Tuesday Southern

I smoked on the threshold of the back porch at the Grove job, next to the pine ice-box, picking plaster grit out of my hair. The ancient box fan muttered along inside. I realized I didn’t notice the smell of the old house anymore, myriad dusts, or pine tang from whatever framing I was blowing off. The painter was singing again, upstairs, in Spanish. I realized I’d started to hate him. There were bugs in the hot yard in October. For no reason. I thought about slinging a walnut at the chattering squirrel, the abandoned sink in the grass, the trash trailer. I smoked instead. The fan on its base with one bad wheel kept its own song. I don’t believe I’ve ever felt so Southern.

Brass

I spent the better part of last week in the basement of the Grove job stripping one hundred years of paint off the hardware for the second floor windows and doors. It involved a process Judson (boy genius) found on the internet of boiling water and trisodium phosphate, roughly one cup dissolved in a five quart pot, over an old camp stove that he'd restored. I'd get the water just under boiling, so that I was still able to handle the stuff, let it soak and then peeled off layers of paint with a scraper and a brass-wire brush. I used a dull scraper to move the paint rather than scrape it as that would scratch the soft brass. One of the hardest parts to this operation was keeping the different piles organized, to do this I utilized a year's worth of sushi take-out containers from Akida. Here is a jig we came up with to soak the long brass arms that open the transom windows over the doors:










Skinning the paint left the brass in a raw state which rusted pretty easily, so I put a protective finish on it, by shmearing Brasso on the hardware, letting it dry and then hit it with a buffing wheel on a bench grinder. They make a polishing compound for the wheel that I used as well. To polish the screw heads (yes, because I didn't want them to stand out from the hinge faces and such) I used a pair of needle nosed pliers with electrical tape wrapped around the jaws so that they wouldn't mar the brass. To be able to do the transom swing-arms I had to run it with all the safety features removed, and even though I was careful, I still got myself a couple of times with the wheel on Firday cause I stayed up all night Thursday watching this damn thing.

It took a good while to do all this but I think it will make all the difference in the world with the house is finished. I don't know how many times I've worked on a place only to either half-ass scrape the hardware and re-install it, or else just chuck the whole batch and go with all new cheesed-out shiny stuff from Lowes. However, this is coming from a guy who has no problem spending an afternoon rummaging through piles of rusted-up hardware that will never find a home outside of the buckets they find themselves laying in.

1/6

Copper

Last Friday, Judson and I climbed onto the roof of the Methodist church next to his house on Grove that we've been working on. We got there via the scaffolding the church had set up for a mason named Larry (that coincidentally I used to have to tote tile for) so that he could re point the grout joints above the frieze.

~~~
















"Scaffold"


















"Pediment"


















"Copper..."


















"...You'll Never Be Gold"

















"Rope"

Found Cabinet #1

Inside what I guess would have been the reception area of the old crazy house down on Grove below Lombardy. The place is going condo and I think they've going to save it intact.

The Painter Victor

Is probably one of the finest painters in the city.

His numbers: (c) 512-0945 (H) 271-8291
Tell him Clay sent ya

The Nation of Ulysses

Had instructions on how to remove your fingerprints
In their liner notes. Their music unraveled easily,
It frightened me. They were the hardest Dischord
Band to listen to, the most revolutionary.
My friend Sean, who used to hit the all-ages shows at the Black Cat
Told me one night the Nation of Ulysses showed up and set
A dumpster on fire and rolled it, burning, into the middle of the street.

I don't know why, nearing middle age, I remember this
As the first cool wind to end summer rolls over me on my back porch.
Where are the Nation of Ulysses now, with so many gluttonous dumpsters
There in the alley or bristling with the shredded paper of K street?
What would Ulysses think of his wild and ravenous children,
Full grown now, lost in the forest or else mute under the manager's eye?

Smoke or Fire

California's Burning

Ground-Squirrel View with Finger in It

Tony's Ice Box

Here ya go, bud.

Springsteen

Will Percy: Do you think pop culture can still have a positive effect?

Bruce Springsteen: Well, it's a funny thing. When punk rock music hit in the late 1970s, it wasn't played on the radio, and nobody thought, Oh yeah, that'll be popular in 1992 for two generations of kids. But the music dug in, and now it has a tremendous impact on the music and culture of the nineties. It was powerful, profound, music and it was going to find a way to make itself heard eventually. So I think there's a lot of different ways of achieving the kind of impact that most writers and filmmakers, photographers, musicians want their work to have. It's not always something that happens right away-the "Big Bang"!

Fig.11-Achilles and Hector at the Gates of Troy

circa 1997