So one day I drew this imaginary dog named Wally.

Custom Orders, Part Two

2009-06-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

Last week's posting on custom orders was advertised in an email I sent out to the seven hundred or more people on my mailing list. I managed to get some interesting orders and the pictures of these items speak for themselves. Like I said last week, I have mixed feelings about these kind of orders. They are a lot more work than my standard items, but it's really fun to see what people come up with. And the people who order these items are really thrilled to get them, so it's fun to get the rave reviews. Sales are still pretty slow this year, so this is a good way for me to squeeze some extra sales out of a slow economy. If you like what you see here and want to place your own order, just check out the "custom items" section of my webstore. You might want to get your orders in before I raise my prices on this service. Our next kiln comes out in about three weeks!

It's kind of like making custom birthday cakes, only on pottery.

2009-06-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

My apologies to my faithful readers for my lapse in blog postings lately. I kind of dropped the ball on my blog last month and I'm finally getting back in gear here. This week I'm putting together a pair of email sales pitches to my retail customers and my wholesale accounts for a niche market I've been cultivating over the years: custom cartoons on pots. It's a service I've been doing for years, and we always get rave reviews for these items. It's always interesting to see what kind of designs people come up with. Last week, I received a great little cartoon for an order for a commemorative bowl for a dog named Toby who passed away this year. I'm looking forward to putting this cartoon on a salad bowl. To me, this is the perfect custom order: simple, fun to draw and very sweet.

Over the years, I've done dozens upon dozens of these kind of pots. Commemorative wedding gifts are a popular item. One of my all-time favorites had Wally jumping a Harley Davidson motorcycle over the wedding party, on the groom's side were scary biker types and on the bride's side normal middle-class people. It's a timeless story: the good girl falls for the bad boy. For some reason, I seem to have gotten a number of custom orders from Deadheads and Phish devotees. These cartoons are as cryptic as Grateful Dead lyrics: "Harry meets Sarah dancing in The Phil Zone". Unfortunately, I haven't taken many pictures of these items, but perusing my collection of pics this afternoon, I did find a good one that illustrates this point perfectly. If you happen to fall in love at a jam band concert and you want a commemorative item, I'm the guy you need to call, OK? !!!!!
So I kind of have a love/hate relationship with these pots. I've been known to grouse about how much work it can be to draw them. Those "Holy Shit! That's good coffee!" mugs are so easy to draw, I can do them with my eyes closed. Conversely, the graphics on these custom orders are a real challenge. And I don't charge nearly enough as I should for this service. Right now, it will set you back and extra five dollars for a custom order. Pretty cheap, huh? I suppose I should charge more. But when these pots come out of the kiln or when I get that glowing email telling me how the plate with the goofy cartoon made the birthday girl cry tears of joy, it makes me realize I can't stop making these pots for people. To order a custom item, you can go to the "custom items" section of my webstore.

Father's Day SHOUT OUT to Walter G. Edwards: My dad turns eighty this year and he was the early inspiration for my odd style of drawing. When my sister and I were kids, he would always leave us silly notes with lousy drawings on them. I'm pretty sure these lousy drawings were stuck in my subconscious when I picked up a glaze pencil back in the 1980s and started this line of work. Thanks, Dad, for teaching me how to draw like an eight year old!

Odds and Ends

2009-05-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

It's been over a month since my last post and I apologize to my faithful readers for dropping the ball on my weekly blog like I did the past four weeks. I really didn't have much to write about as my pottery work was pretty much on hold due to a series of circumstances. And, in all honesty, I just haven't been inspired to write. But things are finally getting back to normal, and this week's post has some nice odds and ends to follow up on. Here goes:

Bo Obama's dog bowl is out of the kiln! The First Family finally got their dog last month so I was finally able to decorate a few of those blank dog bowls that had been sitting in my studio for many months. For the background on all this, see my post, "I'm on the Obama Dream Team!" Today I'm shipping this minor masterpiece out and my well-placed customer is going to hand it to her well-placed friend who will hopefully personally hand it to The President. I realize that it could blow the surprise for the First Family by posting pics of it on the web right now, so if you are friends with the Obamas, please don't tell them about it, OK?

New topical humor! Along with the presidential dog bowl, I came up with two new designs this week. I couldn't resist doing a swine flu joke, even if that topic is on the wane now. A few months ago, I received some emails from disgruntled Republicans urging me to come up with some jokes slamming the new administration. While this one is a far cry from a "slam", it does take aim at Janet Napolitano, one of the current objects of conservative disgruntledness. I have a very limited number of these available in mugs, plates and bowls in my webstore now, and I'm pretty sure they are destined to be collector's items.

My other new design has much better marketing potential. It's available in mugs only, and I really like the way it could be a joke gift given from a Republican to a Democrat or vice verca. We shipped out a bunch of these to my various accounts today, and I still have a few in stock and available in the webstore. I'm excited about coming up with more new designs later this month, and I should have another firing out in about three weeks.

"I'M YOUR BIGGEST FAN!"

2009-04-01T07:01:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like about forcing myself to write this blog every week is the fact that I'm getting some interesting and esoteric stories about my work loaded on to the the web where they will hopefully be archived forever. This will be a real bonus for the folk art historians of the future who decide to research my odd little niche in the crafts universe. Yes, I realize this sounds a bit egotistical, but when you see the photo at the end of this post, you will see why I'm feeling so full of myself today. The topic for this week is "Fan offerings and the fans that offer them: a trip down memory lane with the stuff people have sent me over the years". Enjoy!

The Tim T-shirt: This came to me from a fan who wanted to make a commemorative shirt for her friend Tim who was going on a trip to Japan. It was always fun for me to wear because people thought it was a typo that it said "Tim" instead of "Tom".

The Fred Babb original plate: Back in the summer of 1989, we had so many orders that there was a six week waiting list for galleries to receive their pots. Oh, those were the days! One of my best accounts was "What iz Art?" in Cambria, CA. It was owned by Julia and Fred Babb. Fred is an amazing artist and he is one of my true heroes and mentors in the world of crazy, fun and magical self-expression. When I told Fred his order was going to go to the back of the line just like everyone else, he sent me this plate as a bribe. It worked like a charm and I squeezed his pots in the next firing.

The silver Wally pin: A jeweler named Jewel sent me this a few years ago, and I love the way Wally looks in shiny metal. I used to do ceramic Wally pins back in the 1980s, and one of them was worn by Demi Moore in the film, "The Seventh Sign". Look for it in the chase scene where she is running through a church wearing a beige overcoat. Wally is right there on her collar!

The Wally Tattoo: This pic just came to me last week from a superfan via email.... really! I'm overwhelmingly flattered by it and I'm still kind of in a daze. It isn't finished yet, as the Wallys need to be colored in and the banner will have a phrase. The words have yet to be decided.... any ideas out there?

P.S. I just got a nice mention today on missmalaprop.com. Check it out!

BJM tonight

2009-03-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

Just a short little post this week as I'm not in the blogging mood. But I am in the sycophantic rock fan mode today because tonight I'm going to see one of my very favorite bands in the whole world, The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Their sound is an reminiscent of The Stones in their psychedelic period, but they have pulled off an amazing feat by creating much more than just a retro sound. A few years back Robin brought home their double CD "Tepid Peppermint Wonderland" and after just one listen I was totally hooked. Their lead singer, Anton Newcomb, is one of the craziest geniuses in the rock world, and his live appearances can be really hit or miss. Check out the documentary, "DIG!" to get a good overview of his eccentric (i.e. borderline psychotic) personality. I was lucky enough to see them live two years ago and the show was near perfect and they played for almost four hours without a break. Other shows have clocked in at just fifteen minutes so it's a real crap shoot what you get when you see these guys. Whenever I see a band in concert, I always like to pick a song I hope they will play. My pick for tonight is "That Girl Suicide". Here's a ragged video of the song:

Post script: It was a great show and they did indeed play "That Girl Suicide". Here's a nice review in Denver Post.com

George Clooney Flavored Tofu Confirms My PETA Conspiracy Theory

2009-03-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

This week I'm going to use my blog to expose something I've been wanting to expose for years: my sincere belief that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) simply has to be run by people who hate animals and they are doing everything in their power to make a joke out of the animal rights movement. This heinous subterfuge has been painfully obvious to me for a very long time, and I'm hoping that last week's ultra-wacky PETA news story will finally make my theory clear to the rest of the world. For those of you that missed it, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk procured a sweat-soaked towel used by actor George Clooney, and she is in the process of trying to develop a food product that will taste just like the academy award winning actor's precious bodily fluid. In a letter to Mr. Clooney, Ms. Newkirk wrote:

"The technology actually exists to take your perspiration and make it into George Cooney-flavored tofu (CloFu). We could do that and give the tofu away. Of course, your fans would swoon at the idea of eating CloFu, but what interests us most is that we would attract many people who don't try tofu because they worry that it would be bland or that they wouldn't know how to cook it."

There are so many levels of bizarre and stupid in the above paragraph that it totally boggles the mind. Why would anyone be attracted to a food that tastes like movie star sweat? If she were pitching smoothies with the flavor of Angelina Jolie's breast milk, I suppose an argument could be made that there is a small niche market out there, but true CloFu aficionados are creatures so rare you will only find them described in abnormal psychology textbooks.

But the abnormal is the norm in PETA-land and to support my conspiracy theory I will list below some of their "greatest hits" stupid news stories over the past decade. These prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people who run this left-wing organization are a cabal of right-wingers. And they are laughing their asses off as they do so.

January, 2009: PETA calls for fish to be renamed "sea kittens" so people will be less inclined to eat them. It makes perfect sense. We'll all stop eating tuna sandwiches if we just change their name to "sea kitten sandwiches".
December 2007: The "KFC blows" campaign in Thailand uses inflatable sex dolls to protest the fast food chain. Again, there is the subtle theme of perversity in this PETA protest idea.
February 2005: "The Fish Empathy Project" borrows the slogan "Fish are friends, not food" from the animated film Finding Nemo. This catchphrase is from that great scene in the movie where the sharks are in the mock-AA meeting trying to deal with their urges to eat fish.
June 2000: The CBS TV show "Survivor" was blasted by PETA protesters over an episode where the contestants caught, cooked and ate some native rats on a remote tropical island. For some reason. the TV viewing audience was unable to develop an empathy for rats.

The sad thing here is that the cause of animal rights is a valid one and PETA continues to make a mockery of the very thing it claims to champion. I've always felt that Greenpeace and PETA are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of smart vs. ridiculous media campaigns. Greenpeace seems to have its way cool public image figured out and the fights it chooses to fight are respectable and thought provoking. PETA on the other hand picks stupid issues. This George Clooney sweaty tofu story is just another example of how idiotic this organization has become. I do wish PETA would dissolve and get replaced by a group that the public can listen to without breaking into uncontrollable laughter. I'm half serious when I say it's a right-wing conspiracy. That's the only logical explanation here. Are there any investigative journalists out there that could prove my theory? I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out my joke was the truth and PETA's "truths" turned out to be a joke.

Long Lost Wallys

2009-03-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

Every so often I get an email from someone who has searched for me on the web because their treasured Wally mug, plate or bowl has broken and they need a replacement. The most recent request came from Mark in Washington DC and the mug that broke was an old design that I vaguely remembered... something about smoking, nihilism and angst. For some reason I couldn't recall all the details of this one and a search through my filing cabinet couldn't produce a photo of the mystery design. Fortunately, Mark sent me a pic of the broken mug and a replacement is forthcoming in this week's kiln load. But the search for the "lost" Wally adventure got me thinking that I really should get my archival act together. So in the interest of posterity, I'm posting below a whole bunch of ancient Wally adventures. Folk art curators of the future take note... all of these are out there somewhere!

"Wally descending a staircase" (a la Marcel Duchamp)
Wally gets an NEA grant to wrap himself in an American flag and sit in a vat of lemon jello
Here it is! The highly controversial Mapplethorpe portrait of Wally
Wally channels Andy (Warhol) and hits the party circuit
Wally still can't figure out the lyrics to "LA Woman"
Wally and Axl Rose do a killer cover version of "When I'm Sixty-Four"
Wally goes to a punk rock nightclub
Wally gets front row seats to a Morrisey concert and becomes celibate
Wally gets a B-52 to sing backup on his new album and has his biggest commercial success ever
New age superstar, "Walli" opens at a Yanni concert with his shimmering cover version of "Holiday in Cambodia"
Wally, the world-class charades master, plays a round where he must non-verbally communicate the titles of old Brian Eno songs
Wally convinces the Jerry Garcia band to do an eighteen minute cover version of "The six Finger Jingle" WTF! This is the most ridiculous and esoteric joke I've ever done! - Tom
Wally and Mr. Rogers become vampires and do a late-night infomercial
Most dogs simply eat grass.... Wally watches "Thirtysomething"
Agent Cooper notices a curious, distinct pattern in the donut scenes in"Twin Peaks"
Wally goes to Hell and listens to the same Barney tape forever
Wally casts Lorena Bobbitt in the leading role in "Edwina Scissorhands"
Wally stars in the low-budget sci-fi epic, "The Two-Headed Dog from Pluto"
Wally, the bravest dog on Earth, operates a leaf blower at Sean and Madonna's house at six in the morning
Wally takes The Pope to a rave
Wally attains cult status
A Wally cult member goes crazy
Wally's friends get worries when he becomes a complete Susan Powter fanatic
Wally humps a watermelon
Wally gets his watermelon a sexy new outfit
Wally gets kinky... menage a trois with watermelon
Wally's adventures with watermelons create a litter of little wallymelons
Wally lands his total dream job: product durability tester at Aacme Love Dolls, Inc.
Wally goes straight to the tabloids with shocking polaroids of hmself and Bill Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton gives Wally the job of enforcing her new health care program
Wally and Tipper Gore star in the environmentally correct remake of "Easy Rider"
Wally and Dan Quayle take the stealth bomber to Vegas
Wally and Dan Quayle fantasize about having a bloodless coup d'etat here in The United States
Wally bumps into Ted Kennedy and Pee Wee Herman at the all-night liquor store, porno shop and dog biscuit emporium
Wally and Al Gore go to a Marky Mark lookalike contest
Wally pulls quite a prank on Japanese Candid Camera
Wally deciphers Al Gores book and finds himself living in an old "Twilight Zone" episode
Wally's mother reveals that Bob Packwood is Wally's father
Wally and Godzilla get a great advertising gig for the Mothra Twins
Wally gets Tonya Harding a job advertising "The Club"
Wally's gay ski shop in Aspen goes broke and he is forced to burn his Barbar Steisand records for warmth
Wally and Mother Teresa blow off World Youth Day and hit the outlet stores in Silverthorne
Wally finds a miracle buffalo pie at the base of the Mother Cabrini Shrine.... is it the divine image of Elvis or Jesus?
Wally gets his very own cold war surplus MX missile
Wally and Joe Camel summon the spirit of Sigmund Freud
Wally gets Rush Limbaugh a date with a feminazi
In a shameless ploy for media attention, Wally agrees to a conjugal visit with Amy Fisher
Wally's bogus environmental organization raises enough money to sponsor a spotted owl driver in the Indy 500
Nike and The Grateful Dead hire Wally and Ken Kesey to promote their new shoe -I love this one.... Ken and Wally are saying, "It's a shoe and a bong! It's Nike's 'Dead Air"

It's Showtime!

2009-03-03T12:53:00.001-08:00

The kiln is out, everything looks good and I seem to be spending a lot of time fussing with the pots today. Taking photos, assembling clocks, gluing magnets and putting together the consignment list has taken a lot more time than it did to ship out the regular wholesale orders I dealt with yesterday. It always amazes me how making your best pots is way less profitable than making your average pots. But it will be fun to have an opening and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of response these new pieces get.

I'm thinking about adding four pieces to the show that weren't done by Noah. Two of them were collaborations with Chris Smith and the other two were painted by John Lacey. All four are some of the most novel and ambitious pieces I've ever been a part of, and they have been gathering dust in my studio for years now. I've invested a fair amount of hourly wages in them, and it would be nice to recoup some of my investment. Also, I can put a high price on them and it will make Noah's "high ticket" items seem not quite so expensive. All four are posted below, and I think it would be nice to get them out of the studio. The first one, a shallow bowl entitled "Chris Smith is a Fucking Genius" took a total of eight hours to decorate. Let me see... with wages, withholding and workers comp, I've probably got close to $120 invested in this one. So if I sell it for $250, the gallery gets half and I make a cool five dollars profit. The other ones weren't quite so time-consuming to paint, but they do represent a high water mark for my art. Yeah... I can afford to get rid of them. It's time.

The Mud-Pie Dilemma Part 2

2009-02-24T17:37:00.001-08:00

I'm not very inspired to post this week so I'll let the pictures do the talking. Noah has been in the studio painting like mad and the show pieces are done. My favorite ones are these plates. I think the colors will really pop when they come out of the kiln. Pricing is going to be weird as some of the mugs actually took longer to paint than these plates, which should fetch a higher price. For some reason, the public won't pay much more than $35.00 for a mug, but a nice plate could get twice that much. If we do another show, it might be best to do nothing but plates. The pic on the bottom are the refrigerator magnets.... too cool!

The Mud-Pie Dilemma Revisited

2009-02-17T16:20:00.001-08:00

The Mud-Pie Dilemma is the much-loved book for all of us baby-boomer potters.Written by John Nance, it chronicles pottery legends Tom and Elaine Coleman and their struggle to earn a living selling pots back in the 1970s. After observing the couple for a number of months, the author concluded that their effort to put together a showing of the best pots of their career netted them a sub-minimum wage for the endeavor. But the photos of the pots in the back of the book are to die for and this text was a true inspiration for me when I started making pots for a living over thirty years ago. Fortunately, Tom and Elaine are far more financially successful now, and their work continues to boggle the mind.

With slow sales in the Wallyware line, I've taken on a mud-pie dilemma of my own. I agreed to throw fifty pots in a collaborative show with Noah Van Sciver, cartoonist nonpareil, really nice guy and my oldest daughter's boyfriend. We've got a show lined up at the Earthwood Gallery in Boulder and the opening night is March 6th. Noah has been working on the pots for a couple of days now, and he should have them finished sometime next week. There are some really nice graphics getting painted on these pots. I was amazed that the very first thing he did in the studio was to decorate the two most ambitious pots of the series: a pair of vases. He knocked them out in a relatively short period of time and they are lovely. So it's going to be a fun show and we are in the process of trying to peddle our situation to various media outlets. It is a really sweet story: the potter/caroonist dad and the cartoonist boyfriend working together in the studio with the Brian Jonestown Massacre blaring in the background. Ahhh... the lives of a struggling artists!

But the finances of this gig are not going to be the best. I think we're going to beat Tom and Elaine Coleman in the profit margin category, but not by much. That's the problem with taking your time and doing your best work. It doesn't always pay off very well financially. But the pots are going to be cool... way cool!

If you want me to re-enact the pottery scene from "Ghost", it will cost you extra.

2009-02-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for a "real" job these days as my sales are way down and my inventory is way up. I've sent my resume off to a few interesting job prospects: 1) a dog toy factory looking for a customer service rep and 2) a funeral home seeking a funeral planner. The second one really captivated my imagination as it looks like a job that would have real meaning and it could be a satisfying thing to do for a living. I have a feeling I would be good at helping grieving people and it would be fascinating to have such a radical career change at this stage in my life. But neither of these potential employers have called back, so my life has yet to go off on a different tangent. Perhaps it's just as well.

A number of people have suggested that I teach pottery lessons and this is a good idea, of course, because I have the skills and the studio for this type of business venture. But I've always had an aversion to the thought of teaching people how to throw pots and I finally figured out why. On a recent episode of NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" the panelists were joking about a news story about British music teachers having to don protective ear muffs to save themselves from the sound of loud, poorly performed music. Host Peter Sagal quipped, "It's like forcing an animal lover to work in a slaughterhouse." This is exactly why I don't relish the thought of filling my kiln with a lot of beginning potters' work. I really love well-crafted pots and I think it would be tough to be involved in a money making venture where the physical byproduct is mediocre pottery. Call me a prima donna, but that's how I feel about it. I just don't have the passion to teach pottery.

The other problem with being a pottery teacher is the fact that most people's impression of throwing on the wheel is shaped by one movie alone: "Ghost". That sizzling scene with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze is still the image that most people conjure up when they think of my line of work. I suppose this could be a hook that I could use to make some real money. I could charge extra for the the "Ghost" experience... light some candles and play the right music. If I'm going to prostitute myself, I might as well do it right.

Sinful Pottery

2009-02-01T19:23:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of sins in my studio right now. The fact is,
I'm dealing with all seven of them: wrath, gluttony, lust, greed, envy, sloth and pride. The reason for this is I'm throwing pots for a collaborative show with underground comic artist, Noah Van Sciver. He suggested the sins as a take-off point for his comic art so I'm knocking out some mugs that will celebrate these seven defects of human nature. Noah is an emerging comic artist and my oldest daughter's boyfriend. I've lined up a showing at Earthwood Gallery in Boulder for these pots and it will be fun to see how they turn out. Sales are incredibly slow in Wallyworld these days, so it's a good time to do something new. I'm feeling particularly slothful this week, so I'll let the pictures tell the story for now.

I'm on the Obama dream team!

2009-01-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

I realized this week that I am now a full-fledged member of a new national phenomenon: I want to get famous by getting noticed by President Obama. I say this in all self-deprecating humor because my little pipe dream has about as much chance of coming through as does a ticket to one of those idiotic multi-state Powerball lotteries. But like the people who own the Powerball tickets, I've got my little dream scheme and there's a small chance that it could happen. And I'm not alone. There are hordes of starry-eyed Americans out there with similar dreams and I'm pretty sure that the majority of these fantasies involve dogs and dog related items. As we all know, the very first promise the president elect made after winning the election was to allow his daughters to get a puppy. It was a brilliant political maneuver that made even the staunchest republicans say, "Awwwww... how cute!"

So now we have TV news stories every day showing us some dreamer with a puppy that would be perfect for the first family. My wife and I were out to dinner with a group of friends last week and our friend Mary has a foster puppy named Karma who would be perfect for the job of "First Dog". This pooch even has a blog aimed at pitching himself to the Obama family. And get this: the very next day Mary and Karma were on the local TV news telling the story of how Karma just might have the right karma to wind up with the name Karma Obama. (That name does have a ring to it, I'll admit!)

The Wall Street Journal ran a story last week on how the nation's capitol is besieged with left-wing dreamers and schemers hoping to get the ear of our new president with their various visions and ideas. It's natural that this happens every time we change the guard, but Mr. Obama's "we the people" rhetoric has exacerbated this phenomenon to dizzying heights. My favorite of the group was the guy who drove his schoolbus into town with an organic garden on top to encourage everyone to grow their own food. You gotta wonder what kind of gas mileage he gets on that mobile victory garden, don't you? I love the dark irony of calculating an environmentalist's carbon footprint.

So what's my dream? It's quite simple: a dog dish. I was contacted via email from a well-placed customer with an even better placed friend who will be meeting with the president this year and he wants to give the first family the gift of a hand-painted dog bowl. I realize that I might be totally jinxing it here by talking about it, but I believe in destiny, not jinxes. If I am meant to be, for the rest of my life, "that guy who made the dog bowl for The President" it will either happen or it won't. Odds are that I will get something in the middle. Yes, I will make that amazing presidential dog bowl and yes it will get sent to the White House. But I'm guessing the odds are that it will be just one of a horde of thousands of Obama dog bowls that will end up getting shipped off to a warehouse somewhere deep inside the Smithsonian Institution. Picture in your mind's eye that final scene in "Citizen Kane" where the Rosebud the Sled gets tossed in the furnace. Such is the stuff of dreams...

My Top Ten Favorite Wally Adventures

2009-01-18T20:01:00.000-08:00

I can't even estimate how many various adventures my imaginary dog Wally has had over the past twenty-five years. The total number is probably close to a thousand, especially if you count all the various custom orders I've produced. Wally has been commissioned to motorcycle jump over wedding parties and "wrestle" with Hillary Clinton, just to name a few. Today I'm going to take another trip down memory lane and present you with my top ten favorite Wally cartoons of all time.

WARNING: SOME OF THESE JOKES CONTAIN DRUG REFERENCES AND SEXUAL SITUATIONS THAT MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUNGER AUDIENCES. PARENTAL DISCRETION IS ADVISED.... REALLY!!!!

#10: "Wally finds a way to secure increased funding for NASA". I really like the simplicity of this one, and it was a good simple political joke for the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion in 2003.

#9: Wally comes home to find his house completely redecorated and Martha Stewart waiting in a bathtub filled with whipped cream". When I first came up with this idea, I thought it was too racy to sell in stores. Wrong!

#8: "Jerry Garcia wills Wally the marketing rights to his obscure but memorable exercise video". I did a number of Grateful Dead jokes with Wally in the 80s and 90s, so when Jerry died I was compelled to commemorate his passing. This cartoon was printed in Bill Husted's column in The Denver Post in 1995.

#7: "Wally is diagnosed with a clinical case of caffeine dependency, thus enabling him to park in the handicapped spaces at Starbucks". I suppose the fact that this one is our #1 top selling Wally mug helps, but it's still a really solid joke. I've drawn it on pots well over a thousand times!
#6: "A 'Random Acts of Kindness' seminar inspires Wally to beat up a masochist". This joke was inspired by the witticism: "A masochist is someone who is kind to a sadist".
#5: "Wally makes the mistake of using George W. Bush for his lifeline on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionare". We made a ton of these five years ago, and I still really like the hook in this joke.
#4: "As luck would have it, Wally's trip to Disneyland falls on the same day as The Apocalypse". I love the premise of this one: the happiest place on Earth on the last day on Earth.
#3: "Wally guest stars in a 'Love Is' cartoon". I never could convince my wholesale accounts to carry this one, but I still think it's about as funny as it gets. Perverted, but funny!
#2: "Wally buys the 'Lost in Space' robot on eBay only to have it nag him about how much time he spends shopping online". If I could think of one joke as simple and funny as this every day, I could do a syndicated cartoon in the newspapers.
#1: "Wally experiences a blind date so bad, it causes severe psychological damages". I had a really great guy who worked for me for about a year, and his name was Kyle. One day he told me about a friend of his who took LSD and watched the movie 'Faces of Death'. Yikes! I just took that story one step further here, and I think it's wonderfully dark and weird.

Wally becomes a leading economic indicator and Tom discovers "Extreme Craft" (and vice versa)

2009-01-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

New cartoon! With depressing economic indicators constantly beating on our brains all the time, it's not surprising that my latest Wally adventure features a connection between the 1930s and the present. I'll be pitching this one to my galleries and retail customers this week, and we'll be drawing it on a bunch of mugs, plates and bowls that will be loaded in the kiln on Wednesday. If you have any specific designs or custom orders you need, be sure and let us know ASAP as Kelly is leaving on her academic world tour later this week. I'll miss working with her but I'm so glad she's going on this amazing trip. Her "Semester at Sea" destinations include: Spain, Morocco, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Japan and Hawaii. All I can say is, "Wow!"

Good news! My first week on Etsy (see last week's post) had a nice little success. I was chosen by Garth Johnson of Extreme Craft as one of the featured artists of the week and my "Lost in Space" plate got pitched to all Etsy subscribers in a mass emailing. Garth is quite possibly the world's leader in championing weird and wonderful craftspeople and the stuff that they make. I'm totally geeked about his blog that features everything from watermelon bras to people who create their own superhero costumes and weapons. I highly recommend exploring this site and reading his insightful posts. With an MFA in ceramics from Alfred and a lifetime of exploring all facets of the craft world, this guy is my new hero. As the other Garth would say, "I am not worthy!!!"

It's 2009! Hello Etsy, goodby Cosmo.

2009-01-04T13:51:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

I'm putting some of my "beginning of the year" energy into building a new website for my pottery at a social networking/retail craft site called Etsy. I came across it last month while I was reading various pottery blogs and it has been getting good reviews all over. It's dirt cheap: just twenty cents to display each item plus a small fee if you sell through their site. I'm using it primarily as a way to find new customers and steer them to my existing online webstore. As I was building my store, literally within the first few hours of being on Etsy, I received an email from someone who had bought my work back in the 80s and was happy to see that I was still making pots. This is a very good sign! The selection of artists on the site is a younger crowd and I really like the vibe. It's like Facebook for artists and I'm looking forward to seeing how well it pans out in terms of sales. I should have my site completely built by the end of the week at a total cost of under ten dollars. Click this link to check it out!

Over the holidays I read the book, "Clear Blogging" by Bob Walsh. It's a very good overview on the mechanics of blogging and I picked up some excellent tips and ideas. It was great to learn that I did a good job of figuring out how to create a blog by just stumbling through it the past few months. A lot of things in life are just common sense. But I think if I had read this book before I started this endeavor, I might not have jumped into it at all. There is a fair amount of maintenance and diligence needed to have a blog that is read by the masses. So from a business point of view, the jury is still out as to whether or not I should be spending my time doing this. But now I have a better sense for how I should focus my writing so it is something people will want to read once a week. It's pretty clear that my weekly posts should:

be really fun to read
be focused on the zany aspect of my artwork
be shorter so as not to loose my audience
use bullet points to make my point, because for some reason you should use a lot of bullet points to make your point

So long, introspective, "talking to myself out loud to myself" posts like this one will just have to go, I guess.

One of the things the book emphasized was to have a "beat" and cover it on a regular basis. This was totally the case with my "Stump the Sage" blog. I started that one on a whim because I really know a lot about rock trivia and I'm a geek for Bret Saunders' trivia shtick every Wednesday morning on KBCO. The blog pretty much wrote itself and it was terribly fun to do. Writing from the perspective of a caustic monkey just fit the subject matter perfectly and I probably could have kept it going if I had much of an audience. But the sad fact is that it just didn't get many hits. The one week that Bret mentioned it on air was good and we got a decent number of viewers. But the next week was dismal and I think the only people who were reading it were people from Clear Channel... DJs and corporate goons. I know this stuff because I have Stat Counter, an amazing service that gives you tons of info on who is visiting your various sites. I sent a fair amount of emails to the KBCO folks to try and get links and such, but they really didn't see it as an asset so I'm letting it drop. So I am sorry to inform you that Cosmo the monkey "died" in a plane crash last week. Life goes on, man. You just gotta deal with it. If this sad news really affects you, I suggest that you leave your thoughts and feelings in the comments section at the "How to Stump the Sage" site (That was a not-so-subtle hint)

Here's a Bowl of Mixed Nuts for the Holidays

2008-12-21T06:24:00.000-08:00

This is my last post for 2008, and I'm happy to report that I've met my goal of putting up a halfway decent article each week. OK... you be the judge of the quality here. It's been a lot of fun writing this blog, and I'm pretty sure I'll keep it going next year as I've gotten a lot of positive responses from fans and friends. I do like the process of writing, and I think that this blog is a good way for me to share my thoughts with the people who buy my work.

Here's a few odds and ends for the end of the year:
"The Goddess of Turkey Media" - I'm kicking myself for not having made at least two dozen of these plates last week. I got an email request to "do a joke about that Sarah Palin video with the turkeys" from a customer in California. After watching the YouTube video, the joke pretty much wrote itself. My initial thought was that this story was a flash in the pan and Wally pots with this design would get old quickly. But the image and story is something that is fun to remember, so I'm going to put this design in my webstore as this could be a great decorative Thanksgiving object to treasure for years to come.

"The greatest gift of all" - I think the best gift that I will have given this year is going to be the one that I made for the sheer fun of it. I'm in a guys' book club that meets at irregular intervals, usually at cheap restaurants where we usually don't talk much about the book that we read. It's a group of men who are a bit older than me and have interesting lives with very successful, eclectic careers (film making, oil exploration, etc.). Last week we met at Bert's house because he has been laid up with a back injury. He and another member of the group traded stories about the misery of sitting at home all day in pain, whacked out on drugs with not much to do but feel like crap. The day before, as Bert's wife was putting up the Christmas tree, the two of them reenacted that memorable scene in "It's a Wonderful Life" where George Bailey goes totally bonkers in the family living room on Christmas eve. Suffice to say, Bert just doesn't have the Christmas spirit this year. Driving home that evening, I realized that I could make a nice commemorative gift out of this story. A week later, the ornament was out of the kiln and I literally ran it down to their mailbox. I live exactly five miles from their house, along the route of my favorite fifteen mile run. Bert called just a few hours later and he and his wife were totally thrilled with their ornament. Bert's wife is a former potter and their home is filled with some truly amazing pots. I'm glad that their collection now has one of my best pieces in it.

"Yippie-kai-yay, Merry Christmas!" - While my all-time favorite holiday movie is and will always be "It's a Wonderful Life", I now have a close second. We were decorating our tree last week and we wanted to put on a Christmas movie but we had a problem. All of our holiday films are on VHS and a lightning strike last summer took out our VCR. Monica had just bought the first "Die Hard" movie on DVD and Lori remembered that the story takes place on Christmas Eve so we put it on. Man! This is the perfect film to prepare you for the stress of the holidays. What are our mere trials and tribulations this time of year compared to John McClane's epic duel with a pack of terrorist/thieves?!!! Christmas music and imagery abounds in this film, as in the scene shown below. I love that moment when McClane's first casualty shows up in the elevator wearing a Santa hat! This film brings back fond memories of Los Angeles for Lori and me. Our first home was just a few miles away from "The Die Hard Building", as we called it. Lori commuted to UCLA where she worked and got her degree, and the cheapest gas station en route was "The Die Hard Gas Station" featured prominently in the film. To top it off, we had seen Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard filming a scene from the TV show, "Moonlighting" one time when we were getting off a plane at LAX. The show was just starting to take off and Bruce Willis was still a relatively unknown actor. I made eye contact with Bruce and he gave me one of those patented eyebrow raises as if to say, "You've seen my show, right?" File it all under, "I love LA".

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

That dude who got elected president is right. Change IS coming!

2008-12-14T05:31:00.000-08:00

Permit me to lapse into the introspective, self-absorbed mode of blogging that was discussed a bit in last week's post. No, I'm not going to show you a picture of a super clean toilet. But I will bare my soul to the world just a bit.

The topic for this week's post is, "How is the current world economic crisis affecting Wallyware Pottery?" The short answer here is, "A whole lot". Ever since the mid 1980s, I've been selling the majority of my work through fine craft galleries. Since then, the fourth quarter of the year has always been the pleasantly busy time of year with each kiln load filled with wholesale orders that get shipped out of the studio the day the pots are unloaded from the kiln. In our heyday in the late 1980s, I had a potter working for me and two decorators painting for me during the holiday season to meet the demand. We had clipboards filled with orders and at times the galleries had to wait up to six weeks to receive their orders. My overhead was a lot lower then, and the cost of everything has gone up significantly for a number of reasons. Needless to say, I used to make a darn good income when we lived in Los Angeles! But this year, the majority of my steady accounts didn't even place their regular holiday orders, and the ones that did sent us much smaller orders than in the past. So I have a lot of pots in my stock room right now and I'm looking at next year realizing that I need to find some new ways to make money. And I'm not alone, am I?

The one bright spot in all of this is that it has inspired me to be more creative. My online webstore was languishing for a number of years and I'm putting more energy into it now and it's paying off. Thank goodness that my fans are still buying my pots! I'm actually getting more orders than last year through the webstore right now, but the size of the average order is significantly smaller than it was just a year ago. As Bill Clinton would say, "It's the economy, stupid." So with the slower sales, I've been more inspired to come up with new designs. My "What's New" section is a real testament to the fact that I'm trying hard to keep this business from going under. The new 401K mug and that Obama ornament are selling pretty well. This blog and the spin off "Stump the Sage" blog have been wonderfully fun to write, but I'm not sure if the time spent on them has been worth it in terms of sales. I'll probably have the imaginary monkey that writes the "Stump the Sage" blog get lost in a plane crash in the jungle in January. Things either wax or wane, and that project should start to wane soon. But it was wonderfully fun to create and it was nice to get a "thumbs up" from Bret Saunders on the radio last week. So the exercise of writing once a week has been a good challenge for me and I'm glad I took it on.

The other thing that is going to make my business change a lot in the new year is the fact that my assistant, Kelly is leaving in mid-January for a four month semester at sea program. Kelly has been working for me for over a year now and she is an absolutely perfect person to work with. She's great at the details of painting and shipping pots, and she is a true friend who is very easy to get along with. To top it off, she is a distance runner with amazingly similar tastes in music, movies, etc. Having her work for me is like having another way-cool daughter!

So rather than hire someone new right off the bat, I'm going to grind out a couple more kiln loads before Kelly takes off and put the pottery studio in a dormant mode if the orders don't come in next month. And I'm guessing that this is going to be the case, considering my orders have been slow the past few months. We will still have pots for sale in the webstore, of course, and I'll be putting a lot of energy into trying new marketing strategies via the web. But I'm preparing for the worst, and to meet my financial obligations to my family, I'll probably have to look for a paying job. This is a bit daunting as, in all honesty, the only things I'm really exceptional at are making pots, running long distance and rock trivia. One of my goals with all this is not to be a disgruntled middle-aged man who feels sorry for himself. I love a good challenge! But it's going to be damn weird as I haven't had a "real" job since 1978, my senior year in college.

So how do I end this post? How about some nice pictures from earlier this week. On Thursday morning I sent Robin an email and invited her to come up to paint pots for holiday gifts. It's something she and Monica have been doing ever since they can remember. She brought her boyfriend, Noah and they had a nice afternoon raiding the refrigerator and painting pots. Noah is carving out more and more notoriety in the local cartooning scene, and I like his work a lot. It was really fun to see what he came up with for the pots. He's got a comic talk/book signing with John Porcellino coming up on 12/20 at Kilgore Books. If you live in the Denver area, check it out!

A blog about a blog about blogs

2008-12-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

My eyeballs are hurting. I've been scouring various "best of blogs" websites this week because I thought it would be fun to write a blog about all the blogs out there. The other day I realized that I started writing this thing a couple of months ago without doing much research at all on what other people are doing out there on the internet. So plowing through the blogosphere this week was fun for a while, but in the end it left me overwhelmed by the quantity and underwhelmed by the quality of it all. And my starting point on this adventure was thebestofblogs.com! I can only imagine how dismayed I would be right now if I had been scouring the average or below average sites. So let me share with you some of the good, the bad and the ugly...

The good: Stuff White People Like is a delightful read and the author really knows how to gently poke fun at people whose ancestors hail from Caucasia. I loved his take on topics like hummus and marathon running. This site is a real treat!

The bad: I'll run for Donuts was the winner of "best sports blog" on thebestofblogs.com and I can't imagine why. He does have a snazzy banner that looks like the Dunkin' Donuts logo, but the rest of it is drivel. This week's post features a pic of his clean toilet and endless chatter about the minutia of his life. Oh, and his posts on how he trains for his five and a half hour marathons are even more boring. It left me screaming like Nancy Kerrigan after she got hit on the knee, "WHY?! WHY?!! WHY?!!!!"

The ugly: Temporary? Insanity, the Egomaniacal Ramblings of a Mildly Deranged Housewife is well written but it's downright creepy. I stumbled on to this one and read the 12/03/08 post entitled "An Addiction". Here the needy, pathetic blogger/guru is discussing her inner demons and threatening her faithful readers with the ultimate form of internet suicide: hitting the delete key on her blog. It's fascinating to read the responses from her sycophantic friends and fans in the comments section of this post, but in the end you feel bad about the unhealthy trip these people are on. Maybe there are happier posts in this blog, but the ones from the first week in December were rather dismal, in my opinion. My advice: go outside and get some fresh air and exercise instead of spending all those hours glued to your computer.

But I have a weird side, too, because a couple of weeks ago I started a second blog! I'm a huge fan of rock trivia and I've won well over a thousand dollars worth of concert tickets over the years with my musical knowledge. My favorite contest is called "Stump the Sage" on KBCO FM in Boulder. Bret Saunders, the DJ, channels the spirit of a crabby know it all and answers questions from the audience. If you pose a question he can't answer, you win the prize. So I put together a fan website hosted by MY alter-ego, a caustic genius monkey with psychic powers. It's called "How To Stump The Sage at KBCO". I'm pitching the concept to the program director this week, because it might just be a good ad for my business. I'll keep you posted.

And speaking of business, here's our latest mug design! We're rolling a bunch of them out of the kiln on Tuesday....

Geek Power! Why wussies, dweebs and nerds make good long distance runners

2008-11-29T14:14:00.000-08:00

Note: This is a rough draft for a "lighter side" piece for the magazine "Colorado Runner". I started it a year ago, and I keep meaning to finish it and send it off. I'm really swamped with things to do this weekend, so posting this is easier than coming up with something new for the week. I hope it's not too self-indulgent. It's way too long and it needs some serious editing. I'm still working on it....

Wussy: a weak, cowardly, or ineffectual person

Dweeb: an unattractive, insignificant, or inept person

Nerd: an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person; especially : one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits

I’m a distance runner mainly because I was afraid to take PE class in high school. I had lousy hand-eye coordination, so any game with a ball was a problem for me. I played just one season of little league, and it was pretty pathetic to be the absolute worst player on the team. While I enjoyed surfing and skateboarding as a kid, the aggressive aspect of fighting for waves in Manhattan Beach, California in the late 1960s was a real problem for me. I was a total wussy when it came time to shout “My wave!” to catch the best waves. I usually just chickened out and took the waves that nobody wanted. As if my inadequacies in sports weren't enough, I was a total science geek. When I was in the third grade, I was one of those “kids say the darndest things” kids on the nationally syndicated Art Linkletter Show. Art asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up and I said, with a cute little lisp from missing my front teeth, “A nuclear physicist.” I got the big laughs on that one. Yup, I was a nerd alright!

On my very first day of high school, while I was walking to school all by myself, I got befriended by a similarly geeky freshman. He was equally scared of all the potential social crap that lie ahead of us. Every day we walked to school together and every day this guy would suggest that we go out for the cross-country team. His main selling point was the fact that if you do cross-country, you don’t have to do regular PE class. This sales pitch really worked for me because I was dreading that hour of the day where I would reaffirm my wussy status. The idea of enduring the pain of running eight miles a day seemed like an reasonable trade-off for the pain of being the guy no one wanted on their basketball team. At the end of the week, we both signed up for the team. A week later, my friend quit cross-country, and I ended up becoming a life-long running geek.

My first season of cross-country was probably the most difficult running I've ever done. At the beginning of my very first race, I went into total oxygen debt after about four hundred yards into that two-mile race. We had twenty-six members on our freshman squad, so there was no pressure at all to have to perform well. It was the exact opposite of standing at home plate in a little league uniform with a bat in your hands and everyone looking at you, waiting for you to strike out. All you had to do in cross-country was show up and run. And social interaction within the group was optional.... such a bonus! By the end of the season, I had made some friends and clawed my way up to ninth man on the freshman squad. I even won a “most improved” award at the sports banquet. That trophy really sealed the deal for me, and I was totally psyched to run track the following spring.

Mira Costa High School had a great distance running program in the 60s and 70s, and coach Frank Carl was a big advocate of high mileage and running year round. Our team was one of those classic sports dynasties driven by a great coach, and it was a rare year that we didn’t win the league championships. I loved hearing all the stories from the upperclassmen about the epic runners from our school’s past. I was particularly intrigued with the guys who had run massive training mileage and turned themselves into champions. Back then distance running was a real outsider sport. We would be on a long run and people would stop their cars and ask us, “Why are you running?” as if they’d never even seen a people out on a run before. I really liked that freakish nature of the sport, so at the end of my freshman year I decided to try a full marathon. It was the yearly ritual after track season for our team get as many runners as it could to run the brutally hilly Palos Verdes Marathon. I don't know how I did it, but I pulled off a miraculous 3:14 to beat all of our varsity runners. I still remember the “what are you doing up here?” look on one of our top middle distance runners when I passed him at the 22 mile mark. It was the first time in my life I ever did something truly exceptional, even if I did get beat by two minutes by Mary Decker. She was eleven at the time, and she was just establishing herself as a true legend in the sport.

One of the greatest freak-geek-nerd distance runners of all time is the amazing Gerry Lindgren. In the early 1960s, he took the national high school two mile record from 9:21 down to 8:40. He was teased mercilessly as a kid, and he says that running away from bullies was the start of his running career. The summer after he graduated from high school, he was one of the favorites to win the 10,000 meters in the Tokyo olympics. A sprained ankle the week before that race put him in ninth place behind Billy Mills' epic win. I had the good fortune of meeting Lindgren in 1974 at the beginning of my freshman year in college at UC Santa Barbara. Gerry and Jim Ryun (former world record holder in the mile) had run in the short-lived "pro track" circuit and were trying to regain their amateur status. They would run some of their long runs with the UCSB cross country team, and I was certainly star struck meeting these two legendary figures in the sport. Jim Ryun was the most shy, mild-mannered guy you could imagine, and I don't think he said much to us at all. Lindgren was the exact opposite: crude and obnoxious with this annoying cartoonish voice that felt like sandpaper on your brain. I know it's mean to say this, but I totally see why he was teased as a kid. In 2004, NPR did a story on Galen Rupp's attempt to break Lindgren's still-standing national HS 5,000 meter record, and they interviewed Lindgren. Hearing his voice on the radio was the weirdest experience for me. I said to myself, "Yup, that's HIM alright!"

I'm not sure if the stereotypical freaks and geeks of my era are still the template for distance runners today. The sport of distance running is far more understood and respected by the mainstream now than is was back in those days. And parenting is a lot different now, too. If a kid has any talent for anything these days, most parents will support and encourage them. I think the pendulum has swung too far in this direction, with all the hovering sports-nut parents putting too much pressure on their kids to succeed. But long distance running will always be the perfect venue for the scrawny and unnoticed kids to transform themselves from the ugly ducklings into beautiful swans. I sure do love that aspect of the sport!

Yeah... I like it but might be a bit too self-centered and nostalgic. I never get any comments on these blogs, so any honest input you out there might have would be appreciated. Maybe I'll polish it up and send it off. Here's a link to another one I did for "Colorado Runner". It's about how guys feel when they get beat by girls. It's called "Getting Chicked".

My Thanksgiving Rant

2008-11-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

I have never liked the adage, "Money can't buy you happiness". It's so absolute and authoritarian. Yes, I understand its intent: to explain why Howard Hughes' immense wealth couldn't save him from his agoraphobia, for instance. But I really think that this phrase is incorrectly worded. Don't you think "Money can't guarantee you happiness" or "Just because you are rich, it doesn't mean you are happy!" would convey the concept a lot better? I suspect that "Money can't buy you happiness" was created when a medieval king commissioned his slogan maker to come up with some effective propaganda to keep the poor folk from staging a revolution. The peasants were getting increasingly pissed off about their standard of living being so much lower than that of the king, so the king used a slick advertising campaign to secure his place on top of the totem pole. With these grand words plus the zinger, "Money is the root of all evil", a peasant uprising was cleverly avoided.

Unfortunately, the economic news of the last two months has gotten all of us a lot more focused on things like money and potential peasant uprisings. Like most of us, I am totally appalled at the sight of some of the richest men on the planet coming to the American taxpayers with their hats in their hands asking for handouts the size of a small country's annual GNP. Suffice to say, things are definitely weird these days. And I'm really feeling it in this year's holiday orders. I sell over 90% of what I produce to a group of less than a hundred fine craft galleries throughout the United States. Every fourth quarter of the year has been roughly the same for me: we get a steady stream of orders in September and October, and we ship them all out by Thanksgiving. Then we get a bunch of re-orders the first three weeks in December and hopefully we have a really low inventory by the end of the year. This year things are way off. A lot of stores that regularly order with us haven't done so, and the ones that have placed orders are down by about half as much as usual. I feel a bit like a canary in a coal mine.... cough! cough!

The main reason I started this blog is to liven up my presence on the web. The sales in my webstore were phenomenally low in September and October, and I attributed it to the economic crisis. This month, my webstore sales have picked up pretty well up due to an email I sent out to all of my online customers. I'm hoping that the next few weeks will see a lot more sales for us through the internet. But the real question is, what is it going to be like in January? If my accounts are laying low during the holiday season, they surely won't order much at all after New Years. By coincidence, my assistant is leaving for a three month "semester at sea" program the second week of 2009. Kelly is an absolutely perfect co-worker, and she will be hard to replace. So if we have a lot of pots still in our stockroom at this time, I probably won't hire anyone new and I will look for other employment. Sounds like fun, huh? I just contacted an incense distributor in Boulder who is looking for massive quantities of hand-thrown incense bowls. This could be a good fall back situation for me and I'm hoping that it works out. I'll still be producing Wallyware, but only to meet demand. You can only have so many pots in your stock room, right? I'm fortunate that my business is out of my house, because if I was renting a warehouse, this would be an entirely different situation. Rest assured, fans of Wallyware. We are far from throwing in the towel at this stage.

OK... that's enough ranting. Now for the things to be thankful for. While my lack of money does make me somewhat unhappy these days, the big things in my life are good. My family is doing really well. I'm married to a wonderful woman who is doing quite well in her career. Lori's job is a lot more stable than mine: she is a tenured professor at CU Heath Sciences and her career continues to thrive. Our teenagers are quite successful, too. Robin is an English major at CU Denver, and she is the editor of the arts and entertainment section of the school newspaper, "The Advocate". She has a host of side projects in other media, as well. This week she got promoted from intern to freelance writer for the print and online version of the A/V section of "The Onion". Check out her latest article. And Monica is having a very nice year senior year in high school. She has excellent grades and test scores, and she has a really great group of friends. It's fun watching her turn into an adult. So we all have our good health and our varying degrees of success, but it would just be nice to get some more pottery sales right now. Because if I'm working at Wal-Mart a year from now, I don't think I'm going to be quite so happy about the state of things.

What's up with that spittoon?

2008-11-14T14:48:00.000-08:00

One of the realities of being an artist is that you end up getting asked to donate your work to a lot of various charity silent auctions. I generally enjoy supporting worthy causes, but over the years I've noticed that there is one downside to this process. Namely, it totally sucks to watch your artwork sell for way less than it's worth. This was certainly not the case last weekend, when my wife and I attended the "Champagne and Diamonds" event for Sense of Security, an organization that raises funds for the basic needs for women dealing with breast cancer. I had donated a serving bowl with the "Wally goes to a party and realizes that he is the only one who isn't on anti-depressants and it makes him sad" design, and it was valued at $90.00. To my surprise, there was a lively bidding war and it sold for $175.00. How cool is that? This week I threw some more salad bowls, and they will be in my webstore in about two weeks. So if any of you people out there who missed out on buying the one at "Champagne and Diamonds" happen to be reading this blog, bring your credit card back to my webstore in a couple of weeks.

Undoubtedly the most ambitious item I've ever made for one of these auctions is "The Unsinkable Molly Brown Spittoon", one of the collectable Wallys I featured in last week's blog. I don't know what got into me, but I was totally inspired to make a bizarre work of art for this year's Rocky Mountain PBS auction. I suppose it could have been the lure of seeing my artwork on TV that made me totally knock myself out on this one. And boy was it worth it! I got to see my magnum opus on TV at 3:00 on a Saturday afternoon... woo-hoo! What a thrill. But the problem with this experience was that my assistant and I pissed away well over a day's labor on it and it only sold for $250. It was valued at $500. I guess the process of putting that much energy into one pot was a good experience, and hopefully it's the perfect interior decorating accent for whoever snapped it up at the auction. But next year, I'm going to do something way less ambitious for RMPBS... probably a set of coffee mugs or something. I've posted the pics of this kick-ass ceramic wonder below for your enjoyment. But please... don't ask me to make another one of these ambitious monsters for your next charity auction.

The 22nd Century Collector’s Guide to Wallyware

2008-11-05T09:02:00.000-08:00

Permit me to indulge myself for just a bit here and let us imagine that it’s one hundred years in the future and Wallyware pottery has become a collectable item. For the record, I never tell fans of my work to buy it as an investment, so we are just pretending here. But a century from now these pots would certainly make an entertaining feature on a futuristic version of “Antiques Roadshow”. And it’s not unrealistic to think that the tens of thousands of pots I’ve created in my lifetime could be enough volume to warrant a small collectables market in the next century. Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, the topical humor I’m doing now is going to seem like it’s from another planet to people in the distant future. So let’s dig deep into the Wallyware catalog and unearth some esoteric and already ancient Wally adventures that will be the most collectable of the bunch, due to their extremely limited availability and/or their significance to history:

1) “NAPPY! HE AM GOOD BOY!!!” (1983) True fact: There is only one of these, and it is the very first image of Wally that I ever drew. It was a gift to my friend Liz, to commemorate an experience she had as a medical intern. Don’t be surprised if someday there are imitations of this plate now that its picture is posted on the web.
2) “The First Wally Adventures” (mid-1980s) These are the very early Wally pots that look a lot like they are drawn by a child. The artwork is crude, and the jokes are incredibly simple: “Wally sees God”, “Wally meets visitors from outer space”, “Wally eats visitors from outer space”, etc.

3) “Happy Wedding, Julia and Keifer. Love, Wally” (1991) Inspired by the big celebrity news of the day, this joke was drawn on only a couple dozen plates. (Note the painted-on sale price sticker!) A few years after I created it, one of the galleries that shows my work sold it to a friend of Julia Roberts who allegedly gave it to the academy award winning actress. How fun!
4) “While negotiating a labor contract with Zigfried and Roy, Wally encourages his clients to get tough with management” (1990s) I created this joke for a fine craft store in the MGM Grand at Las Vegas and it sold pretty well for them. It was kind of creepy in 2003 when the news broke about Roy Horn getting attacked by his tigers.
5) “Wally and Up with People sing their way into the Guinness Book of records in a ditch in Waco, Texas” (1993) I made less than a dozen of these just one week before the Branch Davidian compound was burned to the ground by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. We shipped the first ones out to Twist Gallery in Oregon, and they arrived the exact same day as the tragedy. The gallery owner called us and said, “We need to send these back.”
6) The “Wally and OJ” series: 1995 was a real boom time for us with the OJ trial. The Geraldo Rivera joke was the first, and Geraldo himself held up a mug with this cartoon on his TV show. We did a series of spin-off adventures about the trial, and the high point of it all was sending a batch of plates off to the prosecution lawyers for a special order from the DA of Los Angeles, Gil Garcetti. I even got to talk to Gil on the phone one day. It was so weird!
7) The Oregon Bach Festival series (1990s): For a string of about five or six years, my account in Eugene, New Twist, would order commemorative Wally designs for the Oregon Bach Festival. They were a big hit with the musicians at the festival, and the subjects of the jokes were wonderfully esoteric.
8) The Provincetown gay theme series: In 2004 I received a really huge order for ten different gay themed Wally adventures for my account in Provincetown, MA. That summer we produced a couple hundred pots with Wally as a drag queen, Wally as a giant ape carrying female impersonator Ray Fay to the top of a skyscraper, Wally cuddling with “The Bears” etc. It was quite the left-wing soapbox tour de force!
9) “The Unsinkable Molly Brown Spittoon” (2008) Every year I donate something to Rocky Mountain PBS station and this year I got inspired and created an epic tale to grace a spittoon. It sold for $250.00… cheap! It’s definitely a one of a kind.10) “Wally creates the ultimate political reality TV show: ‘The Perils of Palin” and “Wally defends Sarah Palin’s stand on hunting wolves with helicopters with some folksy backwoods wisdom” (2008) These two adventures celebrate the overwhelming national spotlight on that spunky right-wing Alaskan governor that dropped into our laps a few months ago. I’m hoping that she will go away now, but only time will tell.
If you happen to have any old Wally ceramics out there that might be worthy of this list, feel free to post the titles below. The really odd thing about doing this line of pottery for as long as I have is the fact that there are pots out there that I don’t even remember making. I have shoe boxes full of photos and memorabilia, but I don’t have records of everything I’ve done. It’s going to be an interesting task for folk art historians of the future to nail down all those esoteric designs out there!

Tales from the Parenting Crypt

2008-11-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

As I recover from my sugar hangover this morning after Halloween, let me share with you a couple of somewhat spooky stories. Don’t worry, they are more sweet than scary…

Spooky Story #1: “The Spirit of the Beloved Author” One of the things that my wife and I enjoy about being a parents is watching our daughters connect with some of the same books, movies and music that we love. Why a person gravitates towards a particular work of art is a real mystery to me and I don’t think it can be explained by any single factor in a person’s life. Is it nature, nurture, neither, or all of the above? Two years ago, my youngest daughter was reading Kurt Vonnegut books like mad and I realized that I was the exact same age as her when I plowed through Mr. Vonnegut’s entire body of work. There is something intoxicating about the mix of insight, idealism and cynicism in his writing that fit perfectly with the mindset of a teenager. Monica and I had some great conversations about Vonnegut that year as she read a number of his classics. This topic of conversation subsided after a while, but it resurfaced out of the blue the following year on April 11, 2007 when we were driving home from school. Monica was urging me to read his latest collection of essays, “A Man Without a Country”. I distinctly remember that this conversation between us was quite spirited. Later that night, as Monica was listening to the radio at bedtime, she heard for the first time the news that our favorite author had died earlier that day. And so it goes.

Spooky Story #2: “The Curse of the Music Junkie” My oldest daughter, Robin is afflicted with a genetic curse that must have come from me. She is a total music geek. At the age of four, she was pondering the lyrics to XTC songs, and marveling at the delicate intricacies of side two of “Abbey Road”. This affliction is one of her true passions in life. At the age of nineteen she is a writer and editor for her college newspaper, as well as a contributor of reviews and articles for the “A/V Club” section of The Onion. She also writes for a host of websites and small local publications. She really knows how to follow her muse! Last night she did her midnight radio show on KGNU in Boulder and it was a real treat: an hour and a half of Halloween themed-music that span an amazingly eclectic range of genres. Her shows are archived on the web for just a few weeks after each broadcast, so if you want to listen to this one and you are reading this during the first weeks of November 2008, go to KGNU.org and find her show for midnight of November 1st. It’s a real sweet treat that won’t give you sugar hangover.

Robin in the fourth grade: Her punk rock phase.

What's funny? Talking dirty at dinnertime.

2008-10-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

A big part of my job as a potter/cartoonist is coming up with new jokes to put on my pots. It is by far the most challenging and mysterious aspect of my work. It can be wonderfully easy or totally exasperating, depending on how the idea comes to me. I have all the creative issues that regular cartoonists deal with plus one extra hurdle: the joke has to be something that people will want to look at while they drink their morning coffee. I've noticed that this means that just about any joke on the subject of coffee is pretty much certain to sell well. But esoteric ones like "Wally introduces Pee Wee Herman to Jocyln Elders. Kleenex is required before they shake hands." really don't have that much sales appeal. What was I thinking when I came up with that one? So while I'm banging my head against the wall looking for new material, I've got a marketing director in the back of my brain saying, "Make sure it will sell!"

Right now, a lot of the galleries that carry my work are begging for new jokes about Barack Obama. I've been grappling with this subject for almost a year now, and I have yet to come up with a really good zinger about the senator from Illinois. And a lot of my fellow humorists are in the same boat. Sarah Palin is a total goldmine for all of us. There is so much goofy reality to that $150,000 wardrobe hockey mom that the sky is the limit for jokes about her. But getting a good laugh out of Mr. Obama tends to be a real conundrum. This was brought home to me the other night while I was watching Dana Carvey on The Tonight Show. He is absolutely amazing at doing impersonations, and he did a brilliant job of lampooning recent newsmakers: Biden, McCain, Palin, Tom Brokaw, etc. But when he did his impersonation of Barack Obama, it fell totally flat. I was floored by this, and it completely confirmed my gut feeling that the man who just might be our next president is going to be a tough subject for satire. But I'll keep working on it.

The best way to come up with new jokes is to find them in your daily life. I had a really funny experience a while back. My wife and I were out to dinner with a group of friends, and just as we were ordering our food, our friends brought up the weirdest topic of conversation. Totally out of the blue, they started talking about their way-cool designer toilet. It comes from Japan and it's called a "Toto". It has a heated seat and tons of features, the best one being this weird little motorized bidet gizmo that slides out underneath you and washes you clean when you are done. Yes, this conversation was happening just as we were perusing our menus. I was pretty much speechless during this curious filibuster, but I was genuinely fascinated as I had no idea that commode technology had advanced so much in my lifetime. Where had I been while these incredible technological developments were being developed? I really need to get out more and learn about what's happening in the world. So the funniest part of this conversation came when my friend asked us, "What's the dirtiest part of your body?" For some reason I couldn't answer this one immediately, and the next day I realized that I wished I'd said, "My mind." And then he asked us a rhetorical question, "You wouldn't just wipe your hands with paper to get them clean, would you?" My wife answered this one quite well, as well she should because she has a sharp mind and a PhD in Public Health. She replied, "Well, you don't pick up food with your butt."

The next day I found myself thinking about this situation and I realized that the whole thing was like something out of the TV show "Curb Your Enthusiasm". Larry David, the offbeat writer for "Seinfeld" has made a career out of observing weird interpersonal situations in everyday life and depicting them in his comedy. So that was my Larry David experience! But I really don't think that I'm going to get a Wally cartoon out of it, as it feels like it could be another one like that Pee Wee Herman joke, and the fans of Toto toilets are a pretty small market to cater to. But I do have a new Wally design on a similar subject. It was inspired by my dog, Ivy and it is posted below. Do you think it will sell?

Maybe I should change my name to "Joe the Potter"

2008-10-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

I'm really jealous of this Joe the Plumber guy. Can you believe how much media attention he is getting? I'm googling the news every day to see the latest developments in his story. The most recent is an online effort to get him to run for congress as a Republican in 2010. That's a brilliant idea! Now we have a trend in the GOP to launch candidates who are woefully unqualified for the job, but super flashy in the "fifteen minutes of fame" department. Isn't it reassuring at a time in history when we are facing a lot of really scary Gordian knots in just about every aspect of our society, that we want "real" guys and gals like Joe and Sarah to help us try to untie these knots?

But it's a shame that Joe doesn't have a plan to cash in on all this notoriety because he obviously needs the money to pay his back taxes, gas for his SUV, etc. I really identify with Joe's dream of making more money because that's one of the issues I deal with all the time as a self-employed studio potter. Right now I'm looking for ways to increase the visibility of my work on the web and this blog is, apparently, one of the ways I can increase my "searchability factor" on the internet. Just yesterday, I googled the words "The Caffeine Curve" to see what kind of buzz is out there on one of my top selling mug designs. I was amazed to find that the graphic I had made for this mug was posted on literally thousands of blogs and websites all over the world. I left responses on some of these blogs, thanking the writers for sharing my joke with their readers. I also mentioned that these mugs are for sale at my website. I know, leaving comments on blogs is a lame way to hustle my pots, but it's a start. The funny thing is, a half an hour later I got an email from a blog poster in South Africa asking if I can ship my work to him there. Wow!

So now I'm looking at Joe the Plumber's overnight fame and thinking about ways to try and get the world to beat a path to my door. Any suggestions you folks out there might have would be much appreciated. I realize that getting famous can be a Faustian bargain. It could be a problem that I don't have a valid potter's license and I might have some overdue library books out there. The media can be a vicious pack of wolves if it decides to turn on you. But at least I have a way to make a buck off of it all. So far, Joe the Plumber hasn't gotten that far.