Skywater

This round’s blog-off topic caught me a little off-guard. Well, they all do, which is the object of the game: a random question lobbed at you from the intertubes, requiring a reflexive response. It’s reminiscent of catching a glimpse of an approaching Frisbee in your periphery and either ducking the impending blow or rising to the moment by catching it and returning the volley as gracefully as possible. I tend to examine topics from an internalized, alternate perspective –  some might say “skewed” – but there are enough viewpoints which take the direct frontal approach that I don’t feel the need to follow suit; I go rambling off in another direction. Careening across a verbal landscape, I will remain true to form or freeform, as it were.

I have been an armchair traveler for the most part; I do have a long wish list of geographical desires which I would like to experience some day but for the most part it remains just that – a list. I read constantly about places and times, near and far, and travel through the words and images of others. There have been a few realized exceptions, but most of my life has been spent quite close to home (which happens to be in one of the most beautiful places I know: Vermont, an oasis of lasting simplicity). The lasting appeal of Vermont has made it a popular destination for visitors from the northeastern megalopolis and parts further flung; the tourists come to enjoy the quaint villages, the bucolic farms, the burbling brooks and thickly forested mountainsides. It truly is “picture postcard perfect”; some decide to move here or build a second home and hold on to the vision of pastoral bliss they have experienced. We have a saying here, among the local transplants – “Welcome to Vermont! We dare you make a living.” And there is more than a kernel of truth in that expression. While the quality of life here is hard to beat, the struggle to survive and eke out a living is equally difficult to understand. And so we work – and work – and try to enjoy ourselves with the simpler pleasures at hand.

welcome to my village

While I have spent many years here, struggling with the demands of life at hand and dreaming of other realities, sunnier climes and greener pastures, I have begun to learn the depth of experience available right under my gaze and indeed, inside my gaze. Rather than waiting for “some day”, I seek to discover what is inside of “this day”. It’s a lowering, not of aspiration, but of focus, to the essence of the moment. The smallest details expand to fill the grandest canvas. When one’s awareness is permitted to fly free, to gather in all the bits of life floating by in the present, there is no pressing need to escape, to get away from it all, to pay someone else to amuse, serve, pamper, or divert. There is a world of experience already nearby, if you look for it. And then allow it to reveal all of its facets and nuances, never repeating and always wondrous.

I began to understand this in a very small way when I was quite young, maybe ten or so; I made a vow to myself (actually more a statement of realization) that ‘I’ would never be bored. That endless complaint of the disenchanted and restless adolescent and their older variants, so often heard and futilely addressed, “I’m bored…” would not be upon my lips. And it hasn’t, to this day. I still look forward to sailing the seven seas and traipsing through the halls of kings and priests, wondering at great feats of architecture and vast sweeps of scenic grandeur. To make the Grand Tour. To walk where legends and civilizations were born; to see the green flash of a tropical sunset, the fiery, steaming bowels of the earth convulsing, the technicolor rush of hundreds of rainforest birds aloft. But I am not bored with the offerings of my days and nights closer to home, as I eat, work, play, and sleep…

Riverine Dreams

The weight of a late summer afternoon, pressing down on my body as I lay in the grass next to a lazy river, hawks wheeling slowly overhead as the towering mountain across the valley lifts its spruces into the piercing blue sky. The smell of fresh concrete as I peel the cradling formwork away from our latest studio commission, all the careful preparation and the rush of mixing and pouring now seized in solid immutable weight. The dawning of understanding and the smile that lifts the corners of my mouth when standing before another’s work, soaking it in and turning it over in my mind, letting the representation become an inspiration in reverse. All these small details, charting a macroscopic journey through “now”. I am still learning the signs – I stumble, I wander, I digress, I lose the horizon. But there is always a new day and a new view to quicken my step and draw my eye.

I was raised with the belief that heaven (and its counterpart, hell) was a place that came after this life, some otherworldly reward for eschewing the dangers and disgraces of a temporal existence. The creation was fallen, the shallow attractions of this mortal plane were deceptive and destructive. If one kept their eyes above and beyond these temptations, there would be a slice of heavenly cake waiting on the other side – your just desserts. But I have come to the more gratifying realization that you can have your cake and eat it too. I find my slice of heaven right here, right now, wherever I am. Often rather close by, sometimes farther afield but always where you might expect it least – not in the obvious guidebook or entrancing glossy magazine, the latest hotspot revealed or the last great unspoiled discovery. It’s right in front of my nose and well within my grasp. I turn to a fellow New Englander, once again, who said, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” (Henry David Thoreau) Watch your step and you will travel far.

Go here to see the full list of #letsblogoff participants; a panoply of polished perspectives!

Today’s #letsblogoff question is “Are today’s college graduates ready for the working world?” Several of us, bloggers from varied professions, are voluntarily tackling this topic and delivering our own blast of bombast directly into your earholes. Bear with us… a list of participants may be found here.

I count myself among those who have never had to face this dilemma. I met my fork in the road sooner and never needed to justify the expense incurred, the choices made, or my “trainability” for the realities of the workaday setting. In retrospect, I suppose I recognized that I wasn’t ready for much at all after an initial short foray into higher education. Instead, I went straight into the working class without the benefit, or rather, luxury of facing the transition from academia to assignment. There was no quandary regarding readiness or preparedness; it was a precluded action at the time. Or at least it seemed that way to me – we all make our decisions based on what we know and I did the best I could with what I had at hand. I went with the “default” setting.

To be honest, the percentage of our employable population possessing a college degree (a bachelor’s or higher) is in the minority, running around 29% of the workforce. And the percentage of positions requiring a degree is even smaller, at about 24%. So there’s a problem. To skew the odds even further, the job market is already awash with more unemployed degree holders than will graduate in a given year. So much for getting a leg up.

So, my tendency when faced with a question of this nature is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and posit that no one (nearly) is ready for the working world – degree’d or otherwise. It is often a rough transition from living on someone else’s nickel to earning one or two of your own. It is not made any easier by possessing a shred of sheepskin in your hand. The disparity is not incurred by the amount of knowledge lodged in one’s cranium, but by the inherent experiential gap of a novice and perhaps even exacerbated by the inadequacy of preparation.

There are many reasons that may hamper progress in landing or keeping a job – and we all fall victim to the truism that the current generation is facing the most dire straits of all. What sort of outlook is that? A mindset that sees every new batch of workers facing an increasingly mismatched and overpowering set of performance requirements is an endless downward bent. It’s the opposite of productivity. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it doesn’t help to make chit chat about the scenery as we plummet along. At the risk of falling off the wicker crazy train, I believe that it is never as simple as pointing a finger or reducing the equation to a simplistic statement. By definition, equations have multiple sides, all of which have a bearing on the outcome(s). We should also be cognizant of the limitations of our historical and cultural heritage: the constrictions of a standard arithmetic (used adjectivally) approach, as in “1 + 1 = 2”, and the preoccupation with dualism (black/white) and straight lines, severely limiting in vision.  Which brings me around to my circuitous point (ha! – I am attempting to walk the talk)…

Scientific and philosophical thought has moved in a different direction in the last couple of centuries; we are exploring fractals, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and all sorts of out-of-the-box concepts. The dialectic analogy of a spiral is a fitting model for a change from straight-line Newtonian physics to the complexity which we are discovering all around. I don’t claim to know much about any of it, personally,  but I am endlessly fascinated with learning more about as much as possible and have a lot of catching up to do. Boredom is not in my vocabulary! But as human thought and experience move on to broader and more expansive/inclusive approaches, there is a significant, almost crippling lag in the everyday popular culture, including and maybe especially, in the workplace, where change is often perceived as the enemy. And this is where the topic at hand may be stood on its head or should I say, blown into tiny bits. I would like to suggest that the working world is not ready for much of anything, much less a college graduate (or dropout).

As our understanding of our planet and its systems expands into a more (w)holistic encompassing approach, the manner in which we deal with situations and relationships needs to adapt as well. The “working world” is but a single part of the whole, and an artificial construct at that. This is the basic difference between knowledge and wisdom – and a metaphor for the difference between a fresh-faced newly-educated hopeful hire and an experienced, grizzled veteran. The former has a head full of facts, the latter knows what to do with them. To translate this to the question at hand, to wit “readiness”, I believe we need to make (or continue to make) fundamental shifts in attitudes and perspective: to move toward a paradigm which embraces as much as possible, as soon as possible. The cause and effect curve of human actions in the natural world has been on a long tail of subtlety for most of our time on the planet; we are fast approaching the parabolic crescendo of drastic consequence. I am not painting a picture of doomsday and despair, because I believe in our awesome ability to adapt, change, and make real, progressive change. All of us together, as in Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”: for all the worlds within worlds, by starting with the world within each of us and spreading the ripples out into our workplaces, our dwelling places, our sacred places. Eventually we will find our place in the world as humans – this is the work set before all of us. Are you ready for this?

Oh those times...

Veronika Miller of Modenus is a Twitter friend (instigator) that has founded a series of “blog-offs”, in which several of us tackle a topic in our own inimitable manner and let the chips fall where they may. Crash. This is round two on the latest topic “Living Small”. Links to other posts are listed at the end of my humble contribution.

When I was an earnest young grasshopper, seeking knowledge at the universe’s knee, I wrote a column for a number of local weeklies entitled “Walking Softly”. This was in the late seventies – I was a late-blooming environmentalist and back-to-the-lander, enraptured by the discounted Sierra Club coffee table books from the Ballantine Press – lovely photographic journeys through our wild heritage interspersed with jeweled quotes from John Muir, David Brower, among others, and especially the Great Seer: Henry David Thoreau. I am still enraptured with H.D. Looking back at those days, I see the seeds of what I have become… pale shoots, striving for life-giving sustenance, stretching toward Something/Anything (oh yes, Todd Rundgren in Woodstock, NY), searching for the light. Those early roots are still there, bolstered by the accretions of time and experience, tempered and reinforced by exposure to “life” and its weathering forces. The essence of the plant remains true to its germination; the subsequent realization is a product of its environment and its innate strength of purpose.

The Book

I worked in a campaign for a candidate for US Congress from the state of Vermont in the late 1980’s; my back-to-the-land yearnings had led me here and I have never left this wonderful land of total acceptance and equally harsh realities. The hopeful’s name was Morris Earle and he was running on the Small is Beautiful ticket, derived from the writings of E. F. Schumacher. I still subscribe to that socio-political philosopher’s amazing pronouncements, on some deep gut level which occasionally rises to the fore and overwhelms my everyday preoccupations, even now. It just doesn’t go away. It is still relevant – perhaps even more so in these post-boom recidivist years.

What I am evolving toward (and yes, it is all about me, because I [the collective we] can only speak from what I personally know inside my own head) is a balance of views, perhaps heavily slanted in the “small” direction, and accepting the plentitude of humanity – a measure of encompassing grace – but landing unforgivingly inside the circle of our mother Gaia, the planet which gives all of us life and forgives so many grievances by her “most prescient” inhabitants. Basically: I can accept whatever you might choose to do, but don’t make a mess in your own bed.

in the sand, only...

I see it this way – and I am turning this homily on its head, which is my tendency if you know me: live LARGE and dwell SMALL Stretch yourself, go for the gusto, feel the beauty of all things bright and beautiful. Use only what you need, leave only footprints. Appreciate the fleeting, savor the gifts that drift your way. Quality over quantity. Remember to dance. Forget whoever may be watching. Let this be your guide: will you leave a flourish or a scar on the breast of mother Earth? This is not to say you cannot enjoy yourself while journeying through this expression of being – just have some respect. A lot of respect. Who do you think you are, anyway? You are a god, we are all gods – gods of small things and awesomely immense things – act like it.

Read more on the topic as my Twitter friends opine on the “Living Small” assignment:

Veronica Miller at Modenus, A Small Life is Good, but Slow Down to enjoy it!

Nick Lovelady at Cupboards Kitchen and Bath, Is Small Really Realistic?

Paul Anater at Kitchen and Residential Design, Is Living Smaller the new Living Large?

Rufus Dogg at Dogwalkblog, How Much Does It Cost You to Exist For One Hour? Size Matters

Saxon Henry at Chair Chick, Living Small (and Getting Shagged!)

Becky Shankle at EcoModernism,Is Living Smaller the New Living Large?

Sean Lintow Sr. at SLS Construction, Building Smaller- Is It the Next Big Thing?

Recently we completed an interesting project (aren’t they all?) for a returning client, which is always a nice experience. They have a beautiful contemporary home which is set in the corner of a pasture edging the woods, overlooking a sweeping view of the Green Mountains and the East Branch of the Deerfield River Valley lying between. On the second floor of the house is a light-filled library area at the top of a striking steel and cherry staircase, angling up from the ground floor. In the corner of that room they had planned a small wet bar for coffee in the morning or evening drinks on the balcony deck which fronted the dramatic mountain ridge to the west. It was a very tight alcove, difficult to access comfortably, but it was in the right place for their purpose and needed a customized approach to utilize it to best advantage. Enter artisan concrete!

Inspiration cue

They showed me a ceramic bowl which could provide a color cue to start the project. We were off to a good start already – such a pleasure to collaborate with clients who understood the process from the get-go. It was a warm buttery yellow which would work well with the natural maple flooring and casings in the space; it also picked hints from the artwork hanging nearby. These are the factors that we look for in our work as concrete craftspersons (all PC now): what belongs here? What is the appropriate response?

The alcove in the corner

I wrestled with the intended installation spot: trying to come up with something that would fit and look as if it belonged there, not shoehorned into a compromised accommodation… I decided we needed some strong curves to soften the hard corners of the niche and to help make access to the sink comfortable, which would necessarily be pushed to the back of the space. We had to work with the fact that there was a mini-fridge under the top, which would interfere with drainage routing, if the top was to be mounted at a reasonable user height. (This is a graphic example of the sort of situations that come into play routinely during our design stages)

The solution

I designed a sink with the drain at the extreme rear of the bowl, so as to miss the appliance beneath as the piping exited. The faucet was tucked in tight to the rim so  that a coffee maker could be accommodated in the right rear corner. A scooped arc across the front allowed proximity for the user, and a shelf down the adjoining wall eased the transition from the room into the alcove.  I decided to use a hand-pressed concrete placement technique to give some variety of  texture against a solid wall and a little organic variability to the surface. There is a reason for everything when designing concrete – when the possibilities are limitless, it is important to know where your focus lies and follow through on the promise. And this is what resulted!

Details matter

Another concrete story, fittingly placed in a library. Different story, different conclusion. Happy endings.

Concrete contraption

I have plans. They’re not grandiose or even far-reaching. Some might characterize them as pedestrian. But at least they’re mine. Dream a little dream, said Mama Cass.

Well, I’ve been spending a little (very slight exaggeration) time out in blog world, reading my webby friends and acquaintances periodic  feats of penmanship, and thinking to myself (which is where I do most of my thinking, come to think of it) – “I need to do something a little more useful and expansive with this blog of Concrete Detail” or something along those lines. I have had some helpful and encouraging discussions on the subject with a few confidantes and we (the royal we) are in the early stages of reformatting and reformulating this mouthpiece of  concrete communication. I would like it to be not only a means of presenting the craft of concrete countertops, but a look around at some of the other topics that inform our day-to-day operations and also some of the more esoteric influences that might underlie the mindset of this individual artisan. Warning: still waters may run deep. Or not.

I like writing. So maybe this is just an excuse, a convenience of permission. There is a horde of technical necessities to wade through (this, for a member of the IT-illiterati), much less the always looming content issue – what’s the drivel du jour? – but we’ll cross that boondoggle when we come to it. OK – so there’s that. Tally-ho!

A new day dawns

One of the mantras in our concrete countertop studio is KISS (and why not?) which is an acronym for Keep It Simple Stupid (in a nice way…); we try to apply this wholesale to a wide range of activities. Including visual references – hmm, does that make them visceral references? And so, Captain Obvious would like to share an overt snippet:

Concrete Detail has just moved our artisan concrete design studio, production shop, and (imminent) office/showroom into a new facility at 22 Browne Court Unit 165 in Brattleboro, Vermont. New beginnings. And every day, on the commute into the shop from Wilmington, this is the view with which I am blessed, atop Hogback Mountain on VT Route 9: looking southeast from the foothills of the Green Mountains into New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

A little revisit to a recent concrete countertop project helps to demonstrate the rationale and inspiration behind some of the design decisions that we make when contemplating an upcoming project.  Always a collaboration, of course, between artisan and client – the concrete results incorporate the designer, the owners and their respective environment, be it a home or business.

In this particular case, we knew that the kitchen remodel included a multi-colored slate tile backsplash and the existing natural cherry custom cabinetry. The situation required a little thought about the proper means of tying this together. we opted for a subtle gray/green sage base color for the countertop, with some black sand (recycled coal slag!) added for texture, and a series of one inch square glass mosaic tiles, backpainted in tones to coordinate with the slate’s amazing range of color. These were arranged in a fourquare pattern and embedded at three different locations in the tops. Seen in context, it all makes perfect sense. And that’s why we love what we do – reasons to be cheerful.

Look out below!

At Concrete Detail, we take great care to “do it right the first time”. That’s just one of the reasons we chose that particular name  for the enterprise: to take what is often a common, utilitarian material and refine it into a beautiful, precisely engineered manifestation of functional art for a client’s  home or business. It’s truly “all in the details” when it comes to concrete countertops.

But even the best laid plans go awry occasionally (actually,  rarely!) and something comes out of the form which is not quite up to our standards. It’s that moment of unveiling the day after the pour, when you are finally able to see the end result for which you strove  in the days leading up the actual casting. The culmination of templating, formulating, forming, mixing, cleaning, etc. is revealed when the forms are stripped and the piece flipped over: daylight breaks on the new surface and the alchemy of concrete is manifest. Usually a wonderful moment of revelation, but sometimes things take a turn.

Then it’s  ”Sigh…mutter mutter @%!# mutter” and then,”OK – this is one for the books -please make a note - and off to the docks!” And we haul it out to the  loading docks just outside our studio doors, check for for small children and slow dogs, and at the count of three – ONE TWO THREE PUSH! Crash. It’s somewhat cathartic.

Despite the ailing economy and the continued stall (nosedive) in housing starts, the fledgling concrete countertop industry seems to be on the upswing. We all took a hit in the recent malaise of course- the ripple effect was more of a tsunami in its swathe of shutdowns, postponements and downright failures in the building and design world. But the personal artistic appeal and the sustainable common sense of artisan concrete is making upstream progress against the tide of woe, and noticeable interest is waxing steadily stronger. Remodeling has become the construction option of choice, as homeowners decide they will (or must) stay put for awhile, and make a personal investment in their domiciles (rather than plan for reselling and the bland appeal of mass “taste”).

There is a renewed commitment to giving a little more thought to the true economic cost of product choices, to the “comfort” of a handcrafted surface, and to the local producer (and your own community, by extension). All of this can be realized by making a concrete choice and collaborating on a work of functional art for your home or business – and we would love to help you!

Hand-pressed in gray and blue

Sorry folks – I haven’t been able to steal a minute and post lately… the phone’s ringing off the hook. With the launch of Concrete Detail’s website almost three months ago, the news is spreading and the interest is growing. A recent client (the Vermont Verde Antique-inspiration project) was just relating to me a story about their recent trip down South: nearly everywhere they turned, they saw concrete countertops – at a resort, a hotel, in several homes… And now they will have  one of their own in Brattleboro, Vermont! We have calls coming in from Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and of course Vermont. Concrete countertops have caught the conservative eye of New England and made a good impression; and why not? Concrete is a reflection of the owner and the artisan, a collaboration of art-formed. Always original, always extraordinary.

PS   Final install pictures of the marbled top coming soon…