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Click over to RexBlog.com if you're looking for "Rex's Blog"
October 9, 2009
If you're looking for my weblog, it can be found at RexBlog.com.
9 Things I've Learned About Magazines From Blogging
August 3, 2009
I sure don't post much here
July 1, 2009
I've been described as a "prolific" blogger, but that's not for my record here. It's for my posts over on the Rex Blog. There, and on Twitter.
Do as I say, not as I do
March 24, 2009
Today, I kidded my accountant (and friend) for not updating the information on his website, as his firm moved five months ago and they still have the old phone number and address on the site. Later, he needed to call me on my cell-phone and tracked down this page. Unfortunately, my mobile number on this page was wrong -- and has been for over a year. I guess that's why I don't get many calls on my cell-phone, even though I've shared it on the Internet.
January 27, 2009
The panel I'm on (at 3:45) has the auspicious title: "Bloggers & Journalism: A panel of traditional newsroom and independent bloggers talk about what journalists do right and wrong in blogging. Learn how to be a better blogger."
On the panel with me are Christian Grantham, WKRN's Nashvilleistalking.com; Michael Silence, Knoxville News Sentinel's No Silence Here blog; and Tammi Marcoullier, editorial director of Publish2.
My Sit-Down Visit With Colonial American Craftsmen
January 11, 2009
Three decades ago, I married into a family whose members love furniture made during the early days of America. By merely tagging along on tours of historic house museums and trips to antiques dealers, estate sales and the occasional flea market, I grew to understand the subtleties of design and craftsmanship that provide clues to the style, period and origin of a chair, table or chest. Through the years, I grew more and more curious about the craftsmen who transformed the wood from the trees they found in the New World into utilitarian objects—boxes and stands on which we sit, store items, work or eat—as well as uniquely beautiful art that has lasted centuries.
Specifically, I grew curious about the men who made and sold Windsor-style chairs. Why the Windsor? Perhaps it’s the variety and ubiquity of the style. In portraits of founding families, for example, you can often see a distinctive Windsor feature—perhaps the leg of a chair—peeking out from behind fancy attire. The Windsor style was not limited to highbrow furniture you’d find in the formal rooms of the well-to-do. Chairs in this style could be found nearly everywhere in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, from chapels and schoolhouses to taverns and barns.
My curiosity about the early chair makers grew to the point that I decided to truly understand what these craftsmen were like, I'd need to make a chair myself. I decided to concentrate on a loopback (or, as some would call it, hoopback) side chair. I knew that decision would prove challenging because, previous to that, the only experience I had in woodworking was watching episodes of "The New Yankee Workshop" on PBS.
Fortunately, there is a small but passionate network of Windsor chairmaking enthusiasts around the country—and many have the patience and skills necessary to teach people like me how to make a beautiful chair of our own. (See "How to Make Your Own Windsor Chair" to find out where you can receive instruction on Windsor chair making.)
A slide-show from my Flickr set about the chair.
I quickly learned that a key to making a long-lasting loopback Windsor is using hand-rived, or split, wood from trees that have grown on flat land. Such trees produce beautiful, long, straight grain—the secret sauce that provides amazing strength to the spindles (or "sticks" as the early chair makers called them) and "loop" of a Windsor’s chair back. Riving the wood rather than sawing it ensures long, uninterrupted grain lines. When steamed, bent and formed into the shapes of the chair back pieces—then cured and dried for an appropriate time—these delicate-appearing slivers of wood possess the strength to last centuries, if cared for properly.
Who's Making Windsors?
The desire to make a Windsor chair knows no demographic boundaries.
Our 13-person group included—among others—a medical doctor, a State Department employee, a private investigator, educators, small-business owners, a corporate executive, a "period interpreter" at a historic house museum and a young woman who had graduated from college a few weeks earlier.
We came to the class with different skill levels, but each left with a beautiful Windsor chair. (The John C. Campbell Folk School may be called a school, but since its founding in 1925, the instruction has never been about competition or grades.) We were given the opportunity to make the chair with modern power tools (the school has state-of-the-art equipment) or with nonpowered tools traditional to the early 19th century. A few of the group went completely unplugged, except for the use of modern lathes. Early American chair makers used lathes powered by foot pedals, or, once the Industrial Revolution began making its way into 19th-century America, by waterwheel.
Even those of us who used tools such as power-drill presses to ensure correctly angled holes spent at least 30 to 40 hours of the week doing traditional hand shaving, shaping, carving and sanding on each individual piece that would be used in the assembly of our chairs.
The Chair-making Process
One of the reasons the Windsor chair proved popular—and ubiquitous—among 18th- and 19th-century Americans was its sturdiness relative to the limited amount of materials necessary for its construction. No screws or nails were needed, and the chairs could be made from a wide variety of lumber from trees growing throughout the Eastern Seaboard from New England to South Carolina.
What the chairs didn't need in materials, however, they required in the skills of the maker. It is no small challenge to overcome the laws of physics necessary to make a delicate chair able to withstand the force applied to it daily by men, women and children through the course of decades, even centuries.
While the chair's style originated in England, where artisans developed it into formal and ornate furniture, it became a utilitarian workhorse when it arrived around 1720 in Colonial America. Two humorous scenes in the Mel Gibson movie "The Patriot" make reference to the disparity in the quality of the Colonial Windsor and its fancy British cousin.
Before the Industrial Revolution, individual craftsmen worked alone making the chairs. If especially successful, a craftsman may have been assisted by an apprentice or journeymen chair maker. In those early days, the craftsman prepared each piece of the chair—the shaving and shaping of the spindles, the carving of the seat (or bottom) and the turning of the legs and stretchers.
In the early 1800s, Windsor chair makers began to, in a modern way of describing it, outsource some of the preparation of the stock pieces. Young assistants would prepare batches of sticks, for example. Soon, however, each step in the chair-making process began to be carried out by specialists with titles like "bodger" —- an individual who worked primarily in the forest cutting down trees and splitting logs into the wood stock, or billets, used to craft individual parts of the chair.
Connecting With Early Craftsmen
Using the same tools as the Colonial craftsmen—two-handled drawknives and spokeshaves—our class sat at traditional shaving-horse workbenches carving, shaping and sanding the pieces of wood that we would fit together days later. After several hours of shaving, your hands and shoulders begin to ache, but some time later, the pain goes away. The repetitive movement of shaving down wood is hypnotic, but it requires enough concentration to prevent you from drifting off into a daydream. In the same way Eastern religions suggest that stress can be controlled by being "in the moment," much of woodworking's repetitive tasks can be simultaneously physically taxing and mentally relaxing.
It is during these moments that you are transported to an earlier time. The chair becomes more than the sum of its pieces—it becomes a time machine. As I whittled, shaved, carved and sanded, I had the same sensation you have when climbing to the crest of a mountain and viewing a majestic vista. I got it. I could understand the labor, the hard work and brute effort that the Colonial-era craftsman exerted. But I could also feel the gentle way in which each artisan applied his unique touch to a hundred different places on each chair.
With an inch-deep layer of white oak shavings at my feet and sweat pouring into my eyes, it was finally easy to comprehend the craftsman's pleasure at discovering this most practical piece of furniture is a work of art that will carry on his legacy. I felt that way about my chair, too.
Among the hundreds of funny stories that our close-knit group of chair makers shared was one about a student in a similar class years ago. Tommy Boyd, our instructor, recalled that on the second day of the class, the student said, "I could sell this chair for $700." On the third day, he said, "I could sell it for $1,000." The next day, the man said, "No way am I ever selling this chair." And on the last day: "No one is ever going to sit in this chair."
Making my own Windsor chair was like that. I can put a price tag on what the chair may be worth in the marketplace. But in its value for making me appreciate the craftsmen who first made it in Colonial America, my chair is priceless.
Sidebars:
How to Make Your Own Windsor Chair
While attending a weeklong folk school course is one way to learn how to make period furniture or other woodcrafts, you can also find a place near your home that offers courses in beginning Windsor chair making. Craftsmen, schools and woodworking retail stores provide a wide array of instructional options.
For a beginner, making a Windsor chair can take up to 50 or more hours, depending on the materials used and the techniques followed. Some courses take place during the evenings; others on weekends. There are even options for one-on-one instructional and mentoring programs.
A good place to start looking is the online directory found at www.google.com/Top/Arts/Crafts/WoodcraftWoodworking/Schools_and_Instruction.
Independent and chain woodworking retail stores also offer instructions. Woodcraft , one of the largest such chains, offers Windsor chair courses in nearly every one of its locations coast-to-coast.
These stores have learned it's a good marketing approach to follow an old adage that goes something like this: Give a man a chair, and he'll have a place to sit. Teach a man to make a chair, and he'll be buying power tools for the rest of his life.
Folk Art Schools: Creating Your Own American Craft
Long a tradition in Europe—especially Denmark—"folk schools" began as a way to preserve traditional means of artistic, agricultural, musical and culinary arts. Today, the schools not only serve individuals in the immediate region, but they also attract visitors throughout the nation who participate in short- and long-term programs.
More than 830 different weeklong and weekend classes are offered year-round at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. The school is named after the educator Campbell, who surveyed the people of the Southern Appalachians around the turn of the 20th century. Together with his wife, Olive, he worked to preserve the history of the mountain people and share the intricate crafts of the region. With a heavy emphasis on traditional regional crafts, music, dance and food, the school, founded in 1925, appeals to hobbyists, professional artists and craftspeople. The school makes it easy for anyone to immerse themselves in learning new skills and sharing old ones in the context of the rural, foothills setting.
The school'sWeb site offers a complete listing of upcoming classes and programs, including several related to woodworking.
[Copyright 2009 Hammock Inc. Used with permission. Reprinted from the January/February 2009 issue of American Spirit magazine.]
My Resolutions for 2009
December 31, 2008
I have many resolutions each year. However, I've discovered the ones I keep tend to be rather absurd. For example, in 2008, my resolution was to link to more stories about flying cars. In reality, that was a resolution designed to help me learn about using some new search techniques to track off-the-radar topics.
Recently, I wrote a blog post about adults learning to play musical instruments. I have plans on doing that one day. Not in 2009, however.
Resolution #1: I'm going to attempt to record a short video each day. Most will be screencasts (video screen grabs) that I will post on SmallBusiness.com or a new blog here on Hammock.com called The Conversational Media blog. Others will be fun or random things designed to help me learn more about shooting and editing video with great speed.
Resolution #2: I plan on playing tennis at least twice a week. I used to play at least 3-4 times a week. And then, for the past ten years, I've played little. I started back playing in August and have discovered I enjoy it more than ever. This shouldn't he a hard resolution to keep.
Resolution #3: I hope to read at least 30 books in 2009. I probably came close in 2008, but I wasn't really counting.
Resolution #4: I'm going to work harder than ever to make sure as many people as possible know how talented the folks at Hammock are -- and how passionate we are about helping our clients succeed.
The challenge of this year's Christmas calendar
December 22, 2008
We will then (officially) be closed until Monday, January 5.
I added the word "officially" because there will be people in the office on most of those days due to two factors, one of which is not how much people love the office. 1. Despite several months of planning for the holiday break, this year we've had some work appear that will require a skeleton staff (oops, more Dickens) to stay busy. 2. Some of us love to use that week to catch up on all of those "things we'd love to do if we only had the time" projects.
For instance, we have another blog and an email newsletter here on Hammock.com that we've had on the runway for nearly two months, about to take off. I'm going to address those during the quiet time between Christmas and January 5.
And, as a GTD person (Getting Things Done is a personal productivity system), I've got some "read and review" items (a category I use for dealing with items that are not critical but that I'd like to get around to one day), that I'm looking forward to finally being able to actually read and review.
This year, there will be no travel for my family. As my children are both away at school, they've decided that staying home is the travel they prefer. So we'll be seeing movies and playing tennis (indoors, of course) and watching entire series of TV shows in marathon sessions.
So, bottom line: I'll be around. Easy to reach and not really going off the grid.
However, I plan to be productively unproductive.
Serving Marketers is Our Business - Thoughts from the ABM Top Management Meeting
November 24, 2008
Last week, I attended the annual American Business Media Top Management Meeting in Chicago. Rather than its typical multi-topic conference approach, the meeting focused primarily on presenting the results from a major industry study and recommendations from the consulting firm Booz & Co.
I found the approach refreshing, more like a deep-dive seminar than the typical panel-led sessions of most conferences (did I just telegraph my opinion of most conferences?). The Booz & Co. study (as reported by Hamsa Ramesha for Northwestern University's Medill News Service) focused on "pathways to profitability" for B2B media companies in a period when traditional media is shrinking and digital media is expanding.
As ABM member companies are fully involved in events, digital and print media, it was not a Print vs. Web thing -- most companies are way past that. This study was more focused on the question: "Based on the reality we're living in, what must your company become to be successful in five years?"
Perhaps one of the reasons I really enjoyed the study results may be the way in which the findings and recommendations so closely correspond to much of what we at Hammock have been focused on during the past couple of years.
While I plan to write much more about this in the coming weeks, let me preview it by saying that the Booz & Co. study finds that for business-to-business media companies to succeed, they must focus on one of two pathways: Being a company that serves end-users (subscribers, attendees, etc.) or being a company that serves marketers (custom media, marketing services, etc.). While companies can offer services that target both end-users and marketers, Booz & Co. have not yet found an example of how a company has become a leader in both strategies.
It makes sense to me why they have not, but the reasons why that is so are going to be a part of my follow-up posts on the topic. (How's that for a tease?)
In the meantime, let me say, we at Hammock know exactly what our pathway is: We are going to continue to serve savvy marketers in their efforts to generate more profitable relationships with their customers or members.
Our services will grow to include even more ways to help marketers accomplish that goal via print and all forms of digital and online media. Our services will also grow in ways that will offer marketers the means to measure and manage such programs in ways that clearly provide tangible business benefits to our clients.
We look forward to the continuation of this journey. And I look forward to posting more about it over the coming weeks.
Why are some publishing companies run by people who seem to hate publishing?
(Cross-posted on RexBlog.com)
No stamps honor
publishers who hate
publishing.
publishers who hate
publishing.
Quote:
"That big publishers can't manage to sell enough print ads, in a post-print media economy shadowed by a larger economic meltdown, is not exactly shocking. What is shocking, though, is that they're essentially saying to scrappier, upstart online competitors: Take our business, please! We're throwing in the towel! If we can't play by the old rules of publishing -- the profit-soaked, imperial model with endless layers of coddled management ensconced in luxe trophy offices -- then we don't want to play at all!
Frankly, I should be rejoicing over the phenomena Dumenco is observing as I'm a member of Team Scrappy and not Team Coddled Management. But still, it stuns me to observe what Dumenco sees when he asks, "Looking around at some of America's largest magazine publishers, I see...publishers who are anti-publishing."
A few years ago, I was interviewed by Media Life Magazine on the topic, "Why Magazines Matter" and was asked the question, "Are there any industry-wide practices that you consider detrimental to the business of magazine publishing?
Here was my answer in 2005:
"I think people who don't even read magazines, who certainly don't think about magazines, make way too many decisions about the business and editorial aspects of the industry."
Almost four years later, I'd augment that observation slightly to add that people who don't read magazines or use the Internet or watch TV or go to movies seem to be running certain media companies.
Team Scrappy has the whole innovation playground to itself because people who love media actually run those companies.
Later: So what will happen when publishers who hate publishing pull the plug on publishing? Well, I would be less than transparent if I didn't suggest my belief that companies like Hammock, who help the marketers formerly known as advertisers, create their own print, online and video media, will benefit from this trend. So I'll go ahead and say it. Indeed, I'll go ahead and invite marketers who want to speak directly with customers and not through publishing companies who seem to hate publishing to contact me at rexhammock@gmail.com.
But another thing is happening, as well. As reported in the New York Times this morning, the Kaiser Family Foundation is starting a news service to produce in-depth coverage of the policy and politics of health care, both for an independent Web site and in collaborations with mainstream news organizations. In my book -- and I have 20+ years in this book -- such an endeavor used to be called "custom publishing" and was viewed as something tainted as "non-idependent." I, of course, have been a champion of the notion that media created by or for associations, foundations and even corporate marketers, can provide great journalism, insight and be of the highest quality.
I just never thought I'd be assisted in my advocacy of that point-of-view by media companies run by people who hate media.
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Recent Posts
- Click over to RexBlog.com if you're looking for "Rex's Blog"
- 9 Things I've Learned About Magazines From Blogging
- I sure don't post much here
- Do as I say, not as I do
- My Sit-Down Visit With Colonial American Craftsmen
- My Resolutions for 2009
- The challenge of this year's Christmas calendar
- Serving Marketers is Our Business - Thoughts from the ABM Top Management Meeting
- Why are some publishing companies run by people who seem to hate publishing?
