Category: Origami

Origami Site Update

One of the things I want to do this summer is give my website a long-overdue update, starting with the origami section.  The last time I put up pictures of new models was seven years ago.  Since then I’ve been busy with other things, and I went thru a rather long spell when I found it difficult to do any new creative paperfolding.  I never stopped entirely, but it did slow to a trickle between origami events, and I spent alot of time on a few supercomplex ideas involving pentagonal geometry, where progress got to be slow and frustrating. 

However, now I have more time to put into folding, and my creative energy is reignited by the last few conventions I attended, plus the fact that I’m going to be a special guest at the Origami USA convention later this summer. 

I took an inventory and have created about twenty-five new models since the year 2020, and about half of those have been photographed.  So the first step was to get the ones I had pictures of onto the site, in the gallery pages and with their own detail pages.  While I was at it I updated the layout of the gallery pages with larger images arranged in three columns, replaced some photos of old models with newer better ones where available, and made numerous small improvements and corrections.

There’s lots more to go.  I’m planning a deep and substantial redesign of the whole site, and am going to re-fold and re-photograph a good fraction of the models on display to raise the quality of the whole presentation.  Also I’m going to put up a bunch of crease patterns, and add some new sections on things like exhibits and deep dives into different themes.  On top of that, I’m actively creating new models again, so there’s be more fresh content coming soon.

Still this is a good step forward.  So check it out and enjoy:
https://zingman.com/origami

Models By Subject:
https://zingman.com/origami/models_subject.php

Models By Year:
https://zingman.com/origami/models_year.php

New Origami Models 2026

Here’s some new origami models I folded between the last CoCon and CFC6.  I’ve been working at these for a while, so it feels good to have some attained some completion.  Each of these is folded from a single pentagonal sheet of paper.

Level 3 Penfractal Tessellation

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome with Embedded Penfractal Tessellation

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome, Plain

Level 2 Penfractal Tessellation

Vertex-Centered Dodecahedron

Starman (Pentagon Human Figure Base)

Midwest Adventure, Part 2 – Art and Origami

Where were we?  Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference.  Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule.  Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either.  Bacon and eggs and all kinds of good stuff, lots more time to mingle. 

The conference itself was a series of panels, presentations and discussions around various origami topics.  One of the things I like about CFC is that it’s an international conference and a good fraction of the attendees were from Europe.  It was four days long, so already things that happened on different days run together in my mind.  I must say the level of the presentations was very high, and the topics very cool.  Brandon Wong in particular demoed some base CP-generating software he’s working on.

The panels were interesting and covered topics like origami art and science, book publishing, exhibiting in galleries, teaching, leveraging social media, and ways to broaden the origami community.  I’m looking to do more of all these things, but the TLDR is there’s no magic shortcuts, and all of it is alot of hard work.

I gave a presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry.  It gave some background information and theory, showed a few ways to fold a pentagon from a square, and then dove into a bunch of my own models in various categories including flowers, mandala tilings, fractal/recursive tilings, Penrose tilings, domes and bowls, several of my single-sheet polyhedra, and models that combined more than one these ideas.  I ended with some new work in representational figures, namely a human figure base and experiments with masks and faces.

In the evening the first night, I wound up playing pool with Brian Webb.  Neither of us had played in a long time, but Brian used to be a professional pool shark back in the day, and I wasn’t as rusty as I expected, so it was alot of fun.  He gave me a bunch of pointers along the way for bank shots, spin, and that kind of thing, and I actually learned a few things.  Last game we played was all bank shots, and we discussed each shot before taking it.  In the end the hotel wanted to close the game room because it was late.  I sunk the final shot, so now I get to brag that I beat Brian at pool. Friday night the whole convention went out to a group dinner at a place that had indoor bocce, so I played a bunch a bocce games.   Brian bought me a beer since that was our bet from the night before.  I’d never really played bocce but it was alot of fun.  Playing pool the night before was a good warm up.

Saturday morning there was an origami exhibit.  It was only one day because the hotel was using the other conference rooms for other events such as weddings.  It was a small exhibition but totally amazing because it was thirty or so of the world’s top folders.  David Brill ran a session in which he called upon every exhibitor to explain one or more of their models.  This was really interesting for me, especially to hear the newer folders or those whose wore I was less familiar with.  Also interesting to hear how people develop their ideas, and how everyone has to work thru design and technical challenges, gets stuck and tends to put things down and come back to them later with fresh insight.

The Buffalo Sabres were in the NHL playoffs the whole time, in the quarter finals against the Montreal Canadiens.  We watched three games while were out there, two of them at the hotel bar.  Saturday night was game six, and the Sabres came from behind to win big and bring the series to t 3-3 tie, forcing game seven back in Buffalo.  Unfortunately, they lost that game in overtime, but it was an extremely well-played series.  And, the Sabres went from being in dead last place in December, to a long winning streak culminating in their first playoff run in seventeen years.  Lots of fun.  Hockey was my main sport growing up, and although I haven’t followed hockey in many years, Michelle got into it after the Olympics and I started bandwagoning when it looked like the Sabres were going to make the playoffs.  Lots of fun.  Here’s looking forward to next season, eh!

Meanwhile, no one in the conference thought to look for us at the bar that night, but when the game was over I found where people were doing late-night folding and hung out there a while.  Some people were actually wet-folding in the hotel pool!

Listening to several days of origami-oriented talks meant there was lots of time to quietly fold.  I explored several ideas from my prezzy, where I thought I could use a better example for the picture on the slide.  First one I folded was a new level-2 pentagon fractal just for practice.  I gave this to Beth as thank-you at the end of the conference.  Next was a new variation, embedding the inner subdivision in a semi-sunken dodecahedron pattern.  This one had six big faces, half the full form, so I made this one into a dome.  Very cool and effective.  I’m going refold it out of different paper for the OUSA convention in July.  I had thought that this might make a good study to refine my long-fallow flowerball idea, but it’s good as is. 

The last one was a level-3 recursive pentagon fractal.  Madonna Yoder gave me a 12″ sheet of skytone paper, so I told her if it worked I’d dedicate the model to her.  I figured if I was going thru all the effort, I might as well make it count.  The figure is basically a pentagon divided into six smaller pentagons, and each of those divided into six smaller ones, and each of those divided into six smaller ones still!  It took me basically a whole day to do the prefolding, and another half day to collapse it.  Fortunately, it worked on the first try, and it came out awesome!

The trip home Sunday night was uneventful, except that we came back home into a heat wave.  I had to put in the air conditioners first thing Monday morning.

Now I feel all charged up again to do origami, and there’s a bunch of new ideas I want to work on before the convention.  I’ve also dusted off my web site and started looking at a long overdue update and redesign.

Midwest Adventure, Part 1 – Art and Industry

I just got back from a trip with Jeannie to the Midwest, specifically Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.  The trip was centered on an origami event, CFC6 (Conference for Creators, Number 6), hosted by my good friend Beth in Ann Arbor Michigan.  We’d never been to that part of the country before, so we figured we’d do a few days touristing before the conference began.

Our flight left NYC Monday morning and landed in Detroit shortly before noon.  From there we had time for one daytime activity, and chose the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio.  The main attraction here was a decommissioned lake freighter.  As the big freighters go she was bigger than most, I think they said 800 feet long.  You could go up to the bridge and down into the hold and engine room.  Pretty neat.  The rest of museum was housed in a regular building and featured exhibits about the history, ecology, climate, and economy of the great lakes region, with a lot about the evolution boats and ships, from indigenous people and the arrival of French fur trappers up thru the present day.  The museum was situated in a larger park that was nice to walk around.

The evening we drove out to Auburn, Indiana.  The main attraction there was the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum.  I’ve been a longtime fan of Duesenberg, Cord and Auburn automobiles since I was a kid into building model cars, and this place has been on my bucket list for a long time.  And it did not disappoint.  For those who don’t know, these were some of the coolest classic cars ever, each with their own unique character.  Duesenbergs in particular were the ultimate luxury car, big as a modern extra large SUV or monster pickup truck, but with a giant racecar engine and amazing styling and coachwork.  They typically had aluminum bodies.  (Each body was custom built on an engine/chassis platform.)  Today they’re considered priceless, rolling works of art, with only a few hundred in existence.  Twenty or so are in the museum, all meticulously restored.  The ultimate Doozy is the SJ, with a supercharged engine and distinctive external exhaust pipes.  The Auburn was the Duesenberg’s smaller cousin, smaller, lighter and slightly more affordable, but still with a focus on luxury and performance.  They are famous for their boattail roadsters.  Cord was its own thing, very advanced and a little weird for the day, being the the world’s first successful mass-manufactured front-wheel drive car, with its distinctive coffin nose and touches such as disappearing headlights.  Sadly, Auburn Cord Duesenberg went out of business during the great depression.  Amazing to think that these cars are all ninety years old or more, many of them over a hundred.

The museum was in the former company showroom and headquarters, and had a good selection of all of these cars, plus other historical autos including a Cadillac V-16, and a Lincoln and Chrysler from the same era, as well as a fleet of earlier models going back the the beginning of the 1900’s and the origin of automobiles.  They also had some rare prototypes, some engines and few historical airplanes, and exhibits on E. L. Cord, the automotive design studio, and the history of the factory and the company, and the rise and fall of the automobile industry in Indiana.

Next door was the former manufacturing plant, which is now a classic car museum with alot of muscle cars from the 60’s, a handful of different kinds of racecars, and a broad spectrum of mainly American historical cars from the entire twentieth century. A couple 1960’s Mustangs like my own.

I will say my one big disappointment for the trip was that my other bucket-list item, the National Brass and Woodwind Museum and the Conn-Selmer factory in Elkhart, Indiana, closed sometime in 2025, even as we were beginning to plan our trip, so we never got to see that.  Ah well.

Both days we had dinner at a bar nearby the museum we were visiting. I must say the general vibe of the tri-state region was exactly the opposite of exotic to me, rather it was very friendly warm and even felt familiar.  The landscapes, the people, the history and context, all that.  It felt alot upstate and western New York, and southern Ontario when you get out west toward London.  I guess that’s what they mean by the Great Lakes Region.

Tuesday evening it was off to Ann Arbor.  The convention didn’t officially start until Thursday, but there were activities slated for Wednesday.  The convention was at a hotel called Webers, which was a very cool and funky hotel with a sort of art deco jazz age vibe.  We watched the Sabres vs the Canadiens at the cozy, wood-paneled bar while the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Red Garland played on the PA. 

Wednesday we met a bunch of our origami friends at breakfast, including Ilan and Nicolas, who run CFC and organized the conference.  A short while later, a bunch of convened in the lobby and were joined by our host Beth for the main activity, a day trip into Detroit and the Detroit Institute of Art.  Enough of us had a car that everyone got a ride, a pattern that continued throughout the week.

The Detroit Art Institute is a very cool museum.  Its most famous and impressive work is the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, which fills all four walls of a giant hall and depicts the whole life-cycle of auto manufacturing in a complicated series of panels that merge realism, storytelling, symbolism and mythology in a way that sums up what we’ve seen so far in the Great Lakes Region perfectly.  There were several other galleries including American modernists, and some Mid-Eastern and Asian collections that range from ancient Rome to the present day.  Apparently there was also a furniture and industrial design collection that I missed.  Ah well.  It’s always good inspiration when a bunch of artists go to an art museum together.

We all got lunch, and then went to a place called Michigan Central Station, a former train station that was abandoned fell into disrepair in the later twentieth century.  The city did not have enough money to demolish it and became a symbol of Detroit’s decline and misfortune.  Over the last decade or so, it has been beautifully restored and is now a public attraction and event space, with the the building above the main concourse being an office tower, and overall a symbol of Detroit’s resurgence and renewal.  Alot impressive stonework, particularly because you rarely see stone architecture looking new and clean.

Finally, that evening we had a barbecue at Beth’s house.  It was a slightly larger group as more conference attendees came into town.  It was unseasonably cool but I helped Beth build a fire in a firepit in her backyard.  Beth has a very nice design studio in a building in her backyard that used to be a garage, including a large table for folding.  Makes me want to rethink my own studio setup.  Anyway, it was great to hang out and catch up with my origami friends in a relaxed setting.  Although there’s some overlap with the OUSA regular crowd, there’s a bunch of Midwesterners I rarely see. 

Okay, halfway thru the trip.  The conference is set to begin Thursday morning.  I’m exhausted already.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Yeah it’s true, I got laid off from my day job as lead engineer at [company’s] Innovation Lab last month, as part of a massive company-wide restructuring.  Or, putting it another way, I got replaced by an AI bot.  You see, [company] has been losing money for a while now, its core value proposition of well-researched and authoritative product comparison information being attacked and eroded by AI internet chatbots that, while perhaps not as accurate or nuanced, tend to be cheaper and more convenient.  So, the Innovation Lab is no more. They got rid of a bunch of us including Ben our VP and visionary leader, while the rest got reassigned into other business units in the organization.  Ah well, it was a good run while it lasted.  We built some excellent products in the space of consumer privacy protection, advocacy, and digital rights, including the Permission Slip app and the Data Right’s Protocol.  I was the tech lead for both projects, and they rank high as proud achievements in a career that has included many fun and cool accomplishments in software R&D and product development. And I learned alot about alot of things in my time there too. Sadly [company’s] commitment to continuing working in that space had diminished prior to the restructuring, so the writing was on the wall. Meanwhile, the other main thread of the lab’s work, focused on AI chatbots of our own, had pretty much graduated from R&D and folded into the main digital group.  I have no idea what has become of the remaining R&D initiatives.

But there’s no point in sitting around feeling bitter about it, although they do try hard to make you feel as bad as possible when they give you the boot, suddenly cut off from your friends and colleagues and your own work that you’ve put so much into over many years.  For my part, I had a lucky bounce in that I’ve been able to increase my level of commitment to The Global Jukebox, and it’s a good time for it too.  We’re building towards a major release later this year and there’s tons of work to do, and it’s a fun project.  Last week I listened to over a hundred and fifty pop songs to review the Cantometric codings done by a team of consultants.  Kind of amazing how vast and diverse the last hundred years of recorded music is, and how many great songs are out there. 

Other than that, my plan for now is to relax and enjoy the summer, and not worry until the fall about whether I want to look for another full-time job or just continue doing consulting.  My sense is that now is not a good time to try and jump back in, since all the big tech companies are sacking their workers by the thousands and replacing them with AI.  Eventually this will blow over like every previous cyclic downturn.  What really matters to me is to find a cool and exciting project to work on that is worth my time and effort.

Anyway, it’s a good time of year to have some time off.  As mentioned before, I’ve been doing alot of biking.  I’m averaging about sixty miles a week now, and plan to for the rest of the summer.  This past weekend Jeannie and I finally got out to the Empire State trail.  I did sixteen miles in an hour and twelve minutes.  Not too bad, but a little slower than my best times last year.  I’ve also increased the level of weight in my weightlifting workout, up to 202 pounds on bench press, and 120 on curls and the other dumbbell exercises.  200/120 was the goal I set for myself a long time ago to hit before I turn sixty.  I’ll be fifty-eight this year, so from here on out it’s gravy.  Oh, and I’ve lost ten pounds since the winter too.

There’s tons to do outside this time of year, and I’ve been spending time every day working on the yard.  Project patio is nearly done.  It involves spending time outside and lifting heavy things, so double fun.  My patio is made of flagstones laid on a bed of sand and compacted gravel, and over time the stones tend to settle and shift.  Five years ago during the pandemic I enlarged the patio, so this year I’m straightening up the new area.  This involves lifting up the stones one by one with a crowbar, putting in some new sand under them, putting the back and filling in the gaps between the stones with more sand.  The new area all done and I just have one more spot near the stairs to go.  I might need to go out and buy more sand before I can finish.

In music, my jazz group Spacecats has a gig coming up in late June.  We would have liked to make it sooner, but different members of the groups have scheduling conflicts, so we’re off-and-on for rehearsals for the next few weeks.  We’re also trying to schedule our long-awaited recording session.  Meanwhile we’re continuing to learn new songs and have fun.

My recording project Spellbound is progressing as well.  I’ve been working in the 18-minute epic that fills most of side two, which I’m calling The Sailor’s Saga because I don’t remember what title we gave it back in the day.  I’m tracking the first three sections, leaving the big instrumental fourth movement to the end, because I’m going to rewrite it pretty dramatically, whereas the first three parts follow the original demo fairly faithfully.  Back in the winter I started with a click track and basic piano part.  To this I’ve now added a pretty much full (midi) drum part, and electric bass.  The first section is fast and grooving, the second is slow and atmospheric, and the third features a carefully crafted slow build in the rhythm section over a long, repeated chord progression. 

Now I’m up to the first of the guitar tracks, basic rhythm guitar.  The jaunty first section went down pretty easily, although I had to practice the part a few times to get it together.  There’s no part in the section section, so now I’m up to the third section.  It starts out doing arpeggios on the eighth notes, which is surprisingly hard for me.  I’ve been practicing every day, and consistently improving, but I imagine it’ll be a few more days at least before I’ll be able to get a good take. 

Finally, we have an origami event coming next week.  It’s CFC, the Conference for Creators, and this year it’s in Ann Arbor Michigan, hosted by Beth Johnson.  I’ve never been to that part of the country before, so Jeannie and I are going out a few days before the start to tour around the upper midwest.  Also, I’m scheduled to give a seminar on Folding with Fivefold Geometry, so I need to get my presentation together.  And, I want to have a new model for my exhibit, a perfected version of my Pentagon Human Figure that I came up with at CoCon in Chicago in March.  More on all this as it, uh, unfolds.

Wait for a Springtime Tide

Seasons change and so do I.  I’ve been trying to focus on springtime projects these days, and striking off a bunch of long-standing tasks from my todo list.  Last week I took the mustang into the shop for some maintenance, including an oil change and inspection.  The car is almost sixty years old, so it’s good to have some confidence that everything mechanical is in good shape when I drive it.  I also began and completed project dirt, which started with getting a cubic yard of topsoil delivered to my house.  I used it to fill in some low spots in my yard, mainly where there had been trees years before and now decayed remnants of the stumps and roots have left sunken and uneven areas.  The last step was to cover it with grass seed and start watering it.  We had an unusual heat wave last week, and it got up to ninety degrees three days in a row.  These happened to be the days I was out working in the yard shoveling dirt.  Ah well, at least once I was done it rained for a whole day, so the watering is off to a good start.  Next up: project patio!

I’ve been biking more and more.  Last week I did five days in a row agin.  My longer rides have been getting progressively long, the last one being thirteen miles, with a good amount of pulling up hills, and half of it on mountain biking trails.  Meanwhile I’ve added an extra loop to my short ride, brining it up to six miles.  The weather had been widely variable from day to day, so it’s not easy to figure out how to dress.  I’ve yet to get out to the rail trail this spring.  That’s flat and smooth, and I usually go between sixteen and twenty-four miles on it.  Last year I got up to thirty miles one time.  I also went up in weight on my weightlifting working a few weeks ago.  I’m now up to two hundred and two pounds on the bench press, and one hundred fifteen on the curls and other dumbbell exercises.  Hoping to go up again later this spring.

I’ve been putting alot of time into The Global Jukebox lately.  Plenty to do for the upcoming release of version 4.0.  Recently I’ve been focusing on making the wheel and the map work with alternative taxonomies for language and peoples in addition to the default taxonomy for people.  Nick did alot of foundation work for this: reading in the data and building the models in memory, and a first pass at the interactive UI stuff.  I thought it would be pretty quick to finish of the remaining functionality and fix a few minor bugs, but it turned out to be surprisingly deep.  I ended up doing a major refactoring across five classes.  I’m pretty much done the functionality, but still want to do some more foundational work. Now that I’ve come this far it’s become alot clearer what theright abstractions and design patterns are.

This last Sunday I went into the city to teach origami at OUSA Special Sessions at the American Museum of Natural History.  My class was Fun Spaceships, and included a bunch of intermediate level models from my book Air and Space Origami.  The class was small, and two of the students were really bright kids.  It was great because it was a fun and casual vibe, and I could give everyone enough attention if they needed it.  We ended up folding five models in two hours.  One of them was the Space Probe, which I haven’t folded in a long time and had forgotten what a fun model it is.  Jeannie and Michelle came too, and after the class we did a quick tour of the museum, hitting the dinosaurs, which are always amazing, a loop around the planetarium, and the halls of big dioramas of African and North American Mammals, and ending with the Whale Room. 

Origami Chicago

And all at once, spring is here!  It got up to seventy degrees today, and all the snow is gone.  Nothing much is growing yet, but the grass has turned from greyish-brown back to something resembling greenish.  Can’t wait to take a nice long bike ride tomorrow.

Jeannie and I just got back from a trip to Chicago.  The main purpose of the trip was to go to CoCon, the Chicago Origami Convention.  We went four years ago and had a great time, so we decided to do it again.  We flew out Thursday morning to give us a couple days to go sightseeing before the convention started.  To me Chicago has a great vibe, somehow combining the best of New York City and Buffalo.  The first day we went to the Adler Planetarium.  It was pretty cool.  It had some shows in the dome including a tour of the solar system and the current state of big astronomy in Chile, plus a bunch of exhibits including a Gemini capsule.  After that we walked around the shore of Lake Michigan for a little while.  It was a strangely foggy day.  We ended up at the Field Museum if Natural History, home of the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex Sue.  We went there last time we were in Chicago, but it was so cool we figured we’d go back, being right next door the planetarium and all.  They had a bunch of other cool exhibits, including one documenting melting glaciers around the world.  And I must say, as a former exhibit designer, whoever does the exhibits there does and amazing job!  That evening we walked around downtown near our hotel and got genuine Chicago-style pizza.

Friday we went to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.  This was a pretty amazing place.  Lots of stuff about transportation, trains, airplanes, etc.  The have an entire World War II U-Boat that was captured toward the end of the war, and brought the place in the 1950’s.  You can take a guided tour inside.  There’s also an exhibit that’s a re-creation of a coal mine, taking you thru the history of mining machinery for the last hundred and twenty years.  One had a giant model train diorama that demonstrated to role of rail in the cycle raw materials, heavy manufacturing, the distribution of goods, and travel.  Elsewhere was an entire train from the F.D.R. era, an early high-speed streamline passenger train made of stainless steel.  For me one of the highlights was a 1929 Duesenberg J automobile.  It’s my favorite car of all time and I built several models of them as a kid.  I’ve never seen one in person before.  They’re surprisingly huge! We wanted to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art too, but I guess that’ll hafta wait for next time.

Friday evening was the start of the convention.  I set up my exhibit, which did not include any really large models since I had fly with it in my luggage, in the largest box that would fit in my backpack, and spent the rest of the evening catching up with my origami friends.  A bunch of us went to the Irish pub around the corner from the hotel later on.  Saturday and Sunday I taught several classes, including one for my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, another for my Platypus, and a third for my single-sheet polyhedron Semi-Sunken Icosahedron.  Whew!  I also took a couple classes, including one on making masks and faces by wetfolding thick watercolor paper, and another on a human figure model.  This got my creative juices flowing.  In evening folding I designed a human figure from a pentagon, since the human form has five major appendages.  The idea has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but the folding was pretty spontaneous, and it turned out surprisingly well.  I’m thinking of it as a base, and plan to fold a few more figures and bring out different kinds of character in them.  I was experimenting more with faces, trying to come up with a good pattern for a face bass so the features line up in the correct place and in good proportion, and also to incorporate things like cheeks, jawlines and brow ridges to make it more lifelike.  On the way home I got the idea to try a face out of pentagon too.

After classes Jeannie and took a walk to Daly Plaza, where they have that Picasso, and the next day out the end of Navy Pier, where there’s a statue of Bob Newhart of all people.  By Sunday the weather was starting to turn nice.  It was sunny and warm-ish, but very windy out on the lake.

Now I’m a folding mood, and have started in on a new version of my semi-sunken dodecahedron.  Want to have some new stuff the show at the next couple conventions.

I can bring you up to speed on the music scene too.  My Spellbound project is at the phase where I’m listening back to mixes of the first six songs, and they all sound pretty great.  There’s still one more song to go, but there’s alot of work ahead on that one so I think I may downshift on it for a while to make more time to do origami in the next few months.  Meanwhile, I successfully got my two audio interfaces working together to form a single sixteen-track studio!  This is a pretty big accomplishment.  Next rehearsal we’re gonna do here and hopefully it’ll all go smoothly on the tech side and we can focus on getting comfortable jamming with the setup.  After that we have a couple regular rehearsals for a gig coming up at the end of March.  We’ll use that time to sharpen up our originals and pick which songs we want to record.  So we’re looking at setting up some recording sessions in April.  We’ll keep you posted as to how the situation shapes up.

It’s Snow Fun

The temperature has actually gotten above freezing the last few days.  Saturday it was up near fifty.  But there’s still plenty of snow on the ground, and trying to break up the snow piles is mostly futile since it’s all fused into a solid mass of ice.  On the plus side, Jeannie and took a day off from work Friday to go skiing.  We figured it was the last day before President’s Day weekend, and the last cold day before things start melting.  And, as I’d hoped, the mountain was not at all crowded and the conditions were great.  Not at all icy until the very end.  We left the house around 8:30 and were on the slopes by eleven.  We did eighteen runs in total, all over the mountain.  Stayed until after four.  It was the best day of skiing I’ve had in a long time, especially for a day trip.

Did some shopping over the weekend.  Got a backup hard drive for my new computer, as well as a mouse and some cables to connect various audio interfaces, and even a new desk chair.  Things are moving ahead. 

Last Thursday instead of normal band rehearsal for Spacecats, Ken and Rick came over to my studio to begin work on our new album (Josh being out of town).  This was basically a tech session to see what it will take to use my studio for recording.  It’s going to be a learning curve as I retire my old system which I know so well and move into the new one.  So far I got my 8-channel audio interface hooked up to my computer and some of the software installed, including multiple DAWs and drivers for the outboard box.  Rick played my drum kit, which I had mic’d up previously.  Ken brought his bass amp and a very nice AKG condenser mic so we could record both direct and the output of his amp.  I played sax into my trust Rode mic.  It took an hour or so to get everything set up.  We managed to get a great-sounding 8-track recording of the trio doing a handful of standards.

A few things we need to improve for next time.  First is that I only had one audio interface plugged in, so the meant just five channels of drums to make room for two bass channels (mic and direct) and one for sax.  Actually the kit sound pretty good that way.  The mics are on the kick, snare, hi-hat and two overheads which are meant for the cymbals but also capture alot of the toms.  The three mics are had to unplug were for close-mic’ing the toms. 

For next time I’m going to add another audio input box.  I have a space MBox, the same kind I use for my old studio, that has four inputs, including two XLR with nice peak limiters.  This will get us up to twelve channels, which will do for next week.  But the week after Josh is coming back and we’ll want another stereo pair for the keyboards and eventually mic’ing the piano.  Ken has an eight-channel audio box he’s going to bring next week, so we’ll see how that goes, and Rick has a 16-channel digital mixer too.  So we’re we’re trying it all to see what works best.

The other thing we need to work out is the arrangement of the musicians in the room for minimizing the bleedthru on the mics from the other instruments.  This is going to be a live jazz album with no overdubs, but better isolation will make it easier to mix.  For this session, Rick and I were fairly close together, but put Ken’s amp far away, and that worked out.  We might have to invest in some longer cables and acoustic baffles too.

Meanwhile, I’ve been continuing to work on my home studio project Spellbound.  I’ve been laying down a couple takes of the twelve-string guitar part every day, and I’ve finally gotten solid enough that I can cut together a take from tracks I laid down.  Woo-hoo!  This means I should be wrapping up this song soon.  I also went back and did new mixes of the first five songs.  All that remains is the big prog epic that fills up most of side two.

And lastly, there’s a bunch of origami events coming up.  I’ve been asked to be a special guest for the upcoming Origami USA convention in July.  I’m very flattered and honored, and now I have to level up my exhibit and teaching, plus submit a model the annual collection.  There’s also CFC (Conference for Creators) in Ann Arbor, Michigan in May, hosted by my friend Beth.  For that one I plan to give a talk on folding pentagonal symmetry, with examples from my own work including single-sheet polyhedra, and tessellations including fractals and Penrose quasicrystal tilings.

But the nearest one is CoCon in Chicago, just three weeks away.  For this one I’m mostly prepared, but it’s always nice to have something new to exhibit.  The most important one for me is to complete my single-sheet dodecahedron folded from a decagon.  I have it all worked out except that the lock doesn’t hold tight.  I’m thinking of folding it from a slightly larger sheet to have more paper left at the end for the lock.  I’m also thinking of making a “Star Man” a simple human figure folded from a pentagon.

Rollin’ and Foldin’

The weather continues to get colder and darker and stormier.  Once it gets below forty degrees of so, biking gets more difficult, especially if it’s windy.  So now I’m down to biking every other day or so, and when I go I gotta bundle up.  A week ago I did my longest ride of the season, indeed my longest ride in quite a few years. Over twenty-eight miles in just a little over two hours.  I’m hoping I’ll get another long ride or two in before winter arrives, but if that’s my longest this year I’m satisfied.  The days are short and it’s dark alot, so next time I’ll go for speed to see how far I can go in ninety minutes.

Last Friday Jeannie and I went to see Branford Marsalis playing with his quartet at SUNY Purchase.  They have a very nice concert hall there, although lots of little things about it are weird, including the entrance to the venue being in a tunnel, and the lack of a center aisle of doors in back means the entrance to the hall from the lobby is a little made of side hallways.  Anyway the show was great.  Branford is one of my favorite sax players around today.  The piano player was Joey Calderazzo, who is amazing, and so were the rhythm section.  The mainly band played an interoperation of the Keith Jarret album Belonging and to to some really great places. 

Saturday we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention.  The special guest was my friend John Montroll, who had never attended an OrigaMIT convention before, so that was a fun surprise.  I also met his sister and nephew, who is a professor of mathematics and computer science.  John gave a talk on his approach to origami design, which was very cool.  His style of delivery is pretty breezy and laid back, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll miss how deep what alot of what he has to say is.

I folded several new models for my exhibit.  I taught my Platypus, so I did a new rendition of that out of purple tissue foil; it came out very nice.  I also had a new version of my Lizard and Turtle, both folded out a sheet of beautiful hand-painted paper I bought in Venice, Italy when we were there a few years back.  The other model I’ve been working on is a Dimpled Dodecahedron.  I came up with a layout folded from a decagon that has polar symmetry.  Back in July at the OUSA convention John helped me refine the layout to make the 3-D folding phase more tractable.  It turns out to be a very difficult model to fold because as it accumulates layers inside that zigzag in strange ways and tend to push the model open like a budding flower.  So most of the work I’ve been doing has been to manage the layers and make them organized and flat to mitigate that tendency.  I got thru most of the southern hemisphere and am up to the lock at the south pole, where three tabs are supposed to go together in a pinwheel.  Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the worked out in time for the convention.  I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase: every time I try, I get half the remaining distance to the finish line.