Thanks, Google

I shoulda just hung up.

I get phone calls all the time, Your Google business listing is incomplete, blah blah. (And occasionally, Your listing is not available on Amazon Echo, don't even go there.) They're from scammers who want to charge you to "manage" your listing, something you can easily do yourself online, for free. (As you may recall, "easy" has nothing to do with it.)

No, this was actually Google, or rather, a Google bot, calling to see if our open hours had changed due to COVID-19. Of course, we don't have open hours, because this isn't a store. It's my home studio, which doesn't have a sales space, I sell at Saturday Market, online, and, in a kinder world, out at art fairs and festivals.

Try explaining that to a bot.

After saying "No" in increasingly exasperated tones, I finally snapped "We don't have open hours."

Which is how I spent a frustrating hour at Google Maps trying to get them to take the "Temporarily Closed" flag down.

Finally managed to do so and to get all the spurious open hours (they automatically reset for you. Very helpful.) removed. Almost thought I could get the type of business changed from "Pottery Store" to "Pottery Manufacturer," but upon reflection, they refused the edit. I did successfully add a description to the listing:

Off Center Ceramics makes and sells stoneware pottery at the Eugene Saturday Market and at various Northwest art fairs and galleries. Contrary to Google's inflexible category choices, we are not a pottery store or ceramic supplier.

So, yay?

In other news

I won third place in the Saturday Market Design-Your-Own-Mask contest! I'll have to go pester Dan next Saturday for my prize.

Stamping out pottery

Every now and then, someone will pick up one of my pots, look at the bottom, and ask where my signature is. I point them to the little stamp mark on the side, down near the bottom.

Why don't I sign my work? There are several answers, all equally true.

1. I already spend a lot of time (sort of? I paint fast.) painting the top side of the pot. Don't want to spend more painting on the bottom, where nobody's going to see it anyway.

2. It feels egotistical? Like, art gets signed; this is craft. (I sign and date my sculptures, in fact.)

3. Minnesota Potters use stamps.

The last is probably the primary reason. Minnesota potters draw on the Leach/Hamada tradition, by way of Warren MacKenzie, who taught for many years at the University of Minnesota, and apprenticed under Leach at St. Ives Pottery. Japanese potters traditionally signed their work--when they signed it at all--with a chop, or stamp. Hence, so did Leach, and MacKenzie, and by extension, all of us pot-descendants.

I'm technically a Wisconsin potter, but both of my undergraduate instructors studied under Warren at UM. The first assignment we had, in our first class, was to make a stamp. (The second assignment was to go into the wood shop and make our own tools.)

One of my classmates did jewelry, and made a nifty stamp by soldering together wires of her initials, KS. I didn't have that skill, but I could bend a bit of wire into the stylized "f" I used in signing my cartoons on the campus newspaper. It looked a little lonely by itself, so I mounted it in a piece of round dowel, to make a two-part stamp.

That I'm still using, 40 years later.

Better batter

I may have gotten... a little ambitious. This video is nearly ten minutes long.

Got an email wanting to order three large batter bowls. I've already made nearly everything I need for my August 2 firing, but figured, Why not? Throw four, just to be sure, I'd still have plenty of time to dry and bisque them in time to glaze. And I'd been reminded, looking for music for my coffee cup/painted mug piece, of another Trout Fishing in America song, 11 Easy Steps, that begins "Still spinning around; lowering my orbit."

But I'd already done a video throwing bowls, another one trimming. What would make this one different?

That's when I thought, What if I record the whole process? Wedging, throwing, extruding coil and pulling handles and trimming?

Reader, I wound up with 11 files of video to edit together. The shortest was 19.2 megabytes; the longest, 946.8. All in all, they totaled 4625.3 Mb, over four-and-a-half Gigs.

It's a good thing I have a very big hard drive on this laptop.

I had to edit in another song to make the soundtrack fit, a medley of 11 Easy Steps and Dream, another Trout song. Discovered a few new tricks in iMovie, like how to cross-dissolve between clips, change the framing, make a title card. I'm damn proud of the result. And maybe a little exhausted. Might not be making any new videos for a little while.

Still spinning around...



(Music by Trout Fishing in America; 11 Easy Steps, from Family Music Party and Dreams from Closer to the Edge, Trout Records)