red echo

I spent the afternoon building a stand for the little two-octave controller keyboard I picked up last month. It's too small for a regular X-stand, I don't like the “keyboardist in a cave” feeling of a multi-level stand, and I didn't want something that was going to take up a lot of room. I couldn't find a stand in the catalogs that suited me, so I decided to build one. A trip to Home Depot and a couple hours of tinkering later, I have a custom shelf fitted to my controller. It screws onto a standard microphone stand base, so its height is adjustable and it fits easily into odd corners.

I love building stuff.

The Washington State Legislature is debating a proposal to split the state in half along the crest of the Cascades. I've been telling people for years that Washington and Oregon ought to have been divided north-south along the Cascades, instead of east-west along the Columbia; Seattle has much more in common with Portland (or with Vancouver B.C., for that matter) than it does with Spokane. The Cascades divide culture and political ideology as much as they divide climate.

This bill will never pass, but it's eminently sensible, and I wish it would. Everyone gains: the predominantly Republican rural areas get free from what they see as liberal Seattle domination, and Seattle gets to stop subsidizing its recalcitrant stepchildren east of the mountains and get on with the creation of the nation's first two-party Democrat/Green state. Some of the most contentious political issues under discussion right now would just vanish: Transit funding for projects like a new bridge across Lake Washington or a viaduct replacement? No problem, the West spends the money and the East doesn't. Gay marriage? Absolutely yes in the west, absolutely no in the East. Governor's race? Gregoire by a landslide in the West, Rossi without question in the East. And on the list goes.

Yesterday's rally made the news, and the article is fair and well-written. It was a good rally: organized, focused, energetic. There were no major problems, and the few minor glitches we had worked out in the end. The police gave us no trouble, the crowd was energetic but well-behaved, the bystanders were pleasant - even the people stuck in their cars behind the police lines were mostly smiling. We didn't tie the city up for too long; we marched through, got everyone's attention, made our point, and got out of the way again. The rally was well-attended; people drifted away, of course, but there was still a reasonable crowd to the end.

I had feared that the march might become another left-wing kook-magnet event, like the anti-war rallies a year ago; I had visions of a sea of signs ranting about Lyndon LaRouche, the death penalty, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the evils of Exxon and Citibank. I guess our marketing effort worked, though; the people who showed up all seemed to be primarily interested in gay marriage. We also kept the message clear by handing out 240 signs - not enough for every marcher, of course, but enough to keep the visual impression focused. The Socialist Worker people handed out dozens of their own signs saying “Marriage is a civil right”, which was a little awkward - we all agreed with the sentiment, but our group avoids using the phrase “civil rights” as it has historical connotations we don't necessarily want to hijack. It was still “on-message”, though, as PR people like to say, so I think we did pretty well overall.

I spent the evening at a sort of "flash mob" event where a bunch of people descended on Barça, all wearing tuxedos for no apparent reason. We arrived separately, ordered vodka martinis, took over a couple of tables, and let people wonder. We differed from a normal flash mob in staying to chat for a couple of hours; most of us were strangers, but we were all either Burners or Fremont Arts Council people, so we had no trouble making conversation. Some of the other bar patrons eventually worked up the courage to ask us what we were all about, and different members of the group had fun inventing semi-plausible explanations for our presence. We were orchestra members, professional magicians, foreign dignitaries... It was fun, though I had to bail out early in anticipation of a very busy day tomorrow.