Talent Time

Last weekend was the talent show at Michelle’s school. This was in lieu of the usual musical production that they’ve been putting on the last few years. The main difference is that this format doensn’t have the pre-K thru 4th grade, so logistically it’s much easier. For the older kids it’s not that much different; they have to audition, but then they can do an act of their choosing. Most are music, some are comedy or dance.

Michelle sang Don’t Cry for Me Argentina with her friend accompanying her on piano. The did really well and I was amazed how high the vocal part goes on that song. Some of the other acts were really good, and some sort of just there, but everyone had a great time. This year there was no orchestra, just either piano or karaoke depending on the song. I did the sound mixing for the event, which was a good chance to try out some of my new PA equipment.

Then on Monday Lizzy’s song a theatre group did a show with a rock band theme with a similar format. A bunch of kids, including Lizzy and a group of her friends, did songs with various adults (professional musicians) accompanying them, and were really good. Some of the other kids did full-on rock bands, but they weren’t ready for prime time, and worse they had three songs each!

At least the time was well spent for me. I’ve been thinking about ideas for my next origami book, but I’ve been too busy to fold anything lately. One idea I had was to expand the Origami from Space concept into a full book. So I came up with a model I’m calling Space Probe or maybe Radiosatellite. It’s a spaceship with a radio dish, boom antenna and some solar panels. A bit like V’ger but not quite. I folded one out of the program, and then last night while I was working on code, during compile time. Pics coming soon.

Gamelon

Last week I got the news that an old friend of mine died in a plane crash. (This brings the number of people I’ve known to die in plane crashes up to three, not counting 9/11, but still zero auto accident fatalities.)

Ted Reinhardt was the drummer and leader of the 80’s prog fusion band Gamelon, one the most successful bands to come out of Buffalo, NY. Gamelan had a unique and very evolved sound, with polyrhythms, angular harmonies, funky bass and three guitar players. One sounded a heck of a lot like Alex Lifeson, the next like Eddie Van Halen, and the third one was way out there, doubling on electric violin. Gamelon was the number one band on the scene when my own band, Event Horizon was gigging around. We were big fans and had seen lots of their shows and got to know them, and ended up doing a bunch of double bills with them. They were some of our best gigs, and theirs too. Gamelon went onto national success, playing on the same bill as Miles Davis in one of his last gigs.

I just got their first album again on iTunes and listened to it after many years. It sounds better than I remembered, with lots of stuff going on I missed back in the day. Anyway Ted was a great drummer and a positive influence on my music career. He’ll be missed.

Christmas Cabaret

I’ve been really busy the last couple weeks with the Xmas Cabaret, a big fundraiser at Michelle’s school. Learned like 35 songs on sax and (one on) ukulele. It was a ton of fun. Last time I did one of these shows was three years ago, and I remember working my ass off because I hadn’t played a live show in years and needed to get back into playing shape on the sax, plus learning the tunes while transposing, skipping around the songs, and making my sound fit in with the group.

This time it was alot more relaxed, mainly cuz I already knew the people, and knew what to expect, and also cuz my chops are up and I can sight read and transpose and all that no sweat. Since Michelle L., the director, also runs the school choir, for this show she picked less traditional songs, by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Harry Connick Jr., Billy Squier, and some more mellow stuff like The Carpenters and Bing Crosby. It was the same crew, and great to see them all and perform together again. Mike L. on piano and musical director, his wife Michelle as show and vocal director, Brian and Kristen running the stage and props and sets and tech and all. Plus a dozen or so singers. The band was rounded out by George on drums and Shredder on guitar, both excellent musicians. They even let me sing the Clarence Clemons part on Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Six words, twice! They drafted Lizzy to do the sound, so she got some good experience running a mixing board.

It was a week solid of rehearsals, with performances Friday and Saturday night and matinee Sunday. And in between I taught an origami event at the Museum of Natural History in the city. I had been thinking of bagging it, but alot people signed up so I went. Even had a chance to check out the OUSA holiday tree before my class started. I’ve been donating models to them for a few years now and they have assembled quite a collection. In addition to my new stuff this year, I my stuff from previous years was well represented. The class itself went well. I was teaching models from my book Origami Animal Sculpture, starting with the Octopus since that was prominently displayed under the tree. Also got to the Common Loon and the Narwhal. Not bad for two hours. It’s funny, though, the more I teach the more I find ways to simplify the models to make them easier to get a across. I think if I had to do this book over it’d be that much more refined. Ah, well, a lesson to apply to the next one.

And, as you can imagine, tonight I’m pretty tired so I’m catching up on my rest.

Churn Churn Churn

So Gus and I have decided to reboot the rock band. After jamming together since June, the summer came and went and we didn’t have any more than a few songs really tight and weren’t ready to start playing out. Our bass player wasn’t really cutting it, and our guitarist was not willing to learn new material and was just kind of a dickhead in so many ways it made you wonder how he was able to function in the world of adults. The kicker for me came when we couldn’t even make Roadhouse Blues sound good last rehearsal. I was thinking “I’ve known high school kids better than these guys!” So we had to let them go. Later I found out the bass player was coming back from a long period of not playing due to a hand condition, and I felt bad about that, but I was glad to be rid of the guitarist.

That left me, and Gus the drummer and Jefferson the singer. So we’ve been looking for new musicians. I got lucky cuz there’s been a guitar player Gary who’s been sitting in with the jazz group the last few weeks. He’s an excellent player, you could tell from the first note, great sound and phrasing. And I was telling him about my learning Van Halen on the piano and he had a few things to say about Eddie (“He’s the real deal”), so I had a hunch he was also a rocker. At the end of the jazz jam I made my pitch for him to join the rock group. “Yeah I do all that stuff. I’m your man”, he said.

Then I got a referral from a friend for a bassist looking to join a group. He was pretty enthusiastic about both the cover band and the possibility of a group based on my originals so I invited him over to jam and see what happened. It turned out he’s a high school kid! Just a couple years older than my kids. My mind was truly blown.

But man, he sure could play. Particularly into Joco, James Brown, and all kinds of funk and jazz. His knowledge of classic rock is kind of limited but he’s a quick study. He was also able to grok my originals, which are too hard for a lot of people. Still, I’m not sure I want to take him on. Yeah there’s a chance he might flake, or his parents wouldn’t let him continue with the group down the line, or it might be hard to work at a bar with him in the group. No matter what he’s not that experienced. But you gotta figure a kid who’s that good has the capacity to focus and would pretty much have is act together. Also, I was playing in bands working in bars when I was just seventeen, and never had any problems if I didn’t try and order a drink. No, the reason is this:

When I lived in California I was in horn-section funk band called The Hip Pocket. It was one of the better bands I’ve even been. Played a lot of great gigs. There were 4 guys in the horn section and 10 in the whole group. It was also a 50-50 split of black guys and white guys. The bass player was this dude Dmitry, who was the second best player I’ve ever played with. (The best was Jim Wynne, master of two-handed tap who had a whole technique he developed after borrowing a Chapman Stick for a few months but had to give it back. We were in several bands together including Automatic Man and The Purple Connection. After he left my group Event Horizon he went on the play in Gamalon.) Anyway Dmitri was from Odessa, in the Ukraine, where he’d been classically trained on symphonic bass. But he loved funk. And in a year of playing with him I never heard a single clam. Such a solid groove. Then one day he told us he was leaving the group cuz he’d been accepted into Berklee School of Music. We all wished him the best, then we tried to find a replacement and when we couldn’t find anyone as solid the band had to break up.

I told this story to the kid I was auditioning and he said “that’s my plan!”. Oy!

The good news, however is Ken, the bassist from my jazz group and The Day Trippers, has changed his status from “maybe” to “very interested”. The reason being one of his other bands seems to have folded. He didn’t want to commit cuz he was already in two other groups. If we get both Gary and Ken I feel we’ll have a really solid group that could do some serious damage!

In other news, The Day Trippers next gig has been confirmed for the last weekend in October for some bar in New Jersey. I’ve requested we do an Abbey Road medley. I’ll let you know as details emerge.

In other news Lizzy is learning De-Lovely for her performance group, so I dusted off my Cole Porter songbook to try and learn it on piano.

Random Reflections

Let’s see … lots of bits and pieces these days.

I spent the weekend hanging out with Seth and Mark at Seth’s cabin in the Berkshires. Good to get away from the wife and kids for a spell and eat lots of barbecue. We went on a nice hike to a waterfall. You should know that Mark is an amazing musician and leads the band Cracklin’ Foxy out of Saranac Lake, NY. I learned the only music Mark hates more than Happy is anything from the soundtrack to Frozen. Also Mark has grown a mountain man beard. I think it was 20 years ago this weekend Seth invited my out on his dad’s sailboat and we cruised up an down the Hudson.

I’m over the hump on my Scala class. It’s actually making sense now. I submitted the homework on Huffman encoding and got a perfect score. I’ll admit I googled the problem, but hey, that’s what you do in real life when faced with a programming challenge. Rather than just copy what I found, I took several different solutions and read them and compared them until I understood what they were saying, and then created my own solution that best expressed it to my sensibilities. This week I finished the last lecture, and there’s two more homeworks to go, but the last one is another double, pushing up against OUSA.

Jeannie is back at work, starting a new job after switching jobs followed by a spectacular flameout a couple months ago. Woo-hoo. Meanwhile the kids are counting the days until the end of school.

I’ve been rockin’ my own work of lately. Ever since Olga got sacked it’s been so much easier to concentrate. Today at work I wrote over 200 lines of code! Also I came across a situation (marshalling data parsed out of an xml response) where the Scala approach is better than the way I’ve been doing it in Java all these years. Would have been far less code.

My train reading these days has been the Conan the Barbarian series by Robert Howard. It turns out these were originally published in Weird Stories magazine in the 1930’s alongside the first C’htuulhu stories, and Howard and H. P. Lovecraft were friends similar to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Conan is perfect train reading. I had to give up Game of Thrones because it got to be so rambling and pointless. The Conan stories OTOH are nice and short, with tight plots, heavy on action and with a supernatural twist. I can usually read a whole novella between my morning and evening commute.

The Relix are officially defunct. Our drummer Gus finally quit last week, frustrated with auditioning new singers. He’s now trying to start a new group with Mike and me from the Relix and some guys from his other band, which also crashed and burned. We’re getting together later this week. I learned Space Truckin’ tonight in honor of the occasion.

Meanwhile I’ve written and begun recording two new tunes. One is called Your Dancing Shoes, and it’s a catchy blue-eyed-soul number with a big horn break in the mode of Domino or Sir Duke. I’ve asked Lee, the erstwhile Relix guitarist – the jazzy one – to lay down a guitar track for me, and he enthusiastically agreed. Now I just have to get the bass part clean enough that I’m satisfied with a take. I’m going for no punch-ins on this one because the there’s not very many gaps in the part, and it’ll just groove better.

The other song is called To Be a Rock, and I plan on asking Frank, the other – straight ahead rock – Relix guitarist to sit on that one, cuz it matches his style. In fact I wrote these two songs with these guys in mind. I hope he agrees because even though I could probably play the part myself, I want to capture his sound, which I have no idea of how to reproduce. This song still needs some development; I feel like it’s missing a part toward the end.

Since I’ve become a regular member of my Jazz combo I feel like I should learn the tunes. I have an older version of the Real Book (1980’s) than everyone else, and it’s just chock full of errors. I also want to get my chops of for slaloming changes of the bebop and bossa nova numbers. I finally had a chance to practice sax this week. I’d been noticing for some time that it’s been getting harder to pop out those low notes. I went over the horn with a leak light but the low notes are all tight. They ought to be; I just had the horn repadded two years ago. I finally discovered the problem is the octave key. So tomorrow I’m gonna call up Virgil Scott and see when I can get the horn in. For now I’ve fixed it with electrical tape. I noticed it’s the third spot on my horn fixed in such a way.

Live update – four firetrucks pulled up to my neighbor’s house a little while ago. They loitered four about an hour and just took off.

The last topic for tonight is origami. I finished my Dimpled Dodecahedron, wetfolded it and all, and it came out very nicely. Only one step away from the Stellated Dodec, v2. The closing is working out different than the previous model since I can’t remember how I did it before. I still have two weeks before the convention and hopefully I’ll be able to finishe a few more ideas. The big problem now is that my folding style has grown so complex it’s very difficult to fold these models even for me.

It’s All Part of My Rock’n’Roll Fantasy

Lots going on these days. I finally had a long weekend to relax and catch up on some stuff. Went up up to see Martin, Kath and the kids. That was very nice. Martin is in his mountain man phase now, working on a ZZ Top beard. Also got himself some ducks and chickens and honeybees, and is thinking of getting a cow. Wow. Abbie is now old enough that she’s walking and starting to talk and is a full-on little person. Charlie and Match are happy and energetic and sweet and curious.

My scala class remains really cool but is also a huge time sink. I’ve talked to a few people including my friend Nick, and no one I know who’s taken this course has completed it on the first try. I’m now more than halfway thru – up to week 5 of 7 on the lectures and homework. My last homework was the first on where I got less than a perfect score cuz I ran out of time. Couldn’t do it during the workweek due to deadlines, nor over the weekend due to visiting Martin. Ah well, this week’s lecture seemed pretty easy, but the homework is to implement Huffman encoding. On the plus side my team at work completed our second perfect sprint in a row.

Unfortunately the lowest thing on my todo list is working on origami. The convention is coming up in just a month and I want to have some cool new stuff. Since I gave my one-and-only Stellated Dodecahedron to Uwen for the Copper Union exhibition, I undertook to fold another one. It’s been sitting ninety percent done on my table for three weeks now. On the way I came up with another idea in the Dodecahedron series. I’m calling it the Dimpled Dodecahedron and it closely resembles the Archemedean Icosidodecahedon. It’s sitting there ninety-five percent done. Ah soon.

Speaking of origami, my publisher is trying to arrange an event at Kinokiyuma bookstore during the OUSA convention, and also drop-shipping a shipment of my book to them and to OUSA in time for the convention. I’d be great if that works out.

But the main monkey business this days is with music. First off, my jazz combo invited me to join them as the main tenor man. Of course I accepted and am looking forward to attempting to channel John Coltrane and working on my soloing skills. Also thinking of dusting off some of my originals from Event Horizon and seeing how they go over.

Also, after weeks of just practicing, I’ve gotten back to recording. Worked on Your Dancing Shoes last night, got down a solid take of the piano part, which forms the backbone of the song.

But, you must be asking, what about the Relix? Last we heard the group was on a positive upswing. Well, all human organizations are fragile, and the Relix is entering a, um, transitional phase. First our guitarist Lee gave notice. Lee was the 12-string and hollowbody guy and added a perfect complement to Frank’s straight-ahead rock sound. The good news Lee agreed to lay down a guitar track on Your Dancing Shoes, which is right in his zone.

Immediately after Lee our singer Paul gave notice. Paul is going thru a tough time right now, but it still came as a shocker since it seemed that music was the main source of joy in his life. Of course not having a lead singer is a bit larger problem than losing a second guitar, plus Paul is also a great harmonica player and guitarist too. So we’ll see where it goes from here. We’ve got some replacement singers lined up to audition, but even they’re good, chemistry is important too. The guys in the rhythm section have both mentioned the idea of starting something new and have independently asked me to join them. I think if I start something new I think it’s gonna be Buzzy Tonic live, doing a mixture of my originals covers that showcase my singing and piano playing and reinforce the style I’m going for. Kinda getting back to what I was trying to do with Erik, but not so unplugged. Not sure if I’ll be able to fit the sax in, but that’s a secondary concern. The minimum viable product would a be a power trio – me with bass and drums, but I’d prefer a guitarist as well as a co-lead singer (Mike and Gus both sing backup) and preferably someone who writes. Even so, I have 20 or more songs ready to go, including 6 or 8 of my originals. Like I say, we’ll see how it goes.

Expanded Penrose Tessellations with Robots

Believe it or not we had two more snow days this week! On Thursday I broke my snowblower clearing out 15” or wet, heavy stuff. Thursday night was had more snow and Friday it turned to rain, and then more snow for a slushy and mess. Oy! Well the weekend came and some sunshine, and a chance to get caught up on my rest. And the Olympics are on. I never really get into the summer games very much, but I do enjoy the winter games. In any event, I’m sure everyone is looking forward to spring.

My origami friends Brian and Beth are going to be getting together at a maker event next week, where they will have access to a large cutting machine. Brian asked me if I could provide a cutter-ready file of the crease pattern for one of my Penrose tessellations. When I worked on this before, folding by hand, I did the first three expansions, creation patterns with 10, 35 and 70 cells. With the prospect of the machine doing the scoring, larger tessellations become feasible. I created CP’s for the next two expansions, which come out to 105 and 175 tiles. These numbers are really interesting, because they are all multiples of 5 and 7. 2 x 5 =10, 5 x 7 =35, 2 x 5 x 7 =70, 3 x 5 x 7 =105, and 5 x 5 x 7 =175. You’d expect five, but it’s very strange how seven figures prominently as well.

As for the CPs, I was able to dispense with all the landmarks and only include creases that appear in the final model. This ought to make the folding go much faster as well as providing a cleaner appearance. In addition, I shortened all the line segments so that the intersections don’t get scored, to avoid weakening the paper. Lastly, I color coded the creases so that the facets are blue, the ridges between the are red, and the creases for collapsing the intersections are grey. This was fairly time consuming, an unexpected but fun little project. Good for waiting for the snow to melt and watching the Olympics. Having worked the CP out to 175 I think I’m done with this for a while. If you’re an origami person with access to a cutting machine and are interested in trying one of the patterns, please feel free to contact me. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to seeing how Brian and Beth’s experiment comes out.

We’re Back Again

Rewinding a couple weeks, we spent a weekend camping in the Catskills with friends, cooking over fires, swimming in the lake, paddling around in canoes and playing acoustic guitars. After the heavy rain the first night of our trip in July we bought a new, larger shelter that sets up quicker but is bulkier and heavier to transport. Turns out the weather was beautiful and we didn’t need it. The highlight of the trip was a bald eagle circling around the lake one day. Jeannie and I managed to get close to it in the canoe. We drifted right up under the tree where he was perched and watched him spread his wings and take off across the lake. Amazing.

We were back home for a couple of days and the big news is that I got a full proof of the first draft of my book from my editor. For the most part the look is great, the choice of photos and all. One quibble is them doing goofy things with CaPiTaLiZaTioN of the chapters. The bigger issue is they condensed the diagrams to make it all fit into 128 pages. Some of the layouts are too crowded, and the drawings shrunk too much, and the layouts no longer flowing correctly. I’m working thru what to do about all that. I’ve been providing revised layouts that flow better and maximize the size of the drawings while still fitting in the available space. This is a pretty big time suck, taking me away from other projects, but I suppose it had to happen sometime. Now I’m up the most complex models in the back half of the book, and it’s clear they’ll have to come up a few pages. So either we’ll have to take some pages out elsewhere or make the book longer. We’ll see how it goes.

Then we took a long weekend road trip over Labor Day. The first stop was Washington, D.C. We visited the Udvar-Hazy annex to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. This is out by Dulles airport and has a huge collection of huge planes and spacecraft. Among them is B-29 Enola Gay, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde, a Blackbird, a DC-10, and lots of commercial and military planes and helicopters from small to huge. Also a really cool cutaway of a nine-cylinder rotary engine that really helped me explain to the kids how motors work.

Next day the main thing was the Native American Museum and National Art Gallery in The Mall. The highlight there was a light sculpture installed in the passageway between the east and west galleries. As we moved thru it, I recognized Conway’s Life being played out on the array of LEDs. This reminded me of my friend Leo, an artist how does installations of this kind. Way back in the day I helped him program some controls so he could run Life on a grid of LEDs. Shaw’nuff when we got the end of the passageway the sign said it was Leo’s work. It’s amazing to see his stuff in the same gallery as Rembrandt as Picasso.

The last part of the trip was to the beach in Ocean City. The big downer this year is that our hotel closed its hot tub. We’ll probably have to look for a new hotel next time we go back. Other than that it was great fun and very relaxing. After the first day the weather was hot enough we didn’t even miss the hot tub. We swam in the ocean, went to the water park, went out to dinner and down to the boardwalk, and visited the ponies at Assateague.

Now we’re back home and back to work. Michelle had her first kung fu lesson yesterday. Lizzy had her first day of high school today. Michelle starts school Monday. It’ll be a whole new set of routines this fall.

Red Burns

Red Burns, a prominent multimedia pioneer and educator, recently passed away. Red was the founder and director of my grad school program at NYU, the Interactive Telecommunications Program. I haven’t seen her in many years, but her legacy looms large, both on me personally, and on the NYC tech and creative industries and communities. Here’s one of many articles going around about her:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/nyregion/red-burns-godmother-of-silicon-alley-dies-at-88.html

Camp Rock

Just got back from a great weekend camping in the Catskills. The kids have been really excited about this for weeks. They brought along a couple friends, so it was six of us in the car plus all our food and kit. Packing went better than unusual this time, mainly cuz we did the bulk of it the night before. Also we only brought one cooler and planned on buying more beer for the second night.

Perhaps the highlight of the trip was one night Jeannie and I went for a midnight walk under a clear, starry sky. There was no moon, and you could see the milky way and everything, all shining very bright in the woods. We walked out to the lake where the view of the sky was the best. The mountains were silhouetted between the sky and a lake so smooth you could see every star in the whole starfield reflected in the water. Just then a shooting star appeared. Magical.

Another highlight was teaching Nick and his cousin Andy a little bit of guitar. Nick’s son Geo has been taking guitar lessons for a couple of year and has gotten quite good. Nick and Andy are raw beginners. I was able to teach them A Horse With No Name, the simplest song I know and probably the first song I learned. Rock on!