This design essay is part of a series, including “The Homemade Limits of Everyday Weirdness” and “Some Public Limits of Everyday Weirdness.” I release these essays on New Year’s Day.

My two earlier essays were about weird domestic arrangements. This one concerns weird everyday objects.

“Every Day Carry” is a lifestyle native to the 21st century. This hobby was directly named after “the everyday.” “Every Day Carry” concerns tools, toys and/or utensils which somebody, somehow, feels obliged to lug around on their own person. All the time. Every Day.

“Weird Everyday Carry” is a niche even more intriguing to me, because it combines my abiding interests in the oxymoronic, the everyday, and the weird. How weird is everyday weird? What are the limits to weirdness? How long has this weirdness been going on?

That term-of-art “Every Day Carry” is a neologism from digital social media, but the weirdness is prehistoric. The term-of-art from archaeology would be “manuport.” A “manuport” is some hand-carried knick-knack, a small shiny object, commonly a pretty rock, that somebody saw and grasped. They picked it up, by hand, and lugged it a long distance, because they were happy to look at it, and they wanted it in their hand

.It’s pleasant to take note of this deep human continuity, the anthropoid’s enduring fondness for collectible curios. When these handheld things seem senseless to us, when they lack clear motive, they lack rational explanation, they’re exotic and out-of-place… then they’re weird.

It is entirely normal and banal, it is non-weird, for people to carry some things every day. In our own everyday era, those might be the standard personal clutter of cellphones, wallets, glasses, pens, and keys… Every one of those ultra-common artifacts would be bafflingly weird by the cultural standards of some past era. You could place your cellphone into the hands of Galileo and that genius-of-science wouldn’t get it, he’d be at an utter loss.

Personally, I carry multitools. I’ve done this — every day — for half a century. This is standard behavior for me. Since I carry these tools so very commonly, and so near to my person, and I use them so often, I’d have to say that multitools are, for me, the least-weird, most-familiar artifacts that I have anything to do with.

I know their histories, purposes, promotions and price points. I’ve seen them built in factories. I can maintain them, modify them and even pull them apart. I’ve pretty well got them figured out. They have no occult mysteries for me. I have one, and often more than one, in hand’s reach every day of my life.

And yet, despite their intimate everydayness, they are protean and unstable objects. In my long intimacy with them, they’ve changed a lot, in strange ways.

Back in the vanished 20th century, I had no modern “Every Day Carry” attitude about multitools. I came from a family of Texan farmers and engineers, so pocket tools were the fabric of our everyday reality. As Texan men, we just had ’em, as tradition. I used them every day, in everyday ways. I never felt at all “weird” about them, unless I broke one or lost one. Then my life became weird without them, because I was suddenly deprived of a host of small, useful actions that I routinely did as my reflexive habits. Everyday micro-acts, that I carried out routinely with my pocketable knife, bottle-opener, scissors and other, odder features.

Every time I lost a tool-set of this kind (which I often did, because I was so young, lazy and carefree), I had to promptly fetch some other one. I always did that, so as to restore my humdrum status quo. I consumed them and I tossed them like pencils. I rarely pondered their weird nature as weird objects manuported through a weirdly changing world. I depended on them every day, and I used them a dozen times a day, and yet I scarcely perceived them. It’s a little weird, how entirely normalized they were.

As Adam Greenfield has wisely remarked, “Design dissolves into behavior.”If you carry small scissors, every day, for years, then those intimate scissors will escape your conscious notice. Your design-awareness — (“Lo! I possess Victorinox scissors!”) will dissolve into habit, as your world becomes a normally-scissorable world.

Even the intimate people around you will thoughtlessly expect you to provide this Greenfield scissoring-behavior. They will ask you to scissor things when you’re wet from a shower in a towel. That request seems pretty weird, but it’s much less weird than pausing your own lived experience to formally, technically recognize that your husband can’t possibly scissor some kitchen-package because his pants are in some other room. Whenever design dissolves-out-of-behavior, it tends to manifest as an odd little crisis of this kind.

Though I’ve used them commonly for fifty years, I’m currently more intensely interested in multitools than I’ve ever been before. In the present historical moment, 2025/2026, I follow their industrial foibles, quirks and furbelows, with the abiding interest that I once had for “personal computers.” I buy multitools like I buy coffee-table art books. I’ve been known to carry four or five different models at once, on belt-loops, in satchels, in bags.

This EDC-conscious cultish behavior of mine surely ranks as “Everyday Weird.” I’m aware that it’s peculiar, and I’m even a little chagrinned about it.

I’m comforted, though, that it’s not all my own fault. I was lured into it by social change. I was beset with peer pressure. I have multitools that are uniquely hacked and even laser-engraved, but “Severe Everyday Weird” would be a tool collector/evangelist who owns glass-topped display racks of multitools. Most of these devices never “carried,” any day, by anybody. They’re mint, like in numismatics.

These zealots diligently pursue and collect extreme, artsy, unique and freakish multitools. They design, make and sell their own models. They have digital marketplaces and specialized regional conventions.

I do not scold these tool-zealots for their zeal. No. I regard them as an interesting, contemporary techno-avant-garde, such as life-extension fans and urban parkour gymnasts. They are technosocial influencers. Normal people are becoming weird like them, much faster than normal people can scold them, assimilate them, or calm them down.

Since I’m a writer and critic, I’m curious about their deeper cultural situation. “Everyday-Weird” — how do people manage such sharp contradictions, and even embody that oxymoron? To directly mix weirdness with daily life is like mixing whale-oil with vinegar. Yet, somehow, this feels tasty and attractive to some people. It’s like a salad-dressing.

What is its deepest context? How does mankind, Homo Faber, the tool user, the master-of-fire, etc., ever end up with a miniature metal jumble of seventeen tools in his pants?

Stealthily, that’s how. Through slow and subtle paradigmatic re-framings, over generations.

Long before our modern Everyday Weird was the Ancient Everyday Weird.

As mechanical devices, multiplex folding tools are at least two thousand years old. But our own current verbal framing, our high-concept of “multitool,” dates back only to the early 1980s.

“Multitool” modernity began when the Cold War ended, with a direct, globalizing collision of Oregonian capitalism with Eastern European material culture. This is the much-repeated, heroic origin-story of a young American technical genius, Tim Leatherman. Tim aspired to fix a broken Communist world with one multiplex gadget from his own pocket. A scheme which sounds weird to the point of megalomania — until you actually are an American in Eastern Europe. In which case, I can personally testify that it makes perfect sense to lug Leatherman “survival tools” everywhere, every day.

Historically speaking, as functional artifacts, those spikey, hingey, ultra-compact Leatherman “survival tools” are intensely eccentric little machines. It took eight years from their workshop-invention for them to find customers and a user-base. But those “survival tools” certainly did survive. These surviving tools successfully pried and chiselled-open their own Overton Window. They more than survived, they prevailed, and every similar tool-set in their product sector has been re-conceptualized, and standardized, and made mundane, and feels commonplace now. They made the weird everyday — even though “folding knives” are prehistoric.

Aristotle, disciple of Plato, mentions a multi-use “Delphian knife.” In Roman times, sets of domestic tools, for kitchen, bath and boudoir, were gathered together on metal rings.

Multiple tools were there in the world ages ago, but they were always special and rare, especially compared to the tumbling iron horde of gadgets from the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution. Built in steaming factories, as micro-factories for the hand, these multiplex, portable tools were mass-manufactured with a new, industrial precision: small, cheap, and much favored by the military. Especially the navy and the cavalry, where the man-in-uniform ventures far from his supply-lines.

A handheld totem of consolation for a fellow in all kinds of trouble, a military multitool isn’t much use. However, it’s a whole lot better than nothing. The traditional use-case for multitools is martial and desperate. In tumultuous military conditions, multitools can’t be weird. They don’t have the cultural luxury of weirdness. Multitools are native to extreme SNAFU conditions where everything must-but-can’t happen right away by whatever means necessary.

Multitools make field-tested sense in the deep confusions of wartime, but like a lot of other wartime things, they’re bad. You have to get fully-used to multitools to understand how authentically bad they are, how lacking in merit as tools. As functional hand-tools, multitools are wretched hacks. Supposedly, they can be a comprehensive toolbox fit for all possible challenges, but they’re all jammed into one small dysfunctional handle. The tiny tools that fold-out from those harsh design-constraints are flat, and weak, and wobbly, and frail, and hard to deploy for any length of time, with any force and precision.

Multitools are a dense little crowd of mini-tools, hand-hurting, badly balanced, munchkin-sized. They’re absurd even at a touch and glance…. but the war-fighter does not care about that. He has the standards of a warrior, while civilian tool standards are for sissies not getting shot-at. His Jack Tar sailor jack-knife, his cavalier Swiss Army Knife — those will be coveted.

Coveted military multitools will be “adapted to civilian life.” That procedure is an odd conversion, and they will adapt weirdly. Military multitools are natives of extreme conditions. They look weird and they act weird. They’re also deliberately made even more weird for civilians. Debased, misunderstood, parodized, and exaggerated. In a vulgar, popular fashion.

This “weirdness” is inherent in the nature of artifacts which have been pushed out of functionality into pocket-adornment status. Show-offy, eccentric multitools are artsy, parodic, and impractical, screechy in their extra-ness and their specialness. They’re more everyday than they think they are, but it’s touching that they aspire to be so weird.

I quite like them: the spectacle of them. Goofy, peculiar pocket-tools that visibly flaunt their weirdness. They have some of the virtues and a lot of the awful vices of science-fiction art. They yearn to become exotic, but they’re too easy to understand. These weird tools bear the relationship to functional “tools” that sexy lingerie bears to the act of sleeping. There’s something timelessly human and endearing about them.

Sometimes, these pocket tools are weird-in-decor and also mechanically and functionally weird. They might have absurd functions, bizarre folding systems, and/or exoticized metals. Multitools are small, and compacted in more ways than one. Their formal distinctions — the way they look, the way they work — tend to melt into one manuported lump. The damascened bottle-cap lifter. The ninja-gentleman’s micro-Bowie-knife. The genuine weirdness of oxymoronic product-categories such as “Luxury Tactical.” Within the everyday-weird, the oxymorons multiply like mice.

Folk-weird knives are old. They’re as old as the folk. Ancient Roman folding knives, which were made for civilians, often featured violent fighting-gladiator themes. Sometimes ancient Roman folding knives were bluntly phallic. These everyday tools were so obscene that they’d subject modern EveryDayCarry zealots to instant YouTube bans.

This folk element of “everyday-weirdness” — I know that it makes for poor industrial-design, but I can’t cruelly dismiss it just because folk culture is for hicks. Soldiers and wannabe-soldiers are headlong, boisterous young guys. They’re not jaded multinational polymaths who write design-essays. I do not scold them. I don’t scan them in airports and deprive them of their trophies. I never flinch at titanium ninja-karambits. I don’t decry ludicrous fantasy-daggers that snap like breadsticks. I brim with avuncular tolerance about “folk-weird.” But it’s folksy. It’s not very weird.

Maybe a figure-ground reversal would help in explaining this yin-yang interplay of the weird and the everyday. This particular tool, which is an ancient folding-knife, is the antihero of my essay about EveryDay-Carry weirdness.

This is the remarkably little-known “Hallstatt Knife.” This artifact is at least 2,500 years old. It was hand-made from iron and bone. It seems to have been carried into Europe by some horseback steppe invader from Scythia.

Scythian horseback invaders wore pants. Those riding-pants might have even had pockets. So the Hallstatt Knife, amazingly, might be somebody’s actual, real-deal, “everyday pocket-knife.” In 600 BC, more or less.

The Hallstatt Knife is the oldest folding-knife in the archeological record. Somehow — I don’t understand why — it has always been very obscure, and never famous. Somehow, that “Hallstatt Knife” is and always has been astonishingly normal. It just plain is. It even ranks with what the designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa would call the “Super Normal.” It would pass for a normal modern product at any cutlery store in the world.

That ancient knife is so impressively normal that no ancient-history buff ever bothers to discuss it or replicate it. Their covetous eyes glide right over it. No one wants to clutch one and grip one. The Hallstatt Knife has no collector-frisson. It has no eager fan base of admirers and users. It’s prehistoric and it has a good origin story, but nobody notices or cares. That’s a truly impressive “limit to everyday weirdness.” Somehow, it has never achieved weirdness, not in 2,500 years. Maybe the Scythian marauder who dropped it off horseback never noticed it was gone.

It is freakishly old — it’s the same age as the Babylonian Exile in the Bible. But it’s as common as rice.

With that important, anti-weird counter-example fully-recognized — (no one will remember my sermon about the forgettable Hallstatt Knife, but I felt the strong need to write about it) — it’s time to pay due court to the star of this essay. An Ancient Everyday-Weird multitool so entirely compelling that I had to have one. I even had to make one.

Nobody knows who made the first one. Or who owned it. Or what it’s for, or why it existed in the first place.

Today, there are four different known models of this ancient, weird device. Three and half, because one of them may be a forgery.

These four multitools are artifacts from the Roman Empire circa AD 100–200. They are severely anomalous. No expert on ancient Rome ever expected to discover tools like these. There’s not a whisper about them in any historical document.

Held in the hand, gazed at, it looks weird and it acts weird. Its decor is weird and its engineering is weird. It’s the weirdest multitool in the world.

This device is so anachronistic, and so peculiar, that it ranks as a weird sister of the extremely weird “Antikythera Mechanism.” That bronze Greek computer also has no known name. It was named after the shipwreck where that computer was found.

The ancient multitool was found in graves, rather than found in some shipwreck, but the same Antikythera principle applies. It was entirely lost to mankind and it reappeared by sheer accident, and people stared at it in disbelief for a hundred years and wondered what-the-hell.

Two models of this complex device were excavated by experts from two known and well-dated Roman graves. The other two models were most likely graverobbed from two defiled and unknown graves. There may be some others. No one knows.

Here they are, after time’s long corrosions, more or less:

The Ventimiglia Set.

The Cambridge Set.

The Ljublen Set.

The Zurich Set.

This item I’m discussing is a grave-toy. It’s ancient, eldritch and spooky. It’s the nameless, heroic, ancient queen of multitool everyday-weirdness. It took me six months of curious effort and exploration to get to the point where I wanted to write something about it.

I’ve seen one personally, which was excavated from an ancient grave. I’ve handled a modern replica of another one. The rest of this essay is about my personal efforts to get accustomed to this thing. I never assumed that I would fully understand it, or resolve the deep historic mysteries about it. I wanted to get close enough to it to “dissolve” it, like I do with other such tools. I didn’t want to crassly dispell the raw wonderment of its existence. Instead, I wanted to be able to take it for granted.

To discuss it in the essay here, I will have to name this thing. Its ancient Latin name (it surely had one) is unknown. Whatever do we call it?

In the English language, this device is often called the “Ancient Roman Swiss Army Knife.”

In Italian, it’s known as the “Voyage Service.”

In Bulgarian, it’s described as the “Surgical Instrument.”

There’s supposedly a fourth one which is owned by a private collector in Zurich. Nobody knows what he calls it.

In this essay, I’ll give it a neutral, anodyne, nonjudgmental name: “The Set.”

I have known about The Set for forty years. But I never paid much attention to The Set. I just took The Set for granted.

My attitude changed while I was perusing YouTube multitool videos (as is my wont). On YouTube, a historical-restoration devotee was demonstrating a modern replica of this “Ancient Roman Swiss Army Knife.” Here he is. On a video available on YouTube. (Available for a while, at least.)

This video demonstrated to me that the ancient Set had emerged from its grave. Somehow, modern people had The Set held in-hand. The Set had become another EveryDay Carry device in YouTube’s thriving EveryDay Carry World. Somehow, this eldritch techno-zombie — as weirdly unlikely as Boris Karloff in “The Mummy” (1932) — had survived Roman Imperial destruction, hibernated through Dark Ages, and returned to public life.

Modern people re-built and owned and carried The Set. They used The Set in the full glare of the public. This activity was visible in social media. It was much remarked-upon.

The re-enactor, a devotee of the Roman Army, believed that The Set was a military multitool — a “Roman Swiss Army Knife.” He assumed that The Set was designed and built for everyday use by ancient Roman soldiers. A sensible and rational idea, aligned with multitool history.

He performed with The Set for his camera, while wearing his reconstructed Roman Army gear. He handled the replica Set in close-up. He manually demonstrated The Set’s practical affordances.

This was “experimental archaeology.” I had heard of that scholarly practice, although I’d never done any myself. Better yet, this was “experimental archaeology” on public display in a social media video. Quite an interesting thing to do and to see.

In terms of the artifact itself— “The Set” — I could feel its weirdness-limits shattering.

I was moved by this — the spectacle of this eldritch Roman Army veteran, somehow drafted into the ranks of modern “Every Day Carry”. Among many other such things, The Set from ancient Rome passed muster as just-another one-of-those-things.

I felt an urge to get closer to The Set, and to get hands-on with it.

The Set was vastly distant in time from me, but physically, it was quite near. I was in Turin, as I commonly am, but the world’s first-discovered Set was in a museum in the Italian town of Ventimiglia.

So, I promptly caught a train to Ventimiglia, a pleasant little town on the Italian Riviera. I went there on pilgrimage to encounter the Set. This was the start of an extensive relationship.

The Set in Ventimiglia was unearthed in 1917 by a Turinese archaeologist. This Italian scholar, Prof. Pietro Barocelli, immediately knew that the Set was weird. He wasn’t much impressed, though. “Multitools” were little-known in his own day, and it was not yet a habit to fuss about them.

However, thanks to the 21st century’s ongoing multitool fetishism, The Set has become a celebrity object in Ventimiglia. The Set has a big star poster on the outside of its regional museum.

I had a contemplative look at this ancient device, which currently exists inside the digitized see-thru screens of its protective vitrine. As a supposed “Voyage Service,” The Set has voyaged maybe two hundred meters from the grave from which it was unearthed in 1917. In its spidery, much-corroded state, one gets the impression that The Set wouldn’t mind returning to some peace-and-quiet.

The people of Ventimiglia are justly proud of The Set. It’s the most famous inheritance from their ancestral town of “Albintimillium,” once the fortress-homestead of the long-vanished Albinti tribe of ancient Liguria. Modern Italian “Ventimiglia” is the same town as old Roman “Albintimillium,” after some of its vowels corroded and fell off.

The Set has the bizarre affect of a manuport from a passing UFO, but it existed in Albintimillium, which was and is a real town. In The Set’s museum, there are other metal contraptions of this specific time and place. High-security, outsized, bronze lock-and-key sets, for the front-doors of local villas. Metallic, springy, complicated safety-pins to secure cloaks and togas. Many other everyday objects that the owner of The Set would have encountered, and maybe owned.

The Set had a user. Like his artifact, he has no known name. For this essay, I will name him “User142.” His cremated ashes were found inside a lead box in “Grave 142” in Pietro Barocelli’s excavations.

The gathered mourners of User142 (“UsorCXLII” in Latin) placed his ashes, and The Set, into the same grave in the town cemetery. It seems that the locals thought that User142 needed The Set, in much the way that he needed the various other grave-goods that they also left.

The grave of User142 held a little ensemble of artifacts, from an organized burial activity. The mourners of User142 ate gourmet snails at his graveside. They dropped the empty snail-shells into his tomb — not as picnic debris, for this special snail-feast was their solemn tribute to him. They dropped and broke four glass jars into his grave (with some long-gone, unknown, important liquids inside those jars). They performed funereal drinking at the gravesite, and deliberately shattered their wine jug, and they left another intact wine-jug, as a farewell toast for him, good old User142.

User142 also received one glass dining cup, one silver dining spoon, and two busted pieces of ceramic with a lion logo on them (User142 would have known what that meant). He also was given a toiletry object, a Roman bath “strigil,” maybe handy for the steam-baths of the underworld.

User142 might have been a woman. There are cases of Roman Empire women being buried with their folding-knives, including one maiden entombed with a lethally-hefty pigsticker whose splendid handle was a stark-naked statue of Hercules.

User142 has no known gender, name, ethnic origin or career. It’s not even clear that User142 ever owned or used The Set. The Set might have been a posthumous gift. Roman burials were ceremonies envisioned as a “send-off,” a ritual of journey, toward the world of the afterlife. In the case of User 142, it was an Albintimillium bon-voyage of snails and wine, for that trip from which mortals never return.

Unlike their little travel-gadgets. Those gadgets can and do return. There are some of them around right now.

The Set was placed in that grave by people who understood it. The Set belonged in that grave. If The Set had been shatteringly unusual, truly “weird” in their eyes, they would have sold The Set as a rarity, and laid on a better grave-feast for themselves. The Set was a thing for an everyday guy, for his modest, decent grave in downtown Albintimillium.

Roman-Empire Albintimillium was a seaside town, like Roman-Empire Pompeii, but poorer, smaller, colder, cruder and ruder. Compared to lavish Pompeii, it was a town from an Italian Scotland where the locals lived off their fish and sheep. Albintimillium never ranked with Portland Oregon, a hotbed of technological innovation where advanced multitools might spring into existence. Albintimillium might have been a nice, quiet place to grow old and die with a multitool. The Set was likely imported to Albintimillium and dropped into a user’s grave there. That’s why a regional museum has it now. All Sets that never became “grave goods” have vanished utterly.

The “Voyage Service” was voyaging — until it pit-stopped in Ventimiglia for 1,800 years. There were also other Sets. The “Cambridge Set.” The “Ljublen Set.” The alleged “Zurich Set.”

These artifacts are versions of The Set. They do vary, and they’ve been studied differently.

The Ventimiglia Set was the first discovered. The Ventimiglia Set also has the fanciest and most-varied features.

The “Cambridge Set” has been well-studied, and is the easiest to study, especially if you speak English. The Cambridge Set was bought on the open antiquities market, with no known origin or associated user.

The “Ljublen Set” comes from a Bulgarian tomb, of a married couple from Roman-Imperial Thrace. The deceased users seem to have been a Roman cavalry doctor and his predeceased wife, who, to judge by her tomb goods, was likely a nurse. We can call this Set user the “Thracian Cavalier,” since he was so well-to-do compared to “User142.” His grave abounded with vases, bowls, glasses, spoons, plates, belts, horse-tack, weapons, artworks and even money.

The last “Zurich Set” is private and has been said to be from Roman-Empire Syria.

All The Sets are weird, but united in similar weirdness. One single Set might be so weird that it could be dismissed as a mere freakish oddity. But four of them? That’s a product category.

The Sets seem to be from all over the Roman Empire. Ventimiglia in Italy is 1,400 kilometers away from Ljublen in Bulgaria. Syria was the eastern rim of the Roman Empire. The “Cambridge Set” model, in Britain today, might even be British in its origin. Britannia, that exotic Roman island colony, abounded in folding knives. Roman Britannia even had folding spoons.

All of The Sets are metal multitools, designed to be carried and used by hand. These multitools have various component tools which lack any settled names. So, for this essay, I will name these tools:

1. The Knife

2. The Spoon

3. The Fork

4. The Spike

5. The Earspoon

6. The Leaf

7. And last and deservedly least, The Sieve.

The fancy Set in Ventimiglia has all seven of the tools, while the other Sets have fewer.

The Spoon seems to be the dominant tool in The Set. If you hand some naive person The Set, and you ask them what The Set is, they will tell you that it’s a spoon. Held and touched, The Set has the look-and-feel of a Spoon. The Spoon is the biggest, broadest tool in The Set, and it’s visibly mounted on the outside of The Set. So at the first glance, at the first grip, The Set is a Spoon with a gadget attached to it.

This Spoon feels important, but the Spoon is also unstable and tricky. The Spoon is attached to a rotating lever. This lever spins on an axle, inside a round hinge, at one end of The Set. When the big Spoon flips over, the other end offers the user a tiny, trident-style Fork.

The “Ventimiglia Set,” the most elaborate model, features a silver Sieve attached to the Spoon, while the Fork deploys on its own special pivot.

All four of The Sets have Forks. These trident-shaped jabbing-tools do not behave at all like modern table-forks.

All of The Sets once had iron Knives, which have rusted away. These Knives were likely similar to the everyday blades in other Roman folding knives. Simple “slip-joint” blades, good for slicing, not much good for jabbing or stabbing.

The Set also contains the highly unusual panoply of the Spike, the Earspoon, and the Leaf. All three tools are always present in all the models of The Set.

The Spike is a thin, fold-out tool almost as long as the Knife. The Spike is pointed, but it has no sharp edge. The Spike is clearly built for poking, probing, piercing and perforating. When the Spike and the Spoon are both deployed at once, then the two tools together closely resemble an everyday Roman table-spoon. Normal Roman spoons had long handles ending in a spikey point.

The peculiar “Earspoon” resembles a well-known Roman grooming implement designed to scrape the wax from inside human ears. The Earspoon is a round, flattened, slightly bent metal bead at the end of a prong. The Earspoon is a small, short, and delicate tool, maybe long enough to reach and clean a human ear canal. I choose to call this tool “the Earspoon,” not because I really think it was made for cleaning human ears, but because it looks more like a Roman “Earspoon” than it looks like anything else.

The “Leaf” is utterly mysterious. In over a century, nobody has ever known what to name it. This “Hook,” “Toothpick,” “Nail-Cleaner,” “Spatula,” “Hoof-Pick,” “Phleam,” “Strigil,” etc, is a small, delicate tool shaped like the curvilinear talon of a cat. It has one bent, tear-drop-shaped hole filed though it.

Except for the mysterious Leaf, all the other tools in The Set: the Spoon, the Fork, the Knife, the Spike, the Sieve and even the Earspoon — they all look and act like miniature versions of well-known Roman hand-tools. They’re flat, compacted, shrunken tools and therefore pretty weird, but these tools once had independent, verifiable existences as everyday tools in the Roman Empire. The Leaf, by contrast, is a tool like nothing else known anywhere. The Leaf appears to exist as an artifact only among the tools of The Set.

Also, the four Leaves among the four different Sets are different in shape. They are more variant and apparently fanciful than any of the other tools in The Set. The Leaf is not just weird, but decisively, differently weird. All Sets do have the Leaf, though. A Set without a Leaf is not a Set.

The Sieve exists only in the Ventimiglia Set. The Sieve is a unique component of the most elaborate Set. This Sieve is a tiny metal cup shaped like a modern tea-strainer, with many dainty little holes drilled to drain and strain fluids. The Sieve is so tiny that it could contain maybe half of one modern teabag. It’s hard to understand what precious substance this Sieve might have plausibly filtered.

All the Sets have metal shells to encase and hold The Set’s multiple tools. One end of the case is always doubled-over to form a rounded hinge, which is the important rotation-axle of the exterior Spoon-Fork combo. The other end of The Set’s case is held together with metal rivets.

The metal case shelters the Knife, and also serves to sandwich-together the Spike, Earspoon, and the Leaf. The metal cases of The Set are always “openwork,” elaborate, decorative and frail. Solid metal shells would have worked much better for a multitool, but the cases of The Set are delicate, ornate and dainty.

The Set’s frames vary. They’re hand-made, of different lengths and widths. Some have built-in locking devices to secure the folding tools. All Sets have decorative, look-at-me motifs. Some resemble a military shield. All four Sets have a curvilinear structure. It always resembles the shape of a lyre.

This lyre decoration — it was hard to build by hand, because it’s fussy — seems to be an important design element that identifies a set of tools as “The Set.”

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I built The Set. Or, rather, I built various models of The Set, and the various components of The Set. The original builders made their Sets in forges, but I assembled my Sets under a shade-tree, out of modern industrial debris. It took me about six months of occasional, contemplative labor, until finally I ended up with a workable version of The Set that satisfied my curiosity. Then I was able to stop.

At first, I thought that I would just buy a modern replica of The Set — because hobbyists do make copies, and I’d held one. I thought that I might carry The Set around in my pocket, Every Day, and figure out what it might be “good for.”

But in contemplating The Set in closer detail — and especially, after confronting a genuine dead one — I changed my mind about that. The Set was not a toy for a modern purchase and my personal use. There might be some aspects of The Set that were personally good-for-me to have and use, but with that narrow attitude, I couldn’t learn what mattered about it. The Set was clearly a “personal tool,” but I needed to get closer to the stakeholders of The Set’s general enterprise — the various people who had designed it, built it, handled it, travelled with it, used it and put it in a grave.

If you make a “design fiction” object, you need to engage with futuristic speculations. The concerted, focussed effort in futurism is the point of doing design fiction. Through design, you want speculations to look-and-feel embodied. Not as a verbal narrative, like the vaporous rhetorical larks of a sci-fi writer. As an “object that tells the world.” As a “deliberate effort to suspend disbelief about change.”

The Set is not a design-fiction. It is an already-embodied thing. It seemed important to me to learn to fantasize about it less. “The past is a future that already happened.” An object of the past can speak like a design-fiction speaks, but not in futuristic speculation. Instead, it whispers about a genuine, vanished world. You engage with it in the hope that the process of rebuilding and using it will be revelatory of past worldly circumstances. You want it to behave as a “diegetic archaeotype.”

I’ll offer a quadrant diagram here. Here we have a chart of various efforts to rebuild ancient everyday-objects. We can divide these on two important axes.

Do these objects perform, do they function like the old thing once functioned — or do they merely look old, as visual representations?

Also: were the objects made with the same materials and processes as the old objects? Do they have the same designer “grain of the material”? Or do they use modern processes and materials to make objects that are modern analogies of the old object?

I’m not judgmental about which of these approaches are “better,” but these approaches scatter widely. At the chart’s center is the “museum quality replica.” This is our current modern consensus about rebuilt objects which are not old, but are presented as closely related to old things, within a historically-aware, institutionally-approved, public context.

The museum-quality replica is our culturally legitimated version of a rebuilt ancient object. We haven’t yet invented any method to rebuild and valorize replicas of better quality. So, in this quadrant, it’s at the cross-haired center of the field.

Up in the extremist make-believe corner is the historical FX prop from historical TV, games and/or movies, an embodied fantasy which merely has to look good, temporarily. Costume-play is an amateur-theatricals version of a professional FX-prop of this kind. As far as the materials go, most anything is permitted, since the end-goal is to get the shot, or to strut the stage.

If the materials are valuable, then this value provokes fakes and forgeries. They’re rebuilt and seem ancient, but they’re fraudulent.

“Creative anachronisms” are often created with antique means and materials. Some mastery of antique craft-effort is central to this modern form of expression.

In another extreme are the ancient objects which lack any credible provenance. These objects look and act old, and maybe they are ancient, but no one can prove that. They’re more anomalous, more orphaned by time, even than forgeries.

Flint-knapping is a good example of a modern craft-hobby with prehistoric materials. Objects fired from clay can be similar.

The “restored” object in this diagram is a genuinely old thing which has been patched back together from some battered state of corroded incompleteness.

The commercial “historical reproduction” is a newly-made thing, sometimes hand-made with historical materials. It’s often prettier and better-made than the original ancient object that it mimics.

The Morris Arts&Crafts object exists in moral refusal of mass-market industrialism, and has a Ruskinite ideology. Objects of this kind are not archaic in intent. They’re often not even “old-fashioned,” but rather “pre-Raphaelite,” in a complex, social-critical way.

A “re-invention” is a modern object inspired by an archaic one. A re-invention has an archaic form and use in a modern context.

The “re-discovery” is a new thing that resembles an old thing by happenstance. The designer/maker/engineer made it independently, and had no awareness of any such prior art.

Above the top of this chart are the speculative “future means of production.” Their presence implies that our current means, methods and motives of rebuilding ancient things are unstable. There is not, and cannot be, any perfect, permanent way to “rebuild past things.” People might, in future, remake some things which seem utterly un-buildable to us, such as genetically-restored, de-extinctified mammoths. It’s good to keep these possibilities in mind, so as not to get too self-satisfied and perfectionist about how we happen to hack at the past right now.

This chart may seem rather abstract and fussy, but it was helpful to me, because it became clear to me that you can’t possibly do all these things at once. I was able to perceive that I had no current use for a Set meant for public display. A Set made in bulk and sold as a product to other people, that was possible to do, but not what I wanted and needed. What I seemed to want and need was a “functional analog” Set. What did this ancient thing do, how did it perform and do its work, in the hands of ancient people who once made it by hand, held it in their hands, and gave it to a grave?

It struck me that I needed a cradle-to-grave approach to the Set. I knew that it was dug from a graveyard, but where was it born? Where did it come from, and how? I would never know this directly, but I needed methods to approach those questions.

The Set was an actual, existent mechanism which vanished centuries ago. So is the Antikythera Mechanism. A sympathetic understanding of how that device was designed, built, and used, makes it clear to us moderns that Greek astronomical geometry was more than straight-lines with compass and ruler, or verbal lectures in an olive-grove. Greek astronomy had gears, dials and a comprehensive hardware set-up. That assertion sounds far-fetched, but it’s both weird and true.

If you’re a science fiction writer (as indeed I am), you naturally want to dramatically play-up and intensify the weirdness of the weird. That’s entertaining to the public and you know how to do it. Also, it’s fun. But my struggles with the Set are a different matter. Not about the weirdness of weird, but about the truthfulness of true.

The personal everyday objects I carry in my pockets are my own lived experience. Since they’re with me all the time, in some formal sense they are the least weird and most personal things in my life.

By making The Set part of my lived experience, I expand my awareness of my lived experience. These are some important political and financial aspects of “Every Day Carry Weird.”

My boring everyday wallet, for instance: under no circumstances do I want my wallet to “become weird.” I know that modern fintech people very much want my wallet to be much weirder. They have exotic payment systems to move me away from archaic paper cash on my hip, toward phone-centric apps in their own control, that I can’t see and touch.

I might also metaphorically, but foolishly pretend that my densely networked iPhone is somehow a personal “Digital Swiss Army Knife.” This too-facile comparison is a bad frame-of-mind. That dishonesty will get me, and my intimates, into trouble. There are consequences to this intellectual laziness.

I don’t claim that my studies of classical hand-tools will resolve the focussed assaults of tyrannical oligarchs on my habits and well-being. But they are a form of recreational “otium.” They seem to offer some stoic philosophical consolation.

So, to hand-grapple with “Everyday Ancient Weirdness” I needed a bigger arena of comprehension. The people who built The Set are long-gone and their assumptions and habits are vanished. But this should not be a counsel of despair. It’s more a Heraclitean understanding that you can never step in the same river twice. In the distinct case of the Set, there are four of them, so they didn’t even step in the same river once.

The people of the ancient world in 200 AD were no more “authentic” than we ourselves are authentic. I even suspect that the “Zurich Set” is a fake. Not a “modern fake” — but the Zurich Set looks so different from the other Sets, and it’s so obviously crude, that it may have been an ancient fake. The product of some shady guy in some Roman Syrian bazaar, who once saw a Set, and figured he would hammer out a phony one, and sell it full-price as the real-deal.

It’s important to understand that the “ancient everyday” is just another every day. It’s one every day among a billion days. Yes, it’s old, but our awed respect for antiquity does not make it sacred, or even respectable.

In the case of The Set, you are not “rebuilding imaginary futures,” a topic I’ve written about in other essays. This is an effort to rebuild pasts, which are peculiar and difficult to understand, but can be overburdened with too much imagination, and not enough sincere engagement with what once existed there.

One path out of that conundrum is to stop fantasizing about it and “just make one.” That was my first step.

At first, I wanted to test the hypothesis that The Set was just-plain weird. The Set was eccentric, peculiar, because it was stapled-together by people who were nuts. This is a lively theory and it’s also plausible. Real people in any day, every day, prehistoric, historic, contemporary, futuristic, now, yesterday and tomorrow, can be just plain off-their-rocker.

Maybe The Set was a failed multitool built by an incompetent Tim Leatherman, some Roman inventor who lacked Tim’s concentration and staying-power. Instead, he just frankensteined a bunch of rubbish into a weird gizmo to hold in his hand. An easy hypothesis for me to test, since I was fully-qualified to try that myself.

And I did try it. At first, I did it with cardboard, because that’s an abject material that costs nothing (because it’s garbage). I made a cardboard Set at no cost, but that act was complicated. Through the act of doing that, I soon learned that The Set could not possibly be some magpie process by some mentally-unstable person.

It was not possible to rashly jam those components together on some daffy impulse. The Set had a distinct order of assembly. The Set was built deliberately, with a foresightful “order of operations.” Some things had to happen first. Only then could the other things happen.

I learned this through rehearsing in cardboard, and establishing the proportions and relationships of the pieces of The Set. I myself looked and acted quite weird while I was fanatically slotting and twiddling bits of cardboard, but no one was watching me. I had proved that the builders were sane and well-prepared. That was progressive.

Also, this active design research led me to the important concept of the “chaîne opératoire.”

While I was slicing and dicing my trashy cardboard with a trusty Opinel folding-knife (established 1890), I pondered various videos and texts of “experimental archaeology.” I knew little about this scholarly research practice, but it’s been around since the 1970s and is by no means a fly-by-night enterprise. When I learned how those experiments were done, my attitudes toward The Set changed radically.

I no longer much wanted or needed to “own The Set” or even to “make a replica Set.” Instead, I needed to closely study the Set’s “chaîne opératoire,” and I needed to study that through acts of “kinaesthetic learning.”

Kinaesthetic learning means getting to grips with the way that ancient human hands gripped the ancient object under study. Kinaesthetic learning is the archeological cousin of the “hacker hands-on imperative.” For the demographic that sieves tiny ancient objects out of old mud, it’s also the functional equivalent of the “maker think-and-do-lab.”

To discover these parallels was intensely edifying. Clearly I should have done all that forty years ago, and I would have been better off for doing it. However, it’s never too late to learn.

The profound issue here is the “chaîne opératoire” — in my own case, the chain of operation of the builders of The Set. I knew that they had operations carried out in a distinct order, but what was going on?

The “chain of operation” is always referred to, in scholarly French, as the “chaîne opératoire”, since the concepts of its major theorist, Prof. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, were elaborated over his lifetime. Leroi-Gourhan had elaborate ideas: they’re a comprehensive theory of the co-evolution of man and technology, rather than some mere design-theory about ancient Roman objects.

The key insight of the chaîne opératoire is that the artifact under study is a link in a chain of human relations. You may have just dug some artifact out of the ground — from a grave, maybe. This thing may look peculiar, and even amazing, “weird,” but as a Leroi-Gourhan student of humankind’s manifold artifacts, you want to get over that folk-hick “weird” attitude right away.

According to Leroi-Gourhan, an artifact is best understood in this fashion. It is technology. Therefore, it was produced by an animal on the Earth, which has unique human characteristics of an upright gait, agile, prehensile hands that are permanently free, an expressive face, and the ability to speak. All technological artifacts, from shaped flints to satellites, are incidental products of technology. The physical objects are collateral evidence, while the gestural dexterity and the ability to learn and teach — the ‘’gesture and the speech” — are absolutely central to technology.

If you can grip things and talk to others about them, then you-and-yours can become a technological species. Otherwise — no matter how much or how long you can “build” — you’re a nesting bird or a termite.

I would not claim that I “believe this.” I would say that it was helpful and even liberatory to me. To study the chaîne opératoire, that is by no means a good way to get any practical thing briskly done. It has dismal results for efficient design and manufacturing. However, it’s great. It’s great because you are trying to sympathetically get under the human skin, into the gestures and speech and decisions, of remote people who are making and using the artifact.

The chaîne opératoire method is loose and abstract. But it has one major benefit. Nothing is weird. At the exalted level of abstraction of the chaîne opératoire, nothing can be “weird.” Herodotus is never amazed by whatever merely seems “foreign.” There is no foreign.

When you do the chaîne opératoire as a method of engaging your hands, your gaze, the weirdness evaporates. You are relieved of weirdness. You forget it was ever there. Instead, you are engaged in many small hands-on tasks, the “kinaesthetic learning” of the hands, the eyes, and also the body, face, and speech. Too-complex conceptual abstractions, about means, motives, opportunities, ideologies, customary habits — they painlessly disappear. Become a primate (because you are one) and the issue feels immediate to prehensile hands and binocular eyes: look at it, feel it. Is the thing handled like this, or is it otherwise handled like that? Give it an honest try, with two ready hands and two eyes open. Then judge the result of that experience, rather than idly speculating about what might be plausible.

Forget your own possible uses for it. Don’t force it to be useful in your own routines, your own surround. Instead, identify with the people who made it — you want to listen to the justifications they’re making, what they feel they have to say to another. The looks on their faces, on the ground, in the tall weeds, in the workshop, over the counter. What it means to them — its functional and symbolic roles. Why they would want it to do that, and be that?

I was pleased at this doctrinal discovery of mine. Of course it’s not new, it’s merely new to me, but I found it consolatory, and even enlightening. It helped and encouraged me as I worked on my Ancient Everyday Weird project. I won’t forget it, either. Kinaesthetic learning and the chaîne opératoire are permanent additions to the way I approach the material world. I’m an old man here in the year 02026, but I know that I’ll find many future uses for them.

In my ongoing procedure, I had learned that a Set can never be randomly thrown together on an impulsive whim. It had a chain of operations, meaning first-things-first. What was first?

The shape of the casing was first. That became obvious. No other method could work. The case came first because all of the tools have to fit inside the case. The case had to be understood first, and measured first, and also made first — and yet, the case could never be completed first. In the chain of operations, the completion had to wait for the rest of an organized, ongoing process.

Complicated, rational, and sensible labor — but why? Because the case had to be heated in a forge, and bent, and transformed into a Spoon-Fork axle, before the case was permanently closed and riveted over the other tools.

To accomplish this operational chain had to mean measurements and drawings, and something like rulers and calipers. There’s also an authority structure. The guy who decides about those calipers and rulers, and puts the project into its operative motion — he’s not a shade-tree hobby crank, centuries away, cutting-up cardboard. He’s the boss. He’s the major participant in The Set operation. He might not be dug from a grave, but he’s as real as the cremated ashes of User142. We can call him “the Maestro.”

In some merely verbal, hands-off theory about The Set, we might imagine that the Maestro could build The Set alone, all by himself. He establishes the shapes for making the casing and the tools of The Set, and knows all about it. But to know it, or to talk and write about it, is not to successfully make it. The chain of The Set’s operation is about human hands set in motion.

Filing ancient Roman metal into shape is hard and patient hand-work. You will kinaesthetically learn that when you yourself do that labor by hand. You will understand, without any verbal or written instruction, that the Maestro with those drawings and those calipers cannot be the drudgery person slowly and monotonously scraping hard metal with a hand file. That imaginary division-of-labor can’t make sense. It would waste the Maestro’s valuable skills, and would squander time effort and money for everyone involved.

The Set does exist, so some real person with busy hands filed and sawed that metal. Who? The “Apprentice” files the metal with his hands. This teenager is allowed in the workshop — “the Atelier,” we can name it, since some extensive, fine craftwork is going on in there. The Apprentice puts in long, tedious, operational hours in the Atelier. His arms are sore. He’s bored silly. But also, he’s a kid. The Apprentice needs to learn that grind-it-out work ethic. He needs those necessary thousand-hours of learning the files and the saws.

The Apprentice runs the Atelier’s errands. He puts out the forge-sparks. He sweeps up, afterward. His childish playtime is over for the young Apprentice. He’s got a real job.

When the Apprentice goes home with his file-blistered hands, he’s got a loaf of dark bread and rabbit stew for dear old Mom. Mom is not directly involved in The Set’s chain-of-operations, because Mom doesn’t design, build or use the silly thing, but Mom couldn’t be happier. “Oh, Apprentice, your late father would be so proud to see you making your way in the world! Just look at those blacksmith muscles growing on you, the girls will line up for you!” The personnel who build The Set work within a larger social context. That context supports them. These indirect participants don’t bash the metal, but they look and they nod and they praise.

The Apprentice is just some kid, so he clumsily roughs-up his tools, but someone else up the chain refines, maintains and sharpens the Atelier’s tools. That person would be “The Journeyman.” He’s got an educated eye for the scope of the job. He uses such tools himself routinely, so he already knows what works well and what doesn’t.

The Journeyman is a former Apprentice. The Operation of the Chain is what changes their status. This involved procedure — who does the rough stuff, who does the skilled stuff — is what people in the Atelier talk about together. That is how they garner their new Leroi-Gourhan skills-and-gestures and remember their old skills-and-gestures. The Chain is what moves them.

With the tools grappled by the Apprentice, and maintained by the Journeyman, it is time to complete and fold the metal casing for The Set. The Set’s case arrives in the Atelier as a standard, Roman, flat ingot: it’s a metal bar. This basic, flat metal bar cannot leave the Atelier until it becomes fancy, openwork and involuted, with even a lyre-shape built in. Through what chain of actions does that process take place?

With one glance at The Set, you will surely notice a lot of holes. However, if you build it, you will feel and see those are intense, identical, precise, and numerous holes. In the top-end “Ventimiglia Set” — (the “industry leader of the product category,” in terms of refined Italian fussiness) — those holes are very straight and narrow holes drilled through three tough layers of metal. The Sieve has dozens of holes.

The Set’s casing features many holes drilled where holes have no apparent reason to exist — holes with no functional purpose. Those larger openwork spaces in the casing of The Set — those empty spaces all likely started as drilled holes, and were later expanded by files.

The holes are there — what chain-of-operations made so many holes? They might be a large squad of Apprentice slaves, each one hand-drilling holes. Or: maybe drilled holes come cheap and fast in the Atelier. Because drilled holes are the Atelier’s technical specialty.

A Drill Technician appears as a link in the chaîne opératoire. This personage maintains a specialized device in the Atelier. It’s the ancient Roman equivalent of a drill-press. It’s a special machine, with sharp bits, a chuck, accurate clamps, and maybe gearing from some non-human power-source. A waterwheel. A mule walking circles.

This speculation can’t prove that a Drill once existed with a Drill Technician, but if it did, then this impressive drill-rig is the private competitive advantage of the Atelier. They’re making good, thorough use of it, too. It means that the decoration on the Set is not “artistic” — it’s not hand-whittled figurative sculpture, like with ivory Roman folding-knifes, featuring the standard-weird cheap vulgar gladiators. The Set is a technical top-end product, and its decoration is mechanical — it’s flat patterns, it’s abstract, and mostly it’s made from machine-drilled holes. The more holes, the better. Holes are drill-scrap. The silver case of The Set is table-ready Roman silverware. Those valuable silver little drill-chips, they add up. With your mechanical drill, you want to drill that thing till it’s mostly air.

Following these deductions — (they’re a bit Sherlock Holmes, but they’re logical) — we again confront the Final Boss chain-operator. This fellow is the original Maestro, because he’s the expert who rivets the Spoon-Fork combo to The Set, assembles the tools inside The Set, steadies their bearings, and ball-peens two red-hot rivets through the tools without damaging The Set. The Maestro masterfully performs this final, conclusive, constructive act in the Chain that could easily screw up the whole effort of The Set if it was botched by some mere layman.

To elegantly, and safely, complete The Set — that can’t be sweaty, brawny, heroic blacksmith labor. A little old man might do it. That little old man has to know what he’s about, though. He performs the Leroi-Gourhan gestures, which integrate The Set into the world, as a completed object-of-value. Also, the Maestro speaks those gestures. Because he tells the others what to do, and why, and the Maestro distributes the rewards to the crew. With his own hands.

Then the deed is done. They have hand-built The Set — but they do not sell The Set, in bulk, over the counter. The Set is a complex and fussy contraption, sophisticated-bordering-on-feature-creep, with a lot of moving parts. There can’t be some cheap basket of a hundred Sets in the Roman marketplace, where you might reasonably find a normal basket of mass-produced Roman clay lamps. The Set isn’t merely “weird,” it’s also genuinely, physically hard to design, and to manufacture-by-manual-means. With the kindest possible assumptions about the productive and consumptive capacities of people in AD 100–200 AD, it can’t be a commodity or an impulse-purchase.

This Set is so finicky, and so expensive, and even so weird, that it had to be commissioned. That idea can’t be proven, but it makes sense. If The Set was a “Roman Swiss Army Knife,” issued to everyday soldiers marching in their everyday Legions, there would have been thousands of them. The Sets can’t be mass-produced, mil-spec tools meant for warfare. They are silvery gadgets with lots of drilled holes.

It’s possible that some ancient Roman officers who were wealthy noblemen would choose to own Sets. But The Sets are not solid and fully-functional Roman military equipment that the everyday Roman soldiery carried Every Day.

The Sets were elite, high-tech and fussy. There are only three and a half of them left to us to marvel at — but at least that’s better than the lonely Antikythera Device. The astronomical computer belonged to some elite Academy, but some lone collector paid up front to create and own his own Set.

The Set-Collector bought all the silvery materials, and he was impatiently waiting for his product delivery. He knew what he was about, too. The Set Collector is “User 142,” a personage very much a part of The Set’s “operational chain” — the customer, who is always-right. When the work’s done, he meets the Maestro. Artisan and customer/patron, they meet with a handshake. Then they discuss the matter at hand.

Mutual assurances pass between them. Some are merely verbal and classically-rhetorical. Others you look at, and touch, and grip with your hands. “Oh, this is some of our best work, sir! I can promise you, you’ll enjoy this Set till your dying day!”

User-142 — we can’t say much about him. But he wouldn’t feel happy without that Set. Especially, in his grave, where everyone agreed that he needed The Set.

Especially that Leaf, always present in every Set. He can’t manage his Set without that Leaf. To have no Leaf, that would be sad, but have no Set at all, that would be weird.

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An operational-chain narrative about the Set (which is that verbiage I just uploaded here in New Years Day 2026) is not the historical truth about The Set. However, I would point out that there’s nothing “weird” about that narrative. It’s described as a chain of connected, operational actions that normal people might perform, every day.

Not weird actions, with a weird artifact. Sensible actions, about the role of a modestly-sized, handheld device in a workaday society, where everyone involved has some clear and reasonable motives. It has “Ancient EveryDay Weirdness” to us, and I don’t want to dismiss our honest wonderment about The Set, but at no point does anyone in the past have to stop their own normal lives and yell, “Hey! Let’s make this gadget especially weird, so as to baffle people two thousand years from now!”

Baffling us with weirdness was never their intent, and if we imagine that they’re weird while we’re somehow not, then we’re forcing that idea onto long-dead people in order to make ourselves feel more at ease. I question the justice in that. If our situations were morally reversed, and users of The Set were puzzling about our “standard personal clutter of cellphones, wallets, glasses, pens, and keys,” then they would suffer frissons of weirdness worse than us. We are in a condition of questionable privilege, compared to them.

Eventually, assembling and dis-assembling, breaking and discarding, I made three different Sets, and I stopped with a fourth one that seemed to be more-or-less done. I used and re-used the component tools, and I tried different shapes and sizes. Mostly, I used The Set as my lab-device to explore the Set’s chain-of-operations. Who made it, who used it, how? For what end? Why did a handheld, portable multitool go away, and never come back for sixteen centuries?

I completed one and carried it every day, and it’s bad by the standards of historical restoration that I describe with the quadrant chart, in the lecture here. I’m not ashamed about my Set being so crude — (I probably ought to be, but I’m not a craftsman) — but my awkward version of The Set — a “functional analog” — works fine. I’m even confident that it functions better than The Set ever did. That’s through no merit of my own. That’s the merit of pieces of scrapped modern junk-metal, with which I constructed The Set.

It’s painful to say that our modern metal garbage is Arthur C. Clarke magic compared to the best efforts of elite craftsmen in the Second Century AD, but it is. After the course of two millennia, of course it’s better. My homemade, makerpunk Set can’t and doesn’t function exactly and precisely like an original Set. Why? Maybe because no modern person can ever really know what Sets were doing, or were meant or intended to do. However, my ugly, sloppy, garbage version is a better machine than their ancient, hand-made gizmo. In the starkest, mechanical-engineering terms: “blade geometry,” “edge retention,” “corrosion resistance,” anything that modern “EveryDay Carry” fans might critically say about the tools in multitools — I built a new-and-improved ancient-Roman Set. That’s not my boast, it’s my remorseful confession. I think I learned some subtle but important everyday-weirdness lesson here. I hope I’ll never make another Set.

With that said, how does The Set work, and what does it do when you have one and you carry one every day? How do you experience The Set, with the deep, Leroi-Gourhan approach of: how you look at the artifact, and grip it by hand, and how do people see you, and what might be said? This highly tactile approach to an artifact — not mentally overthinking or outguessing the thing, but look-and-feeling it, almost petting it — is sometimes called “bodystorming” in design circles.

“Bodystorming” is Bruno Munari seeking for the “comfort” in a chair.

I’ve tried it. “Proviamo.”

Mostly, The Set looks-and-feels like a Spoon. As a Spoon, the Spoon works just fine. You can eat with public gusto. The Spoon of The Set has a rather awkward handle, but all Roman spoons had awkward handles. When you fold out the Spike of the Set, along with the Spoon, then you have a relatively normal Roman spoon. The Spike will poke and pierce. It’s the traditional pointed stem of a Roman spoon, but it’s folded away and compacted.

The Spoon on The Set does requires a big knuckly grip, but if you’re at campside shovelling in a bowl of hot Roman Army beans, no one will mock you for that. The Set’s Spoon is a practical and functional spoon. You can put away that chow.

The Spoon feels centrally important to The Set. I didn’t understand this before gripping and using The Set, but I suspect that The Set was a gadget that developed from a folding Spoon. In 100–200 AD, Roman folding Knives were old-fashioned, even boring and vulgar. By contrast, the Set likely presented itself as an upgraded, socially-upscale folding Spoon. That axle-pivoting Spoon is well-optimized, too. It’ll spoon anything spoonable.

The Knife works all right. The Knife will cut and slice. You can’t crudely torque the Knife, or over-stress it, but by Roman standards, a Knife belongs in a folding hand-tool. It’s a traditional Roman given that a Knife would be in there. The Knife doesn’t seem important, until it’s not there. Then the lack of a Knife is a crisis. So of course the Knife is there.

The Fork is a terrible fork, but it only seems bad to us. The Romans called this tool a “forca” in their own language, but it’s a radically different utensil than any modern fork. The Set’s Fork is tiny, it’s flat, it lacks any curvature. The Fork is difficult to grip in any modern way, and it also has two big, decorative, drilled holes though it, which make a mess of the food. The Fork can impale some kinds of food, but it does not convey any food on its three, tiny, hole-bitten tines.

After much manual experimentation, I realized that the Fork works best if aligned with the forefinger. With that grip — (it seems weird to us) — The Set is discreetly hidden inside the hand, and hidden by the wrist, too. Then the user can reach out toward some morsel — a chunk of slippery fish, maybe — impale it with the trident tines of the Fork, and convey it to the mouth, using just one single finger. This has the affect of almost a magic trick. No modern diner would do this, but the human hand can do that quickly and easily, and viewers would see this as a gesture of casual elegance.

I’ve eaten several different meals with The Set. I operated with the hypothesis that The Set was a “Voyage Set” made for dining. I often met with sloppy, practical defeat while trying to feed myself with The Set. I suspect that the Set was also quite difficult for ancient Romans to use.

Ancient Romans did not, in fact, make much use of any silverware utensils. Spoons were common in Rome, but spoons were ladles used to convey the food from a tabletop basin into a private bowl. The diner then used his own fingers with his own bowl, and never touched a spoon to the lips.

The Set features a Spoon, Knife and Fork. But all these utensils are jammed into one handle. Unlike our modern, full-sized, table-ensemble of spoon, plus knife, plus fork, the tools of The Set can never cooperate. They can only be deployed one at a time. We deploy the knife, fork, and spoon with two hands, sitting upright in a chair over a filled plate, looming over a dining table. With The Set, that can’t be done.

Assuming that The Set really is an eating device (and that is not proven) then the key to understanding is in the operational chain. The hands, the eyes, the body, and what people see from the gestures as they watch you proceeding.

Who eats with The Set? As with the Maestro, it seems reasonable to start with the most important person eating the food at the table. The breadwinner. So the Set-Collector, the Set’s user at meals, is the Paterfamilias.

The Paterfamilias is a normal, family-guy dad at the Every Day dinner table — but ancient Rome is an extremely patriarchal and militarized society. While everyone else (who isn’t a slave) sits on chairs or stools at the table, Paterfamilias reclines at his family’s table. He lies on his own special couch. It’s reserved for him only. His full body is on display, head-to-foot, to the lesser diners.

Paterfamilias doesn’t just flop down on his dining couch like some lazy couch-potato. He’s in charge, so he assumes a proper, authoritative dining-posture. On his couch, he props himself on his left elbow and he tucks in one knee. That’s how it’s always and properly done. Paterfamilias presides over the meal with a Jovian majesty. He doesn’t idly gossip and chatter like the other diners, either. Instead, he listens and then sometimes issues orders, as suits his role and dignity.

Paterfamilias never hops up from his couch to hand-carve some turkey for his family. That would be indecent, for his role is to maintain the family order and be served by others. He holds a bowl in his immobilized left hand. To eat, he picks food from from that bowl, right-handed.

Paterfamilias does not rudely grab and mash the family’s food into the palm of his fist. He’s not some starving teen, he’s dignified and solemn, and he sets the proper example. He expertly plucks mouthful-morsels with his gathered fingertips and his thumb. Contemporary people, who customarily eat with their hands, they also tend to eat with neatly bunched fingertips. Sometimes they gather their food inside pinched bits of bread.

The everydayness is the key.

The three “weird tools” in The Set — the Spike, the Earspoon and the Leaf — are designed for eating with the everyday grip of bunched fingertips. All three of these tools are fingertip-extensions. The Spike is meant for poking — like penetrating a marrow-bone. The “Earspoon” is small, like a fingernail — it’s for dabbing at food, something viscous, like jam, or honey.

The extremely weird Leaf has a curved hole through it for the closeup grip of one thumb and one finger. It’s designed for some myopic, up-close, fingertip work, for clawing meat out of walnuts, or scraping bits out of crabs and lobsters.

These three tools are used in the same way with similar intentions and gestures. Difficult, refined gestures. If you recline on a couch, and also use The Set to eat, that act is not convenient. It’s more work than eating with your bare hands.

I’ve eaten meals with The Set, and I can do it, but I don’t think I’ll get much better at it, in the sense of doing it with thoughtless ease. I don’t think that “getting better,” in the modern sense of being more convenient, more efficient, was ever the point of having or using The Set.

To grip and use The Set is so much extra work that it rouses the suspicion that it’s not about the food. It might be that the tools of The Set are prophylactic — their purpose was to protect the hands.

The Set Collector might be showing off The Set — “I have beautiful silverware, and you don’t” — but the manual attempt to use The Set makes that plausible assumption fade away. Holding The Set in your hand, using The Set: especially lying down, with a bowl in the other hand — it’s effortful. It’s not easy and convenient, like cutting Ventimiglia shoreside pizza with a neat and fancy pizza-wheel. It’s a pinched and finicky manual struggle, with specialized tools.

You get the impression that the Set-Collector is anxious about the health-threats from his chow — the tiny Sieve on the Ventimiglia Set looks like it might be used to dissolve some dose of protective medicine. Or else Madame Materfamilias, in her chair-throne at the foot of Father’s recliner-couch, is fretting about her manicure in some extravagant, diva-like fashion.

The Set might belong to a posh musician, maybe, who is about to entertain the diners by plucking the lyre with his perfect, unsoiled fingernails. Is The Set designed and built for invalids? For diet faddists? There were never that many Sets. They’re special.

I’m at peace with it now. I wrote this essay about the “Ancient Everyday Weird,” and I’m sorry if I only made it seem weirder. If it’s any consolation, I’m much less bothered myself. I still don’t know who used The Set, or what The Set was really for, or who cared most about The Set, or why people would bury other people with The Set. I can say that my experiments, in “experimental archaeology,” in the “chaîne opératoire,” have changed my mind about what was at stake for me personally. The act of rebuilding one has widened my horizons, and has freed me to think about other, different things, in a broader, more-accepting, new-and-improved way.

My original, hasty prejudices have departed — not because I verbally argued myself into it in some elaborate, rhetorical, writerly fashion. Because the thing-of-itself of my obsessive interest, the metaphysical “ding-an-sich” — I made one, and I held it, and even Carried it Every Day, for a while. That act freed me from a cloud of too-vague imaginings.

I no longer imagine that The Set was a “multitool” as we currently understand those devices. I think that it was an object of its own class in its own space and time. It was never a sturdy off-road camping tool. Nobody could set camp with this delicate thing, and cook with it, dismember, or skin and butcher hunted animals with it. Ancient Romans did all those things routinely. None of the tools they used for those purposes look like The Set.

It’s weird and a mystery, but I don’t declare it a permanent mystery. More Sets might be discovered in more graves. Somebody might dig up a blacksmith shop in Pompeii with ten Sets under construction. Archaeometallurgy might isotopically show where the metals came from. New and unknown methods of investigation might be invented, with new scholarly revelations. I don’t much mind an apparent failure to “solve the problem” of The Set. Because it’s not a “problem.” It’s a survivor.

In “experiential archaeology,” I think the point is dissolve the weirdness, and, in order to do that, you must dissolve some weirdness into yourself. It’s like pressure-pumping carbon-dioxide into everyday tap-water.

Ancient Everyday Weirdness does not make you make you better, kinder, richer, or happier, but like a deep subterranean spring, it makes you fizz more. I derived no crassly blatant benefit from doing this project, but I know that I got closer to the lived experience of people who once lived near me, in the circumstances of their remote days. I’m not the Maestro of The Set, but I got so close to it that I had in in my hand, and in my pocket.

In terms of one, mysterious, EveryDay object of some vanished day, now I know rather a lot about it. I’m used to it. I’m even fond of it. I haven’t figured it out, but I have other puzzles, too.

***********

POSTSCRIPT

It’s harsh to declare a deep solidarity with long-dead people, but then give them no look-in of their own. As a moral conclusion to this long-winded essay, I’ll offer a parable.

Imagine you’re a normal, everyday Roman citizen, with your normal, everyday folding knife. There’s nothing weird about your everyday ancient tool, it’s functional and handy, because it’s good for gutting and skinning game. It’s got a nice openwork bone handle decorated with hunting-dogs chasing a rabbit. You and your hunting dogs, you’re out in the field. Chasing the rabbits.

Then you lose your hunting knife. Being a Roman provincial from rural Germania, you don’t know what a “pocket” is. So you had your knife tucked into your belt. The knife got loose and fell out. You lost your favorite knife. Tough break.

Eighteen hundred years later, some metal-detector guy in modern Germany discovers your long-lost folding-knife. He gleefully has the luck you didn’t have. At the same time, though, in a neat karmic reversal, you also luckily find a knife. It’s a folding knife from 1800 years in the future: it’s a Swiss Army Knife. It’s an everyday Victorinox “Huntsman” model.

You’re now a Roman huntsman with a Swiss Army Knife. How weird is this artifact of “Future Everyday Weirdness”? The Victorinox Huntsman is a sturdy, well-made multitool, and specifically designed for “huntsmen,” guys who go out in the field to hunt with dogs. For you, though, it’s nevertheless Severely Weird. This unsought object is absolutely the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen or touched.

You handle the knife — (it’s a prank, or a trick of the gods, or both, who cares) — and clearly there are some very fine things about it. The sides are made of weird red amber, with a cross-shaped ritual mark. The steel, which is splendid, amazingly strong and shiny, has some fine Roman alphabet lettering.

This fancy tool has a second smaller knife almost as good as the big one. It also a pair of tiny shears which work well despite their extreme daintiness. There’s even a miniature saw, which makes no sense, until you realize that it must be meant for pruning the vineyards.

The tool has an awl for piercing leather, obviously meant to repair everyday “caligae” leather marching-sandals. There’s also a short metal hook, meant for pulling something. Crossbow strings, maybe.

You and the dogs are up a rabbit, and a new knife, for the day. You skin and gut the rabbit with the shiny knife, then you go back home to the wife and kids. As the rabbit stew cooks, you have a closer look at your lucky find.

You can’t figure it out. It’s beyond comprehension. It’s so weird that it’s a source of real pain. One tool is shaped like the head of a shark, with one sharp tooth in a fish-jaw. It’s brother-tool is a tiny, useless chisel that can’t cut. One final tool is placed centrally, right in the back. It’s a long, stretched out spiral of crazily strong metal wire. The tip of that spiral wire will scrape the best forged iron that you possess.

At first you felt pleased to have the new knife; and you carry it sometimes. But you find that you can’t get used to those too-strange, obtrusive tools. They’re like pebbles in your oatmeal. Intensely foreign, just not from around here. It’s ominous, it makes you uneasy. You don’t want it tucked in your belt. You don’t even want it in the house with your wife and children.

Eventually you take the weird knife to the village blacksmith — the guy who repairs the plows for you. This expert is not so impressed as you are. He hems and haws: oh well, as a smith, I haven’t seen one of this make for quite a while. It’s not from Trier or Cologne, like the best folding knives. Probably it’s from Alexandria. A refined and ingenious people, way over there in Egypt, but they all worship beast-headed gods. Lotta mummies over there. They bury tools with those mummies.

As a favor, he’ll knock the crooked thing into pieces for you. He’ll set-up the salvaged parts on some good, solid, workable handles. You agree, and shake hands. That will be fine.

Together, you smash it up. You re-use the best parts, and the weirdest parts, you melt those down, and they vanish forever. That solves the problem. You don’t miss that troublesome, eerie obtrusion, because the everyday routine is back, and you’re content. The everyday has triumphed; in the long run, the everyday always eats-up the weirdness, like a bear eating a chicken. That weirdness had no proper place in your heart and your hands, and when at last it’s gone for good, then you’re free of it, and busy with another new day, and a new year.

You’d do the same thing with the same weirdness tomorrow; you’d do it again if you had a thousand bits of weirdness in your hands, for a thousand days, or a thousand years.

— FINIS —

EPILOGUE

Making up just-so-stories, which justify the unknown functions of mysterious things — that’s something of a vice, maybe. Science fiction writers are particularly keen on doing things like this — we can explain farfetched gadgets, all day every day. The Set is almost a kaleidoscope of little mysteries. It’s like an all-metal Rorschach blot.

I’d like to believe that The Set is a direct precursor of tools we understand quite well, and that our modern tools are later re-inventions of The Set. But that idea fails in the grasp, it doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t think that The Set was ever a “multitool.” The Set resembles a multitool, but it wasn’t meant or made to be one. It’s not an asset to survival, offering many different tools for multiple uses. I think that The Set began its existence as a simple folding spoon, from an old craft-tradition. Then The Set got feature-creep, with dainty little extras grafted-on.

As a fun footnote, I’d point out this replica of an ancient foldable spoon-and-knife set. This device was found near a genuine Roman Army camp in Switzerland. This cute little artifact really does seem to have been a no-kidding, “Roman, Swiss, army-knife.” It doesn’t look and act much like the fragile and peculiar Set, but it’s a pleasure to see it. “USE HAPPILY,” as the Romans used to inscribe on their objects. “UTERE FELIX.”

If The Set was never a “Roman Swiss Army Knife,” then what was it?

Maybe the Italians are right to call The Set a “voyage service” — because it’s silverware. The Set is cutlery, meant for eating various special foods, with specialized utensils, one-handed, while reclining at table.

But no one in Bulgaria believes that The Set is a silvery picnic set for fine Italian dining. Instead, the Ljublen Set is interpreted as a delicate, but necessary, offroad surgical device. It’s designed and built for a rapid-response cavalry medic.

A radically different interpretation, but it all seems to function. The Spoon and Fork lets the Thracian Cavalier feed his medication to the stricken. The Knife is his surgical scalpel. The Spike probes wounds for shrapnel. The Earspoon cleans out dirt and scabs from lacerations. The ever-mysterious Leaf pries wounds open and also removes painful pebbles from the hoof of a horse.

The “Medical Instrument” theory is a strong competing paradigm. It clearly deserves some hands-on “experimental archaeology.” Personally, I’d rather try to eat with The Set than cut open suffering patients, but some evidence does support that idea, and it might even be true. A medical student at an autopsy might try The Set. Learn what it can do in the hand.

But (1) army camp life, and (2) tools for fine food, and (3) Galenic medicine on horseback, are merely three of the legion of possible Set theories.

Alas, I’m a science fiction writer, so I can’t help but speculate and fantasize. You need heterodox ideas? I’ve always got plenty!

It’s not for the Roman Army — because it’s for the Roman Navy! The Spike is a marlinspike for a ship’s ropes and lines. Of course sailors will always need that Knife. The Leaf scales fish. The Earspoon is for sailors aboard who never bathe.

It’s medical, but it’s not made for a Doctor. Instead, The Set is made for a nurse. It’s the on-the-spot medical tool-set for a round-the-clock female attendant. She sits at the sickbed in her steady, nurturing vigil, spooning medicine and forking morsels into the stricken patient. Sometimes she draws blood. She never deserts the sufferer, for all her nursing tools are right there at hand.

The Set is a makeup cosmetic set. The Knife’s a razor. The Earspoon cleans ears. The Leaf scrapes toes and fingers clean. The Spike dabs up mascara. The Spoon’s for big smears of foundational make-up.

The Set is a travel set — but it’s intended for posthumous travel. It decorates graves as a pious religious object. The Set might never function very well, but that’s all right; for the dead, it’s the thought that counts. Do anything you like in Hades! Here’s a toy that can manage any trial we can imagine!

It’s not Roman, and never was Roman. Instead, it’s Indian, or Chinese, or Persian; or a stray, imported artefact from some lost technological tradition we know nothing about.

It’s a construction Set — a maintenance Set. Every tool collaborates and inter-operates, to build and repair some elaborate, long-lost structure that we don’t understand at all.

The Set’s not “weird” — because it was always vulgar and common. Once there were many thousands of everyday Sets, routinely made from simple iron and wood. These humble tools were so everyday-common that they were beneath any notice or comment, and they all rusted and rotted away. Only a few special, silvery, dainty ones have survived.

The Set is a badge-of-office. You never truly “use” the Set. Instead, you reveal to the other adepts that you possess The Set. Then they silently understand that you’re the kind of guy who has that thing.

The Set is “folk-weird.” It’s a goofy curiosity for a Roman minority of knife-cranks, collectors and knife-nerds. It exists mostly for its neat-o fidget-factor. Sometimes “new improved versions” arrive from some wacky blacksmith atelier, but those models aren’t mechanically “improved,” they’re just weirder.

The Set is “tactical” — a secret weapon for assassins and spies. The Set’s users play Roman-Empire James Bond with the Set’s many secret features. It’s elaborate, shiny and made of silver, so that you can dazzle a victim with technical genius before you slay him.

And, finally: The Set’s best days are ahead of it. Now that it’s crawled back from the depth of the grave, one of these fine days, The Set will be properly noticed, and fully valorized, and then every-day-carried by millions of delighted modern users. One of these bright every-days, after all that’s been said, thought and done, it’ll finally be a world-famous masterpiece, and truly a classic.

THE END

So for a year I tinkered around, experimenting and hoping to find some personal metier. After a year, I wouldn’t call myself a “Maker” or even a proper repairman, but it’s fair to say that I did find a hobby. My favorite craft materials are bamboo and steel wire. Bamboo is a planetary invasive weed, while steel wire is urban scrap. However, these throwaway qualities of wire and bamboo actively attract me.

I will even go out of my way to buy-and-collect commercial, industrial objects manufactured from bamboo and wire. I enjoy the lightweight, ductile, mobile aesthetic of these materials; not only do I enjoy physically messing with them, I enjoy having bamboo/wire artifacts around me as my everyday, un-weird, domestic objects.

As I improved at domestic hacking, I found myself using the proper name “Laura Kampf” as a verb. Day by day, some everyday household object would break, wear-out, or malfunction (because they must, and they do). Then, “I’ll laurakampf it,” I would declare. Family members would tolerantly nod and shrug. A science-fiction novelist with a tool-set, fine, what’s the worst that could happen?

Laura Kampf was once a punk dropout with some design training and a fondness for power-saws. She became an accomplished machinist/designer/carpenter from Cologne in Germany. Laura Kampf is a well-known Maker celebrity, much like her colleagues Adam Savage and Simone Giertz.

Kampf, Savage and Giertz all make unusual things on video. However, Laura Kampf has a distinct laurakampfing schtick. To laurakampf is to make something useful out of junk. Laura Kampf relies heavily on salvaged materials: broken appliances, wrecked vehicles, and abandoned construction debris.

So to “laurakampf” is to deliberately repurpose these abject, abandoned, post-commoditized materials in some design-considerate, and even rather showy and eye-catching way. Laura Kampf takes some pains to show her public how she does these things, in the long-established popular-mechanics “how-to” tradition. However, she also makes some quite unusual, personal, unique and peculiar artifacts.

Some are quite weird. They’re not so abrasively weird as Alexander Calder’s “Calder Domestic Objects,” which I described at length in an essay a year ago. They’re distinctive because they’re from a different era with different means, motives and opportunities.

Laura Kampf is not a famous sculptor like Alexander Calder once was, but after ten years of this video Makertainment activity, Laura Kampf has Patreon fans, aides and employees. She has studios humming with hardware. She has a merchandise shop and a bicontinental lifestyle.

Also, Laura Kampf recently announced her intention to become an artist. She has encountered some of the everyday limits of “Making” and she wants to place some creative objects in art shows and in art galleries. This announced ambition did not surprise me. It makes sense that she would want to let her creations take center stage as her “artworks,” as opposed to her previous, standard practice of valorizing her YouTube video performance-art. This would seem to be a sensible career progression. Basically, it’s the domestic life of the artist Alexander Calder, but carried out in the modern day and in reverse. Rather than the artist becoming the furniture-maker, it’s the furniture-maker entering the art world.

We’ll have to tune-in-next-week to see how that venture works out, which is something I’ve been doing for years as Laura Kampf generates her weekly videos.

In the meantime, however, we should critically consider that remarkable laurakampfian practice of dismantling defunct things and grafting their components on to revived things. This is by no means a standard practice in industrial design or personal handicraft. Instead, it’s a modern mutant-form of handicraft which cannibalizes industrial-designed materials and privately re-works them to create unique artifacts that look machine-manufactured, but are not. Instead, they’re one-of-a-kind assemblages. It’s punk pastiche and punk collage, using industrial debris. That activity is quite “weird.”

I myself do this in both theory and practice, but before I get all design-guru about it, I’ll point out that millions of people in the modern world already routinely live their daily lives with cast-off, repurposed, more-or-less industrial materials. They’re not considered “weird,” they merely live in their shacks or squats as a favela underclass. They make do in daily-life as best they can — although they don’t “laurakampf.” There’s a critical distinction to be made here, between the merely, starkly poor person and the refusenik bohemian. That’s a distinction as old as Henry Murger’s opera “La Boheme” from the year 1851, and there’s rather a lot of oxymoronic creative room to be found there. It’s as if Mimi from “La Boheme” had shown up from stage-left with a tool-belt, a 3DPrinter and a drill press.

Laurakampfing exists in some cloudy, as yet poorly-theorized interzone between Arte Povera, which is Italian avant-garde dropout art expressed with abject, non- “art” materials, and genuinely disadvantaged activities such as Indian jugaad. To practice Arte Povera is to call the art world’s attention to the overstuffed phoniness of the bourgeoisie. To practice “jugaad” is to repurpose a bicycle pedal as a door handle, because otherwise that door gets no handle. They’re both “povera,” but they’re not the same poverty.

Laura Kampf scavenges, but she’s never simple or thrifty about it. Laura Kampf is a technically advanced European-Union woman who is sometimes sponsored by tool companies. She rescues her materials from a planetary avalanche of first-world industrial debris — there’s nothing much for her to be “thrifty” or “simple” about, because that native junk of late-capitalism arrives in landslides. Sometimes the objects she repurposes are already quite weird when they arrive at her doorstep. Leftover German electronic-espionage cabinets have been a particular Laura Kampf favorite — NATO spyware, transformed into her tool-chests.

Laura Kampf will treat this objet-trouvee junk material with a tender designer’s concern. She will clean it, round and bevel its corners, remove all its splinters, and likely repaint it. This debris will be re-imagined and rebuilt with many dainty, user-friendly touchpoints. Then it’s no longer mere junk, because it becomes laurakampfian. Often her creations look quite 1960s European design-modernist. They look rather Achille Castiglioni, back when the Milanese design maestro was repurposing old tractor seats.

This process, performed in public for Laura Kampf’s horde of YouTube fans, has some strong “how done it” appeal. People watch Laura Kampf, not in order to learn to directly imitate Laura Kampf, but in order to be entertained by witnessing how she noisily chews her way through her own self-set problems. If she sometimes fails at her tasks, if she daringly risks mechanical injury or a nervous breakdown, that drama adds to the public appeal of her videos.

Laura Kampf junk is not formally “recycled,” because it is not mulched back to its raw materials and then re-manufactured in some new form. Instead, it is rehabilitated. Its defects, its apparent unfitness for conventional purpose, will be respected, recognized, and even publicly valorized. “Every Defect Deserves Respect;” this is a much-repeated Laura Kampf slogan.

There’s a distinct sentimental element of redemption here. It seems to be obscurely based in some moral conviction that a truly just society wouldn’t even have such a thing as “junk.” All materials are matter that’s made of materials, after all. So to classify and condemn some hapless object as “junk” might be construed as an act of oppression, like crassly declaring a wounded pet to be instrumentally useless.

Laura Kampf’s upcycled junk plays on people’s sentiments for the useless. When a laurakampfed artifact is completed, there will be many telltale details that highlight its recuperated character. Its transgressive, mutant-hodgepodge, ex-defective quality is an aspect of its appeal. A laurakampfed object that was completely, smoothly, and invisibly rehabilitated would be like Berlin techno without a drum-loop.

These defective elements are never introduced as mere eye-candy, as with steampunk decor, which often features glued-on clockwork cogs and maybe some fake “antiquing.” Instead, in authentic laurakampfing, those defects always need to be honestly inherent in the object as it was first scrounged.

To “respect the defect” is somewhat like an industrial designer’s choice to respect “the grain of the material.” However, it’s different, because it moralizes. It’s the manifestation of a punk resentment for the grain of the many cultural processes that transform products into junk. It’s an alternative countercultural act of counter-junking.

There’s even a distinct Gandhian element to it, like sitting in one’s loincloth with a private spinning wheel — not because one genuinely needs a home-spun loincloth, but in order to draw public attention to the imperial exploitations of domineering British industrial cotton-mill machinery. Gandhi with his DIY spinning wheel has no industrial business model. Gandhi is not some lone entrepreneur-industrialist who is somehow disrupting the supply chain and toppling his industrial fabric-industry competitors. Gandhi’s performing an intensely public protest intervention with his solo private spinning-wheel. Why? Because he’s the Mahatma, that’s why.

Laurakampfed objects are not static works of protest-art, meant for frames or vitrines (at least, not to-date). Instead, they generally perform some designed and more-or-less rational function. Commonly these functions are rather eccentric and farfetched, such as peculiar bike trailers or odd barbecue ovens. However, they’re not merely decorative. The practice of laurakampfing seems to acquire more cachet and moral seriousness as their functions become more genuine, heartfelt and broadly critical — such as Laura Kampf’s quixotic personal decision to rebuild an entire, tottering, ant-eaten old house.

This house, called “Haus Lise Lotte,” was, and is, a utopian experiment in domestic living. “Haus Lise Lotte” is a modern object lesson in “the homemade limits of everyday weirdness.” “Haus Lise Lotte” has violently collided with all kinds of interesting limits to weirdness, which are beyond the scope of this particular essay, but entertainly documented for three years by Laura Kampf and her camera-toting colleagues.

It’s become pretty clear that, although she can probably afford to “complete” the Haus Lise Lotte, Laura Kampf herself will never dwell in that utopian house. I’m quite all right with that; as a longtime Laura Kampf devotee-viewer, I even find it a psychic relief that she’s not going to violently reform that house on gesamtkunstwerk spoon-to-a-city principles and laurakampf every object and service that’s inside it. If that were to happen, then “Haus Lise Lotte” would likely be as alarming as a totalized Alexander Calder house where every possible thing was made from Calder’s bent-wire and tinplate. I’m all in favor of a woman pursuing a dream house, but it’s cruel when a woman becomes the captive of one. Every utopia needs an expiration date and an exit strategy.

Laurakampfing is a distinct form of modern design, and it’s quite weird, but it’s by no means entirely novel. It’s clearly related to many other activities that are more conventional and better-known, such as bricolage, kludging, Ikea-hacking, art restoration, industrial salvage and recycling, pre-fab construction, post-consumer alteration, and home-decor TV shows.

There is one aspect of it that does seem new, little-explored, and particularly unstable, however. Laurakampfing is not a merely private hobby. Laura Kampf performs on social media and is a social-media celebrity. She not only creates things publicly, but she also laurakampfs public objects in public spaces.

Her public-space laurakampfing even seems to be valorized over her domestic private-space laurakampfing.

Sometimes she creates useful junkwork that many hundreds of public strangers can use quite unknowingly. A guerrilla public park bench is a fine example — because it is public furniture, in a public space, created and installed by an activist.

To laurakampf for a YouTube camera is performance art and also a mode of earning a living. However, to laurakampf for the benefit of random public people who do not know you, and don’t even know that you’re laurakampfing, and have no idea of the source of their benefit — that seems to be the Mahatma-Laura fait accompli.

Clearly that activity is street-art of some peculiar kind, but it’s like graffiti with a power-drill. Domestic laurakampfing is rather weird, but public laurakampfing is extremely weird. Very few people will glide out at night and surreptitiously fix broken public infrastructure.

There’s a contemporary sensibility to it that somehow reminds me of the practice of “re-wilding.” Especially “urban re-wilding,” which is activity such as quietly encouraging the stricken vegetation that is struggling in an empty lot next door.

To re-wild an empty urban lot has many tragicomic aspects of hopeless love for a lost cause. Objectively, this act seems next-to-useless. Some weedy, trashy lot within a busy city will never become a fully-restored sylvan wilderness which has romantically “returned to nature.” This niche biome, such as it is, will be a modest pastiche mess of invasive weeds, unworthy of a dignified term such as “park” or “garden.” Instead, it’s more of a performative intervention that refutes the crushing logic of the city by allowing some space for defective otherness.

So why even do that? Why perform this liberated-trash-pile act of partial “re-wilding”? If you happen to water and fertilize an abandoned junkyard, what is the game plan and victory condition? Where is the exit strategy? It’s doable, even rather easy to do, but it’s certainly not a business. It’s not any kind of rewarded career. It’s scarcely even any coherent “protest.” At most, the upshot will be that living green stuff appears in a some desolate Rem Koolhaas junkspace which used to be dusty brown stuff.

If this made any sense, everybody would be doing it. They do not. Because it has everyday limits to public weirdness.

I want to be quite frank about the practice of committing punk assaults on the proprieties of industrial design. I happen to do some of this myself, and also I’m a cyberpunk who teaches in design school, but it’s problematic in a host of consequential ways. The principles of sound industrial design exist for some good and sensible reasons. If you create a functional artifact out of salvaged pieces of semi-random debris, that object has never been safety-tested. It can be hazardous, radically undependable; even if you yourself understand its risks, innocent guests or family members might be harmed by it.

Also, it will be unique, and that limits the process. Because it’s made of heterogenous scrap, you can never manufacture another one that’s just the same. It is not a mass-market industrial artifact. It’s a one-off punk hack.

The laurakampfing enthusiast should be fully aware that cyanoacrylate “super-glue,” that modern-miracle super-material, is a form of plastic. It is not miraculous but just plastic, just like the large shoals of plastic in the Pacific Ocean are plastic. “Let Glue Dry” is a core Laura Kampf slogan. She’s a carpenter and she understands joinery, but her creative work is, and has to be, extremely dependent on glue. Modern adhesives are central to her efforts because she’s constantly clamping together junk-scraps which have no common material properties. That’s cheap, fast and easy to do, but these Frankenstein chunks do not work together with well-crafted elegance. They’re built with materials that must age and decay at different rates, materials that are differently-affected by everyday water, by everyday changes in temperature, and by everyday use-wear. These “everyday objects” can’t be solidly united, because these design-monsters are held together with thin films of plastic.

A one-off Laura Kampf AirBnB might be an intriguing place to visit. A Laura Kampf residency high-rise in downtown Cologne, comprehensively built top-to-bottom with Laura Kampf methodology, would be terrifying. The practice simply doesn’t scale. It is not a comprehensive reform-wave like architectural Modernism once was. Instead, it’s a Gandhian gesture.

However, like a lot of Gandhi’s passive-resistance gestures, it’s doable; indeed, even the lowest and humblest jugaad outcast might join that liberatory struggle, a political aspect of social organization which Mohandas Gandhi always understood very well. I have no grand Modernist claims for the virtues of doing this. It’s not a utopian scheme for living, and yet I do it. This practice does not save me money. It certainly doesn’t save time. It can’t even be said to save any materials, because it takes a rather lot of screws, glues and thoughtful determination to turn inappropriate chunks of abandoned debris into designerish, designer-looking artifacts you can more or less live with.

But I do it anyway. Now that it has a verbal niche in my writerly head, I’m pretty sure that, next year, I’m gonna do more, and with some larger ambition. There’s even a clear frontier available for carrying this out, because “the ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.”

We’re heading for a future world where environmental damage is sometimes sudden and often huge in scale. While, at the same time, public infrastructure is neglected or deliberately abandoned. Clearly there’s some new social niche here for a punk anti-vandal, some kind of dashing street-guerrilla of anti-entropic repair. That’s a frontier.

Obviously it’s transgressive to semi-covertly repair the nice things that the stricken authorities can no longer manage to let us have. However, as victimless crimes go, that’s quite an interesting one. “The public limits of everyday weirdness,” of course they’re still limits, but they’re different limits with different means and motives, and sometimes that’s all the difference that one might need for activism.

This is my second yearly essay that concerns itself with some rather ill-defined, yet somehow pressing topics. These are two heterogenous essays which seem to weirdly switch topics, eras, people and approaches, but after a year of making things, I’ve come to understand that I make things in the much the same way that I write. As a creative writer, I like pastiche and I like found-materials; I like what’s “weird” and I always have, but the effectively-weird must exist within some grander awareness of the context of what is weird and what merely seems weird.

It is New Year’s Day as I conclude this essay, and if the coming year spares me (by no means a given, but hope is our duty), I rather suspect that I’ll write yet another one.

As soon as this question struck me, I knew that I had things wrong. Clearly, I was “back-projecting.” I was distorting history to suit my own present-day notions.

Alexander Calder (the famous artist in question) created twenty-two thousand documented artworks in his lifetime. However, he never “hacked” or “fabbed” anything. Calder died back in 1976, when the concept of “hacking” was still restricted to eccentric engineering students at MIT.

However, Calder was an eccentric engineer himself, and to my eye, there was no question that many things in his home looked Maker-style “made,” or “fabbed,” or even “hacked.” Calder performed this personal activity, with various methods, intentions and materials, for seventy years.

Even today, there still exist quite a number of these non-artistic anomalous “objects” that Calder somehow invented, or amended, or subjected to freaky alterations, pseudo-repairs, re-purposings, and upcyclings. Some “Calder Household Objects” are easily identified and can be promptly named as “ashtrays,” “soap-dishes,” “bread tins,” and “drawer-pulls.” Other “objects,” though, are more mysterious — they lack any clear identity as any everyday thing.

The wire sketch of a rooster crowing, that’s supposed to work as a household morning sundial, for instance.

These objects are always present in Calder’s homes, and performing domestic functions of some kind, but they’re not products of consumer culture. They’re not “industrial,” they’re not “designed.” They’re mostly one-off creations, often seemingly spontaneous, often made in under five minutes. They clearly lack any blueprints or any coherent plans for their construction. They often seem to have been cobbled together on some inspired impulse, from cheap, repurposed materials that Calder always had ready.

Such are the “Calder Household Objects,” as I must name them as a distinct class of things, and this rather long, prolix essay is all about the who, what, when, where, how and why of these artifacts. They’re mysterious, but with some critical analysis, I want to make them less mysterious, without also making them more mysterious, in unnecessary contemporary ways.

I do this mostly for my own purposes, because I’m very interested indeed in both kinetic art and unorthodox domestic acts of material culture. “Calder Household Objects” are some primal form of such activity, boiling at the magmatic root, there.

Calder’s not doing things that I myself like to study, for my benefit. He’s doing other things in a different historical epoch for different motivations. However, it’s so similar to my own concerns that it’s like some alternate-world parallel, or, maybe, like a steamship cruise-voyage to France.

Calder’s descendants sometimes publicly display these Calder Household Objects. They tend to half-apologize for them, because they are the great auteur’s creations, but they can’t fit into any proper museum or gallery art-world classification. They don’t even fit my own “Anti-Conventional Objects” classifications, as seen in the diagram here.

I was pretty happy about this design-school diagram of mine before I stumbled into the Calder Household Objects; now I feel that I need to vacuum it and scrub off the rust.

The “Objects” were indefinably weird, but definitely integral parts of Calder’s home-life. They were never framed, artistic showpieces, but they were (more or less) functional objects that he and his family lived and interacted with, and used in daily life. Unique. Hand-created. Never available in stores. On walls, on shelves and in cabinets, next to ceilings, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the breakfast table. Lots.

What was Calder doing with this practice? Alas, he’s dead, so a design journalist can’t just ask him. His response would likely be swift and dismissive, along the lines of “Oh hell, I’m just farting around!” Calder was gruff and earthy, and he disliked art theory talk; his parents were art teachers.

Legendry surrounds the guy. He’s got too much, even. I will have to tackle it headlong in this essay. I don’t begrudge Calder his legendry; any great artist naturally attracts that “Walter Benjamin Aura;” it’s part of the miasma of world-class artistic fame, and it even seems to be a professional requirement. Also, there are aspects to Calder’s creativity that I don’t expect to ever figure out; I don’t think he understood them himself.

But what the heck gives with the “objects?” Why are they so weird, and so weird in those ways? Why did he do it, and why just him and his intimates? Why doesn’t everybody do it?

Why, for instance, this artifact (in the handsome Internet jpeg that I have no rights to reproduce, but that I purloined for entirely legitimate pedagogical purposes because I’ve been known to teach in design schools).

This is an outsized kitchen soup ladle that’s made from a single sheet of formerly-flat, but deftly folded, tin-plate. That’s what it physically is; an archaeologist who dug it up would call it that.

Now, to speak as a design critic, I can easily list all kinds of formal objections to this “object.” First, it can’t function well in any kitchen. It’s not finger-friendly; the sharp edges could hurt. This ladle will conduct kitchen heat unnecessarily, so it’s not much good for stirring or serving large amounts of hot stew.

Also, there’s no rational “need” to make this thing. Even in the 1930s during a Depression, or even during a World War with metal shortages, a properly made, safe, clean, handy kitchen ladle would be easy and cheap to acquire.

Also, there’s something beautiful and marvelous about this Calder ladle-object. Calder himself caused it to exist, and unlike some millions of other ninety-year-old kitchen ladles, Calder’s unique ladle-object still exists, and will likely be around in many years. It’s got aura, that’s for sure.

It’s unique, but with that said, why is it unique? Why is there just one, only one? It’s so simple! Obviously, this inventive “object” of Calder’s would be trivial to mass-produce. These ladles could be stamped out of some proper, kitchen-friendly metal substrate, in one single, automated factory-machine fold-and-punch.

These mass-produced non-Calder ladles would also be “pretty,” as it is pretty, sort of — but even if they cost next to nothing, I don’t think anyone would buy them. Much less, use them.

I’m not sure they’d be purchased even if they were Calder-licensed by Calder’s family foundation, and offered in a museum store as certified Calder mementos. Without the Calder aura, they’re dead on arrival as “products;” and even with Calder aura piled deep on them by the conventional art-world, they still wouldn’t work in a kitchen.

So, did Calder himself use this big awkward spoon, did his wife use it? Yeah. I think they did indeed use it. They had their reasons. I plan to get to those.

This ladle-object shares the innate mystery of many other Calder objects. They’re not particularly fun, useful, helpful, safe or nice. They’re somewhat ingenious — (if you study them with care, and envision the clever processes Calder chose to make them) — but they’re unfit for purpose, they lack clear definition, and they often provoke vague unease. There’s even something repulsive about them.

The genuinely weird Calder ladle-object is by no means the same class-of-thing as, say, a big, hand-whittled wooden camp spoon. Hand-made spoons are pretty common in backwoods hunting camps. The Victorinox company even publicizes their camping knives and their nifty ability to quickly make wooden spoons. Wooden camp spoons are wilderness hacks, they’re social-media Maker things on Youtube. Like Calder’s metal spoon, they’ve got some major design problems: they’re ugly, awkward, unsafe for food, they don’t work well, you could get a wooden splinter or nick yourself with your Swiss Army Knife, etc.

These campfire maker-objects are physically quite similar to Calder’s ladle-Object, but they completely lack the affect, or the lasting value of the Calder ladle-Object. Why is that?

Well, the answer’s not to be found within the two different spoons. That’s no use. The answer is in Calder. Alexander Calder’s not exactly “camping in his house.” But he is exploring it.

I don’t claim Calder’s metal spoon is somehow “better” than the wooden spoon. I would mention in passing that although I have long been very aware of Alexander Calder — (he’s the world’s most famous kinetic artist, even the seminal figure there, and I quite enjoy kinetic art) — there’s a lot of Calder I do not like at all. I dislike it in much the way that I dislike the music of Edgard Varese (another Modernist zealot, and a pal of Calder’s).

I get what Edgard Varese is up to, I appreciate the approach and the effort, I’m not surprised that his sound-constructions have lasted; I just don’t want his recordings around. Varese’s welcome to play that sort-of-music in his own house, I don’t want it in mine. Similarly, there’s certified, much-admired Calder artwork I don’t want to ever see more than once.

Sometimes Calder’s deliberately getting quite out-there with the abstract formulations, and I find that too demanding and tiresome. There’s even stuff that Calder considered cute and family friendly that I prefer not to witness, like, say, way-too-linear Calder housecat drawings.

And, well, the cowboy thing. Calder actually lived with American cowboys for a while, so he knew what they really looked like; a fan of “cowboy art” will find this image hard to endure.

So with that established, I am a Calder devotee, but I’m not in awe of some ashtray he clipped from a sardine tin. Instead, I tend to fret about him. Would I attend a big, boozy party at Calder’s colorful and eccentric house? Yeah, that would be fun! Would I like to try to prepare a meal in Calder’s one-off, extensively hacked kitchens — with their dangling kettles and their bizarre shelving constructions? No, not really. Blood might spurt.

Calder’s work is inventive and adventurous, but it’s also the “Unpopular Front,” as they used to describe twentieth-century Abstract Modernism. Calder performed it — he made strange objects from his childhood, and other Modernists encouraged him and they lit his footsteps — but not everybody could endure doing that, living with it, or even trying the effort. It breaks the weirdness limit. It’s un-recuperable.

Similarly, why doesn’t our modern-day world appreciate Maker-style interventions? Maker Faires have long been rather popular, but Maker department-stores are unheard of. Why has the “Maker Movement” never come up with any massive product-hit? For instance, some jigsawed plywood knick-knack that everybody in the world has to have, some “object” more beloved than a “Pet Rock”?

With “Calder Objects” and also Maker objects, I do not marvel and gawk with an unalloyed pleasure. Instead, I’m concerned about the sterile avant-gardism here. There are some “weird” successes here that normal people don’t understand, but also “weird” treacherous failures that nobody ever seems able to escape or transcend. It’s hard to distinguish the two — even when you know them both, and know them well.

For a few years, I spent much time inside a deliberately unusual domestic “maker space” — “Casa Jasmina,” a structure inside a renovated car-factory in Turin. This structure was never intended to be an “art project,” but it was commonly understood as one. Also, there’s never been more than one Casa Jasmina, even though it was open-source, and there was nothing secret about the goings-on in there.

When I look at the too-unusual Calder homes, I’m seeing what seems to me to be a closely related phenomenon. “Anybody could do it” — next-to-nobody chooses to. What are the historic lessons here? It’s not about the cost of the house. It’s not even the abrasive “weirdness” of the house, because people can get used to living inside most any form of peculiar shelter, desert tents, convents, barracks, squats, submarines, trenches in war-time with scrimshaw art. Somehow, it’s more the gesamtkunstwerk of the house, the challenging alienness of its entire expressive affect.

To grasp the mysteries of the Calder house, we must come to grips with Calder. To begin with Calder is necessarily to begin with the very young Calder. Calder’s Object history begins with Calder as a child of eight. His chosen everyday playthings are hammers, saws, and especially pliers.

At age eight, Calder is already busily altering his childish dwelling-space.

The little-kid Calder looms quite large in the Calder legendry. People who knew Calder as a child were especially taken with this handy explanation for his weird adult behavior. The secret is: our Sandy’s just a little kid who never grew up! Sandy’s got a permanent childish gusto for messing around! He makes a big spoon out of scrap metal — because any kid would! He yanks off functional drawer-pulls, and he replaces them with hand-hammered bronze spirals, because that’s the decor that a four-year-old would like! Sandy has never internalized the rules of adult behavior, so he turns his surroundings into his private playtime fairyland. And, since he’s boyishly good-natured about it, it’s charming. Sandy’s a fun guy, he does it for the sheer joy of it! It’s delightful to try to cook with awkward tin ladles that are hazardous and semi-functional!

I understand why people would want to say all this — it’s a kind of Whig version of Calder, where he’s destined from his boyhood to invent radical sculptural forms. I myself don’t buy this glib explanation, though. It’s way too neat and cozy. I’d like to offer another, less-perky version, where Calder is a too-bright little kid verging on autism. He has serious conceptual issues with three-dimensional space.

Little Calder has unspoken but long-lasting issues with rooms and spaces, with volumes and relationships and motions. When he hacks his bedroom, that’s not a boyish act of gusto. It’s a differently-abled kid learning to cope, and, maybe, aiming to transcend.

Sandy’s big artistic gift is also his affliction. It’s mysterious, like his mysterious life-long speech defect, not so much a “stammer” as a kind of weird word-swallowing that seemed to wax and wane for no particular physical reason.

A lot of little boys are feverish inventors who might whittle big wooden spoons, while little Calder age eight fills his environment with wire. He likes to tug wires and activate windows from his bed, and turn the lights on and off. Obviously there’s a childish sense of command-and-control here — “young Sandy Calder, the little engineer.” This is also a kid who’s strangely disturbed by the cosmic fact that things can be far away. Or too near. It’s not okay to him that space can behave like that.

Especially, ceilings affront him a lot — ceilings, “the deadest space in architecture.” At his parents’ home, Sandy is commonly down in the cellar, privately busy with his construction tools. All that dead empty space overhead — it seems to weigh on his mind.

Little Calder doesn’t merely want to yank his wire puppet-strings, and to make distant things happen. He wants spatiality to become more immediate. Things should be more connected to things.

I’m in deep water here, but I’d go deeper yet. I’d say that everyday spatial reality, boring old height-depth-and-width, is not in concurrence with the connections that the little boy privately senses. He’s trying to repair the disconnections. He somehow wants and needs the moving things to move the moving things. So he’s not “a little kid who doesn’t grow up.” He’s a growing kid at the edge of the bell-curve, and he’s grasping at straws.

This little Calder also has the persistent habit of collecting and assembling debris. This activity seems like a mere chaos of weird rubbish to other people, but the little Calder has some spatial eidetic memory for these elements he picks up and picks out. He immediately notices and resents it, if any small thing is disturbed in his room or in his basement workshop.

So both nature and nurture are contributing to Calder’s issues, or his gifts. His father’s a sculptor, his mother’s a painter, and Calder is surrounded from the cradle by 3D art objects. I don’t cruelly accuse Calder of any particular mental illness, mind you. He wasn’t “mad,” he was never arrested or confined, he had considerable sociable charm and savoir-faire, and in the long run he did very well for himself. But this is who Calder really is — this is the Calder in, and of, the Calder environment. Even utterly alone in a small room he’s very active and preoccupied — not just with his toys, but with the space.

His parents are not weird pack-rats like Calder. Calder’s parents are two natty, well-dressed Belle Epoque Arts-and-Crafts aesthetes who teach art theory. But their messy younger child — who never in his lifetime seems able to comb his hair — seems to have deep issues with the value of objects, and where and why they fit into spaces. Their boy can’t “grow out” of that condition. He’ll never grow out of it. What he can do is sublimate it and artistically express it.

There are also some, perhaps significant, traumatic upheavals during the Calder childhood. The father (known to history as “Stirling Calder” although he’s also an Alexander Calder) catches tuberculosis. Then the afflicted, poverty-stricken, fine-arts family has to relocate to the healthier air of rural Arizona.

Arizona has not yet become an American state. So Calder and his family are well-nigh penniless and they are suddenly living on a wide-open, frontier, cowboy hacienda, dwelling in tents.

This is quite a severe transition, and a stark level of material deprivation, for a big-town Philadelphia kid once-surrounded by cultured Mom and Dad’s artsy bric-a-brac. Yanked from his workshop basement, Calder has to mentally cope with vast wide-open horizons.

Calder’s father survives his grave illness, but he dreads the White Plague back in Philadelphia. The family relocates to newly-founded Pasadena, California. In this brand-new railroad town, turn-of-the-century “Arroyo Culture” has a fierce William Morris vogue for building your own home. The Calder family’s rental-home furniture is made from carefully painted, upholstered, repurposed California orange crates.

In San Francisco, dad finds a big break for some new sculpture work. San Francisco is still in a condition of extensive, post-earthquake ruin, an American metropolis that’s a heap of burnt junk. Among these ruins, Calder’s family is heavily involved in patching together a World’s Fair where everything is made of lath and plaster and it all flies up and then disappears.

These are the weird Calder formative experiences with homes and spaces. These are the weird sources of Calder’s weird later attitudes toward materiality. This is what family life in a family home looks and feels like to him — it’s very artistically cultivated, but radically unsettled. You truly need to adapt and make-do.

When the family returns to the settled and placid East Coast, dad’s health is fine, and he’s even reasonably famous. Civilization envelops them. However, that’s not the world that Sandy Calder has grown up in. The parents are upset and guilty about the exigencies of their artistic life. They really didn’t expect to live so close to the bone for so long, and under such traumatic domestic circumstances. So they urge high-school Calder to get a sound college education and find a solid career that can support him well. A predictable life of propriety.

So Calder, who has an excellent work ethic, dutifully does his college paperwork and earns a degree in mechanical engineering. He lands some office jobs — but the work doesn’t suit him.

He leaves the family home, but at this point in his life, he seems to fall off the edge of the table. He’s got no fixed address, and he’s aimlessly joining the merchant marine and signing on to long trips in the rusty holds of tramp steamers. He takes shelter with his married sister in the Pacific Northwest and he works in a frontier lumberjack camp. In his twenties, there’s something very Jack London blue-collar tramp about Calder. An educated East Coast college guy should have a career, a wife, kids and a house with a mortgage. By contrast, Calder’s living out of a duffelbag and is something of a lost soul.

While drifting somewhere off the coast of Guatemala, Calder undergoes a famous mystical experience. He sees the sun and moon in the dawning sky and realizes their cosmic spatial connection. The legendry speaks of this episode as his birth as an artist.

I think this was indeed a genuine event, and I also think it was a burst of curative mental health from Calder. It was his orientation. He succeeded in understanding where he was in the universe, with a lasting sense of conviction, too. This did not mean that he was fated to become an artist, though. He might well have succumbed to cosmic despair instead of finding cosmic elation. He might have seen the Sun and Moon in their weirdly terrifying Blaise Pascal infinity, and then jumped over the guardrail to vanish and drown. Nobody would have been much surprised at this. History would never have noticed his absence. Calder’s “bed” is a coil of nautical rope, at this point in his life. He’s spiritually ecstatic, but he’s also close to rock-bottom.

Also, this mystical revelation has no immediate upbeat effect for Calder. He is still goal-less and poor, and lives with his parents again. He attends a New York art school and he draws some newspaper cartoons. There’s no financial living in this. He’s still a penniless drifter, and he decides to work his way across the ocean and become a penniless drifter in Paris.

Luckily his parents, being elite artists with Parisian educations themselves, don’t mind this prospect one bit. They even kindly encourage his Paris sojourn with some spare cash they’ve scraped up.

Calder then joins the 1920s art horde in Montparnasse. Montparnasse is a seedy, vice-riddled Parisian neighborhood that also has the greatest collection of hard-working artists since the Italian Renaissance. In these foreign material surroundings, Calder almost instantly becomes quite a different man.

He can’t speak French, he’s very oddly dressed and he’s living in a seventh-floor walk-up garret with no furniture. This situation doesn’t bother him. He buys a few art supplies, he lives entirely inside the studio and he invents all the “furniture.” He even uses the studio as a cramped public-entertainment space, where he crouches and sprawls on the floor, surrounded by entertaining wire-toys that perform wiry circus-tricks, for audiences of maybe a dozen. The French show up and watch. They’re impressed.

In Paris, Calder masters wire. He can find plenty of scrap wire in the busy streets of Paris for no money, and no other artist has ever made much use of wire as an expressive artistic material. Calder finds that wire can distinguish him from the many other Lost Generation American art students infesting Paris.

The experience of exile has blown-out many of Calder’s interior constraints.Instead of being a mumbling blue-collar drifter inside the engine room, he becomes a drinker, a dancer, a boisterous extrovert surrounded by wacky Montparnasse chicks. The many Americans in Montparnasse — the “Lost Generation” — they put up with Calder, for he doesn’t seem special to them. But the French in Montparnasse adore him. Some quality about him — his sense of invention, maybe — seems to energize them. The French really like having Calder around. He gets the kind of unpredictable but hospitable French welcome that Josephine Baker enjoyed. He’s become a Montparnasse artist standing on his own two feet.

So, after this historico-biographical recital, we’re to a point where we can directly approach Calder’s house-hacking habits and his artifacts. “Who, what, when, where, how” — now, we’ve got those basic questions handled. Calder’s got a place to take a stand, he’s got tools, techniques, materials, time to work and a promising career, but he’s consistently, persistently messing with “Objects” that aren’t art, they’re not popular, and he can’t sell them.

Big question: Why?

Why the reflective candles and ashtray ensembles?

Why the near useless forks, repeated with various methods?

Why the genuinely bizarre, awkward, alarming, and most definitely hazardous red-hot naked wire “bread toaster” (one of a series of at least five similar electrical gadgets of Calder’s)?

Why, eventually, does Mrs. Calder — (the former Louisa James, from the distinguished American family of novelist Henry James and philosopher William James) — why does Louisa peaceably hand-knead French bread in that home kitchen with that bizarre ceiling-mounted shelving system?

And then there were Calder’s semi-domestic studios — always sited near to the home spaces. These workshops look genuinely maddening with their radical spatial disorder — but there are eye-witness accounts of Calder working in his spaces at great ease, grabbing his tools unerringly, and never misplacing his materials.

I could go on — I do have other documented examples to offer elsewhere.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/albums/72177720313542402

These aren’t mere jokes or freakish oddities. This is the genuine home-life of one of the most influential, respected, and (eventually) wealthy artistic couples of the 20th century. They genuinely lived within these Calder-object environments, in France and the USA, for almost fifty years.

In their early married life, Louisa James — a toney Bostonian lass given to pearls and fur — even moved directly into Calder’s Montparnasse studio, a “newlywed home” with no conventional furniture whatsoever.

So what is going on with these weird Objects? There can be no one simple reason for a multiplex process which goes on in multiple places for many decades. However, I can summarize it. I can draw the general outlines of it. It makes sense once you get inside the means, motives and opportunities.

The primary reason Calder does it is that he’s mentally propelled toward doing that from his childhood. It’s his habit, his metier.

He’s always been itchy, out of place and also uprooted. But then, the opportunity arises that conclusively turns his deficit into an asset. When confined in a cruddy, empty, unfurnished Montparnasse flat, he’s got a great deal to offer — not despite that, but even because of that.

Here is the Montparnasse Calder sitting on his found crates with the walls festooned with his found wire — there’s not one single conventional housing product in that space, not even a pillow, but Calder looks completely pleased with himself — a young Montparnasse lion in his den, even.

He’s confidently poised for the camera while he’s sleeping on his cot with the bedbugs. He’s in there, but all of Paris is out there, the City of Light. They’re friendly and supportive neighbors.

Also, Calder simply can’t afford anything conventionally domestic. The second reason for his habits is more universal; it’s just his poverty. If you want furniture made from packing crates, you don’t need to search that out in the Louvre. Hacked, second-hand, patched and jumbled furniture is the native furniture of slums, squats and favelas. And also earthquake ruins. And fairgrounds. And a frontier sanitarium in Arizona. And a lumberjack camp. Calder can manage those places; he might not even notice the domestic problem.

Even at a quick glance, Calder’s strange and radical domestic art-studio/kitchen/bedroom/theater is by no means in “good taste.” A concrete-block bookcase with some packing-crate shelves is sort-of usable, but it’s built to be quickly abandoned. This is “furniture” you won’t miss when you hotfoot it out the door.

Slum furniture is not artistically mysterious, not at all. Instead, it’s deprived, tasteless and depraved; it’s sinister and Dickensian even, like the pawn-shop vultures picking over the bedroom of the deceased Ebenezer Scrooge. All that stuff the dead miser used to own, that’s heading straight for the hands of the down-and-outs. It’s dropout reality, the street finding uses for things.

Paris is a huge capital city; it’s got metric tons of street reality. So Calder, the penniless emigre artist and former little-boy pack-rat, is making do. He’s not shamed or demeaned by the scrounging; he’s even confidently in his element about it. He can scrounge and hack all day, every day. And indeed he does.

Such is the bohemian Calder, an inventive twenty-something adept at make-do in his weird room. Then a miracle occurs, and elite members of the Paris art world decide that he’s a major creative figure.

Calder can scarcely speak French, and he also has a speech defect. Also, Calder has no impressive body of creative work that ought to command the respect of the likes of Pablo Picasso or Andre Breton. His fellow Americans in Paris are unimpressed with him; he’s not a genius to them, he’s a goofy vagabond. As far as I can figure, his primary social skill in France is playing funny art tricks with steel wire at parties.

But nevertheless, the Paris art elite intuit that he’s one of their own, and so he promptly becomes one. The likes of Joan Miro, Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian and even the ultra-radical Marcel Duchamp take Calder with enormous, sustained seriousness. They do not resent him as a Yankee hick with a parochial art education. On the contrary, they eagerly share their best ideas with him. They make consistent efforts to help him.

This is the third major aspect of his Object habits: the strong influence on Calder of masters like Marcel Duchamp. The Duchamp connection has some plausibility. Duchamp is a practiced art-world talent scout, and he’s quite well-acquainted with the USA and its people. Duchamp’s longtime mistress is Mary Reynolds, “the Queen of American Montparnasse.” He’s also on excellent terms with Man Ray, the only American Surrealist, the Paris emigre who is one of Duchamp’s most devoted, lifelong cronies.

Marcel Duchamp does all kinds of art-guru favors for Calder. His single biggest boon to Calder is that Duchamp serenely legitimates Calder’s trash-picker, pack-rat habits. Somehow, Duchamp gets Calder to understand that repurposed urinals are major-league sculptural interventions. They’re artistic successes: they will upset the straights for decades on end. The Duchamp “found object” is potentially subversive, explosive.

The Duchampian adept must cultivate the mental habit of making no distinction between the high-priced, precious art relics and the alleged trash. Because, to the adept of Objects, it’s all the same stuff. Clumps of atoms in space-and-time. Congelations of the fourth dimension as the nude walks the staircase. If there’s a price-tag on it, it’s placed there for the suckers. That’s weird, but that’s how it is.

This is a liberatory gospel for Calder; he not only grasps this wisdom from the fountain of Duchamp, he fully comprehends it and he acts on it relentlessly. He even earns his living by it, because Calder “jewelry,” which he can manage to sell with some regularity, is never actual jewelry. It’s never sold in jewelry stores, has no gems or precious metals, and has no fine polish or finish. So Calder “jewelry” objects are Calder Objects. They’re one-off, wearable Calder creations, complete with many plier scars and hammer marks. They’re “Objects” that he builds for the spaces on a woman’s body. French women like them anyway, maybe because of that; they’ve got off-the-wall Montparnasse chic.

Calder “jewels” are luxury objects transmuted quite directly from street-junk, which is a practice you can serenely get away with, once Marcel Duchamp is your drinking buddy.

Later, Duchamp does Calder a further, extreme, life-changing favor. Duchamp’s American girlfriend, Mary Reynolds, brings Duchamp to Calder’s studio, in order for them to help Calder. Calder has just built some new Objects that have motors installed, and they move some colored abstract shapes. These nameless, kinetic Calder objects are akin to paintings, but they’re also something like theater sets, and also like dancing puppets, and also like sculptures, and, so, they’re weird and problematic, and they just don’t fit into any standard artistic classification whatsoever.

Duchamp looks these gizmos over, and when Calder asks what to call them, Duchamp names them “mobiles” in French. This conceptual breakthrough immediately allows Calder to make mobiles by the ton. He successfully and permanently labels his Calder Objects as Calder Mobiles, radical, innovative sculptures unlike any known-to-mankind before.

Mind you, Duchamp’s other American friend/disciple almost does the same thing in Montparnasse. Man Ray invents a dangling, mobile congelation titled “Obstruction.” It looks quite like a Calder mobile, well before any Calder mobiles exist. However, “Obstruction,” although it can indeed move, is not classifiable as a “mobile sculpture.” Instead, Man Ray’s artwork is classifiable as a “Surrealist intervention.”

“Obstruction” is a coat hanger, that can hang coat hangers, that hang coat hangers. It’s a weird mash-up of cheap household objects — ie, mass-produced everyday coat-hangers — whose artistic purpose is the surreal brain-pop of: “Whoa! Wow! what is coat-hanger reality?”

Marcel Duchamp can bless the work of Calder with the neologism “mobile,” while the similar-looking, similar-acting “Obstruction,” with the same Marcel Duchamp looking at it, gets no such blessing. But that’s how it goes with Duchamp, that ascended master of the paradigmatic shift. That great gray-eminence of capital-A Conceptual Art. If Marcel declares it, it stays done, and if you take him seriously, reality just melts.

To return to our central issue, then, I can assert that a lot of Calder’s domestic Objects are Duchampian concept art. He does this because Marcel has given him mental and moral permission to do it. It’s even a cause which Calder feels obliged to advance. Not just in big, public ways. In *all* ways.

I’ll illustrate how this works with one of the seemingly minor Calder hacks, which is a set of dual coffee cups. These Objects are habitually used by both Sandy Calder and Louisa Calder to share their morning coffee in their eerie Connecticut breakfast nook.

These two vessels are Chinese teacups, which lack handles and become uncomfortably hot to the fingers with freshly brewed coffee. These cups are designed for steeped tea, a different beverage. So Calder designs two similar, but not identical, wire handles that latch on to the teacups.

So why this Rube Goldberg intervention, just for some coffee? Why not just hand-build some coffee mugs, or buy two proper, commercial coffee mugs, or obtain ultra-cheap second-hand mugs from the flea market?

You might argue, as Calder’s American intimates often did, “Oh heck, Sandy’s just a big kid! He’s having fun with the teacups!” Or, you might claim that he’s spontaneously invented something like a “beer coozy,” which is that foam rubber wrapper that protects your fingers from ice-cold beer. These “coozy” products exist in millions nowadays, and are very cheap, and throwaway trash, even. Beer coozies are often printed with some cute or funny joke. Americans like them.

But these aren’t handy, popular “coozies,” or boyish larks, either. They’re not even adornments. What Calder is actually doing is demonstrating the Duchampian fact that all cups are cups. If they can handle fluid, the maestro doesn’t care how somebody else (the Chinese for instance), conceptually framed them or sold them.

The cups exist so that both Calder and the wife, first thing in the morning, can jointly celebrate that they get it about this. So they’re Duchampian objects, but also domestic routine. Their cups becomes a shared habit, but it’s a suggestive habit and it frames their day. They’re a coffee-swilling couple (they have collections of French metal coffee-pots), and they’re preparing to be, think and act Duchampian, all day.

No one but he and she can have such cups. Calder could easily make a similar handle for somebody else in maybe forty seconds. His ever-handy Bernard pliers are always in reach, and he measures his wire-supplies by the mile. However, Calder would not choose to build such cups for anyone else in any other house. Because, although the wire handle mimics an “improvement,” it’s not actually an improvement. It’s not any handy shortcut, it’s a deliberate detour. It exists as a “detournement;” it subverts a perfectly normal Chinese teacup into the alien condition of serving as a French coffeecup to an American art couple.

Also, the cups look funny. They’re comical, but it’s the fact that the straights don’t get it, and can’t ever get it, that is the funniest thing about them. They’re dual cups of marital unity; we’re pulling a fast one on the world, and we know that. Here’s to us! Freedom!

The kid-hacker element was important, but Calder did not stay a kid. The poverty element was also important, but his poverty passed. The Duchampian element is genuinely lasting and profound. It’s something like a personal crusade. You don’t go on crusade for the convenience.

These are the larger motivations for Calder house-hacking, but there are some other smaller ones.

For instance, number four, the heritage issue. Eventually Calder’s widowed Mom comes to move into the domestic Calder home, or rather, into her own little house, on the same property. Mom is a strident William Morris-style Arts and Crafts zealot (although Mom happens to be Jewish, and from Milwaukee). So Mom’s into the Ruskinian artsy tradition of “have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Calder doesn’t actually do this himself; he’s not a Ruskinian whatsoever, he’s a committed Modernist abstract artist. However, he’s willing to allow some Art Nouveau grace notes into the domestic hacks. Grandma has a role in the home. She belongs.

For instance, there’s this hacked creamer. It’s not well-photographed, but this creamer is rather a Calder’s-Mother Object.

Somebody broke off the ceramic handle of this conventionally-pretty jug (there were a lot of drunken parties at Chez Calder). Calder rescues Mom’s corny creamer by putting a little metal band around it with two pretty spirals that represent splashes of cream into the coffee. That’s weird (because the creamer’s hard to hold), but it’s quite sweet and feminine, in a very Art Nouveau, whiplash-line, art inspired by nature, fashion.

He also made Mom a rude and wacky toilet-paper holder, because Mom’s artsy prissiness gets on his nerves. Have a seat, Grandma, welcome to Duchampian modernism.

Calder was rigorously hacking his dwellings long before he ever met Louisa James Calder, but many post-marriage Calder Objects in the Calder Home are very Louisa Calder. In a twentieth-century marriage, the domestic area is properly the woman’s sphere.

A lot of these mysterious Calder Household Objects have Louisa Calder as the user-base. They are for her, or about her, or gifts for her, or tributes to her, or husbandly acts of mollification. She is the mistress of the Calder home, and, more to the point, without Louisa James, Sandy Calder doesn’t much want or need any “home” at all. Calder is perfectly capable of living until his death inside a garage. Even with Louisa as his devoted home-making spouse, Calder still has the associated garage workshop. He can’t manage his life without such a space. It’s his own space outside the house, where Louisa does not interfere.

But — after briefly enduring married life in one of Calder’s cramped, bug-infested Montparnasse studios — Louisa is forever all about the Calder house and home. Calder domestic hacks are in service to her domestic purposes.

For instance, there’s a unique “scissor guard,” a long wire coil that locks scissors shut.

This Calder object exists because Louisa has complained about their daughters “running with scissors” — a motherly complaint from time immemorial. Calder responds to this fearful lament by locking the scissors. That’s not very practical, but it alleviates the complaining. Now Mom can devote her mental energy to worrying about something else, such as, which of their five different French coffeepots to use.

In the documented kitchen areas, you can almost hear Louisa Calder issuing her orders. “I need a space for my French cookbooks.” Up they go, onto scrap-lumber shelves, up in a remote, dusty corner, over the door-jamb. “I broke this cutting-board.” Five new cutting-boards promptly appear, all shapes and sizes, derived from actual boards. Louisa might decide on the best board and throw the others back into Calder’s studio scrap-heap, but she rather likes having all five. The array of options feels liberating.

The hospitable Calders like having outdoor grill-parties when the weather’s nice, so he just bangs a bunch of barbecue grills together. They’re big, ungainly objects, hard to store, so they hang against the kitchen wall from ceiling hooks. Colossal straw-covered wine-jugs are handy, because Louisa’s grandfather was a raging alcoholic, and Louisa herself finds some relaxation in her French-centric wine-mom lifestyle. Bohemian artists drink a whole lot. Their code allows this.

Staying fruitfully busy at the home, Louisa gardens, harvests and cooks. Her older sister is an aristocrat married to a millionaire, and she has a servantry, so the relatives are often surprised that the once-posh Miss Louisa James would choose such an apparently meek, peasant farm-wife way of living (including an extensive stint of home-life in a decrepit French cottage that lacks even electricity or running water). However, they miss the Modernist crusader aspects of Louisa, her engagement in performing this domestic feat. There’s something Thoreauvian, and Brook Farm intellectual dropout about her. The decision to abandon art-center apartments in Paris and New York, and to dwell in big, semi-rural barns, that was never Louisa’s submission to humility and poverty. That was Louisa’s own preference.

Life in the Calder home is an adventure — guided by Louisa. Once he achieved this marital and spatial situation, the husband Calder, father of two, changed quite a lot. He built Objects on much bigger scales, often outdoors. Under her aegis, he adopted the lifelong Calder working uniform of a red LL Bean shirt and blue jeans. The Montparnasse Calder admired stage costumes, and he even wore tuxedos. However, the Louisa-spouse Calder is Whitmanesque, in his standardized, iconic, sawdust-proofed, paint-resistant Man of the People garb.

The red-shirt and blue jeans is also a costume — Calder’s famous for it, and he always wears it in public — but it’s Louisa’s chosen costume for him. She’s the one washing it. It is sensible, functional, studio work-gear — (sort of) — but it’s also “Husband of Louisa Calder” gear. She is protecting Calder from the possible distracting compulsion to hack his own clothing. She has freed him from that occupational hazard, because he simply wears the same thing every day. Also, if he rips his clothes, or covers them in glue and sawdust, in ungentlemanly fashion, there’s no problem in the Calder household. Louisa has cabinets, there’s lots more.

Long-married couples tend to effortlessly coincide in their tastes; they pursue and own “things that are us.” This is typical of the Calder couple, who like to go flea-marketing — they obtain domestic collections. Too many handwoven French baskets — “We need some of those.” “How many?” “Get ten.”

These are not Calder-created Objects, but these are Calder objets trouvés, and often French, too. The Calders find the objects that speak to them, and those things tend to get stockpiled.

Louisa James is the “muse” of the Calder Objects, but she’s also pushing the process. “She’s a nice, sweet girl, she’ll do him a lot of good,” assessed Stirling Calder, and that proved true: Louisa James is the major, crucial difference between “Sandy Calder,” that down-at-heels toymaker and newspaper cartoonist, and “Alexander Calder,” the steam-rolling, globally famous, monumental sculptor. Although Louisa was a leftist peacenik — her father was a political crank — she never chose to glamorously swan around in the art world. She’s very bohemian, and also pretty, but she’s like the polar opposite of Kiki de Montparnasse.

If Sandy Calder is “forever just the big kid!” then Louisa James is the adult woman with the heartfelt need to protect him. Those run-down country houses, with all the strange “Objects” inside them, are really Louisa James Household-Objects. They are large, ambitious Louisa James schemes to protect Sandy Calder. These are not mansions that Louisa commissioned or designed — these are junk places that she found. She’s pulled him into these found-houses, off the streets and out of the slums, and into roomy, lofty spaces where he can think bigger, feel bigger and work bigger. There, he can become truly productive. And he can stay out of trouble. And she can watch over him. Because she’s there all the time. Constantly. Not underfoot in his workshop next to his power-grinder, but always very close. Right in the next building. With a Calder Object bell to ring, to fetch him.

Strange tributes exist, to the power of Louisa’s protective influence. For instance, when Andre Breton was forced to flee Nazi-occupied France, he left his only child, his daughter Aube, in the charge of Louisa Calder, in her Connecticut home. Breton placed his own little girl into that strange house with all the “Objects.” There Louisa sheltered this little French girl, and fed her, and probably made her some new clothes. Later, the child’s mother settled near Louisa in the USA, with a new husband.

During the second world war, Louisa Calder volunteered as a nurse at a military mental hospital. This was also a job that Andre Breton was famous for doing, back in the Great War. I doubt that was any coincidence. Louisa James was not some mere housemaid and nanny for Andre Breton, she was his peer, another Surrealist guru and sometime psychoanalyst.

It takes some steely determination to diligently nurse the mentally war-wounded, but Louisa never flinched. She never made any big deal of performing this dutiful, nurturing activity outside her home; she just publicly agitated for peace, whenever she had the chance.

When her children left her home, Louisa became engrossed in creating huge home-made rugs. These vivid rugs creep in at floor-level in years of photographs, and eventually they dominate the Calder house. They resemble no other rugs, some are alarmingly garish and large, and they are hand-crafted “Louisa Calder Objects.”

After Calder’s death, Louisa James became an almost-stereotypical Artist’s Rich Widow. She owned a colossal stockpile of highly variegated Calder artifacts, one of the biggest artistic treasure-troves ever made by one single artist. The widowed Louisa Calder even regally donated a Calder mobile, free of price, to the fledgling “modern art” museum in Turin. Why? Because if those Italians think they’re ‘Modern Art,’ then they’re gonna need a mobile.

This Louisa gift is the Calder artwork that I know best. I’ve spent a lot of time with that mobile — hours on end — commonly sitting on the floor in the corner of its Turinese museum room, with a laptop. The Italian museum functionaries are cool with this act of communion. They probably think that I’m writing something about the mobile. I’m not, but I’ve written a lot in there, and been delighted with its presence.

Louisa was generous with the Calder artworks, and I’m grateful, but I do not know what Louisa did with all the weird “Objects,” once Calder was no longer around. I’d quite like to know that. Did she tidy them up — like Mom, tenderly removing the four-year-old’s crayon sketches from the kitchen fridge? No one seems to have publicly queried her on the subject. She lived another twenty years.

There’s another aspect to the general matter — “Calder Objects” as displays for the family’s guests to admire, or to be weirdly boggled by. Alexander Calder and Louisa James were married for 47 years. At first, their married life was materially haphazard, and busy with children, but eventually their situation matured. Then people would appear at the house as guests, and they would be overwhelmed by its unique, enchanting atmosphere and its uncategorizable objects. When they toured Calder’s workshop (quite a famous pilgrimage) they would be simply wonderstruck.

There was just — so much. Nobody else lived like that. It was a lifestyle beyond all purchase, almost beyond comprehension — a kind of serene bohemian revenge. A Rockefeller could walk into the place (the lordly Rockefellers were big Modern Art fans) and yet they could never possess such a lifestyle.

Of course the most striking Objects in the late Calder home were the Calders’ own fine-art collection. Commonly these precious artworks had been simple gifts to them, for Calder was a generous, warm-hearted guy, and so some drinking buddy would just give him some painting. “Wait — is that a genuine Picasso?! You could buy a yacht with that!”

In the Chez Calder, the artwork was not glamorously framed or lit, it was just festooning their everyday walls. It had once been some weird “modern artwork” that nobody understood, and that most everybody hated, but decades later, yeah, of course a kid could go through college with the auction-price of that canvas. “Those who worship the Muses end up in the Museum,” and the elderly Calders lived in a cultural treasure-house.

Surely it’s alarming that blue-chip art investments should be hovering over a crooked sink with hand-riveted forks. But “respectability does not so much beckon, as embrace,” and this was one fruit of their long dedication.

Calder’s grandfather and father were both sculptors. Unlike him, they ended their lives as forgotten artists. The elderly Sandy Calder enjoyed the blooming late-life career of an elderly architect.

Calder personally knew many elderly architects — he was considered the A-OK art-adornment guy for Modernist ultra-structure mavens. Commissioning a Calder public monument was like buying IBM; nobody could get fired for doing it. In later life, Calder would venture out to oversee bolted emplacements 60 feet high, whose undersides could contain urban crowds. Then he’d go home to his den with the copper sink-strainers.

These activities were intimately related. It’s not that one is the weird hobby, while the other is the millionaire payoff. The seemingly weird hobby is what provides the distinction that enables the millionaire payoff.

“Stirling Calder” would never have willingly hacked his elegant houses, and Stirling’s own father, who was yet another Alexander Calder, wouldn’t have hacked his house, either. These two craftsmen might have physically done it, but they would have recognized it as inappropriate, goofy, weird — beyond the pale.

But the “pale” is a spatial boundary that exists because someone else put it there. “Outside the pale,” that’s where the giant orange Stegosaurus, shaped like origami steel, can live.

Then, finally, there’s the famous Mondrian studio episode, or rather, this core, central aspect of Calder legend, with its nested set of anecdotes. This is a rather typical yarn of thunderstruck artistic inspiration, but the legend doesn’t explain very much — myths are mystical.

The actual events, though, when teased apart, provide some intriguing insight into my original burning question in this essay, “Why did a famous kinetic artist have a Maker home?”

My question turned out to be framed quite badly, and my “explanation” won’t satisfy everyone, either. Calder himself could never have answered that question. He never restricted himself to the role of “kinetic artist,” and he never knew what a “Maker home” might become.

However, the Mondrian legend demonstrates that “kinetic art” and weird “maker homes” were not separate categories. That’s the real answer. They arose as the very same thing. Same place. Same time.

This fateful place-and-time was the showplace-studio of another Calder friend/ally/guru in Montparnasse in Paris, the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

Here’s how things went. Imagine Calder, tinkering with wire in his “studio” — he sleeps and eats there, it’s his den. He hears some hot rumors about Mondrian’s much-better studio. Mondrian sleeps and eats quite near his own studio, which is a weird five-sided nook in Montparnasse.

However, Mondrian has radically re-made his own space. Mondrian has applied his lofty, minimalist, conceptual, abstract-art theories, not just to the canvases that he is painting inside the studio, but, crucially, *to the entire studio space.*

Piet Mondrian has diligently re-designed, re-painted and re-lit his entire Montparnasse atelier, so that it can become more “abstract” and “plastic,” as he puts it. His so-called “studio” feels more like a theater experience. Mondrian’s studio is immersive, a total work of abstract spatial art.

Calder has also been remaking his own studio into a makeshift theater, where he manipulates wire marionettes in a “circus” that he’s invented on the floor. So the news of another painter’s studio-theater is of keen interest to Calder, and he wangles a studio invite from Mondrian, who is cordial to him.

Calder enters Mondrian’s five-sided studio and is promptly mind-blown. Spatially, Mondrian’s creation is about the size of his own cruddy studio, but the space has been radically altered, upgraded and completely re-thought. It even features a theatrical sound system (a Victrola, because Mondrian is a jazz freak) but the record player has been painted white so as to vanish within the space.

Calder has never seen an artist working space so cool, thought-through, and radically impressive. Also, with his innate over-sensivity to space, he can’t distinguish the artwork from the walls. Mondrian has firm, novel ideas about how colors should fit together into abstract spatial relationships — mostly primary colors, rectangles of them, assembled in grids. That’s Mondrian.

However, since the Mondrian studio has five walls, the rectangular grids just don’t fit. Colored shapes seem to drift, almost in optical-illusion fashion. Mondrian has built detachable panels of sharp color, and he can move them from one wall to the other. By doing this, Mondrian can demonstrate that the placement of abstract colors can create a strong aesthetic affect on the viewer. They’re not representational “drawings” or “pictures” of any particular “thing,” but these abstracts do convey a distinct frisson. It’s potent. It hits.

This immersive-interaction-installation affects Calder deeply. American that he is, he tries his best to help Mondrian. He suggests that it might be even better if the moving, abstract color panels were motorized. Then the colors could could oscillate in the space, maybe vibrate, while they moved around mechanically.

This is rather a hip, with-it response from Calder — it’s very of-the-moment, it’s very Sigfried Giedion “Mechanization Takes Command.”

However, Mondrian is cool to this dorky Yankee high-tech notion. The two artists part, and Calder goes back to his own work-space. He’s had a breakthrough. He’s on to something. Now he knows that studios can become demonstrative, dramatic spaces. Abstract things can move around in there.

The legend says that Calder promptly applies some engineering to Mondrian’s paintings. Then, presto: automated Mondrians become Calder mobiles! But this over-simplifies historical events. Actually, Calder’s engineering skills had next to nothing to do with what happened. Calder went back to his studio and he immediately began painting abstract art canvases. The abstraction itself was fresh and new to Calder, he’d never before been an “abstractionist.” So he painted collections of potential, abstracted shapes that might possibly oscillate or vibrate — just as he’d recommended to Mondrian.

In these abstract painted experiments, there were no engineered gadgets. Calder’s first rehearsals for mobiles were many painted works. Calder commonly began his work-day with some painting; the act of painting eased him into his flow.

The process of inventing mobiles was long and intuitive. There were no deadlines, blueprints, physics calculations, weights, measurements, or design plans. Instead, there were many explorations of arcane art-world concepts. Calder did it all from-the-shoulder; he was following the process at hand.

Calder’s process went something like this. He tinkers persistently. He doesn’t engineer it, but he feels his way into it. If painted colors should oscillate in space, how might they do it? Well, that answer’s at hand — they move on wires.

He might paint his wire figurines — because they can move well — but puppets aren’t abstract enough. The puppets do move and dance — but he needs to *abstract the movements* from the puppets, and then deploy abstract movements throughout the whole space.

Calder also realizes that his cute little floor-crawling wire toys don’t scale up. They’re just little wire-circus puppets — they can decorate the space, they don’t dominate the space. They need to become art that’s ‘about space’ in the way that Mondrian’s diagram-like paintings, leaking all over the Mondrian studio, are about space. The whole effort needs to become more architectural — a kinetic art that’s about the room.

After hacking around, intuitively but diligently, Calder realizes that he is no longer drawing line figures with his wires — (for this was Calder’s most-effective earlier good idea, when he realized that a wire can behave like a ball-point pen line). Instead of *drawing on* space with the wires, he should be *sculpting through* space with the wires, and with their elements.

Each understanding slowly builds on the last. Iron wires and rods are sturdy. They can occupy a whole studio. The wire contraption inside the studio can infiltrate the entire space that contains it. The kinetic art is also the house. Viewers can step right into the wire sculpture and push the wires around!

These original, yet-unnamed, private experiments at “mobiles” are not yet delicately balanced decorations hung from a ceiling and admired from an artistic distance. The original mobiles are attempts at immersive, interactive experiences inside a space. They’re wire-animated studios. They’re puppet strings where the puppets are made abstract, melted away into primal blobs of primary color, and it’s the strings which are valorized. The wires stretch through the space, connected by wire-loops, and they’re sculptural outlines turned into cascades of levers.

This Calder notion works, more or less — as long as the master of the wire-circus is present inside the space, with his pliers, to continuously maintain and fix the wires. However, a “wired studio,” unlike Mondrian’s fancy painted studio, has big problems. If the wires are too stout and heavy, somebody gets hurt. If they’re too delicate, the artwork warps or breaks, right away. Also, the wire circus-master has to stay inside the space-of-the-room with the wire-circus. Because it’s way too weird for anyone else to manage.

Calder never gets over the original urge to inhabit the mobiles. Whenever he’s building them, he usually steps inside them to create them. He doesn’t mind the mobiles banging, clashing, tangling — but as formal sculptures available for public display or private collection, this is a fatal drawback. Calder knows that he can’t always be there to manage the circus. In his bigger studios, later, there’s commonly a dozen mobiles dangling around him, while he’s cheerfully whacking and banging them, tinkering, hacking, upgrading, repairing. But alas, this experience is private. He can’t place that in public. You can only see it done at his house.

Calder’s road toward classic mobiles is incremental and crooked. He obtains some useful help. When he puts on a modest show of his first, motorized mobiles, Piet Mondrian kindly drops by. He’s glad that Calder is using primary colors — he warned Calder that abstract visual relationships have to be vivid. However, Mondrian doesn’t like the motors at all. The motorized movements are either too fast or too slow, and also, they’re very monotonous. They work, but they work the nerves.

Calder’s not upset by this scolding from Mondrian — he even appreciates the feedback. He refines his chosen shapes, settling on Joan Miro biomorphic abstract shapes, adorned in primary Calder colors. Abstract Miro shapes — which look like they’re attempting to do something, but never successfully performing it — are especially effective when they’re mobile. Also, Calder refines the movements. A bunch of paintings attached to the arms of a machine are just a display carousel. But abstract shapes on sculpted wires can scale up, they can fill spaces of any size.

Calder gets rid of the motors. A mechanized, repetitive, horsepowered mobile gets boring, irritating, and they’re loud, they break, they smell, they malfunction, they run out of fuel. However, a wind-powered, hesitant, flinchy, ambient, bright-but-barely there mobile has intense, can’t-look-away, eye-candy appeal.

Eventually, Calder, as a wise artist, understands what works best as mobile art. It’s not what Calder himself likes about it. What Calder really likes about mobiles is that they are spatial; they are microcosms. They are 3d-animated Mondrian paintings that are space-filling systems of subtly linked objects. It’s the roomy contraption-ness that’s the nature of the breakthrough. It’s the weird gizmo factor and the space-slicing space-mastery. That’s what Calder has invented and enjoys: but what is “weird” is not what is “great”.

What is great is what the wife and kids like about it. They wouldn’t presume to tell Calder what to do, but he can see it in their eyes.

A mature Calder mobile needs no wall-plaque critical explanations. The viewer need to know nothing — zero — about minimalism, abstract dynamism, biomorphic shapes, statuary reduced until it is mostly air — none of that. The viewers doesn’t even need to know the name of Alexander Calder.

The little mobiles are dainty and pretty. The big mobiles are big and grand. Sculptors from ancient Greece would have stopped dead and stared at them. Existential philosophers are amazed. Art viewers worldwide, seven-to-seventy, they all get it. The mobiles say nothing, represent nothing but themselves, and they’ve got it going on.

It’s about the disparity of colored elements, the delicacy of the balance, the interactions of subsystems, the variety of vertical and horizontal elements, and, also, the visual lines drawn by the wires and the spatial shapes implied as they move. That’s what makes a great Calder mobile.

Also — through diligent effort and prolonged attention to materials — Calder figured this out in a rather complete way. He’s the guy who invented mobiles, and it’s universally agreed that he’s the guy who built the best mobiles ever made. Mobiles are rather easy objects to construct, and there are lots of others, but none have ever “improved on” Calder. It’s a form of sculpture that seems to be unimprovable.

I find that a problem.

I would assert that Alexander Calder made mobile-objects in his studio, and he made Calder-Objects in his home, because these were, to him, aspects of the very same activity. Yes, it’s weird, but it comes easily to him, it’s natural to him. The entire space and all the objects within the space, he feels all right with their conceptual unity; that the parts imply the whole and the whole generates the parts, he’s a great artist, he’s internalized all that and he found peace with it. Also, Alexander Calder can paint-from-the-shoulder with wire. He’s extremely experienced with wire and also with flat metal, so if he sees something, anything, anywhere, in the space-of-the-house where wire-and/or-tin might make some interesting difference, then he just has at it.

Conventional assumptions of what’s proper, those can’t touch him. The wife gets this about him. She’s very aware, early on, that he perceives spatial details, and bits of scrap, that other people just don’t see. She’s granted him her loving permission to do Calder Objects, attic, basement, kitchen, Grandma’s bathroom, it’s all fine; she knows it’s good for him.

This is plenty weird, but it’s never some grave misfortune, it’s not obsessive-compulsion. Alexander Calder never does this to other people’s houses. In fact, he’s quite conventionally handy inside other people’s houses, he can deftly fix your sink or door-hinge in next-to-no time. He doesn’t do Calder Objects everywhere — but he does do Objects. He’ll do it to the family car. He’ll do it to a barn that he owns. Once, he duplicated the Calder Object fire-irons and gave them to a local neighbor who admired them.

But no one ever went over to Sandy’s house, and joined the Calder Object club, and made other Calder Objects. They seem pretty easy to make, most of them — but it seems that no one has ever dared.

Worse yet, no kinetic art critic has ever written a better kinetic-art essay than Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, about a Calder mobile, way back in 1947. You see, in Paris, Sandy Calder kindly gave Jean-Paul Sartre a mobile that he’d made out of beat-up, recycled Connecticut license plates (Sartre didn’t know about the source of the materials). He also gave the Sartre girlfriend (some Paris beatnik chick named Simone de Beauvoir), a rather nice sample of Calder “wearable art jewelry.” Simone was quite happy to have that. Back in 1947, Alexander Calder could really raise the morale of the war-battered French. They were truly thrilled to have him around. The French were very loyal in their fondness for him. From the get-go, they somehow had him figured-out as a titan-for-the-ages. The French can be picky about their visitors, but they can do that for people, sometimes.

I have read that Sartre essay about mobiles many times, and I wish that this essay about mobiles was better. Unfortunately, it’s not. My essay is about weird household gizmos. It’s a lesser topic. Also, the passage of time since 1947 doesn’t seem to have helped much.

In conclusion, I’d like to be able to helpfully suggest what should happen next. Obviously, this is what Calder himself would like his legacy to be; not confinement in some vitrine in a dusty museum, but the ongoing, cultural vitality of radical invention in the fine art of sculpture. Calder was a democratic progressive. Even in old age, he leaned somewhat toward starry-eyed Space Age visionary. If he was weird in the home in his day, then now, he’d want to be weird in the home in a more advanced way.

But if Calder’s ideals and impulses were triumphant, we’d have Calder Household Objects all over the place. Cadres of people would discuss them, and make them. They’d be a common practice for people involved with arts or crafts. That is simply not so; Calder Household Objects are persistently weird and peculiar, really, truly, lastingly unusual. So much so, that when I saw one in a video, I had to stop and re-run it.

I have witnessed some weird household things that are relatively new and have novelty in their weirdness, but are somewhat, vaguely, suggestive of Calder Objects. If you happen to own and use a 3DPrinter, then Calder Objects can seem somewhat less alien. A molten-plastic 3DPrinter can’t output steel wire, but it does output plastic wire. So a 3DPrinter can ooze out oddly-shaped pieces of relatively-sturdy plastic that can be jammed hither and yon into various domestic nooks and crannies.

If you owned a 3DPrinter and got very nimble with it, you might imitate Calder, maybe even faster and at less cost. Calder was a hand-craftsman, expressive with manually-shaped wire, but you could pull a John Henry on him — if he puts a brass wire handle on a teacup, then go ahead, one-up him with digital technology! Put a plastic printed handle on the teacup. Embed a whole plastic action-figure into your hacked coffeecup, that’s just as easy. Would that make your home life happy and fulfilling? Maybe. What is missing in this digital-to-analog substitution? Way too much. Everything that matters, maybe.

I can offer one interesting anecdote of hope — it’s about families who have owned Calder mobiles in their own homes for decades, for entire generations. Their homes contain time-tested Calder Objects, which are likely worth a cool half-million at an art auction. That’s not the news, though. What’s really interesting is that some of these quite elderly mobiles seem to *manifest new behavior* after quietly wobbling around for eighty years.

They’re entropic, but they’re not fossilized. They’re very gently decaying, rusting, corroding; the little wire loops and hooks are slightly changing shape. So the internal leverage is changing. They don’t rot or collapse, nothing sad or traumatic — they just perform new spatial behavior, like an aging wine cask manifesting new flavor. There’s something grand about that, like live volcanoes slumbering under their ash.

I don’t want to stuff Calder into a dusty corner, although he’s indeed somewhat stuck there nowadays. I do suspect that his domestic activities have some modern lessons that are little-appreciated and might be useful, illuminating, inspirational — but you don’t see me volunteering to follow him, beating a drum. I don’t design homemade inventions and interventions. I have no particular knack for doing that, and also, I don’t like to get in the way of gifted people who are actually good at product design of functional objects. I would much prefer to praise somebody else’s chair — (or instance, a Nils Diffrient Freedom Chair, those are excellent) than to cook up some plywood-and-plastic maker-chair all on my own. If Calder’s on crusade, I’m not part of it.

But the “do-it-yourself” scene is not entirely about yourself. The great moral lesson about Calder is that he’s inside a genius art scene — Montparnasse. In Montparnasse, the renewed Calder, the true Calder, appears on the scene, because other people are helping him with his self-actualization.

Even when Calder is in top form as Calder — whenever he’s friendless, when he’s isolated by wartime, just alone on his homestead with all his nutty gadgets and a lot of spare time, he doesn’t burn with his usual hard, lambent flame. All alone to do-it-entirely-himself, he seems in rather bad, sad shape. Calder puts in the hours, he does some good work, but he’s at a creative loss without his friends and colleagues. Calder doesn’t thrive, he does not gleefully innovate, while his wife’s on duty at the mental hospital. When that strange little French girl in his home needs her onion soup.

He gives away a great many of his “Objects,” Calder. Because he needs the people who surround him to have them.

“When you can’t imagine how things will change, that doesn’t mean nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.” Calder did change sculpture in ways that were previously unimaginable. Today, though, Calder’s revolutionary kinetic art has some aspects of a cul-de-sac — it’s much respected, it’s not actively advancing.

However, there are other unimaginable things that might well happen tomorrow. They shouldn’t be imagined as apocalyptic, psychedelic, transcendant things; they’re not sudden bolts of Jovian lightning; no, they can be more like magma rising from the workshop of Vulcan, slowly breaking through, and transforming the landscape. They are talent, and a lot of process-centered, intuitive exploration of things and ideas that other people have overlooked or dismissed. That would be more likely to happen if we understood how, why and when that happened, and cordially encouraged it to happen.

We don’t even need to “reward” it. Often it’s enough to not to crush it or dismiss it, just to give it sufficient space and duration.

Getting by with do-it-yourself has its distinctive virtues — especially in the service of others. Personally, here in the year 2024, I still don’t “make” much stuff. I’ve come to know something about the subject, but I doubt that I ever will do much of that.

However, as the lone American currently living a European household of five, I have, indeed, somehow, become their household repair guy. Entropy abounds in my household here, and a lot of conventional stuff falls apart. The possessions of three generations; there’s a lot of variety there. Fixing a toy is certainly much appreciated. Because they’re such cheap junk, toys. Their devoted users really beat them up.

I don’t genius-hack some busted kid-toy so that future generations will stare in wonderment. I do attempt to fix the household objects, though, and it turns out, often I can really do it. I didn’t imagine that I could become so generally handy, but time passes, it can happen. I’m not particularly skillful, but I have been around. In a household world of non-weird, troubled, busted objects — I get the principles.

In my case, the effort’s mostly about cyanoacrylate glue, WD-40 spray lubricant and the Victorinox “WorkChamp” pocket tool. I sometimes do make use of pliers and wire, just like good old Calder. I’m about as good with those as Sandy Calder aged nine.

It’s not that I myself aspire to do this, just for myself — it’s that others ask me for it. The expectation of a capability provokes one; that’s a literal “confidence trick,” an obvious placebo, but it works. Any and every household needs its objects serviced, weirdly or less weirdly; better objects do mean a better home. That modest effort, it transforms me somewhat — modestly.

I am more capable. It’s New Years Day as I write this — this year, I’ll do better. I’ll do more.

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