Mostri di Roma

Looking up the Tevere towards Islola Tiburina Water flows through Rome more visibly than time. It is an almost magical presence here, an animating force that makes the Eternal City feel alive in the present. Water streams constantly from hundreds of street corner taps, cold and delicious. Some still flows over aqueducts from the Colli […]

An Argument for Transparency

After making a fairly complex Argument for Simplicity I’m faced with the task of devising a corollary. That is, either clarifying what I mean by simplicity in design, or attempting to make an inverse point, a simple argument for complexity. The latter seems a little facile, bordering on absurd, so I’ll attempt the former. Simplicity […]

Squalls of Fall

November morning over Bodega Bay The first squalls of fall spiral ashore in waves from the open ocean, lending drama to the sky and purpose to our stores of dry wood and kindling. The whales have begun their migration past Bodega Head. American Coot bob in tight clusters like black shadows in the surf while […]

An Argument for Simplicity

As artisans we’re often compelled to make things that last, for obvious reasons. If the thing is functional we don’t want out efforts to be wasted; we want the functionality to remain in tact over time, hopefully adding to a thing’s value. If a thing is purely aesthetic, we want its beauty and meaning to […]

A Fish Story

Dr Constable pilots Belle 76 to Weakfish Thoroughfare, Brigantine Bay, 1976. My first apprenticeship was at the helm of a Boston Whaler, hunting for flounder and weakfish in the back bays of South Jersey with my dad in the summers of the late 1970s. I could pilot a boat years before I had my driver’s […]