john t. unger studio

It's only life or death. It's always only life or death

The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn't get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It's an ice calm I wouldn't trade for anything.

The second best thing that ever happened to me was when the dot com crash of 2000 wiped out most of the design industry at the peak of my career as a freelance print designer. I went from turning away work every week to working exactly 7 days of the next year. I lost my girl. I lost my loft. I lost part of my thumb in an accident moving out of the loft. I pretty much lost it all.

Of course, the only reason I was working in offices was to fund the art career I wanted… materials, space, tools, etc. I worked eight hours in the office and ten in the studio, sleeping when I passed out involuntarily. I decided that if my industry had tanked, I was damned if I was gonna retrain to do something else I didn't want to do. I chose to make the art be my sole means of support. I built some monumentally scaled commissions working out of borrowed shop space, with borrowed gear, sleeping on borrowed couches.

It worked. I've been making my living as an artist ever since, and these days I earn triple the income I ever did from the best corporate gigs.

The third best thing that ever happened was the day my studio building collapsed under a load of snow while I was standing on the roof shoveling. I rode that roof to the ground like a gut-shot rodeo pony. The building and some pricey tools were completely destroyed, but I was unharmed… until I spent the next three months (December, January and February) without heat, running water or a stove because the natural gas line into the house had been severed in the collapse. The gas company refused to fix the line until they could bury it in the spring. I lost a few brain cells, I'm sure, by running an unvented kerosene heater inside the house to stay alive.

How was that good? The bank came out to assess the damage, saw my work and suggested I do a $10,000 commissioned sign as the down payment on the remaining two buildings I'd been leasing with an unlikely option to buy. Getting this place had a lot to do with making the art career fly. I had affordable space to work and a place for customers to find me. I don't think the deal would have happened without the disaster… They didn't want to take a loss on the property (or hold it) and I was willing to take it on at the cost of the mortgage before the building fell.

Bottom line:

The only way you can tell the difference between disaster and opportunity is to decide to make an opportunity out of every event.

Postscript:

During the second and third disasters, my friends were pretty evenly divided in their response to my choice to make the world work on my terms.

One camp said, "Dude, you're so brave to just bail on the day job and do your own thing. You're my hero. I wish I could do that." The other camp said, "Look, don't be crazy. Just take whatever work you can get until you're on your feet, even if it's fast food or something. You're never gonna make it without some cash." Really, both camps were wrong (though I love them all dearly).

I wasn't brave. Not the least bit. I was frickin' desperate, is what I was, but not terrified. I was back to that ice calm… you learn that it just ain't over till it's over, and that giving up never got anyone out of a jam. I didn't want a life of stability if it meant I had to do digital layouts of junk mail for a living. I wanted to do what I was best at, what I loved, and get paid for that. It was worth the risk. It was the only real way I could see to better my situation.

I wasn't crazy either. By the time I figured out that the design work wasn't just in a slump, that it wasn't coming back any time soon, I had about $5 in cash and $20,000 in debt. There was no way that a subsistence level job was gonna fix that… I ran full tilt towards the art career because I knew if I did it right, and worked my ass off, I could probably make enough to get out of the hole

I had to think about it again when the building crashed. That time, I almost did pack it in. It felt like my dream was a stupid idea after all, that I had just run everything into the ground betting on a long shot. But in the rural economy here, few jobs pay well enough to escape the poverty line and there are fewer and fewer jobs available anyway every year. A job wasn't gonna save me. It would just suck all the time and energy I needed to realize my dreams, while keeping me alive enough to resent it.

I remembered other businesses I had started on a shoe string earlier in life… each of them ultimately failed the first time something major went wrong because I hadn't had enough cash to keep them going. Or had they? Had money really been the only way to get them back on track, or was it a failure of creativity and nerve? Had they really failed because when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, I'd believed it to be what it seemed, bought into it, walked away because I didn't feel able to do the so-called impossible? I decided that what I really couldn't afford was to waste all the time and energy I had put into building an art career that was just on the edge of being sustainable. I'd come too far this time to back down.

Having weighed the pros and cons of sticking to my guns, I decided to force a positive change out of the crisis. Within a month, I unexpectedly sold a few major pieces, paying off the last of my old debts with the money and having cash left over. From that moment, the art has sold exponentially better each year. If I'd given up at the moment, none of the great things that have happened since would have come about.

Meet me at SXSW Interactive this week

I'm on my way to SXSW Interactive tomorrow morning, driving down. I'm really looking forward to it after having such a blast last year. The best part is always meeting up with friends I don't see often enough as well as people I've formerly only known through the web.The warm Texas weather doesn't hurt either, or the great food, music, etc.

I'll be in Austin, Texas March 7-15. If you're going to be there and want to meet up, call me on my cell at 231.584.2710. Probably the best way to keep track of what I'm doing is to follow me on Twitter. I'll be staying in New Braufels with my friends, the Whipple family, but I'll be pretty available to hang out in the evenings.

This year I'll also be launching a new project I'm really excited about: www.emoodicon.com. I've been working long hours the last couple weeks to get the site ready for launch before SXSW. Just put the finishing touches on it today. What is it? Well, go check it out already… let me know what you think and be sure to enter one of the contests while you're there.

Gift Giving and the Geek Girl

So, I recently started dating someone and couldn't possibly be happier. Marcie totally rocks. She's gorgeous, brainy, geeky, sexy, writes great poetry and prose, and we have all these weird things in common… Like, we're both carnivores but won't eat any seafood under any circumstances, ever. I could go on and on (and probably will eventually… half my posts on Twitter are about her in some way or another) but really I just wanted to post an email she sent me while it's still actually Valentines Day.

We both kind of hate holidays, Valentines Day in particular, so we had agreed to blow it off. But then I was talking with Debra Condren a couple days ago and telling her about Marcie's writing. Debra asked if Marcie had her own domain and I said, "I don't think so." Since Debra has Godaddy on speed-dial in her browser, she immediately checked and said "OMG, her name is available as a .com, you should get her that for Valentines Day!" Well, yeah. I did and even managed to keep it a secret until today. Marcie was totally into it. One of the fun things about dating someone as geeky as I am is that it makes gift giving much more fun.

Later, Marcie was talking with her mom and sent me the following transcript of their conversation:

Mom: So, did you get anything for Valentines Day?
Marcie: OMG, yes, John bought me my own domain name!!!!
Mom: (silence)
Marcie: Website, he bought me a website name, www.marcievargas.com
Mom: Oh...You have to pay for those?
Marcie: Um...yeah
Mom: Okay. Oh, um, so how do I see it?
Marcie: Well, there's nothing on it yet...
Mom: What? What do you mean there's nothing on it?
Marcie: Well, I have to decide what I want to use it for.
Mom: (Silence)      Wouldn't you rather have chocolates?

Love it.

I also got to name an animated cartoon character after Marcie today… Not only is it the perfect name for the character, but the animation even looks a bit like her. It was one of those weird coincidences where I described my ideal woman to the illustrator, and just before I saw the finished art I got an email from someone on OKCupid who turned out to be Marcie. Nice. She's my total dream girl. Yeah, I know, that sounds cheesy, but it's a holiday today. And hey, if you based a fictional character on your ideal woman and then actually met a real person who was a total match and fell in love, well, you might say a few romantic things too, eh?

Making A Firebowl by Night

I was working late in the studio one night, just before the snow came, trying to finish up a rush order of fire bowls for the Sheraton Hotel in Honolulu… My neighbor Preston Cole stopped by and shot a bunch of pictures as the sun went down. They came out just great… I love how industrial the sparks look, ot to mention the great reflected light from the torch. I haven't had any photos of the work process, so actually, I never really knew what the cutting looks like from the other end of the torch.

You can see a finished fire bowl in the left corner, the bowl I'm cutting (of course), a blank behind me waiting it's turn and the huge drift of scrap in the lower right… pretty much the entire life cycle of a Great Bowl O Fire. Preston gave me a framed copy of this image for Christmas and it was the best gift I got this year!

You can click this photo to see it larger.

Happy New Year

So much cool stuff happened in 2007 that I'm having a had time coming up with a list of it all… Hands down it was the best year ever as an artist.

In thinking about it, I've realized that even though the art business has done really well, it's often the social element that really makes art fun for me. I love hearing back from people who are ecstatic with the art they've purchased; I like talking with people about projects and coming up with just the right thing; I dig getting to meet more of the people I've previously only communicated with online; I like the interesting opportunities that crop up as a side effect of blogging, making art, etc.

I got so busy with art, code, consulting, traveling and so on last year that I really barely got a chance to write anything for the blog… I'm going to try to make a better effort this year… I'm hoping that some of the new ideas I've been playing with the last few months will come together to make that a bit easier. More organization, more outsourcing and hiring, and a new studio that I hope to start building as soon as the snow goes (more on that soon).

In the meantime, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who made 2007 rock!

Some of the highlights for 2007 include (in no particular order):

• I sold exactly 100 firebowls in 2007, not counting the Pot-de-Feus and Braziers! That was really exciting… especially since it took two years to sell the first 50.
• I took a trip to NYC and got to meet up with a lot of cool people that I only knew through the web before: Clive Thompson, BL Ochman, Debra Condren, some of the crew at Etsy Labs. The funny thing about New York is that even though I've only visited it once before, I recognized more of the city than I do Chicago where I lived for five years. Weird.
• I spoke on my first tech panel at BlogWorld Expo with Denise Wakeman and Rich Brooks. It was great to get a chance to hang out with both of them.
• I added a bunch of new designs to the firebowl line and came up with some improvements to the way I make them.
• The firebowls also picked up some nice wholesale accounts that helped to make it a record year.
• I've got a new project going with Chris Carfi that I can't talk about yet, but the prototypes just arrived and I'm geeked! Details soon.
• I hired a shop assistant part time this year in the studio. Kurt's been doing a great job on finishing the bowls after I cut them, and the relief of turning over the grinding to someone else is huge.
• TypePad Hacks officially became for hire this year and I've worked with some really great people on some stellar blogs.
• I fell in love with Austin, TX during SXSWi. I'll be going again this year.
• Lots of new equipment in the shop this year, including: A huge air compressor, a forklift, a stick welder, new 7" grinders, and a bunch of assorted smaller gear.
• There was a lot of press this year, as documented on the press page.
• I got to do some really interesting consulting gigs, especially on the PayPal Storefront Widget.
• I found an architect to work with one designing the new house and studio building.
• I learned that I can get ten times as much done as I would have thought, and also figured out that I'd actually rather do a little less and find the time for a real social life ;-)
• There were a lot of really cool projects this year (Like 5 gas fired Great Bowls O Fire for the Sheraton on Waikiki Beach!). I haven't got pictures back yet for most of the really huge projects, but I'm totally looking forward to seeing them.

I'm pretty excited for the new year… Lots of cool projects ramping up already, which I'm really looking forward to. But I'm also going to take a bit more time to get out and travel this year. Should be fun.

The noiser it gets, the quieter it appears

Yeah, I know, sound isn't visible (usually) so my headline's a bit off. What I mean by it is that the busier I get, the harder it is to find time to write about it.

Hugh Macleod lists a few explanations for the slow down on blogs this summer: why we're all blogging less.

A common conversation thread I'm hearing a lot among the veteran bloggers, is how we all seem to be blogging a lot less. The reasons are numerous; here's a short list of the main ones I'm picking up.

1. We got busy. For many of us, blogging created opportunities for us in the offline world, just like the early blog evangelists predicted. And as we found out the hard way, it's actually quite hard to do stuff and blog about it at the same time. As my father, a very smart and observant man once quipped, "A lot of these bloggers seem to have a lot of time on their hands". That may have been true in 2002, back when the recession was still on. It's certainly less true with a lot of people I know.

He seems to have struck a nerve. The comments on the post mostly agree that time is a scarcer resource than when we all started this stuff. Check out his follow-up post for the rest of the story (in which, blogging isn't dead, it's just getting more focused).

I can relate to the whole time issue. I've got scads of photos of new work that haven't made their way to the blog yet. Tons of news, scores of ideas, lots and lots of things that really should get mentioned here. It'll happen, but not until I get caught up on some of the work and opportunities that have come to me through the blog.

I've been through this before, actually. When I bailed on college and hit the streets back in the late 80s, determined to make it as an author, I had a simple theory of how to write. "live an interesting life, and write it down." I quickly found out that there wasn't that much time to write if you really had an interesting life… Plenty of stories to tell, but you had to choose between telling a story or living one. Back then, living the story often took preference over recording it.

Sooner or later I reckon the break-neck pace will slow. And then there'll be a lot of catching up to do.

Brute Force Redundancy and Entropic Distribution

Some tools are so useful that they become hard to keep track of… I can't tell you how many hours per year I spend looking for my tape measure, for instance. I use it in the house, in the yard, in the studio, on job sites… at any given time, it could be anywhere.

I solved that problem yesterday using a new strategy I'm calling "brute force redundancy." I went to the dollar store and bought six tape measures and plan to let entropy distribute them to the places they are most likely to be used. For now, they're all hanging from the tool hooks in the shop, but I guarantee that by the end of the week there won't be a single tape measure on that hook. There'll be one in the car, one in the mosaic room, a couple in the studio and the outdoor work area, etc.. Plus, I made sure to buy bright yellow ones instead of the dark blue I can't find because it blends into shadows. If I could get one that beeped and blinked lights, I would.

With any luck, I'll never waste more than a minute looking for my tape measure again. Yay!

Best Radio Station Ever!

I mentioned KNBT the other day as the station I was listening to while I was in Austin. Roots and Americana music like you wouldn't believe. I'd given up on radio forever, and now I feel like this must be what happens to people who are born again.

I'm listening to it right now over the web… And trying to figure out why no one makes a portable device for listening to online radio? (or do they? If anyone knows of a browser boombox, fill me in).

I'd kill to have radio this good where I live. I figure I like about 99 out of 100 songs they play, which is better odds than when I set up my own playlist in itunes! Because basically, they're playing all my faves plus a bunch of amazing stuff that I don't know. Rock on. This is the inspiration I really needed to set up my old laptop as a music server and run speaker wire out to the shop.

Seriously… go give KNBT a listen.

It makes me want to get a radio license and start broadcasting the best of the web over the traditional airwaves like a cross between NPR, pirate radio and (I hate to say it) MySpace.

In Case No One Believes Me

Very frickin' cool. And I like how they incorporated the star.

WhippleWorld: as Warm and Open as a Texas Plain

When I mentioned on the blog that I would be in Austin, John Whipple sent me an email saying:

Whippleworld is only about an hour from Austin so maybe we could drive up there and see you.

I was totally geeked!

Jimmie Whipple was the very first customer at my ArtBuzz blog and I've stayed in touch with the family ever since… They're very cool folks, which comes through clearly on their blog. The chance to get to meet them in person was really every bit as exciting as the idea of meeting any of the panelists at SXSW.

I'm bad at geography, so I'd had no idea they were that close to Austin. I wrote John back and asked if he had any suggestions for a cheap motel outside Austin (I hadn't made reservations when I bought the SXSW ticket and there was pretty much nothing available in town). He offered me the use of their little Casita trailer that sits on the site of their homebrew music fest, the Woodzie. Here's the trailer:

There's a bunch more pictures at the the Woodzie blog that give you an idea of how beautiful the location is.

The Casita was a totally cosy little place to stay… And actually, there was something just perfect about spending the days at SXSW immersed in tech and and noise and business, then coming home to a quiet little place in the woods. If I'd been staying in Austin, I'm sure I'd have had a blast and partied harder, slept less, and well, generally run myself into the ground. It's a funny thing, because I don't really care for the isolation and quiet in the woods where I actually live, but while staying at the Casita I pretty much came home, turned on KNBT and relaxed for the night.

My first night there, John and Jimmie and I got a chance to hang out and drink some of the 90 beers that Tony Racky had given me for the road when I dropped off the last panel of the Baseball Triptych for LakeView Baseball Club (story to come). We had a great time talking and later in the week went out for all-you-can-eat BBQ and a great open mic in a nearby bar. John sang some of his songs (And yes, John, I was serious… I really want a recording of the one about dustdevil love) which were beautiful.

It's way cool when you get to meet people that you've known from afar in person and they're even cooler than you had imagined. I sent out a gift when I got home that should come in handy on Woodzie Weekend.

I'm really looking forward to another visit!