zingblog – Page 2 – Zing Blog 2

Fire and Rain

We went for a camping trip this weekend up in Mongaup Pond in the Catskills, with Martin and his family. We haven’t really done a camping trip since before the pandemic, so it felt really good to be back. We went up on Friday. The whole packing and loading in went smoothly, except that we forgot to pack lawn chairs, so we stopped at a Target on the way. And traffic was really heavy. What’s normally a two-hour trip took almost four hours. Anyway we got there and got set up and the weather was fine. Grilled some meat and drinks some beers and stayed up talking around the fire into the night.

Martin’s kids are at and age where they’re lots of fun to hang out with. They were into pulling a prank where they’d jump out of the woods and attempt to scare you and tell you you’re being mugged. First time they tried it, Alley and Matthew set it up with a story about how the woods were full of robbers and muggers, and we were walking on the sketchy trail. I was confused, but when they sprung the trap it was hilarious. The second time they actually got me, and I hollered out in shock and surprise. They’re also pretty helpful and can build a campfire and keep it going.

In the morning we hung out and had coffee and Martin and I played guitars. Surprisingly, we don’t know that many of the same songs, so mostly we were showing each other different tunes. Today I put more time and focus into my guitar practice than I usually do. In the afternoon we went down to the pond and the kids swam, and later went for some walks or maybe light hikes. We felt a drop of rain in the afternoon and so set up the shelter just in case.

In the evening, when were just about the start making supper, the skies turned dark and ominous, the thunder began to rumble. Soon it began to rain. Right at the start, I made a good fire, put on alot of wood, and Jeannie put tinfoil on the grate to keep it dry. It poured for a good hour, and we sat under the shelter and played an epic game of Fluxx. The rain finally subsided, and we started thinking about cooking again, and that it would be getting dark soon. But the respite didn’t last and soon it was pouring once more. We had heard from the park rangers it was going to continue rain much of the night. Kathleen and Martin decided it would be better to break camp, and Jeannie agreed. We did our best to stay dry as we packed down, but finally we had to take down the tent and the shelter, and it became futile. Ah well, at least the car was fairly organized with the wet stuff all being in one place. And we could run the heat together with the air conditioning on the drive home to dry out.

Amazingly, the fire was still burning strong as we finally pulled out of the campsite. It was probably the worst rains storm I can remember on a camping trip, which was a bit funny, because before we left the forecast was for a thirty percent chance of scattered thundershowers. When we got out of the park and had cel phone service, we learned there was a tornado warning for the sight that night, so it’s just as well we didn’t try and ride it out. It rained most of the way home too. We got home Saturday night and Michelle was surprised to see us and that we threw in the towel. “I wasn’t even aware it was an option,” she said.

We got what we wanted out of the trip. It was a great time despite the rain. It would have been nice if it lasted longer, but we would’ve just gotten up Sunday morning and packed in the rain then. Sunday we put all the wet stuff out in the driveway, the shelter, the tent and the tarps. Also we didn’t cook alot of the food we brought so we had steak yesterday for dinner and we’ll have burgers tomorrow.

A Trip to Italy, Part IV – Venice

Venice is of course the legendary city on the water that we’ve all seen in countless movies. This one was a pretty short train ride and we arrived mid-morning. The train into the city goes over a long bridge, and in most of the city there’s no cars, so there’s a big parking lot on the island next to the train station. The station lets out into the Grand Canal. Coming into the plaza, we all just stood there for a while taking it all in, trying to grok that this was indeed a real place.

We were staying out on Lido island, which separates the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea and is known for its beaches. To get there one takes a water bus or water taxi. Jeannie, being a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker with a fondness of public transportation in all it’s forms, had this all worked out and had us get 48-hour water bus passes. Lido is only five minutes away from the main part of the city, but the bus took a circuitous route thru the Grand Canal and three-quarters of the way around on the north side before it crossed the lagoon, so the trip was more like forty-five minutes. Very scenic tour of the city.

The boat landing at Lido was like an extension of the main part of Venice, with canals penetrating the island. However, here there were also cars. It was a five-minute cab ride to our hotel on the beach side of the island. It was lovely small hotel, the best one yet, right at the edge of the beach. Our room wasn’t ready yet, so we walked down along the beach until we found an “American style” outdoor beach bar for lunch. I had the “big American” burger, which had prosciutto and an egg on it, a distinctly non-American twist.

The music here was American rock. The Red Hot Chili Peppers seem particularly popular in Italy; we heard them several places. Interestingly, when we were in South America last year, pretty much all the music was some kind of salsa, with a clave instead of a backbeat, even the remixes of rock music were salsified. The main exception was some songs had a reggae beat. In Europe there were some dance remixes but alot of it was straight up rock and pop like we have at home. It wasn’t until we got to Venice and saw pseudo-classical/folk/gypsy ensembles playing at the tourist cafes that we heard anything distinctly European. More on that soon.

After lunch we checked into the hotel, and our room was on the fourth (top) floor, with a view of the Adriatic Sea, all blue and beautiful. It was a ten-minute walk back to the water bus station, and then fifteen minute boat ride halfway around the island to St. Mark’s plaza, the epicenter of downtown Venice.

The scene there was fantastic, with a glorious palace right past the boat landing, then an equally impressive and ornate cathedral, a great big bell tower, and big fancy renaissance architecture on all sides. The square itself was full of kiosks and restaurants and live music. Going under an archway in the back of the plaza led to a maze of narrow twisting streets with frequent footbridges over the canals. The streets were lined with shops, restaurants, hotels and churches. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality, and it was something to try and imagine how this place came into being, and now hundreds of years after it’s peak of power and influence remains a world famous tourist destination.

Just as Florence was famous for its leather shops, so Venice has lot of glassworks. I saw lots of glasses, vases, bowls, ashtrays, etc., plus alot of handblown sculptures ranging from kitschy knickknacks to works of art as large and expensive as you want to go. There were dragons and devils, and cuttlefish and octopi and all kinds of things. Some of the animal figures reminded of origami in that the artist was following a known pattern, with variations in the finishing to give each model its own expressiveness. I bought a nice glass dish, azure like the Adriatic, perfect for putting guitar picks in. And I set my mind to find a nice, handblown octopus sculpture.

We did the classic gondola ride, which give you another, unique perspective on the city and its architecture. We wandered as far as the Rialto, a big fancy bridge over the Grand Canal, lined with shops. We found a place along the canal for dinner, another long lingering affair with appetizers, pasta and wine. By this time the kids were telling us every evening that this was the best family vacation ever. I really can’t disagree.

At the end of the night we made our way back to St. Mark’s square. The tide was now high, and when a police boat sped by it’s wake splashed up onto the plaza. The water bus ride was breezy and refreshing and on the walk back the hotel we passed some really nice villas. Ended the night up at the hotel listening the the sound of the ocean and the distant strains of American pop music.

I now have a new quest, a bit more in depth than finding the right glass octopus sculpture. In a few years when I retire, I want to spend a few months as an artist-in-residence at some cool and picturesque place in Europe, and spend the weekends traveling and sightseeing as much as I can.

Next morning it was another beach day. Lizzy and I were the most enthused about this. I like swimming in the ocean, and she mainly wanted to work on her tan. Jeannie was happy to sit on the beach but didn’t go in the water. Michelle came out to the beach but then decided she’d rather go back to the hotel and rest inside in the cool. Anyway, it was super nice for swimming. The water was clear and blue and warm, and the waves were gentle. No big breakers like you get in Long Island. The second time I went out for a swim Lizzy came out with me. At one point I was just enjoying how amazing everything was and I said to her “I feel completely relaxed. I mean I just can’t get any more relaxed than this.” And so we hung out in the water and the sunshine. Came back in and laid on the beach, and went back out for yet another swim.

In the afternoon we went to Murano Island, where the glass blowing shops are, as well as a famous glass museum. We first took the water taxi to St. Marks, then crossed by foot over the Grand Canal to the north side of the island, to catch another water bus to Murano. Along the way we grabbed a quick lunch of panini from a food stand. Murano was alot like the main island with more canals and shops and restaurants. The museum was was cool, and had alot of historical Venetian glass as well as some modern stuff. Afterwards we checked out the glass shops, but I did not find what I as looking for. Then it was was drinks and appetizers at a place on the waterfront.

We took the water bus back to the main island for more wandering around looking at the shops. I finally found the perfect souvenir, a glass octopus maybe 8″ across, with a good heft, and a really cool pattern of white and blue inside the glass. I named him Otto, which means eight.

After dinner at yet another quaint and charming place we lingered in St. Mark’s plaza listening to various musical groups playing in different quarters of the square. The ensembles seemed to be a variation on a basic setup. Piano and standup bass, no drums. The frontline was some combination of one or two violins, an accordion, a clarinet and sometimes a saxophone. Some of the groups leaned more classical and traditional, some were more euro-pseudo-jazz renditions of pop songs. Mostly it was about setting the right mood. All were very good. My favorite thing that I heard was an interpretation of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson.

The last day I woke up early and watched the sun rise over the Adriatic from my hotel room. The beach was empty and I was tempted to dash out for one last swim before it was time to go. As it was, we left Lido pretty early, for a marathon relay of eight different vehicles for the journey home. It started with a cab from the hotel the the water bus dock, then the water bus into downtown Venice. This time it went the other way around the island so in the end we circumnavigated it all and then some. From Venice we took the bullet train back to Rome, and then the express train to the airport. In the airport there was a little tram the went from the main concourse out the the gate. Then of course the plane itself. We were back in New York City sometime after nightfall. Then it was the shuttle bus back the the car parking service, and finally the drive home. Whew. What a great trip.

It took us a few days to catch up on things like laundry, mowing the lawn, and getting back into our routine. It was in the mid-seventies here the day after we returned, and it felt downright cold. The weekend was hot again, and I spent most of it doing yardwork, edging the driveway, walkway and patio, and trimming the hedges. All caught up now. Even got on my bike once or twice, and took the mustang out for a ride.

A Trip To Italy, Part II – Naples

Next day we got up early and took the train to Naples. Italy has high-speed rail so the the trip was quick and easy, although our train was delayed leaving Rome so it took longer than expected. We got to Naples and checked into our hotel. It was in the old town in a neighborhood near the train station. Like Rome, Naples is a real, large city.

The main activity of the day was to check out the famous Roman ruins of the city of Pompeii, a short ride from the city on the commuter train. The Bay of Naples is dominated my Mount Vesuvius, with Naples to the north and Pompeii to the south. Pompeii was fascinating. Although not as rich and fancy as downtown Ancient Rome, it was much more expansive and much better preserved. You really could understand the architecture and the layout of the the town and get a feel for how people lived and worked. Towards the back was the amphitheater where Pink Floyd filmed their famous concert movie over fifty years ago. There was a little exhibit about it underneath the grandstand. The amphitheater was more intact than the one in Rome, and there was a feeling of intense energy standing in the middle of it.

We had thought about maybe taking a trip up to the top of Mount Vesuvius, but even though it was no longer 100 degrees, it was probably still about 90, and after several hours of wandering around we had had enough. It stays light really late in Italy in the summer, so back near the hotel we found a restaurant and had another long languid dinner of pasta and that sort of thing. This place had wine for seven euros a bottle, so we had three of four before we finally left, and then another drink at the hotel bar.

Next day the goal was Sorrento. We got up early and took the city subway to the harbor downtown, just a few stops away. Jeannie was delighted to see a cruise ship she follows on the internet was in port. We hopped a ferry across the bay, very beautiful. Sorrento is a charming seaside resort town atop some cliffs; down at the shore they have a series of little beach resort clubs where you can rent a beach chair, umbrella, towel, etc. for the day, and have drinks and food brought out to you. The beach itself is pretty minimal and most of the place is built out over the water on piers and breakwalls, creating a semi-enclosed swimming area. Still it was very nice; the water was calm and warm and blue and beautiful, and the whole vibe was very relaxed. Beautiful views of scenic seashore and cliffs and mountains dotted with villages, with yachts and other boats crisscrossing out on the bay. The music was euro dance remixes of American pop and rock hits, mainly from the 1980’s. The food included things like octopus and tuna tartar.

When we were done there we went up to the town and walked around and looked at the shops. We took the ferry back to Naples and had another great dinner the next restaurant down from the night before.

Single-Sheet Stellated Icosahedron

Summer continues. The weather’s been either really hot or really rainy, or sometimes both. Been busy with things.

Last week I went into the the office pretty much every day for work, because it was the summer onsite for our research fellows. This turned out to be alot of fun, because the fellows are smart and interesting people, plus I got to spend face time with the people on my team. However, by the end of the week I was pretty fried. I was able to keep my workout and music practice routine, but didn’t do any biking, partly due to commuting and partly because of the weather.

Saturday was a beautiful day and we went out the beach at Robert Moses State Park. The waves were pretty rough but once you got out past the breakers it was okay, and I took a couple nice swims in the ocean. Sunday it rained all day, so I ended up catching up on my rest and on some random tasks. No mustang, no bike ride this weekend, but I finally got out on my bike again today.

I finished the updates to my music site, including the page for Spacecats, now featuring our new drummer Rick. We’re starting to actively look for gigs, and to that end I’ve started recording our rehearsals, particularly a batch of new originals we’re working up. Hopefully I’ll post some of these soon.

I’ve also been woodshedding the sax part to A Plague of Frogs. I’ve been just laying down a take or two a couple times a week. They started kinda rough but steadily improved. I edited together a full track from all the takes, and it’s pretty much there. Now that I understand the part, I’ve done a few more takes to hopefully bring it to the next level.

Another thing I got done was to take some pictures of my new origami models. The most important of these is the Single-Sheet Stellated Icosahedron, which I’ve been working on since the wintertime, and debuted in my exhibit at the recent OUSA convention. Shown here are two models, one made of 19″ elephant hide, and the other of 15″ skytone paper. The next model is the Halloween Spider I folded to teach my class, made of a 10″ square of some nice tissue foil. Lastly is a Dragon model I came up with as a kid, in third grade or so. I remembered it all at once when a group of us were sitting around talking about early origami experiences and the first models we designed. My brother and I used to fold dozens of them and have epic dragon battles.

Summer Time

And the livin’ is easy. Moving right on from the OUSA convention to the next adventure, with barely time to put down our bags. We just got back from a trip up to Buffalo to visit family and friends. Drank some beer, grilled some steaks and dogs and burgers, took some walks in the park, watched some fireworks. Very languid, very relaxing. I feel like it’s been one continuous spell of focus and getting things done since the new year, so it was a welcome stretching out of time.

On the trip up we stopped by Watkins Glen and hiked the trail up the canyon overlooking the river and rapids and waterfalls. Very scenic, very impressive. The next day we got together for a fancy dinner at a restaurant downtown with Lizzy, and with Larry and Jackie and three of their kids and Timothy’s girlfriend. A great time, lots of catching up and storytelling. After dinner we went to the bar around the corner where Lizzy plays trivia, and continued, and after that even lingered in the parking lot as everyone tried to get in one last story about camping and bears. On the third Martin and his family came down and stayed for the fourth. Beers, birthday cake, hanging out, rollerblading, fireworks. Did I mention it was languid and relaxing?

On the way up there my car started having problems with the air conditioner. This seemed to fix itself, but then there was a leak in the power steering. On top of this, the car seems to have mysteriously acquired some scratches sometime in the last few weeks. Ah well, I guess it’s getting to be kind of old.

Saturday we went to the Pleasantville Music Festival, a local outdoor rock show a few towns up from us. We’ve been meaning to go and check it out for years. It was a fun time, and the venue was very well run. The festival featured a beer tent and food and a bunch of pretty good if rather low-imagination pop-punk bands on the secondary stage. On the main stage we saw the Allman-Betts band, an Allman Brothers tribute band by two of the sons of members of the original group. They played about half originals and half Allman Brothers classics, all very good. There were some old guys in the band on Hammond organ and slide guitar, that were probably the glue holding the thing together.

The headliner was They Might Be Giants. I haven’t seen them live in probably twenty years, last time being at a bandshell in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They put on a great show, having fun and mixing it up. Their new songs sound great, and there’s always a twist on their classic hits. The current touring lineup has a horn section of a trombone, tenor sax and trumpet, all also doubling on other horns such as the euphonium, bari sax and pocket trumpet. Each of the them had an excellent featured solo. The trumpet player in particular was amazing, and used to be part of Conon O’Brien’s TV show band.

Also this weekend we got back to doing bike rides. Sunday I went for sixteen miles, and the girls for ten along the local trail. On the return half of the ride, suddenly the sky opened up and we got drenched in the pouring rain. Nothing for it but to keep on riding. By the end of the trip the sun was coming out again. We got home, only a ten-minute car ride away, and it hadn’t rained here at all.

While I was upstate, I came up with an album cover for my upcoming record Plutonium Dirigible, and a new web page to go with it, with the latest links to all the songs, as well as the lyrics and stories about writing and recording the various songs. This led to an update of my whole music site, which will be finished soon. Enjoy.

Back in the USA

Just finished the Origami USA convention in New York City. It was a really great time this year. I felt like last year it was good just to be back again after the pandemic, but this year I was drawn into getting deeper into different creative ideas I was seeing in other folders’ work and in connecting and talking with people. Also it was good to see attendance was up, including lots of first timers and lots of kids. Maybe a few will stick around in the years to come and become the next generation’s leading origami artists.

I felt good about my new work this year. Last fall I invented my Halloween Spider, and after attempting to teach it in the springtime I reworked the folding sequence to eliminate the “sink of doom”, which made it a good deal easier to teach and to fold. I practice folded quite a few of them in the last couple weeks to see how it works in different kinds of paper, and to get a feel for the details of sculpting and finishing.

I also finished my big new polyhedron idea, a Stellated Icosahedron that also featured sunken stars. It was the third in my series of icosahedron variations folded from a hexagon. Although I conceptualized it first, on my trip to Bogota in February, it turned out to be the hardest to fold by far. I finally got a model completed a couple weeks ago, but then I attempted to wetfold it and it ended up looking not very nice, so I started over. By the final attempt I finally knew how it would go together without experimenting, so was able to do some precision precreasing to help it along. I used a fairly large sheet of Elephant Hide, about 19″ square before cutting. I did a second, smaller one out of a sheet of Skytone paper, about 15″, which was also very nice but a bit more delicate.

In addition to Jeannie and Michelle, we had a houseguest this year: our friend Madonna, who we got to know in Bogota. She won the OUSA Convention teaching award this year, but that only included three nights in the hotel. So she stayed with us Thursday and Friday. Madonna is mainly into tessellations, often out of a grid of triangles on a hexagon sheet. This doesn’t overlap much with what I do, but is nevertheless quite interesting and beautiful. Almost as soon as she arrived at our place, she noticed our fridge magnets which are a combination of hexagons, triangles and rhombi, and set about the rearrange them to demonstrate some patterns that were in her mind. We hung out folding late into the night and exchanging ideas. She gifted me lots of skytone paper, which is one of my new favorites. It’s alot like Elephant hide but thinner, and comes in great marbled pastel colors.

The convention itself was great. We arrived Friday afternoon and started seeing alot of our origami friends as they trickled in. I set up my exhibit, which had a bunch of new stuff as I mentioned. I chose some classic models to set off the new stuff, including more polyhedra and insects, some animals from my Sculptures book, and a few spacecraft. We mainly just hung out and folded Friday night, and went out to dinner. John Montroll was there, with lots of new diagrams, and it was good to catch up.

Paul Frasco and Ryan Dong folded the world’s largest origami swan out of an eighteen-foot square of paper, certified for the Guinness Book of World Records. One cool thing was that Paul built an armature of out PCV pipe to support the model’s weight. He assembled it as the model was being finished, and it looked totally improvised. But it was pretty clear he had an adaptable plan that would fit to the proportions of the folded paper without having to know the dimensions ahead of time. Very smart. Once the swan was stood up, it was fifteen feet long and ten feet tall, and looked like a dinosaur in a museum exhibit. Very impressive.

Saturday we got there early since Madonna was teaching a class first session. I took a class for someone else’s Spider, a box pleated model with a clever asymmetrical development to form the legs. I taught my first class in the afternoon, my Foxy Fox from the Sculptures book. The class was very full and had one or two too many kids who were a little too talkative and weren’t paying enough attention, so that made it challenging. Still the class was a success and everyone folded a nice fox.

I had agreed to teach this class because there was a call from the convention committee that there weren’t enough mammals being taught, and I knew this one would work well in a single period class. I haven’t really checked in with the models from this book in a while, so it was fun to revisit. Kind of makes me want to do a new version with new improvements and refinements I’ve incorporated over time as my style and skills have evolved. Same with my Loon, which I taught to my friend Kathleen.

Sunday at lunchtime I ran the paper airplane competition. I’d never done this before and had some help from Paul Frasco and Steve Rollin, who had participated in the past. It was pretty intense! There were contests for distance, accuracy and time aloft. The distance winner went over fifty feet, and the time winner over three seconds. In the target contest, the fist and third place winners were separated by only one half of an inch!

Sunday afternoon I taught my Halloween Spider. There were only ten or so people in the class, which made it much more relaxed. Also I had a document camera giving a close-up view of the folding in progress, projected on a giant screen. There were a bunch of kids in this class too, but they were all already virtuoso folders and followed along without any difficulty. The time I spent practicing paid off because we got done with time to spare, and had time to focus on the sculpting at the end. Also, I folded mine from a sheet of tissue foil I bought at the source, so it came out looking great. There was a new line of high-end tissue foil this year in all kinds of color combinations, in 10″ and 20″ sheets, so I bought a ton of it.

Sunday a bunch of us including John and Madonna and Marc Kirschenbaum went out for Indian food for dinner. When we returned it was time for the giant folding competition. Marc was running it and I helped judge for awards. I feel like people get better at it every year, even though everyone underestimates how much a giant sheet of paper tends to behave like it’s cloth.

Monday we decided not to go into the city until noon, so I got a chance to work out in the morning. I had lunch at Ray’s Famous Original Pizza next door to the conference hotel, which I presume is not the same as either Ray’s Famous or Ray’s Original, which were both down in Greenwich Village when I first moved there in the early 90’s. I’d heard that Famous Ray and Original Ray had settled their feud some time ago and joined forces to become a chain. Anyway, great genuine New York pizza.

That afternoon I gave my lecture on single-sheet polyhedra. When I gave it at CFC in the winter, the interest was mainly on the mathematical and geometric aspects of it. Here the crowd was a little different, and in discussion afterwards tended toward the craft and ornamental side. Still, quite well recieved.

Throughout the weekend there was alot of free folding in the hospitality area. Jeannie and Michelle both took classes and learned some nice new modular ornamental things, and Michelle folded one of John Montroll’s complex insects, a dragonfly. Also, I met Taro and some of the people from Taro’s Origami Studio. I’ve been looking for a publisher to work with for my next book, and it turns out they’re getting into publishing and are looking for authors, so that might just work out. Also Michelle is looking for work this summer and they sometimes contract out piecework folding models, so that might just work out too. Now she describes herself as the world’s first origami nepo baby.

We had the banquet Monday night, and then it was time for goodbyes, and now here we are again back to the normal routine. Ah well, the next big convention is in the fall, so that gives my time to fold some new models and hopefully make some progress on the publishing front.

Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

New York in June continues. The weather remains amazing for the most part, as if California has come to us. In fact, last week we experienced the effects of forest fires hundreds of miles away in Canada, as the wind blew the smoke high into the atmosphere above us. The sky turned overcast and brownish and hazy, and the next day it got more intense, and everything had an orange tint and smelled like a campfire. Luckily the day after that the wind changed and it blew away, and we were back to blue skies for the weekend.

The Origami USA convention is coming up in just a couple weeks. It was my job to put together the class schedule. We had almost 150 classes that had to be fit into three days, with many constraints on time, availability, class size, use of document cameras and projectors, etc. So that kept me busy Monday night and Tuesday. It went smoother than last year. I’m using scheduling software that I’d purpose-built in the OUSA web site, and like so much one-off business software, is more clunky than one would hope. However this year we’re starting to grasp the essence of the problem, and we’re refining it to make the workflows smoother and faster. So the schedule got approved and published on time. On to the next thing.

The Global Jukebox is submitting a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities for part 2 of a multi-year project to create an interactive experience within the jukebox on The Roots of American Music. In addition to new content and visualizations, it includes a brand-new mobile experience built on our existing web application framework. So I was busy helping Kiki get some materials together for the grant application.

Meanwhile at the CR Innovation Lab, we’re getting to planning for an upcoming product launch, setting up a program for deploy pipelines, unit testing, e2e and integration testing, QA, and infrastructure availability and scaling. We also have a bunch of new team members, so everything is a bit hectic these days. I went into the city for a set of onsite meetings, however some of them got cancelled to due people calling in remotely because of the smoke condition. Unfortunately, the conference room chairs there are singularly awful and triggered some fairly severe pain in my back and leg. Ah well, I was back to normal after a couple days.

Friday night Jeannie and I went to see Kurt Elling at the Village Vanguard. Before the show we went out a fantastic dinner at a Persian restaurant, with shish kabobs and fancy rice. We walked around the city from midtown to Greenwich Village. Great night for people watching and taking in the city.

Kurt Elling is one of my favorite jazz singers around today. He has a great voice and sense of phrasing and style, and always picks really interesting material and treats it in a fresh and fascinating way. The Village Vanguard is of course one of the classic jazz clubs in New York City. What I didn’t know is the Vanguard has an in-house big band that was started back in the 1960’s by Mel Lewis and Thad Jones, and plays every Monday night. So the show was Kurt backed by the Village Vanguard Orchestra, doing big band arrangements of his songs. Wow, totally amazing. (The Vanguard is a very small club, so the fact that the band fit on the stage was pretty amazing before they even played note one.)

One thing Kurt likes to do is add lyrics over rarely covered jazz songs. He did this for several tunes, including Continuum by Jaco Pastorius, and the second movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. They’re great lyrics that add new depth to song, clever, thoughtful, playful and even profound, but because they’re so unexpected it can take you a minute to figure out what songs he’s doing. Another highlight of the show was the sax solo during the Coltrane number. The tenor play at the end of the sax section was a really old guy who looked like Mark Twain. Half the set he was slumped in his chair and looked like he might fall asleep at a moment’s notice. But when he stood up, he roared to life and delivered a high-intensity solo worthy of a Trane number.

Saturday morning I listened to two Joco albums: the first one that begins with Donna Lee, and The Birthday Concert which featured the Word of Mouth Big Band including Michael Brecker. Great stuff.

Saturday afternoon we went out to a barbecue at Cousin Mary’s. My two nieces Katie and Valerie both graduated from college. On the car ride down, we listened to Kurt Elling’s latest album Super Blue, which is sorta jazz-adjacent soul funk fusion. Totally blew me away. Some of the songs sound like they could be Steely Dan. And the album before that has the studio cut of Continuum, among others.

Sunday we went for another bike ride. Jeannie got a new bike, a Trek mountain bike, very nice. And she passed her old bike on to Michelle, so now everyone has a bike that fits them comfortably and they like to ride. We went back to the Empire State Trail, this time starting in Elmsford and going up to Thornwood. They both did ten miles, and I did fifteen, and new personal best for the season for everyone. I was thinking of getting a new bike too, but my 26-year-old Trek 850 is still going strong. It was a pretty high-end bike at the time, very light, with an aluminum frame, handlebars and rims, and 21 gears. (I bought it from Palo Alto bicycles, because at the time Jeannie and I were sharing a car, and she had a longer commute than I did. Above the bike shop was a small startup called Google, but that’s a story for another time…)

I finally completed the spring yardwork cycle but trimming the branches from the neighbor’s willow tree that hangs down into our yard. Hopefully a week or two off from that, then the it starts over with weeding and edging.

As mentioned previously, the Origami USA convention is less than two weeks away, and doing origami has finally risen to the top of my todo list. In fact, now is the time of year when I tend to stay up late folding like a madman. In fact, I just destroyed a super complex model I’ve been working on since Bogota by trying to wetfold it! Ah well, at least I have the pattern worked out now.

Yet the universe won’t leave me alone, and in addition to the predictable demands of work and all that, random tasks pop up at inconvenient times. Jeannie borrowed my car the other day, and came home with a flat tire, so I had to get that fixed. Then it was supposed to rain and cool off, but the weathermen lied! So around five o’clock I put in the air conditioner. It’s a new AC that’s supposed to be much quieter and more powerful than the old one, but it was a major pain to install. Ah well, now it’s in and I’m enjoying the cool zone.

Rack On

Our run of luck with the nice weather continues, interrupted only last Saturday when it rained all day. I spent a good chunk of the day doing origami. I completed the first successful single-sheet stellated icosahedron earlier in the week. I made out of a 19″ sheet of elephant hide. I unfolded and refolded the bottom and the lock several times, experimenting until I found an arrangement of the paper that worked best. The finished model is a bit squished, so Saturday I spend a bunch of time folding a new one now that I know how it goes at the finish. This one is out of 15″ mohawk skytone paper, given to me by my friend Madonna. It’s a very nice paper, a bit thinner than elephant hide, but just as strong and crisp, and in a variety of nice soft colors. This one is almost finished, just the final collapse to go. With luck it will be an exhibit quality model, just in time for this year’s OUSA convention.

Michelle came home from college Saturday. we immediately rebooted family game night. We also finally also finished Muppets Mayhem. Now Michelle is baking a cake. Nice ot have her home.

I got three bike rides in last week during the week. Then went for another bike ride with Jeannie Sunday morning, on the same pathway but this time starting in Yonkers. This time Michelle came with us. Jeannie thought her bike was too tall for her, so she tried riding Michelle’s. She thought that was too small, although Michelle likes Jeannie’s bike. (Michelle is about six inches taller than Jeannie, although they were around the same height when I bought Michelle her bike.) Anyway, Jeannie is now shopping for a new bike.

I went 12 miles although Jeannie and Michelle both turned around earlier. Afterward I came home and did a bunch of yardwork, including washing the Mustang and putting armorall on the new tires. Ah how it all gleamed, for one brief shining moment. I left it out in the driveway for a few hours and by time it was already dusted in tree pollen. Ah well. I also trimmed my hedges, which involved going up and down a ladder and swinging around a trimmer over my head for a few hours. By the end I was pretty tired.

In jazz land, Steve, the old drummer for my group Spacecats had to leave for health reasons. This was unfortunate because he was an excellent drummer, a great guy and a good friend. Luckily, we got a new drummer a couple months ago, and he’s been working out well. His name is Rick, and he’s a friend of our bassist Ken. He’s an excellent player, great chops, great groove, very responsive and energetic. He also writes, and is into alot of the same kind of stuff we are, not just jazz but fusion, rock, prog, and jazz-adjacent funky jam bands, and likes experimenting with bringing those sounds into the group. Last week our piano player Josh couldn’t make rehearsal, so we got together as a trio, sax bass and drums. It was super fun exploring different sounds and ideas. We did tune by Stone Alliance called Sweetie Pie for just such a set of instrumentation. Also ran Some Skunk Funk a few times, getting it fast and tight. I think it’s time to start looking for gigs.

Sundown

After a pretty solid two weeks of rain, including heavy rains the whole weekend before, the weather finally turned nice this weekend. That basically meant spending the whole weekend doing yardwork. Friday I mowed the lawn for first time. Unusually late and the grass had gotten quite tall. Saturday it was weeding the edges of the driveway and putting vinegar on the cracks of the patio to kill the weeds. Sunday it was weeding under the hedges and in the flowerbeds. Meanwhile Jeannie wanted to start barbecue season, but or old grill was rusted, so we had to buy a new one. She spent the better part of Sunday putting it together.

Our Nordic Track exercise machine broke one day last week, and it turns out they don’t make them anymore, but you can get replacement parts on the internet. Meanwhile I relying on biking as my main form of cardio exercise, so it’s good that we have a spell of nice weather ahead this week. I wanted to take a ride Sunday morning and test out our new bike rack, but Jeannie wimped out at the last minute. I thought then I’d go for a ride on my own later in the day, but by the time I was done with the weeding I was pretty tired and my legs hurt, so it was just as well. I did go for a ride today, and it was quite nice. Hope to get a ride in every day this week.

Friday night often tends to be movie or TV night at our house, as we have time to relax but are often tired at the end of the work week and don’t always feel like going out, or maybe just go out to dinner then come home. However, despite the plethora of streaming options there’s actually a dearth of good shows to watch. The last few weeks I’ve been getting into Nova, the classic PBS show. Lots of cool stuff about the James Web Space Telescope, saving Venice for sinking into the sea, renovating Notre Dame cathedral, and lots about fossils, ice age megafauna and dinosaurs, and how they can reconstruct stories of long-extinct creatures from bones in the dirt. One in particular suggested they may have found a site where the fossilized creatures were killed the day the meteor hit the earth to end the Cretaceous, caught in a flood caused by the shockwave thousands of miles away. They have episodes from past seasons, and I remember as a kid seeing the episode where the theory that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact was first advance. I wonder if I can work my way back far enough to find it.

But last Friday I decided to watch a documentary about recently pass folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, who to me is one of my all time despite not being the any of the genres I listen deeply to nowadays. He seemed to be on the radio when I was a kid, and they played alot of his songs at the ice rink at hockey practice. Somehow his songs had a big impact on me. This led me to a bunch of other music documentaries including one about guitar shredder Randy Rhoads and another about the great vocalist Ronnie James Dio, another one of musical heroes. So now I have this mashup of 70’s folk ballads and 80’s post Black Sabbath heavy metal stuck in my head. Strangely, it’s not a bad combination.

The Rain Rain Rain Came Down Down Down

First of all, it’s been incredibly rainy the last week. It rained the entire weekend starting Friday afternoon thru Sunday night, alot of the time sustained heavy downpour. The pond in the neighbor’s yard is in effect, and there’s still puddles everywhere. I left a wheelbarrow outside over the weekend, and now it’s full of a good six inches of water. Needless to say I didn’t get any yardwork done, and the lawn is getting desperate for it’s first mowing.

We went to a party on Long Island on Saturday; Jeannie’s cousin’s daughter’s first communion. It was great to see everyone on that side of the family, especially since we missed the family Christmas party this year due to having covid. A bunch of us ended up hanging out in the party tent in the backyard long after things had begun winding down. It took over an hour to say goodbye to everybody.

I’ve been reading alot lately. First was a book on the Italian Renaissance, focusing on sculpture, architecture and painting, the whole historic and cultural context, and the threads of development among the various famous masters.

Next was a book called The World in Six Songs by Dan Levitin, a famous music brain science writer. I used to work with Dan back in the ’90’s at Interval Research, and has a story in his book about the psychic research going on there to make a point about how hard it can be to design as study to produce verifiable claims in the social sciences. That was fun, I’d forgotten all about the psychics there, and it inspired my to dig out an old song I wrote from those days call Paul Allen’s Limo Driver. Anyway the book was really interesting, all about the purpose of music in terms of its origins in human evolution, and the different roles it plays for individual people and human society.

Then it was a book about the famous John Coltrane album A Love Supreme. Everything you could want to know about the record, its writing, recording, and various reissues. Of course it had alot on John Coltrane himself and his various phases of musical exploration and development, his relationships with Miles and Monk, and the coming together of the classic quartet that was the group for the record. This led me into a deep dive into listening to Coltrane, which is something I hadn’t done in a while. After all this time, it’s still a challenge to grok his later stuff. In addition to A Love Supreme, I listened to Crescent, Ascension, and Live at the Village Vanguard, and with one of my favorites The Gentle Side Of. For all his high energy playing in all keys at once, he sure could shift gears and deliver a killer ballad.