Starry Skies Sounding (2015Jul21)

Posted by XperDunn on July 23, 2015

Tuesday, July 21, 2015 8:06 PM

Whilst casting about for titles for today’s crop of piano improvs, I supposed the heat of summer made me conscious of how summer is caused by our hemisphere leaning more towards our star, Sol, than during the rest of the year. So I’m using famous stars’ names for titles today: Polaris (Ursae Minoris), Sirius (Dog Star), Algol (Beta Persei or Demon Star), and Sol (Sun). Don’t expect the artwork to correspond to the title stars—I just used a general Astronomy theme for the videos.

I’m astronomically inclined due to both last week’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto (successful after a nine-year voyage) and the anniversary, yesterday, of the first moon landing. But who am I kidding? I’m always into astronomy, space flight, science fiction, all that stuff. In time, my fascination became leavened with the realization that outer space is not the old west—pioneering in the twenty-first century is a long game, generations long, given the distances and the difficulties.

Plus, once you’re up there, you need a heat shield just to get home again—if you thought it surprising that a sandstorm’s winds can scour the flesh right off your bones, just imagining mere atmospheric friction turning you into a piece of overdone bacon. Still, I love NASA, I worship astronauts and cosmonauts, and I’ll never lose the thrill of ‘boldly going’ somewhere where the gravity is a balmy zero.

One exception is the final video, “Sol (Sun)”, which uses some handheld video of our neighbor Sherryl’s garden—it’s kinda jumpy, so my apologies if you find it unwatchable. If you can hang on, there’s some very pretty flowers—even a couple of bees and butterflies.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015 4:05 PM

Oh, What A Busy Day! (2015Jul22)

Claire drove me to the DMV this morning at the crack of 10:30 am—and we didn’t get out until 11:30—just wait ‘til those people see my Yelp review. But then we went to the Eveready Diner, which I would highly recommend—if I did Yelp reviews. Not that I have anything against it—I just don’t get out much—and I don’t have a cell-phone. I’d have to acquire a life before I acquired the modern habit of sharing it, interface-wise, on the fly—like the kids do. Plus, I’d have to start wearing my glasses all the time, trying to interface with those small screens and keyboards. Someone will eventually roll out the new ‘senior model’ I-pad—about a foot and a half square—with a full-size, ergonomic keyboard for a ‘kickstand’.

When we returned I went next door to visit with Sherryl—her garden has been the subject of some recent videos, but she showed me her biannual hollyhocks (nice perfume) and some other amazing flower whose name eludes recall.

[insert flowers pictures here]

Hollyhocks (I think)

Sherryl told me three times and I still forget the name…

This time, I took video as well as stills, and I found, upon editing it just now, that it looks much better at half-speed—it reduces my hand-shakey-ness and lets the viewer get a better look at the flowers. I would have loved to retain the soundtrack if it had just had the bird-calls and bee-buzzings, but all that cool shit was drowned out by the whine of landscaper power-tools and passing traffic. Changing the speed ruins the audio anyhow—so it all works out. I think it’s a pretty fair tour of a summer garden in full glory. Now all I have to do is figure out how to use twelve minutes of garden tour for a five minute music video—maybe I should just go play some more piano….

Nah, that way lies madness. I’ll edit it down to just the best parts and see what’s left—maybe I can distill its essence into five minutes. Like I said—busy day. Whenever I go over there with a camera I end up with hours of post-work here at the computer—today, for instance, I got over forty good photos along with the video footage.

Back in pre-digital days, most of my shots didn’t come out the way I wanted, if they came out at all. All the things my daughter, the photographer, has learned to do so painstakingly by hand are mostly done for me when I set it to ‘Auto’. A camera’s ‘auto’ does a lot—focus, light-level, aperture, who knows what-all else, and although I can’t adjust these factors artistically, as a professional photographer does, it still lets me take a great picture. In the old days, I’d pay good money to get a roll of film developed, but I’d be lucky to get two or three photos I really liked. So that’s another effect of digital—I have much more experience with a camera than I would have in earlier times—we all do. Photographs now are not only free (the big plus) but we get instant feed-back from the camera’s digital display—telling us when to take a second try at something we messed up.

I like being older—because of such things. Someone who’s never used a Brownie and waited weeks to get back terrible black-and-white prints that cost money—a younger person just can’t appreciate what a wonder a digital camera is. Like me with light-switches—I had to be taught what a wonderful thing they were—I had to be taught that they weren’t always part of the walls of houses—I grew up thinking they were nothing special, just something that was always there. I was in my teens before I saw an electrician wire a frame-house under construction—I suddenly understood that a house has a nervous system, so to speak. I was even older when I learned specifics of the history of Michael Faraday, Joseph Henry, Nicola Tesla, Thomas Edison, et. al. And even so, I’ll marvel at the parade of history, but a light-switch is still just a light-switch to me—yet a digital camera will always be a small miracle.

Hope you like the music!….

Sherryl’s Gardens (Just To Be Fair) (2015Jun26)

Posted by XperDunn on June 26, 2015

Okay, this time I’m giving credit where credit is due–Sherryls’ got the green thumb. Harlan, however, makes an appearance towards the end of the video (see yesterday’s blog about the Big Tree across the street).

Sherryl and Harlan’s Garden (2015Jun10)

Posted by XperDunn on June 11, 2015

Wednesday, June 10, 2015 2:53 PM

First off—to be honest, it’s Sherryl’s garden more than it is Harlan’s—I’m pretty sure he confines himself to lawn-mowing, landscaping, and home-repair—Sherryl does the gardening. I only used Harlan’s Gardens because it sounds so nice as a title. Ergo, my humble apologies to Sherryl—but, as she knows, ‘that’s Hollywood’.

I went next door yesterday right after a big June shower—I wanted to get the droplets on the flower petals (which I did) but I also got a lot of wash-out in the whiter flowers—and I hate to lose that delicate detail and end up with a white blotch in its place—but what are you gonna do, right? There’s still a riot of color in these photos—almost like a party in your eyeballs.

Also, there are just a few shots of our own flowers and vegetable boxes towards the end of the clip, so today’s video should not be considered an official ‘documentary’ of Sherryl’s garden—more like a celebration. One of the very last photos is interesting because it is lettuce from a previous year’s box garden that decided to start growing wild in the cracks of our driveway’s asphalt. Nothing stops Life, I guess.

Every one of the 162 photographs were retouched in Corel Photo-Shop, whether it needed it or not (they all needed it)—so I hope you all appreciate how much eye-strain and mouse-clicking I go through trying to make these videos interesting to watch. And here I run into a paradox—when I do these photo-journal, slide-showy videos of pretty pictures, I always make the insert frame of the ‘me performing’ video very small. I do this because I want the photos to be as visible as possible. But then when I’m making the ‘me performing’ video I add all kinds of video effects—because I figure it’s going to be too small to see. That’s the paradox—I like adding video effects gadgets so much that I’m happier when no one is going to see exactly how loopy the video turns out.

As always, however, I put the lion’s share of my efforts into the music itself—and today, as you will hear, I even got some help from a flock of birds. This improv is a little different from my usual, but I was trying something new—I hope you enjoy it.

On a whinier note (and yes I will have some fine cheese with that) my back is killing me, my shoulder is stiff from all the repetitive photoshop-mousing, a headache is just starting that tiny silver hammer-tapping, and I’m awful tired. I sure hope this video lives up to all the effort.

Irish Breakfast (2015May07)

Posted by XperDunn on May 7, 2015

Thursday, May 07, 2015 3:39 PM

“Yorkshire Gold”®—that’s the stuff—an Irish Breakfast tea I obtain through the English Tea Store. Don’t get excited—the English Tea Store is just one of Google’s ‘Trusted Stores’—it’s not some authentic little old lady with a cat in London or anything ‘Harry Potter-ish’ like that. The only thing English about the English Tea Store is that it offers foreign brands. An ‘American Tea Store’ would have just two brands: Lipton and Tetley—if you don’t count Snapple or Nestea, which are produced in the only way average Americans like their tea—iced and flavored.

But I’m an old man with old impressions—truth be told, nowadays there are a lot of new tea brands on the supermarket shelves—greens, chais, herbals—a whole shelf-section of esoteric tea exotica. But they don’t count—no caffeine. No, the Old World understands that tea is a good drug and that non-caffeinated tea is an abomination against nature. They give their teas arcane names like Earl Grey Supreme or Lap Sang Soo Chong. Those are two of my favorites, by the way—the Earl Grey Supreme has a complexity similar to a good wine, and the Lap Sang Soo Chong includes actual burnt leaves, which give it a smoky flavor that couldn’t go better with tobacco.

While I enjoy a good cup of fancy tea, my everyday taste runs more towards the basics—and Yorkshire Gold’s Irish Breakfast tea is some of the blackest, bitterest tea you’ll ever taste—coffee be damned. When it’s good and hot, it’ll warm your insides like a wood-burning stove is lit in there.

I only recently became interested in tea this last mid-winter—I bought a glass teapot with a strainer and some loose-leafed teas, just to experience the real tea flavor. It was an eye-opener to me, having grown up with nothing but Lipton in a bag, with milk and sugar—which ain’t half-bad, don’t get me wrong. If I hadn’t liked Lipton I’d never have been tempted to go further—but, boy, is there further to go. I had these cute little tins of several loose-leafed teas—Bear asked me to save the tins for her when the tea is gone. I’d brew up a pot of real tea and enjoy it in a small cup; then I’d have to throw away the clump of tea-leaves, and rinse out the pot, especially the strainer bit. Some leaf-bits would always get past the sieve—that became annoying, trying to drink the last of the cup without swallowing the leaves.

So then I tried tea-balls—those little metal containers on a chain used to dunk the ball in the hot water. Still, some leaf detritus came through—it was better than that strainer-coil inside the teapot spout, but it wasn’t perfect. And rinsing the tea-ball out each time was almost more trouble than cleaning the pot had been. Eventually, I found the perfect solution—some company makes empty tea-bag sleeves. I bought a box of them. You just add a teaspoon of tea (it always tickles me to think that I’m one of the rare people who use a teaspoon to measure tea) and close it up—voila, homemade tea-bag of whatever loose-leaf tea you prefer.

It worked so good that I bought a mini-stapler to close them (I didn’t want to keep swiping the one off of Bear’s work-desk). So for a while, I made my own Yukon Gold tea-bags. Then that got somewhat tedious, so last week I decided to buy the pre-made Yorkshire Gold teabags. I don’t like to buy stuff frequently, so I ordered a box of one hundred—this huge case of tea showed up yesterday via UPS. It seemed excessive but then I did a little mental math—one hundred tea-bags, about fifty weeks in the year—that’s only two cups of tea per week.

In reality, I drink three or four cups a day, so one hundred teabags is about a month’s supply—still, when you see it all in one box, it’s a lot of tea. Also, I have several other teas I drink for variety, so it should last a little more than a month. I hope so—this stuff ain’t cheap. I should do a cost analysis—it’s bound to be cheaper than coffee—anything’s cheaper than coffee—isn’t it?

Our kitchen isn’t what you’d call spacious, so I didn’t want to add a crate of teabags. I tried stuffing handfuls of Yukon Gold teabags into the emptied spaces of my existing teabag boxes and into the case that’s already there to hold my loose-tea tins and empty teabags and such. But Yukon Gold went for the deluxe foil packet for each bag—it’s about twice the size of the Lipton and Twining packets, so I had to jam them into the boxes to close the lids. I still had an armful left, so I put them in a Baggie and threw that into the cupboard. Our kitchen is virtually bursting with teabags—but I’ll work through them all too soon. Next time I’ll buy four boxes of twenty, or something.

Tea is trickier than coffee. With coffee, I make a big pot and just keep nuking each mugful after the pot goes cold—very low maintenance caffeinating. Tea is more delicate, so I don’t like to make a big pot—I don’t want to nuke old tea. It just won’t do—so I end up making tea by the mug, a separate procedure for every cup of tea. It’s distracting—especially compared to my old coffee days. But boy, howdy, how a cup of coffee perks me up now that I’m used to tea—wow! That’s an added benefit. It’s like aspirin—if you take aspirin a lot, it doesn’t do much, but if you haven’t had any for a long time, you can’t believe how effective it is. All good drugs have the same tripwire—they’re only good in moderation, but the better they are the more you are tempted to be immoderate. ‘Twas ever thus, as my dad used to say.

Earlier today, when I uploaded “Xper Dunn plays Piano – May 7th, 2015 / Improv – My Neighbor’s Garden” to YouTube I felt I had to add:

NOTE: These pictures are a combination of the flowers in my neighbors’ yard and in mine. The beautifully tended quince and wild bleeding hearts are my neighbors’—all of the messy stuff is from our place.

It had occurred to me that no one else on the block would want to think pictures of our place were theirs. I don’t garden—in the traditional sense. It’s more like spectating. But everyone else is far more adult and competent about their yards—and it shows. They’re really beautiful—especially next door’s yard. Well, the other-side next door is a landscape contractor, so his yard is pretty spectacular too—but they have a fence to keep the deer away from their tulips—and to keep their cute little dog from wandering off. We can see it out our windows, but that would feel more like spying than photography. Besides, that’s why I go outside—it’s hard to take a good picture out a window—I’ve tried.

So the improv went pretty well today. There were a couple of walk-throughs—not that I’m complaining—that’s life when your living room is your recording studio. It does interrupt the thread—I just start in again in a different key but, generally, the less distraction the better with these things. On the other hand, it’s very convenient to have an excuse for failing to achieve greatness. (I gonna get there! I just know it!) Oh well, maybe greatness isn’t my thing.

Journal Entries (May 4th & 5th, 2015)

Posted by XperDunn on May 5, 2015

Monday, May 04, 2015 3:08 PM

Such A Beauty (2015May04)

I know a woman who is a broth-witch. She takes a mess of crab-claw shells and boils them all day, filling the house with a seaside perfume—and by evening there’s a bowl of sinfully rich shrimp chowder like you’ve never imagined. Or take today, when what looked like the ejecta from my lawnmower catcher, and a handful of various spices, again filled the living room with a multi-layered scent, the subtlety of which hinted at the many ways such a potful could have gone wrong. But when the steam left the pressure cooker, there was a bowl of clear vegetable broth on the kitchen table. I lowered my nose to inhale the steam—paradise. And I’m a meat-broth kind of guy.

I use to wonder what that woman saw in all those cooking shows—turned out it was a professional interest—she could kill on one of those shows, if she had a mind to.

It’s eighty-two degrees! I have photos from about a month ago—three feet of snow. It may not be climate change, but it’s sure-as-hell hot out there. The bleeding hearts are blooming—the neighbors’ cherry-blossom tree is a pink, humming mob of bumble-bees. The breeze is blowing. This beats snow any day.

It’s a beautiful day. What more can I say? May the fourth be with you.

**-**-**

Tuesday, May 05, 2015 4:07 PM

In Which I Disappear Up My Own Egress (2015Mar05)

When I type phrases using words like ‘erudite’ or ‘pomposity’ I risk sounding pompous and over-educated. When I employ what I think of as bitter satire I risk sounding childish and flippant. And certainly if I don’t write well, those points become confused with a host of unconnected difficulties. I’m one of those idiots who think that I should bring all my education and emotion to my writing—you’d think I’d never heard of style, much less manipulation.

I blame it on honesty—a concept with which I have much concern. Honesty doesn’t go well with good manners—another concern of mine. Thus I feel constrained in writing what I know—I don’t know anything that doesn’t involve everyone else. Plus fiction (my favorite thing) was, I thought, the ultimate goal—but good creative writing is a process of manipulating the reader and of imagining, well, fictions, i.e. lies. Good fiction writers are good storytellers—they have no compunction about telling tall tales—whereas I’m too hung up on the ethics of both the inventing of entertaining fictions and the recycling of my personal history as fodder for the writing factory.

I write quite comfortably in this blog. You can’t see the sausage being made—I have to back up and correct every other word because of tremors and generally poor motor control, but the result doesn’t show that. I don’t know—maybe I’m afraid to let myself go as a creative writer—it reveals a great deal about a person. Where I have the courage of my convictions when it comes to sharing my thoughts, as I do in this blog, sharing my feelings is quite another story. A great deal of social posturing is concerned with maintaining a strong front, a poker face, the eye of the tiger, even. Exposing oneself in the writing of fiction feels, for a close reader like myself, very naked-ish—I don’t know if I have the balls.

What is a story? A young person leaves home and enters the woods, as Joseph Campbell might begin. More modern stories might begin with the humdrum lives of two young people who have no idea they’re about to fall in love. Beyond the adventure/journey story and the love story, there’s the family drama, the saga, the epic, and the mythos—all in various flavors of time period, interlocutor, class, culture, setting, fantasy, psychology, etc. However, there’s been a whole lot of fiction written—and more being published every day. The best modern fiction either lasers in on one aspect of the human condition or else ‘goes big’, interlocking and intertwining several of the above scenarios.

It’s all become quite huge in concept. Plot-outlined whiteboards end up looking like dense electronic blueprints. Big-money fiction writers use many hands—researchers, writing assistants, an editor or two—and, nowadays, in many cases, aspiring writers try to keep up through involvement in a writing class, a writing workshop, or a writing commune—either geographical or digital in location. While writing still consumes the lion’s share of a writer’s working hours, the idea of a writer working in solitude and sending the finished work off to a publisher is as antique as Jane Austen, who died in 1817. And she was pretty good, too. The rest of us need help—or so it would seem. I’m not sure I have the energy to find out.

I can virtually hear all you he-men out there: “You don’t know if you have the balls? You don’t know if you have the energy? Quit with all the negative vibes and make it happen, sissy-boy.” Yeah, yeah—I get it. But everybody has a different context. In my context, exercise produces negative results—added effort only brings extreme fatigue. Ordinary human bodies recharge after exertion—mine, not so much, or so quick. Do you remember how, in the Bourne Identity, Matt Damon’s character wonders why he can’t remember his name, but he knows he can run so many miles before his hands start shaking too much to aim a gun? Well, think about that stat—fatigue doesn’t just reduce strength, it reduces nervous control and mental concentration as well.

The virus is no longer preventing my liver from detoxifying my blood. I can exercise now without flooding my bloodstream with the toxins of exertion. Well, no, that’s wrong. Everyone gets a flood of toxins from exertion but the body, especially the liver, cleans that stuff all up. In my present case the central nervous system got its feelings hurt, back when things were really bad and now it goes off on a tantrum every time it gets a whiff of muscular activity, like talking a short walk—you’d think I’d asked it to scale K-2. So maybe the he-men are right—maybe if I powered through all the pain and tremors and spasms and restless leg for ten or twenty months I could get myself back in the fight. Trouble is, I’ve never been a big ‘self-control’ nut—I have trouble getting myself to drink coffee in the morning—even remembering to.

Plus, I’ve spent many years with the perspective of one who ruthlessly simplifies life to the least possible motion, conserving a tiny bit of energy for the most essential activities. In my not-so-long-ago world, pushing myself was not only unproductive, it was dangerous. And there is an accretion of coping mechanisms encrusting my life-style: nicotine, caffeine, junk food—all of which would have to go if I attempted to torture myself back into being able to jog around the block. It would mean Olympic-level training just to get me in semi-average shape—at my age, with my stress levels, I could blow a gasket trying to get into the kind of shape I may never see again.

As you can see, I am beset by doubts and weakness. I’d be embarrassed to admit it if I thought I was the only one—or if I thought it was possible to be a thinking person without such baggage.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Someone on Facebook remarked, “I hope you know we don’t make as big a deal about it down here in Mexico.”—which makes a strange sort of sense—since Napoleon would have gone on to invade North America, if he hadn’t been stopped in Mexico.

The video is more to show you my garden pics than for the music—not my day, musically.

Rip Tide (2014Jul21)

Posted by XperDunn on July 21, 2014

My new camera has been going gangbusters–but then my PC’s harddrive bit the dust! Five or six days without access to my programs and websites (like this one). This backlog was tremendous, but I’m nearly there–soon I’ll be living in the present again.

First off, there was a righteous jam session with my friend (and professional drummer) Pete Cianflone–

A Playlist of the complete session…

Then I had some hummingbird footage I lucked into from our garden–

Then I did some silly improvs–

and some silly song covers-

There’s some other stuff left over, but I didn’t have the peace of mind to do any writing or poetry or drawing (I get out of sorts when my system is down), so this will do for now.

Should I add some stills? Yeah, why not?:

20140710XD-Improv-DHummingbirdsHandMaid(GRAPHIC-humgbird)_B

20140711XD-Neighbor_s_Flag(ReNewedPC (13)) 20140712XD-Rock_n_Stick-Zoomed(ReNewedPC (28)) 20140712XD-Cloud_w_Sunbeams-ZoomedIn(ReNewedPC (31)) 20140714XD-Nancy_s_Sculptr_by_Window(ReNewedPC (16)) 20140714XD-ReNewedPC (31) 20140714XD-ReNewedPC (27) 20140714XD-ReNewedPC (25) 20140713XD-ReNewedPC (5)