20-Mar-99 Prints and Suppliers

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First thing (after making orange-whole wheat pancakes for breakfast) I did was to go over to Harris Cyclery and get my new road bike. It was ready, with the water bottle cage, narrow tires, and a straight alloy seat post ready for my bizarre bike seat.

Several years ago at work we saw a motivational video about creative thinking which said (among other things) that the ordinary bike saddle was really a modification of a saddle for a horse, not what you would think of if you started from scratch. It showed an alternative, a new kind of bike seat that had two separate pads to sit on. It sounded reasonable, and when I saw an ad in a bike magazine for the RAD Action Seat I sent away for one. The truth is, I wanted to try it just because I’m scared to death of getting all stodgy and set in my ways as I get older. If I could get used to this thing it would be evidence that I could still do something new. The RAD Action Seat swivels from side to side as you pedal, and the two pads swivel up and down independently. People in the bike club tell me (after they finish laughing) that I should get someone to ride behind me with a video camera to see how strange I look. It took me about two miles on it to be convinced that it was what bike seats had always wished they could be. You have a tiny bit less control than with a traditional seat, but it makes up for it in comfort. With the traditional bike saddle I have to stand up every couple of miles and sort of shake out my crotch, but this one just stays out of the way. I can’t believe that I’m the only person in the Charles River Wheelmen who has one.

At any rate, I put the RAD seat on the bike, swapped out the pedals for the clipless pedals I had put on the old road bike two summers ago (hmm, another non-stodgy move), installed the pump, and put on a flickstand. That's a little wire U that swings out to clamp the front wheel so you can lean the bike against something without its rolling away. It weighs less than a tenth as much as a kickstand and does three quarters as much for making the bike parkable. One of these days I’ll take it for a spin.

We went over to BU to look at the Boston Printmakers Biennial show this afternoon. It’s a show of prints from around the country, and most times is very impressive. This year it didn’t seem so strong. There was an overall lack of color in the show, and a strange sameness to a lot of the prints. Sometimes I’ve gone to an art museum or exhibit and come away saying, “Holy smokes! What a lot of different things there are to do with a piece of canvas or paper!” This show wasn’t that way. A lot of the prints were just black and white or a limited palette of neutral tones. Most of them were representational, and images of the figure, insects, and machinery seemed to predominate.

I think Photoshop is partly responsible for making this show look less interesting. One thing that has traditionally been easier to do with prints than painting or drawing is the layered look that’s so easy to get with Photoshop that it’s no longer special in printmaking.

There were several artists’ books, of which I liked a small one (maybe 5 x 7 inch pages) called “The Tree that Fell into Three Lines” the best. It had color, variety, and witty text. I was excited to see one gocco print in the exhibit. It was the first time I’ve seen a gocco print in an art exhibit of this level. One of the prints with the most color was a yellow background with a single figure on it and words over the image, something like, “When you see a woman dressed up as a woman you don’t think there’s any perverse behavior going on, but there could be as much perverse behavior as when you see a man dressed up as a woman. It just depends on the reason for the dressing up.”

There was an exhibit of student work in the same gallery space. Of those, the one that stands out was called “Catch,” in which you were looking straight up at someone who was leaping into the air to catch a fly ball. It was a dramatic, effective point of view.

A couple of nights ago we got a phone call from a fellow stamp manufacturer who wanted our help locating a source of wood stamp mounts. She told us, “I just called good old Dale, but he’s out of business.” We had placed an order with Dale in July and found out then that he was out of business. We found a place in upstate New York that we got a batch of stamp wood from, so I gave Ellen that company’s phone number. She called back the next night to say that their shop had burned to the ground and they were also out of business. So we’re both looking for a source now.

The art stamp business just isn’t like Apple vs. IBM. Whether a customer wants one of Ellen’s stamps or one of ours depends on how they like the designs, and they can buy several stamps from each of us anyway. The initial purchase isn’t a long term committment to one company’s products. In any event, we tend to behave much more like colleagues than competitors.