red echo

I've just posted my pictures from the Phoenix Festival. I didn't carry my camera with me while I was out dancing at night, so I have no records of the crowds listening to music or any of the pretty blinky stuff, but at least you can tell what it was like during the daytime.

This year, it's the Rave-O-Matic that I am truly excited about, anyway. The starball and strobe light arrived a couple of days ago, and I'm eager to install them for a full complement of lighting effects. I'm hoping to get the microphone system ready by next weekend, too, so I can test it out at Phoenixfest.

It was another mad scientist evening in the basement. I've been taking it a lot easier since my big push to get the rave-o-matic ready for Critical Massive, but the Phoenix Festival is coming up pretty soon and I'm starting to feel a little pressure once again. Splitting my efforts tonight between both projects, I started out spending an hour or so sanding down the rave-o-matic outriggers so they would fit into their sockets more smoothly. I ran out of sandpaper after grinding away about 3/32" of wood thickness; it will thicken back up a little bit once I've repainted it, but that still ought to make assembly and disassembly less aggravating. Next I did some tinkering with one of the skybeam generators. I have a design worked out for the motor bracket, and even figured out a way to reuse part of the squirrel-cage resistance fan as a shaft coupler, but it was pretty late by the time I got it all sorted out and I decided to save the actual construction for tomorrow.

There was an immigrant couple ahead of me in line at Home Depot. I've seen them a couple of times before, in the fasteners aisle, discussing some collection of nuts and washers at great length in an east-Asian language I didn't recognize. They were middle-aged, tiny, slim in a sharp-edged way; I probably weighed as much as both of them put together. Their way of moving caught my eye; they wove deftly under and around all of us tall, ponderous Americans, never making eye contact or bothering to maintain the usual degree of physical distance as they moved past. It felt as though they didn't even see us, as though we were part of the furniture, part of some other world than theirs.

They stopped to ask the checker a question while ringing up their purchases. I couldn't make out anything they said, and the checker had almost as much difficulty. Eventually she worked out that they wanted to know where a collection of drill bits was from, where it was made; she looked at the package - “China, it says it was made in China.” Instantly, without so much as a glance between each other, the man walked back to the shelf to put the item away, as the woman shook her head and explained that they didn't want it.

Their careful, almost fussy examination of every package they pulled off the shelf, their scrutiny of every bin of bolts and nuts, suddenly took on a whole new meaning. I can only guess at the story behind their personal boycott of the People's Republic; whatever it is, it instantly replaced my vague irritation at their eccentric obliviousness with a sort of sad feeling of sympathy.

I've been reading South, Ernest Shackleton's account of his Endeavour expedition to Antarctica. The following paragraph grabbed my attention. It is May, 1916; Shackleton and two others have just arrived at a remote whaling station on South Georgia Island, and this is the first contact they have had with the outside world since departing the same island a year and a half earlier:

After breakfast Mr. Sorlle took us around to Huvik in a motor-launch. We were listening avidly to his account of the war and of all that had happened while we were out of the world of men. We were like men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad. Our minds accustomed themselves gradually to tales of nations in arms, of deathless courage and unimagined slaughter, of a world-conflict that had grown beyond all conceptions, of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast with the frigid whiteness we had left behind us. The reader may not realize quite how difficult it was for us to envisage nearly two years of the most stupendous war of history. The locking of the armies in the trenches, the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Nurse Cavell, the use of poison-gas and liquid fire, the submarine warfare, the Gallipoli campaign, the hundred other incidents of the war, almost stunned us at first, and then our minds began to compass the train of events and develop a perspective. I suppose our experience was unique. No other civilized men could have been as blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings as we were when we reached Stromness whaling-station.

This is one of the things that fascinates me so much about this particular expedition. Shackleton and his men left an England glittering in the Age of Empire, a Europe secure in its domination of the world; they returned to the birth of the twentieth century, a cataclysm that had already ended the Belle Epoque, changed the social, political, and commercial order of the world, and pounded a fatal crack through the foundation of the global colonial project. The world changed more in their two years away than in Rip van Winkle's twenty.

I've just finished revising the Rave-O-Matic site. I spent an hour and a half working on the machine today, rebuilding the pole anchor system, and rather than packing even more pictures onto that single page I decided to split it up a bit.

This is the kind of day that makes me feel fully alive. I got up late, had a dawdly breakfast, and went kayaking out on Lake Union with Sara. It was good weather: overcast, but not too windy. We cruised up the eastern side of Gasworks and into Portage Bay, admiring houseboats and waving at the tourists in the duck trucks. On the way back we threaded our way between the test course (where the enthusiastic owner of an old wooden powerboat was gunning it back and forth) and a sailboat race in the middle of the lake. After this I headed down to South Park for a barbecue at Diem and Angel's new place with a crowd of burners. There was food and conversation and creative music: the DJ played, among other things, part of an old read-along record for “The Empire Strikes Back,” with lots of R2-D2 chirps. Then back to Seattle for a brief stop in at Paul's birthday party and a tour of the sprawling co-op house he inhabits (with many interesting vestiges of its hippie past still visible). Over to Heden: wine and chat in the kitchen. I met a couple of Lauras and spent half an hour talking about kayaking with one of them; she told me all about the Gulf Islands - basically Canada's version of the San Juans, but less travelled and more safe. Eventually this party packed up into a fleet of vehicles and headed west for a couple of hours at ToST in Fremont. The music was an odd combination of live hand-drum playing, throat-singing, and sort of middle eastern style DJ music. Interesting, but not great and not exactly what some of us had in mind for dancing music, so Adam, Michael, Scott, Janet, Alexis and I split off and headed for Trinity down in Pioneer Square. Now that was some good electronica! We danced for pretty much two hours straight. The hilight of the evening came when a girl in a tiara walked up and, amid much blushing, asked me to dance - it was her bachelorette party and her girlfriends were armed with cameras and a checklist. Those ballroom dancing lessons from years back do come in handy every now and then! I pulled out everything I could remember of the east coast swing, and while I'm sure her state of inebriation improved the experience she sure seemed to have a good time. Anyway around three AM we decided enough was enough and headed back to Heden, where relaxation and absinthe were had, and the party was still going when I bailed out an hour later...