Touchstones

I’ve been revisiting some of my touchstone works recently.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I don’t know what sort of things other people use in the way of touchstones. Perhaps a place, a relic, a piece of the true cross—I don’t care. I don’t judge. 

 

For me, there are some musical works, novels, and stories and some films. These are things that I will read/view again over time. For example, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are works that I revisit every few years. 

 

The most recent touchstone novel I read was Gertrude Friedbert’s The Revolving Boy. I talked about that work here some years ago.

 

There are some films that serve me as touchstones as well. Charade is one. Some Like It Hot is another. The 1963 one with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. 

 

Some of this is, perhaps, comfort. These works are touchstones largely because I encountered them at particular times in my life. Therefore, pretty much by definition, they are reflecting an earlier time. 

 

But another reasons I that every time I experience one of them, I see something different. Sometimes it’s as small as noticing an element I had just passed over in previous viewings. There’s a brief encounter in a scene in Charade where a man is repairing a door and says to Cary Grant that next time he should use the doorknob. My attention was usually focused on Grant and Hepburn but one time I realized he was repairing the hole left by Scobie’s (played by George Kennedy) artificial hand. I’m not going into all the bits of the film. I’ll make a blog post about it someday.

 

Other times, it is a profound reconsideration of one of the characters. I talked about this here, where I discussed the relationship between Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon) and Osgood (Joe E. Brown) and the film as an exploration of the different kinds of love.

 

Although, some have suggested I overthink things.

 

The interesting thing to me about touchstones is not about the works themselves. It is completely about how I perceive them and how that perception changes over time. Touchstones are those works that continually deliver something of value every time I look at them. 

 

Let’s be clear, many works are forgettable. Few works stand up to multiple experiences. And fewer still stand the test of time. So for a work to hold up over decades indicates it strikes something deeply in me. Consequently, every time I see something new it reflects an unexpected facet of myself. 

 

It makes me wonder about how children want to repeat an experience over and over. 

 

When my son was young, he very much wanted to watch “Big Scary Beast,” The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A giant dinosaur destroying Manhattan that serves as the model for every kaiju created afterward? Me, too. 

 

But did he see the same film every time? Or was it different for him every time? Was it the repetition that was comforting or the material?

 

My Mom had a rule about books in our house. I could read anything I could reach. Since I climbed like a chimp, there was little unavailable to me. This allowed me to read From Here to Eternity at about age eight and left me with a unique idea of military life, music, and prostitution that remains to this day. But, it remains a touchstone novel and sometimes I see its echo in my work.

 

In point of fact, much of my work has connection to these touchstones. Not solely, to be sure. But enough that I can see it. Jackie’s Boy connects to both Huckleberry Finn and Kim. God’s Country reflects pieces of From Here to Eternity. Not directly and not completely. But I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see the relationships.

 

When I look at the work of other authors, composers, and film makers I wonder what their touchstones were. Beethoven wrote works explicitly on themes from Handel and Mozart—were they his touchstones? He studied composition with Haydn and certainly his early work reflected that. Then, he moved away from it. Did he ever revisit that? Did he in the privacy of his studio play Haydn for inspiration or just comfort? I have no idea.

 

We tend to overvalue originality and undervalue heritage here in America. Few—if any—things we create are completely our own. I am either cursed or blessed with what I call annotation, in that I can see echoes of past works in present works. This is not a criticism. It’s good that Hammett’s Red Harvest influenced Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that triggered A Fistful of Dollars coming back to Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing.

 

That said, when people do adapt my touchstones into other media, (I’m looking at you, Huck) they’re often hard to watch. Not because I might disagree on an interpretation but because they depart from the original material entirely. An example of this is Cannery Row with Nick Nolte and Debra Winger, adapted from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Let’s just say that there is no baseball subplot in Steinbeck’s novels.

 

But that might cover another blog post.

 

And here is an article showing how China is doing better at moving away from coal than the US. All due to Orange Voldamort. And it’s nice to know Ghislaine Maxwell, purveyor of pedophilia, has a puppy, courtesy of this administration.

 

Arts and Crafts IX: The Need for Wood

I like woodworking. I like being able to turn wood into something nice.

 

Still, I don’t like buying wood. Especially exotic wood—though I’m not above working with a good piece of paduak or purpleheart. And I have really enjoyed working with bloodwood. American hardwoods like walnut or ash are also fun.

 

But every day I see trees—really beautiful hardwoods—cut down to make subdivisions of McMansions. Whenever I can, I try to snag as much wood as I can—or think I can—use.

 

However, I don’t have a saw mill and turning an off-center log on my lathe rotating at ten times a second is just scary. I have a band saw but it’s not really up to the task.

Some years ago my old Delta gave up the ghost. That is, the pulleys of the Reeves drive broke. A Reeves drive is one implementation of what is called a continuously variable transmission. It consists of two pulleys made of intersecting cones. (See the link above.) Pulleys trade speed for power. A little pulley rotating quickly that turns a larger pulley means the larger pulley is turning slower but with greater torque. A big pulley rotating slowly turning a smaller pulley more quickly has less torque but runs faster. The Reeves drive allows selecting this with a simple lever.

 

But the Delta pulleys were of inferior quality. First, the one turning the spindle (which turns the wood) broke but I found a replacement. Then the motor pulley broke and no replacement was available. Delta hasn’t made lathes for some time. (That was then. A new search has suggested replacements might be more plentiful. Oh, well.) I replaced the lathe but the old Delta just hung around the shop. I don’t like throwing things away. It’s a waste.

 

Finally, I hit on an idea. I’d rip out the pulleys entirely and replace the spindle pulley with the biggest one I could find and replace the motor pulley with the smallest one I could find. I calculated this would get me as slow as five rotations/second—still not great but vastly better than ten. The Delta would then be used as just making blanks from logs. I could use all that wood I’d been accumulating.

 

I did that and it worked. But now I had a dilemma. 

 

Over the years, I’ve been trying to expand my shop into the left bay of the garage. And this lathe just wouldn’t fit—at least, it wouldn’t fit and leave me space to work with it. But, I thought, wait a minute. I could just take the lathe out of the garage and do the turning outside. Since I planned this to be a seasonal effort, that would work. 

 

But that meant the lathe had to be mobile. Wood lathes are very heavy. Mobility was not in their repertoire. 

 

I came up with the idea of putting it on wheels. This was a good idea but had a significant flaw. I’d put the Delta back on its cast iron stand. The stand’s legs were at a significant angle. The wheels wouldn’t fit.

 

I tried to make a wooden insert—and broke a chop saw and nearly my finger in the process. That wasn’t going to work. 

 

My friend Eric suggested I pour the insert into a mold. I resolved that was what I would do.

 

I built a set of four boxes for each of the legs.

 

 

Then, I filled them with concrete and attached a lever arm wheel assembly.

 

 

I now had a lathe that I could move easily.

 

 

Now, I could turn the raw wood (seen above) into product.

 

 

 

But, where am I going to put all this brand new wood? Uh oh. Is another project in the offing?

 

Also, Orange Voldamort is going to restart nuclear testing. Antarctica is starting to look like Greenland. OV didn’t create the situation. He is just making things much, much worse. And, of course, the East Wing is gone, as the Brain Caterpillar goes from destroying metaphorical institutions to actual physical ones.