I Learned a New Trick

Today I decided to find out how to do a couple of things in GimpShop that I've never tried before. Here's one of them. Hard to believe that I've never worked with multiple layers before.

[Original version of this pic here.]


I'll try not to overdo it!

Fountain

Blocked View

Rocket

Arthur Ganson

Until quite recently I'd never heard of kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson. I think, now, that he may be my favorite "artist." I use the quote marks here only because I don't think "art" is a big enough term to contain what he does.

You'll rarely see/hear me blathering about art and meaning and all that stuff, but when I look at Ganson's pieces I'm utterly mesmerized and feel as though I'm as close as humanly possible to gazing at meaning itself. (Yeah, I'm blathering.)

If you're not familiar with what Ganson does, you should check out his YouTube site. Here are a couple of clips. Maybe you'll get what I'm on about.

Each scrap is activated in two places. The mind is very acute and recognizes instantly the manner in which energy flows through a system. Here, the center point always leads the peripheral point. This is vitally important in allowing the scrap to feel as if it is flying.

"This is vitally important in allowing the scrap to feel as if it is flying." Damn. I realize that not everybody looks at the world the same way I do, but, but... Damn...

If you find that philosophically depressing (I don't--what's the point!?), the next one may cheer you up a bit. It's a variation on a theme, but it strikes me as looking at things a bit more optimistically.

In this machine, the chair is passive and all motion is due to interference by the cat. The large disk at the back serves to both counterbalance the arm and give more mass to the chair itself. The motion of the chair is complex and will never repeat.

I think it was Susan who pointed me to Ganson's stuff, but I can't remember when/where/how/etc.

See also Arthur Ganson's Machines (official website).

Odd

The other day I was sitting on a bench in a park having a smoke when some junior high girls walked by. They were humming the tune of Ravel's Bolero. "That's odd," I remember thinking to myself.

That evening I was at home sitting on the sofa with my little girl when, out of the blue, she started humming Bolero.

"This is how horror movies begin," I thought to myself. I waited for the phone to ring...

Hangin' Around

Swingin'

Pizza-La

Grow

Hmm... I'm getting a mixed message here...

Vending Machines, No. 78

With bonus ice cream vending machine.

Miyazaki Side Street

You don't need Japanese to spot the barber shop and the Italian restaurant.

Busted

Brownout: "Slinky"

Four words: psychedelic, Latin, funk, and rock. For me, resistance is futile. Last week I discovered (i.e. heard for the first time) Brownout and their album Homenaje. I got the album, played it a few times, and loved it. I imagine a lot of geezers like me, when they think about Latin rock, remember Santana and then draw a blank. Well, OK, the real hipsters might remember Captain Beyond's second album, Sufficiently Breathless (billed as "space Latin rock," but I always thought it owed more to The Allman Brothers...). Later there was Los Lobos, of course. But really, I have no idea what's been going on with Latin-based rock since forever. I still don't. I just know that whenever I hear stuff, it usually sounds good to me.

I remember a couple of years ago I was on a bit of a Ray Baretto kick, and I commented to a friend that I couldn't hear anything not to like in Latin music. I mean, shit, I kinda dug the music when Q materialized the mariachi band onto the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek TNG. At that time I tended to associate "Latin" more with jazz than with rock. Big fuckin' mistake.

And then today, seemingly out of the blue, an email arrives in my spam box from Six Degree Records (home of Brownout) with a header of "Some content for your blog." What the fuck...

Hey Rick,

Love the site. I work for Six Degree Records.

I wanted to let you know that we just released the new full-length album from Brownout, called Aguilas and Cobras on 9/15. We would love to share some content with you.

The band is the offspring and germinating seed of Grammy-nominated Grupo Fantasma, consisting of eight of the same members.They've been getting into hardcore psychedelic Latin funk rock, and this is just that, at it's best. When not performing as Brownout, or Grupo Fantasma, they can be seen as Prince's back-up band.

I didn't know that last bit. Maybe I should start listening to Prince again...

I'm not naive enough to think that my blog was specifically targeted for this email, but it was a weird coincidence that I had been planning a post about Brownout. In fact, I suspect the diligent folks at Six Degree did a scan of Last. Fm (sidebar on the right) and checked out who was listening to Brownout. I also checked out some videos at YouTube. It was a nice touch to personalize things with my name, though.

I would hesitate to call that email "spam." It was exactly what I'd been looking for: links, information, and free stuff to share on my blog. I'm happy to oblige.

Here's the video for Brownout's "Slinky":



That's a cool tune, but doesn't really give you clear idea about the band's overall direction.

You can download a free tune ("Olvidalo") off the new album here (link/download safe and OK--I did it myself).

There's also a DJ mixtape (25 minutes) available for free download here.

That stuff is all great. If you're still not convinced, you can stream the new album in its entirety from Brownout's website [9/25- Bad link now repaired].

This is all great music by a really good band. Seriously, Kyklops recommended.

Chillin' at the Beach

Are We Not Men?

Just got back from a family road trip up to Yamaguchi Prefecture. I'll have some words and pictures about that later this week, but now that my wife and daughter are sleeping, and I'm showered and drinking beer, I'd like to relate a rather disturbing and disgusting spectacle I witnessed earlier today.

On our way back to Miyazaki we decided to swing by the Costco in Fukuoka to pick up some stuff (now that we're members, and all). It's the "Silver Week" holidays, so I wasn't surprised that Costco (like anyplace else in Japan on a holiday) was wall-to-wall crowded.

Anyway, we wend our way through the aisles picking up items that my wife deems necessary (and value-priced!) to our household. (A penchant for 5-gallon jugs of whiskey and 48-packs of beer has resulted, over the years, in the loss of my "can-deem-something-necessary" powers in our household's political hierarchy. There was also the Amazon CD and book fiasco...) We've got some coffee in our cart, some clothes for our daughter, a case of soup (a subtle victory of mine!), and some other stuff. Not much really.

We wait until we have everything else until we go to the fresh food section of the store (bakery, meat, produce, etc.--stuff we might have to put in a cooler before driving home). This is only my second time at this store, but I think this particular section is generally very crowded, so many people park their carts on the fringes and go in "hands free." My wife wanted to buy some rolls, but the shelf was empty. She seemed sure that they would be putting some more out soon, so she told us (our daughter and me) to go wait by the cart for a few minutes until she was finished. When we left her she was the only person in line waiting for rolls...

After about 15 minutes our daughter started getting a bit antsy, so I decided to go see what was keeping my wife. As I approached the spot where I'd left her a few minutes earlier, I could see a crowd had formed. I could also see that staff behind the bakery counter were basically just throwing bags of rolls over the counter and on to the sloped shelf one by one as they were being prepared, so that they basically slid down into the hands of whomever was lucky enough to be standing in that particular spot. To say there was a "scramble" for these rolls would be a slight understatement. My wife, who's not a very tall woman, and who was still right at the front of the counter where I had left her, was not having much luck. In fact, much taller men were reaching over her and plucking bags of rolls before she could reach them...

Freeze that scene for a moment. I've seen similar scenes with my wife before. These scenes are, simultaneously, a source of pride and frustration for me. I've never seen her jostle for position, when any rule of fairness would say that she has it. I've never seen her scramble or clutch at or fight for anything that she had every right to have in her hands. I honestly don't know if she has some kind of inner zen, or if she's simply "too good" to lower herself to that level; perhaps if it's some combination. I do know that after about a minute--in fact, it's probably exactly one minute-- of that kind of crap, I'm gonna get nasty...

If it had just been women fighting it out for these fucking rolls I probably would have let things run their course. (Hey, I've read The Bacchae!) If that sounds a bit (or very) sexist, well, excuse my sorry ass. I assume that the only reason any woman would find herself fighting tooth and nail over food is to feed her kids. The beer and potato chips are elsewhere... And, as I've already mentioned, some sorry-assed pricks calling themselves men had already interjected themselves into the situation.

I'm still holding back a bit until one bag of rolls comes cleanly into my wife's hands. I say "cleanly" in the sense that she's started to turn around and walk away with her prize. Just then, some asshole, some prick, some fucking piece of shit who no doubt considers himself a hero of modern manhood, some worthless scumbag, grabbed the bag from my wife's hands. She had a good grip on it, so when he grabbed it away the bag actually ripped a bit. And then, and then, he held the bag of rolls up like a prize and actually cried out in triumph.

At that moment I wished for nothing more than a machete so that I could remove that asshole's head and hold it up like a trophy with a shout of triumph. Fortunately (or not, who really knows?), I've been hanging out with my wife too long for anything like that to happen. Instead, I (firmly but gently--ahem) made my way through the crowd, put my hand on my wife's shoulder, and told her not to worry about it, let's get out of here.

The next bag of rolls fell into her hand. No one else touched it.

Driftwood

Not a Buoy Anymore

Reflections

Riverside