My house is hard to find, but I’ll give you directions,
You can visit sometime, down where all that I built surrounds me
Just make sure your car’s got good shocks
There’s steep hills, there’s potholes, there’s rocks
…
This is not the house that pain built
I was drowning in something, I jumped in the rift
And you knew me back then, when I spat on my gift, but no
It’s tough and it’s tiring when you go it alone
I learned about wiring, I learned about stone
The building is done but the work’s never through
And I won’t give up, no how, it reminds me of who I am and where I am now
I remember myself, that’s the work that I do
On a spring night when the snow is melting
You’ll see two sets of footprints walking
Look at all the stars, and turn around, and walk home,
Slowly walk home.
That is not a house that pain built
My friends all think that I holed up and hid
But I tell them I didn’t, you know I don’t think I did, no.
And this is where I let my pain go
This is where I let my pain go
This is where the footprints dance in the snow
I think most of these photos of the scenery of Hawaii turned out really well. I did a fair amount of bracketing at first but was able to discern what settings would work best in given conditions after a while. Most of the time, without direct sun a shutter of 1/250 @ f/16 ISO 400 worked great. I kept the detail of the shadows and didn’t completely blow out the sky. I shot Canon Raw the entire trip and only had to do a small amount of highlight recovery.
Often I’d step down to ISO200 and go down a shutter stop if I wasn’t on a moving vehicle.
I have a bunch of black and white film shots that I need to develop still, and I think I found a reputable place in town to do it.
Since I don’t have an external iSight anymore, it’s difficult to do these… but I’ve also found myself drowned in other interested. The world is just so darn distracting with all of its interesting tidbits.
I went to visit my jichan one day, at what I thought was the early hour of 7:30 on a Sunday. I quietly knocked on the door, but there was no response. My grandfather cannot hear all that well, so the silence was not an indication that I was not welcome. I let myself in.
I found him getting ready for bed, silently struggling to put on his pajamas. I sat there in wonderment for a moment. It was my first instinct to watch, rather than help him. I watched him wage a tiny war with each pant leg as I contemplated how much I take my mobility for granted.
I was standing right next to the bed and he didn’t notice me; that was a combination of focus and lack of perception. Not until I said hello did he look in my direction.
He was surprised to see me, just as surprised as I was to see him already getting ready for bed.
“Holy Shoot!” he said. He always says that.
When I asked why he was retiring so early, he blinked a couple of times, as if it was a difficult question.
“What am I supposed to do? I get up at 4, eat, play cards, eat…I get tired of watching tv. I play cards all day. I can’t talk to anyone here.”
I have been going through the hundreds of transparency slides my grandfather took in the 60s and 70s. He was a photographer, and according to mom, tried
to pass down his enthusiasm to just about everyone in my family, including my older brother.
It’s sadly ironic that I am the only one that really has an interest in it and now he’s too old to really teach me or share with me. I do, of course, bring my photos over and he loves to look at them. But how I wish I could actually discuss it all with him.
My grandmother on my dad’s side was an artist, too. She illustrated all of the ads [for Ditrich Furs] that they only recently stopped using. How I wish I could have actually talked with her about illustration. I rememer sitting in her sunlit studio in the back of the house, the room yellow from the lemon curtains on the wall. But I was only 10 and never really had the interest until after she died.
Jichan is 89 and still has all his wits about, although his body is giving out slowly. Whenever I am feeling down, I recall my own mortality and remember that most of us, if we’re lucky, have 90 or so years on this planet. Here I am at almost 30 of those, and it’s gone past in the blink of an eye.
I’ll often get lost in a future daydream where no one is left but me and my memories. I will remember my grandfather, my wife, my family, and all these times which I do my best to cherish as they happen. I wonder if someone will go through all my photos like I’m going through my grandfather’s and wonder who all these forgotten people are?
I’ve started mucking around with Drupal to see if it’s worthwhile for the InsideOut and my own website. It seems like such is the case, but I’m having difficultly wrapping my head around their organizational structure.
I like my PHPBB back end for IO, but it’s been hacked twice and I need to update it so it won’t happen. The cool thing is, my code will likely work just fine with whatever upgrade to phpbb I install (all it needs is SELECT access) but the messageboard itself was so ungraciously hacked by me that it’s difficult to say if I’d be able to patch in what I changed should I install v 2.0.21.
The piano tuner today pointed out some artists that I probably would like, for jazz, latin, bach and beyond. They are not artists I’ve heard before. I can’t wait to get some CDs.
So, I listened to the recording by Glenn Gould this morning and I heard a couple of things.
One, he plays the piece much more staccato and bouncy, which I liked.
Two, he adds an A# in the 10th bar, which I had to rewind a few time to figure out what he had done. It’s not in the publication I’m reading from. Actually, he ignores an A natural in the third bar as well, an oversight that I found interesting. But I simply could not sleep without playing the piece more fanciful and adding that lovely A#.
It makes sense to add it there. That little note adds a lot of life between those two bars. Since there’s a small move to the key of e-minor, it resolves so much more definitively, even for that short span of time.
I’m still working on Forlane (if you’re watching, Allan). It’s not an easy piece. Also, I got a little sidetracked trying to learn Promenade, which might be next.
I can’t really decide which tempo best fits this variation. It can change depending on my mood. I think I like more as a briskly moving dance between the voices, but I liked the second take where I slowed the tempo down considerably. I didn’t favor this variation much at all until I started to learn it, then I found all the interweaving voices and fell in love with it. The small sequence near the end of the second half is particularly wonderful to play.
The fifth take is a tempo in between the other two, still on the faster side, but I wanted to make the voices more legato as they are more detached in other takes. There’s also more liberty with the tempo.
Getting better at this whole dry erase thing. Part of the beauty of it as a medium is the “messy” factor, really, so I learned to accept that each sucessive framw need not be “pristine clean” and using the fingers to erase is just fine and dandy. Kind of gives it the sense of those old sand animations I used to see from The Nation Film Board of Canada.
In Flight
First, a little test of flight movement. I would like to have something to actually study, but I did this on mere speculation. flapping my arms up and down in my living room. The third take definitely is an improvement on the first two.
Bounce Boy
I really enjoy doing the parabolic bounce movements.
Today I got to use the large dry-erase board I bought solely for this purpose. It’s not as easy as I thought to use, as the onion skinning is hard to follow when it’s projected on the screen. But it’s also difficult because I’m not used to drawing on a perpendicular surface, using my entire arm. I found this to a be a good exercise in loosening up and using the entire arm from the elbow up, rather than the tight, controlled “wrist-only” drawing I usually do.
The drips are okay…the bounce is delightful, especially on its last bounce. I think I may do another one next week. They’re fun.
Two takes of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations. There are some subtle differences between the ornaments and the tempo from the first take is slightly faster. I like some of the push and pull and dynamic changes of the second take more. Although there a couple of hesitations in the second take that I wish didn’t happen. I think the first is a little better. Less pushy.
Next up will likely be the 4th or 7th variation, or perhaps something completely different, like Couperin’s Les Baricades Mistereuses, which I played at a wedding, or III. Forlane from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, which I have always wanted to play ever since I first heard it.
My tripod is not quite as articulate as the one we used in Chicago, but it was effective nonetheless. It’s a lot more fun to have something that will pose so you can stop worrying about how you’re going to move it and concentrate more on actually moving it. I would have gone much longer with this but it’s late and my car was broken into (again) so I must tend to those thing tomorrow after reading a good book and sleeping well.
I am particularly fond of the way the tripod starts to move rather frantically when it realizes it is not alone. I would have like to have less “hand accidendents” and perhaps found a better way for it to leave the situation, but…c’est la vie.
My first attempt was at bipedal walking using a traditional wooden model. That didn’t really work out so well. The model was hard to articulate, wasn’t easy to keep standing, so I gave up on that one.
Spare Change evolved on the fly from an initial idea of using coins to slinky around. It shows that I’m not too good at 24fps yet; the movements are far too fast. If you can play it back at 12fps, the results are much easier to see. A nice accident of this animation is the clock in the background - spinning around via inadvertant time-lapse showing how long the animation took.
I am not feeling particularly well, so this is all I can muster today. Ideally, I’d like to tackle this with a dry erase board - cleaner erasing. Also, this iSight is difficult to exposuse something like this. In terms of the bouncing movement, though, I think it turned out rather well.
You will need Quicktime 7 to view these, as I’m using the H.264 codec to keep these small and lookin’ güd.
It’s wonderful being married.
