Monthly Archives: May 2009
Extracting the Root
I forgot to post earlier about the latest piece I added to the Sound page:
It was a collaboration between myself and Mike Mogan in the late 80’s. I am not sure of the year. It actually made it onto a cassette release of a compilation of Fresno indie music. I’m not sure what kind of music to call it, but it was influenced by early, so-called world music, Peter Gabriel, and ECM jazz stuff. I can’t remember what the title is a reference to. It was actually quite a challenge to record as it was done on a Tascam “Portastudio 244” 4-track cassette recorder. There were quite a few parts and stereo imaging of things, so there was a lot of careful bouncing tracks down. It is hard to believe we managed to do it with somewhat decent mix levels and minimal tape noise.
Mike played rhythm guitar, the cool double-tracked guitar solo, and synthesizer. I played rhythm guitar (the part with the dubious timing), acoustic 12-string guitar, and did the drum machine programming. It was my first drum machine, the E-mu Drumulator. This thing came with a stock set of sounds that was a basic drum kit. Eventually, you could add, I should say change, sounds by swapping out the computer chips onto which he sounds were recorded. Here I have the ethnic percussion chip set going. It sounds a bit dry and forward in this mix. I think we actually recorded a sync track for the drumulator on the tape and printed the stereo percussion part straight to the mixdown.
Memory Dresser
My dresser for my entire childhood.
This was my dresser for my entire childhood — from day one until the day I moved out as a young adult. It contained many memories. I remember digging in the bottom drawer for shorts to wear on the first hot days of summer; and the top left drawer with socks, folded in the special, partial inside-out way my mother used to fold them that made it easier to put them on. I remember hiding cigarettes in the bottom back corner as a teenager. And some other stuff, too.
One particular memory I have is of the time when I was about 13 that my friend Les Wood damaged the dresser. Les was a strange sort of friend. He was in 9th grade when I was in 7th grade. Les was a little scary. He had a streak that was half thrill-seeking and half sadistic. So, periodically I would have to endure some harrowing experience like being being burned on the forearm with a red-hot butter knife while cooking together, or being hiked on the back of a paper bike and plowing through a row of rose bushes.
On the occasion of the damage, which was around the Fourth of July, Les showed up at my house one day with some fireworks. While I was not looking he dumped out an entire box of snakes on to the top of the dresser and lit them. Within moments the room was filled with a choking sulfurous smoke. The snakes curled out into a monstrous heap of twisted ash and burned through the top layer of the dresser, leaving a shallow crater and wide burned area on the top. I was pretty damn mad; even as a teenager, I had a sense of propriety and pride of ownership. My parents, needless to say, were furious. Les just laughed his little sadistic laugh, his small teeth peeking through a thin-lipped grin.
Les’s attitude and behavior never really improved. Two or three years later, when I was about 16 years old, Les had been kicked out of the house and was living around with different friends, or just in the Chevy Vega he drove, and selling drugs for money. During this time, he gave away or sold almost everything he owned. He sold me his once beloved stereo system for about $20. That was my first real stereo, and I set it up on the top of my dresser. One night, I saw Les and Greg Baker, who had been hanging out together, at Geno’s Pinball Palace. Geno’s was a stoner kids’ hangout in Fresno in the mid-70’s. I saw Les outside in the parking lot drinking an Old English 800 Malt Liquor and extremely high on LCD. At one point he was sitting on the curb holding is head in his hands like a vice, his face red and sweating, trying to not freak out.
A few minutes later he was fine, walking around and laughing. Not many people tended to laugh with him. He asked if anybody wanted to go for a drive, go out to the fig orchards that were once plentiful in northwest Fresno and “go figgin'”. That meant driving out into the powdery soft dirt in the orchard and spinning the car around in circles, raising plumes of dust in a whirl of teenage entertainment. The only taker was Greg, who was probably equally high.
They next day we found out that the Vega had hit a giant fig tree at a high rate of speed and exploded on impact. Les and Greg died nearly instantly, we were told. We never really knew whether this was a drug-fueled accident, or Les’s intentional, final act of defiance against a world he didn’t like and that didn’t much like him back.
In any case, we had a yard sale last weekend, and while the dresser was not for sale, it was out because we used it to display other things that were for sale. I had started to refinish it over a year ago, and simply never got the momentum up to finish.The knobs were off, and only the drawers were really done. Three people asked me if it was for sale and offered to buy it, and by the third, I was starting to think that it probably made sense let it go, and do what we were out there to do: lighten our load. The other furniture had not even gotten a second look. I sold it to a woman for $50.
I guess I’ll have to find something else to keep my childhood memories in.
My First Gallery Show
El Cerrito, CA 2008. I have no idea what kind of car this is. All the chrome and make and model plates were missing. Still, I love the red accents. Especially with the curtains in the background.
Well, it looks like I’ll be having my first gallery show this summer. I’m really excited about it, and will pass details along when thing are finalized. I want to thank Frank Synopsis for inviting me to participate and helping make it happen. I have been sharing stuff on flickr for awhile now and felt like I got a good response to my photographic efforts. I don’t engage in quite the promotional efforts that are required to put up huge numbers in views, faves, comments, etc. there. But I think moving on to printing and showing physical stuff to people is an important next step.
I have done a first round of printing experiments using dickermanprints.com inSan Francisco. The printing came out great and I received great feedback from the master printers regarding everything from color correction to composition and mounting.
The hardest part may well be selecting a small set of photos, about six, from the first cut of candidates!
Introducing Sound
I have finally introduced Sound to SightWordSound. It’s extremely rudimentary, but it’s a start. So, if you go to the Sound page, you can click on bulleted links there to hear mp3 streams of some of my stuff.
In my typical fashion, my prowess for commercialism and self-promotion has lead me to begin by uploading whacked out experimental sound pieces that will probably drive most people away. But fear not. If anyone comes back for more, I’ll eventually get some old song stuff up here, too. I have hours of tapes going back to some of the earliest garage and experimental days. It will be a treat to be able to share with people, particularly you far-flung players on these recordings, where ever you now live.
Staying busy part 4: Time well spent vs. time wasted
I’ve spent another hour poking around and I still have not gotten to the bottom of the comment presentation problem that appears when I use the “black hat” theme for the blog. This really disappoints me because not only did I basically like the theme, but I also spent time customizing it. I suppose that means I could be the cause of the problem. Perhaps I should run the original download and see if the still occurs.
I hope it gets sorted out eventually, but in the meantime, I have changed themes. It has a similar look and configuration except for a couple things. For example, the top nav bar displays categories instead of pages and meta links. I don’t like that one bit. But if I have to learn enough php to customize that much of this, I might as well just fix the other theme.
I suppose it could be useful to learn php anyway. If I already knew it, I’d have a paying contract gig helping a friend migrate his various sites into a WP-based site.
But if I were going to learn php, then the time would probably be better spent learning python, for god sake. So much to learn, so little time.
Staying busy part 3: blog troubleshooting
I am finding that just maintaining a blog can keep you busy, and I don’t mean the writing part. I discovered that some older comments from before I moved the blog to this new address are not appearing correctly or at all. I spent more time than I’d like yesterday trying to troubleshoot the problem. All I have found so far is that it only seems to happen with this particular theme selected. If I switch the look to the default WP theme, for example, the comments appear in the correct posts. How can that happen? If anyone has a clue, please let me know. Are there known issues with the “black hat” theme?
Staying busy part 2
I honestly didn’t mean to go into such a lengthy monologue about my mom in the last post. It really was supposed to be about the slightly paradoxical feeling of being overly busy despite being unemployed.
Of course, an obvious explanation for feeling like one has too much to do would be engagement in a fevered job search, writing and sending of dozens of applications every day, calling all contacts at all hours, devising ever-more refined searches on the job board, and so on and so forth. But this doesn’t apply to me at the moment. I have moved through the panic phase that immediately follows being laid off. I did keep that up for awhile, but I had certainly started to feel the futility of frenzied days fighting to reenter the work force. Perhaps I also had a vague intuition of broader issues raised by the periodic dumping of American jobs, whether they go overseas or simply into the trash heap of social progress.
Friends and acquaintances started helping me bring a different view of my situation into focus. It started with Rebecca pointing me to The Brazen Careerist’s post on 5 things to do when you are unemployed. The list did not include job hunting. A couple weeks later, through networking with a friend and colleague, I met a java programmer who recently received her MBA in sustainable business. She took the opportunity of unemployment to build a great Web site called neighborhoodfruit.com that’s devoted to helping backyard gardeners share and trade the fruit and vegetables they grow. We had a great conversation about the current employment climate, sustainability, and what I want to do next. Then tonight, a received an email from a prominent local businessman with whom I had an interesting conversation after running into him late the other night at the Hotsy Totsy. It simply contained a link to an interesting article entitled Use Jobless Time to Build Better World. And with that as a goal, you can see how even the current legions of jobless workers could be working overtime.
Staying busy part 1: eldercare
Ever since I was laid off from my job in February, life has been exceptionally hectic. This seems completely counter-intuitive. This is because I obviously have much more free time than I did when I was working full time. Nonetheless, the free time seems to fill up fast with things that I either wish to do or that come up that I must do.
One huge thing that has come up is caring for my mother. This started the very day I was laid off when she fell and broke her wrist. About three weeks later, her left hip, which had been painful for months as the prosthesis from a much earlier hip replacement was rattling around loose in her femur, finally just broke. That is, her femur just started disintegrating. It was time to attempt a total revision of the hip replacement. This was a major undertaking that just a couple months before was seen as not worth the risks by an orthopedist at Kaiser Richmond. But now the risk of a failed surgery, becoming wheelchair bound, was already a reality.
The first orthopedic surgeon to look at her new situation, basically thought he could not do anything for her, but offered to refer us for a second opinion. The referral was to Dr. Bini, director of orthopedics for Kaiser East Bay. Dr. Bini was very confident he could fix her. “I can cut this and replace that; and if that doesn’t work, I have some other toys I can play with.” But he was very upfront about the risks: “For a 91-year-old, the anesthesia is dangerous. Or afterwards, she gets a clot and it goes to her lungs, that’s it. Or she gets pneumonia, which it’s unlikely she’ll recover from.”
We decide to move forward with it, and he schedules her for April 29th, at the end of an already full day of surgery for him. He just adds her in. So, there were three days of appointments for tests, including blood, urine, ekg, and biggest of all, a heart stress test with nuclear imaging.
Finally, she has the surgery. Dr. Bini calls me 5 or 6 hours after I left her with the pre-surgery team to say that the surgery went great, and that she came through it well. By Friday, she was recovering really well and they were planning on discharge to a rehab home the next day.
But the next day, Saturday, she started having terrible trouble breathing, and a chest x-ray showed patchy fluid throughout her lungs. It looked like pneumonia. By Sunday, she was moved to ICU, on an oxygen machine that helped keep her lungs inflated (bipapp?) and the doctors there were mostly talking to me about her health directive and “do not resuscitate” (DNR) status. We were all preparing for the end game. But I know these old Greeks, and her in particular. She’s too stubborn. Monday morning, the doc on watch suggested that she could be on the breathing machine indefinitely and that if she goes a couple days without change it might be time to think about pulling tubes out of her and just keeping her comfortable till the end. I said let’s see what we can pull back in terms of intervention and see how she does. So, over the course of a couple hours, we took her off the back-pressure oxygen, and got her down to just a little oxygen through a nose tube, not even a mask. And there started the big rally. The ICU docs were surprised.
She continued to improve through the week in terms of her infection and ability to breathe. However, she refused to eat, take her meds or otherwise cooperate in any way. Her lack of English, baseline dementia, and combination of lack of sleep and regular morphine all had her totally delusional. I was having to come in everyday to try to get her to eat and take some meds. By Friday, the ICU docs were again concerned that this was going to send her into decline again. And they felt like the hospital environment was a big factor in her disposition. They wanted to discharge her to a skilled nursing facility for rehab and focus on getting her on a normal routine. Saturday they did that, and sent her to Kaiser Post-Acute. Of course, that didn’t change her attitude much. They called me this morning to talk to her about eating, letting them take her vitals, and starting physical therapy on her hip. I tried. Later in the morning, we (Sarah, Theo, and my friend David) all went there for a mother’s day visit, and to see what the situation is. I actually got her to eat several bites of pureed food (can’t blame her for not liking it), and let them get her vitals. It looks like that is going to be the drill for the coming days, until she gets oriented. Assuming she ever does.
Monday in London
I finally got a chance to work through a batch of photos from the London trip and posted them on flickr last night. My walking tour began on Monday. We had been here many years ago, but I did not get a real sense of the layout of the city center. It seemed pretty big and confusing, and hard to grasp. We took the Underground pretty much everywhere, and got good at looking at the tube map and figuring out how to get from hotel to museum, etc. But this means that you start at a point and then disappear underground, and then pop up at another point. So, one does not get a real sense of the connective tissue between. This time was different. I took the tube to get a bit closer in, but then just walked the streets from point to point. This helped to make it clear where things are in relation to each other and made the city intelligible to me as a visitor. I’m not claiming I’ll remember any of this by the next time I get to visit, but that is another story entirely.
As I mentioned in the last post, I took the District Line tube to Westminster and came out of the station right in front of Big Ben.
This was a wonderful site with which to start a day in London. The sky was clear and the gold glinted in the sun. I walked around the corner onto Victoria Embankment to stroll along the Thames for a bit. That’s when I first glimpsed the London Eye, a gigantic ferris wheel 443 ft. high. That’s over 25 stories! It simply dwarfs the large buildings right next to it. Sarah wanted to go for a ride, but I’m not sure how my acrophobia would treat me up in that thing.
Along the way I also saw the Battle of Britain Monument. I thought it was rather an odd monument that was not sure whether it wanted to be a contemporary, abstract work or more of a traditional figurative sculpture.
I walked up Horse Guards Ave, and back down Parliament St, past the Horse Guards Cavalry Museum. Then past Downing St., which is pretty well guarded. It’s a fairly small and short side street, closed off with a large metal fence and gate and many police guards standing around. No surprise, of course.
I didn’t see Mr. Brown, however. He and the finance minister were busy working on a deficit budget to bail out the British economy, which became quite a news story while we there. There is quite a bit of opposition to the amount of borrowing the British government is proposing to do to get through the economic hard times. In contrast, the daily protests by Tamils over Sri Lanka were barely covered in the media I saw while there. A couple citizens I spoke to seemed mystified about what the protesters were demanding the government do about the situation in Sri Lanka.
Coming back down the street toward Parliament, I happened upon the aforementioned Sri Lankan Tamil protest. I’m not sure how I missed it the first time around; perhaps they had not started “protesting” yet and I took them for tourists.
At first, I was quite surprised to come upon the scene and found it rather exciting. There was definitely some action as the huge crowd spilled out of the park at one point and blocked Bridge St. The police were trying to hold them , but got pushed back and eventually fell back to protect the House of Commons, etc. Ultimately, it was all pretty civil, and well behaved on this day. After taking about 100 photos at the protest, I headed back up Parliament St toward the National Gallery. This time the Horse Guards were out and I got a couple shots.
Soon I arrived at Trafalgar Square, and got the standard shots of the Nelson’s Column and National Gallery in the background. I immediately recognized Admiralty Arch from my previous visit to London, but only as a landmark I passed through to get to the ICA.
I spent only about two hours in the National Gallery. Since I was traveling on a budget, I didn’t spring for special exhibits, but immensely enjoyed the fabulous permanent collection in the rest of the museum, which is free.
After the NG, I headed up Strand toward St Paul’s Cathedral. Along the way, I passed Somerset House, a large historic complex which I’d not heard of before, but which appeared to include a wonderful art venue and be worth a special effort to visit in the future. More on that and the rest of Monday in the next post, coming soon.