Bouquet of Doom

Hacking the Mix.

A while back, I wrote a piece for Stage Directions Magazine about a (relatively) simple way to use an iphone to control levels of sound in QLab. The piece was published in the most recent edition, and you can read it here!

Thanksgiving in Pictures

A good day today. Lots of food, family, and friends. I'm headed to bed soon, so I'm not going to write much. Mostly, just photos.
The pan, waiting for the turkey. In the pan: apples, onion, celery, carrot, fennel, olive oil, salt, pepper. On the bird: a bacon & herb-infused butter.

Le bird, she is in le oven.

Mom dresses some flowers, D does some tidying, and I check our status on an elaborately color-coded spreadsheet of cooking madness.

Flowers on the table, places are set.

Le bird, she is out of le oven.

I'm not sure why, but my camera had trouble focusing on N today. Happy first Thanksgiving, bud!

C, R, N, Dad, Mom, D, and S all wait for me to stop taking photos so they can start eating. Dinner included applesauce, yams with streusel, herb-bacon turkey, herb-onion dressing, pumpkin-ricotta ravioli, green beans with pecans & dijon vinaigrette, cranberry sauce, sauerkraut. Oh, and manhattans and wine. Everything turned out well except for the gravy, which was very time-consuming and got rushed at the very end of the prep. Instead, we called it turkey 'au jus.'
The pear-blueberry cobbler with corn biscuit topping. This turned out remarkably. We also had a yummy farmer's-market-bought pumpkin pie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Willy Loman rides again

The fall term got off to a huge start, and I've been remiss in posting for a while. Here's a quickie before heading off to bed.

A few weeks ago, a friend turned me on to this column about how baby boomers have failed us (I'm a child of boomers) as a generation. Not my parents, of course (I noticed how the author also excused his parents), but their generation in general took an amazing world gifted them by the greatest generation and turned it into a myopic, selfish, litigious world full of terrible leadership and terrible advice. I had a great conversation about the column with my father-in-law a week and a half ago, and the other day, he referred me to this column, which forms a sort of rebuttal by taking my generation to task for their superficiality.

I've been thinking about both columns, and about Willy Loman. The 'hero' of Death of a Salesman grew up in a time when a man could provide for his family, when a handshake meant you had a deal, and when a good personality was all you needed for professional success. He advises his sons that the most important thing to be in life is to be well-liked. By the end of the play, Willy Loman, having seen his whole world shatter, is driven to suicide.

We're supposed to view Loman as sad and out of touch. The world has changed and left him behind. It's no longer useful to be well-liked: you now need to be smart too! Poor Willy - he's doomed to obsolescence.

Except that what Willy believed is what we're taught. We're taught that a smile and an emoticon is enough to get you out of trouble. We're taught that it's okay if you're not smart as long as you can tell a joke. We're taught that those who are intelligent but not well-liked end life at the bottom of the pile. We're taught that masking your true feelings behind a veneer of pleasantness is the way to the top.

The truth lies in between, as most truths do. It's not enough to be well-liked, but it is important. It's not enough to be intelligent, but it is important. It's not enough to be honest, but it is enough.

Well-liked, Intelligent, and Honest. Willy Loman had two (mostly), and he killed himself. Bernard was all three. Biff, two, and he hurt for it. Happy, two, and he was blissfully ignorant.

You need all three for success.

Soundwalk 2011

Saturday night was Soundwalk in Long Beach, CA. Soundwalk is an annual sound art festival. This year, there were about 40 artists who took over about 6 square blocks of downtown LB with their noise installations. I had two projects in this year.

The Whole World Blind was a partnership with Roxanne Varzi, an anthropologist here at UCI. We worked together to create a binaural recording that de-contextualizes the visual elements of war photographs. It was a really interesting piece, and I heard a lot of great response about it.

City Park (2011) is a project by my collective, Push The Button. Brad Berridge, Davin Huston, and I created an interactive environment using ipads and iphones. We installed in a storefront on 3rd St.

Over the course of the night, we had lots of visitors come into our room. The population cycled between 5 and 35 people, each of whom got a chance to use the iDevices to control the sonic environment.

We got a lot of great feedback during the event, including more than one person who called us 'geniuses' (which, of course, we won't let to go our head). Plus, this installation was the first time we had children take part in the exhibition, and we found that kids as young as 2 REALLY got into the way that they could control the sounds with their fingers. Here's a couple older kids (younger adults) pushing the buttons.

What's next? Well, we're not telling. But Push the Button's got plans.