jigs


This is a jig I made for welding caster wheels centered onto the end of a 1" square tube: It's not so pretty to look at, but it got the job done. Each wheel ended up square and mostly centered without having to do a bunch of tack welds. When I was a kid and making things in my Dad’s shop I never got why he wanted to make jigs for making repeated pieces. I was under the impression that to measure each thing was a far superior method to creating than to put into the world the visual turbulence of a jig that I then became coconspirator with, like small robots building up to become a larger robot.

It is now with joy that I make a jig; push a few things together and weld or screw or staple like Michael Jordon taking free throws: eyes closed and tongue out. Absurd confidence.

But maybe the creation of jigs at all times is a bit like camouflage: it makes me disappear in the flow of my work; the texture of my hands starts to become the texture of the material and my heart beats at the rotation of a flywheel. There’s this give and take between to jig and not to jig; to be consumed or to stop the flow of the river and float above the mangrove.

For two years I’ve wanted to write a book How to Become a Failed Artist in Five Years. And for two years I’ve almost started. At first I didn’t start because I was scared I would ruin it. Now I’m scared to start because I don’t think I remember the details and point to what I was trying to write about. And I’ve been wondering about this tension in me about forgetting, but also wanting to honor the original scope of what 2-year-ago-Mark was thinking. Maybe I built a jig in my mind and then never used it and now looking back at it is a bit like this jig in the photo with no context: haphazard cuts and some charred wood.

This whole process feels a bit like snakes eating themselves, where the jig then becomes something to talk about and observe. Like that guy who wrote reviews of Pitchfork reviews. Maybe making jigs isn’t only about process but scale. Jigs at a certain scale are not just a tool, but also an idea themselves: a dedication to seeing a process have a concrete step.

Like most things we do, though, steps flatten or steepen. Stairs turn to slides turn to elevators. 

leopards and hairless camels.

I used to go to this zoo in the winter on days I wasn't in the studio. No one went in the winter and the animals all forgot about people and the feeling was a bit like being in a sequel of Jurassic Park (not the one with the first occurance of the Pterodactyl... I didn't like that one) where the buildings felt abandoned and utilitarian: minimal set design. 

There was a camel that was losing its hair due to stress or illness, that laid on the ground in a mirrored position of its lips: limp and forming to that which it was placed upon. Skin on teeth and rocks. Next to it was an aquarium-like cage that contained a leopard that was also stressed but paced endlessly in front of the glass, packing the dirt into a trench.

In college, I once had an anole that I placed in a cage with a hamster I also had. They seemed to get along. Then one morning I woke up and the anole was dismembered and the hamster was pacing like that leopard, packing down the wood shavings to a density such that a newspaper could have been printed on it.

The leopard did once stop pacing when I came to visit when it was snowing once. It stopped and then seemed to point it's paw in a direction that said "over there". At this point it, too, was starting to lose hair.

the ways I mentally bleed.

I’ve recently become aware of the great amount of my time I waste reading pointless news: which is a lot of news these days. I don’t advocate for being uninformed, but there seems to be this swell of information (and this is me speaking as someone embedded in American news) that is repetitive and not really building on anything substantive. I don’t know the reason for this, whether it’s the need for a 24 hour news cycle tied to advertising or something or another, and honestly I don’t really care. Because at the end of the day it is our choice how to engage with the media.

I think Trump is trash. I probably will never think otherwise as he never does anything that isn’t trash. He’s ineffective and incompetent. I know this. Yet I still read stories about him waving to supporters from a hermetically sealed car, with secret service agents held captive inside, for a photo-op while having Covid-19. Why does this matter to me? In some ways I feel that the news’ primary purpose is no longer about information exchange as it is about creating a sense of engagement and emotional reaction.

On the BBC there is always commentary at the end of most articles, immediately giving feedback on what the news item means to a certain person. Why is this given? Why are Twitter user’s options being quoted within articles about current events? I know there are exceptions when this would make sense; where “on the ground” accounts are needed.

This makes me feel the news is meant to put a wet blanket on me a bit in the same way that I feel social media already does. It fulfills and also dilutes. Of course this isn’t across the board. Reading a good Economist article and I can be reminded what it means to have someone clearly lay out facts and relationships of those facts to me as a reader in a way that is meant to educate.

Perhaps the only non-trash thing that Trump does is call out Fake News. Because while the news he talks about isn’t fake, it definitely is not news in the pure sense of the word. It’s something a bit more trashy.

Maybe trashy is just the way the world is these days. I do know that not clicking on google alerts and random chum bucket links has made my brain feel healthier. It makes me feel clearer and like bombs aren’t going off in my brain like being at a dinner party where a few children under the table take center stage. I honestly started writing this because as I sat on the couch in my studio looking at a cockroach majestically scale this small Everest of drywall debris (solo ascent) out in the loading dock, I realized I had subconsciously taken my phone out and was reading an article “Why this VP debate actually matters”. Thanks BBC, no Thanks.

Here’s to becoming less trashy and, like that cockroach, scaling some small victories of my personal surroundings.

projected building

Didn't you catch the news? The whole hotel moved from using bricks to stop lights for their new construction. I know, I know, it's going to make it a real project to change the bathroom toiletries. 

on toxicity and marine layers.


I’ve recently landed to live part time in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. It’s an ideal looking town of a bit over six thousand people, having a waterfront full of the signs of its local industry: fishing (lobestering? I don’t know what you call what lobster boats do). I do know that lobster boats are way hotter than fishing boats: big ‘ol butts. In the morning, I walk by character homes and trees — such green trees — and the smell of marine paints (chemical like resin) and slag (burnt electrons and sunburned skin) from the places repairing aluminum boat parts; there’s this toxicity in the marine layer that wraps the charming waterfront in a romantic mist; a protected harbor with a tinge of chemistry. It’s only present at a very particular part of the morning.

And this idealism wrapped in a marine layer of cancer causing agents, makes me to wonder a lot about stereotypes in this new setting. The stereotype of small towns and stereotypes within this new stereotype. I’ve never spent any time really living in a small town and I can feel knee jerk reactions to things I witness that are shitty and think to myself “fucking small towns”. But these aren’t unique to small towns. The extraordinary mundane pleasantness of certain conversations here could easily find their mental parallel in someone in LA describing a TikTok to me (is that how you say that?) or their favorite trashy Netflix show; my perspective jumps and mugs these conversations here in derisive tones, because in general I don’t like these types of conversations that are like barges that require no tugboats: they just plow forward without any ability to be swayed.

I think a lot of this disconnect is scale. Our values should be reflected consistently through different scales and rarely are. It's a bit like how I would deal with a roommate that was eating my food out of the fridge and an HOA that was making strange use of funds for building maintenance. Both require clear communication with individuals, while in the first case I may be more inclined towards passive aggressive hints, and even feel justified doing so. But both situations are the same, just different scales: people I’m in relationships to due to my housing situation; people that must be counted on in order for me to have a smoothly running home life. I should address both situations aware of the values I’m trying to exercise.

Small town or large city: they both are full of the same things just at different sizes. The good and bad people. The annoyances and the blessings. To hold one up as a better or worse version of the other is to focus on a toxic film, perhaps smelling of resin, over the simple fact: we are all the same. And I think focusing on this film turns a situation away from the possibility of what it can achieve, away from the overall protected harbor that is available for refuge, and instead places us in boats bobbing separate on an infinite ocean.

I had a night out in Yarmouth that ended in me getting punched in the face. It involved some guys that believed me to be gay. And to be honest a second time, I had quite a lot to do in provoking them (don’t blow kisses at angry men). Luckily no injuries came from the whole thing, but I was furious and upset after it in only the way you can be when you are forced into a situation where you know that violence should not escalate, but the reptilian part of your brain desperately wants it to. My wife dealt with the vitriol and vile I spit at Yarmouth that night with a calm collected patience. And in reflecting on the whole instance the next day, I thought about how in my head I had immediately felt like I saw the obvious intolerance that was present in all small towns. There was no safe harbor. Only toxic marine layers in a specific part of the morning light.

But I’ve met those same guys in a 100 bars in 30 different countries. I’ve met them in LA. And I think a larger danger of these men in any of these places is when their presence and/or actions gets labeled as something to do with them being an “other” or from “someplace else”. That’s a problem of a larger internal mechanism at work.

I think some of the ways we feel so acutely new discomfort or joy is in the fact that it seems unrelated to what we previously have felt. But I think it’s disingenuous to maintain that those feelings aren’t related to the structures we have already built in our life. To see how they are scaled versions of something that we have experienced in what we consider to be our own space.

Yarmouth taught me a bit about my marine layer.