward of Catholics absolutely must attend church. With everything closed, I don’t think they can come up with a good excuse to not. For three and a half months I’d been able to avoid the early morning wake-up that preceded the walk around the corner to Holy Rosary. Not today.

I had lived on my own for the better part six years, blissfully unsupervised and secular. I rarely came back to my parent’s house during that time. If I did, it was only for a night or two. Rarer still, was my presence on a Sunday morning and for good reason: my parents liked the early mass. Throughout my adolescence this usually meant perfectly good Saturday nights lost to reasonable bed times. It was a cruelty akin to having a test the day after your 21st birthday or getting the early shift on New Year’s Day or having a weigh in the day after Thanksgiving. Routinely, I was roused at 8:00am, I dressed, and then stumbled out the door whether I was awake or not.

Come on, it’s just one mass. Looking up over the tips of my fingers I surveyed my room and sighed. The sun streaked in through the dusty window panes and illuminated everything with the suggestion that summer wasn’t too far off. Boxes were still piled up, full of books and other belongings, hastily stacked into towers. Feet on the rug, I shuffled over to my closet and braced for the icy cold of the hardwood floor on my bare soles. What to wear? I picked my dark grey suit, white shirt, red tie. Sure, it’s not bright and cheery, but neither am I.

“C’mon! We’ll leave without you!” my mother called up the stairs. They always promised but never delivered.

I dressed as quickly as I could in pants with two buttons, a slide clasp, a zipper, and a belt. Once my unmentionables were on lockdown I slipped on my shoes and walked downstairs wrapping a Windsor around my neck. If there was one thing I took away from twelve years of Catholic school it was the ability to tie a tie running at full sprint, blindfolded, and in less than 7 seconds, and have it look good too. “Well you certainly look nice” she said when I entered the kitchen. I poured myself some lucidity from the pot, two scoops, a little milk.

“Mrrf...” I grumbled into my coffee

Bones - 1st draft

2010-02-15T15:57:00.005-05:00

[This is an essay I used for an assignment where our prompt was a picture that we had. It's the first draft and has since been edited and revised. Maybe someday I will post it]

At the time it was still a door that meant something, though its message had changed. When I was a kid the building was the home of Singer Steel, the name by which most residents of the neighborhood still call it. Only the recent trendy residents call it “that warehouse.” The heavy industrial business was an imposing landmark on the northwest side of the heavily ethnic community that marked the outskirts of our culture. The men who worked there were dirty and sweaty and smoked. They stood on the abnormally wide, green-painted sidewalk outside the building on their breaks and though I was only seven or eight years old I distinctly remember these sweaty smoking men being heavy set and drinking from gold-colored cans that where dazzling under the sun during my summer vacation. It was their version of the three martini lunch. Not as glamorous, but to them it wasn’t any less earned.

As small children we were of course susceptible to any manner of no-good that our parents didn’t know we were already willing participants in and the warehouse was one of those things. It was on the same side of Random Road (no that isn’t a cop out, it’s the real name) as the playground which was just a little north down the street and around the bend but the stretch where Singer Steel sat was mostly forbidden to us on our sixteen inch bikes. Our parents always said it was because of the trucks that pulled in and out of the three garage doors like clownfish in an anemone. The three trucks owned by the company were all red flat beds. Two were International 4000’s, shiny, new, one longer than the other, and one was an older International S-1900 in a little rougher shape but the same length as the longer of the newer trucks. The shortest often used the third garage door that was separated from the main two by about 80 feet. I always imagined it as the little brother. They never seemed to go anywhere but were constantly shuffling things inside and rolling in or out as needed.

The black, corrugated steel building was fortunately placed for my small group of friends so it wasn’t too hard to avoid its influence. We were of similar age but when you’re that young, a difference of 2 years is a quarter of a lifetime and so we weren’t really that similar at all. What brought the four of us together was the stern belief that we were the only people within the square quarter-mile of Little Italy under the age of 65. I lived on the north side of the block, just south and around the corner from the playground so I never passed the place much. Anthony Jr. was a year younger and my best friend and he lived on the south east side of the block. His way home from the swings was mostly via my street. Chris lived just around the corner from me to the west. Chris was a year older than I and deaf, something I didn’t understand when we first met. We gradually learned to use rudimentary hand signals to communicate. The most common were two hands held like gripping handlebars with the right motioning like the throttle on a motorcycle. It meant “let’s go ride our bikes. Fast.” The older people in the neighborhood whispered that his single mother was a prostitute. Whatever that was. He lived a bit closer but not by much. It was still easy to avoid. Frankie on the other hand was two years older than I and had a bit rougher time of it.

People that lived here would find a variety of reasons to dislike Singer Steel. Francis [name removed] who lived across from the little brother door said that the trucks in the street blocked her view of the traffic. She had completely paved her back yard in the way urban dwelling Italians love so she didn’t have much else to watch. Mr. Frank [name removed] Sr., Frankie’s dad, was her counterpart. He lived across from the two doors of the bigger trucks and he wasn’t fond of the mud pits that resulted from the heavy tires bumping up and over the curb on his side of the street. “Not fond” is perhaps an understatement. In every other locality that I’ve asked, it’s simply called “that piece of grass between the sidewalk and the street” but in Cleveland, any green space that escaped the ever-expanding pavement was named and taken seriously. Frank Sr. took his tree lawn very seriously and was not fond of those mud pits.

Frank Sr. was a cruder man than my parents. He had black hair and wore white undershirts and drove a pale yellow 1981 Buick Electra. There was a small gold cross hanging from a small gold chain around his neck but it didn’t stop him from cursing. Frank Sr. cursed frequently around us, particularly when he was speaking of “those fucking bums” across the street. He always told us to make sure those goddamned trucks didn’t pull into his driveway. Occasionally one would while we were riding up and down the pea gravel driveway next door making and seeing who could make the longest skid mark. We’d really here about it then. Frank Sr. would cuss for 10 minutes and leave the room to sit in the basement with a beer. Frankie’s mom would then offer us a can of coke in the kitchen. Frankie always called her by her first name. We could never figure out why, we just thought it was another part of his weirdness. He didn’t know how to ride a bike, spoke with a slight lateral lisp, and played with Power Rangers toys long after they stopped being acceptable for children our age. I discovered years later during high school that he was gay. I couldn’t imagine how with a father like Frank Sr.

With the exception of Frank Sr. and Mrs. [name removed], most other people just said the place was noisy, or dirty, or ugly. These were facts of life for a lot zoned for semi-industrial usage but things that people of a “historic arts district” and “cultural center” felt did not belong. By those criteria most of the people didn’t either. My father chose the last reason as his and always campaigned rather ineffectually to my mother and I about the possibilities for the façade and the rest of the structure. We had the nicest house on our street and at that time possibly the entire neighborhood too so my father felt he had an obligation to uphold the architectural example our house set. But part of his desires for something greater was a more personal connection.

In the late 1920s and 30s his maternal grandfather worked as a stone cutter in the business that occupied the building before Singer Steel bought it in 1947. Most famously, Dominic Mastrangelo worked on the towering stone pylons that are now part of the Hope Memorial Bridge. Now all that remains are a dusty photograph of him working that hangs in my grandparents’ living room and a portion of the weathered sign on the side of the building that reads “OHIO STONE.” That wasn’t the name of the place but the rest of the paint is washed away.

In 1994 Singer Steel moved to Streetsboro and dismantled operations at the building on Random Road over the next few years. Gradually the red trucks stopped showing up as frequently and one day a large 18-wheeled flat-bed rolled out with the large overhead crane on the back. It was the last major activity I saw from the place. For a few years the building sat vacant and silent with a large commercial real-estate agency sign on the side. The flat white sign with painted black letters that read SINGER STEEL on the apex of the sloped roof also began to show signs of dereliction and the white gradually gave way to brown at the edges eventually lengthening to long rusty streaks.

Our recklessness started small, from the gravel driveway next door to Frankie we would sometimes pick up the larger rocks and hurl them with flailing fresh teenage arms toward the building. We told ourselves that we were trying to hit the steel parts of the walls to see how loud of a sound we could get but given the ratio of glass to steel the inevitability of stone contacting and then shattering a pane was monumental. When the sound of falling shards was heard we would scatter like roaches at the flick of a light switch. When we saw that no one really cared we would slowly emerge from under porches and rocks and cracks in the sidewalk to inspect our handiwork. These were the first glimpses we got into the shadowy guts of the beast. We were finally able to look around and see the internal structures and we found that it was bigger than we thought.

In 1999 we discovered a back entrance near the railroad tracks on the opposite side from the one that faced the street. You had to squeeze under a fence behind the ball diamond and get through some pretty thick bush before hitting the access road. After that it was a quick quarter mile to Singer. A back garage-type door had been left partially open and on our bellies entry was pie. It was late afternoon when we snuck in and the last orange rays of daylight were starting to fade. A quick peak around showed nothing overtly remarkable besides a late 60s Cadillac left to compost near the ramp leading to the tracks. It was pretty much exactly as it seemed from the outside: just an empty warehouse.

It was then that we saw the door. It was slightly open and it called to us. It was scary and forbidden and irresistible to a thirteen year old boy. After some deep breaths we slipped inside as if someone were watching us. It was the old office building for the operation. Just an average looking house tacked onto a section of brick wall on the side of the building. Our inquiries into the contents of the abandoned desk drawers yielded nothing more than a few dirty magazines and trash. We pronounced the managers as perverts and kept the magazines though they were probably the property of some homeless man looking for a dry place to sit and rest with his girls. After that one afternoon, I didn’t venture back into the place when Anthony or Frankie did, the place just creeped me out.

After a few years, the neighborhood revitalization brought new popularity and more cars of suburbanites. On small, already cramped streets parking was precious and so the decision was made for the Murray Hill development company to purchase the building and use it as a parking lot for the increased traffic. Beginning around 2001 there was nearly always a big fat man sitting in a folding chair with a spray painted sign that read “PAKING 5$ [sic].” The man looked like the ones who used to work there loading steel but I dismissed it as a coincidence.

In the fall of 2005 I decided to take a photography class and chose the makeshift parking lot as one of my subjects. Camera in hand I marched around the corner and asked Big Fat Attendant if I could take some pictures. His blank look let me know I needed to explain myself. Then he said “No, I don’t want to buy anything.” It was my turn for a blank look. I again explained myself and added the magic word: “school.” Like Ali Baba I was in and snapped away 2 rolls before I saw the door again.

I didn’t have enough frames left to bracket my shot so the result is greatly underexposed. Add to that my subpar processing and frustration at the tedium that is a dark room and you have my result here. There are dust spots and some smudging on the right side. I got a modest grade. I also got a photo that still hangs on my wall. Sure it’s not great technique but what I see in it is the same thing I saw at thirteen after sliding under a half-open door: fear, mystery, grit and grime. But I also saw something new: decay. To me that’s what makes it a great photo.

After letting my last lease in Kent expire I moved home. During my first weekend back I took a walking tour of the old neighborhood just to get my legs about me after 6 years. The people have changed. Anthony is getting married, Frankie moved away while I was gone and Chris disappeared right before high school. What’s left is mostly young trendy folks and college students. They think I’m one of them not knowing I’m a native; the ones with which they battle about noise complaints and parking spaces. I walked by The Singer Steel Building and found most of the corrugated steel siding missing and the glass removed. The small office house was torn down and all that remains is the steel girder superstructure; a skeleton of a giant. From what I’m told, the next phase of development into a multi tiered parking deck is underway. The brick wall is still there minus the wall around it and the door is still hung, still partly open. Only now, it’s a door to nowhere in a wall that separates nothing.

We're not there yet.

2009-12-08T00:25:00.003-05:00

Procrastination is: finding a reason to clean your ashtray at midnight when you still have pages to go.

I am well aware that this is not a good poem.

2009-12-07T21:24:00.006-05:00

I've never been one for verse.
I can read the words
And feel its breath on my lips
But simple appreciation is my curse.
My pulpy anvil and inky hammer exist
Today for utility
To wright thoughts and ideas
And words unfit to be kissed.
No art will trail from these midnight lines.
No singularity, concise and tact
Will be birthed on this page.
Instead it might only rhyme.

Perhaps, I'll learn in time.

Is bibliographic a word?

2009-11-27T00:34:00.002-05:00

It's probably what I'm most excited for concerning my impending move. My parents call it the Library. It's our upstairs living room and my father has been working building those shelves for most of my life while they've both been filling them for much longer. Dad put up the ladders last summer. The crown molding was just finished last week. It's really nice despite the ancient couch and vestigial OSU themed linoleum left over from when it used to be a kitchen for a duplex. There's an Art History section, language section, fiction as well as non-fiction sections, and the baseball section. Maybe I'll finally have time to catalog it all in MS Access.

There is another half of the wall on the left side of the picture that you can't see plus another half of the wall next to the doorway I was standing in. Pardon my clunky image stitching. Until someone realizes that people on PC's need good photo editing it'll have to do.

Sitting on a Bench Outside

2009-10-07T21:40:00.001-04:00

My coffee had grown cool. The night was still and for the moment I felt like the only person left in the world. Across the street a little light blinked slowly in the window of a car. the little sedan is snoring I thought bemusedly to myself.

There was a silent snap as my previous cigarette burned itself out in the ashtray and a crack, sizzle, fshh.. as I lit the next and inhaled deeply.

It doesn't make any sense, I thought, my mind back to the matter at hand. I took another swig of coffee. it was cold enough to be enjoyable again. Was it the second night or the twenty-second? I couldn't tell anymore. The clock stopped saying the time long ago. the crickets still chirped but really i wasn't sure if I believed in them anymore.

Putting my feet back on the cold concrete, I stood up from my chair. I grabbed the box of Camels, my lighter, and my mug with the stars on it. I opened the door and silently stepped inside. Gracie hopped down from the window where she had been watching me and climbed the sofa next to the door.

"Mrow?" she said.

"Hi there." I replied and I snuffed my cigarette in the ashtray next to the lamp. I climbed the stairs to my room and quietly undressed and slipped under the down quilt. I reached over and set the alarm for 8... again. "It doesn't hurt to hope, right Gracie?" I asked. She sat silent and knowing. I knew, too, when I woke it would still be dark. Still be 3 A.M. There would be ten smokes in the box again and this page would still be blank.

From a page titled "8/25: First Class of Robert Pope"

2009-08-25T21:31:00.007-04:00

There's a certain intricacy in the act of writing that you, the reader, simply cannon grasp. I am here at my desk, looking at a sheet of white real estate, undeveloped, waiting to be born between the rolls of rubber. There are only a few lines now and I cannon in good conscience speculate on what might be wrought by the slamming, literate anvil in the ones that follow, if they do at all.

Yes I am here, my mind as naked as yours, existing in blissful ignorance of what may be in the coming lines, or pages, or volumes. Of course this is my now and your now may, no, will be very different than mine. In time, your now will become my now and the combined our now will leave the ignorance of the not-yet stamped ink (if indeed it is still ink in our now) solely upon you. Unless your now is currently my now and you are reading over my shoulder. Are you there?

If I am indeed as alone as I believe, then my task is to be here, tap-tapping out a line that I can throw to you in hope you will hoist my anticipation to yourself. I am a time traveler and this typewriter is my time machine.

The news at 11

2009-07-24T23:30:00.001-04:00

Everything has been imported. It was much easier than I expected. Read the stories below.

I'm utterly convinced...

2009-07-24T21:09:00.000-04:00

that this is, in fact, the correct way to go.

* * *

I did the self-built, pay-for-host blog back in high school and up into my freshman year. These were the last days before the great social networking revolution (hereto: GSNR) and it was a unique thing to have your own staked out claim on the web.
It was a good site. I had flash and iframes and my own graphics. The best part was that I coded it, not some program that just took my preferences and generated a page. I worked on that site for hours, coding into the night, making a frame sit just right, learning new work-arounds for browser non-standardization. Then as soon as the first version launched I began work on version 2.0, and again for 3. But I had fewer responsibilities then and that's just far too much work to do now. Working and trying to have a social life and have time for sleep kinda eat up most of my time. Any time I do get is spent writing.

* * *

I got a myspace back when I only knew two or three other people that had one. And even then, I only kinda knew them. Now, we live in a world where people used to give out their myspace url's instead of their digits. Shit's crazy.
At first the concept of a prefab space just for me was enticing. But over time it became stagnant so I left. Then people started figuring out how to splice code into the page and it got a interesting again. This was the GSNR big bang. I could wash the sterility off myspace and replace it with something a little more... different. And it was still kinda easy. And people started noticing.
Once I got the appearence set I started writing a blog. (This is where my initial interest in writing came from, methinks.)
The blog feature was a large portion of the user interface in the early versions of myspace and a user couldn't just ignore it. I didn't really know what to use for content so I just wrote what I knew. Me. It was simple and introspective. More of a journal or diary than anything else. But it was boring. People were interested in posting on the wall anyway. So I never really used it much.

* * *

Around this time I had an aquaintence at another nearby university and she mentioned something about Facebook. Check that, thefacebook.com. Old school facebook. What a great thing! It was perfect for staying in touch with old high school friends in college far away or back home. But you couldn't really do much with it. It actually became refreshing when myspace got out of hand and became nearly impossible to navigate without insane musical spasms and visually assaulting graphics coming out of your browser.
Then facebook got a big head. Everyone could come aboard and they could customize it, not much but in little ways. and then facebook got clunky. The blog funtionality became buried and hardly anyone used it. It was treated more like a directory with a comment box. But it's the social networking site. There are no others.

* * *

I had both a wordpress and a tumblr. They were true ready-made blogs that focused on content. It was exactly what I wanted, but you just can't see them. Hardly anyone's heard of wordpress anymore and even fewer know what tumblr is.
Blogger has been around forever and most interesting pre-fab blogs I read are blogspot sites. So this is my current direction. If I want to be an interesting writer and have a simple web presence it should be here.

* * *

So, I'm going to import the good stuff from the other places to here. Stay tuned.

Situational Awareness

2009-06-14T03:10:00.000-04:00

I think I’ve figured it out. Baseball that is. It’s quite simply a game of situations.

The game is remarkably different than most other mainstream sports that exist. In football (American) you try to get the ball to the goal, the endzone at the other end of the field which the other team is defending, by whatever means you can. That is how you score points. In soccer, you try to get the ball to the goal, a net at the other end of the pitch which the other team is defending, by kicking it. That is how you score points. In basketball, you try to get the ball into the goal, a net in the air at the other end of the court which the other team is defending, by bouncing it and shooting the ball. That is how you score points. Hockey is the same, lacrosse, fooseball, hell, even tennis is close. They’re all variations on a theme: get the object into the goal that your opponent is defending.

Now I’m not saying these sports are boring. No! On the contrary, it’s insanely fun to watch two armies battle in the snow, pressing and charging down the field trying to get inside the kickers range to make that field goal that will put them two points up. There’s also the calm in basketball when LeBron is at half court, dribbling, seeming looking at nothing but watching the entire court, waiting for an opening to make an explosive play. It’s adrenaline pumping, physical, and incredibly dynamic direct competition.

Baseball doesn’t follow these rules. As a batter, you don’t advance the ball to a specific goal. The pitcher, the first defenseman in fact, is the one with control of the ball. The game isn’t nearly as dynamic overall as the goal sports. It can be, yes, but usually isn’t.

In baseball, a play is a reaction by the defense (fielding team) to what the offense (batting team) did. These plays either create opportunities for the offense or eliminate them. These situations are the backbone of the sport. The action essentially stops when the batter steps in and the pitcher looks for his sign. Everyone is waiting.

For example: It’s the top of the sixth with the leadoff man at the dish (no one on, no one out, and no score). The game is still an open book at this point. That batter then hits a bloop double to short right-center. The situation for the next batter is a man on second, no outs. He should try to advance the runner, not necessarily hit a home run. In fact, a sac fly would be good, putting the running in scoring position. But he goes down on strikes and so does the next but the runner steals a base. Suddenly, there are two outs an a man in danger of being stranded on third and the team failing to capitalize on that opportunity. but the clean up batter is tapping the caked dirt from his cleats. This is the situation he was placed in the line up for. He’s the power hitter, the man you turn to when you need a good hit or a home run. After he’s done, for better or for worse, the situation begins new.

What's in a Name?

2009-03-04T06:50:00.000-05:00

Steampunk? Hardly. It’s true, the cogs and gears are a wonder of clockwork and they sure are pretty with copper, bronze, and a green petina, but it’s just not my style. I was born just long enough ago to have had personal computers around for nearly all of my life and I firmly assert myself as a product of the 90’s. So, the victorian age seems… well, just a little too old fashioned for me.

I tried to figure what a slightly modern version of steampunk would be. A time when a gleaming steel B-17 ruled the skys and every soldier carried a raygun as their weapon of choice. This is when people feared Nazis on the moon with death rays and the closest you got to an SUV was a Willys Jeep, a time when your computer was made of bakelite and used nixie tubes and no one’s ever heard of an integrated circuit or microchip. A robot down at the corner gas station with vacuum tubes clowing in his chest was the mechanic for your oil burning car. In design, form just began to lead function and “streamlined” was the buzz-word. You said ZAP! instead of pew!pew! It would be a glorious age of polished steel and great discoveries in physics under the Hoover administration.

What I think it boils down to is nostalgic fondness for the aesthetic styling of grossly obsolete, 65 year-old technology blended with fantastic functionality. But what do you call this anachronism? Do you go with a new _____punk name like electronpunk, or analogpunk? Or do you simply call it “Modern Steampunk”? An anachronistic anachronism in and of itself.

Vintage

2009-02-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

What can I say about this desk? It’s simply fantastic. The drawers shut without binding, and the roll beautifully. There is a quality of craftsmanship here that can’t be had for such a value in today’s market. A desk that is 40 years old and purchased for $57 shouldn’t be as amazing as this.

There is something to be said for the entire concept of vintage. Objects that can survive 25, 40, even 50 years are usually built with quality. Chances are, if it’s still around now, it’ll probably be around for a while longer. Look at older cars. Cars built from, say, 1945-1970ish are solid pieces of American industrialization. They were considered machines that were designed to be durable (crumple zone what?). This is how a “barn find” is possible. If you took one of today’s cars and stuck it in a barn to sit for 30 or 40 years you wouldn’t have much of a car left to restore. Vintage guitars and drums are sought after by musicians for their tone quality and construction. Vintage office furniture should be added to this list of “better when it’s old”. This desk was designed for work. It’s designed to stand up to work. And it’s no-frills design is a paradigm of utilitarian understatement.

What makes something better when it’s old? Yes, in some cases it’s the so-called “street cred” that you get when playing a rare instrument, or driving a collector car, or wearing an awesome vintage t-shirt. But I posit that in most cases, old things are better. My previous desk was a contemporary pressboard design. No, I didn’t pay for it but when I got it it was in good condition. Three years of off-campus college housing and the 3 moves that it endured took it’s toll. It all but fell apart under it’s own weight and I removed it from my room a few days ago. In pieces. My former roommate had a contemporary design desk bought at a office supply chain for a moderate price. Within two years it was coming apart at the seams. I noticed the problem before his purchase when I took a look at the floor model on display. The display was shakey and the joints were loose. If a product can’t stand up to moderate examination then how will it hold up under heavy use? It’s supposed to be a work surface not a monitor holder. But my Steelcase spent 10 years in a garage and cleaned up just fine.

My new desk.

2009-02-08T22:59:00.000-05:00

This is one of the coolest things that I have ever owned.

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