Thursday, June 22, 2006
Hammerthrowback
I work in an urban setting.
Here’s a photo of my office building, in its natural habitat. The area has mostly been built up in the last 20 or so years, though of course it’s been inhabited much longer than that. Just a few blocks from my office, for example, you find
this gritty edifice. For years I wished I needed a coppersmith, so I could go in and get my smithy fix there. And then it came to pass that I actually did need such a craftsman - our ranma was in need of hand-hammered brackets so we could mount it on the wall without punching holes through its century-old self. I’ll just go to the coppersmith, I told myself. They’ll coppersmith me up something in two shakes of a crucible of molten metal.
But when I looked more closely, the coppersmith was just an old preserved facade on a remodeled building housing a design-build firm and some condos. It hadn’t been a cool dangerous foundry for a very long time. I was frustrated and I groused about it to my colleague a few weeks ago as we walked back from a site visit. “I finally need someone to do some metalworking for me,” I complained, “and the coppersmith is gone.”
“Well maybe,” she replied, “but the
blacksmith is still in business.”
Blacksmith? Turns out, yeah, there’s a blacksmith in downtown Suckafree City. Klokar’s has been around since 1906, but it’s post-quake and therefore officially modern. As modern as anyplace that does business using stuff like
this, anyway. Tony runs Klokars, and he runs it his way. He’s got a booming voice and he likes to curse and trade stories and shmooze and enjoy the time god’s given him. There’s not a lot of business at the smithy’s these days, after all, so he makes the most of his time as the Mayor of the 400 block of Folsom.
When I walked in, he was on the telephone in his small, impossibly cluttered office. I bided my time by looking around the front rooms, two dizzyingly chaotic spaces full of greasy old industrial equipment, pieces of iron stock, long tubes and worked plates, and thousands of little projects that had been done for fun or never paid for. A round wooden table stood near the grimy front window, where an enormous plate of pasta in meat sauce sat on a plastic gingham tablecloth. The place resonated with the ring of thousands of
hammerblows, and the dust that blanketed the dirt was there honestly. Everywhere I looked were bizarre, random elements - a towering stack of deck chairs, a juke box, an enormous belt-driven machine lathe built in Detroit and older than color movies. I understood that it was supposed to be an impenetrable mess to anyone but the craftsman, for whom knowing what and where everything was, was such a key part of his craft. It was part of the creative process, and I was there to partake of it.
When he hung up his eyes were goggling from their sockets. “That was my gay nephew. He’s gay, that son of a bitch. That’s some bullshit, huh? Damn. We’re really not in touch much anymore but he called so we talked. They caught him in the chicken coop with his son-in-law. Now that’s bullshit. Huh? Huh? So hey, what, do ya got money for me? What do you want from me, anyway? Do I know you?”
I explained myself, showed him a little schematic I’d drawn up in Word’s “draw” function ("Hey, that’s some good bullshit! You made this on a computer? Hey, now that’s some serious bullshit, there!"); he seemed to get my drift and told me he could work something up. I called back a week later and he was ready with six beautiful brackets. I brought my camera and took some photos of his
vise and his
scary fridge and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t come out so good. I felt a bit self-conscious, frankly, with my shiny shoes and effete camera getting all dusty in the murk of his workshop.
But I have to say, he did a really nice job on my brackets. I can’t wait to see how they look when they’re holding the ranma in place, but for the time being,
they look pretty damn good lying across the top of my dining table. I like the way the iron seems to contain many ages and patinas, and how it’s roughly hammered into broader leaves at the ends, and how it’s full of
texture and infinitesimal differences.
And I especially love that I could get it hand-hammered and custom-forged by a craftsman who practices arts on which society was utterly dependent for thousands of years, but who is now a living anachronism, plying his ancient trade not ten minute’s walk from my bland beige cube on the fifth floor of a 12 story building. As my old friend Tony would say, that is some good bullshit.
