Time for You to Go Out to the Places You Will Be From

Last weekend we took a road trip up to Buffalo for Lizzy’s college graduation. She earned a B.S. in business, with a minor in psychology, Cum Laude, from the University of Buffalo. Congratulations!!!

The whole trip felt like a very strange time warp, like I stepped out of a time machine 30 years in the future. Jeannie and I met at UB. We were teenagers. I graduated in 1990, and she in 1991. The night before our trip Jeannie pulled out a bunch of old photos from her graduation and time around that. Man, we were so young! But we still feel like those same people.

When I finished college I couldn’t wait to get out of town. After a couple years of working a day job at a slowly dying company and trying to make it as a musician by night, it was pretty clear that things were going nowhere, so I moved to New York City to enroll in grad school. Now Lizzy, who grew up downstate, has decided to stay in Buffalo and make a life for herself up there. She has a good job awaiting her, and some close friends, and just likes the city. The cost of living is so much cheaper, and we’ve heard Buffalo is up and coming once again. We all feel fortunate about how the whole situation turned out.

We drove up on Thursday evening so we could help Lizzy move on Friday. She and two of her current roommates got a new apartment in the downtown area, just off the Elmwood strip between Allentown and Delaware park. It’s been a long time since I spent any time in that neighborhood. My various bands played gigs in some bars around there, but there wasn’t much reason to go down there otherwise. Although once beautiful back when the city was in its prime, it had been in decline for a while and was mostly pretty shabby in the post-Reagan era (although there were always pockets that remained nice, they were like islands). The city’s economic base of heavy manufacturing, cars and steel, had collapsed, and there was a massive population exodus in the 80’s and 90’s.

But they were right, Buffalo is back! After we moved Lizzy’s heavy furniture we walked around the neighborhood to find a place for lunch. A generation has gone by, and everything that was once run down is now super nice, restored, rebuilt, repurposed, and reimagined. Lots of apartments, restaurants and shops, bars and coffeehouses, and vibe is very much young positive energy. Lots of pedestrians out and about. Trendy shops for things like fancy pet supplies, gourmet coffee and yoga studios. Really nice looking houses down all the side streets. It reminded me alot of Greenwich Village and SoHo in the early 1990’s, San Francisco in the dotcom era, or Brooklyn in the aughts, when I lived in those places. We ended up at a great little Mexican restaurant with a great selection of margaritas.

We stopped at the Darwin Martin house, a local landmark designed by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When I was in college as an architecture student, I helps work on its restoration. I friend of mine who was a grad student actually lived on the grounds in the caretaker’s house. One of the buildings had a carpentry shop set up in what was once the living room. I remember measuring and cutting up pieces of wood to create trim to match the existing molding. For my graduation the school of architecture had a brunch on the grounds before the ceremony. Anyway, the place was a mess back then, in serious decay, but now it’s been fully restored, looking glorious, and even has a new visitor center.

Then we were back on the UB campus for the graduation ceremony, which has changed alot in 30 years. For one thing, there’s a new outdoor sports arena, which provided a safe venue for the event. After we went out to Baird Point so Lizzy and her friends could take pictures. That was a favorite spot to go smoke pot back in the day.

Afterwards we found ourselves back in Allentown for lunch, then hanging out at Lizzy’s new pad, and yet again in Allentown going out to dinner with friends. Michelle stayed to hang out with Lizzy and go to her graduation party and had a great time. She’s starting college at UB in just a few months, so it’s good for her to get to know Lizzy friends. She’s already making plans to come over to Lizzy’s apartment and use her kitchen to bake in.

On the ride home we listened to the 90’s grunge/alternative station for an extra dose of nostalgia.

Ev’ry New Beginning Comes From Some Other Beginning’s End

I feel like things have been coming back to life, slowly but inevitably increasing. Things are new and hopeful on many levels. A few weeks ago I got my second shot of vaccine, and have slow been starting to go out and do things. We went out to dinner one night to celebrate Michelle’s birthday. Jeannie’s parents dropped by for a visit one afternoon.

I got a haircut, the first in over a year. Having long hair again was kinda fun, but it was time to move on. I went out and bought some clothes – a sports coat, slacks and a couple neckties. I haven’t had an occasion to get dressed up in a long time. It’s funny, a year and a half ago, even before the pandemic, when I started working from home full time, one of the first things I did was to go thru my closet and get rid of some old clothes. Now it feels like it’s come full circle. Soon it’ll be time to tune my piano, get an eye-exam, and all the other things made difficult to impossible by the pandemic.

Michelle’s last day of high school was today, which means I’m done picking her up after school (before the pandemic she took the train). She’s got a job lined up for the summer, which should be fun and exciting. Meanwhile, my workdays will be a little easier and more flexible. And safer.

I couple weeks ago I was on my home from picking up Michelle, sitting at a traffic light, when I was hit from behind by another car. It was a pretty strong jolt, but my car was basically unharmed; the only damage was the tip of the chrome cuff around the tailpipe was dinged. His car, a Mini, was a wreck. Bumper, hood, radiator, the whole front end smashed. It looks like he was driving without a tier, just a bar wheel. Maybe the tire came loose from the wheel and that’s why he couldn’t stop. He told me he was driving with a flat because Minis have no spare tire, and was on his way to the garage to have it fixed.

I took my car to the shop for inspection, and while they were at it I asked them to look and see if there was any serious damage underneath, but all was good. Then an oil change, which they didn’t notice I needed when they did the inspection. So I brought the car back for that. While I was at it I told them to rotate the tires. Then it turned out the needed new brakes too, which somehow they also failed to notice when they did the inspection. But then it takes a few days to order the parts. So three different days the car was in the shop. Yeesh! We had a big road trip coming up, so I had to get this all done ASAP.

Lots more happening. I’ll tell you all about it in the next post.

Mupple Earth

Things have been moving along, but nothing really exciting to talk about. Spring is in full bloom, and all the flowering trees around here look gorgeous. The Japanese maple tree which I planted in my front yard four years ago as a sapling really came in alot bigger this year. Project dirt was completed weeks ago, with 57 loads total. Now we’re well into project watching the new grass grow, and that’s coming along nicely. I need to make a place in my garage to store my wheelbarrow, which I probably won’t use again for years. Our next-door neighbors sold their house and so we now have a new neighbor. So far she seems really nice. When Jeannie first met her, she said she was thinking of putting in a pool and fence around her yard. I talked to her a few days later, telling her I was fond of the hedge row separating our yard from hers, and she agreed and told me she’s not going to make any changes until she’s had a chance to let the house speak to her. Maybe the crazy cost of lumber these days helped sway her too.

Continuing to work on music and origami. At my day job I’ve dusted off my C++ chops and started learning JUCE and diving in the app side of our codebase. So far, so good. My first goal was to revive a product for editing patches, which was broken because it relied on a shared code library that had changed. The major part of the work was refactoring the shared library so code that was being shared was in there and correctly exposed, and then going around to the different projects and updating their shared dependencies. A good way to learn my way around the codebase and the build process. Soon I’m gonna be building features on top of this, including stuff that integrates with the cloud stack I’ve been building.

But the main point of this post is to think thru what if the Muppets did The Lord of the Rings? Working out the casting is the first step. So…

Bilbo: Kermit, obviously

Frodo: Robin the Frog, because he’s Kermit’s nephew

Sam, Merry, and Pippin: This sets the precedent that the Hobbits are frogs. We need some more frog muppets for the rest of the Hobbit roles. There are few that appear now and then in songs and skits, but are not named characters. Time to give them names and personalities.

Gandalf: Fozzie Bear

Aragorn: Viggo Mortensgten, because there’s always one token human among the muppet cast, to give a sense of scale. If anyone reading this blog knows Viggo, please contact him and make this happen; it’ll be awesome. It doesn’t even have to be a 13-hour recreation of the Peter Jackson epic, a two-hour-long condensed version would be fine.

Boromir: Animal. He’d be great at the dramatic death scene

Gimli: Rizzo the Rat, which means the dwarves are rats

Legolas: Link Hogthrob. At first we were going to make the pigs orcs, but we realized the pigs being elves is way funnier. Link is the most heroic and action-oriented of the pigs.

Galadriel: Miss Piggy, obviously
Elrond: Dr. Strangepork
Arwen: Annie Sue

Saruman: Gonzo, obviously. Gonzo vs. Fozzie would be an epic wizard battle.

Gothmog: Camilla. All the orcs are chickens

Faramir: Scooter
Denethor: Sam the Eagle

Eowyn: Janice
Eomer: Floyd
Theoden: Dr. Teeth

Wormtongue: Pepe the King Prawn

The Balrog: Big Bird

Hmmm, maybe it still needs some work. Anyway, next up: The Muppets do Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood

Hello City

Spring continues to warm and grow. All the trees around here are budding and flowering. Lots of lovely sunny weather, and some heavy rainy days as well. Project dirt is nearing completion. I’m up to fifty-four wheelbarrow loads, getting to final low spots in the front yard. There’s grass coming already in on the areas I filled in earlier on.

I’ve been into Manhattan not once but twice last week. The first was a trip to the MoMA, keeping with our tradition of spring break museum outings. I haven’t been to the MoMA in years. Parts of the joint are kinda funky these days, with the main floor being filled with stacked up furniture taken from around the museum as a pandemic precaution, in lieu of an actual exhibit, and the nearby galleries filled with things of dubious artistic merit, such as jars of bodily fluids. The upper floors were better, with lots of impressionist, early modernist, and classic modern art. I seem to recall there used to be an extensive industrial design collection, but it appears that it’s been scaled back a good amount. The famous Ferrari was not on display. Still, most of what there was to see was pretty cool, and it was an enjoyable day out of the house, and stepping back into a hopefully soon-to-be post-pandemic world.

My other trip was for a lunch with the Association for Cultural Equity gang, to celebrate the recent launch of the Global Jukebox 2.1, as well as the new Alan Lomax Digital Archive. This was most excellent. It was great to see Anna and Kiki face to face again, and meet her current grad fellows and some ACE board members. It was a beautiful day in Greenwich Village and they picked a place with great food and drinks, and breezily open to the outside. Afterwards I walked around my old neighborhood for a while, seeing how things had changed. Driving into the city on a weekday in daytime remains a strange and epic adventure, not to be repeated too often.

Now that my song Mo’bility is in the can, I’ve turned my attention back to Lift Off. I’ve come to the conclusion that on the computer it’s never going to sound the way it does in my head, which is alot like classic bebop recorded live by great players full of extroverted virtuosity and expressive spontaneity. So it’s time to get a bit more creative about the sound and the arrangement. First thing is to see if I can put together a really smokin’ sax part from the takes I did, or if I need to keep on woodshedding. Meanwhile I’ve begun working on the last song for the record Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know). It’s a sort of Crimso Mahavishnu Mancini supernatural spy jazz vibe, in 5/4 time, with an uptempo middle section and unison riff break in there somewhere too.

In the spirit of new awakenings, I’ve started to get back into doing origami again. A little over a year ago I took an awesome trip to Spain for CFC2, the second Conference for Creators in origami. I folded a bunch of new stuff for the exhibition, and met alot of great folders from Europe, and good number of old friends too. When I got home I was really fired up to do some new stuff. But then the pandemic happened, and all the conventions were cancelled, and anyway I was busy writing software for OUSA. I sort of lost my creative fire and didn’t really fold anything for a year.

Then a week ago was Fold Fest, sponsored by Origami USA. It was an online event, and the first one I attended since OUSA’s Un-Convention last June. I attended a few classes and connected wit some friends and had a good time. And a bunch of ideas I’ve been working on in the back of my head for a while came to the fore. So I’ve been folding like a madman in my spare time the last week or so. Hopefully I’ll have something to show soon. For now let’s just say I’m combining flowers, tessellations and single-sheet polyhedra. Meanwhile, it makes the time go by faster when you’re stuck in boring meetings.

New Song: Mo’bility

My new song Mo’bility is ready. You can listen at:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/Mobility29.mp3


This sure changed alot since I wrote it. It was originally more of a Hank Mobley vibe. As mentioned before, now it’s sort of a hallowe’en cartoon-jazz jump stride swing thing, featuring the Hungarian minor mode and 7/8 meter. The arrangement is for soprano and tenor saxes, with some midi trumpet and vibraphone rounding out the melody instruments line. The rhythm section consists of piano, bass and drums, with bass being more-or-less double tracked fender electric bass and midi synth bass. Additionally there’s some mellotron strings in there for extra sweetness/spookiness. Finally, I wanted a gong sound but didn’t have a good sample, so I recorded hitting the cymbals of my drum kit with mallets and letting them ring. It turned out to sound great, and perfect for the part. Enjoy!

Also updated mixes of some previous songs.
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/HeavyWater37b.mp3
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/AutumnEyes32.mp3

Hippity Hoppity

Spring continues. The days are getting longer faster, and the nice weather appears more often than not. More and more people I know have gotten the vaccine and getting hopeful about life returning to normal soon.

We didn’t have much of a spring break this year, but it was enjoyable. Busy with work and stuff. Jeannie and I both took a long weekend off from work, and Lizzy came home for the weekend. Hard to believe she’s graduating college in just a month or so. We had family game night Friday night, which was lots of fun. On Sunday we went down to Queens to visit Jeannie’s parents, and Lou and my neblings came over too. It was good to see everyone in person, even if it was pretty low key.

We normally try to go to a museum or day trip this time of year. We haven’t picked a place yet, but we’re looking at next weekend. Most places are running at limited capacity and you have to get tickets in advance. Michelle has asked that we go Washington D.C, this summer to visit a few more museums. That might happen. We might even get back to Ohio for the Centerfold origami convention, and swing my the National Air Force Museum while we’re out that way.

I finished diagramming my Platypus model, called Gladys the Platypus, for the Origami USA 2021 Convention Collection. This is my first new diagram in some time, and hopefully I’ll get back into the groove with that. I hadn’t been that motivated to do much origami during the pandemic, cuz all the conventions were cancelled, and I don’t enjoy the online ones that much. But I’ve been involved in planning and setting up the 2021 OUSA, that includes a virtual gallery, and there may even be some live, in-person conventions later this year. So I’m starting to get back into folding again.

Project dirt continues. I’m up to thirty wheelbarrows of dirt, and have gotten maybe two-thirds of the way around the yard. I filled in one really big low spot on the north side of my house that took four loads by itself. It’s good to spend some time outside, and it’ll be really nice when it’s finished. I made a pretty good dent in my neighbor’s dirt pile, but he has a whole swimming pool’s worth, so there’ll be plenty left.

Spring Into Action

It looks like winter is finally at an end and spring has emerged. It took a while but all the snow on the ground finally melted and we started having some nice days. A week ago on the weekend I started spending time outside to work on the yard, beginning with scraping up all the leaves and debris from the flowerbeds. Also, we finally admitted ski season is over and we wouldn’t get a second day skiing in this year, so we went for a hike instead. We went up to the Palisades in New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River across from Hastings and Yonkers.

This last weekend on Saturday I took the Mustang out for a drive for the first time. Happy to say the engine turned over right away and everything seems in great shape. On Sunday I went for the first bike ride of the year, up to my local Nature Study Woods. Since I was tuning up my bike, Jeannie asked me if I’d get hers ready to ride too. It’s been a couple seasons since she did any biking, but she wants to get back into it. I’d like to get my rollerblades on sometime soon too, but the snowplows tore up our street so badly this winter I’ll have to find another place to go skate.

The yard work continued as well. Last fall after I expanded my patio, I had some leftover dirt that I used to fill in a few low spots in my yard. Once I got into it I realized there were quite a few lumpy areas and wouldn’t it be nice to have some more dirt. Well last fall my neighbor across the street put in a new swimming pool, and now he has a great big pile of dirt, that until recently looked like a sledding hill. He invited me to come over and take away as much as I wanted. So far I’ve take eight wheelbarrow loads, about a cubic yard. I’m probably about twenty percent done. So more next weekend. I’d like to get it down and covered with grass seed in time for things to really start growing.

In other news, I demoed the scheduling tool that I wrote for scheduling classes for conventions to the Origami USA convention committee today. It went over well. Still a few details before we can take it live, but it’s basically there. Thanks to Robert Lang for all his help.

Now I’m starting to think about designing and folding some new models for the convention in June. I have some ideas, but haven’t really been folding much since the pandemic began.

I’ve found some new and interesting stuff to practice on piano. One source was from out continuing movie nights on Saturdays. We recently watched a few classic scifi films including Start Trek IV and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I haven’t seen either in many years and 2001 was particularly inspiring. Among the composers whose works Kubric lifted when he put together the soundtrack, beyond the famous Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss and Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss, was Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem by the Hungarian modernist Gyögy Ligeti.

The Ligeti stuff was some intense, crazy music, and so I decided to check out more of it. This eventually led my to his Musica Ricercata, a series of pieces for piano that are mostly not crazy but express a variety of moods and styles and are notable for progressively building from simple to complex. The first one uses just one note. His approach to modernism reminds me a bit of how Monk approaches jazz, often unexpectedly humorous in the way it plays with conventions of form and genre, while remaining very self-consistent.

Another series of piano pieces in a similar vein is Mikrokosmos Béla Bartók, which starts with both hands doubling the same figure using the pentatonic scale and a limited range, and progresses to the complex and bizarre.

The third piece of sheet music came from my trying to find a chart for one of my songs I’m introducing to my jazz group. On the way I came across a cache of old sheet music someone gave me once that I didn’t even know I had. In there was a book of Art Tatum transcriptions. Art Tatum is one of my all-time favorite piano players with a unique and virtuosic stride-based swinging style that influence Keith Emerson and Eddie Van Halen, as well as countless jazz carts. I doubt I’ll be able to play these pieces at speed any time soon, but they’re worth studying for his approach to voicings and rhythm, particularly in the left hand, as well as where and how he inserts embellishments while maintaining the flow of the tune.

Fotoz 2020

It’s been a year of mainly sitting around the house waiting for the pandemic to end. As a consequence we didn’t take that many pictures, but at least we got out around the neighborhood a bit, and upstate a couple of times. As always, ping me if you need login creds. Enjoy!

Smarch Smadness

We’re coming up on a year under the pandemic. Last year on February 28 was my last live gig with a band. At least the first hopeful stirrings of spring are afoot. A week ago I was a-shoveling snow, and it seemed endless. Then we had a few days of warm weather and rain, and vast quantities melted away. Now only the rump ends of the biggest snow piles remain. Only downside is we didn’t go skiing this weekend as planned. Ah well, it’s supposed to turn cold and snow tonight. In fact it’s storming out right now. Hopefully we’ll get back on the slopes one more time next weekend.

I’ve been working on my Computer Jazz record this whole winter. I’ve been mainly focused on Lift Off, but it’s taking a long time because it’s a difficult song and I’m trying to capture some subtlety in the arrangement. I got the organ part done, including the solo, and made some changes to the piano part to make them fit together better. Also been working on the drum solo and the overall form. Even laid down a first take of the sax part, which was not too bad. But it was starting to feel like hard work. So I took a break from that to focus on Mo’bility instead.

I wrote Mo’bility for my last jazz group and it always went over really well live, with it’s danceable gypsy-jump vibe. For the studio it was shaping up okay, but didn’t really have the tone and character I wanted. It needed a bit of Raymond Scott cartoon vibe. The other night at rehearsal we working on a different original of mine, and somehow the the feel shifted to 3/4 time. It was pretty interesting, and got me thinking about different ideas for the meter and groove for Mo’bility. I changed it to 7/8, and it was just the thing the song needed. The arrangement fell together pretty quickly, and is very satisfying, just a little unbalanced. I quickly got up to the point where it was time to record the live instruments, soprano and tenor sax, and bass guitar. Unfortunately it’s much harder to solo on and groove on now, so I have to practice it a bit. Still this song should be in the can pretty soon.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s been a long pandemic. We’ve been watching alot of movies on the weekends, and seem to have fallen into a zone that includes a good amount action-adventure-scifi-fantasy. In addition to a number of family all-time favorites, there are lots of great movies that Michelle has never seen and I haven’t seen in along time, and lots of great movies out there that I’ve never seen. So we’ve started making lists of movies we want to watch.

I tried to make a list of my 100 favorite movies. It ended up more like 70 or 80 all-time favorites plus an equal number that might or might not make the cut. Still there are some definite trends. The oldest movie is from 1940 (Fantasia) and the newest from 2017 (Thor Ragnorok). By decade so far there’s 8 from the 1960s, 12 from the ’70s, 30 from the ’80s, 8 from the 90’s, 21 from the ’00s and 5 from the ’10s. The most movies in any single year is 5, for 2003 (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Big Fish, Underworld). Favorite directors (appearing more than twice) include Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Chris Nolan, James Cameron, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Zemeckis. For directors I counted multiple movies in the same franchise if I like them (e.g. all the LotR movies but none of the Hobbit ones). For actors I didn’t count them again if they reprised the same role in a sequel, even if both movies are favorites. Favorite actors (in 3 or more movies) predictably include guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, and Samuel L. Jackson. Perhaps more surprisingly it also includes Billy Crudup (Princess Mononoke, Almost Famous, Big Fish, Watchmen), Keith David (The Thing, They Live, Princess Mononoke), Frank Oz (Star Wars, The Muppet Movie, The Blues Brothers), and Ian Holm (Alien, Brazil, Lord of the Rings).

Our newest hobby these days it to re-imagine a favorite movie as done by the Muppets, and try and and fill out the cast. Go ahead and try it. it’s lots of fun! Like I said it’s been long pandemic.

The Global Jukebox 2.1 is Live

I’m happy to announce that The Global Jukebox 2.1 is now live. Go ahead and check it out at:

https://theglobaljukebox.org/

This rev culminates many months of work, and contains quite a new features including an all-new Wheel View, an updated world culture and song taxonomy, and numerous enhancements to the content and functionality.

The Association for Cultural Equity, the organization behind The Global Jukebox is a non-profit foundation. Our funding is way down this year due to the worldwide pandemic. If you care about world folk music and its legacy, please consider making a donation so we can keep adding new content, features and improvements.