Author: Zingblog 2

Midwest Adventure, Part 1 – Art and Industry

I just got back from a trip with Jeannie to the Midwest, specifically Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.  The trip was centered on an origami event, CFC6 (Conference for Creators, Number 6), hosted by my good friend Beth in Ann Arbor Michigan.  We’d never been to that part of the country before, so we figured we’d do a few days touristing before the conference began.

Our flight left NYC Monday morning and landed in Detroit shortly before noon.  From there we had time for one daytime activity, and chose the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio.  The main attraction here was a decommissioned lake freighter.  As the big freighters go she was bigger than most, I think they said 800 feet long.  You could go up to the bridge and down into the hold and engine room.  Pretty neat.  The rest of museum was housed in a regular building and featured exhibits about the history, ecology, climate, and economy of the great lakes region, with a lot about the evolution boats and ships, from indigenous people and the arrival of French fur trappers up thru the present day.  The museum was situated in a larger park that was nice to walk around.

The evening we drove out to Auburn, Indiana.  The main attraction there was the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum.  I’ve been a longtime fan of Duesenberg, Cord and Auburn automobiles since I was a kid into building model cars, and this place has been on my bucket list for a long time.  And it did not disappoint.  For those who don’t know, these were some of the coolest classic cars ever, each with their own unique character.  Duesenbergs in particular were the ultimate luxury car, big as a modern extra large SUV or monster pickup truck, but with a giant racecar engine and amazing styling and coachwork.  They typically had aluminum bodies.  (Each body was custom built on an engine/chassis platform.)  Today they’re considered priceless, rolling works of art, with only a few hundred in existence.  Twenty or so are in the museum, all meticulously restored.  The ultimate Doozy is the SJ, with a supercharged engine and distinctive external exhaust pipes.  The Auburn was the Duesenberg’s smaller cousin, smaller, lighter and slightly more affordable, but still with a focus on luxury and performance.  They are famous for their boattail roadsters.  Cord was its own thing, very advanced and a little weird for the day, being the the world’s first successful mass-manufactured front-wheel drive car, with its distinctive coffin nose and touches such as disappearing headlights.  Sadly, Auburn Cord Duesenberg went out of business during the great depression.  Amazing to think that these cars are all ninety years old or more, many of them over a hundred.

The museum was in the former company showroom and headquarters, and had a good selection of all of these cars, plus other historical autos including a Cadillac V-16, and a Lincoln and Chrysler from the same era, as well as a fleet of earlier models going back the the beginning of the 1900’s and the origin of automobiles.  They also had some rare prototypes, some engines and few historical airplanes, and exhibits on E. L. Cord, the automotive design studio, and the history of the factory and the company, and the rise and fall of the automobile industry in Indiana.

Next door was the former manufacturing plant, which is now a classic car museum with alot of muscle cars from the 60’s, a handful of different kinds of racecars, and a broad spectrum of mainly American historical cars from the entire spectrum of the twentieth century. A couple 1960’s Mustangs like my own.

I will say my one big disappointment for the trip was that my other bucket-list item, the National Brass and Woodwind Museum and the Conn-Selmer factory in Elkhart, Indiana, closed sometime in 2025, even as we were beginning to plan our trip, so we never got to see that.  Ah well.

Both days we had dinner at a bar nearby the museum we were visiting. I must say the general vibe of the tri-state region was exactly the opposite of exotic to me, rather it was very friendly warm and even felt familiar.  The landscapes, the people, the history and context, all that.  It felt alot upstate and western New York, and southern Ontario when you get out west toward London.  I guess that’s what they mean by the Great Lakes Region.

Tuesday evening it was off to Ann Arbor.  The convention didn’t officially start until Thursday, but there were activities slated for Wednesday.  The convention was at a hotel called Webers, which was a very cool and funky hotel with a sort of art deco jazz age vibe.  We watched the Sabres vs the Canadiens at the cozy, wood-paneled bar while the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Red Garland played on the PA. 

Wednesday we met a bunch of our origami friends at breakfast, including Ilan and Nicolas, who run CFC and organized the conference.  A short while later, a bunch of convened in the lobby and were joined by our host Beth for the main activity, a day trip into Detroit and the Detroit Institute of Art.  Enough of us had a car that everyone got a ride, a pattern that continued throughout the week.

The Detroit Art Institute is a very cool museum.  Its most famous and impressive work is the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, which fills all four walls of a giant hall and depicts the whole life-cycle of auto manufacturing in a complicated series of panels that merge realism, storytelling, symbolism and mythology in a way that sums up what we’ve seen so far in the Great Lakes Region perfectly.  There were several other galleries including American modernists, and some Mid-Eastern and Asian collections that range from ancient Rome to the present day.  Apparently there was also a furniture and industrial design collection that I missed.  Ah well.  It’s always good inspiration when a bunch of artists go to an art museum together.

We all got lunch, and then went to a place called Michigan Central Station, a former train station that was abandoned fell into disrepair in the later twentieth century.  The city did not have enough money to demolish it and became a symbol of Detroit’s decline and misfortune.  Over the last decade or so, it has been beautifully restored and is now a public attraction and event space, with the the building above the main concourse being an office tower, and overall a symbol of Detroit’s resurgence and renewal.  Alot impressive stonework, particularly because you rarely see stone architecture looking new and clean.

Finally, that evening we had a barbecue at Beth’s house.  It was a slightly larger group as more conference attendees came into town.  It was unseasonably cool but I helped Beth build a fire in a firepit in her backyard.  Beth has a very nice design studio in a building in her backyard that used to be a garage, including a large table for folding.  Makes me want to rethink my own studio setup.  Anyway, it was great to hang out and catch up with my origami friends in a relaxed setting.  Although there’s some overlap with the OUSA regular crowd, there’s a bunch of Midwesterners I rarely see. 

Okay, halfway thru the trip.  The conference is set to begin Thursday morning.  I’m exhausted already.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Yeah it’s true, I got laid off from my day job as lead engineer at [company’s] Innovation Lab last month, as part of a massive company-wide restructuring.  Or, putting it another way, I got replaced by an AI bot.  You see, [company] has been losing money for a while now, its core value proposition of well-researched and authoritative product comparison information being attacked and eroded by AI internet chatbots that, while perhaps not as accurate or nuanced, tend to be cheaper and more convenient.  So, the Innovation Lab is no more. They got rid of a bunch of us including Ben our VP and visionary leader, while the rest got reassigned into other business units in the organization.  Ah well, it was a good run while it lasted.  We built some excellent products in the space of consumer privacy protection, advocacy, and digital rights, including the Permission Slip app and the Data Right’s Protocol.  I was the tech lead for both projects, and they rank high as proud achievements in a career that has included many fun and cool accomplishments in software R&D and product development. And I learned alot about alot of things in my time there too. Sadly [company’s] commitment to continuing working in that space had diminished prior to the restructuring, so the writing was on the wall. Meanwhile, the other main thread of the lab’s work, focused on AI chatbots of our own, had pretty much graduated from R&D and folded into the main digital group.  I have no idea what has become of the remaining R&D initiatives.

But there’s no point in sitting around feeling bitter about it, although they do try hard to make you feel as bad as possible when they give you the boot, suddenly cut off from your friends and colleagues and your own work that you’ve put so much into over many years.  For my part, I had a lucky bounce in that I’ve been able to increase my level of commitment to The Global Jukebox, and it’s a good time for it too.  We’re building towards a major release later this year and there’s tons of work to do, and it’s a fun project.  Last week I listened to over a hundred and fifty pop songs to review the Cantometric codings done by a team of consultants.  Kind of amazing how vast and diverse the last hundred years of recorded music is, and how many great songs are out there. 

Other than that, my plan for now is to relax and enjoy the summer, and not worry until the fall about whether I want to look for another full-time job or just continue doing consulting.  My sense is that now is not a good time to try and jump back in, since all the big tech companies are sacking their workers by the thousands and replacing them with AI.  Eventually this will blow over like every previous cyclic downturn.  What really matters to me is to find a cool and exciting project to work on that is worth my time and effort.

Anyway, it’s a good time of year to have some time off.  As mentioned before, I’ve been doing alot of biking.  I’m averaging about sixty miles a week now, and plan to for the rest of the summer.  This past weekend Jeannie and I finally got out to the Empire State trail.  I did sixteen miles in an hour and twelve minutes.  Not too bad, but a little slower than my best times last year.  I’ve also increased the level of weight in my weightlifting workout, up to 202 pounds on bench press, and 120 on curls and the other dumbbell exercises.  200/120 was the goal I set for myself a long time ago to hit before I turn sixty.  I’ll be fifty-eight this year, so from here on out it’s gravy.  Oh, and I’ve lost ten pounds since the winter too.

There’s tons to do outside this time of year, and I’ve been spending time every day working on the yard.  Project patio is nearly done.  It involves spending time outside and lifting heavy things, so double fun.  My patio is made of flagstones laid on a bed of sand and compacted gravel, and over time the stones tend to settle and shift.  Five years ago during the pandemic I enlarged the patio, so this year I’m straightening up the new area.  This involves lifting up the stones one by one with a crowbar, putting in some new sand under them, putting the back and filling in the gaps between the stones with more sand.  The new area all done and I just have one more spot near the stairs to go.  I might need to go out and buy more sand before I can finish.

In music, my jazz group Spacecats has a gig coming up in late June.  We would have liked to make it sooner, but different members of the groups have scheduling conflicts, so we’re off-and-on for rehearsals for the next few weeks.  We’re also trying to schedule our long-awaited recording session.  Meanwhile we’re continuing to learn new songs and have fun.

My recording project Spellbound is progressing as well.  I’ve been working in the 18-minute epic that fills most of side two, which I’m calling The Sailor’s Saga because I don’t remember what title we gave it back in the day.  I’m tracking the first three sections, leaving the big instrumental fourth movement to the end, because I’m going to rewrite it pretty dramatically, whereas the first three parts follow the original demo fairly faithfully.  Back in the winter I started with a click track and basic piano part.  To this I’ve now added a pretty much full (midi) drum part, and electric bass.  The first section is fast and grooving, the second is slow and atmospheric, and the third features a carefully crafted slow build in the rhythm section over a long, repeated chord progression. 

Now I’m up to the first of the guitar tracks, basic rhythm guitar.  The jaunty first section went down pretty easily, although I had to practice the part a few times to get it together.  There’s no part in the section section, so now I’m up to the third section.  It starts out doing arpeggios on the eighth notes, which is surprisingly hard for me.  I’ve been practicing every day, and consistently improving, but I imagine it’ll be a few more days at least before I’ll be able to get a good take. 

Finally, we have an origami event coming next week.  It’s CFC, the Conference for Creators, and this year it’s in Ann Arbor Michigan, hosted by Beth Johnson.  I’ve never been to that part of the country before, so Jeannie and I are going out a few days before the start to tour around the upper midwest.  Also, I’m scheduled to give a seminar on Folding with Fivefold Geometry, so I need to get my presentation together.  And, I want to have a new model for my exhibit, a perfected version of my Pentagon Human Figure that I came up with at CoCon in Chicago in March.  More on all this as it, uh, unfolds.

Wait for a Springtime Tide

Seasons change and so do I.  I’ve been trying to focus on springtime projects these days, and striking off a bunch of long-standing tasks from my todo list.  Last week I took the mustang into the shop for some maintenance, including an oil change and inspection.  The car is almost sixty years old, so it’s good to have some confidence that everything mechanical is in good shape when I drive it.  I also began and completed project dirt, which started with getting a cubic yard of topsoil delivered to my house.  I used it to fill in some low spots in my yard, mainly where there had been trees years before and now decayed remnants of the stumps and roots have left sunken and uneven areas.  The last step was to cover it with grass seed and start watering it.  We had an unusual heat wave last week, and it got up to ninety degrees three days in a row.  These happened to be the days I was out working in the yard shoveling dirt.  Ah well, at least once I was done it rained for a whole day, so the watering is off to a good start.  Next up: project patio!

I’ve been biking more and more.  Last week I did five days in a row agin.  My longer rides have been getting progressively long, the last one being thirteen miles, with a good amount of pulling up hills, and half of it on mountain biking trails.  Meanwhile I’ve added an extra loop to my short ride, brining it up to six miles.  The weather had been widely variable from day to day, so it’s not easy to figure out how to dress.  I’ve yet to get out to the rail trail this spring.  That’s flat and smooth, and I usually go between sixteen and twenty-four miles on it.  Last year I got up to thirty miles one time.  I also went up in weight on my weightlifting working a few weeks ago.  I’m now up to two hundred and two pounds on the bench press, and one hundred fifteen on the curls and other dumbbell exercises.  Hoping to go up again later this spring.

I’ve been putting alot of time into The Global Jukebox lately.  Plenty to do for the upcoming release of version 4.0.  Recently I’ve been focusing on making the wheel and the map work with alternative taxonomies for language and peoples in addition to the default taxonomy for people.  Nick did alot of foundation work for this: reading in the data and building the models in memory, and a first pass at the interactive UI stuff.  I thought it would be pretty quick to finish of the remaining functionality and fix a few minor bugs, but it turned out to be surprisingly deep.  I ended up doing a major refactoring across five classes.  I’m pretty much done the functionality, but still want to do some more foundational work. Now that I’ve come this far it’s become alot clearer what theright abstractions and design patterns are.

This last Sunday I went into the city to teach origami at OUSA Special Sessions at the American Museum of Natural History.  My class was Fun Spaceships, and included a bunch of intermediate level models from my book Air and Space Origami.  The class was small, and two of the students were really bright kids.  It was great because it was a fun and casual vibe, and I could give everyone enough attention if they needed it.  We ended up folding five models in two hours.  One of them was the Space Probe, which I haven’t folded in a long time and had forgotten what a fun model it is.  Jeannie and Michelle came too, and after the class we did a quick tour of the museum, hitting the dinosaurs, which are always amazing, a loop around the planetarium, and the halls of big dioramas of African and North American Mammals, and ending with the Whale Room. 

Easter Beagle Birdland

We were up in Buffalo last week for Easter, to visit my Mum and Dad, and Lizzy and Josh.  Kathleen and the kids came up for Easter Sunday too.  It was a fun trip and a good time.  My Mum made a big Easter dinner.  We watched some weird TV specials including Peter Cottontail, It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown, and Happy Arbor Day Charlie Brown.  Lots of chocolate, my dad really enjoyed that.  Charlie is a good chess player.  I haven’t played in ages so I’m pretty rusty, but nevertheless he beat me twice.  We also played Risk, which was alot of fun.  Michelle won that, having consolidated North America early on. On Dyngus Day, Michelle and I visited the Buffalo Zoo, which was a fun time too.  I haven’t been there in years.  They really have alot of great animals in a relatively small space.  Lions, tigers, rhinos, gorillas, giraffes, a Komodo dragon, lots of other reptiles, birds and other creatures, and the largest polar bear I’ve ever seen.  That night we all went to play trivia with Lizzy, which was alot of fun too.  The Sabres were on TV, having just clinched the playoffs. Back home Wednesday night, Michelle and I went to see the Sabres vs. the Rangers at Madison Square Garden.  The Sabres are hot this year and going to the playoffs for the first time in many years.  The ended up winning 5-3.  It was a well-played game on both sides.

I’ve been binge-watching 1980’s scifi/action movies.  So far the list includes Big Trouble in Little China, History of the World Part One (I know, it’s a comedy not action/scifi), Spaceballs, Escape from New York, and first Two Terminator movies.  Now I’ve started thinking about it and there’s a ton of fun, cool movies from when I was a teenager that I haven’t seen in many years. 

The weather had finally turned nice.  I’ve been biking five days in a row.  This week I’m also getting rolling on a bunch of springtime projects including getting some work done on the mustang, and project dirt.

Spellbound – New Mixes

Here are rough mixes of the first six songs of my upcoming album Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter. I’ve been listening back to them and making tweaks to the balance, effects, and compression. I’m ready to declare victory on these for now and put them aside until the last song is finished, then come back to them for final mastering. But that may take a while, since the last song is a doozy!

Anyway, here you go, enjoy!

The Call of the Muse
Strange to My Mind
The Slient Hour
Sandcastles
Flock of Fools
Frozen Ocean

A-Hoppin’ an’ A-Boppin’

It’s been a busy few weeks.  Winter is over and one or twice a week we get a day nice enough to be hopeful that spring will be here any day now.  I’ve been going into the city alot recently.  The week after our trip to Chicago we went to a tribute concert to Billy Joel at Carnegie Hall.  I’d never been to Carnegie Hall before (even though I practice every day), so that was pretty cool.  The concert itself was great.  The band was Billy Joel’s backing band, and a series of guest artists sang a bunch of his hits and deep tracks, some doing pretty different interpretations.  Among the highlights were the singer who did River of Dreams on ukulele, and Natalie Merchant’s rendition of Allentown, which Michelle called “the saddest version ever”.

The week after that we saw Kurt Elling at Birdland, with the Future of Jazz big band.  The show was excellent, and afterwards we were talking to the bass player because his father was sitting next to us in the audience.  Kurt did Joco’s Three Views of a Secret and he remarked that he wasn’t really familiar with the song and it blew his mind.  I was thinking, you’re a jazz bassist in a big band and you don’t know the record Word of Mouth?  Kids today I tell you.

Only a couple days after that I went into the city for work, mainly to go to lunch and say goodbye to my friend Sukhi.  She was the product manager on our product Permission Slip, but CR is getting out of the privacy business, so she’s moving on.  The general vibe of the company now is fear and uncertainty, so it makes me wonder about the future of the Innovation Lab. 

Finally, Jeannie and I took a quick little trip to Boston for a special event for the Global Jukebox.  It was in induction ceremony for the Americana Roots and Folk Music Hall of Fame, and Alan Lomax was one of the honorees.  Anna accepted the award on his behalf, and got to invite a number of people as guest to the ceremony.  So we were part of her entourage.  I met Odysseus and his family, and some others of the Lomax clan, and Kiki and Robert were there too.  The event took place a beautiful old theatre.  There was a cocktail hour in the lobby with amazing bacon Old-fasioned’s.  The main event was a dinner with the tables set up on an enormous stage with the band turned around facing us. The house band that played a few songs after each honoree’s acceptance speech, with numerous guests.  All very good.  Anna mentioned the Global Jukebox in her speech and me by name, so I got to stand up and take a box.  Very kind of her.

Finally, my band Spacecats had a gig last Friday.  It was a good crowd and the music went over well, although we didn’t make much money.  One of the new songs we did was Joy Spring.  Another was a jazz interpretation of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.  This went over amazingly well.  Several people sitting way over at the bar came out to stand in front of the stage and record us with their phones.

Meanwhile, like I said we’ve had a few nice days.  Over the last two weekends I began the spring cycle of yardwork by raking up all the leaves and debris on the lawn and in the flowerbeds and under the hedges, and did a little but of trimming.  I also got the Mustang out on the road for the first time this season.  Happily it started right up, even after a brutally cold winter.  But now I need to get it into the shop for an oil change, a soft tire, and a bunch of other minor issues.  Ah well.  Maybe this is the year I’ll finally get it painted.

I’ve also been able to get out on my bike a bunch of times, maybe two or three days a week.  I’m over 20 rides and 120 miles for the year already.  I’m hoping start going pretty much every day soon.

Ah, spring!!!

New Song: Frozen Ocean

I finished tracking my new song Frozen Ocean a good while back, and have been honing the mixes to the point where I have a pretty satisfactory rough mix.  This was one of the few songs I’ve ever done where the main sound is built up out of layers of guitars, and I learned alot.

To rewind a bit, Frozen Ocean is the sixth song on my upcoming record Spellbound.  It’s one of two songs that was not on the original record Martin and I made back in January of 1990, but one that he wrote around the same time and was part of the live set of his band Shade.  I think it was Martin’s first really great song – great lyrics, great melody, great sound, imagery, tone, build and dynamics, everything.

This song took alot of practicing to get the guitar parts right, but along the way I definitely leveled up my guitar playing and mixing skills.  It opens with the guitar playing an arpeggiated pattern shifting among open and fretted strings. Martin was such a good guitarist, even early on, that I didn’t realize how subtle and complicated the part was.  Next up, lead guitar part was another major challenge. First I listened to his original recording and learned his riffs, then began to practice and memorize them. The song has three guitar solos, a light and airy one at the beginning and end, and a heavy one in the middle. There’s alot of nuance in the tone and phrasing I sought to capture, as well as some moments of intense shredding that really needed to woodshed.  Lastly, I decided to double the rhythm guitar with the twelve-string, since it worked so nicely in the two other guitar-oriented songs. I subtly changed some of the voicings and patterns to bring it more in line with Martin’s original, and to create more depth.  It took a while to make all the guitars sit well together in the mix.  They key was to put a bit of flange on the 12-string to make it blend with the original rhythm track.

Compared to the guitars, the other instruments all went down pretty quickly. There’s a piano part in the background, which I actually recorded first to serve as the spine of the track, and to retroactively insert myself into song to make it fit with the tone of the rest of the album. The drums, being midi, took some work because I was trying to replicate lots of open-sounding cymbal work and some jamming-style fills. My plan is retrack the drum part with real drums, as with all the songs on the record. The vocals went down surprising fast, since Martin’s vocal range and sense of phrasing was very similar to my own. I think I did three takes in less than twenty minutes and knew I’d nailed it.

So here you have it, enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/FrozenOcean18a.mp3

…

Frozen Ocean

I’m going to fly away
Watch me on the run
Try to sail a frozen ocean
See the world but she won’t want me
See the stars they only haunt me
Sail this path until my life is done

You learn the waves you ride
They carry you to the other side
Wait for a springtime tide to bring you home

Here upon my frozen ocean
Watch the world drift by
Caught between the sea and leaden sky
See the life that’s moving under ground
Hear the death that rolls with thunder sound
See the place where all our spirits lie

You learn the waves you ride
They carry you to the other side
Wait for a springtime tide to bring you home

You’ll see the breaking of the day
Your spirit blowing you away
With nothing nothing left to say
The wind is calling you to stay yeah, stay yeah

You learn the waves you ride
They carry you to the other side
Wait for a springtime tide to bring you home

I see the sky is falling
I hear the wind is howling
I see the death that gathers ’round
Lost upon this frozen ocean
Watch the sun go down
Nevermore and never to be found

— Martin Szinger, 1990

Fotoz 2025

Yesterday was the first day of spring.  The weather has been all over the place, but on average it’s been getting more pleasant to be outside.  We’ve even had a few genuinely nice days that make you remember how it feels good to be alive.

I just barely completed my fotoz albums for 2025 before the end of winter.  It was a little more of a process than usual since the software I’ve been using for years to build the galleries no longer works reliably so I wound up doing alot of work by hand instead of automating it.  Next year I need to find or develop a new workflow. 

Anyway, here are galleries.  As usual, please ping me if you need access credentials.  Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/fotooz/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2025/2025-04/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2025/2025-03/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2025/2025-02/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2025/2025-01/

Spacecats Live at the Green Growler March 27

My jazz group Spacecats will be appearing at Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Friday March 27 at 7pm. The group consists of John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on bass and Rick Arecco on drums.

The Growler has become our regular gig, and a great environment for the band to experiment and progress. We’ve been sharpening up our originals in preparation for recording our second album, and rotating in new jazz standards and rock and pop songs. Our sound and playing keeps progressing to higher and higher levels, with great imagination and energy. Should be a great time, so come on down and check it out!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Friday March 27, 7pm
at
The Green Growler
Croton-on-Hudson, NY

Origami Chicago

And all at once, spring is here!  It got up to seventy degrees today, and all the snow is gone.  Nothing much is growing yet, but the grass has turned from greyish-brown back to something resembling greenish.  Can’t wait to take a nice long bike ride tomorrow.

Jeannie and I just got back from a trip to Chicago.  The main purpose of the trip was to go to CoCon, the Chicago Origami Convention.  We went four years ago and had a great time, so we decided to do it again.  We flew out Thursday morning to give us a couple days to go sightseeing before the convention started.  To me Chicago has a great vibe, somehow combining the best of New York City and Buffalo.  The first day we went to the Adler Planetarium.  It was pretty cool.  It had some shows in the dome including a tour of the solar system and the current state of big astronomy in Chile, plus a bunch of exhibits including a Gemini capsule.  After that we walked around the shore of Lake Michigan for a little while.  It was a strangely foggy day.  We ended up at the Field Museum if Natural History, home of the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex Sue.  We went there last time we were in Chicago, but it was so cool we figured we’d go back, being right next door the planetarium and all.  They had a bunch of other cool exhibits, including one documenting melting glaciers around the world.  And I must say, as a former exhibit designer, whoever does the exhibits there does and amazing job!  That evening we walked around downtown near our hotel and got genuine Chicago-style pizza.

Friday we went to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.  This was a pretty amazing place.  Lots of stuff about transportation, trains, airplanes, etc.  The have an entire World War II U-Boat that was captured toward the end of the war, and brought the place in the 1950’s.  You can take a guided tour inside.  There’s also an exhibit that’s a re-creation of a coal mine, taking you thru the history of mining machinery for the last hundred and twenty years.  One had a giant model train diorama that demonstrated to role of rail in the cycle raw materials, heavy manufacturing, the distribution of goods, and travel.  Elsewhere was an entire train from the F.D.R. era, an early high-speed streamline passenger train made of stainless steel.  For me one of the highlights was a 1929 Duesenberg J automobile.  It’s my favorite car of all time and I built several models of them as a kid.  I’ve never seen one in person before.  They’re surprisingly huge! We wanted to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art too, but I guess that’ll hafta wait for next time.

Friday evening was the start of the convention.  I set up my exhibit, which did not include any really large models since I had fly with it in my luggage, in the largest box that would fit in my backpack, and spent the rest of the evening catching up with my origami friends.  A bunch of us went to the Irish pub around the corner from the hotel later on.  Saturday and Sunday I taught several classes, including one for my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, another for my Platypus, and a third for my single-sheet polyhedron Semi-Sunken Icosahedron.  Whew!  I also took a couple classes, including one on making masks and faces by wetfolding thick watercolor paper, and another on a human figure model.  This got my creative juices flowing.  In evening folding I designed a human figure from a pentagon, since the human form has five major appendages.  The idea has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but the folding was pretty spontaneous, and it turned out surprisingly well.  I’m thinking of it as a base, and plan to fold a few more figures and bring out different kinds of character in them.  I was experimenting more with faces, trying to come up with a good pattern for a face bass so the features line up in the correct place and in good proportion, and also to incorporate things like cheeks, jawlines and brow ridges to make it more lifelike.  On the way home I got the idea to try a face out of pentagon too.

After classes Jeannie and took a walk to Daly Plaza, where they have that Picasso, and the next day out the end of Navy Pier, where there’s a statue of Bob Newhart of all people.  By Sunday the weather was starting to turn nice.  It was sunny and warm-ish, but very windy out on the lake.

Now I’m a folding mood, and have started in on a new version of my semi-sunken dodecahedron.  Want to have some new stuff the show at the next couple conventions.

I can bring you up to speed on the music scene too.  My Spellbound project is at the phase where I’m listening back to mixes of the first six songs, and they all sound pretty great.  There’s still one more song to go, but there’s alot of work ahead on that one so I think I may downshift on it for a while to make more time to do origami in the next few months.  Meanwhile, I successfully got my two audio interfaces working together to form a single sixteen-track studio!  This is a pretty big accomplishment.  Next rehearsal we’re gonna do here and hopefully it’ll all go smoothly on the tech side and we can focus on getting comfortable jamming with the setup.  After that we have a couple regular rehearsals for a gig coming up at the end of March.  We’ll use that time to sharpen up our originals and pick which songs we want to record.  So we’re looking at setting up some recording sessions in April.  We’ll keep you posted as to how the situation shapes up.