Hot Summer Nights

Summer continues.  Getting into the soft nougatey center of it all.  After we came back from Buffalo it was time for another round of yardwork.  This included edging the driveway, the walkway around the side of the house and the patio, and also weeding under the hedges and trimming the low-hanging fronds from the neighbor’s willow tree that intrudes into our yard.  It was very hot out out last week, so I mainly waited until the evening to do this stuff, and I did my bike rides in the morning.  Btw I’m up to a hundred rides, seven hundred seventy-seven miles for the year so far.

I discovered a wasp nest in the overhang above my garage door.  I sprayed it but that didn’t take care of them, so the next step is to take apart the soffit and find the nest inside.

I also discovered my ’67 Mustang seems to have some electrical problems.  The blinkers, wipers and stereo no longer work.  My first guess is that one or more fuses need replacing, and indeed there’s two fuses that if blown would explain the failure.  I bought some replacement fuses, but when I looked at the fusebox, it seems that there are extra wires in there, probably from when they installed the stereo, so I’m kinda afraid to mess with it, and I’m thinking it’d be better to have a qualified expert handle it.

We did get to the beach a week ago.  Jeannie and brought our bikes and I did eighteen miles on the Ocean Parkway Coastal Greenway, then went for a swim in the ocean, while Michelle hung out on the beach and read her book.  The water was perfect, very calm for the Atlantic shore of Long Island.  Since I’m taking the summer off, I have as an explicit goal to the beach on a weekday.  I’ve been talking with my friend Nick about this, and we’re targeting sometime in the first couple weeks of August, but there’s alot going on these days and the summer is flying by fast.

My friend Ginny, a former colleague at Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, had a party last week to celebrate our product Permission Slip, of which I was tech lead for a number of years, being sold to an internet privacy company and so will live on even after the Innovation Lab is no more.   You  may recall that I got laid off back in May, along with a handful of other colleagues, so it was good to catch up with everyone.  Most of those left behind have split and found new jobs.  Our former VP Ben is taking a sabbatical for the summer like me.  Our former head of operations has joined the new company as a consultant.  A couple others have joined NYC’s Pit Crew and are working to put up a web portal to report violations of the city’s new law mandating one-click cancellation for consumers, a worthy pivot.  All in all it was good to catch up with everyone and get a feeling of closure.

We had planned to go camping with Kathleen and the kids this last weekend.  Unfortunately, in the days leading up the trip, the skies all over New York State were brown and hazy from distant forest fires, making it unpleasant to be outside.  This, combined with the forecast of heavy rain all day Saturday, led us to postpone our trip until August.  Instead, we had a backyard barbecue Friday night, and used our firepit for the first time this season, while listening to tunes and enjoying some beers and cocktails.  Saturday we went and saw Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey in the theatre.  I must say the movie was epic in every sense of the word.  Big, loud, fantastic, full of monsters and fights and heavy thematic material.  Beautifully shot, great acting and story construction.  In a word, totally amazing.

In music news, Spacecats continues to search for more and better gigs, even as we take a few weeks off because everyone is taking vacation at different times. When we reconvene, the focus will hopefully be on finally getting the recording sessions for our next record scheduled. Meanwhile, on the Spellbound project I’ve finished recording the organ parts for The Sailor’s Saga, and have moved on to the twelve-string guitar parts.

Now the Origami USA conference is only a few days away.  As a special guest, I’m going to be doing alot this year.  I’ve been busy practice folding the models I’m going to teach, thinking about what to exhibit, and maybe even folding a couple brand-new things for that, and generally getting prepared.  Should be a fun time.

Yankee Rose

Summer rolls on, the Fourth of July weekend is come and gone.  Time to rewind and catch up on things.

The last Friday in June my jazz group Spacecats played another gig at the Green Growler.  For this one we decided to play our originals as only half the songs, and the other half split between jazz standards and our renditions of rock and pop songs, on the theory that people who aren’t necessarily into jazz will like it if they hear something familiar.  It seems to have worked.  After the show various people told me they liked our versions of Black Hole Sun, Black Magic Woman, Mister Magic, Englishman in New York, and Josie.  Meanwhile we have enough original, with new ones every show, that we’re rotating them in and out of the set list each show.  Another new thing for this gig is I brought my bari sax and played it on a couple songs.  One was our original Where Has the Sun Gone, a slow, bluesy number with a low growly riff that seemed just perfect for it.  The other was Bemsha Swing by Thelonious Monk, with gave it a cool vibe.  Both went over well. Now it’s on to planning the next gig, and focusing once more on making a record.  Onward and upward!

Meanwhile in my D&D campaign, the party is in the middle of melee combat with the final boss.  The module is White Plume Mountain, which is an original AD&D module that I first DM’d back in high school in the 1980’s.  They’ve subsequently updated to 5th edition rules and published it in the Tales from the Yawning Portal compendium.  We’re playing 5E rules in this campaign so that worked out handily.  It’s fun to compare the two versions; the main difference is that the monsters are alot tougher nowadays.  The module’s ending is a bit abrupt.  The last encounter is a pair of Fire Elementals who show up to prevent the party from leaving the dungeon.  But the party never gets to meet and fight the real big bad, a powerful Lich.  There’s a note at the end, saying if the Efreet capture the party, they’ll be taken to an indoctrination center and made into mindless zombie-like servants of the Lich, and the DM should just improvise this.

Well, lo and behold, stuffed in the back of my original module is hand-drawn map of a dungeon “White Plume Mountain, Level 2”, plus some notes in my handwriting.  It turns out to be a good series of encounters including said indoctrination center, a bunch of guards, henchgnomes, and other minions, some prisoners to set free, a trap or two, and finally a well-guarded crypt with the fearsome Lich in real undead person!  It actually quite well done, so I’m in the process of converting it to 5E.  More on that as the situation unfolds.

Elsewhere, in The Global Jukebox I’ve been spending time updating the code for the routes to accommodate a bunch of new features.  The routes basically handle representing the state of the app as a unique url and resolving urls to app states.  It’s pretty deep and complex and has to handle lots of stuff.  Martin wrote the original version of it.  We don’t really use any frameworks for the Jukebox, but we do use plenty of design patterns, and the general approach is informed by Angular, since I was doing alot of Angular apps around the time I started the GJB.  I remember having long conversations with Martin about the design and the requirements of the routes feature; I was always able to communicate with him about software design like no one else, probably because we taught ourselves programming together as kids and understood alot of deep concepts in similar ways.  Anyway, I dusted off the code and started reading it, and I must say it’s a real a masterpiece.  So well thought out, so consistent and logical, a joy to work with.  I really felt Martin’s presence and missed him like I haven’t in a long time.

Which leads me to the next topic, my work-in-progress record Spellbound.  If you’ll recall, this is a new rendition of a record Martin and I wrote together a long time ago.  In the last few weeks I sang and mixed all the vocals for the epic eighteen-minute final track.  (There’s lots of instrumental jams in there, so it’s not as much work as it might sound like).  So I now have a basic arrangement of the first three-fourths of the song, and a sketch of the structure long extended jam at the end.  It’s sounding pretty good and holds together musically as an extended piece.  The next round of work will be to add more texture instruments such as organ and twelve-string guitars, then the solos, then fleshing out the ending jam.  Ought to be done sometime in the fall.

It’s been super hot here the past few weeks, and I’ve been going out early to get my bike rides in.  A few weeks ago I saw Diamond David Lee Roth at the Capital Theatre in Port Chester. And although he can’t really sing the high notes anymore, he still put on a great, energetic show, and smartly had a chorus of backup singers, which helped to point up the importance of the vocal arrangements in those original Van Halen songs. 

My only disappointment was he didn’t do any of his solo stuff, but I was inspired to listen to his first few solo albums Crazy from the Heat, Eat ‘Em and Smile, and Skyscraper, the latter two featuring Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan and guitar and bass.  I must say they hold up way better than I expected. The songs are great, Steve and Billy are out of this world monster musicians, Dave is in top form and branching out into a range of styles and sounds, and overall they have a great summertime party vibe and have entered heavy rotation in my house, especially Eat ‘Em and Smile.

I went up to Buffalo for July Fourth weekend to visit my folks.  It was super hot up there too, close to ninety the first two days.  But it was even hotter home in NYC, over one hundred degrees!  On the second we had dinner with Lizzy at a place on the lake in Hamburg, then went up to the Niagara Falls.  I hadn’t been up there in years, and it was good to go in the evening when it was cooler and less crowded.  And it turned out the were fireworks shows up by the visitor center, and after that down in the gorge.

The next day was even hotter.  Jeannie and Michelle went with Lizzy to shop for a wedding dress.  Apparently they found one that’s very nice.  Meanwhile I hid out in the air conditioning and build the class schedule for this year’s Origami USA convention.  As the special guest I’m teaching five classes this year, so one nice perk is I can choose the times and rooms I want for my classes first.  I’m starting to get excited about the convention now.  Only three weeks away, and lots to do!

On the evening of the third, Kathleen and the kids turned up, and we spent the evening hanging out.  The next day on the fourth, we basically spent the whole day sipping beers, barbecuing, and listening to tunes.  Jeannie made a whole playlist of America-themed songs (including songs about states, cities, and other places in America), partly because we can’t let the rightwing nutjobs take over the symbols of patriotism and the idea of loving our country.  I thought this was a great idea and offered a few suggestions.  Lizzy heard us working on it when she was home a few weeks ago and came up with a playlist of her own.

That evening we watched the fireworks, although this year they moved them to the lake in the park at the end of my parent’s block because there was construction at the school at the far end of the park and they couldn’t use the athletic field there like the normally do.

We got home yesterday and had the air conditioner running the whole time we were gone, but still it was pretty hot inside.  Finally last night the heat broke and it started to rain.  Today it was cold and rainy all day.  What a relief!

Some Summer Fun

Life goes on full of its comings and goings.  A week ago Lizzy and Josh came into town for the weekend.  Saturday they were at a party on Long Island, then they spent Sunday with us.  We did a barbecue and had a fun time hanging out outside.  Monday I went to the Bronx Zoo with Lizzy and Josh.  That was a fun time too.  It’s a big zoo and it took most of the day, but we saw pretty much everything.  Lots of birds and reptiles.  Did the monorail and the elephant was out to see.  Lots of other big mammals: giraffes, rhinos, bears, tigers, lions, gorillas, gazelle and zebras to name a few.  Afterwards I took them to the airport.  Their flight was delayed, which worked out well because we had extra time at the zoo.  However, traffic was terrible because it was rush hour, and the computer routed us on a strange route thru street-level Queens.

This last weekend Jeannie and went up to Westerlo to visit Kathleen and the kids.  On Friday, her friend and neighbor John, who is the drummer for the band Martin was in, the East Berne Band, had a backyard party barbecue jam session, and invited me to sit in.  He sent me a setlist so I spent a few days listening and learning the songs.  Some were pretty basic bar band songs, while other were interesting and quirky.  The sound was centered on groups like The Band, The J. Giles Band, and the E. Street Band with lots of extra keyboards and horns.  In fact when I got there, there was another keyboard player and another horn player sitting in, so it was a big sound.  Off to one side of the stage we a row of people in golf carts, who I dubbed the rolling VIP section. 

The bass player Dan and drummer John are co-lead singers, and alot of the songs feature harmonies.  Dan is good at directing the group from the middle of the stage, and keeping everything from devolving into chaos.  So it was a good jam and a good party, and it was great to catch up with those guys.  Only problem was midway thru the second set the skies turned dark and the threat of a downpour was imminent. So we had to pack up in hurry.  Funny thing, but by the time we were packed up the rain was lightening up, but there was no way we were going to set everything up again.  Ah well, it was a good time even if it was cut a little bit short.

That evening we hung out and played videogames with Charlie and Matthew and Abbie.  Charlie amazed me by speed running sixteen stars in Super Mario 46 in about twenty minutes.  He did all kinds of circuitous shortcuts and side paths and huge wall jumps, and all kinds of leaps and jumps, even plummeting from great heights land on a hidden ledge, and made it all look super easy.

The next day there was a Renaissance Faire in one of the nearby towns so we went to check that out.  There was a bunch of booths selling things like jewelry, chainmail, and metal goods, boots, corsets and leather goods, wooden swords, maces and battle axes, foam swords, maces and battle axes, and even real swords, maces and battle axes.  The real attraction was the cosplayers.  There were tons of them, and most were very good.  They ranged from authentic-ish to totally fantastic.  I had no idea elves and fairies were such an important part of the Renaissance!   It was a nice summer day for walking around.  My only criticism is they should have had more performers.  Apparently there was a joust but we missed it cuz we were having lunch, and the next show wasn’t for another three hours.  Ah well.

Sunday Jeannie and I got back on the local bike path.  I did twenty-two miles in a hundred minutes.  Jeannie did fifteen miles, a season’s best for both of us.  Tomorrow I will pass six hundred total miles for the year, on track to make twelve hundred by the end of the year. 

In my recording project, I’ve laid down the lead and harmony vocals for A Sailor’s Saga, and am in the process of mixing them.  Don’t tell anyone, but I’m using a touch of Auto-Tune to make them sound a bit more in tune. 

Spacecats Live at the Green Growler June 26

My jazz group Spacecats will be appearing at Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Friday June 26 at 8pm. The group consists of John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on bass and Rick Arecco on drums.  Note this is an hour later than our usual start time.

The Growler continues to be our regular gig, a great environment for the band to experiment and progress. For this show, in addition to developing and sharpening our originals and jazz standards, we’re adding some new pop rock and funk material to jam out on, trying to take things that people will know and recognize and do something fun and cool with them. Also, I’ll be bringing my bari sax to play on a couple of songs! Should be a great time, so come on down and check it out!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Friday June 26, 8pm
at
The Green Growler
Croton-on-Hudson, NY

Down by the Old Mill Stream

I did a fun thing this week.  I played in the pit orchestra for a local vocal group, The Old Mill Singers.  I’ve done a good number of pit orchestra gigs over the years, most recently when my kids were in middle school, and they’ve always been a good time.  Rick from my jazz group is the regular drummer for their show, and he asked me if I’d like to play a solo for one of the songs.  The group is about thirty or forty singers, doing mainly choral and choir type arrangements of traditional and pop music, show tunes, and that kind of thing.  There were a few soloists too. 

One of them, Savia, sang I Will Always Love You, following Whitney Houston’s arrangement, which includes an 8-bar sax solo.  This is by no means an easy song to sing.  In fact, it’s a real tour de force, beginning with a long a cappella intro, and full of expressive turns and melisma, and has a big dynamic range and very wide melodic range, with a dramatic pause and key change towards the end, where she goes really high and belts out the chorus before returning to quiet sensitive tone for the ending.  Savia is an excellent singer and really nailed it.  It was a high point of the show.  My solo came in about halfway thru.  She wanted me to pretty much follow the solo on the record, but there’s alot of free expression in the phrasing, so I learned the basic shape and improvised on that, and it worked out just fine.

The rehearsals and performances were at a school up in Braircliff Manor.  The orchestra included Rick on drums, a piano player, a bass player, and a few others who played on just a few tunes, including a viola and a guitar/ukulele.  Savia and everyone there were really nice people, and when it was done they said they’d like me to come back for their Christmas show.

Origami Site Update

One of the things I want to do this summer is give my website a long-overdue update, starting with the origami section.  The last time I put up pictures of new models was seven years ago.  Since then I’ve been busy with other things, and I went thru a rather long spell when I found it difficult to do any new creative paperfolding.  I never stopped entirely, but it did slow to a trickle between origami events, and I spent alot of time on a few supercomplex ideas involving pentagonal geometry, where progress got to be slow and frustrating. 

However, now I have more time to put into folding, and my creative energy is reignited by the last few conventions I attended, plus the fact that I’m going to be a special guest at the Origami USA convention later this summer. 

I took an inventory and have created about twenty-five new models since the year 2020, and about half of those have been photographed.  So the first step was to get the ones I had pictures of onto the site, in the gallery pages and with their own detail pages.  While I was at it I updated the layout of the gallery pages with larger images arranged in three columns, replaced some photos of old models with newer better ones where available, and made numerous small improvements and corrections.

There’s lots more to go.  I’m planning a deep and substantial redesign of the whole site, and am going to re-fold and re-photograph a good fraction of the models on display to raise the quality of the whole presentation.  Also I’m going to put up a bunch of crease patterns, and add some new sections on things like exhibits and deep dives into different themes.  On top of that, I’m actively creating new models again, so there’s be more fresh content coming soon.

Still this is a good step forward.  So check it out and enjoy:
https://zingman.com/origami

Models By Subject:
https://zingman.com/origami/models_subject.php

Models By Year:
https://zingman.com/origami/models_year.php

New Origami Models 2026

Here’s some new origami models I folded between the last CoCon and CFC6.  I’ve been working at these for a while, so it feels good to have some attained some completion.  Each of these is folded from a single pentagonal sheet of paper.

Level 3 Penfractal Tessellation

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome with Embedded Penfractal Tessellation

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome, Plain

Level 2 Penfractal Tessellation

Vertex-Centered Dodecahedron

Starman (Pentagon Human Figure Base)

Midwest Adventure, Part 2 – Art and Origami

Where were we?  Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference.  Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule.  Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either.  Bacon and eggs and all kinds of good stuff, lots more time to mingle. 

The conference itself was a series of panels, presentations and discussions around various origami topics.  One of the things I like about CFC is that it’s an international conference and a good fraction of the attendees were from Europe.  It was four days long, so already things that happened on different days run together in my mind.  I must say the level of the presentations was very high, and the topics very cool.  Brandon Wong in particular demoed some base CP-generating software he’s working on.

The panels were interesting and covered topics like origami art and science, book publishing, exhibiting in galleries, teaching, leveraging social media, and ways to broaden the origami community.  I’m looking to do more of all these things, but the TLDR is there’s no magic shortcuts, and all of it is alot of hard work.

I gave a presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry.  It gave some background information and theory, showed a few ways to fold a pentagon from a square, and then dove into a bunch of my own models in various categories including flowers, mandala tilings, fractal/recursive tilings, Penrose tilings, domes and bowls, several of my single-sheet polyhedra, and models that combined more than one these ideas.  I ended with some new work in representational figures, namely a human figure base and experiments with masks and faces.

In the evening the first night, I wound up playing pool with Brian Webb.  Neither of us had played in a long time, but Brian used to be a professional pool shark back in the day, and I wasn’t as rusty as I expected, so it was alot of fun.  He gave me a bunch of pointers along the way for bank shots, spin, and that kind of thing, and I actually learned a few things.  Last game we played was all bank shots, and we discussed each shot before taking it.  In the end the hotel wanted to close the game room because it was late.  I sunk the final shot, so now I get to brag that I beat Brian at pool. Friday night the whole convention went out to a group dinner at a place that had indoor bocce, so I played a bunch a bocce games.   Brian bought me a beer since that was our bet from the night before.  I’d never really played bocce but it was alot of fun.  Playing pool the night before was a good warm up.

Saturday morning there was an origami exhibit.  It was only one day because the hotel was using the other conference rooms for other events such as weddings.  It was a small exhibition but totally amazing because it was thirty or so of the world’s top folders.  David Brill ran a session in which he called upon every exhibitor to explain one or more of their models.  This was really interesting for me, especially to hear the newer folders or those whose wore I was less familiar with.  Also interesting to hear how people develop their ideas, and how everyone has to work thru design and technical challenges, gets stuck and tends to put things down and come back to them later with fresh insight.

The Buffalo Sabres were in the NHL playoffs the whole time, in the quarter finals against the Montreal Canadiens.  We watched three games while were out there, two of them at the hotel bar.  Saturday night was game six, and the Sabres came from behind to win big and bring the series to t 3-3 tie, forcing game seven back in Buffalo.  Unfortunately, they lost that game in overtime, but it was an extremely well-played series.  And, the Sabres went from being in dead last place in December, to a long winning streak culminating in their first playoff run in seventeen years.  Lots of fun.  Hockey was my main sport growing up, and although I haven’t followed hockey in many years, Michelle got into it after the Olympics and I started bandwagoning when it looked like the Sabres were going to make the playoffs.  Lots of fun.  Here’s looking forward to next season, eh!

Meanwhile, no one in the conference thought to look for us at the bar that night, but when the game was over I found where people were doing late-night folding and hung out there a while.  Some people were actually wet-folding in the hotel pool!

Listening to several days of origami-oriented talks meant there was lots of time to quietly fold.  I explored several ideas from my prezzy, where I thought I could use a better example for the picture on the slide.  First one I folded was a new level-2 pentagon fractal just for practice.  I gave this to Beth as thank-you at the end of the conference.  Next was a new variation, embedding the inner subdivision in a semi-sunken dodecahedron pattern.  This one had six big faces, half the full form, so I made this one into a dome.  Very cool and effective.  I’m going refold it out of different paper for the OUSA convention in July.  I had thought that this might make a good study to refine my long-fallow flowerball idea, but it’s good as is. 

The last one was a level-3 recursive pentagon fractal.  Madonna Yoder gave me a 12″ sheet of skytone paper, so I told her if it worked I’d dedicate the model to her.  I figured if I was going thru all the effort, I might as well make it count.  The figure is basically a pentagon divided into six smaller pentagons, and each of those divided into six smaller ones, and each of those divided into six smaller ones still!  It took me basically a whole day to do the prefolding, and another half day to collapse it.  Fortunately, it worked on the first try, and it came out awesome!

The trip home Sunday night was uneventful, except that we came back home into a heat wave.  I had to put in the air conditioners first thing Monday morning.

Now I feel all charged up again to do origami, and there’s a bunch of new ideas I want to work on before the convention.  I’ve also dusted off my web site and started looking at a long overdue update and redesign.

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 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.