I think that fundamentally we all like to organize and sort; if there’s no pattern, we create one. We find images in clouds and stories in raindrops (as a child, sitting in the family car’s back seat on a rainy day, watching the raindrops march from one side of the window to another, an endless army of burden-bearing monkey-men).

Yet now I desperately want to paint this moment, and I find I lack the skill to do so. Sitting here with such a multitude of colors, sounds, smells and images, I don’t know what make of it. How can I possibly wedge this into a narrative when the pattern isn’t yet formed in my own mind?

Danuv told me a story this morning about her daughter’s mock election in Kindergarten. When her daughter was asked about the reason for her vote, she replied: “Because the other guy already was President and it wasn’t fair for him to get to do it again.”

I was for a brief moment worried that a combination of the lunar eclipse and the outcome of the World Series was going to result in my house being burnt down, but my fears were unfounded. Beside hundreds lof oud “woooos,” honking horns, police sirens, and scattered fireworks, there wasn’t much of a commotion on my side of town.

Provided that Symphony Hall didn’t get torched and looted, I’m going to see the Boston Symphony perform Le Sacre du Printemps tonight, and I’m more than a little jazzed. The fact that I’m jazzed jazzes me all the more, as at one point I was so indifferent to attending concerts that if J.S. Bach himself had been coming to town to perform a never-before-heard piece I’d be indifferent. It’s a sad thing indeed to lose passion. And so Stravinsky tonight, along with Ligeti and Schoenberg. I’m going to be one happy Jeffrey.

A graph of orb color choices over the past five months; an incredible power curve.

In the moving box full of CDs still to be archived, I came across a hand-burned disc labeled “Prison Symphony.” I was surprised to find out that it was, in fact, music I myself had written and forgotten. An unexpected gift from myself to myself.

My mind raced back to try and remember the circumstances behind this piece, and I found myself as a fifth year scholar at DePauw in the ‘97-’98 academic year. I’d finished up my degree, and diploma hung on the wall, was sticking around (at the university’s expense) to further the cause of Humanities by taking classes that were not in my major area. I had a hard time choosing (like magic, all prerequisites were waived, so I had the run of the catalog), but finally I managed to choose a few languages and two art classes; the ever-popular beginning ceramics and a one time seminar on installation art. Bolting things to walls and making people walk through them was an attractive prospect.

Installation Art as a discipline is about as specific as “putting things on other things,” so I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was this: the teacher had struck a deal with the city to rent out the recently-abandoned county jail, and we were going to use the jail as the installation, with each student getting a portion of the jail to work with. But before we set foot in the jail-cum-gallery we did research; we learned as much as we could about the history of the jail building, and of jails themselves, and theories of incarceration and punishment. De Sade, Aquinas, Bentham. I can trace my distrust of art film to this class.

Being a musician then, I had decided to incorporate music into the installation, and I stayed up late tinkering with what now to me is a primitive program. I sampled and resampled and mushed and stretched and came up with what, to me, was an expression of the oppressive, intrusive, unpleasant, impersonal experience of the theoretical prisoner. I was at the time fascinated by the idea of the Bentham’s panopticon, a type of prison meant to foster mental uncertainty through perpetual surveillance (surely no parallels in our camera society), and it was deeply woven into the work.

Finally the day of the jail lottery arrived, and we were the most eager bunch ever to go into an abandoned, barely cleaned, musty wreck of a prison. I fell in love with the storage room and managed to lay a claim to it while the art majors staked out space in the cell blocks.

Here I ran into two problems. The first was, that, despite my keen senses and warrior’s will, I was in an advanced art class with absolutely no technical skill. I devised magnificent plans, only to realize that there was no way I could ever hope to actuate it in the amount of time; I’ll say nothing of time or money, which were an issue (we had to buy/scavenge our own construction materials). The second was that the music I had written, once played in the room, was completely wrong; I’d have to start over. I burned it to a CD, put it in my collection and promptly forgot about it until my future self would find it in a distant October.

Faced with more than a little fear and dread, I went back to the beginning and and considered what I had to work with. I thought about freedom and the windowless stone storage room with chipping paint around me, and I realized that with one action I could both solve my problem and play to my strengths in a way that was true to the place. And then I removed the room.

The final installation, which I called Kairos (borderless), consisted of a tape piece which I had playing as a loop from two stereos nestled in the pipes above the room. Over the space of a month, Ani Difranco on the boombox, I emptied and cleaned the room and constructed a complicated light-lock three or four layers deep with black fabric and plastic. For the opening, I turned on the music and turned off the lights. Stepping through the door was stepping into a lightless space of indeterminate size with a rich harmonic drone coming from no specific location.

The public opening was sadly the same day as the closing, but for that day I was the warden of a prison not of cages and walls, but of their complete lack. I learned that one person’s prison is not another’s; some people went into the room, felt out a space on the floor and sat down for the remainder of the exhibit. One person payed a rather hefty sum for the CD of the drone, as he felt it calming. Then again, some other people stepped in and immediately fled. I got people to react and think, so I’d say my first and only installation was a qualified success.

Prison Symphony

• I. Panoptic Panygrations (10:15)
• II. Bentham Reverie (4:45)
• III. Perfect In Virtue (6:31)
• IV. I’ve Got A Panoption (9:23)

Kairos

• Kairos (borderless) (43:33)

Last night something crumbled inside me, and the walls and barriers and guards I set up to keep me cheerful and strong in the light of the world fell, and I wept for all the things I cannot control.

Sadness mercifully gave way to fatigue and I crashed into sleep. But I dreamed, and my dreams were of three terrible men; the first a man of earth, the second a man of storms, the third a man of the oceans. And reciting fearsome poetry which I will never remember they held me, even as I was held tightly in my bed.

What better way to start this week than with a old MIDI recording of Dies Irae done up New Age style?

I stumbled across a new metaphor this morning while catching up on my small mountain of e-mail, which is good as my friends and family are likely sick to death of my old metaphors.

If you’re like me, when someone asks me how I feel, if I choose to answer beyond the socially acceptable (good, tired, etc) it’s a bit tricky. I realized that’s because there’s not really one feeling in there, but a whole bunch, like… taste. So using the taste experience of a complex food or wine can be a great way to visualize feeling. A swirl of feelings, perhaps with a strong baseline, some contrasting, ending up with a lingering feeling or two.

I’m home safely. I don’t think my lungs ever left, as I had a dreadful time breathing 7000 feet above sea level.

The trip itself was pleasant. It was a treat to see my extended family, something that happens all too infrequently. I’m still processing everything that went on, but I had a good time.

On the airplane while waiting in line for the restroom, I found myself reading the phrase “absolutely no stowage” in an Elmer Fudd accent before realizing that wasn’t the intention of the sign maker.

I’m off to Colorado for a few days to visit with family; my grandfather is having his 80th birthday bash, and I’m not going to miss it. I’ll be incommunicado until Sunday night unless I can manage to scrounge up some internet access.

Expect to see the empty days filled up with entries (Pepys-style) when I return.

I’m beat. Today was a maze of colliding responsibilities, and it was a struggle to honor both while not getting myself irritated. Yet more proof that I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. Tomorrow promises to be more of the same.

The prodigal PowerMac came home today with a new front panel, RAM and graphics card. Seemed to have been a hardware error after all. I am eternally grateful to the techs at the Computer Loft for taking the time to actually find out what was wrong with it.

I’d intended to spend a bit more time writing up my experience of this past Saturday night, but as things seem a bit busier than I’d anticipated I’d rather write something small than let it slip by. I was invited to what I thought was a dance that turned out to be a Contact Improvisation jam; this is akin to mistaking a Megadeth concert for the London Symphony. I arrived entirely unprepared (and overdressed in a t-shirt and jeans), but left pleasantly surprised.

From my observation, the event was almost entirely analogous to improvisational chamber music, just with bodies instead of instruments. It’s a process of working together with other people to create something on the fly that flows and works as a piece. It requires trust and sensitivity, and there’s a constant awareness of when to follow and when to lead. Improvisational chamber music is one of my favorite memories of my life as an active performing musician.

While I got the idea, I’m not a dancer, having sat squarely on the other side of the stage for as long as I can remember. I made a valiant attempt, but finally my inner ear and my inflexible legs got the best of me; for about half the dance I sat on the sidelines and watched.

When I first stepped off the plane in Austria, it was like stepping into an alien world. The year was 1995, and we had been given lectures and readings and first-hand accounts, but nothing could prepare me for the real thing. After a few minutes of desperate observation my companion and I managed to figure out how to buy a ticket out of the airport, and boarding the train we were on my way.

The problem is that of rules and expectations. There are millions of them in play at any time; they help us find our way and allow us to differentiate an appropriate behavior from an inappropriate one. These do not serve to stilt expression, but to focus it, to make it meaningful.

On the way to Vienna, we hit a snag. The conductor came by and asked for our tickets, which we happily produced. This didn’t make him happy; on the contrary, he became very stern and shouted angrily at us for a while. Why? We hadn’t validated the tickets, something one does in a machine in a place differently from the vending machine. We hadn’t observed this in action, and as such didn’t have the entire routine down. Somehow, most likely thanks to the global expectation that Americans are morons, we worked our way through the situation and arrived in Vienna shaken and scared.

There’s only so much one can pick up from watching or even doing something once or twice. The mastery, the grace, the elegance of a thing comes from repetition, from being in a space so long that it feels completely natural. We all have places like that, places where we slide and weave through with barely a thought, and the web of expectations almost disappears as we and the situation blend together.

When one has built up enough territory of mastery, it’s tempting to stay there. Perhaps if the space gets large enough the thought that there’s somewhere else one could be vanishes altogether. One forgets that somewhere there’s a station waiting to take us to a place of new wonders. If only one can figure out how to buy a ticket.

What a killer today has been. 11 hours in front of the keyboard, frantically coding for the last half. Still we managed to get the job done, and only an hour late.

At the end of the day, I noticed that my cell phone picked up a new trick:

I don’t know how I managed to crash a telephone, but there you go. Some day everything we own will be prone to random system failure. Onward, technology!

I’m presently mesmerized by sodaconstructor.

Thanks to Sue for the link.

I’ve been chased out of the house by a very large machine with a pile driver at the end. I bought some industrial earmuffs to dampen the neighborsounds when I really need quiet - it’s impossible for me to do certain kinds of thinking with clanging and banging - but against a full body vibration, they did no good. In my last job, situated above the Big Dig, I had many a day of vibrating buildings with no escape, so being holed up at the cafe with a bagel and a very mugfull of chai isn’t a bad deal at all.

I’ve been up for five hours, thanks to a mostly sleepless night, so I’m not the sharpest tack in the drawer, but then again I’ve got a list full of mostly routine tasks to take care of. I’ll zone out and make characters dance.