I was talking to my brother, who is on the point of retiring from a 40-year career as an orchestral musician. He was until recently co-principal double bass with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva, but his retirement ambition is to become a street musician....
Forty years ago we moved into an old apartment at 520 Oakland Avenue in Oakland, one that needed a lot of work. We landed there because it was the one downstairs from our old friend Nancy, with whom we stayed after our arrival back in town, and it became available at...
Memories of the late 1970's are rolling into my mind. Forty years ago Evelyn and I arrived back in northern California after two years in Germany, where I had taught English in a German secondary school while she studied textiles nearby. We had plans for further...
Lately I have been rereading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, a book my daughter gave me several years ago. Its subject, the representation of reality in western literature from Homer to the twentieth century, is treated in a manner both sweeping and detailed, and although...
When we moved to Napa in 1987, one of the friends we left behind in our old Oakland neighborhood was Eric the photographer. I guess we didn’t exactly leave him behind, because he’s been up to Napa to photograph new pieces for us; but he did continue to live in...
My father was an engineer, who spent most of his working career in the aerospace industry, and what he did was completely mysterious to me as a child. I knew it had to do with making rockets work and that things had to be figured out and tested, and that it all had to...
I was asked recently to give a gallery talk about my woodworking, and I decided to select a small number of images and organize the talk around them. Here are the eleven images I picked and roughly what I had to say about them. I usually tell people that I started...
For a good while there has been a Latin quote on my workshop wall. I’ve completely forgotten how it got there, but I do know what it means. It says ars longa, vita nostra brevis est, literally “art is long but our life is short.” I know that because I took Latin in...
I own an ashtray and a yardstick, promotional products of the sort given away by small businesses when I was a boy in the 1950’s, which I acquired from a family source some time later. They are important to me because they came from my Grandpa George’s furniture...
I took some display pieces down to San Diego the other day, where their other design parent lives and works. She is going to see if she can place them in a showroom in her market area. This was the first time she had seen these particular pieces, if you don’t count...
I have made wood furniture for more than thirty years. Although woodworking was my full-time occupation all through the 1980’s, in those early days I never had occasion to write anything about it beyond an occasional bit of advertising copy. Now, however, I find that...