WALLYWARE

Bright red dinnerware!! Lust Cats of the Gutters are media darlings!!!

Here’s something completely different….. dinnerware that is 100% humor free! We just rolled out a kiln load with this really wonderful set of these ohata khaki glazed dishes for our own use at home.  I really love this iron saturated glaze and it makes me want to make more of these simple pots.  If anyone out there reading this is looking for a new set of dinnerware, send me an email and we can talk prices.

Last week was a good one for my daughter, Robin.  It started when her riot grrrl band, “Lust Cats of The Gutters” received an impressive write up in famed rock critic Everett True’s blog.  A few days later the Denver Post Reverb music blog featured their song, “Nothing Cool Happens on Dates” in the “steal this track” feature.  Then a few days later their debut CD (it’s really just a demo they recorded a while back in our basement) got a positive review in Denver’s “Westword” newspaper.  How cool is all this?!!!!  And to top it all off, she turned twenty-one on Friday!

April Fool’s Day Odds ‘N Ends

Halloween is for exhibitionists and St. Patrick’s Day is for drunks, but my favorite second string holiday is April Fool’s Day because it celebrates my profession: humor.  I love the fact that nobody even knows the origin of this holiday which was first recorded in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1392.  In honor of this day, I have painstakingly added a bunch of weird odds and ends items to my online store.  The above piece was a collaboration with my former assistant John Lacey, and it was exhibited in the 2002 Colorado Men in Clay show. The thumbnails below are just some of the pots that are available on this hallowed idiot’s holiday.  It is important to note that if you don’t see them in the online store, it means that they were snapped up by an earlier shopper.  Better luck next year!

One of my favorite April Fool’s Day memories is that of a prank that Lori and I pulled on our daughter Monica when she was in the first grade.  We have a family tradition of pulling practical jokes on our kids on April Fool’s Day, and they generally (but not always) have gone well.  This one could have gone bad, but Monica’s keen sense of mischief saved the day.  The joke was simple: we put a note in her lunch that said:  “This coupon is good for one FREE PUPPY!  Simply take it to the principal’s office and give it to him and he will give you a puppy!”  Yes, it’s a knockoff of that great joke about the “free horsie” coupon in Shel Silverstein’s, Uncle Shelby’s ABZs. Monica handled this prank wonderfully well.  First she showed it to her teacher who laughed a lot and told her to go to the principal’s office.  The principal was, of course dumbfounded and couldn’t produce a puppy.  Monica’s memory of this event is that she wasn’t traumatized, and I think she “got” the joke.  The fact that she loves pulling pranks nowadays is a testament to the fact that this wasn’t a case of child abuse.  Either way, the statute of limitations is long gone because Monica is now in a freshman in college and doing quite well. I wonder how her roommates are doing today?

New Year’s Resolution #1: Build a new website!

Welcome to the new Wallyware website!  Our old website at www.wallyware.biz will be up for just a few more weeks as we load all the content on to this one.  I really like this new domain name as I can’t tell you how many times in the past six years I’ve had to say, “It’s wallyware, spelled W-A-L-L-Y-W-A-R-E dot B-I-Z, that’s Z as in zebra.”  And this Wordpress software is really easy to use and update.  Kudos to my oldest daughter, Robin for encouraging me to try this and then spending a day of her time to help me put it together.  She’s really sharp with this stuff and deserves a lot of credit for the look of this site.  It was wonderfully fun to collaborate on the graphics and layout with her.  Thanks, Robin!!!

Here’s a Bowl of Mixed Nuts for the Holidays

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!!!

Tales from the Parenting Crypt

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.

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?