Category: Origami

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.

It’s Snow Fun

The temperature has actually gotten above freezing the last few days.  Saturday it was up near fifty.  But there’s still plenty of snow on the ground, and trying to break up the snow piles is mostly futile since it’s all fused into a solid mass of ice.  On the plus side, Jeannie and took a day off from work Friday to go skiing.  We figured it was the last day before President’s Day weekend, and the last cold day before things start melting.  And, as I’d hoped, the mountain was not at all crowded and the conditions were great.  Not at all icy until the very end.  We left the house around 8:30 and were on the slopes by eleven.  We did eighteen runs in total, all over the mountain.  Stayed until after four.  It was the best day of skiing I’ve had in a long time, especially for a day trip.

Did some shopping over the weekend.  Got a backup hard drive for my new computer, as well as a mouse and some cables to connect various audio interfaces, and even a new desk chair.  Things are moving ahead. 

Last Thursday instead of normal band rehearsal for Spacecats, Ken and Rick came over to my studio to begin work on our new album (Josh being out of town).  This was basically a tech session to see what it will take to use my studio for recording.  It’s going to be a learning curve as I retire my old system which I know so well and move into the new one.  So far I got my 8-channel audio interface hooked up to my computer and some of the software installed, including multiple DAWs and drivers for the outboard box.  Rick played my drum kit, which I had mic’d up previously.  Ken brought his bass amp and a very nice AKG condenser mic so we could record both direct and the output of his amp.  I played sax into my trust Rode mic.  It took an hour or so to get everything set up.  We managed to get a great-sounding 8-track recording of the trio doing a handful of standards.

A few things we need to improve for next time.  First is that I only had one audio interface plugged in, so the meant just five channels of drums to make room for two bass channels (mic and direct) and one for sax.  Actually the kit sound pretty good that way.  The mics are on the kick, snare, hi-hat and two overheads which are meant for the cymbals but also capture alot of the toms.  The three mics are had to unplug were for close-mic’ing the toms. 

For next time I’m going to add another audio input box.  I have a space MBox, the same kind I use for my old studio, that has four inputs, including two XLR with nice peak limiters.  This will get us up to twelve channels, which will do for next week.  But the week after Josh is coming back and we’ll want another stereo pair for the keyboards and eventually mic’ing the piano.  Ken has an eight-channel audio box he’s going to bring next week, so we’ll see how that goes, and Rick has a 16-channel digital mixer too.  So we’re we’re trying it all to see what works best.

The other thing we need to work out is the arrangement of the musicians in the room for minimizing the bleedthru on the mics from the other instruments.  This is going to be a live jazz album with no overdubs, but better isolation will make it easier to mix.  For this session, Rick and I were fairly close together, but put Ken’s amp far away, and that worked out.  We might have to invest in some longer cables and acoustic baffles too.

Meanwhile, I’ve been continuing to work on my home studio project Spellbound.  I’ve been laying down a couple takes of the twelve-string guitar part every day, and I’ve finally gotten solid enough that I can cut together a take from tracks I laid down.  Woo-hoo!  This means I should be wrapping up this song soon.  I also went back and did new mixes of the first five songs.  All that remains is the big prog epic that fills up most of side two.

And lastly, there’s a bunch of origami events coming up.  I’ve been asked to be a special guest for the upcoming Origami USA convention in July.  I’m very flattered and honored, and now I have to level up my exhibit and teaching, plus submit a model the annual collection.  There’s also CFC (Conference for Creators) in Ann Arbor, Michigan in May, hosted by my friend Beth.  For that one I plan to give a talk on folding pentagonal symmetry, with examples from my own work including single-sheet polyhedra, and tessellations including fractals and Penrose quasicrystal tilings.

But the nearest one is CoCon in Chicago, just three weeks away.  For this one I’m mostly prepared, but it’s always nice to have something new to exhibit.  The most important one for me is to complete my single-sheet dodecahedron folded from a decagon.  I have it all worked out except that the lock doesn’t hold tight.  I’m thinking of folding it from a slightly larger sheet to have more paper left at the end for the lock.  I’m also thinking of making a “Star Man” a simple human figure folded from a pentagon.

Rollin’ and Foldin’

The weather continues to get colder and darker and stormier.  Once it gets below forty degrees of so, biking gets more difficult, especially if it’s windy.  So now I’m down to biking every other day or so, and when I go I gotta bundle up.  A week ago I did my longest ride of the season, indeed my longest ride in quite a few years. Over twenty-eight miles in just a little over two hours.  I’m hoping I’ll get another long ride or two in before winter arrives, but if that’s my longest this year I’m satisfied.  The days are short and it’s dark alot, so next time I’ll go for speed to see how far I can go in ninety minutes.

Last Friday Jeannie and I went to see Branford Marsalis playing with his quartet at SUNY Purchase.  They have a very nice concert hall there, although lots of little things about it are weird, including the entrance to the venue being in a tunnel, and the lack of a center aisle of doors in back means the entrance to the hall from the lobby is a little made of side hallways.  Anyway the show was great.  Branford is one of my favorite sax players around today.  The piano player was Joey Calderazzo, who is amazing, and so were the rhythm section.  The mainly band played an interoperation of the Keith Jarret album Belonging and to to some really great places. 

Saturday we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention.  The special guest was my friend John Montroll, who had never attended an OrigaMIT convention before, so that was a fun surprise.  I also met his sister and nephew, who is a professor of mathematics and computer science.  John gave a talk on his approach to origami design, which was very cool.  His style of delivery is pretty breezy and laid back, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll miss how deep what alot of what he has to say is.

I folded several new models for my exhibit.  I taught my Platypus, so I did a new rendition of that out of purple tissue foil; it came out very nice.  I also had a new version of my Lizard and Turtle, both folded out a sheet of beautiful hand-painted paper I bought in Venice, Italy when we were there a few years back.  The other model I’ve been working on is a Dimpled Dodecahedron.  I came up with a layout folded from a decagon that has polar symmetry.  Back in July at the OUSA convention John helped me refine the layout to make the 3-D folding phase more tractable.  It turns out to be a very difficult model to fold because as it accumulates layers inside that zigzag in strange ways and tend to push the model open like a budding flower.  So most of the work I’ve been doing has been to manage the layers and make them organized and flat to mitigate that tendency.  I got thru most of the southern hemisphere and am up to the lock at the south pole, where three tabs are supposed to go together in a pinwheel.  Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the worked out in time for the convention.  I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase: every time I try, I get half the remaining distance to the finish line.

Origami USA 2025 Convention

July 22, 2025

Just got back from the Origami USA 2025 Convention.  Lots of fun, lots, of folding, lots of friends.  The big news this year is that Jeannie joined the convention committee and helped run everything on site all weekend, including leading the registration and check in. This being a volunteer organization, lots of people including myself were quite happy she stepped up to join the leadership.

Meanwhile I spent the week before the convention trying to advance some ideas I had for new models.  I kinda had a hard getting back into doing origami this year.  Martin passed away just two weeks after last year’s convention, and it took me until the winter to unpack my stuff, and this led to a whole reorganization of my studio.  I threw out several boxes worth of old origami, and as I went thru them I rediscovered a bunch of ideas I’d been working on.  I finally got out of my rut in springtime when Ilan asked me to make a video for an upcoming online event.  The model was my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron, which is composed of triangle and sunken pentagonal pyramids in the shape of a ball. I perfected some internal details of the folding sequence and closure.  This led me to also perfect my Dimpled Icosahedron, and a variation with hexagons and pentagons like a soccer ball.

I was on a roll, so I dusted off an idea that I had never finished before, a Dimpled Dodecahedron, where the sunken triangles make the overall form that resembles an icosidodecahedron.  The dodecahedron is a very hard shape to fold, for a few reasons.  First, it’s made of pentagons, and so requires a fivefold geometry throughout.  Second, unlike squares, rectangles, rhombi, triangles or hexagons, pentagons do not tile the plane, so one must use a non-repeating quasicrystal pattern for the layout.  Third, once you get into the 3-D part of it, the faces come together in threes, so there’s no straight lines on the internal layers that develop.  They always have to turn a corner, which can get awkward and difficult.

I’d folded a version this shape before, using a layout that has the middle of a pentagonal face at the center of the paper (a.k.a. the north pole), and five flaps from the edges of the paper coming together to form the lock at the south pole.  This layout works well for models such as my Stellated Dodecahedron and Great Dodecahedron, where there’s a vertex in the center of what would other wise be a pentagonal face.  But it’s unsatisfactory for the Dimpled Dodecahedron, because one of the faces is not smooth but has the five pinwheel flaps coming together. 

So I’ve been trying to work out a new layout where the center of the paper is a the vertex of three pentagons, and the lock is also three pentagons coming together with tabs in a spiral.  Unfortunately, this layout is even harder.  For one thing, it requires a decagon rather than a pentagon as the starting shape, since the central point has three wedges of 3/10 coming together for the pentagons, and a gap of 1/10.  Then this gap becomes an internal ridge that has to get folded away in a zigzag fashion to get to the south pole.  I folded a number of studies, but but had not worked out how to close the model by Friday afternoon when it was time to head into the city for convention.

Jeannie had gone in to the city in the morning by train, and Michelle and I drove in after she got home from work.  Once we arrived it was the usual chaos and buzz of setting up my exhibit, meeting up with friends, going out to dinner and returning for late night folding.  We stayed at the hotel Friday and Saturday nights since Jeannie had be there early to run the registration desk.

Saturday morning I ended up in the exhibit space talking to people the whole morning.  For lunch a group of us found a Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast burritos along with margaritas.  In the afternoon I taught my first class:  my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, two of my favorite models from my spaceship collection.  Each is foldable in ten to twenty minutes.  That evening a bunch of use went to an Irish pub for dinner.

When we got back I showed John Montroll my progress with my dodecahedron and explained the difficulty with the hidden layers of paper.  I know he’s spent alot of time thinking and working on one-sheet polyhedra, having written several books on the topic.  He took one look at my CP and immediately spotted a troublesome confluence of pentagons.  He suggested an alternative layout where three pentagons come together and the negative space between them forms a sort of double fork, which can be collapsed symmetrically, thus sidestepping the turn-the-corner problem.  I modified my design to take advantage of his insight and began folding a new study.  This was a three-quarter sphere (nine pentagons instead of twelve) to see if the layout would work in practice before I dealt with designing the closure and the lock.  Shawnuff it was a big improvement, although it took me until Sunday afternoon to get far enough to demonstrate it.

Sunday lunchtime I ran the Paper Airplane contest, this time with the help of Michelle and Paul Frasco.  It’s really alot of fun and amazing how people get so into it.  The space we use has a spectator gallery, which adds to the excitement.  This year, in addition to the usual prizes (gift certificates for the origami store), Boice donated some high-end supercomplex books from Japan as extra prizes.

Sunday I taught another class, this time my Narwhal, which don’t believe I’ve taught before, and haven’t folded in ages.  I’m kind of amazed how many people still like my book Origami Animal Sculptures, and come up to me to say it’s one of their favorite books, and ask to me sign it for them.  A surprising number of people also asked me about when I’m going to publish another book.  I’d love to, and indeed I have enough models for three or four books.  But diagramming is alot of work, and so is pulling everything together to make a complete book out of a collection of diagrams.  Right now I don’t have a publisher, so I’m looking at self-publishing on Amazon, and that’s a whole ‘nuther level of work.  Not to mention that my we site is fiver year out of date for just photographing my models and posting the pics with a basic blurb. 

Sunday evening a bunch of us went out to dinner at a Raman place.  I ended up sitting next to Robert Lang, and he told me about his current plans and progress around rebuilding his house and his studio, both of which burned down earlier this year in wildfires.  Everyone in the community is concerned for him and very supportive, and I must say his resilience and positive attitude are remarkable.  His eyes lit up when he described how he’s going to build a new dream origami studio expressly for his needs.  Of course it’ll be a couple years before it’s all done and ready to move in.  Meanwhile he and Michael LaFosse made a stack of Origamido paper incorporate the ashes from his old studio and his countless lost origami models.

Sunday night was the Giant Folding contest, and I helped Marc Kirschenbaum judge the entries.  More great fun and alot of very cool models.

Monday was pretty chill.  Jeannie and I slept in late and arrived around noon, and went out to lunch with Eric Ma and Brian Webb.  I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with John Montroll (his new collection is Gnomes, which are adorable and a ton of fun to fold!), Brian Chan, Jon Tucker and a few other people.  Talked guitars and music with Marc Kirschenbaum. I successfully folded a full model of my dodecahedron.  It’s definitely supercomplex and takes some time.  But the layout clearly works and it all collapses nicely.  All that remains to arrange to tabs for lock to close the model.

I talked to Nicholas Terry for a little while.  He hasn’t been to OUSA in a few years, but he was special guest this year, coming over from France. He also asked about when I planned to publish another book, and after I explained my situation he offered to help.  Wow, awesome, we’ll see if anything comes of it. In any event he won’t be back home for a few weeks.  He brought his family out to the States and they’re taking a month-long vacation around the American west.  Very cool.

So even as the convention recedes, I feel freshly motivated again.  Hopefully that will translate into making time to do origami every week like I do for music.  Designing, folding exhibit-quality instances of my models, photographing, making CPs, posting to my web site, diagraming, page and books layouts, etc. Eventually I’ll get into a rhythm and the results of my efforts will begin to accumulate.

Bungle in the Jungle

Been busy.  The rain continues.  I went for another long bike ride last weekend despite the rain.  This time I did 16 miles in an hour and 8 minutes, which is two minutes better than last week, and an average speed of 14 mph.  Also got around to trimming the neighbor’s willow tree that hangs over into our yard.  I swear that thing gets bigger every year.

Saturday I taught an Origami Connect event.  I taught my model Gladys the Platypus, which uses my hex base.  It went well and was alot of fun.  Also helping me get my head in gear for the upcoming OUSA convention in July, thinking about what to teach, what to exhibit, and try to get some new stuff finished.  On a related note, I’m down to my last two boxes of old origami to consolidate.

Got my performance review at work: “Exceeds expectations”.  Man, I really overshot the mark.  I was hoping to get laid off with a nice fat severance package so I can get an early start on retirement (just kidding!). In a way I’m a bit surprised because last fall when I was deep in my grief, it felt like there were lots of days when it was pretty hard to focus and function at all, let alone be all creative and innovative and super sharp and tech leadership-y.  On the other hand, I did kinda lean into work as something to do to keep me going.  Anyway, I guess that’s mostly behind me now.  And on the plus side, Data Rights Protocol 1.0 has shipped, and that was my main project since I started this job.  Then I successfully transitioned over to a new project on the Experimental Engineering group, and that’s going well so far.  Using AI software to write AI software, such irony!

Our D&D campaign has been very entertaining lately.  We’re playing The Isle of Dread, which an Expert D&D module from the 80’s that I’m running using 5th edition rules.  There’s alot of trekking thru the jungle on the way to central plateau, where there’s an ancient evil temple on an island in a lake in a crater of a dormant volcano.  Along the way the party befriend a tribe of flying monkeys and fought a next of evil, magic-using spiders, where they gained a cache or strange magic items.

More recently the party had to cross a river to get to the plateau, and chose a shallow swampy location.  Safy and Bart decided to hop across on a chain of small grassy patches sticking up out of the water.  Nyx flew across with Skrill on her broomstick as a passenger, left him on the northern shore, and returned to ferry the others.  I rolled a Hydra as the wandering monster encounter.  I didn’t realize it, but the 5th Edition Hydra is alot more powerful than the old version, and I feared the party might have met its match.  Midway on her way back, Nyx was attacked by a five-headed hydra, but she was able to fly away in the nick of time.  Combat ensued.  Skrill, alone on the far shore, was attacked and  almost immediately incapacitated.  The Hydra lost two of its heads but regenerated them next round.  The party rallied and cut off several more of its heads, although still more grew back. In the end, Aliana the sorceress found a Fireball spell on a scroll and used it to inflict massive damage and finish the beast off.

The party decided to try and ascend to the central plateau by crossing a rope bridge high over the gorge, when they were approached by three pteranodons, a kind of flying relative of the dinosaurs.  Bart charmed and befriended one, while Skrill attacked another.  The friendly one landed on the bridge, causing Luna, Aliana and Safy to loose their balance and get thrown over the side.  Ali and Safy hung on, but Luna plummeted.  Nyx threw her broomstick to Luna, who caught it and was able to fly away safely and avoid getting smashed up on the rocks far below.  Safy climbed back onto the bridge but Aliana remained hanging.  Two pteranodons attacked Skrill, while the 3rd one let Bart and the rabbit climb on its back.  Next round, one of the pteranodons attacked Ali, and she fell, but was saved by Luna, after casting magic missile.  Safy finished off one of the flying dinosaurs with some holy damage spell.  Now we’re at the bottom of the round, with one pteranadon flying away with Bart on its back and Nxy in its claws.  Luna and Ali are flying around on a broomstick.  Skrill has hooked the last remaining winged beast with his fishing rod and is attempting to reel it in.  Safy is hanging out on the rope bridge, looking cool for the moment.  I wonder how this will all end.

Here Comes that Rainy Day

Well summer had begun in earnest, but so far the weather had been mainly cool and rainy.  I don’t think we’ve had more than two days in a row without rain since April.  Despite that I’ve been getting most of the yardwork done, and even went biking on the rail trail two weekends in a row.  This last weekend I did my usual sixteen miles.  The weekend before I did nineteen, my best so far this season.

Last week Jeannie and I went camping with Michelle, and with Kathleen and her kids, a bit of a mini vacation before Michelle starts her job.  Martin and Kathleen have been going camping with us every summer since they were dating and our kids were little.  Michelle first went camping when she was three months old.  Last year we had to cancel our plans, so it felt good to reestablish the tradition.  The year before that we had torrential rains and had to break camping and leave the last evening instead of the following morning.  Michelle didn’t come with us that time, so when Jeannie and I arrived home unexpectedly late that night, she was all like “I didn’t know that was a thing you could do!”

The weather was great for this trip, the only three-day stretch with no rain so far this summer.  It even got hot the second day, as we all went for a long hike up to Bad Man’s Cave.  It was a little over four miles but very hilly and rocky, and took a bit over three hours.  We went mid-week, so alot of the other campsites were empty.  And, going early in the summer meant the creek was full and gurgling along.  We brought our bikes up, and I biked around the campground with Charlie, Matthew and Abbie.  In the mornings and evenings we made campfires and cooked and hung around played games and just talked.  All in all a very nice trip.

Back at home, Michelle and I have been watching the Avengers and the other early Marvel superhero movies from that era – Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and all that.  It’s hard to believe they’re all around fifteen years old, and amazing how well they hang together and still hold up.  I guess enough time as gone by that I can appreciate them.

I’ve been doing more origami the last few weeks.  I’m currently perfecting my Dimpled Icosahedron, which resembles a great dodecahedron with the triangle facets sunken.  This is an inverse or complement to my semi-sunken Icosahedron, which resembles a great dodecahedron with the pentagon facets sunken.  However it involves a completely different geometry and folding sequence, and starts with a pentagon instead of a hexagon.

I’m also doing and Origami Connect event this coming Saturday, June 14, at 2pm Eastern time.  I’ll be teaching my model Gladys the Platypus.  You can go to the Origami USA web site (orgiamiusa.org) for more details.

Summertime Blues

It was a fairly low key long weekend. Traditionally Memorial Day kicks of the summer, but the weather has been mainly cold and rainy again.  Sunday it got up to 65 and cloudy, and Monday was 70 and partly sunny, so at least we had a little barbecue.  Jeannie and I went for a bike ride on the local trail.  This time I did sixteen miles in an hour and ten minutes.  My time does not seem to be improving much.

Mostly we spent the weekend catching up on our rest after all our travels, and doing random tasks. Michelle bought some new furniture, mainly bookshelves, and I help her set them up.  She’s acquired a fairly extensive comic book collection in college, so I’ve been reading some classic X-Men comics such as The Dark Phoenix Saga.  I’d forgotten how much then they are.  Also I put a new battery in the Mustang because it wouldn’t start.  Now it’s happily running again.  And of course trimming the shrubbery and other yardwork.

Most years this time of year I put together a new playlist for summer backyard hanging out.  This year I think the theme will be my Top 40 Favorite Prog Rock Songs.  Fewer songs than usual, but it’ll probably be just as long.

One longstanding task I finally got around to was a video tutorial for an origami event I’ll being doing with CFC this fall.  The model is my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron.  I practiced folding it a couple times and really drilled down on the details to perfect the folding sequence.  I’m pretty happy with the resulting model, and the video.  This also got me back into doing origami, which I haven’t really done much of in the past year.  It’s a good thing too, cuz there’s a convention coming up soon, and I’d like to have something new to teach and exhibit.

Continuing to defrag my studio.  I’m up to the last major task: sifting thru and consolidating my many old boxes of origami.  I’m throwing out alot of stuff, but also finding lots of cool ideas and works-in-progress I’d largely forgotten about.

I don’t have my drum mics plugged into my new DAC yet, but I’ve gotten up to rough mixes for the first batch of four tunes on the Spellbound project.  I’ll be sharing those soon.  Meanwhile, up next is another lyric.

Be of Good Cheer

Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays.  I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here.  The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back.  Tons of fun.

We put up our tree a week ago, and started listening to lots of Christmas music.  I’ve discovered all the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald have Christmas music that’s much better than your typical pop radio fare.  I guess the big problem with Christmas music is there’s only 50 or maybe 100 songs, so it gets repetitive fast.  We watched the movie Elf, as well as The Hogfather, neither of which I’d seen before, but were recommend by Kathleen and her kids.  Both fun and charming in completely opposite ways.

I should mention the Origami USA holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History, since I contributed some Flying Fish models to it this year. Go check it out if you haven’t yet! https://origamiusa.org/holidaytree/2024

I also saw not one but two rock shows in Brooklyn over the last week, at a venue call the Kings Theatre, which I’d never been to before.  It’s a big, beautiful, ornate, overwrought art-deco kind of place, similar to the Beacon in Manhattan.  I guess it’s been completely restored recently and now they’re having cool acts play there.  Predictably, drinks are way overpriced.

The first show was Beat, a King Crimson isotope featuring Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the original lineup, along with Danny Carey from Tool on drums, and Steve Vai on guitar.  They did 80’s Discipline-era Crimso, and in fact played most of the three classic albums that Belew and Levin made with Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp.  The show was most excellent.  The band was tight and energetic and really delivered new interpretations of the material.  Probably the most interesting thing was how Steve Vai, legendary guitar shredder that he is, sort of pointed up the amazing complexity and difficulty of Fripp’s original parts.  Vai covered some parts exactly, and interpreted others; he did alot of stuff tapping that Fripp originally did picking, and skipped some of Fripp’s parts entirely, such as the intro/bridge to Frame by Frame.  On the other hand, Vai was able to impart a bit of a slinky greazy bluesy feel to Fripp’s very mechanical-sounding parts, and that lifted everything.  His solo on Sheltering Sky was one of the high points of the night.

Less than a week later we were back to see Brooklyn’s own They Might Be Giants.  Their music is also pretty complicated, but the vibe is complete opposite, being wacky humor rather than wacky seriousness.  Needless to say the show was alot fun, with a horn section and lots of moments showcasing all the players.  I realized the song Particle Man perfectly describes the graphic novel Watchmen, whether by coincidence or by design.  Dr. Manhattan is Particle Man, Ozymandias is Triangle Man, and Rorschach is Person Man.  Small world, go figure.

Next up: D&D

Comings and Goings

It was another busy week.  We got home from our trip Monday morning and it was straight to work.  Wednesday evening we went to see a rock show, Cyndi Lauper at Madison Square Garden.  Had dinner in the Persian place Jeannie likes before the show.  Cyndi put on an excellent show.  The band was great, and so was the light and video show, and she can really still sing.  There were lots of costume changes, and a fair amount of long storytelling intros to songs.  Between the two, they rarely played more than two or three songs without a pause.  Ah well, she’s got alot of great, fun hits.

Friday night we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention, which was on Saturday.  It’s fun to be able to say I teach a MIT every year, even if it’s just origami.  This year I taught my Flying Fish, since I recently folded a bunch of the for the OUSA holiday tree, and made some improvements to the design along the way.  This year’s convention seemed a bit more low key than other years, and the only person I really ended up talking to in any depth was Brian Chan.  Erik Demaine did his usual lecture on his research, and this year seems to have made good progress in cracking the layering problem, which central to the whole question of modeling origami in software.  After the main classes were over, there was a group activity, a design challenge.  For the prompt “things you find in a kitchen” I folded a cake with a slice cut out, and the missing slice out of another sheet of paper.  Interested 3-D geometry challenge. 

We drove Saturday after dinner.  It was good to get an extra hour of sleep Sunday morning, and finally have a low pressure day off.  The weather was nice so Jeannie and did a bike ride, maybe the last of the year.  I went sixteen miles in a little over an hour.  Also took the Mustang out for a ride, and raked up the leaves in the yard, which we hadn’t done since before our trip.

Monday came and I was pretty exhausted today, and also feeling out of sorts with it getting dark so early now that the clocks have shifted.  Ah well, looking forward to not having to do any traveling for a while, and get some things done at home.

Origami USA Convention 2024

This year the OUSA annual convention was about a month later than usual.  You’d think that would give me more time to prepare, but no, I was busy doing other things.  I had a whole list in my mind of new models I wanted to fold, but after an explosive year of exploration last year, there was a bit of regression to the mean.  I did fold a handful of new versions of existing designs, some of which I never quite perfected, and are now revised and refined.  These include my Spacecat, Platypus, Heavy Rocket, and my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron, (which could probably use a more evocative if less technically accurate name; it looks something like a soccer ball composed of eighty triangles).  Most of these I folded from a new kind of handmade tissue foil which I bought at last year’s convention.  It’s very attractive, well made, and comes in a great variety of colors including bright, dark and earth tones.  Some have a bit of sparkle or texture.  Very good for models that require sculpting that you don’t want to wetfold. 

I arrived Friday evening with Jeannie and Michelle.  The convention was at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan again this year, right at the north end of Times Square. The first thing was to check in and set up my exhibit, which also included a bunch of classic models.  I have a pretty deep bench so I rounded it out with whatever fit my mood.  After dinner we met a bunch of origami friends including John Montroll and Brian Webb, who hasn’t been to a New York convention in quite a few years, so it was great to see him.  It seems everyone had a story about where they spent the eclipse.  John is up to his tenth Origami Symphony Book, the conceit being each is divided into four “movements” which explore a related set of models or subjects in some depth.  So he had lots of fun diagrams to share.

Saturday was the first day of classes.  I didn’t do any classes in the morning, but at lunchtime Jeannie, Michelle and I went shopping to the gundam anime store, Kinokuniya, and Midtown Comics.  I was there mostly to look around, but I was inspired to buy a Mecchagodzilla action figure.  We had lunch at Kati Roll, which I hadn’t been to in a long time.  In the afternoon I taught my Spacecat.  The class was full and it went over well.  It’s a pretty complex model, but everyone finished and had time to do the sculpting.  After that I folded a couple different cat models from other creators.  When classes were done it was time for the annual meeting.  I took on a new function this year as the election proxy.  It was my job to count the votes for election for the officers and board members of the organization and announce them at the meeting.

At dinner time we went to a local bar called Names and Faces.  Back when the convention was at the Fashion Institute, we often used to go a neighborhood bar Mustang Sally’s at the end of the night.  It grew into a real scene over the years.  Brian and Paul Frasco were trying to bring this idea back and found a good place near the hotel.  It was a pretty good crowd, but since it was only dinner time everyone went back to the convention.  A few returned to the bar for late-night folding.

Sunday I took Brian Chan’s lecture on origami photography.  I found this very helpful, especially the focus on lighting.  At lunchtime I ran the annual Paper Airplane contest.  This was my second year at it.  It’s mostly kids but they really get into it.  There’s three categories: distance, accuracy and time aloft.  The prizes are gift certificates for the store where you can buy origami books and paper and tools and trinkets.  There was some kind of street fair going on outside the hotel, so for lunch I got some kind of rice bowl and zeppoli. 

After lunch I taught my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron.  This is a very advanced model, but I’ve been practicing and I brought some tools (paperclips and chopsticks) for the class to use to help hold the model together and poke inside while midway thru folding it.  Unfortunately a few of the students didn’t listen to directions and messed up precreasing the grid.  But most went on the more challenging 3-D part.  Afterwards a couple of the students came up to me and said they really liked the model and plan to fold it for the giant folding competition that evening.  I said it almost certainly wouldn’t work but collapse under its own weight.

That evening we went out to dinner with John Montroll and Pei, a convention special guest from China.  Pei does beautiful work that is sculptural, sometimes very complex, and super expressive.  He has a great eye for form.  His signature piece is a deer with antlers like a tree full of many, many tiny flowers, folded from a single square.  John has travelled extensively in Asia and was quite happy serving as a guide, making Pei feel at ease, asking about things China and telling him things about America. 

After dinner was the giant folding contest and shaw’nuff there was a team folding my model from the afternoon, a giant pink soccer ball about a yard across, made up of triangles, folded from a single ten-foot square of paper.  Paper that big tends to resemble cloth when you work with it, all floppy.  But I underestimated the strength and rigidity of the form.  The triangles scaled up from about an inch on a side to a foot, but that was still small enough for the paper to hold its shape on the network of creases.  Very impressive; indeed they won a prize.

Monday was a bit quieter since a good fraction of the people didn’t stay for the last day.  I took a class of Pei’s, a Hippocampus with an unusual and creative way of making the tail.  In the afternoon I took a class on pentagonal flowers, followed by Boice Wong doing one of his box-pleated human figures.  I ended it up doing a class on towel folding, which introduced a couple moves outside the regular origami vocabulary such as rolling and twisting.  The perfect way to cap a weekend of crazy complex stuff.

There’s always a banquet Monday night.  The last couple years the venue has been pretty dismal, but this year it was at Carmine’s, a big Italian restaurant, the kind place that has pictures of guys like Dean Martin on the walls.  It’s right off Times Square, in fact where Ollie’s used to be, right across the street from where I used to work.  We had a whole room upstairs to ourselves, with a bar even.  Perfect.  The food was great: lasagna and chicken and eggplant parmesan, and salads and appetizers and pistachio cannolis for desert.  Brian and I had a couple cocktails too.  It was a family style situation, so in the end they said anyone who was local could take home a tray of food.  Jeannie grabbed some eggplant and pasta and a tray of cannolis.  Yum. 

Then it was time to say goodbye.  Bam! came and went until the next convention.