stripmindblog

live music

2008-03-10T22:27:00.004-05:00

I'm embarrassed about this, and can hardly believe I'm writing this here, but I just made the decision that I don't want to go see one of my favorite bands in concert, so here it goes:

I really don't like to see live music.

It makes me pheel like a philistine to write this, because - just like locally grown vegetables - live music is something that's good to like. But this winter when invited to a concert for a band that was trendy in the 90s, i had a striking realization about my relationship to this cultural pastime.

I'm saying it again: I actually don't enjoy live music.

Maybe I shouldn't say that so baldly. There are live shows that I love, for example, Zakir Hussain. But aside from vituosic instrumental/acoustic (usually "WORLD" music), I'm can't get into it. I don't enjoy it.

OLD REASONS:

In my heart of hearts I've known that I didn't enjoy live music, and I've had a host of reasons over the years that ran through my head when I found I wasn't enjoying the show.

REASON NUMBER ONE:

Too damn loud. I always prefer to be social when going out with friends, and live music is too damn loud. I'd rather be able to talk to the people I'm with when I'm out, and live music is universally too amplified. Club and bar music is also often too amplified, which I've never understood at all (why would a bar with bad speakers play music at deafening volume?), but live music is the worst for this. I always feel like I leave live music venues with a hoarse voice and ringing ears. I can never hear the music as well as I can even on a terrible recording. It's almost like the performers are scared you might do something other than listen to the show. They'd rather you lose your hearing than hold a conversation.

REASON NUMBER TWO:

Lack of focus. This is the part that's most embarrassing for me - my own personal deficiency.

It has been a number of years since I felt like I could really focus for two straight hours on listening to a band. My mind starts to wander, and then the sheer discomfort of the venue (per reason one) is more of a hindrance than anything.

(I should say here, that there are times when I can focus on music for long periods, but I can't do it on command (such as at a show), and I'm usually alone when I do have that kind of focus and interest. So the combination of the ostensibly social venue and the private focus on music really just doesn't work for me.)

REASON NUMBER THREE:

Awkwardness. The standing still thing that happens at some concerts doesn't agree with me. It's so awkward! I'm bad at pretending to be enjoying myself, or pretending to be interested. I'd rather sit down. Or listen to a CD in my living room. Instead I wander in and out of the hall, adjacent rooms, and the bathroom.

------------

So, those are the standard reasons that I have had for not enjoying going to shows. Looking them over, they're not very convincing, and only do more to make me pheel like a philistine. These reasons are pretty lame, really. So there's good reason that I haven't been comfortable saying this out loud.

NEWER IMPROVED REASON WHY AARON DOESN'T LIKE LIVE MUSIC:

But then this winter, I was invited to see an old band who I didn't really like even when they were popular in the 90s. The first thing that passed through my mind was, "why are those people still on stage?"

That's when I realized why I don't like live shows. The question "why are these people on stage" gets stuck in my head as soon as I lose focus on the music. So for me, going to see a live show is exactly like going to a two hour session of pondering, in mental isolation, the nature of the cult of personality.

It's a terribly boring mental exercise: analysis of performers' manufactured image, questioning of motives, criticism of staginess and posturing, projected aspirations to fame, criticism of the stagy passivity of the crowd, internal criticism of my own stagy passivity, repeated recognition of the vampirism of cool.

Clearly, I end up in a really terrible head-space. At this point, even if I could regain interest in the music, I'd be immediately distracted by the orchestration of "the performativity of celebrity culture." It makes me even sadder in small venues, because it's such a hollow recreation of celebrity.

So, in conclusion, seeing the show actually detracts from my enjoyment of hearing the music. For a second I thought maybe I should try going to a concert blindfolded, but then I got the better of that idea. I mean, so what, I don't like live music. Why fight it?

Goodbye, attempts to enjoy live music,
Hello...
...other things.

i should note here, that some types of music and performances are exempt from this analysis. notable exceptions: dance bands, some jazz, much "world", most street music.

I should also note that much theater, however, is not exempted; I find the stage of theater to be similarly distracting, though perhaps to a lesser degree.

algae to the rescue

2008-02-25T05:21:00.003-06:00

Here's a video showing a development on the algae-bio-fuel production method.

cool stuff. I hear that with this method they're past 50,000 gallons/acre per yr, and they're shooting to double that yield in the next year. This sort of production could really make virgin veggie make a lot more sense.

I'm not quite sure where the carbon is coming from with those numbers above. There's mention of using the algae to sequester the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants, so I don't know what the rates of production would be like using atmospheric carbon dioxide, but this is still really cool.

bubbly boom

2007-12-09T18:20:00.000-06:00

hi.

Tomorrow is Jessica's birthday, and she likes Prosecco, an Italian champaign-like drink, so we have some on special occasions. This is dangerous because when you drop a bottle of champaign it goes off like a bomb, flinging glass-shard-shrapnel and alcoholic beverage everywhere.

I'm just glad I wear glasses, and that this afternoon I was wearing layers.

WVO storage and settling

2007-12-06T11:25:00.000-06:00

i finally put together a settling setup for the waste vegetable oil that I've been collecting. Doing this has made me realize just how much energy I put into feeling organized. It seems that I really am committed to the idea of creating clean (and potentially time-saving) systems, even if they require a lot of time initially.

This is one of those cases. Linton had just been storing the vegetable oil in the containers he picked it up in, and letting it settle in those. In a lot of ways, that makes the most sense. I could have just settled on a system for keeping those buckets organized, but no. I wanted to build something, Not just shelving to organize the oil, but something a bit more 'developed'. I put it under the stairs, and I think it looks pretty good, and the first part - the collecting and settling - is done. I still need filtering and delivery, but that will come later.

Doing this, I could really see the pressure differences between a gravity drip and a siphon system. It really speeds things up to get the air out of the system, and now I have a mechanism for doing that. Still, even though it looks really organized, and I'll know I'll feel good using the system, I do wonder how much overkill this was. Ultimately, I think my satisfaction here is based on the assumption that this will save time in the long run. After doing this, though, I wonder if that's a faulty assumption.

biofuel debate?

2007-12-01T03:00:00.000-06:00

I'm on some bio-diesel listserves, which I occasionally read just to get a sense of what can go wrong with my car. But recently there's been some debates that have caught my interest, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts here.

The chatter started when San Francisco decided to start a waste vegetable oil collection program. SF is going to start running some municipal diesels on it. Cool, I think. But then these articles surfaced on the list talking about the ecological dangers of biofuels.

First this not so good BeyondChron article, got it started. It really misconstrues a lot of arguments, and generally bashes everyone running anything bio. It references a couple of articles by George Monbiot which are much better written.

I had a very negative and defensive reaction to the BeyondChron article. At first it was knee-jerk defensiveness, but looking back at the article, it is a pretty shitty piece. I think my own negative reaction would have been mitigated if the following point (from the first Monbiot article) had been acknowledged first:

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are perfoming a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel(2). Beyond that, the trouble begins.
--monbiot.com

I'm not going to summarize the article here, just comment on it, so go read the Monbiot stuff if you're interested.

The line of criticism in these articles is interesting and deserves some attention, but I think both articles suffer from seeing biofuels as a one-fuel substitute for fossil fuels. This comes off as plain stupid to bio-diesel users and WVO users who want to encourage the diversity in fuel supply -and use a waste product- rather than be yet another vehicle burning dinosaurs.

Some of the claims made in the articles are also a bit misleading. The figure of "10 times more carbon emissions from bio-diesel" than fossil fuels seems particularly suspect because those carbon costs are primarily one time costs, rather than recurring costs. I don't know how they're glazing over the math there, but there's something disingenous about it.

That said, I do think that users of virgin veggie have some rethinking to do. The bio-fuels vs. food issue is one that is not quickly resolved, and while bio-fuels are becoming popular because they could address the spike in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, we've got to recognize that climate change is not the only environmental problem we face. Reaching some of the biofuel targets - producing 25%-33% of transportation fuel from plant matter - is only possible with huge increases in the environmental footprint. Switching to virgin veggie at that scale would certainly have huge environmental impact - not only in loss of biomass per acre, but on countless ecosystems, available water, food supplies... Adding those costs into the production costs for biofuels does change the balance considerably, and virgin veggie starts to look pretty shabby.

But virgin veggie isn't really what I'm into anyway. I've never considered running virgin vegetable oil as a reason to get a diesel. For me, it was about utilizing a waste product to make a fuel. This has been said everywhere before, but the solution for the transportation fuel problem is in a diversity of solutions - a combination of public transport, greater efficiency (hybrids, etc), renewable electric power sources, AND waste-flow utilization. Picking on bio-fuels because they can't be the whole solution doesn't make sense.

But a knee-jerk defense of bio-fuels doesn't make sense either. The criticism of biofuels surrounds virgin veggie, and the large-scale mono-cropping producers who would have bio-fuel be everything to everybody. Seen from this perspective, I don't feel a personal need to refute those criticisms. It also clarifies my interest in bio-diesel. I wouldn't be excited about doing bio-diesel myself if the waste-stream of used veggie oil was already completely utilized.

Another issue is representation-
I think it is important to realize that the home-schooled grease monkey burning WVO make great publicity for multi-national conglomerates cutting down virgin forests and draining peat. A sad problem. How much does publicity for waste vegetable oil re-use get confused with agri-business push to expand into fuel production?

I think it would be great for the environmentally minded (and re-use focused) bio-fuel users to be able to differentiate themselves from the agri-businesses who are promoting bio-fuels as the next fossil fuels. How would that PR coup be managed though? The small-scale recyclers don't really have the advertising or lobbying budgets...

something to think about.

halloween 07

2007-11-06T16:34:00.000-06:00

Jess and I had a great Halloween this year. We ended up going over the hills to Canyon for a party with some friends. Not only did we have a great time, but we were at the cutest cob house.

I hadn't seen any cob construction before. This one felt like a hobbit grotto (but human sized). Jared does very nice detailed work - stained glass, mosaic, living roof... really cool. Makes you wish you could do it yourself, but I don't think Mariposa has the space for that sort of thing. Maybe if we someday expand into some other yards as well...

Jess and I dressed up, which was also fun. The only problem was that I couldn't fit through any doorways. Sad. Watching the movie, they edit out any points where Daniel San moves through a doorway. Ah, the magic of cinema. While it was very comfortable outdoors, this costume turned out to be rather impractical for party hopping.

I also carved another pumpkin (I haven't done anything with this in a while). I kinda felt like this was a practice pumpkin in a lot of ways. What would it be like going for a more minimalist twist?

Answer: I think the level of detail and the complication of the forms on earlier attempts actually resulted in a more effective experience.

Drawings of cubes may be classic optical illusions, but I feel that in this case, the viewer's ability to interpret a "normal" cube in multiple formulations (convex, concave, open, closed) in some way over-rides the sense of distorted space. There are other problems, too.

Ask yourself, is the top of this cube open? or reflective? To my eye, it could be either. This ambiguity somehow makes the form less interesting. In the end, this carving does not make you reassess what the source of the lighting is. While it's possible that the top of the cube is a solid reflective surface, the prior knowledge that the pumpkin is lit from within actually pushes you to interpret that the top of the cube is open, even though this means that there's a missing line. It ends up looking almost like a paper bag with a candle in the bottom of it. And that's not such a leap to make from a pumpkin with a candle in the bottom of it.

Here's what the pumpkin looks like:

if that doesn't work for you, you can see it on youtube.

kissing alone

2007-10-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

hey there. I changed my address again. I'm now in 828 B 59th St. Oakland, CA 94608. We moved from A to B at the beginning of September. It's slightly larger, more central to the community, and is finished more to our taste. We've been painting and had some construction going on until just recently. We're very close to very happily settled. But that's not what this post is really about.

Sometimes when you leave a place, you leave things behind that you would never know you left. And sometimes those things expose you in a very personal way.

The previous occupants here, in the room where my office now is, left something like that. She was a very nice 14 year old girl at just the age when a lot of teen stuff starts happening. I didn't know her well, just the externals. Her window was always covered with a black cloth, and she started dying her hair black while we were living next door. A lot of this is my imagination, but to me it seemed she was on the cusp of making a decision - to goth or not to goth?

Anyway, when she moved out, at first glance there was nothing left in her room. The thing she left was completely invisible except under specific lighting.

I knew nothing about her except the externals and that she was new to the area - a new kid at school. But then that changed. When I saw these prints, I could identify.

Practice kisses. Suddenly I wanted to listen to New Order. I think that's what I was listening to at the adolescent moment when I was kissing mirrors.

I should really clean this mirror, but somehow I don't want to. I don't want to be the one to erase the record of that age. Even though most of the time it's painfully awkward and it really sucks, it's still a precious time of life.

Sheesh. Fall makes me nostalgic as hell.

one year later, reflecting on ritual

2007-07-09T16:42:00.001-05:00

Coming back from Ben and Julie's wedding in Boston, (a ridiculously short trip), I've found myself considering rituals again. Jess and I got married just over a year ago now, and I still haven't really had a chance to reflect on some of the decisions we made for our "blessed event".

In our own wedding planning, I found that a lot of the ritualized aspects of it made me uncomfortable from the beginning - I wanted to avoid a lot of the traditional aspects as much as possible. I wonder if I was being fair there, or simply reactionary - a knee jerk questioning of the rules. Some of this resistance to ritual/tradition/church ceremony was surely rooted in my social discomfort at church when I was young, but I think there's a lot more to it than that.

Thinking about ritual now, I'm having real difficulty coming up with a ceremony that I was a part of (before my wedding) that held real meaning for me. Baptism/confirmation/various graduations/sing-alongs/camp-rituals/nightly blessings etc. - never really meant too much to me. They even bothered me.

I love shared experiences, and in a lot of ways, I take pains to create those situations, but in some ways I seem to consistently rail against group activities. It feels odd, like I'm having some kind of cognitive dissonance there, so I'd like to figure it out more.

I hear that people like rituals because they offer a way to mark transitions, or because they bring people together, or because they get something out of communing with people in that way - being a part of a larger whole or losing the ego, perhaps?

I'm trying to come up with situations where ritual was good for me in any of these ways, and it's tough. I keep coming back to when my high-school graduation was rained out. Now that was a marker. It was real, it was over, and it was cathartic. When they decided to skip the valedictory speeches in favor of starting to call names immediately, I loved it. In the "E"s when it started really pouring, and everyone started screaming and scattering, I thought, "Now this is really the end of this era." That was a time when I really appreciated rain as a cultural symbol. the symbols of mortarboard, gown, diploma, etc. were still silly though.

The other thing I can really appreciate about ritual is the "it brings people together" bit. For me, that was a big part of wanting a wedding. I did want a marker too, a way to communicate to my community that I was in a different stage in my life. But mostly the wedding was an excuse to have a big party where lots of my friends could meet each other, and meet Jessica. For that, it worked really well. Certain rituals do have a way of getting people to turn out.

At my Uncle Dennis' funeral last month, I really did appreciate that element. It was a good time for us to be together as a family - to have that social time together. But the ceremonial aspects of it were totally unnecessary for me. My dad's side is Catholic, and once again, I found myself just marvelling at how weird it was. Most of the funeral service was so strange - the priest kept incorrectly referring to Dennis as "Michael" - there was a lot of repetitive call and response, some even stranger readings from the Bible - and I just kept wondering how this was helping. I know my Grandma gets something out of it, but I really struggle to understand why. I think she might like to have that conversation, and I hope we can talk about it some time.

The good part of the funeral, for me, was the remembrances that were a part of the ceremony. The priest forgot that my dad and Uncle James wanted to speak, but once they did, it was good. The rest was just waiting, at best. The personal bits are the best. At Ben and Julie's wedding, the parts that they added to the ceremony were the parts that worked for me. So, yeah, maybe I can be down with ritual, if I view the ritual as a culturally specific blank canvas. Still, if the people holding the ritual didn't break from it at some point... For me that would be like an unpainted canvas, or an empty stage. For me, the viewing before Dennis's funeral was like that. The priest had no contact with Dennis, he had nothing to add but empty motions.

From my own church-going days, I remember that I occasionally enjoyed the reflective sermons of one particular minister, and that 7-10 minutes could have interesting things to think about, but the rest of the hour was usually painfully dull for me. I'm still not won over. There sure is a lot of useless framing most of the time.

Another way I could look at this is to think about how I go about marking special events or turning points. It occurs to me that for a long time, I would change my facial hair when there was a change in my life. Lately I haven't been doing that - there have been significant changes with no impact on my facial hair - but I think us getting a kitten was very much like a marker in our lives.

Enough for now. I hope I come back to this again soon.

mariposa grove

2007-05-26T14:02:00.000-05:00

Jess and I have now resettled in a really great cohousing community called Mariposa Grove. We're still in Oakland, but now we're living with a lot of other people, and we're buying a condo unit. This is great. The community is made of four old (but modified) victorians, and about 20 people live here. The 3 core units house 11 adults, 5 kids. It's interesting to be around kids. I'm enjoying it (they aren't my responsibility).

Also, jess and I made the switch to a car that runs biodiesel after the corolla was totalled, so we've now got one of those 80s era mercedes. We haven't done the conversion to waste veggie oil yet, but biodiesel is working out well so far. The water pump went out last week, but it wasn't too expensive to fix, and we've still got reserves from the insurance pay-off for Sonia (the corolla).

One of the shared perks (besides the chickens) is that there's a common guest room, so if you're in the area, we can put you up on something better than our couch. That's right, your own guest room and bathroom! Just let me know ahead of time, because there's a calendar that I'd have to put you on to reserve the space...

If you'd like to move in, one of the other units is actually opening up in August, and we're holding open houses over the next couple of weeks. Pop on by.

As for working, so far this space seems like it will be pretty good for me. I'm still working on the Vietnam UXO doc, so that's fine.

-Aaron.

Phone for Aatcon

2007-03-20T14:27:00.000-05:00

I have just received the first phone call for Aatcon.

"Hi, may I please speak to Aa... Aatcon Mee... Meeshells?"

I was too stunned to say anything other than, "Aatcon? That person doesn't even exist!" (I now recognize this as arguably a fleshist chauvinist simplification.)

Whoever it was - probably one of his telemarketer buddies - then apologized and hung up.

I think the flat vehemence of my response stunned her. Certainly mine was not the usual response a telemarketer gets. Perhaps she felt she had mispronounced Aatcon's name, and "Aatcon" had taken offense. If only she knew how much deeper it goes.

As I reflected on this brief conversation, I was actually quite impressed with her pronunciation of Aatcon, and then it dawned on me. In our brief conversation, she had helped to solve a long-standing mystery.

The mystery relates to what I had previously regarded as the frequent mispronunciation of my last name, which is "Michels". My family believes this is correctly pronounced very much like "Michael's". I had always thought that the lack of the "a" in the last syllable threw some people off, and they simply went for something different. But now I realize, "Meeshells" is a perfectly legitimate pronunciation of the spelling of my last name, and in some regions of the bureaucratic underworld, it is in fact the preferred pronunciation:

"Meesheels" is Aatcon's preferred pronunciation of his own last name!

All of these years that I felt that telemarketers, phone bankers, and computer generated voices were mispronouncing my name, they may in fact have been mistaking me, briefly, for Aatcon, my second shadow-self in the world of raw information. A monumental discovery!

In retrospect, If I had been clearer headed, I would have held the woman for questioning, but before I had a chance to think, she had disappeared, back into the anonymous phone banks from which she had come.

30

2007-03-19T15:34:00.000-05:00

three decades of fun - but it's time to renew the ol' mortal coil. o yes.

So, I turned 30 a couple weeks ago, and now I'm in the 9th day of a 10 (or 11?) day fast. It just occurred to me that these might be related things. I certainly didn't decide to do the fast because I turned 30. I've been curious for a while, and my neighbor was talking about it, and had this totally kooky book that i read about it. So I thought, "This would be a good time..." I've wondered for a while What it would be like to not eat. Plus I wanted to get rid of my 'toxins'! I mean, who wouldn't?

I'm doing the "Master Cleanse Fast" which means all I consume is water and lemonade with cayenne in it. yum! It's actually been surprisingly easy. I haven't felt starved at all, just conscious of how much of life is devoted to food, and how much I like to cook and eat.

-aaron.

Oh yeah, and my knee doesn't really hurt in the morning anymore. so that MUST be the
'toxins' going away.

who is "Aaron Michels"?

2007-03-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

The other day, I was googling some old friends, to see what their web faces looked like, and then I decided to check my own - look in the google mirror, so to speak.

I did see myself, but I also saw "Aaron Michels" as a chemist, as a leader of college republicans, and as a gay porn star. How varied we are. Interesting.

Another thing I did recently was test the 20 questions AI on my name. Basically, it tries to guess the name you are thinking of by asking you traits of the person with that name. I put in my own name and then tried to answer honestly. Based on many iterations of people doing this, the AI forms a personality profile for that name - something like an "Average Aaron".

They won't tell me what the average Aaron looks like except in contradiction to my own answers.

Apparently, the average Aaron is vain, careless, and sexy. Also skinny, weak, non-athletic, and shorter than me.

The final puzzling bit is that it asked the question "Would you like to be [Aaron]?" I answered "Yes." but apparently the correct answer is "Doubtful". Yikes!

20Q results:

You were thinking of Aaron.
Do they want to be famous? 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Do they make careless errors? You said No, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Probably.
Would you go on a date with them? You said Irrelevant, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Are they active in sports? You said Sometimes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Doubtful.
Are they medium height? You said No, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Are they strong? You said Sometimes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is No.
Are they skinny? You said No, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Would you like to be them? You said Yes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Doubtful.

Contradictions Detected
The opinions of the 20Q A.I. are its own, and are based on the input of players. 20Q's answers reflect common knowledge. If you feel that 20Q is in error, the only way to correct it is to play again!
Similar Objects
John, Alex, Warren, Matt, David, Darrell, Mitchell, Daniel, Gagandeep, Keith, Mark, Carl.

songs that make me cry.

2007-02-10T17:15:00.000-06:00

There are songs that make me cry every time I hear them. Some of them I grow out of to some extent, but others, not so much.

Some of them are clearly sadish songs, but strangely, others are not sad at all and I struggle to explain why they have this impact on me. I have one "song that makes me cry" that is peppy ironic electronica. It's pretty popular, even danceable, and so it tends to come on at times that are inconvenient. When this song comes on as background music in a restaurant or bar I suddenly need to take a break and go for a walk, you know, get some privacy, otherwise I'd have to explain myself. so. yeah. powerful urges. yikes.

I'm tempted to name songs here, but you know, that would be like handing over X-rays of my most private emotional being. It's as if each song is an X-ray from a different angle, and the complete list is a detailed road map of my most vulnerable bits. So. Enough said.

Do you have songs like this?

PEAR lab closing

2007-02-09T22:55:00.000-06:00

Well, the days of the PEAR lab are now truly numbered. They're scheduled to close on February 28th. The New York Times just put out an article on it. So I think there's going to be a flurry of media on this - some folks have mentioned that yesterday's Oprah had some mention of PEAR-related concepts, though from what I saw about it, it looked like self-helpish stuff with not much tie-in.

Anyway, this press splurge means that I'm putting up a web page again.

I'm headed to the lab for the closure. I'll be picking up some more footage for the eventual documentary of which the PEAR lab will be a part (but not the singular central element).

Although I'm picking up this footage at the end of the month, I'm not going to go full steam on this doc any time soon. Not going to rush into it. I'm still following the freelance plan for this year. Still, I've been turning over ideas for that doc in my head, and I think it will mostly be about belief and the cynical mind. Possible other themes: growing up and out of and the magical thinking of childhood. Animism. The working title "The Science of Disbelief" occurred to me, but perhaps it's not doing to well in my focus groups... what do you think?

Eagles Fly

2007-02-06T13:42:00.001-06:00

My friend Omar works for MY TV in St. Louis, and they recently broadcast this video after a microphone mishap ruined the host's on-site audio. So they had to re-record something in the studio. What they recorded is hilarious. And very catchy. I woke up with the song in my head this morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwBsC3dst3I

check it.

BBC and the PEAR Proposition

2007-01-08T20:36:00.000-06:00

Apparently Yoko Ono recently commissioned a piece on the PEAR lab for the BBC. Her producer did some shoddy edits on my interview material from the PEAR Proposition and then introduced the material himself. Of note: I get no mention. Neither does the product (for sale here) that he lifted most of his material from.

Take a listen to the BBC's piece. Everything that's not Brenda or the producer is directly from the PEAR Prop (~30%). As I understand it, he didn't go to the lab, so his descriptions of the scene are also from the DVD. I would have loved it if he had approached this as a review of an educational release instead of as "journalism". As is, it makes me sad.

In light of the recent unexpected resurrection of GUR, and other things, I find myself in a disturbed state of mind. What is going on here?

Growing Up Racial - surprise appearance

2007-01-08T20:27:00.000-06:00

Nearly a year ago, I thought I was revitalizing that project. As it turns out, I didn't. But over Christmas break, it made a surprise resurgence. A neighbor told me he had seen it either on the IFC or Sundance Channel. I believe him, because he proceeded to describe it to me. This surprises me, because I never heard anything about this.

It was my understanding that the Higher Education Channel would debut the 30 min version and had the rights to play it a couple times, but I had assumed they had played it in 2003. (I didn't have cable at the time (and now, once again, I don't). I've searched the web-sites for all three and have seen no mention. Odd. Who played my material? And why didn't the tell me? This is something I need to figure out in the next couple of weeks.

Part of me wants the short 30 min version to be buried, never to be exhumed, but that's the same part of me that insists that someday I'm going to revisit and finish the project. Who knows what I really want?

Well, well, well.

2007-01-08T19:59:00.000-06:00

Another new year, so here's a long overdue update:

I messed up my rt. ankle while camping in Yosemite.
Jess and I moved to Oakland because Jess got a job at the Bay Area Discovery Museum. (address is new, phone is the same).
the 1 min video I made for/with Joe Uhl screened at the Film Arts Foundation's 30th anniversary party as one of the top 10.
I'm working part time to help editing along on a documentary about victims of unexploded ordnance in Vietnam.
The compost video is done, and better than I thought it would be. Not yet in distribution though.
Blurb.com is really cool. Jessica and I made a wedding album with it. The product is better than you imagine it will be.
Other things are still in a sort of "behind the scenes" limbo which may change my life drastically, or may just be a depressing episode.

Things I'm looking forward to:

I seem to be in a prime location for bonsai and tai chi. The Oakland Chinatown is VIBRANT. I think my ankle's just about good enough to make tai chi possible again, so I'm looking forward to that.
Jess enrolled me in a class that is going to make sure that I work out the next variation in the light sculpture projects (opaque objects). I've also got some better ideas for materials for the semi-transparent objects. Anyone nearby want to be the subject of a sculptural portrait?
I'm going to be an -ee this year. Not an -er. This has been my mom's suggestion since Alicia and I were small: Be an employee. So, I'm not going to start any major self-employment activities this year, and instead will dedicate myself to "OPP" (other people's projects). I'm still wrapping some old stuff up, and for most of the spring, I will be only part time employed outside of the house.

lucky kids

2006-11-22T12:31:00.000-06:00

hey. I listened to this podcast this morning, and it made me think.

http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_061115.mp3
slightly more info here:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/11.09/11-luck.html

"[T]his innocuous preference for the privileged may eventually grow more harmful, further increasing negativity toward the disadvantaged. Such preferences may, in turn, help explain the persistence of social inequality."

My comment: in places where I read synopses of this study, there seems to be a sociobiological bent to the interpretation, ie "this natural childhood phenomenon could explain persistent social inequality."

I lean toward the social conditioning explanation, which seems to be getting a lot less play: "Hmm. So kids learn by age five to side with the advantaged. Not unsurprising, I guess."

Aatcon Update

2006-11-03T20:15:00.000-06:00

You know, in some ways I may have brought this on myself.

Some background: I'm a man who keeps pretty good tabs on his bank statements, and you could say I'm kinda frugal sometimes. So when someone says, "Hey, here's a 0% interest loan for a year, no fees!" I basically read that as, "have some free money, on us." And I often say, "Sure, why not."

Since I keep good records, and pay off debts when it's advantageous, I just earn some conservative interest on that money for a year, and imagine that I'm taking a bite out of the profit margins of predatory lenders. Which I think is a good thing.

So how does this relate to Aatcon? As I mentioned before, Aatcon often gets a better offer than I do, so... er ...

Full disclosure here: In the past I have claimed to be Aatcon in order to get the better rate.

It's not something I'm proud of. You have to understand that Aatcon had been flaunting his preferred status for some time. Yes, I took advantage of him, but I'd hardly call it identity theft; I'd call it quid pro quo. Customer service didn't call it anything, they just said, "I'm sure we can help you with that," when I said, "you got my name wrong on your offer".

So, in my declaration of war, I suppose it wasn't entirely just of me to represent him as only a burden. Yes, he uses me, and he has taken certain liberties that I find detestable (the matter of making me a "formerly known as") but the truth is that I have found him useful to have around at times.

Which is probably one reason why I still hesitate to finish him off. Yes, he is still here. In fact, Aatcon started getting mail at my new address before I did. I think the reason was that my mail forwarding paperwork got caught up in the USPS system somehow, and of course, it took me a while to inform friends and family of the new address. So I didn't start getting my real mail for a couple of weeks. But, of course, I had immediately changed my address on my credit cards. So Aatcon's friends were the first to know about the move, and sent him a greeting (in the form of convenience checks from US Bank) before I happened to get any mail myself.

I guess that's the advantage of being made of information. When your address changes, people know it. It's like he's got little elves that update all his friend's address books.

I could use some of those elves. I think I'm still getting mail in Santa Cruz.

email blip

2006-10-28T20:38:00.000-05:00

hey yall.

if you sent me email between the 10th of October and yesterday (the 27th), I did not get it. I realize there's not much chance that people who sent me email in that time period are reading this, but this is the best way I have of reaching the plural unknown "You" out there, so there you have it. My apologies if I never respond to your inquiry.

Apparently, exactly as I was moving from Santa Cruz to Oakland, (which came up very suddenly, and took up way too much of my October), my email inbox overflowed*. Unaware, I decided that it would be a good time for me to take a bit of a break from the web, and I delayed setting up broadband in my new location. I thought I would be coming back to an inbox full of news and things I needed to respond to, but instead, I came back to an inbox that looked identical to when I left it. After a couple of test messages from other accounts, I've discovered that most people who emailed me probably did not get any message saying "message not received". So, this is that message.

*the thunderbird setting that orders my email to be "deleted from server when I delete a message or move it from my (Local) inbox" apparently does not work reliably, which resulted in my inbox eventually getting filled. 100Mb!

demo reel.

2006-08-25T19:58:00.000-05:00

i'm surprised I haven't had to put one of these together before now, but I guess I wasn't looking for jobs much either. In any case, I'm doing a bit of a job hunt at the moment while I consider weather or not to continue "independent" projects. I'd like a more social and active environment than my home-office.

anyway, here's a stab at a demo reel...

-Aaron.

wedding photoz

2006-07-07T18:32:00.000-05:00

wedding photos and links have started pouring in. I'm feeling rather gushy lately. i enjoyed this more than I thought I would, and that's a lot. so anyway, some flickr links:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mexican/tags/jessicaandaaronswedding/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessicaaaronwedding/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gniewko/tags/aaronjessicawedding/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/jessicaandaaronswedding/

wuv,
aaron.

dreams and memory

2006-05-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

i had a nice little dream last night. It was very simple; all that happened was that I was walking past a garden, saw a place that I recognized from my childhood, and put it back to rights.

It was one of those special little places where a kid might have hidden or played without anyone noticing. In this case, it was a small patch of dirt under a bush near a garden wall. In the dream, I had a very vivid memory of how I used to play there, and how there used to be a small cup made of turned stone that I would place in a certain spot.

I stopped as I walked by, and it seemed wrong that the cup was not in its place. Searching the grounds, I saw that the cup was nearby and half-covered by dirt. I went into the garden, unearthed the cup, brushed it off, and put it back in its proper spot.

------

The interesting thing about this dream was a certain quality of the memory. I don't know if you're like me, but I often have a similar experience when I visit old haunts. These little secret spots just jump out at me. I never remember them until I see them, and then all the little idiosyncrasies come out. I remember what each knot on a tree means, which bush was King Kong, and which one was home base. These little spots are just packed with personal meanings.

The place in my dream was like that. But because I found the spot in a dream, I find myself thinking, "it's not real", even though it feels more like a real childhood memory than a dream. So today I'm idly pondering the differences between "real" memory, dreaming, and the memories created in dreams.

Was the place I came across last night a 'real' childhood memory manifesting in a dream? Was it the rediscovery of a place where I had dreamed before? Or was the dream just the sensation of being surprised by 'memory'? What would be the difference?

If every elements in a dream comes from memory composites, is it the same with childhood imaginings? Does every childhood meaning come from an earlier memory association? When the second bush in the row became King Kong to me, I must have known about King Kong. And I must have wanted to represent King Kong some way in my daily life. This makes sense to me.

But more than clarify what last night's dream was (beyond a conglomeration of memories, dreamed derivatives of those memories, and my own dreaming and waking associations), it only redirects my questioning.

This dream highlights a particular class of meaning that dreams share with the wandering imaginings of childhood. It's a kind of meaning that is highly personal, and which doesn't reason well. It is the space where toys have living personalities, where "four" is not "two plus two", but a calm intelligent friend who moves slowly - maybe like an elephant.

The adult world has an odd prejudice against these meanings. The common analogy here is the cobweb - these remnants of childhood meanings must be cleared away. It was just like that this morning - like waking from childhood into adulthood. And this morning as I got up and focused on the tasks of the day, I dispersed the invisible touch that allowed a stone cup to keep its soul.

pics and thoughts from the Maker Faire

2006-05-28T01:02:00.000-05:00

hey. It's been about a month since the Maker Faire, and I wanted to show some peeps new iterations of the back-lit carvings I've started doing, so I thought I'd finally post this. check it out.

The rest of this post I'm going to talk about what I've learned from doing this. The questions to answer: What's going on here mentally for the viewer? What have I learned about materials? What have I learned about images? What's next?

Sitting at a booth and explaining this over and over again made me really think about what's going on here in the mind of the viewer. Why is it interesting at all?

As far as I can think right now, there are four elements that confuse the viewer and make the effect surprising.

apparent vs. real light source,
reflected vs. transmitted light,
topographical sculpture vs. light-image, and
angle-specific legibility

1. More than a photographic print or a projected image, this technique brings your awareness to the way light creates the image. You see it, you know it's back-lit, so you think the light source you are supposed to interpret is behind the surface. It's as if you expect a silhouette. This conflicts with the impression of a different distinct light source in the image. So, for example, the face above looks lit from the left, though it's actually lit from behind.

2. Another way there's a bit of a mental bender here is that you know that you're seeing transmitted light passing through a translucent material, but the experience of the image above is that you're seeing reflected light bouncing off opaque skin.

3. You know you're seeing a topographical surface rather than a simple projection, so your mind is constantly flipping back and forth between seeing the topographical surface and the image the light creates.

4. The specific topography of the image also creates some serious distortion when viewing the image off-angle. Viewed off-angle, the image is almost unreadable. It becomes even more so when it's un-lit or projected on a curved or off-angle surface. The experience of walking by the object is really nice for Halloween because you can't really understand the object until you pass the precise angle at which the image is legible. There's a surprise factor when the image suddenly pops out at you.

These four factors combined create an experience of cognitive dissonance. It was kind of fun sitting at the booth and watching people react to the baby face. From a distance the image looked like a simple projection. But when close, the mind starts to reach for other explanations of what the object is. Watching the faces of the viewers was interesting - lots of knotted brows, blinking, and "whoa" expressions. It's almost like it makes you dizzy.

Speaking of cognitive dissonance, it was really surprising how many people entered the room and said, "I can really smell the pumpkin in here!" It seems that the mental cue of "carved fruit lit from within," made everyone think that the smell was pumpkin. There was a strong smell in the room from the heated watermelon, but it was clearly a watermelon smell once you were able to get past the idea of a jack-o-lantern. When I pointed out to people that there was no pumpkin, they were pretty surprised by that too.

Ah, the human brain; how we are creatures of habit.

--------

okay, so that's about as much as I've thought through what makes this technique interesting. For the Maker Faire, I put most of my effort into trying new materials. Though I only ended up showing stuff in styrofoam and watermelon, I tried some other things which aren't ready to show yet.

So far, pumpkin is still the best material to work with, except for the rotting factor. I definitely had the best range of shadows working in pumpkin. The styrofoam had a good gradient and was easy to work with, but there's no point where it becomes completely opaque, so you never get a real black.

Pumpkin naturally has a skin on it, so you can get pretty decent blacks when it's back-lit. It also has a pretty dense flesh, so even after you take off the first layer of skin, you've still got a pretty dark shade to work with.

Watermelon, on the other hand, has a very translucent flesh and rind. As soon as you remove the skin of the watermelon, you get a very hot spot of light. If I went down to a small-wick candle for the back-light, I may have had more range in the shadows, but I wouldn't have been able to display in the low-light conditions I had; I would have needed a pitch dark room. In the end I had to work most of the darker areas on the watermelon just by scratching the surface of the skin. Just scratching the surface meant that the depth of the carving was lost and so the interesting distortions when viewing off-angle were also lost. sad. Conclusion: watermelon is delicious but annoying. Perhaps cantaloupe would work better.

To imitate the pumpkin skin, I thought about skinning the front of the styrofoam with spray paint, but I ended up not doing it. I prefer the idea of solid materials to layering. To me, the cool thing is that the image is created from the carving depth, not by line drawing or outline painting.

Here are my recommendations for picking a material:

Start by determining the level of light you're going to have at your display.
This determines the strength of light you'll need for your back-light,
And that determines the thickness you need of your material for it to be fully opaque in front of your back-light.
At this point, pick a semi-transparent material that can be near opaque at a reasonable thickness in front of your back-light. An opaque skin on the front may be helpful.

----------

I fielded a lot of questions about image selection at the Makers Faire, and what follows is the best advice I've been able to come up with.

use images that have strong directional lighting. You may have more than one source of directional lighting, but very diffuse light is not good. Stronger gradients are better. Camera-mounted flash-photography is bad.
something that needs very fine detail for it's impact makes the carving very tedious - so avoid extreme subtlety in expression if you're doing portraiture.
make sure you're picking an image where the light source in the image has an interesting interplay with the back-lighting. So don't pick a silhouette, or something front lit. it should be off-angle lighting to emphasize the cognitive dissonance i talked about earlier.

for the rest of the intstructions, you can still check the instructables site.

------------

Where to go from here?

Well, one thing that should be clear from the images I've carved so far is that I've been paying a lot more attention to materials, mental processes, and the light characteristics of the images than I have been paying attention to the content of the image.

I need to give that some thought. I seem to like portraiture, which isn't a bad thing for this...

I also haven't yet given enough thought to how the reflectivity of the front surface of the material could interplay with the translucence coming from the back-light. My next plan is for some reflective carvings instead of doing them back-lit. I think I'm going to stick with portraiture, but I'm going to try to put more effort into making the content work.

-aaron.