Making Shelter Simple: An Interview with Lloyd Kahn By Avi Solomon at 1:07 pm Tuesday, May 15.
It’s a pretty long interview, along with an audio track. It’s nice when a journalist gets it right. Here’s the beginning:
Avi Solomon: What do you see in your childhood that pointed you onto the path that your life took?
Lloyd Kahn: When I was a kid I had a little workbench with holes in it, and the holes were square or round or triangular. And you had to pick the right little piece of wood block and hammer it in with a little wooden hammer. And so I’d hammer with it, put the round dowel into the round hole, and hammer it through. And then maybe the most formative thing was when I was twelve – I helped my dad build a house. It had a concrete slab floor, and concrete block walls. And my job was shoveling sand and gravel and cement into the concrete mixer for quite a while. We’d go up there and work on weekends. One day we got the walls all finished, and we were putting a roof on the carport, and I got to go up on the roof. They gave me a canvas carpenter’s belt, a hammer and nails, and I got to nail down the sheathing. And I still remember that, kneeling on the roof nailing, the smell of wood on a sunny day. And then I worked as a carpenter when I was in college, on the docks. I just always loved doing stuff with my hands.…”
Click here for the whole interview: https://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/making-shelter-simple-an-inte.html
Colors are best in the fog. I shoot collages, rather than using a wide angle lens setting, because the proportions look about right to me through a 50 or so mm lens. Click on it to enlarge.
Got a call from the post office at 8AM this morning that they had arrived, airmail from the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa. All bantams: 30 Golden Seabrights, 10 Auracanas, 2 Partridge Rocks, 4 Rhode Island Reds. 4 Japanese Bantams, 1 “free rare exotic chick.”
I picked them up and we put them in a box under a warm infrared light and dipped their beaks into water for their first drink. The Seabrights are quite tiny, quite beautiful, and fragile. 6 have died so far — par for the course. They can’t sex bantams, so we order twice as many as we want in in order to get the right # of hens. We’ll keep one Seabright rooster to eventually hatch more of them. Excess roosters will be offed for barbecue. We’ll use the Rhode Islands as setters (the full-size Rhode Islands never set, but the bantams retain the setting instinct).
I spent the weekend building a separate yard for the babies; otherwise they would be attacked by the grown-ups when small.
Victoria pays tribute to British Columbia’s original people with Thunderbird Park, right in downtown Victoria. The present totems were carved by master carver Mungo Martin in the 1950s, chief of the Fort Rupert branch of the Kwakwaka’wakw (commonly referred to as Kwaikiutl) tribe. My friend, artist Godfrey Stephens, hung out down at the park with his childhood friend, Tony Hunt, grandson of Mungo Martin, and it was there that he (and Tony) learned to carve.
At Toby’s Feed Barn in Pt. Reyes Station, Calif.
“When I am asked ‘What will the inside of your new bus look like?’, I always reply ‘Just like the inside of my housetruck, only bigger.’ For most people this is answer enough, but for those of you in Netland who are curious, I provide this photo essay to spark your imagination.
Inside, the living space is decidedly non-automotive. In planning the interior, I toured motor homes, travel trailers and yachts, and found the latter to be most appealing, although the end result would never be considered “nautical”. “Early Twentieth Century Studio Apartment” would be the most accurate description. Nearly all of the furniture, fittings and fixtures are collectables. Wood, brass, natural fabrics and leather predominate. Use of plastics is almost non-existent. A Vermont Castings ‘Intrepid’ wood stove keeps away the winter chill, and multiple skylights illuminate my daily activities.…”
https://www.mrsharkey.com/busbarn/sharkey/sharkey.htm
I love being in other parts of the world, but I hate getting there. The indignity of airport security, the air in airplanes; the stress level.
Left: the Bay Area as we approached the airport
I almost feel like kissing the ground when I get back to San Francisco (have in fact, on occasion). The smells of the ocean, of my own home. And wouldn’t the moon be spectacular as I got to town…
When I was in Duluth, my friends Peter and Cindy were playing a (vinyl) collection of Bob Dylan titled “biograph.” It has versions of a lot of songs I’d never heard. I ordered it the next day, and am playing it now. If you’re a Dylan fan, check it out.
I think in future ages, Dylan will be recognized as a poet on the level of Chaucer. When I really listen to some of those lyrics, even these many years later, I’m stunned.
