caleeope
Friday, July 29, 2005
I'm presently listening to This American Life, the theme of the show: A Little Bit of Knowledge. The first segment is about these off-base ideas that you get about things that you just kinda hold onto. Actually, it reminds me of something my wife and i were talking about last night. I have this picture of myself as a 2 or 3 year old, standing next to this column, looking up at the camera which is being held by someone on a 2nd floor balcony. (I'll try to find the pic and scan it, perhaps for illustrative purposes.) All you can see in the picture is part of the column with my kinda standing up against it, facing it, looking up. The background is the ground, dark and blurry, and it's kind of blueish. Looking at that picture as a kid was always very confusing to me because i look happy, i have a big smile on my face, but it was obvious to me that i was holding onto this column to keep from falling into the water below. I'm not a fan of deep water, and it was very disconcerting for me to see myself standing above this water with no solid ground in sight, knowing that one of my parents was taking this picture instead of helping me...Then one day, when i was older, i looked at that picture again and realized that it's not water, it's just grass that's in shadow and out of focus. But it took me until i was probably like 25 to really give it any rational thought and figure out what the actuality of this picture was.
What the T.A.L. segment reminded me of initially, though, was this story that my friend Ryan told me a few years back about this street in New Orleans. The Steamboat Natchez has a steam driven organ on it called a calliope, pronounced cah-lie-o-pee, that an organist plays before the boat departs for trips on the Mississippi River.
It's LOUD, audible throughout the entire French Quarter and further i'm sure. It's a traditional thing that has been around for about 140 years and, as such, there was a street named after it that runs from the Convention Center west under the interstate. (There's also the Calliope housing projects that, apparently, the Neville Brothers and Master P grew up in.) The thing is that they don't call it cah-lie-o-pee, they call it ca-lee-ope. The mispronunciation is so rampant that, despite being a part of the heritage of the city, they tried to get it officially changed to the wrong pronunciation.
Keep in mind that this story is second hand (perhaps i can have ryan clarify it a bit), and new orleans is a city rampant with widespread mispronunciation, but the theme of off-base ideas that stick, i think is taken to a new level in the case of Calliope St.
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scootering
Thursday, July 28, 2005
I spent the afternoon hanging out in the backyard while the kids played, looking at info about scooters on the laptop. I've been wanting a Vespa since i was 19, though i didn't look at Vespas today beyond finding out that their 50cc model is over $3k. You're obviously paying for the Vespa name, but still. There are a couple decent knockoffs from Honda and Yamaha, though, that get the retro vespa look down pretty well for half the price.
Vespa LX
The problem is that, when the lease on the Jetta expired, we got a Dodge Caravan, which is a step up in practicality, for sure, but a big step down in cool. The Caravan probably gets about 15 miles to the gallon, and it's 11 miles from here to work. Between Kim and I we do the trip twice a day. You see where i'm going with this. That's easily 45 miles/day and the cost in fuel is ridiculous.
Yamaha Vino
Adny has been trying to convince me to get a motorcycle for a while now (and trying to convince me that a 250-350cc 70's Honda CB isn't big enough), but as much as i like the idea of riding the scenic trails to the park to hike (besides the commute to work), i'm reluctant to seriously consider buying a bike simply because i have a wife and two very young kids. Not like i'd be the only married father with a motorcycle, but it just strikes me as more risky than smart right now. My dad is 50 and cruising around the country on his Harley, there's nothing saying i can't eventually do the same. That just leaves me with now.
Honda Metropolitan (What's wrong with Honda's marketing team that they can't put out a 3/4 view?)
So now it would come down to whether i really want to spend close to $2000 on a vehicle that doesn't get much more than 35mph, compounded by the fact that i live in a winter wonderland and would only get to ride it half of the year. Thing is, i could take the lakefront all the way to work, so the speed wouldn't be such a big deal anyway. As far as i can tell, a 50cc scooter averages about 80 mpg, so i could get back and forth to work all week for like $3. Yay!
Aprilia Mojito Custom 50
Of course, i haven't mentioned any of this to kim yet, which is the next logical step. What'd be really cool is to get two of them so we can go cruising around like dorks.
Between the Vino and the Metropolitan, the Metro seems to be the better of the two, if just slightly. Based on what i've read, like this guy's Metro vs. Vino Comparison, the Metro seems to be a little quicker, and it's got a 4-stroke engine rather than 2-stroke.
The most subjective category of them all. We think that the Vino looks more 'classic', while the Metro looks more 'hip' or 'modern'.I'd have to agree with that, i kinda like the look of the Vino a bit more, which is kinda hard for a very aesthetically driven person like me to over-look. That Aprilia is probably coolest looking of the three non-vespas, but it amounts to about $700 cooler looking, which isn't quite worth it. (Also a 2-stroke.) But something tells me that, were i to really consider getting one, the Metro is the one i'd consider most.
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Edward Hopper
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
I've been meaning to get this post up for a while, so here it is:The thing that sticks with me about Edward Hopper is just that, for the most part, he seemed like a pretty normal guy. You always get this sense from mass media that all artists are neurotic, self-destructive eccentrics, but it's obviously not the case. Perhaps it's more interesting to make a movie about Jackson Pollock because he was crazy and drunk, but there are a lot of artists who are simply creative people with good ideas.
I grew up with Hopper, seeing as he's my mom's favorite artist. It's not like we had his prints all over the wall and she gushed about him all the time. I don't think she ever mentioned him to me until i brought him up one day and she said "Yeah, he's my favorite..." My mom had us very early, so after my younger brother was born and we were all in school, she went to Delgado Community College and get herself an Associates Degree in Fine Art. No, there's not much you can do with that. While she was in school she painted a lot, one of which was a copy of the top picture below, Early Sun. When i was a kid i didn't know that it wasn't an original, but eventually it all made sense. Original or not, it was nice to grow up with that painting on the wall.
There seem to be several different camps under which artists fall: those that challenge our notion of reality/society, those that attempt to introduce new ideas into reality (which begs the question, "are there any new stories left to tell?"), and those that illustrate a truth about reality. Certainly there's overlap, and the idea of these "camps" is rather off-the-cuff and in no way definitive, but it sounds like a good rule to go by. Agreed? Fine.
I think that Hopper falls into the latter camp. His work is centered in reality as it is, but depicts an aspect to it that we don't often like to see. They're lonely and melancholy, often without human subjects, but when people are present they appear to be very inert and inside themselves. Hopper's world seems like a very muted place that is full of warmth and life, but it emphasizes our isolation in a world that is meant to be occupied. Mass media tries to convince us that the world is full of adventure, action, beauty and parties, but I think that Hopper is much closer to the truth.
For a while my mom and i had traded, she got to keep one of my drawings and i had her reproduction of this piece, but somehow she ended up keeping both of them.
I love the pea green of the main building, and how the subway entrance and the doors and signs beyond it become one amorphous shape.
To me, this painting is one of his quintessential pieces.
Could a house look less inviting?
I love this watercolor mainly because it reminds me of the huge mansions lining St. Charles Street and the neighborhoods in the Garden District and Uptown New Orleans.
No, it's not James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. (Just having those names on this page is going to get me all kinds of misdirected-directed search results.) It's just a couple of people hanging out at a diner in the middle of the night and an old man working the night shift behind the counter. Makes it much less glamorous; this isn't a private party, it's a group of people all keeping to themselves.
I can't say enough good about Mark Harden's Artchive site. He's got a great bio and assortment of images there.
Of course, there's always the invaluable google image search.
Maybe one of these days i'll put together a list of good art reference sites on the web.
posted by j. Permanent Link
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literate ep review
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
sophrosyne - literate ep review"...his work is wholly electronic, and instead of lionizing the analog (or loss thereof), he fully embraces his digital tools. As a result, the music is not cold and forced but alive, organic and warm."really, it's a good review, but naturally that i can't read it without picking it apart. realistically, once something is put out there, my intentions are kinda a moot point. at that point it's got a life of its own and people will interpret it as they see fit.
I think it's funny that he tags me as IDM (Intelligent Dance Music).
"Other influences include... the pop/electronica fusion of bands like Saint Etienne." Saint Etienne!? I had that one CD back in 94 that i used for one track on a mixed cd... I get the point, though, that he's talking about a genre and not them in particular. I liked Komeda better.
"there just doesn't seem to be room here for processed guitars." Well, except for the processed guitars of Chet Garrett on track 3, Property Gets Into an Improper State of Mind.
"The lack of ebbs and flows, crests and waves..." It flows! The songs just don't have refrains. But that's because i have no idea how to make music. Seriously.
so yeah, it's a good review. i'm pleased.
posted by j. Permanent Link
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NOCCA pt4
Monday, July 18, 2005
It's about time for me to get back to the NOCCA story, I think.The way it worked was that we'd get there at 8 in the morning (Mr. Gross was a real fascist about tardiness, too) and we'd all meet in the main art room where they'd take attendance and talk about the day's agenda. This generally didn't last too long and by about 8:20 we'd break up into groups and each of the three groups would go with one of the instructors. I don't know how it happened, or how the groups were formed, but I remember that the our little clique always seemed to be mostly grouped together. It's kinda odd that, in a group of 28-30 kids, a clique even formed at all, but I'm fairly certain that ours was the only one.
So our groups would separate and go into different classrooms/studios for about an hour and a half. At ten we'd take a break, then finish out the morning with a different instructor. The day at NOCCA ended around 11:15 or 11:30, then we'd return to our "home schools" for the rest of the day. This basically put me getting back to McMain for 4th period which for me was Algebra 2. Generally speaking we'd all pile into Liz's Mitsubishi Eclipse or Otis' "French Mobile" (which I think was actually a Datsun, but some of those old Datsuns looked like little Fiats and Renaults) and head back to McMain. But lets look at this objectively: if you have a car full of 15 and 16 year olds in transit, there's a pretty good chance that it's not going to make it to its intended destination. I missed more algebra 2 than any other class in high school. (With the one possible exception being when I was supposed to sit in the Latin 1 class senior year and complete the latin 2 correspondence course to fulfill my foreign language requirement. That lasted for about a week before I just started going to the library to hang out with little Liz Nguyen and Ms. Moinet. ) I skipped the last 2 1/2 weeks straight of algebra 2, showed up for the exam, no questions asked, and got a C.
When the school year began we were given a set of supplies that included a 14" x 17" pad of smooth-finish bristol board (heavy-weight paper), a set of thick-lead Prismacolor colored pencils, a plastic pen and a few nibs (I can't believe I just recalled the word "nibs" and used it correctly), and a bottle of pelikan ink. Every week we were given an assignment, due first thing the next monday morning and the week started with critiques. We'd mount our drawings on the wall and sit around and discuss each piece. Someone would be chosen at random to go first in choosing a piece to talk about (other than your own, though I don't think that was an actual rule) and when your piece was chosen, you chose next. I still feel like these critiques were one of the best learning experience I've ever had. The critiques were honest and sometimes tough; if you brought in crap they knew it and said so. They weren't overly critical of lack of talent, but lack of effort was definitely bad form.
At the time NOCCA was in an old school building in uptown New Orleans and every so often we got to experience the benefit of our location. There were numerous times when we'd go outside with pads and pencils and sketch in the backyard, or we'd go for walks around the neighborhood. I can remember one walk to Audubon Park during which we stopped to discuss the pattern of bricks in an old brick wall. ("They just don't make 'em like they used to.") We also had the benefit of a nice place to hang out while we skipped fourth period.
I'm trying to recall things from that first year of NOCCA that stand out and define the experience, but there isn't a lot that stands out from the rest. I can remember our knot tying tests, in which we were graded on the knots Mr. Gross had taught us as a matter of practicality, and our subsequent use of those knots tying loose tree branches into bundles, tied to the pipes on the ceiling of the basement. It was a monday morning, I think, and Otis showed us his drawing that he'd done while he was on acid that weekend. I remember doing the pointalism oyster shells in the basement studio; the few photography classes we had with the teacher whose breath reeked of coffee; the day we did blind contour drawing, which I thought was ludicrous; the times Mr. Gross left us in the computer lab upstairs to just figure the macs out on our own; Mr. Gross imitating the pose of the army figure in my drawing during our first Monday morning critique; the time I illustrated the first few lines of a Tear Garden song and suggested that Purple-hair Liz might be familiar with the song, only to be met with a blank look; there was one day when we went outside to draw and there happened to be a karmann ghia parked next to the yard that I sat and drew; . . .
There. Stream of consciousness art school memories.
Another thing that we got in our supplies was a small "art journal," a hard-cover bound book of blank white pages. Every so often they would collect our journals to thumb through and comment on, and perhaps even grade, I can't remember. We didn't have assignments to do in our journals, they just wanted us to use them. Fair enough. I remember going through this thought process where I decided that I was going to learn to do portraits because, I figured, if I could draw faces convincingly, I could pretty much draw anything. I may even have been right-- doing portraits is hard, especially teaching yourself to do it when you're 16. It's not a matter of the level of detail involved, a portrait doesn't necessarily have to be detailed. But it does have to be representational of the subject. It has to look like them or it's just not a good portrait. There are definitely tricks to learn like not drawing the lines in between teeth, or drawing hair in clumps, not strands... But really what it comes down to is capturing a likeness and the slightest thing can throw the whole portrait off. I remember thinking that my instructors would be so impressed with my new abilities... As it turned out, I never did get any feedback from them about it.
We finished the year off with a student exhibition in which we were allowed to submit anything, assignments or personal work, so I decided to show a portrait I had done of my then girlfriend. It wasn't a cheesy senior picture type thing, it was more of a larger drawing with her in it, though she was obviously the main subject. Actually, there was anther drawing similar to it as well, both 18 x 24", done in colored pencil. Not light-sketch colored pencil, either. This was thick, 100% opacity, sharpen the pencil every half-minute, lay it on till it looks like oil pastels colored pencil drawing. It's slow, tedious, and difficult. But the Grosses decided that they were not going to show those two pieces.. I might've understood had they said "look, they're fine drawings but they're not in line with what the show is about..." or something, but they never said anything to me. They just left them out without explanation. It left me feeling betrayed.
Previous NOCCA entry
Continue with part 5 ->
posted by j. Permanent Link
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gimme books
I'm in need of some good summer reading. I just finished Life of Pi (Yann Martel) and Of Love and Other Demons (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) (gotta add that one to my book list), and I kinda want to stick to shorter, easier books in that vein. At least for a little longer. I'm trying to resist the urge to start reading the third book of In Search of Lost Time, but the only other book currently on my list that i have sitting around is Moby Dick, and that's not what i'm looking for either. I want to read a few more quick books before i get back into headier stuff. Ideas?posted by j. Permanent Link
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brian eno
Friday, July 15, 2005
I finally got around to listening to the new Brian Eno album yesterday. I had kinda forgotten about it, probably in part because it seems to be getting 7/10 reviews across the board. It's a "vocal album," which is pleasing. Despite of his work creating ambient music (and largely the genre itself), i've always thought that Brian Eno has a great voice. Or, at least, that he uses his voice well. Two songs, in particular, always stood out to me as examples of his vocal tracks that really showed his talent as a singer. The first is called Spinning Away, from an album he did with John Cale, Wrong Way Up, in 1990. I don't know why this song has always had something of an emotional effect on me... it's not really an "emotional" song. It reminds me of what it feels like to create.
The other song is called Under. It's quite a few years old, but he included it on this new album for whatever reason. When i first hit play in winamp, which was set to "shuffle," this was the first song that played. I thought it was a mistake, but i could not figure out which album this song was from.
Back in 1994 my friend chet and i used to listen to this song on repeat in my dorm room. I remember feeling enveloped by it; it's got this depth... Brian Eno's voice multi-tracked just sounds amazing. It's kinda similar to Deep Blue Day, from Apollo- Atmospheres & Soundtracks (also on the Trainspotting soundtrack), except that where that one feels like you're floating, this one feels like you're submerged.
So i did a little digging on allmusic and it turns out that the song was originally included on the Cool World soundtrack. I never would have remembered. Good ol' internet. The soundtrack came out in 1992, so Brian Eno put a song on this album that's at least 13 years old, which is kinda funny, but it fits into the album really well and is probably still the highlight of the album.
Under
Spinning Away
Deep Blue Day
As an aside, on track 2 of Another Day on Earth, he runs his voice through a vocoder, which seems like a disservice to his voice. I'm all down for vocoders in the right context, over-used as they may be. But if you're Brian Eno, you don't need that.
posted by j. Permanent Link
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patience--;
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
i find that when i come home from work in the afternoons, and i come home earlier in the afternoon than most, i often have this lack of patience that i can't explain and can't seem to get rid of. for a while i thought it might be related to caffeine, and perhaps it is. i don't drink very much coffee, usually just one of those little bottles of starbucks coffees that has, at most, half the caffeine of a single latte. sorry if that's too technical for you coffeeless few. but slight as it may be, my body is definately accustomed to it. i get caffeine headaches if i don't drink it and i'm sure i also come down from it in the afternoons as well.
sometimes i think it's hormones. stupid hormones, what a chemical mess. i'm not going to go into it here, but i've been noticing more how hormones effect my body and especially my mind and i don't really like it. why can't i always just be even-keel? or even always in a good mood! imagine.
what else could it be? perhaps my daughter's incessant chatter. look, there's nothing cuter than her squeeky little voice. but she hasn't stopped talking since she was 16 months old.
or it's the boy. graham and i didn't start off well. due to a mix up with her job, kim had to go back to work when he was one month old. he didn't like bottles, so he was always hungry, so he was always crying. he's a very self-sufficient little man, thank god, but he doesn't listen to a thing. he's adorable, but he's grumpy. he eats like a pig, but he's a really picky eater.
(as an aside, elise just turned to graham and said "graham, let me ask you a question. why are your feet so stinky all the time?")
perhaps it's just me being selfish, wanting to do for me when i should be wanting to do for them. but there's nothing in particular for me that i necessarily want to be doing. then again, i always seem to have a list of things i want to get done. i've been meaning to start working on music. i've been meaning to get upstairs to finish the drywall. i've been meaning to work on my web portfolio to update it and make it more presentable so that i can try to get more contract work, enough that my wife can quit her job like she so desperately wants to. and wouldn't that just solve all of my problems, right? not to be home alone with the kids all evening with no car and no place to go. wisconsin is so damn boring.
but i'm sure it's none of these things. my wife would be quick to point out the possibility that i haven't mentioned, that it's a spiritual issue. but it's hard to be spiritual when you don't feel spiritual, and i feel about as spiritual as i do patriotic.
i used to be such a patient, laid back person, and i don't know where that went. i have a feeling that i quit being patient when i quit smoking.
the truth of the matter is that i'm probably just as bi-polar as everybody else in my family.
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google earth nola guide
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
a while back i created the "nola guide" for friends of mine who were going to new orleans (used on 4 separate occasions). it was originally meant to be printed out, but i created a much more extensive version using Google Earth. i had planned on updating the print version as well as making it interactive with Google Maps as well, so this is a start. hopefully the print-friendly version will be coming pretty soon.
download nolaGuide.kmz
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where even free is a ripoff
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Elise went on a vacation with Grandpa and the rest of Kim's family to Galena, IL leaving Kim and I alone with Graham for a weekend, which is as near to being alone for the weekend as we can get without actually being alone for the weekend. Elise likes to talk a lot; Graham doesn't talk at all. Except for the fact that he's grumpy, he's a pretty easy child.
So we took Graham out to run around town and play this afternoon, starting with going to Grand Ave. Mall to get snoballs. Snoballs made with an authentic SnoWizard machine, too. Only, we were let down-- the Snoball stand was gone! How could they? So we got an iced coffee and got back in the car. The plan was to eventually head down to Summerfest, which i'll get to, but it was still fairly early, about 4:30, so the sun will still rather bright. I figured we could waste some time for a bit so that we didnt end up with sunburns, so i was heading out to a park when we spotted the Italian bakery that sells individual pieces of tirmisu. Naturally we decided to stop, so we start circling around to find parking. As we walked up to the bakery i noticed... it's closed.
So we went to Summerfest, which was actually the impetus for writing any of this. Summerfest claims to be the World's Largest Musical Festival, but the lineup is ludicrous. How can Journey, in 2005, be a headlining, main stage, separate-ticket-price act? We got two free tickets to go, but there honestly wasn't a single band i wanted to see. They tend to draw these bands that were either big sellers in the 70s/80s or are cover acts of such. Hall and Oates were supposed to headline one night. That's what you can expect from the World's Largest Musical Festival. Every so often you get lucky and there's something decent/contemporary, or something jazz/blues that's worth seeing. (I did get to see the Funky Meters there a year or two ago.)
It was crowded as hell, so we just kinda jumped into the flow of the crowd and jumped back out when we got to Crawdaddy's, the premier "cajun restaurant" of Milwaukee. Not the actual restaurant, but its festival-site food-court counterpart. (I know, that sentence has no verb.) We both got red beans and rice, and graham had Cajun Fries. They even had a roast beef po-boy on the menu, and there's not much in life that is more tempting than a roast beef po-boy. But i never paid $7 for a roast beef po-boy in new orleans either.
There was a band that kim thought was potentially worth seeing, so we ate by the lake and let graham play at the playground for a few minutes, then went to check out the band. Turns out it was the Boogie Men who weren't the funk/blues i think kim was hoping for. They cover disco songs of the 70s. Great! So we didn't even stop to listen, we just kept walking and somehow managed to find our way over to the rock stage where some bad metal was playing. Yeah. Then we just left.
Coming from New Orleans, when you go to a music fest dubbed the World's Largest, you know you have one standard to hold it up against: Jazz Fest. Summerfest... we couldn't even stay for an hour. I've never understood their propensity for hiring has-beens. I mean, i'm sure there are cost factors involved. Whitesnake's got to be a lot cheaper to get than Radiohead, but you'd think they'd consider the potential for making more money by attracting actual contemporary bands.
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growing divs
Friday, July 01, 2005
i decided that it was time to play around a little with animating divs with javascript. i'm working on a software redesign and am creating search boxes that are popup divs on top of the content. i thought it'd be a nice touch to have the boxes appear and open before the content of the box appears.none of this sounds very interesting.
this page is an example of expanding divs, this one is a div that expands, then loads content (in this case my entire home page).
it's kind of odd how, in the 2nd example, when the content is loaded into the div, it changes properties of the main page's body attributes (most notably the background color).
i honestly don't see a lot of use out of contracting the box. in practical use plan to simply set the div's display to none and unload the content. speaking of unloading the content, i'm not sure if there's an easy way to unload the content that you've loaded in with ajax.
i also came across a strange thing with setInterval, in that in IE(6) it chokes on arguments that you send. it's a strange syntax in the first place, that you call setInterval(functionName,milliseconds,functionArguments); instead of setInterval(functionName(args),milliseconds);, though i guess that would be like sending a function as an argument to another function. this post is getting geekier by the word.
regardless, when you look at the source and see:
divName = x;
divWidth = w;
divHeight = h;
pageToLoad = htmlPage;
that's why. it was a problem with passing arguments. IE was also having a problem, uh, remembering what the value of x was in x = document.getElementById(x); which is why it's repeated in expandDiv() and contractDiv().
posted by j. Permanent Link
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Walker Ranch on Google Earth
google's new Google Earth application is phenominal. i only wish that you could switch back and forth between satellite and map view... the map view helps me get my bearings. between maps.google and Google Earth i was able to find a pretty high res image of the Walker's Ranch in Sonoita, AZ. (duh, i just had to turn on the Roads layer.)
In the bottom-left is the "big house." The dark blue rectangle is the swimming pool with the two pool house rooms below that. The sideways L shaped building is the 3 apartment casita. My brother used to live in the center, 2br apartment, and there are two 1br apartments on either side. About a quarter inch down/left from the casita is the entrance to the gym-in-the-hill.
The big building in the center is the barn. To the right of the barn is the arena area (what would you call that?) where they practice roping cattle. ("Oh, it's just something I do to take my mind off of things.")
The lake, i believe, is man-made.
The Walkers (my brother's in-laws) have their own contracting business, doing mostly work for the government. I think they do a lot of work in Sierra Vista at Fort Huachuca, but I'm not certain. Either way, them being builders, they built the entire ranch themselves. They even made the bricks that the buildings are constructed of.
The Ranch is for sale, by the way, if anyone is in the market. I don't recommend it if you have outside cats, though. They tend to get eaten by the coyotes.
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