Eric Gjerde has formally announced the arrival of his first book, Origami Tessellations: Awe-Inspring Geometric Designs and we’d like to recommend it to your attention. We got to read through this at the Pacific RIm Origami retreat, last week and were greatly impressed with the breadth of the subject matter, the clarity of the presentation and the professional air to the design of the book.
(And by the bye, several of the friends of this blog have models in this volume.)
A very exciting foray into the world of authorship for Mr. Gjerde — we’re already looking forward to his next book.
The logo should be centered at the midpoint of the polygon’s sides, which is also the radius of the semicircle. There will be some loss of the logo — the top of the box is conical, you know. There are ways around this, just haven’t had time to play around with them. The logo doesn’t rotate. Took me a while to figure that out.
Allow me to observe, one of the most fruitful areas of investigation will be in cutting (horrors!) into the semicircle, as Mélisande* did with the Chagrin d’amour box.
It’s been a while since we launched into one of our trademark political rants and indeed, the evil of these times has been so oppressive that our obligation to denounce the manifold sins and wickedness of the present administration sometimes slips our mind. J’accuse, mofos.
It can be easily seen that this blog is written by one of those East Coast intellectual elitists you-all done heard tell about, down to the Wal-Mart. But now it can be told, we are descended from a long line of Indiana Republicans, at least on our mother’s side – the politics of Dad’s family are not as easily determined. Last time I was home, my father was telling a tale from the first years of their marriage, when he came home from work to find a volunteer from the county Republican party, registering my mother to vote. After introductions, the volunteer lady asked if my father would like to register. He said yes and asked with admirable naïveté, was she able to register him as a Democrat or did he have to go to the courthouse to do that? Mother was horrified, as was the party operative. After the volunteer left, my father said, “Why, Sal, you knew I was a Democrat before we got married.” “Yes,” said my mother, “but I thought you’d get over it.”
Indiana has been the reddest of red states for a very long time. When I see Obama seven points up in Hoosierland, I have to peek outside for the Horsemen.
Anyway, my parents moved to western Massachusetts in the late fifties (the real Massachusetts, as we like to say, the pro-Massachusetts region of Massachusetts) and started hanging out with brie-eating elitist liberals, blacklisted writers and the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P. In no time, my mother was dumping the infant oschene and his brethren at the dairy farm down the road and going off to Washington DC, to march in favor of test ban treaties and civil rights and what have you. A very blue lady, but she’s still visibly embarrassed about what Dad said in front of the Republican lady.
The polls look good right now, though I am scarcely inclined to believe them. Ten days is a long time and the Dirty Tricks Team has a hometown advantage. Still, if all goes well, maybe we can get the NSA out of your browsing history and and next year at this time, you won’t have to read this blog though a proxy.
Get out there and vote! While you’re waiting in line, you can fold this groovy box. (I hasten to add, this is 2.5 megabyte file. You should only click on it if you mean to.)
I was rooting around in my file cabinet, looking for some piece of prose about Wendy that I had written during the Pliocene or the Pleistocene, and I came across this crease pattern. I remember drawing it — it was probably for Imagiro, an APA I belonged to, once upon a time. The model itself took a bit more remembering.
It was early spring in 1986 and I was hitching back to the valley from Pittsfield, where I had been visiting the not-yet missus oschene. Someone had dropped me off on Route 9 in Cummington and I was getting nowhere very quickly. It wasn’t especially cold, but the shoulder I was standing on was at the foot of an abandoned ski trail and banks of ice fog kept rolling down over me. Miserable. Moreover, I was reading the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, a story not calculated to warm the cockles of your heart. The Pardoner kept making references to a dice game called hasard. Checking the notes in my ancient Riverside Chaucer, I realized the rules that the editor described so minutely were for a game I knew quite well — craps.
This got me to remembering how I had once taught craps to the kids at a reform school where I had been working. My idea had been to teach them how to count and add numbers in their heads, something they were pretty bad at. It worked well — once they got the counting and adding, I started teaching them the odds for the combinations. But soon, the little monsters were gambling away their allowances and the resulting economic disturbance led to swearing and fighting and all manner of bad things. Got me in some serious Dutch with the administration. Gambling is not a vice that I have ever found the least bit tempting and I have difficulty remembering that other people are not built the same way. It’s not that I’m at all averse to taking stupid chances — I just never do so for money.
So, I’m on the shoulder, thinking about the dicing urchins at the reform school and hasarding rioters in the Pardoner’s Tale, shivering like a mad thing in the ice fog, and this red muscle car pulls up. Guy says, jump in, I’m in a rush. So, I do. He’s wearing red jeans and a red shirt and a red scarf. Long blond hair and mirrored sunglasses. He’s got the stereo turned up to eleven and he’s pounding out the bassline on the dashboard. He’s doing ninety in places where you can’t do forty and passing cars on both sides. He yells over the music, Sorry, man, I’m really running late.
I asked him what he did for a living — always good policy to make nice chat when you’re riding with maniacs. Lead singer for Molly Hatchet — you like our stuff? Um, I said, Flirtin’ with Disaster? That was the only song of theirs I knew — never was much of a metalhead. And I realized that Flirtin’ with Disaster was the song on the stereo. That’s right! he yelled, Got to beef this mother up! Can’t tour with it like this!
I was after thinking, if I’m fated to die in such a grotesquely clichéd manner, why with this guy? Why not with Bruce or Graham Parker or Joe Strummer? The lead singer of Molly friggin’ Hatchet, so banal.
It’s twenty miles from Cummington to Northampton and should take you about forty minutes, the road being more than a little twisty. Took us seventeen. My feelings on getting out of the car were those of surprise at being alive and disgust, both at my manifest lack of judgment and at this eejit’s reason for speeding — he was late for a hair appointment. I got on a B43 bus for school, put some Stones on my Walkman® and finished my reading. Then, I folded this model.
Crease pattern and the same in PostScript. And let us have a little folding music:
[audio:Johnny Copeland – Tumbling Dice.mp3|titles=Tumbling Dice|artists=Johnny Copeland]
It’s all an illusion, of course — adrenalin breakdown products in the blood can give you a very profound sense of thematic connectedness. It is best to have a quiet beer and to ignore such mystical atmospherics. Still and all, no sin, no death; no death, no art.
Just a note — this should be more widely known, that folder, sculptor and performance artist, Polly Verity, is dipping her toe into the blogosphere. Visit her here.
Polly is cool beyond my powers to say. After I spend weeks recovering the thinnest scrap of the Dreaming, I will flip it over and invariably find, “Polly woz here,” scratched on the back.
According to the stats machines at Flickr, this is one of the most interesting photos I’ve ever taken. I am not one to argue with machines — they tend to equivocate and braid sorites and they’re absolutely useless with analogies. I have an old Thinkpad somewhere that believes that a raven and a writing desk are aspects of the same quiddity. Fortunately, one can always turn a machine off. There’s a knockdown argument for you.
It was the reactions of different people from different places to this model that I found interesting. A Brazilian viewer said it looked like a local sweet, teta de nega. An Indian said it looked like modak, a sweet dumpling favored by Lord Ganesha. An Italian saw a meringa, something I think we’d call a macaroon. Obviously, a shape that holds potent cultural associations and one to be explored further.
It was my intention to make an onion shape and it is, kinda sorta. It resembles a flat Italian onion called cipollini. I had been hoping for a more bulbous onion, something like a dome, but the tato-box closure restricts development of the top story. That’s okay, there are other ways to do things.
A man’s itch should exceed his scratch, else what’s a metaphor?
The same model in polypropylene, folded by Jeff Rutzky.
Yesterday, on the way home, I ran into Wendy, who was sitting on the sidewalk, begging. To be fair, it’s not something she does often. But such sights always throw me into ethical conniptions. Do you give them money, do you not give them money, do you give money to a third party…it doesn’t matter. By the time you’re on the sidewalk, you’ve effectively removed yourself from the possibility of any real help from anyone. Such a drag. But I can’t just go home. Even though she can’t remember it, Wendy and I were roommates, twenty-odd years back. Fate would surely kick my ass for walking on by. And there are worse things than Fate.
I think about it and go and buy some food that I remember her eating: tuna, celery, bread, mayonnaise, some ramen noodles. (Yeah, we always thought diet might have been part of the problem.) I circle the block and she’s still there, sitting behind a box, labeled “Money for Food.” I say hey and drop the bag with the groceries into the box and Wendy gets this puss on, a face of immense annoyance and offended pride. Man, that took me back.
Of course, Fate cannot be fooled by gestures. But I can be.
Two crease patterns: one with landmarks for those who enjoy working it out for themselves and one without for those who just want to get to it.
We’re back from the Convention in New York and our head is still spinning a bit, but not so’s you’d notice. We can report that a good time was had by all and that Mélisande*‘s and my class on Monday went very well, indeed. Tato boxes were the topic of the day and it was a sell-out crowd — an enthusiastic crowd, methought, as well.
Since the spinning continues, a twist fold seems in order and as it’s Independence Day, a star-shaped model is not inappropriate. This is from a decagon, though I think it could be easily adapted to a pentagon or a circle, and is very much a tato — a tato marked by manifest inutility, no doubt, but a tato, nevertheless. It’s called Falling Star Tato, since the purse section is so small that it could not contain much more than a wish.
The central pentagon of the pentagram is the purse portion
The puff star is made by folding another pentagram inside the central pentagon and by making another pentagon around it.
Make your tato and then hide the edges
Pop the sides of the tato in to make a puff star
That will make more sense if you look at the crease pattern and pay some special attention to the gray lines. And I will confess, that after teaching pentagonal shapes all weekend, I realize it can sound a bit like gnostic formulae if you’re not used to it. Let those who can hear, hear — the rest of you lot, study up.
We have been uncharacteristically quiet of late — it goes with the Marshwiggle physiognomy and the unwieldy amounts of pollen in the air. But there are a few things that want mentioning.
¶ Much thought is going into tato boxes, whereof the dining room is slowly being buried. A crease pattern for the above. It’s like learning a dance or a fencing move, but with a lot of trial-and-error, as we discover which steps matter and which are ornamental. And then we forget again. Someday, it’ll be a handy algorithm, but not today. (The curves, here, are particularly difficult to describe. When I make them, I know the curve wants to go thisaway and then thataway — the word is probably tractrix, but this is just a sound to me.) Mélisande* and I will be teaching a Monday session on tato boxes at the Convention this year, by the bye.
¶ Eric Gjerde‘s book is slowly fighting its way out of the world of forms and into a bookstore near you. Keep your eyes peeled.
¶ I am profoundly dissatisfied with the constitutional structure of OUSA. There, I said it. You don’t have to do anything about it — I’m certainly not going to. I like and respect the people in the administration, but it has been and continues to be a regional group that pretends to represent a nation of folders. It doesn’t. Bless them, they’re trying, but you can’t put web 2.0 lipstick on a 19th century pig. We need a whole new model hog.
¶ Brazilian mathematician and origami artist, Jorge C. Lucero has launched a blog, chock full of interesting things. Of course, I spent ten minutes trying to google the Greek mathematician, Antigüidade. I had never heard of him and he posed some fascinating problems. Hmm. No, I won’t tell you who he is.
¶ If you like folding dollars, you might try this. It’s a variation of the Dollars to Doughnuts fold and divides the dollar into a 9 x 21-point-something grid. Named the Hoppin’ Bobbin, a bobbin being a small steel gizmo that sits under the plate of a sewing machine and holds thread. You lap the left end over the right to the gray vertical — it represents the 16th division — and then collapse like a mad thing. There is no trick to this, just brute force and psycho-accuracy. You’re left with a one-sheet hyperboloidal spring that you can play tiddlywinks with. Or quarters, maybe.
Hey, you’ve got to do something with your dollars — you sure as hell can’t buy oil with them. Have a crease pattern.
Because the Lazy Susan is the oldest version I know of the kaki lock, I keep coming back to it. Here, I just keep the central compartment — hence, the name — and turn the other four into Argentine pleating. (Robert Harbin says such pleating comes from Argentina and I will not argue with him.)
I rather like this — it stands up straight and catch the eye nicely. Give it a try — here’s a crease pattern.
