Category: General

The Rain Rain Rain Came Down Down Down

First of all, it’s been incredibly rainy the last week.  It rained the entire weekend starting Friday afternoon thru Sunday night, alot of the time sustained heavy downpour.  The pond in the neighbor’s yard is in effect, and there’s still puddles everywhere.  I left a wheelbarrow outside over the weekend, and now it’s full of a good six inches of water.  Needless to say I didn’t get any yardwork done, and the lawn is getting desperate for it’s first mowing.

We went to a party on Long Island on Saturday; Jeannie’s cousin’s daughter’s first communion. It was great to see everyone on that side of the family, especially since we missed the family Christmas party this year due to having covid.  A bunch of us ended up hanging out in the party tent in the backyard long after things had begun winding down.  It took over an hour to say goodbye to everybody.

I’ve been reading alot lately.  First was a book on the Italian Renaissance, focusing on sculpture, architecture and painting, the whole historic and cultural context, and the threads of development among the various famous masters.  

Next was a book called The World in Six Songs by Dan Levitin, a famous music brain science writer.  I used to work with Dan back in the ’90’s at Interval Research, and has a story in his book about the psychic research going on there to make a point about how hard it can be to design as study to produce verifiable claims in the social sciences.  That was fun, I’d forgotten all about the psychics there, and it inspired my to dig out an old song I wrote from those days call Paul Allen’s Limo Driver.  Anyway the book was really interesting, all about the purpose of music in terms of its origins in human evolution, and the different roles it plays for individual people and human society.

Then it was a book about the famous John Coltrane album A Love Supreme.  Everything you could want to know about the record, its writing, recording, and various reissues.  Of course it had alot on John Coltrane himself and his various phases of musical exploration and development, his relationships with Miles and Monk, and the coming together of the classic quartet that was the group for the record.  This led me into a deep dive into listening to Coltrane, which is something I hadn’t done in a while.  After all this time, it’s still a challenge to grok his later stuff.  In addition to A Love Supreme, I listened to Crescent, Ascension, and Live at the Village Vanguard, and with one of my favorites The Gentle Side Of.  For all his high energy playing in all keys at once, he sure could shift gears and deliver a killer ballad.

Big Wheel Keep On Movin’ Along

Spring weather has finally arrived.  Ah, lovely. At least some days, others are stormy, windy and rainy.  Ah well.  Michelle was home for spring break last week, which was fun, but pretty low key.  She went out with her friends a few times, did some homework and studying, and did some baking.  We had game night a couple times, and watched Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II, which was pretty funny and held up to the tradition of the original.  Probably the funniest bit was when Jesus thinks he’s John Lennon.

The season was well begun by spending time outside.  I raked up half the yard and filled up my available cans.  Need to get some yard bags so I can finish the job.  Also got the Pilot washed waxed and vacuumed on the inside, cleaned all the mud and salt off from the winter.  

And, I had some time to continue with origami.  I completed a model called Dimpled Dodecahedron II, which resembles a soccer ball, and made good progress on my stellated icosahedron. I had done a few studies on that one, but the paper I chose was too small or too soft.  Now I’m doing a nice large one out of elephant hide and medium sized on out of skytone paper.

Here Comes That Heat Wave

It’s late July.  It’s been really hot out all month.  Almost every day over ninety degrees, many close to a hundred.  I’ve been watering the lawn most every day, and trimming and edging continues unabated.  We went to the beach last Friday.  It was a good time, despite warnings about sharks attacking swimmers, and the ocean being unusually rough.  It took alot of effort just to get past the breakers and swim for even a few minutes.  Luckily no one got eaten.

In other news, Lizzy got a raise and promotion at her job, and went out and bought a new car, a VW SUV.  She got pretty lucky and found the exact model she wanted, available and at a reasonable price.  So I bought back from her her old car, a Toyota Camry that she drove thru high school and college, and that I’d given her as a graduation present.  Now Michelle has a car to take to school.

I’ve been trying to schedule another gig for my band, but everyone is going to be out on vacation a different week in August, so it’ll have to slide into September.

I’ve been working on music in the studio.  I have two songs, Slope and My Ol’ Brokedown Truck, that are close to finished.  I recorded real drums for them last night, since I can’t re-create the sound of brushes with midi and samples. Sounding real good.

The Analog Kid

More summer, more busy these days.  The weather has been beautiful.  One night last weekend we built a fire in our fire pit and hung out on the patio and considered what song we might use to break Vecna’s curse.  Last summer I made a playlist of 80 favorite 80’s songs, and now I’m thinking of making a new playlist of 77 favorite 70’s songs for this summer.

I edited up some highlight form the the Spacecats gig.  I’m going to update my web site soon to feature of few of the best ones, but for now, you can see the whole set here:

zingman.com/music/spacecats/video/spacecats_altmed2206/

I got out for a bike ride five days last week.  I mostly go around our neighborhood, which is kinda hilly and some streets have alot of cars. Sometimes to a local place called Nature Study Woods, which is mountain biking trails, and not particularly well maintained.  The steep parts tend to be washed out and stony, and the low spots muddy.  Also I tend to go on fairly short rides – a half hour to an hour, and usually go as fast as possible.  

All in all Jeannie doesn’t enjoy this style of riding, but we wanted to start doing some biking together.

So on Sunday Jeannie took our bikes out to Jones Beach and biked along the scenic Ocean Parkway Coastal Greenway.  It’s a great bike path, smooth and flat, that runs the length of the island, out from the main beach, through as series of smaller beaches, saltwater wildlife refuges, and the occasional marina, restaurant or bar.  We went out a little over seven miles then turned around, for a total of fifteen miles or so.  On the way back there was a pretty consistent headwind, but it was a very doable and fun ride.   We had a lunch of ice cream and clam strips, then went out to the beach, but it was too cold for swimming.  The water was unusually calm and there were lots of seashells.  Also tons of giant container ships out at see, queued up to get into New York harbor, like I’ve never seen before.  There’s usually maybe two or three, but this time there was over a dozen.

I also got the mustang on the road over the weekend, and continued with the yardwork.  This time is was doing the edging on the driveway and front walk.  Still to go is the walk around the back of the house, and the patio.  It seems everything has grown in quite alot this spring, and needs an extra level of cutting back.  Also I’ve never seen so many bunny rabbits and chipmunks in our neighborhood, nor heard so many songbirds.

Lastly, I’m continuing with doing origami and preparing for the convention, which starts this Friday.  My two dodecahedron star balls are nearly complete, but it’s taking some work to finish them.  They’re single-sheet polyhedra, a very advance form of origami, and closing off and locking the bottom where the edges come together is a nontrivial design challenge.  I’ve also been experimenting with a new design called the Space Cat, a variation on my Sophie the Cat, with a midcentury modern look and proportions.  Hopefully will get there and have a few new pieces for my exhibit.

Meanwhile, I’m teaching a couple classes, and agreed to pre-record them for people who are attending the convention remotely.  This process grew out of last year’s online-only convention, in which all classes were taught live as Zoom calls.  This year we’re recording Zoom sessions, with a camera pointing down at the work as it’s being folded.  I kind of view this a run-thru, a rehearsal for the real class, and good opportunity to make sure I know the model and can teach it.  My first class, Sophie the Cat, went off without a hitch, totally great.  For my second class my Five-Banded Armadillo, I somehow skipped a stepped and messed of the proportions of the bands, which are created by pleating.  I realized my mistake after I did the collapse and it was too late to undo, so I had to just roll with it and adjust the proportions as I finished the model. All in all it still turned out in the end, and I’m sure to get it right in the actual class.

Waiting for the Sun

Been waiting for spring to begin, but still hoping to get one more ski trip in. I really want to start spending time outside, biking and skating and working on the yard. I’ve been feeling good so I’m going to go up in weight on my workout in the next few weeks. I’ve also added pull-ups to my routine.

It looks like the pandemic my finally be ending, so I’ve started looking to get out of the house and go see some jazz and other music concerts. Lots of interesting acts coming around the next few months. I also want to see about getting some gigs for my band. I haven’t played a gig since February 28, 2020 (wow, two years ago to the day). I really don’t know where to start. That group broke up and my new group has a different sound, although you can still call it jazz. I suppose I can start by calling up all the places we used to play.

We’re trying to get together a demo to play for the clubs, so we’ve been taping our rehearsals. We’re sounding really good overall, but you always compare everything you do to the best music you’ve ever heard, and there’s room for improvement to really live up to our potential. We need to focus on a handful songs for a few weeks to get them really tight, to have a really killer demo.

I’ve started the process of transitioning my website to a new host. I ran into issues with my current host not being able to host a Unity app, and their customer service was so terrible I decided I want to get rid of them. However, I’m doing it one step at a time, since I want to do some long overdue upgrades to my site’s architecture, deployment and other things. For one thing I want to deploy via git instead of ftp. So for now, I have a placeholder home page at: https://zingmanstudios.com

More to come soon, so watch this space!

New Year State of Mind

It’s been a little while since I last posted. Took some time off for the Christmas holidays. Both kids came home the week before Christmas for a whole week, which very nice. Lots of baking and gaming and listening to music and watching movies, and of course visiting with family. Lizzy’s boyfriend Tim came down too and spent a couple days with us. Mary’s came over on Christmas day and we had a great big feast. On boxing day we went up to Buffalo and visited with my parents and Martin for a few days. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, and Martin’s kids are getting big fast. Charlie is thirteen now. Martin and I stayed up late talking, alot about music and software and things, but there’s never enough time to get into everything there is to say. We saw our friends Steve and Scott up there. Haven’t seen Steve in some time, so it was good to catch up. Both have been going thru difficult times. We did not see my friend John due to the the threat of heavy weather, nor Larry and Jackie due to the threat of covid. Nor did we see any of the extended family from Canada. Ah well, we’ll be back in a month, hopefully with our skis.

Over the break I read C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and the rest of his planet trilogy, regarded as one of the groundbreaking classics of science fiction. (Earlier in the pandemic I tried to read Jack Vance’s Dying Earth saga, but I had to put it down because, you know, dying Earth and all that.) The planet trilogy is fascinating and very well written, but not what I expected. The first book is about a journey to Mars, in which the protagonist meets some wise aliens, including ones made of energy. The second takes place on Venus, and goes deeper into similar themes. The third book takes a sharp left turn and is set on Earth, in postwar England, and involves sinister research institutes, strange conspiracies, Arthurian legends, the Numinor, reanimated talking heads, and a pet bear, among other things. A surprisingly well executed combination of science, mysticism, philosophy, mythology, action and adventure and even terror. Still mulling it over.

Before the kids came home I wound down and wrapped up the year’s work. The last half of November into the first half of December was super busy. There was a big push of new work for the Global Jukebox, to support a talk Anna gave at a conference. Improved playlist and lots of other stuff.

I’ve also been looking for other consulting and software gigs, with an eye toward getting into web 3D, three.js, and Unity, with the long term goal of developing my own independent games. I’ve been working on my own but there’s alot to learn, so I’d like someone to pay me to get deeper into it while leveraging my existing skill set.

A while back I applied to a place that makes casual card and board games, looking to get into the online gaming space via Steam and Jackbox. It seemed like a perfect gig for me. However, between the time I made first contact and the time they set up the main interview, the job morphed from full stack engineer to Unity dev. The company wanted me to do an all-day Unity coding challenge. Normally I’d tell them to get lost, but this looked like a good opportunity to get up the learning curve faster than I otherwise would. In the end they didn’t want me for the Unity role, but the full stack role is still in the offing.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on my own little game, called Rock-Tac-Toe, so I plan to finish that up, both as a Unity application and as a web/mobile app, so I can compare the pros and cons of each approach.

Another area I’ve been trying to get deeper into is music software. Out of the blue I got a call from these guys from Switzerland. They’re academic researchers in computational musicology, and fans of the Global Jukebox. They have a database of 20,000 classical music compositions as midi files, and some kind of software tool to do statistical analysis on the corpus, and they’re looking to build a web application to publicly showcase their work. They seemed really eager to work together. I submitted a scope of work proposal, but unfortunately they were not clear about their budget, so it came in high. I submitted another, scaled back proposal, and am waiting to hear back.

In music, I finished my fourth Buzzy Tonic studio album. Unlike previous records, this one is all jazz instrumentals. I titled the record Bluezebub [Pandimensional Jazz Tesseract], after the song Bluezebub, the Devil You Don’t Know. It should be on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon any day now. I even got a small batch of CD’s printed up.

Now it’s on to the new rock record. More on that soon. For the moment I’ll remind you that I had three songs in the can before I switched my focus to the Jazz Tesseract, and several more in various stages of writing and recording. I started by dusting off the completed songs, and decided to add some new overdubs to two of them.

One of my goals for 2021 was to increase the amount of weight I lift when I work out. For bench press I went up 15 lbs., and am back up above 200 lbs. for the first time since six years ago, when I suffered a rather severe injury to my left shoulder and pec. For curls and most everything else that uses dumbbells I went up a similar amount, from 100 lbs. to 115, and from 50 lbs. to 90 for the light weight exercises. For 2022 I aim to add another ten pounds to every set.

The global pandemic looks to be entering its third year, with still no end in sight. We keep making and cancelling plans. We were supposed to go out to California last fall, then were thinking of going to Arizona this winter break. Now we’re thinking of going on a ski trip instead, somewhere more local were we can drive instead of fly, and spend most of our time outdoors.

And lastly, Go Bills!

Channeling Ringo

We had a lovely Thanksgiving. Spent the day out on Long Island with Jeannie’s sister and the niblings, playing Jackbox and watching the Bills game. Michelle came home from college, although Lizzy stayed in Buffalo cuz she had work on Friday. We observed Slack Friday, as is our custom, and did no shopping. For someone who doesn’t watch alot of TV, however, there was alot on.

First, we watched the new Cowboy Bebop live action series the weekend before Thanksgiving. I thought it was great, very entertaining, and want to watch it again at Christmastime. John Cho is excellent, as is the whole cast, and they pulled off the trick of staying faithful to the spirit of the original tone, action, humor, and sci-fi world building, while pulling the story arc and characters in into deeper directions. And the music was great.

The internet seems to hate it, but they must all be super picky nerds who do nothing besides wallow in their fandom. After all, it’s a show on a streaming internet service, based on a cartoon from the ’90’s. What do you expect? If you’re at all reasonable, the new Bebop blows them away.

Then we watched the new Peter Jackson remake of the Beatles’ Let It Be. I heard it was long, but was hopeful nonetheless. After all, Jackson’s adaptation of Help! was the original extended trilogy, and remains one of my favorite movies of all time, even at thirteen hours long. In fact, we usually watch it every winter, and since Michelle was home for the long weekend, we viewed the first half.

Granted, Jackson transposed the setting for Help! from 1960’s England to a place called the Shire, and the four young lads are Hobbits rather than Liverpudlians, and as they try and get rid of the ring, they’re being chased by a death cult of Nazgul rather then a death cult of Kali, and they’re trying to get to Mordor rather than the Bahamas. Eleanor Braun is replaced by a CG Gollum and Victor Spinetti by Christopher Lee. They added a few new songs and changed the title, but the basic plot remains the same.

So, was the new Get Back on the level of Lord of the Rings, or more like PJ’s The Hobbit, bloated and stretched thin like butter over too much toast?

Well, I have to tell you I’m a huge Beatles fan, but now I finally feel like they’ve jumped the shark and landed in overrated and self-indulgent territory. It would have been a much better film if it was five or six hours long rather than eight. As a musician who has spent tons of time in rehearsals and recording sessions, I know very well how tedious it can be to write, arrange, rehearse and perfect a set of tunes. I think there was actually a great story in there, and a bit of editing would have moved things along without all the false starts, noodling jams, and endless complaining how they don’t have the material for a movie yet. Eight or sixteen bars would do. As it is, the new film is not really much better than the original, just alot longer. They should have named it The Long and Winding Road.

Ah well, at least Jackson has kept in touch with his horror movie roots. He featured Yoko Ono “singing” (ok, really just screaming) for several minutes, presumably anguished over George quitting the band. Why anyone would let that woman near a microphone is beyond me, even if you’re drug addled, madly in love, and think it’s avant-garde. The look on young Heather McCartney’s face at witnessing the spectacle is priceless though.

In other news, my new jazz album is almost done. I’ve decided on a running order for the tracks, and five of the six songs are fully mixed and mastered. The last one, Sun of the Son, was the first track I did, over a year ago, and I did a three or four rock tracks after that before I decided to make the focus of the album instrumental jazz. So I changed my mastering setup for the newer songs, to give the sound more depth and dynamics. Now I’ve gone back and done the same thing for SotS. Almost there!

What’s Going On

Things have been mellow lately. The kids are out of the house, and my main contract gig ended a little while back, so there’s less to do than usual while I line up a new gig. Last year at this time I was building a patio, but right now there’s no need for any big home improvement projects. We’re kinda in the middle of defragging the house, but that’s slow going. We’ve been thinking, mostly idly, about getting some new furniture. The world is still under a pandemic, so it’s not a great time for any epic travel adventures. We do have a few mini road trips coming up, but I’m hesitant to do anything that involves air travel nowadays.

I’ve bee updating my web site, including my online software projects portfolio (https://zingman.com/portfolio/). So far alot of it has been invisible, behind-the-scenes stuff, but there’s some new content too. More stuff is in the offing, so stay tuned for future updates.

Been working on the Global Jukebox (https://theglobaljukebox.org) too, and in fact we just did a push to live a couple weeks ago. There’s also another site for The Association for Cultural Equity called The Alan Lomax Digital Archive (https://archive.culturalequity.org/). The site is pretty much what the name implies with lots field recordings, films, radio shows, etc. plus a section of curated exhibits. The site is built in Drupal, and most of the work involves styling and skinning, plus a few UI widgets. The workflow is pretty convoluted, since the site is not under source control and there’s no dev instance nor any way to deploy a local version. A large part of the early phase of the project was setting up a pipeline were I could do chunks of work locally, rapidly deploy and test, and roll back if things didn’t look or behave as expected. Now things are pretty much humming along, but there’s gotchas at every turn.

Although the heat of summer is gone and suntanning season is over, the weather has remained quite mild and pleasant into mid-October. We’ve yet to turn on the heat or even take out the air conditioners, but the days are really getting shorter faster these days. I’ve been going for walks in the nearby field alot, and Jeannie and I even got in a good hike last weekend, up Mount Hook in the Palisades. I’ve also been biking about twice a week on average, once on the streets and once in the Nature Study Woods. I still want to get back on my rollerblades a third time before the end of the season. I went up in weights recently in me workout, and added back in tricep curls. I’m still 5 lbs. short of my goal for the year, and hope to go up one more time, but it gets harder when the weather turns cold, so I better do it soon.

In music, I’ve been working on a new song Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know). This is the last song on my upcoming Computer Jazz record I’ve been working on since the start of the pandemic. It’s a sort of 60’s spy-jazz meets King Crimson vibe, in 5/4 time with a sort fugue-like riff structure for the first half, a crazy uptempo jam in the middle, and then an elaboration and recapitulation to end it all off. I have the whole arrangement worked out, and have tracked the drums, fender bass, synth bass, and fender rhodes piano, and have sketched midi tracks for the horns and lead synth. Yesterday I broke out my bari sax to attempt to lay down the part, only to realize that I better write it out first and practice it a few times, so that’s next.

I’ve been a bit of a Beatles phase lately, as I tend to do every few years. This time I created and printed out lead sheets for a whole bunch of their songs , as part of my ongoing songbook project. Most of the stuff from the first half of their career is to play on guitar. Turns out they’re mostly pretty easy and really fun to play, and full of little twists and tricks and tight arrangements. If only I knew someone who like to sing harmony. Their later songs are mainly to work up piano, with a focus on maximum psychedelia such as Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am the Walrus, plus some not-quite-rock Paul songs.

The jazz group is humming along, although I haven’t had any luck getting gigs, and admittedly I haven’t been trying very hard. Also keeping an eye out for the opportunity to form a new rock group, although there’s not much movement there either.