WALLYWARE

Bo’s Dog Bowl

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?

George Clooney Flavored Tofu Confirms My PETA Conspiracy Theory

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.

I’m on the Obama dream team!

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…

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

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 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!!!”

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

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!

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

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.