The Gypsy Gentleman – Episode 03: San Francisco from Marcus Kuhn on Vimeo.

This whole documentary series is incredibly well done and does an excellent job at portraying the both the tattoo artists and the cities where it’s shot. I don’t have any ink, but watching this makes me want to change that soon.

Also: It features great soundtrack by Lucero that is well worth a listen.

Sometimes you find yourself talking about all the things you used to make, the tools you had (worn smooth to perfectly match your grip) that were left behind in a cross country move or sold when other needs became more pressing.  Maybe you were a dedicated hobbyist, a weekend warrior and it became impossible to balance making things with all your daily commitments.

Or maybe, more tragically, you were a craftsman, a Grand Master, and it was the economy, or a cost benefit analysis or something else that took your ability to make things away. But in Cardigan, England the Hiut Denim Company is breathing new life back the town’s tradition of handmade jeans. It’s an inspiring story, that seems to be off to a positive start and is a great reminder that all your  skills and experience don’t go anywhere, they’re just waiting for you to give them another chance.

This is another stunning “Made by Hand” video, this time featuring Belgian designer Kaspar Hamacher’s piece “Ausgebrannt” from 2010. Less a design or craft manifesto than a brilliant visual showing the confidence of practice (I wish my cuts were that confident), this is a must watch.

↬ Core77

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

All of the “Made By Hand” videos are fantastic, but “The Knife Maker” featuring Joel Bukiewicz of “Cut Brooklyn” hits particularly close to home. It’s a great reminder that when making one thing doesn’t really work out, maybe making something else will.

↬ SwissMiss

Basically this band makes fantastic videos. “The Lament of Coronado Brown” was one of my favourite singles from 2011 (and appears on this video at 38:25) and I may actually get the chance to check them out in Montreal next month.

Check pearlandthebeard.com for tour dates.

So things have changed a bit, or a lot, depending on the scale you use to measure major life events.  I am currently in Montreal, studying city building and place making with a bit of sustainable or ecological design thrown in.

I’ve been at McGill and immersed in planning for 6 months now, and while the work load has made it somewhat impossible to think of much beyond studio and stats and graphics, I keep finding all of these really amazing and transformative pieces of art and design and literature that are a powerful reminder of the experience of building and making.

My tools are 4,600 kilometers away and my art practice of short pieces sketched out during lectures are really not enough, so the tone of this site is going to change a bit.  Highlighting makers and the things they make….until Atrux can get back to making things of our own.

So as the title suggests I got to spend some time in the PDX last week.

Portland had a lot to live up to.  During my time in LA it was universally considered the one city I had to see before I headed back up North (unfortunately I wasn’t able to make that happen) and it was hailed as a city with a strong and supportive creative community with great coffee and even better beer.

It didn’t disappoint.

I got to spend some time working on a project for the “day job” with the great folks at Periscopic, and I got to check out a really interesting “conference” put on by The New Communicators.

Interested in how we communicate, the second year of events focused on Reciprocity and how it and unspoken social norms influence communication today.  Presentations ranged from a Keynote examining education and public policy to definitions of all the social media animals you will encounter once you start interacting with the public through a variety of tools.

I also learned that here at Atrux we are what they call “Lükologists” (for more on this great collaboration check out the citizens think tank Research Club) and that creativity (in whatever form you find it) is an asset and every time you go out in the world looking for willing collaborators, you have a way of finding them.

This is the greatest cup of coffee I've ever had.

First on the docket:  “A Lyric a Day” is a pretty self explanatory project by Cheltenham, United Kingdom based graphic designer Luke Beard.

Using lyrics that range from former “Hot Boy” Lil Wayne to current Indie darlings Mumford and Sons, the project is a great introduction to Luke as a designer in a format where he also gets to play around.  The rigid timeline of the project seems to encourage a kind of frantic creativity that I’m sure has produced some pieces that wouldn’t have happened if the work has taken place under more comfortable circumstances.

Another great thing is that as patterns begin to emerge…..

(It seems like Luke is a fan of the collage and portraits from the 50′s and 60′s)

and you think you might have a handle on his aesthetic, he comes out with something completely unexpected.

With over 5,000 Tumblr followers  and a print run of postcards scheduled, this great art project is picking up steam.  Personally I’m excited that we still have four months left to see what Luke can do.

Hopefully it includes more work like this:

All images are property of Luke Beard.  For more check out ALAD on Flickr.

The first baby steps forward happened today:

It doesn’t look like much, but it’s definitely a start.

This is a change, a huge one, for me as an artist.  Working in a format I can barely understand (3 weeks of reading and electrical schematics are still unintelligible), with tools I don’t know how use, while trying to reverse engineer a final product that produces sound without overheating or blowing up.

I am better when looking at staff paper than a circuit board.

But this is helping me remember the sense of possibility that comes with working on something new.  Sometimes we forget that, get into patterns, focus on the art that we know.

Thankfully Atrux isn’t about playing it safe.

Hopefully Week 2 will be just as productive……

Again we’ll keep you posted…..

And while we keep working on the recording projects and some print designs, I got an interesting offer a few weeks ago that I’m pretty excited about.

I have the chance to write for a couple of fantastic musicians as part of a festival for the Los Angeles Friends of the River.

Thankfully a high degree of trust exists between “The Friends” and I and I’ve been given free reign over what the piece can be, with only a single note of caution:  The performance is beside the freeway.

Now for those of you that don’t know basically everywhere is beside (or near) some kind of freeway in Los Angeles, and so while this wasn’t surprising, I thought it was a problem that deserved some consideration.  So I started thinking about the river and how it relates to Los Angeles and the question that I kept coming back to was:

“How do you amplify the quiet?”

(Because truthfully my “small sound” music is going to need a little kick to cut through the billboards and the bright lights of the City of Angeles)

My unoriginal answer (that I kept coming back to) was solar powered amplifiers.

It seemed so simple at the time…..

Needless to say I’ve been reading up on voltage and speaker resistance and Ohm’s law and capacitors and trying to figure out how to read schematics and calculating the DC voltage of solar panel units wired in series.  This is an example of those things you learn in high school that will never be applicable in that thing called the “real world”.

I’m excited (my calculator is tired!) about the possibilities.

Stay tuned for more pictures from what is sure to be a long process!