Jorn Micke 的烟斗

jt

Found a very nice article by Susan Forste.  

http://translate.google.com/#    this translator is not so good.  Maybe someone来自海南的大学生[ 烟斗村·众议所 ] — 全球华人斗客的精神家园+ `6 B$ m0 p( d- B8 X  like to contribute a better version?  thank you


With a Puff on His Pipe

Jorn Micke wakes up early in the morning, before daylight usually, so he sees the sun rise most days. From his house in the middle of a fishing village on a rocky island off Denmark, he walks along the coast, past the cliffs, to his workshop. His workshop is a small house among the rocks, facing the Baltic Sea. Inside are knives, some machinery, brier wood for pipes, oak for sculpture, paint and brushes, a big bed, a little kitchen.

Some days he'll carve for an hour or two on one pipe, then take up another. Or he'll paint or sculpt, or if the weather's good, go fishing. For trout and salmon he scouts about near the cliffs. For catfish he takes to the sea in his motor boat and spends the day with a pipe to smoke and a piece of wood to carve. His work, he observes, he can take anywhere.

Micke is one of the world's most revered pipe makers. One of his pipes,the bowl smooth and asymmetrical, lies on a velvet pouch under the glass counter top at Sasaki's Pipe Shop in Ginza. The most expensive pipe in the store, its price tag reads ¥360,000, medium range for a Micke pipe.

His fame is useful, he said, because it gives him more spare time;Micke is a painter and sculptor as well as a pipe maker, but his pipes make his living. "It's very simple," he said. "About once a month I go to the post office with a small package, and a month or so later I get money to live."

Most of his small packages come to Japan. With a yearly production of25 pipes, Micke points out that he can hardly be expected to supply the world. He prefers to have one main market, and this is the one he chose.

"The Japanese pay so much attention to small things, things that in the West maybe we would not even notice," he said. "You know, when I make apipe I'm never afraid to let Japanese touch it, because they will never scratch the pipe by fingering it or something. But that will happen ifI show the pipe to a European customer. I think my work is better appreciated here."

Micke is in Japan this month on one of his frequent visits. In all, he estimates he's spent about 15 months here—enough, he feels, to know"rather much" about the country. His coming and going may even give him an advantage, he thinks, over foreigners who have lived here longer."When you leave, your imagination has time to rest," he explains. "When you come back, you see things in a different way."

Most of Micke's friends are Japanese, he said. The majority he met in Denmark, and he visits them when he comes here. "In Europe, people live more on the surface. In Japan, people live close together. If they didn't have mental strength, they would break down. The Japanese rest more in their own person, like the fishermen on Bornholm (the island where Micke lives)...Americans are frank in a way, but in a way they're not. They hide very much, from themselves too....Talking frankly to a Japanese friend is more frank than talking to a European friend...In Japan you can walk in very crowded places but nobody pushes you. If they do, it's very politely...I like the way they treat one another. I don't know. It's too complicated. Anyhow, my pipe is always dead. Too much talking."

So he lit his pipe.

Ordinarily Micke doesn't talk to journalists. Newspapers he holds in rather low esteem—never reads one. But, pipe in mouth and beer in hand,an army green cap to push back and forth on this head, he spoke in an unreserved and friendly way.

In his youth Micke studied with Danish pipe maker Sixten Ivarsson, but he never planned to become a pipe maker. He planned, rather, to become a doctor. That was an occupation, he thought, that would allow him to work one year and take off the next to paint. After six years of medical school, however, he decided he'd make a mistake, that he would end up being both a bad doctor and a bad painter, and that at any rate,he couldn't work with other people.

"I'm not good at working with others because I do not find them good enough sometimes," he said. "It is my fault. I must live with my handicap."

When Micke set about restoring his present house, an old stone building that used to be a brewery, he ordered new doors and explained how he wanted them made. "But no one could suit me. I had to make the doors with my own hands." Pipes, too, he began making out of exasperation. "Iwould keep buying pipes, but after a month I'd get dissatisfied and throw them away."

"No one can help in my job now, but if I were a surgeon people wouldn't like me," he said. In 1963 he moved to Bornholm, resolved to paint. As for money, he would do odd jobs, make a few pipes and get by somehow.

Which is not say that for Micke pipe making is simply an odd job. He regards his craft as a special kind of sculpture. "Making a pipe is like making a bigger sculpture. If you have a little press here, then you need another press here," he said, demonstrating on his own pipe.

"My pipes and sculptures are similar. They are based on the shapes of things you have known from the beginning of your life—shells, stones,fruits. And later as a man, you know women. Most of my sculptures are female forms. That is what I like personally. That's what I'm feeling.Oh—it's difficult to express. But it's important to me. Those are the best in our forms, in the things around us in life.

To Micke, pipes are a special kind of sculpture because they are used.In museums, which he dislikes, sculptures sit. "But a pipe, a pipe is always in a man's hand, or in his pocket or in his mouth, even in bed maybe. It's like a walking exhibition on a street. A pipe is a very personal way to get in touch with another person."

To his wife he gave not an engagement ring, but a pipe, one with a slender almond-shaped bowl and a bamboo stem. He made one for himself too, different but with the same kind of stem. "When a Japanese friend of mine heard that they were engagement pipes, he asked me if the stems were made from the same piece of bamboo. No, they weren't," Micke said,and puffed on his pipe. "But if I had been thinking the Japanese way,of course they should have been."

[ 本帖最后由 jcats 于 2010-1-16 19:32 编辑 ]

halfy

感谢！This article made my day!