oodles of doodles

I've been doodling a lot in my class notebooks, and this latest batch was pretty weird, enough to be amusing...

Oh, how the imagination takes over when you're bored in class.

Otherwise, I'm working on my resume and trying to figure out how to get a portfolio together—more a question of what to include, than how to put it together.

I also recently purchased the full Adobe Creative Suite, and I have my work cut out for me when it comes to learning the intricacies. The instructional books at B&N are all super-expensive, so I may go to the Seattle Public Library and check them out instead. I imagine it would be worthwhile to go through more than one.

But, just standing and going through the InDesign instructional books right there in the store, I learned that InDesign can indeed generate indexes and TOCs. I asked about that in the computer lab a couple Thursdays ago, but our main instructor is a FrameMaker guy, and he wasn't sure.

It didn't make sense that Adobe would allow that program to go out the door without an index function of some sort, so I'm glad to have that figured out.

On other fronts, I've been pulling out my copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and thinking about getting the materials together to pursue that and improve my drawing skills.

I also spent some time in ProTools today trying to find a suitable drumbeat in Strike! to build a little blues composition/jam track. I found the drum pattern I wanted under something called "TeraPop." I have no idea what the name means. The drum pattern itself was more of a Mitch Mitchell groove, and I wound up switching around drum kits and tweaking things to get it to sound right.

So far, I've found it really hard to build sequences in Strike!, especially drum fills. When I trigger the fill to hear how it sounds, the program immediately reverts back to whatever main pattern was played last. Maybe there's some trick I haven't figured out yet.

Later...

whew! busy day!

Today was a stressful day, the culmination of about three days of feverish editing work on a comprehensive technical editing assignment. I feel satisfied that I took the material in a fruitful direction; I don't believe I went too far with my edits, although I may have skated close to the edge here and there.

I both love and hate comprehensive editing.

The worst part of the process is when I'm confronted with a pile of baffling prose that doesn't seem to hang together, and I look at it in horror and think, "What the hell is this?!"

For me, the analytical brain work is the hardest part.

Once I have the piece figured out and I know what to do, the rest is just details and it usually flows.

[Digression: I just had a massive deja vu while writing this piece. My time in Seattle so far has been marked by regular and strong deja vu experiences. I don't really know what it means, but I have long suspected this experience is the universe's way of telling me on the right track and where I'm supposed to be in this life. I sure hope so. It does feel nice to be learning again and making new leaps of understanding in my studies.]

I wound up staying up way too late last night in the computer lab at the undergraduate library. I took a break to blow off steam, began studying Illustrator, Photoshop, HTML, and Flash, and I didn't stop until it was almost 4AM.

I also find myself taking great joy lately in drawing and working with visual material. At one time, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and now I find myself sketching in my notebooks and playing around with Illusrator at every opportunity. I once took formal art lessons in my pre-teens, and it might be nice to dust those skills off again and make something useful out of it.

Maybe I can get around to some regular guitar practice again, too. I'm still playing, and working on useful bits, but my engagement with it is not at a boil like I wish for.

Also, two days ago I picked up Andrea Stolpe's Popular Lyric Writing—10 Steps to Effective Storytelling. The author submitted a manuscript to Writer's Digest Books while I was there, but it didn't work out for WD to pick the book up, which disappointed me. What I saw was eye-opening, and she points out how outer detail and more abstract emotional statements in lyrics have a definite relationship. Her ideas intuitively felt right and true, and I've been waiting for the book to come out for months now.

Finally.

It looks like Tuning the Air will be performing a run at Fremont Abbey. It's going to be a massive challenge to bring this space to life, but it's a promising space and community on so many levels.

There was a funny moment when the performance team ran through a test circulation. JB hit some flat notes here and there; when I looked at her, she shrugged as if to say, "Yeah, I'm out of tune. So what?"

white and headless and on the march

Something about this little tableau struck me as being very Blade Runner. Would-be replicants awaiting completion.

GOODIES FROM THE PHOTO ARCHIVE

I've been scanning in old photos from a box I found when I flew home to see my parents last weekend. Just the choicest cuts, mind you.

My Teenage Car Crash

For instance, here we have a photo from my high school daze, featuring the remains of the Mazda 626LX I totalled my junior year of high school.


It was a dark and stormy night in 1987. I was young and stupid, driving very fast down a curving road. The gutter from the road above opened out onto the road as it went downhill, so I hit this layer of water and took off like the car was on skis. The car flew off the road right before a bridge, over a stream, and hit the shore on the other side.

It knocked me out cold—I'm pretty sure I smashed the steering wheel with my face—but I was mostly unhurt except for a temporary limp and a nasty headache the next day.

I don't remember the moment of impact, and I don't remember being airborne. Instead, I remember bouncing and bumping off the road through a field and seeing the weeds in the headlights.

I still remember returning slowly to consciousness and thinking, "God, what an awful dream!" Then I realized where I was. The hood was crumpled up in front of me, and steam was drifting out from the engine comparment.

That was a great car, too. I still miss it sometimes.

Portrait of the Artist as an Irritating Young Man

This is my senior picture from 1989. People tell me I look young now, but they should have seen me back then.


High school sucked. Not much else to say about it.

The"Big Hair Shot" from Ball State

This one comes from an early-1990 road trip I took with my Indiana University dorm friends AP, MM, and WD (the girl pictured on the left) to Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, to party with MM's high school friend MB.


Either AP or MM took this shot in MB's dorm room. I was growing my hair out at the time and fell into this thing where I would hang upside down off my dorm loft with wet hair while 3 or 4 girls would mousse and gel the hell out of it on a quest for Robert Smith follicular elevation.

I enjoyed the attention.

WD was the designated "gel girl" on this occasion, and in the photo, she is examining her handiwork.

The object of the road trip was to go to downtown Muncie and see the Love Cowboys, a regional band surfing the wave of Red Chili Peppers-style funk rock that was taking off at the time. We saw them in some little dive performance space upstairs above a gallery or something in downtown Muncie. (Note: when I mentioned the band's name to someone about two years later, the guy laughed and questioned band's sexual preferences—in his typical fashion designed to paint everybody around him in an unflattering and inferior light. No, the Love Cowboys were not gay to my knowledge. All the same, I can see how the name might not gain traction among homophobic young Midwestern dudes. Then again, the guy I'm talking about was sort of a Moustache—see below—so what do you expect?)

The Love Cowboys were pretty good. The bassist did the snap-and-pop thing on one of those Travis Bean basses with the aluminum necks. I think the guitarist might have been his brother; they both had long, stringy hair and looked almost identical, but I don't know they were actual blood relatives. The vocalist was sort of a non-descript frat-looking sort of guy with a cap, maybe leaning little to the ska side of frat non-fashion.

One big highlight of the show for me was watching WD dance; she had this "dance club" solo move going on that I thought was cool. She looked like she knew what she was doing, while the rest of us just did our best to not look stupid.

My Completely Obvious Crush on WD—but she was MM's girlfriend, so she was out of bounds. I thought WD (and her roommate JT) were both pretty hip. They were into charismatic, artistic pop stars (Bowie, Robert Smith) and all things French, especially French New Wave cinema; WD later had her cut short like a woman who starred in a Godard film, and both WD and JT wore a lot of black. I thought they both reflected a sort of updated "Mod" sensibility common at the time in "alternative" circles in the Midwest, with a little Goth mixed in for good measure. (I actually had a crush on JT at first, but I quickly decided that I like WD better, probably because she was spoken for by my friend and therefore unattainable.)

MM had a similar sensibility, so he and WD were a good match, which I recognized regardless of my own crush on WD. MM later transferred to school in Kansas or Iowa or something—God only knows why—and WD soon after dated a guy who looked like he could have been MM's brother. The two met, and the new guy (who I knew as a distant acquaintance) later said it was a pretty weird scene, and it made him feel incredibly strange to be confronted with this near-doppelganger ex-boyfriend.

I have absolutely no idea what WD is doing now.

MM's Wild and Crazy Friend

MM's friend at Ball State, MB, was a similar kind of guy, but a lot wilder; he dressed in a Mod/Goth sort of way but had cut his hair into a mohawk. He and MM were into Ministry and the WaxTrax stuff going on at the time, maybe because they both came from Valparaiso near Chicago, and MB's claim to fame was that he could be seen in a Ministry live concert video running across the stage and grabbing his crotch (I have no idea whether this is true, and I've never checked).

MB later dated a super-hot Mod/Goth girl named Portia, and the gossip was that they were having out of control sex 3-4 times a day. MM thought the two together were bad karma; MM later drove with them to Chicago, and he joked (I think) that the happy couple were somehow magnetically drawing in hordes of animals to their loathsome deaths beneath the hurtling automobile; MM had never hit so many animals on the road before, or knew of so many animals dying because of one car in such a short stretch.

"What the Hell Happened to You?"

One surprise denizen of the dorm we stayed in was DS, who was one year ahead of me in high school. We had been friends on the Academic Team (how nerdy is that?), but I had lost contact with him. My main memory of him in high school involved being in a car driven by him, with one or two other Academic Team members. He made a risky pass on a state highway, and we missed a head-on collision with another car by mere feet. Everybody in the car was sweating and catatonic for at least a mile afterward.

A year or two later, he looked like a mess; he had a beer gut and was chain smoking. He looked like he had aged about 10 years.

DS's current whereabouts are also unkown.

Death to Moustaches

Anyway, everybody in MB's circle in the dorm was at war with the redneck types down the hall; MB and his gang referred to the rednecks as "moustaches," because of the wispy moustaches such types all seemed to grow, like it was a requirement somewhere (along with having to drink awful swill beer like Budweiser).

"Moustaches" were also all required to own a copy of Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and it was hilarious later when we saw a Steve Miller live concert video on MTV (when they still showed music videos) and the entire audience was full of Moustaches. Whenever the camera turned to show the audience, the screen showed a sea of drunk young men with the regulation cheesy moustaches, all jumping up and down, eager to be immortalized on video.

Later, after the Love Cowboys show, we piled into a booth in the local Waffle House; we carried on about these "Moustaches" in disparaging terms, and MM later said he heard a couple of middle-age rednecks in a nearby booth grousing about us. MM said one looked at other and said, "Yep, them boys are pissing me off, too!"

let's strap on the happy helmet

I've been writing about a lot of weird, bummer stuff lately, mostly the angst caused by the bizarre habits of my co-tenants in the nasty little boarding house I live in.

So, let's lighten up a bit, eh?

Besides, how can life be a bummer when when a Totally Super Awesome Concert™ is imminent!


Also, I recently spent some time hanging around the UW campus Art Building with my Ohio guitar pal JT.


There's a small student cafe called "Parnassus" tucked away inside the building, and while using the restroom before getting a cappuccino, I discovered this building has some of the most fascinating and artistic bathroom graffiti I've ever seen.


Amazing cosmic knowledge comes to light...


On Monday, I went to Seattle Center House with the Tuning the Air performance team to check out the Theatre 4 space.


Ultimately, the team decided to pass on Theatre 4. The space itself is wonderful, but getting there—up a flight of stairs, up an elevator, down a hallway, and then through a set of fire doors and down yet another even narrower hallway past the building circuit breaker board—proved a bit too much. Parking sucked, too, and there really isn't much ambient foot traffic from which we might harvest new audience members. We would be putting on the show in the evening, and most of the people hanging around the Seattle Center House at the time of night are a bit sketchy.

All the same, I got some nice shots of the Space Needle and other areas of Seattle Center after getting off the 74 bus and wandering around for a while.


I don't know if these arches have an official name, but they looked pretty cool in the evening...


Last Saturday evening, my pals S and AR from the boarding house invited me to a Chinese New Year celebration on campus, sponsored by the Chinese Student Association.

Welcome to the Year of the Rat!

The show featured a wide range of performances, including a traditional Lion Dance (featuring the guys in a long lion costume, sort of like the long dragon costumes most Westerners are aware of), martial arts forms, some Hunan Opera, Chinese classical music, a guy from the Beijing Opera, a drum performance, traditional Mongolian dancers with bowls on their heads, and breakdancing.

Most of my cell phone photos came out blurry, but this one of the Chinese classical musicians is at least semi-OK...


They had some technical difficulties with the sound system, so some of the performers were hampered from struggling to hear themselves and the music. The Hunan Opera performance, in particular, went wrong in a big way; not only were they struggling to intonate, but the male lead kept slipping on the stage. (All the same, I must say we were entertained to the max, and the show went on, as it must...)

I got the impression that even a lot of Chinese find Hunan Opera sort of cheesy and irritating; AR later told me that even native Chinese can't understand the lyrics (he lived in China for a while and is studying at UW), and that regular performances feature a teleprompter for the audience so they can tell what's going on.

What struck me was Hunan Opera's weird combination of strange intonation and ultra-cheesed out Western pop drum beats. It's like they took elements of Western music with absolutely no sense of whether a Westerner would consider it to have any actual aesthetic value, and just threw it in with their own traditions. It had to be totally arbitrary; they could just as easily have chosen something cool, I guess.

This makes me wonder if legit World musicians look at Westerners incorporating tabla beats, sitar, African drumming, and so on into our pop music and think, "Hey, check it out! What crap!"

The intonation of the classical instruments was strange, but also kind of compelling. Most of what I've read indicates a lot of music from the Far East is just-intonated on a Pythagorean formula of stacked 5ths. I've been checking out the Pythagorean 3rd a bit lately, and I think I could get a bit of that energy from the tuning of these instruments.

This music seemed to use mainly pentatonic scales, and I had this weird sense that the music was somehow only a little sideways step from sounding like Celtic music or even Appalachian Bluegrass, especially when the woman playing the hammer dulcimer-like instrument played a solo spot. I kept thinking it would morph into an Irish hammer-dulcimer piece I once heard called "Planxty Fluharty." (A lot of such pieces are called "Planxty Something.")

Maybe all they needed to do was play the same pieces in equal temperament.

In something related, I've been listening to an album of Celtic guitar duos, and there's one piece that starts out in a traditional Breton Celtic tune and then ends with a Bluegrass fiddle melody from the 1920s. You can hear the unequivocal kinship between the two streams of music, but by the end of the track, the music has clearly leapt the Atlantic Ocean to the hollers of Tennessee, and I'm not quite sure what specific musical elements meld together to make that happen, but there it is. My ear knows.

Now. Aren't we all so much happier than before?

at least i'm not bored

So, what's been going on...

A young woman knocked on the front door of the house as I walked past this morning; she was there to look at one of the open rooms (the room that formerly belonged to Crazy Lady L). I went and found D and L, and they led her off to look around.

I seriously doubt she's going to rent that room. D and L have done a great job cleaning up the devastation left behind by the evicted Crazy Lady L, but the bathroom next door stinks. It's reeked of urine for some time now, and at first, most people in the house thought it was because of S becoming incontinent as his brain cancer reached the endgame.

Well, S has passed on--may he rest in peace--and the urine stink both remains and has gotten stronger and more intense over the last few weeks.

In the meantime, D and L's son, M, arrived from Alabama and moved into S's old room (now cleared of all the stuff packed to the rafters--it turns out that S was a world-class pack rat).

I haven't used the basement bathroom for some time now. In fact, I actively avoid going anywhere near it. It's that bad, that wrong.

Anyway, M has figured out in short order that the urine stink comes from the Birdman going in there and pissing all over the toilet, leaving unflushed urine in the bowl to ferment, and probably other stuff that I don't even want to know about. All of this in addition to his habit of rinsing his parakeets' birdcage pans out in the shower.

The Birdman...God, I truly hate the guy...

He must be mentally ill. As long as L and S were in the house, the Birdman could fly under the radar, but people in the house are now catching on to his antics.

One way or another, we are going to get rid of this guy.

In a related development, D and L have been persistently upset over a note somebody left for them about how the bathrooms upstairs next to their room are always nicer and cleaner.

D and L clearly suspect I wrote the note, and whenever I hang out with them and they consume a few beers, they begin asking me questions and making non-sequitur statements apparently designed to trip me up and expose me as the note author. Their suspicion doesn't suprise me, considering I openly criticize the state of the bathroom downstairs and the fact that I routinely vote with my feet and use the bathrooms upstairs by their room (I am after all, allowed to use any bathroom in the house that I choose--they are all supposed to be accessible).

But, I didn't write the note.

And while hanging out last Friday night, they suddenly produced the infamous note and handed it around for examination.

It looked (and read) like it had been scrawled out by a 5-year-old.

All the same, it's a fact that the bathrooms on the top floor are nicer and cleaner. The rooms on that floor are more expensive, and the tenants (I suppose) more civilized in their habits. By the simple fact of proximity, D and L see those bathrooms more often and are inevitably more aware of their general cleanliness. (D refers to the basement as "the dungeon," and he has plainly stated that he avoids going down there, so am I expected to believe that he will have some objective awareness of the basement bathroom's state?)

It's simple logic here, people.

It's also a simple fact of my life that people routinely don't find me believable when I complain about something.

"No, he's exaggerating. He's making it up! It just can't be!"

Well, now that their own son is living down in the dungeon, I am suddenly a lot more credible.

M won't use the bathroom, either. He also routinely goes upstairs. My own behavior suddenly makes a lot more sense to everybody.

Hallelujah!

So, let's get rid of the Birdman, eh?

Caution is needed, though. The guy is weird.

I read an account of a "nightmare neighbor" in Chicago who would creep out and shit in the washing machines.

The situation could go wrong if we're not careful. I'd rather get rid of him without provoking an escalation in his behavior.

More later. Not everything is bad. Some things are very good right now, so stay tuned.

This just happens to be the stuff that is hot on my mind while the keyboard is under my fingers...

fact-burrito theology!

I experienced yet another strange encounter with a Denizen of the Outerworld(tm) yesterday while on my way to class.

On my way across campus in the rain, I stopped by a trash can in Red Square to finish my burrito, and a young man with pinwheel eyes snuck up in my blind spot (as they always seem to do) and launched into a pointless theological discussion--something about how he thought God was in fact female, with supporting documentation from the Bible and this and that, blah blah, woof woof.

Whatever. I could not care less, and I kept looking at my watch.

Eventually, I finished my burrito, thanked him for being a nice guy, and informed that I needed to be on my way.

"But...don't you want to stay and talk about this?"

Not enough to be late for class.

I found myself behaving in a patronizing way toward him, but I couldn't help it. I was trying to go about my business, and he was interrupting me with this...this pile of baffling twaddle!

He seemed offended that I insisted on getting on with my life and going to class, but what was the guy thinking?

"I need to find somebody who will listen to all of my ideas about the gender of God and how it's supported by the Bible. Oh, look...that guy over by the trash can stuffing a burrito into his face in the rain--he'll want to talk to me!"

If he has a theological bone to pick, why doesn't he go hang around a seminary somewhere? Or even a coffeeshop? There are millions of people in coffeeshops across the nation willing to engage in some friendly, idle sophistry at the drop of a hat. I know a few of them personally. Some of them might even care enough about the topic to have a real conversation.

But...out in the rain next to a garbage can, with people who are obviously in a hurry to get somewhere?

...bleeblebleeblebleeble... [sound of lips being flapped with index finger]