red echo

Life would be so much simpler if I had a time machine. Anytime I wanted to record a choral part for one of my songs, I could just write out the parts, sign the paper "J.S. Bach", zip back a few centuries and plant it among his papers. Then I could return to the present, walk over to any ol' second-hand CD shop, pick a recording of my brand-new chorale out of the bargain bin for $2.99, and start sampling.

The barista at the coffeeshop down the street has gone back to calling me Lars. I paid with my debit card once, and he noticed then that he'd been using the wrong initial consonant, but he's apparently forgotten again. At the bagel shop, the guy who took my lunch order got my name as "Myers". I've been called Mark, Marcus, Morris, Marris, March, Marsh, Marx, Marcy, Mares, Marks, and probably others I've since forgotten. In fact I'm surprised, anymore, if anyone believes their ears the first time I tell them my name. "Hi, I'm Mars." "Morris?" "Mars - like the planet." "Oh, Mars! Hi."

It isn't that they can't hear me correctly - they just assume they must not have heard me correctly, and try to interpolate something that makes more sense. As evidence for this, people are far less likely to get my name wrong at Burning Man-related gatherings - they just assume that I've given them a "playa name". "Hi, I'm Joe! Who are you?" "Hi, nice to meet you, Joe, I'm Mars." "Oh, heh, hello Mars, well, they call me Fireboy, heh heh."

Six in the morning, just got home: wow what a night out. I haven't been out so late since... um... since Burning Man, I guess. I stopped by the BATTL cd-release party at the Mercury for an hour or so, then headed over to Ballard for Seacompression. Lots of the Seattle-area burners were there, some good friends and lots of acquaintances. The music worked well, the space was elaborately decorated burner-style, there were three fire performances, everyone was dressed up and the mood was good...

The laser system worked as well as I had hoped, and people really seemed to like it. I got a lot of questions and compliments - and there were plenty of people who saw the laser pattern but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. They seemed to have an easier time figuring it out when I was dancing, presumably since the laser pattern would move in sync with my body.

The attachment system did tend to sag a bit if I didn't keep the vest buttoned. A little foam block under the bottom end of the housing might keep it pointed away from my feet a little more, but I'm not sure it's really worth bothering.

I went up to Greenwood for an hour or so last night and played through a few songs with a guitarist/singer who is recording an album and wants to add some keyboard parts. It was a low-key audition, well suited to his temperament and the style of his music; I didn't feel like I played particularly well, but I was improvising accompaniments to chord charts for songs I'd never heard before, so I don't feel too bad about stumbling a bit. It would be fun to broaden my musical experience and get my name in another set of CD liner notes, but it was kind of a lark, so I'm not going to be too disappointed if he doesn't call back.

Meanwhile, I continue to scan craigslist and The Stranger, looking for some or all of a bassist, keyboardist, cellist, v-drummer, dj/turntablist, and backup singer(s)... or maybe just a "keyboardist wanted" ad for some band with a heavy, electronic, danceable sound.

Ernst Horn is a genius.

Conversation with a couple of other dorkbotters last night prompted an idea for a new art installation piece, possibly a Burning Man project. An hour of refinement with my friend Adam turned it into this: a big LED display on a pole, driven by a wheel, a button, and a dial at the base. User spins the wheel to select a word and whacks the button to append it to the text on the display. It's a bit like magnetic poetry: you get a limited set of words and try to create something interesting and maybe even profound from the pieces available.

The whole thing is driven by a cheap old laptop computer; the software is based on Markov chains. It picks a set of perhaps two dozen words that are most likely to follow the preceding text; the user selects one of them, by spinning the big wheel left or right. When the user whacks the button to commit the word and move on, the software picks a new list of words likely to follow whatever you just entered, and the fun continues indefinitely.

For more variety, the dial would let you pick one of several different compositional styles. Each style would be the probability map derived from a single literary work, or body of similar work; you could choose a probability generator derived from Poe, perhaps, or switch to the vocabulary of the Psalms, or carry on in the mode of a Shakespearean sonnet.

I think this would be a lot of fun: interactive, creative, social, and a bit silly. The predictive input system would keep the interface simple, and would help you keep from getting stuck in a creative rut, but it would still give you a lot of latitude to express yourself and entertain your friends.

It's not official yet, but it's getting close: a good majority of the citizens in the country I live in took a look at George W. Bush, considered the trail of lies and blunders he has blazed across the last four years, reflected on his ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, and cock-headed cowboy machismo, and said something like: "Yeah, we like that. He's a good man; let's have four more years of that."

What am I supposed to do with these people? How can I feel like I have something in common with a country that would voluntarily elect George Bush as president? Here we have an election which amounted to a referendum on the bizarre, cruel joke of a war in Iraq, and the American people gave it their stamp of approval.

I truly thought Kerry was going to win. I'm not particularly interested in him as a candidate; he seemed like your average business-as-usual corporate Democrat, and his vote for the Iraq war permanently tainted his credibility in my eyes. But the breadth and intensity of the disgust for Bush I have seen building up over the last couple of years was so powerful, and the rumours of unusually successful Democratic voting drives so persistent, that I had convinced myself that Kerry would win a clear victory simply because he wasn't Bush.

We've been awash in "go vote" propaganda for the last couple of days, and now it all rings hollow. What good is voting when there are so many people who will support a candidate like Bush? How am I supposed to find common cause with them?

There's one bright spot in a sea of mostly-discouraging election news: I-83, the proposal to "recall" the monorail (not by actually recalling it, but by denying the Elevated Transit Co. permission to build over city property), has gone down to resounding defeat: according to the Seattle Times, two out of three Seattleites thought it was a bad idea.

I'm very happy to see this. Seattle needs rapid transit already, and the monorail project has been doing a good job of developing their plans in the open, responding to community opinion, and sticking to their budget. It'd be a thorough shame to cancel the effort now, especially in such a sneaky round-the-back fashion. I'm glad that Seattle has decided to continue building the monorail, and even more glad that the mandate is now so overwhelmingly clear.