Summer isn’t dead yet. (P.S. I retooled the oft-neglected scraps page with a blogging engine. This doesn’t mean much for the presentation, but perhaps it will inspire me to add to it more often)
Critical Mass, how I love you. Look at all those bikes.
Indian summer is upon us. It’s the only summer we get here. This was the scene at 7PM last night at Ocean Beach.
And this was the somewhat exciting scene—it only happens once a year—this afternoon as our training ship made its way back to campus, fresh from a summer in the South Pacific and then in San Francisco for a drydock makeover. More to the point, this is me awkwardly trying to make conversation with coworkers and it rarely goes better than this:
Wednesday nights: lose at softball, drink with pirates.
The penultimate piece in my procession of panoramic panels is done! Six ill-tempered layers on this one and each is like a child to me:
Layer 6: (Out of the jar black with a touch of brown) The youngest and therefore most immature layer. Clogged up the screen almost on contact. Virtually useless. Wants to go to college to be a philosopher or some bullshit.
Layer 5: (Dark Brown) Very annoying. Required several intermediate screen washes. Left a big stain on the mesh even after thoroughly washed off. Will probably run off with pregnant girlfriend.
Layer 4: (Warmish Light Brown) Was a mistake from the beginning. Can’t remember how this one was conceived but I think she accidentally got a little acrylic and water-based in her. Made for a very uneven coat that would get me fired in a real print shop. Luckily, Layer 5 covered for most of this. Not that I approve of Layer 5.
Layer 3: (Beige) Just like layer 4.
Layer 2: (Warm light beige) Went on smooth and lined up with layer one reasonably well. I have no problem with layer 2. He talked about business school once or something.
Layer 1: (Warmish off-white) The first born and therefore best layer. Set a super example for all her siblings but obviously could not save them. Oh well. It’s their fucking life.
I am gonna throw in the last track from the live “Music for Airports.” I decided it might be as good or even better than that first track. Takes a few minutes to get going but this one has more of a beginning, middle and end. Get ready.
Bang on a Can: “2-2”
[audio:2_2.mp3|text=0xHHHHHH]
The upside down bear can only mean one thing. *sigh* Summer is over.
Received, umprompted, on a recent Saturday night.
Oh my.
“Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” -James 1:4
Late summer softball in the Presidio is forcing something unnatural. In the midst of a fifty mile fog bank flooding in from the Pacific at 15 miles per hour, our outfielders could be forgiven if they couldn’t tell what the fuck was happening at the plate, nevermind having a fair hope of catching anything for the duration of our double-header last night. The first game was competitive, but a smash to the cumulus cloud that was center field virtually guaranteed the opposition of their game-clinching grand slam. We lose again. Ah, but what of the second game? Suddenly every one was finding ways to scratch and claw their way on base, our infield defense became a lock box and there was even an unbelievable running catch in center right field.
Ladies and Gentlemen, after a summer of softball, Some Other Team has their first-ever victory. (Technically a win by forfeit, due to a girl shortage).
Check out this monster sidewalk find. It was sitting on the corner of Noe and 19th streets, weighs about eighty pounds and has an auspicious future as the east wall centerpiece of my Maritime Academy office.
I just found a remarkable live version of the song I listened to probably more than any other song in the last five years. Well, not so much a song as it is, um, a composition.
Soap box alert.
In 1978, the British multimedia artist Brian Eno more or less invented ambient music with the release of an album he titled “Ambient 1: Music For Airports.” This was back when experimental music was still hypothesis-driven and, as with much of his work, Eno approached the project with a strong sense of intentionality. His goal, a recording that would “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” was later famously compared to the effect of visual art, acting on the viewer through many planes of consciousness, often in the background. It was not to be confused with background music (Muzak), which fixed non-challenging, derivative bullshit in the world’s elevators and supermarkets.
Lots of the so-called ambient music that followed (including plenty of Eno’s own, including plenty from this album) made a poor case for this distinction and it always struck me as ironic that the pinnacle of the art came in the form of the first track of this first ever ambient-with-a-capital-A record. At first listen, the track “1_1” sounds like not much more than a minimal repeating figure (future listens reveal another level of complexity), and what blows me away about this 17 minutes of music is how something so simple can achieve such complete transcendence. The composition isn’t overtly emotional in any one direction (happy, sad, afraid, or mad, as my therapist would have said). Rather, this is their elusive equilibrium, perfectly modulated for the potential to become anything and to shape any environment. It is the musical equivalent of the stem cell and it is rare.
Anyway, I spent many days and nights wandering around San Francisco with this shit on my headphones and it took over a special place in my heart. Eno’s original was arranged using a combination of tape loops and early analog synths, and in 1998 the avant garde chamber music collective Bang on A Can re-recorded the entire album note for note, using classical instruments. That type of bullshit usually makes its way to the novelty discount rack real quick, but these guys have managed to maintain the balance of the original piece while installing it with a new sense of power. And it was recorded live, something Eno could never do. Fucking outstanding. Put it on and go do something else.
Bang on a Can: “1-1”
[audio:1_1.mp3|text=0xHHHHHH]
Socializing has become less natural for me every year since college. Given a long enough exchange, meeting new people now requires me to confess that I work at a maritime academy in Vallejo. I have been experimenting with methods that prevent this from ending conversations.
On a cool night last week over cheap beer at some Mission District bar, I was doing my 2008 version of socializing with someone. The Academy eventually came up and this time it led to an inventory of nautical tattoos: she had two Popeye-style forearm anchors, a lobster on the bicep, something forgettable inside the lower lip, and a bunch of underwater stuff under her clothes. Then an 800 pound dog or something distracted me and that was that. Later, though, as is my custom, I let the episode get inside my head. When your life-changing decisions are another people’s personal aesthetics, is it time to find a new bar?
Instead of taking any kind of positive action, I think I’ll just keep screen printing useless postcards. Here’s the latest set, about San Francisco fast food, currently available at this place for approximately 1/500th of the cost required to make them.
In the last fifty seconds of the final period, Delila came back from a two touch deficit to even the score. The 9-9 match went into extra time.
In Olympic fencing this is a sudden death situation. They traded clinks for a few moments. Suddenly, with a quick attack executed from below, the Olympics were over. She lost.
It was a kick-ass match. She was mesmerizing. I don’t know…I am proud of her.
My cousin Delila fences tomorrow. The long line of fencers established on my Mom’s side has been a beacon of family pride for some time now. Oh Dad, don’t be jealous. We will never forget about your nucleic acid sequence encoding a polypeptide with at least about 90% homology to a LAMP self-binding domain, and corresponding proteins.
Through special Olympic time travel technology developed by the Chinese, tomorrow’s action will be broadcast online live from the Beijing National Convention Center tonight. Ten PM Pacific time. Women’s Individual Foil. Round of 32 (she got a bye in the original round of 64). The blue piste.