Finally, Serenity. I want to say a lot about the plot, but that would be very bad form indeed. It wasn’t perfect, but I enjoyed it immensely and am going back to see it on Sunday with Tom as part of a double feature with Mirrormask. Watching it with a whole bunch of die-hard fans was a treat, but it makes me wonder how the movie seemed to people meeting the Firefly characters for the first time. A number of cunning Jayne hats were sighted.

For even more Neil Gaiman goodness both V and I separately (and accidentally) picked up copies of Anansi Boys. At least we won’t have to fight over who gets to read first.

Best Graffiti of the Day award goes to “read a book by Italo Calvino,” found in the men’s bathroom where we had dinner.

The postman was benevolent today. First was delivered a Utilikilt, a belated birthday gift from Chava. I’ve been keen on getting one for a while, despite a few comments that I’d look ridiculous in one — apparently skinny men in kilts aren’t for everyone. I seem to have both simultaneously filled out and gotten wirier, though, and the kilt fits and looks pretty darned good. There can be only one!

After that I answered the door, kilted, to sign for my very own copy of the Adobe Creative Suite. Yes, I’m finally at that conjunction where I both really need the muscle of Photoshop, Illustrator, et al, and can afford to take the (blissfully tax deductible) hit on my pocketbook. Now I can create lens flares and stick President Bush’s head onto people riding burros with righteous impunity.

I’m doing a lot of interesting work, and haven’t enjoyed my job more in a long time. To be honest, the flow and trajectory of life is good in general. I’m a lucky guy.

EDIT: Image requested, and delivered!

Last night was not restful; I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m running on about two hours of rest and 2 pots of coffee. I’d hoped to get a nap in this morning, but the contractors were up bright and early, sawing and pounding as they replaced our back porch. I retreated to my usual refuge, the Diesel, where I’m inhaling coffee. I don’t feel that bad, for all that.

My mother in law is coming for a visit next week, so Varia and I hired a Zipcar for a few hours and dashed off to Target to pick up bedding and other sundry goods. Amazingly, they were playing our song on the radio.

I should explain about our song. When we were first together, traveling from Indiana to Texas, we realized that we didn’t have an “our song” and felt this was bad form. So we picked something that wasn’t likely to get played on the radio all that often. We ought to have picked something like Stockhausen’s Stimmung (or the Bartok inexplicably playing in the cafe), but we instead chose something almost as plausible, what was on the air at the time as we drove through Arkansas or wherever, Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do.” The full 16 minute version, mind; the short version where they cut away before the solo doesn’t count.

I don’t think I’ve heard “Do You Feel Like I Do?” since then, so it was a bit of a surprise when Frampton came alive.

Things did not work out how I was planning in software land today, as I was expecting something to work that just didn’t. I’d planned and plotted and diagrammed, but the extensive work to get it rocking didn’t make sense. Like any good general, I beat a hasty retreat, changed my plans ever so slightly and forged ahead. And now, I am truly rocking.

I’ve been infected with Anthony Bourdain fever; I feel a siren call that’s telling me to leave everything behind, steal the chef’s knife from the kitchen and join the ranks of aspiring professional chefs. I will lash myself to the mast, make coq au vin a few times in the next week, and hope I survive, but if I disappear, imagine me washing dishes somewhere, making goo-goo eyes at the sauté station.

When I was in school, I had this idea that all composers worth their salt were long time sufferers of what I like to think of as “Tortured Artist Syndrome.” Constantly depressed, melancholy, twisted with grief or anguish or whatever. I always think of Beethoven, wild-haired, composing furiously, wracked with passionate grief. Some of my friends thought that if they developed the syndrome they’d become better artists, but it didn’t seem to work that way. Although to be honest, they did look mighty artistic.

I used to think this was complete and total crap, but I’ve since found something to it. I’ve done some of my best work when I’ve been depressed, irritated or angry. Pettiness works too; when I’ve been up against the wall and wanting to prove something, I’ve reached into some well of inspiration and come up with the goods.

But not always. The bigger picture is that creativity flows from some sort of stimulus — love, happiness, understanding, novelty. Tortured Artists do it with pain, and while some folks are generally stuck in crappy situations, a lot seek out torment because it gives them stimulus they crave; people cut themselves for the same reason. But there are all sorts of ways to get that creative seed that don’t involve beating one’s self up or being self destructive. One’s muse doesn’t have to be a domestic abuser.

Jeffrey’s Studio Desk. September, 2005

The desk is feeling neglected. Here’s my setup in the new place. I’m not quite settled in yet, but it feels cozy.

And functional too! Thanks to a few hardware purchases over the last year I can now do some reasonable recording; I had Elin of the lovely voice over last night for a fun and productive recording session.

My copy of Reaktor 5 arrived yesterday too, which has 50% less knobs but 100% more cool. I’m certain to gush more about this later.

Tine is rich middle-ground hung over a simple progression. Very shimmery indeed.

As usual there’s lots more music in the gallery, and if you’re so inclined you can always buy a CD.

Tine (download, 5.1 MB)

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Apple released its shiny new version of Backup today. I like me my backups, and my system right now is a hodgepodge of rsync, Synk and manually (when I remember) so I was really excited about the prospect of getting everything more or less automatic.

Backup 3 looks nice. It can, for example, do an incremental backup of my Documents folder every morning, and prompt me to stuff in a DVD once every week for a second copy. I can do a backup of things that change less often, such as my photos or music, once a month. Once I get some space free to get everything set up; music takes up a lot of space! Very simple if I erase the backup folder, right?

Time for an analogy: I saw this movie where there was a guy and his identical clone, and the guy was evil (or was it the clone), and they were fighting and then got interrupted by a man with a gun and they were both “shoot him, he’s the evil one!” and the guy had to make a snap judgement about which one was really evil.

When I mashed the delete key, I shot the wrong guy.

I erased not the backup folder, but the working folder, which hadn’t been backed up for a while. This was because, due to the large size of the music folder, the standard original/backup placement was reversed and they had identical icons and I wasn’t paying complete attention. After an awful lot of swearing, I took a look at the damage, and it wasn’t so bad. Besides a grevious blow to my pride, everything from the last six weeks was vaporized, including a few albums I bought off of iTunes (gone forever!), a few things I ripped from CD (replaceable), and a couple of new mixtapes (replaceable if I successfully beg to get new copies).

The morals for today are: clearly label which copy is the backup so as to not mistake the backup for the original and backup more often.

The world is a vast and complex place. It’s not really possible to do everything or know everything. We trust books, teachers, and life experience to give us the condensation of what’s important. and if we’re fortunate enough to really know something about something then we write what we know and teach it to others.

But sometimes I want to revert to my six-year-old self and start with the “why”s. I want to dig past the veil of Cliff Notes that makes up our collective experience and really understand something. Maybe two somethings. I don’t want to back the boxed and packaged just-add-water cake. I want to make my own, even if it isn’t quite as good looking after it comes out of the oven.

There’s a lot out there, and we probably don’t really need to know much of anything these days. The corners of life where I live are pretty soft and rounded, and I don’t have to trouble my pretty little head. But now and then there’s no substitute for rolling up the sleeves and thinking for oneself.

I’m on holiday right now, resting and relaxing and staying away from the computer as much as I’m able. It feels right to do this now and then.

But I’ve been keeping this journal for three years, and that’s more than a little amazing to me. It’s not always easy to do, and it’s not always interesting, but it’s more or less regular. Again I’d like to thank the people who do read for doing so; I hope you get something useful or entertaining out of it, and glad you do. I’ve met a few very interesting people over the years as a result of this journal, which is reason enough to make it worth the effort.

Mutated by x-rays or affected by radioactive explosives, they’re called Science Heros. And there’s an awful lot of them, and they’re fighting right alongside regular men in World War II, on both sides. And then the war ends, and it’s 1949.

In action films, the hero with the strength of ten men rides off into the sunset or returns to the ice castle or bat cave or what have you because he transcends the rules and laws of normal people; that’s why he’s a hero, and that’s why he was needed in the first place. But what to do with thousands of superfolk, suddenly unemployed and unwanted?

In the world of Top Ten: The Forty-Niners, the answer is to build a completely new city, Neopolis, and populate it with all the world’s heros. Half concentration camp, half new beginning. And it’s a mess; everybody has powers, and old enemies are rubbing shoulders with each other. This is the premise of The Forty-Niners — people used to being above the law deal with to being under it. The story follows the Neopolis Police as they go through their appointed rounds, solving crimes and busting thugs. It’s a detective story where everything’s super.

There’s a lot in this story, even discounting its ties to its parent series Top 10, which deals with the Neopolis P.D. in more recent times. On the top of things there’s a coming of age story wrapped up with a love story, punctuated with time machines, evil Nazi scientists, vampires, and anti-robot vigilantes. Underneath there’s the entire issue of heroism and power, and the whole point of why we as normal people need to work out our issues using super-folk in the first place.

It’s darned funny too. I was particularly taken with Puzzleman, who was of old a villain, but now just a regular John (though not Neopolis’ new mayor, the excitable “John Q. Public”). His power seems to be limited to saying everything as a crossword clue, which as he’s getting beat up by one of his old archenemies, tends to be things like “Bantam Popsicle (4,7)!”

Days like today make me aware of all the good things in the world. Being alive is an amazing thing.

I’m a bit low energy this week, and very much off my game. I can go from being full of unbounded joy to feeling empty and grey within a matter of minutes; I’m simultaneously holding both a great deal of happiness and more than a little melancholy. I’m managing to get some music written despite all this, which makes it all worthwhile somehow.

Current meditation is on symbols and their personal significance. I like symbols, my life is steeped in them. They are filters, ways for me to interpret the world, and the more I have around, the more ways I can see things. This mental process of unpacking is obviously related to the physical counterpart, which is more or less done, and undoubtedly related to why I’m a bit swirly.

I was invited to a gamelan concert last night. Unfortunately the person inviting me ended up not being able to go after all, but I decided that it was worth going to by myself.

The concert was put on by the Boston Village Gamelan, and it was a great show. They are a Javanese gamelan, which is similar and yet so completely different from the Balinese gamelan I am familiar with. The instrumentation was a subset of the full orchestra and the five pieces they played were very quiet and introspective. I would have appreciated a bit more context about the texts being sung in the program notes, but the music was stunning enough to hold my attention.

Taken September 10, 2005, Central Square, Cambridge.