Wear Your Blizzard Season Coat

We’re coming to the end of another holiday season.  This one was strangely both eventful and uneventful. I guess I should rewind to the week before Christmas.  Michelle came home from college for winter break, but even though we were no longer symptomatic, Jeannie was still testing positive for Covid, so we all kinda did your best to avoid each other for a few days just in case.  Luckily Michelle never got sick.

We had planned a trip up to Buffalo to visit Lizzy and my parents.  Since she had to work both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, Lizzy wasn’t coming home, so we figured we’d go up for Xmas day this year.  Our original plan was to drive up on the 23rd and catch the Sabres playing that night.  But then there came talk of a coming blizzard.  When they cancelled the hockey game, we figured it was gonna be trouble.

So we stayed home while the storm slammed into town on the 23rd and continued thru Xmas Eve and subsided sometime Xmas day.  It turned out to be a once-in-fifty-years level storm.  We kept in close contact with Lizzy and my folks, and they were all alright.  My folks just hunkered down and waited it out, and fortunately did not loose power.  Lizzy was at work early Friday morning, but closed her store around nine and left for her roommate’s parents’ house in Arcade, away from the lake effect snow belt.  Made it out just in time.

By mid-morning there was a travel ban in the City of Buffalo and all of Erie county.  All our loved ones were safe, so we decided to stay local for Xmas since.  It was actually really nice to have a couple days of down time with no immediate responsibilities.  I worked out and made more progress on my song, and we all played games and watched movies.

We were going to go over to Mary’s Xmas day, but then Lou got Covid, so that was out.  On Xmas Eve Jeannie went out and got a nice rib roast to cook, and her parents came over, so Xmas was low key but fun.  And everyone got Legos.

We headed up to Buffalo on Monday, boxing day.  The travel ban was still in effect for the city, but in the suburbs where my parents are it was okay to drive.  Once we got past East Aurora the amount of snow on the ground increased considerably.  My folks had a good three feet.  Luckily my dad has a giant snow thrower, and they have a friendly neighbor with a plow.

Lizzy couldn’t go home, so she went to my parents’ too.  And Martin showed up with his family.  We spent two days merrymaking, which was most excellent.  On Tuesday Lizzy took a ride to her store just to make sure everything was okay, and snow was still falling.  I tagged along because I wanted to give my old pair of skis and boots to my friend Larry, who lived nearby. Unfortunately, Larry came down with Covid as well, so I just left them on his front porch instead of going in to hang out.  Ah well.  On Wednesday it finally stopped snowing.  We had thought about going skiing but everyone was too tired.  We ran a bunch of errands in the morning then headed home.

I guess we really needed to catch up on our rest cuz the next day everyone slept in until noon. The last few days we’ve been on a fairly leisurely schedule.   Been trying to go for a walk in the brief, thin daylight every day.  More working out, music, games and movies.  Our New Year’s Eve plans were a bust too since our friends had Covid. 

Ah well back to work tomorrow.

In the Purple Circus

It’s been a few weeks since my last post.  Been busy with work, trying to wrap things up for the end of year, mainly lots of meetings with partners and stakeholders, a few key software commits, and lots of planning and strategy to set up the coming year of projects for our new R&D lab.  Plus, it’s been cold and dark and my energy level has been low.  On top of that I fell Ill with the covid a couple weeks ago, and so did Jeannie. Totally on brand for this time of year.  We’re all better now, but we didn’t get much done beyond the bare minimum for a little while.  We did manage to do most of our holiday stuff.  We put up a lovely tree, and new holiday lights outside, and wrote our Christmas cards, and got a fair chunk of gifts.  Been reading alot, and we watched alot of movies.  Among the better ones was the new production of Dune, although it only covers the first half of the book.

I’ve also been working on a new song in this season of darkness, called ‘In the Purple Circus’.  I wrote the lyric a while back, and earlier this fall set down at the piano and came up with pretty much the entire song, the main riff, the chords, the overall structure and various sections, pretty much all in one sitting.  (Actually also I wrote a song ‘Los Gatos de la Cosmos’ for my jazz group Spacecats around the same time.  It’s a nice little samba based on the harmony of a minor-major-seventh chord, and nice atmospheric spacy jam section in the middle.  It started as an attempt to get inside the head of Jobim, but owes more to Nica’s Dream by Horace Silver, and ended up taking on a direction of its own. More on that once we get the tune together.)

In the Purple Circus is in E minor (from a certain point of view) and the vibe emerged as dark, proggy and heavy. The main riff is in 13/8 time with a couple extra beats on the end after four repetitions so the complete phrase fills seven bars of 4/4 time.  This made it much easier to sequence in ProTools.  The riff uses a downward harmony thing, starting on a Dorian minor, moving to the half-diminished, then the suspended 4th and landing on a #9 dominant 7 chord.  Lots of buzzy tritones and semitones rubbing against one another.  The verse and bridge continue the rhythmic and harmonic motifs.  The time goes to straight 4, but there’s an overlaid 3-against-4 feel, with the downward harmony moving around, and the phrases work out to seven bars throughout.  Then there’s a middle section which takes the main riff and breaks it down, brings it down to a whisper, and builds it back up into a monstrous sonic maelstrom. 

The piano track went down first, then midi drums.  It was starting to take shape with some real character.  Next was bass guitar, which features heavy use of chording on the top two strings while an open E rings out on the bottom.  That sounded pretty badass.  A low E is about 40 Hz.   Having seen Steve Hackett earlier this year, I was inspired by his prodigious use of Moog Taurus pedals to bring the really deep bass.  So I created a bass synth part, an octave below the bass guitar to really emphasize the E-ness on that 20hz tone.  This is right about at the lower limit of human hearing, to say nothing of the frequency response of one’s speakers.  Even on my high-quality but normal studio monitors it sounds pretty great.  I’d love to get a massive subwoofer and hook it into the system.

Next came the electric guitar.  For this record my goal is to put guitar on all the songs, and to develop an approach and guitar part for each song.  For this one the sound was a pretty full and distorted, and I worked out chord voicings both low and high in the range using open strings where I could, to bring out the dissonance and resonance.  I laid down the part and it was just overwhelming!  So now I’m rethinking both the guitar and bass parts to have a bit more space and interplay, to fit together as if they’re the left and right hand parts of some giant 10-string meta instrument.  And to practice the parts so I can lay them down tighter, with particular attention going to the jam/riff bits at the end of the phrases where it builds up over a B altered chord.

So the song is about halfway tracked, and I expect to finish it sometime in the new year, and it will be pretty killer.  Meanwhile, here are the lyrics.

…

In the Purple Circus
By John Szinger

Well I said, get that bidniz done by Christmas
But the Devil had his plan
So let’s get it thru here by the New Year
Can I talk to the weather man?

The purple circus is where the work is
Vanilla villain where you been?
Chances and changes, chases and cages
I don’t know where to begin

We traffic in majick
Grapple the facets
Conjure abjure and summon
Divination evocation
The mountain surely is a-comin’

She tells me you have the energy of a major enemy
Thick in the grip of crippling sickness n’all
So I vault into the firmament of the permanent tournament
Cuz after all we’re born to crawl

We’ll depart our hostess ‘ere the solstice
Alight beneath the new snow moon
We can check that box off by the equinox
But the lion in roars a day too soon

We traffic in majick
Package the tragic
Sensing seeing knowing
Equivocation declamation
The mountain surely is a-goin’

We traffic in majick, yeah traffic in majick
Yeah, can I talk to the weather man?
Chances and changes, chases and cages, woah
I don’t know where to begin
First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is
She’ll be comin’ round that mountain when she comes, yeah

Shine a Light

It’s been another busy couple of weeks.  A week ago, Buffalo NY, where alot of my family lives, got a once-in-ten-years level snowstorm, with my parents in Orchard Park getting six feet of snow.  Up in Amherst they only got a foot or so, but it complicated plans for people coming home for Thanksgiving, especially for my niece and nephew whose trains got cancelled.

In the end, everyone made it home safe and sound, and we had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving. We hosted seventeen people and Jeannie made a most excellent stuffed turkey dinner.  Spent the rest of the weekend listening to music, mainly classic live albums, and playing games like Ticket to Ride and Quirkle with Lizzy and Michelle.

I also finished some home improvement projects.  The big one was was to replace the light fixture in our kitchen ceiling, which blew out right around the end of the summer.  It was an old florescent light in the form of a square wooden box with plexiglas diffuser.  It first I I investigated the possibility of replacing just the socket and electric components.  Once it became clear that wouldn’t work, the quest for a new lamp became a full-blown research project.  We finally settled on one we liked, a broad, shallow frosted glass dome with traditional light sockets that could take modern LED bulbs.  We ordered from a local showroom, but it took several weeks to arrive, and by that I was folding like a madman in preparation for our origami conventions.

Back home again a couple weeks later, I pulled off the old fixture.  I had planned on having to paint the area that had covered because the new light is smaller.  What I didn’t count on was that the old fixture was screwed directly to the ceiling, and there was just a hole where the cup for the wiring and structural support was supposed to be.  So I had to cut a hole in the drywall, buy and install the mounting hardware to the framing of the house, put back the drywall pieces, fill in the gaps, and sand and paint it.  This added considerable time to the job, especially since the ceiling needed two coats of paint.  I ended up finally installing the new lamp Thanksgiving morning, with Jeannie urging me along so we could switch the power back on in the kitchen and she could put the turkey in the oven!

I didn’t quite match the ceiling paint, but it’s pretty close. Lizzy, who works for Sherwin Williams, was very helpful in recommending a mini roller and pan kit; I din’t know they made such a thing.  She also gave me a deck of all their color chips, so hopefully I can do a better job matching next time.

Oh, and, the week before Thanksgiving was a big one for milestones at the Innovation Lab at Consumer Reports.  Here are a couple of press releases about two projects of mine.

https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/16/introducing-permission-slip/

https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/15/osiraa-release-announcement/

Origami Spiders, OrigaMIT and OUSA Holiday Tree

Busy times continue.  The week after the CoCon origami convention in Chicago was OrigaMIT.  This of course is MIT’s origami convention up in Boston, and one of the funnest ones out there, because of the size, venue, general vibe, and emphasis on origami math and theory in addition to the usual teaching models and exhibition.  And also the crowd it attracts. They haven’t had one for three years, so it’s good to be back.  I saw a bunch of origami friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

I largely reused my exhibit from Chicago.  And I taught two of the same models as in Cocon, and they were well received.  Brian Chan gave an excellent talk on how he’s using various CAD software to model constraints, which helps him come up with some very advanced and artistic crease patterns.  His new Scorpion in particular is just mind-blowing.

I ended up spending most of the evening with Beth, Brian and Adrienne, it’s just invaluable to be able to getting into deep conversations with other folders at the level.  In Chicago I started designing a new spider, which I’m calling Hallowe’en Spider.  It’s inspired by some of those classic models with multiple sunken preliminary bases grafted together, but the overall technique is more modern and well integrated.  The goal was a detailed, quasi-realistic looking spider with a fairly straightforward geometry that can be folded in half an hour or so.  I also wanted nice fat legs to make is scarier.

I came pretty close.  There’s not alot of steps, but one of them is a fairly complex sink that’s repeated four times.  At one point Saturday night I was showing Beth what I was up to, and explaining how I needed to adjust the proportions and what were some of my options.  She said, “why don’t you just pleat right here?”, and that turned out to be just the thing.

Over the next few days I finished a few more models, continuing to refine it. I folded a pair of large spiders out of 15″ paper.  One of them is for the American Museum of Natural History’s origami holiday tree.  I haven’t contributed to this in a few years, but this year the them was World of Bugs, so how could I resist?  In addition to the Spider, I folded one of my butterflies and one of my inchworms, also out of large paper.

Meanwhile back home, it’s peak leaf raking season the last couple weeks, with a couple more weeks to go.  And I finally got around to trying to replace the busted ceiling light in my kitchen with a new one I bought back in September, but was on backorder and finally arrived.  However, when I took out the old fixture I discovered it had been screwed directly to the ceiling and there was no electrical cup to hold the weight and connect to mounting hardware to for the new lamp.  So now I gotta cut a hole in the ceiling, install a cup, patch up the drywall, sand and paint it, and then I’ll be able to go ahead and install the new light fixture.  Ah, good times.

Global Jukebox Plos One Article

Over at my other project as lead software developer on The Global Jukebox, I’m happy to announce our article in the peer reviewed journal Plos One has been published:

The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture
Anna Wood, Patrick Savage, et. al.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275469

Abstract
Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity. …

Chicago Part II – A Hit by Varèse

COCon, the Chicago Origami Convention, was in the downstairs of the hotel, where they had a reception area and series of conference rooms, adjoining the lobby via a broad spiral stair.  It was a perfect setup.  There were a handful of vendors including a friendly woman named Katy who made tiny origami art pieces composed and arranged in little glass bell jars.  Being from Chicago, she gave us great advice on places to eat.

There were ten or so artists exhibiting, so I got a whole table.  My whole exhibit fit in a shoe box in my carry-on luggage, so that was plenty of space.  There were a bunch of my “greatest hits” models, including a turtle, lizard, moose, elephant, dragon, flying saucer and retro rocket.  Also the models I taught: the Space Cat, Flying Fish, and Butterfly.  Then there were three new geometric models.  I displayed versions of these at OUSA NYC in June, but wasn’t satisfied with them so I folded newer improved versions.

First is my Hydrangea Cuboctahedron.  This is six hydrangea tessellations arranged on a sheet to then form a single-sheet polyhedron, a cube with sunken corners to resemble a cuboctahedron.  I changed the layout of the tessellations so that it would have a symmetrical lock formed from the four corners of the paper.  This went together easier and held better than that previous lock.  I also added another level to the hydrangea tessellations compared to my previous version.  I folded it from a 50cm square of marble wyndstone paper, which looks great and is super strong.  The model could be wet folded but that turned out not to be necessary.  I may still do it if the lock tends to open up over time.

The other two are Starball Variations I and II.  Both of these models are based on a dodecahedron, with extra creases to sink the vertices in such a way as to reveal a star pattern on the faces, again single-sheet polyhedra.  I use different geometries so that in one the start recedes inwards and in the other protrudes outward.  My first attempts were made from 35cm Tant paper, but that turned out to be at the limit of foldability.  I made two larger pentagons from a sheet of 70 x 50 cm marble wyndstone, and that enabled me to fold more accurately, and really understand the precreasing involved in the bottom half of the model where there layers stack up, so in the end they turned out much better.

I taught three classes, two on Saturday and one on Sunday.  They were my Flying Fish, Space Cat, and Beautiful Free Butterfly.  All the classes went really well, despite there being no diagrams and no document camera and projector.  I thought ahead and brought a pack of large paper with me, suitable for teaching.  Everyone finished the model, and I had time to help a few people who weren’t quite up to the requires skill level.  Hopefully they leveled up in my class.

I took a few other classes, including Beth Johnson’s Gorilla, and a Turkey and a Spider.  I’ve been thinking about an origami spider for a long time, so now I’m trying again to make my idea work.  Since it was a Chicago convention, there were a good number of folders I’d never met before, so it was great to meet them and see what they’re up to.  Spent alot of time just hanging out, folding, and going out to eat, mainly with Beth, Katie, and Jared N. from Oregon.  Also Eric, Wendy, Patty, Kathleen, June and a bunch of OUSA convention committee people.

Saturday night Jeannie and popped out right at sunset to go to the top of the Hancock Tower, which was once the tallest building in the world, and take in the view.  And it’s … flat.  There’s Lake Michigan in one direction, and the plains in the otter, and past the city they look more and more the same as the eye draws out to the horizon.

We also discovered Chicago style hot dogs.  These are great, served with pickles and tomatoes as well as the more common ketchup, relish and onions, with an extra large frank and bun.  Jeannie says Chicago style hot dogs and pizza are on the level of Buffalo chicken wings and beef on weck, and I’m inclined to agree.

Our flight home was on Sunday night.  By this time it had started to rain.  The trip home was smooth and uneventful.  We were able to watch the first half of the Bills game in a bar in the airport, and most of the second half on the plane.

All in all a great convention.  I hope they do it again.  It was a great time, and there’s still lots to do and see in Chicago.

Coming soon – photos! 

Chicago Part I – Beginnings

Just got back from a fantastic trip to the capitol of the Great Lakes, Chicago.  Jeannie had never been there before and I hadn’t been since the 1990’s when I used to go there for work alot, but mainly spent my time in an office park out in the suburbs.

The motivating excuse was COCon, the Chicago Origami Convention.  This is the first time for a Chicago convention, and they had it in one of the big hotels downtown.  We arrived a day early, on Thursday to play tourist in the city.  The flight out there was smooth.  We got up before daylight to get to the airport in time for our flight, and we landed mid-morning.  I slept on the plane so it felt like the start of a new day.  We grabbed a cab, checked into the hotel, and were out walking around the city before noon.

It must be said that Chicago is a great city for walking around.  And the weather was beautiful the whole time.  We were right near the waterfront at a place called Navy Pier, and there was a scenic walkway for bicycles and pedestrians.  Then into a park with a funky piece of public art called The Bean.  It’s basically a giant curved chrome blob that you can walk around and underneath and see really interesting reflections.

The main attraction for the afternoon was the Art Institute of Chicago.  It’s a world class art museum to rival the Met in New York or the one in Vienna.  It’s got a great collection, and very well presented.  Famous paintings on display included Sunday in the Park, American Gothic, Nighthawks, a Van Gogh Self Portrait, and one of the missing stained glass windows from the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo (I wonder if the plan to repatriate that someday) to give you an idea.  Also a wing full of great Asian bronze, pottery and sculptures, going from ancient to contemporary artists, ancient Greek and Roman stuff, and a wing of European art including lots of paintings and sculptures and a whole hall full of arms and armor.  On the way back to the hotel we walked thru the Honorable Richard J. Daley Plaza where they got that Picasso, across from the Cook County assessor’s office.

Walking back to the hotel along the Chicago river we came upon a plaza with some cafes, and stopped for some beers and a late lunch.  Chicago is famous for its architecture, and we were right across the river from some crazy art deco googie tower apartment buildings with parking garages spiraling up the lower half and boat docks in the basement.  In and around the river, the museums and various other places downtown I noticed a pattern on the architecture that I’m calling the Chicago motif.  It consists of a square divided into eight triangle by square cross and an “X”.  Coincidently, this is also the crease pattern of an unfolded waterbomb base.

That night we went out to dinner at a bar across the street from the hotel where they had the football game on.  I had a burger with a fired egg on top, cuz if I’m in a place with that on the menu, that’s what I’ll usually get.  Later we met my friend and colleague Ann Marie, with whom I’ve been on several zoom calls a week the whole year, but never met face to face before.  She invited us to join her and her friends at a different bar downtown where there was a hallowe’en themed burlesque show.  It was a lot of fun, with a very positive vibe, and as she put it, classy with a capital A-S-S.  Afterwards, we walked around downtown for a good hour while Ann Marie played tour guide and pointed out lots of notable things like restaurants, architecture, and historical sites.

Friday we went to another great museum, the Field Museum of Natural History.  It’s alot like the American Museum of Natural History in New York which I know well, but maybe not so large and a little bit more shiny.  Great architecture.  The star attraction was Sue the T-Rex, named after her discoverer Sue the human.  It’s the most complete Tyrannosaur skeleton every found, virtually complete.  The T-Rex is the centerpiece of a great hall of the history of life on earth, with tons of fossils and other artifacts.  There was also a short 3-D film about the discovery, unearthing and preparation of the Sue fossil, and how they analyzed and what they learned about the living creature’s life and death.   It turns out Sue was fully grown, 40 feet long, at 19 years old, and died at 29.  During his or her life he or she suffered nine broken ribs and a fractured tibia and recovered from all of those injuries.  Among the things I never knew I never wanted to know was that Sue was infected by parasite worms that burrowed holes into it’s jawbone.  

For all its attention to scientific detail the film’s CG animation was strangely inaccurate in several ways.  For one, they showed the dinosaur’s gait as having wide-set feet like a sumo wrestler, rather than more plausibly with the feet under the the body.  Second was that whenever the terrible lizard appeared, the other little dinosaurs would wait for it to get close, then turn and shreik at it before running away, rather than running off at the first whiff of trouble like real animals do.  Lastly, in a visualization of an epic battle with a Triceratops a la Disney’s Fantasia, where they conjectured the T-Rex got it’s leg injury, somehow the T-Rex almost effortlessly bites the three-horned adversary on the neck under it’s protective crest.  It’s almost as bad as that bit in Toy Story where the light fixture disappears into the ceiling.

There were also halls of taxidermy, a really nice collection of gems and minerals, and whole hall of jade and carved jade art, a bit of crossover from the day before with artifacts from various antiquated civilizations, shown here for the naturally historic rather than artistic value.

After the Field Museum we hit the Aquarium, which was right next door.  Highlights include beluga whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, jellyfish, eels, tropical coral reefs, cuttlefish, a cool movie about octopus, and a whole section of tanks devoted to Great Lakes fish such as pike, walleye, perch, trout, and bass.

We walked back to the hotel along the lakeshore trail and by the time we arrived, other origami people were starting to filter in.  We spent happy hour at the bar with some friends, and then I set up my exhibit (more on that later).  We went out for dinner for authentic Chicago style deep dish pizza.  Most excellent.  Returned to the hotel for late night folding.  I mostly practiced models I would teach the following day.  

More on the convention itself next.  

In the Spaceship, the Silver Spaceship the Lion Takes Control

It’s been a busy few weeks.  The weather has been alternating between mild and sunny and cold and rainy, so I’ve been getting in a few bike rides a week here and there.  Every time I do I think it might be the last nice day. It’s rainy again this week, and of course it’s getting dark earlier and earlier. A week ago Jeannie and I went for for a hike up a mountain called Anthony’s Nose, which looks down on the Bear Mountain Bridge from the summit.  That’s right folks, there are alot of great hikes in the area, but we picked the nose.

I transitioned in my job from consultant to full time lead staff engineer at the Innovation Lab. Last week was heavy on onboarding and strategic planning and roadmapping meetings, as well as tactical planning for the upcoming release of our mobile app in November.  Also got a new computer and been moving into that.  One night after work last week there was a dinner event hosted by one of our partners in the consortium, and I met some of their engineers and some of their customers, as well as an attorney named Havona who was “raised by hippies” and is now living in Spain so her daughters can train to be future tennis pros.  It’s the first time I’ve been to an event like this since before the pandemic, and it turned out to be alot of fun.

And, I’m looking to hire software engineers with a combination of full-stack and R&D prototyping skills.  Ping me if you fit the bill.

Been folding tons of origami for some upcoming exhibitions.  More on that as it, uh, unfolds.

Also Jeannie got me a lego spaceship recently and I’ve been trying to find the time to build it. More on that as it, uh, comes together.

Lastly, been working on music.  I have two I’m working writing/arranging/tracking: In the Purple Circus, and A Plague of Frogs. Additionally, I have six tracks basically done, but the guitar sounds were all over the place.  Last weekend I went back and worked on putting them into some kind of tonal shape.  The main issue is that there’s lots of low end noise muddying up the mix.  EQ helps but not enough.  When I put it thru an amp simulator it cleans up alot of that but also alters the tone pretty radically into the treble range.  I ended up creating a signal chain with 2 buses, one for the raw guitar mix and another for the amp, then mixing the two of them for the right balance. It made a huge differenceI and I applied this to five songs.  Further tweaking can occur but they’re all in the zone.  Hopefully by the end of this record I’ll have something like “my” guitar sound, or at least a sound I can control.

Sun and Rain and Jazz

It’s been cold and rainy the past few days.   I got in quite a few good bike rides in September, but now summer is definitely over.  Been busy with work, new origami, the Jukebox, setting up new computers, and the recording project.  One plus side, I saw two excellent concerts last week.  

The first was The Levin Brothers at the Jazz Arts Forum, a cool little jazz club in Tarrytown.  The Levin Brothers are Mark on piano and Tony on bass, along with a drummer and, for this tour flute player Ali Ryerson fronting the group.  We were seated right up front, so close to the bandstand that I had to move Tony’s music stand and some cords on the floor so I had room to sit down.  They played a combination of originals and jazz interpretations of pop and rock songs, including Steely Dan’s Aja and the traditional Scarborough Fair.  The tone was mostly laid back and tasty, occasionally reaching out into more abstract and experimental territory.  The flute was unusual choice for lead instrument, and fit perfectly.  She was an excellent player, great tone, phrasing and soloing, and gave the group a unique sound and brought it all up to another level.  

Tony Levin is of course a world famous bass player, and equally famous for pioneering the use of the Chapman Stick.  For this gig, however, there was no stick.  He stuck to an electric upright bass, some kind of Steinberger I think, and and old Gibson bass guitar with a star-spangled paintjob that might well date from 1976.  His tone and playing were much more restrained than with some other groups, but sounded great and tasteful.

After the show the band was hanging out at the bar and we got to meet them.  Jeannie had a picture on her phone from when we saw King Crimson last summer.  Tony liked that and said it’s good we were there, cuz that’s probably the last time Crimson will play North America.  I mentioned the first time I saw Tony was with Peter Gabriel back in the 1980s’.  He said Gabriel is gonna be doing a major tour next year, very exciting.  I said to ask Pete if he’d do Carpet Crawlers.

The other show was Sungazer at Gramercy Theater in the city.  The venue was pretty cool, smallish but not that small, maybe a former vaudeville or movie theater with an open floor in the front half and raised seating in the back, and a bar on each side in the middle.  There was an opening act that I’d never heard of, but who were really good, called Childish Jibes, fronted by an attractive, dark-haired singer with a great voice and a sort of Amy Winehouse or Adele vibe, complete with a beehive hairdo and boots so high she could barely dance.  The band were sort of a blend soul funk and rock and pop with a unique sound.  Excellent players, great songs and arrangements, really polished.  I hope they make it big.

Sungazer is sort of a jazz-adjacent jam band like Lettuce or Galactic, but less funky and way more proggy, with elements of metal, techno and jazz fusion.  They favor dense, complex arrangements with out meters and multilayered polyrhythms and subdivisions of time.  The drummer and leader of the group is a virtuoso of this kind of playing, and his solo was just mind blowing.  The synth player had his own devil’s mellotron with samples from videogames and cartoons and things.  The bassist and guitarist were prone to unison shredding, and the bassist augmented the low end with a sub-bass synth reminiscent of old Genesis.  The sax playing resembled something like Morphine or King Crimson more than what you’d typically recognize as jazz. 

All in all totally my kind of weird.  It’s funny, Jeannie and I were very likely the oldest people in the crowd.  I wonder how a band like that finds an audience in this day and age.

Mo’ Origami

There’s an origami convention coming up Chicago next month, so I’ve been getting organized about folding some new models for the convention.  Having to do an exhibition is a great motivator.  I’ve also been busy at work, transitioning from a part-time consulting gig to a full time staff position as Lead Engineer of Consumer Reports’ new Innovation Lab. I’ll be building an R&D software engineering team to create prototypes and products around consumer’s digital privacy and data rights.  More on that as the situation comes into being, but soon, having Fridays off will be a thing of the past.

So last Friday I spent a good chunk of the day organizing my origami studio.  Since the start of the pandemic there have not been alot of in-person conventions and exhibits, so I’m really just getting back into it.  I have lots of boxes of half-folded experiments and ideas.  I want to take the best and perfect them and fold them at an exhibit-quality level.  Some of the stuff is pretty complex and ambitious.

While I was at it, I threw out lots of old models.  One has to do this every few years, but it’s always funny because the stuff I’m getting rid of was once some of my best work.  Michael LaFosse told me not too long ago that if the model has a face, like a human or an animal, he can’t bear to tear it up or crumple it.  Instead he unfolds it first, then throws away an unfolded sheet of paper.  I found myself doing that a few times.

I registered to teach classes at the Chicago convention.  I signed up to teach two classes, and am thinking of adding a third.  Among the models I’m teaching is my Space Cat, which I designed at the beginning of the summer, right around the time my jazz and funk band Spacecats decided on its name.  The model is a variation on my Sophie the Cat, restyled with a sleek, atomic age midcentury modern look.  Very hip.

And, it looks like the Origami MIT convention is back this year, after three years off!