stevengharms.com

Lauren: The Language of Flowers
Mice: The Language of Fans

Getting that we’re about to be back into the Texas summer and our swing venue can get awful warm, maybe Lauren should get a fan.

My girlfriend Lauren, as Re-L Mayer:

Anime

Costume

Yours truly as Ergo Proxy:

Anime

Costume

When I was a young fellow living in The Castilian dorm in the late 90’s, I would occasionally visit the TV lounge on my floor early in the morning and study there. Being a bit of an odd bird in that I would rather “sleep less and get up early” versus “stay up late” this would mean that the lounge was empty ( save the odd beer can and cheetos wrapper before the morning cleaning staff came through ).

The cable provider in Austin at that time carried Classic Arts Showcase which follows a roughly MTV-like format where a clip is introduced by a title-card in the lower left describing the music and the visual, and then the art plays.

It’s a very enjoyable program and far more educational than the sea of infomercials playing in the same time slots. I saw 2 things on Classic Arts showcase in those wee hours that have stuck with me all these years that I wish to possess:

• “O Fortūna” from Orff’s Carmina Burana with this amazing Tarot-esque stage setup with plague carts and overdone European motley references
• A video of bowler-clad, Edwardian English society types each walking up to a keyboard to play the progressive downbeat note to something of Chopin’s that I surely saw on “Looney Tunes”. I think it must have been a Hungarian Raphsody, but I failed to make a note of the name…
• {I didn’t see this at that time, but in a similar vein…} Anna Netrebko singing the same famous opera song ( I think I translated it as “Oh what am I pretty!”, something along the lines of “Wat bin ich schön”) in a variety of settings, but with the video stitched together

Well thanks to the video revolution of the internet, I’ve found the first of these lost treasures.

It’s Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s réalisation of “O, Fortūna” that so struck me lo those years ago.

While the film quality shows its age ( 30+ years ), the scope and subtext of a devil and an angel turning the rotam fortuna as begging kings, dwarves, whores, and clergy beg for the coins of its favors was something that would really sear your gray matter at 3 in the morning as you worked memorizing logic formulae for your test later that morning. It features a certain sensibility in European theatre of the time that recalls the work of Werner Hertzog, the Italian Sci-Fi epics ( “Dune” / “Flash Gordon”), and Carnivale.

Death reigns resplendent as the tool of of the blind, turning, dog-faced bitch, Fortune in the misty vale on the other side of the wheel-structure as the archetypes dance ( Major Arcana, no? ).

This is a video that hits the collective unconscious tuning fork deep inside my skull with a chi-punch.

Check it out:

Letterpress: 1a. The process of printing from a raised inked surface.

source

I’ve watched it now three times and I find a great peace in the slow narration and accentation. Makes me want to visit the northeast again.

It reminded me of Jessie Ferguson’s installation hosted by Make magazine.

Often attributed to Kepler is a statement of the nature of the following. I don’t seem to have a copy of the Mysterium Cosmographicum handy, so I’ll parrot what I found at goldennumber.net:

“Geometry has two great treasures: one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.” —Johannes Kepler

I’ve always been a fan of Kepler since I was in Holland and studied 16th century science. As Sagan said, he was the last of the mathematical astrologer or the first astronomer. Either way, Kepler and his odd sense of mysticism or keen sense of science managed to produce some stunning insights about the way our cosmos works, about planetary motion, and about geometry. In the quote above he refers to the “Golden Number” or the “Golden Ratio”: phi. Kepler, and his work, for me have always been one of those historical oddities of that era where Western science looked to shake off the shackles of church dogma and mysticism and become, properly, science. More odd trivia for me to know. Until…

After having finished Trig I thought that I would like to take a look at some of the finer points of subtending space by line, so I purchased this very nice “Mathematical Toolkit” for drawing lines, arcs, etc. at the local Office Depot the other night.

I haven’t really touched tools like these since early high school when I took Geometry, so it was a bit strange to reacquaint myself with their use. Figuring out how to create phi ratios, one of Kepler’s “treasures”, seemed like an obvious enough learning task. So I did. I shot pictures of the process and now share that process with you, Internet.

I pulled out some graph paper and made a square…

And made a golden rectangle from it…

And many more from that one…

Maybe try to draw something in the space?

It’s really a pity that our math classes and our science classes don’t always align. It’s very good to have practical hands on experience of that which you seek to model mathematically.

Note: First blog post from new MacBook Pro

I still receive email updates for Bay Area acts. It helps me find out if said acts might be heading to Austin soon. There was this winner in the latest update.

Hilary Duff Sleep Train Pavilion

Sensible.

On March 13th my world became a little bit weirder and a little bit richer as I watched Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. It tells the story of an American boy named Noel BrelEngel, who heads to Los Angeles and joins a trio called The Walker Brothers. The Walkers have minor success in the early Sunset strip scene, but then head to Jolly Old England where their success is of a much larger and much more lucrative variety.

There they seem to tap into a post-war ennui psychology that ties the bourgeois-making-tea-staring- out-the-tenement-development that defined Britain. Listening to the music you hear the heavy reverb, the Phil Spector influence overwhelming the headphones. Unmissable is the driving bassline and Scott’s present, urging baritone.

Now, to this point in the film, I was intrigued that I had never heard of this band.

The Break Up

Eventually the Walker Brothers ( neither Walker, nor brothers, discuss ) break up and Scott starts releasing edgy matrial. English translations of the chansons of Jacques Brel about the seedy side ( a decade ahead of Lou Reed ) of life and, somehow, his core audience sticks with him.

Yet it was clear that is not thinking of this being the limit, Wikipedia notes Walker studying Gregorian chant, dissonances, and other elements that made his work completely indescribable.

Scott proceeds to do a “Doors on Ed Sullivan” and continues to be booked as a pop singer, but performs his exploratory and, occasionally shocking material. His emotional state and distaste for fame push him into being a near recluse, separating his albums by intervals of whole decades.

The film chronicles Scott’s unworldly use of vibrato and analyzes his harmony content as being a counterpoint between dissonance and implied resolution. It’s eerie, it’s creepy, it’s disconcerting and the lyrical content, swimming in vibrato hints of tortured nightmares of a hellish landscape.

In short, music to play Silent Hill to.

Lyrics like:

And I used to be a citizen I never felt the pressure I knew nothing of the horses nothing of the thresher.

Or

Do you swear that the breastbone was bare? I saw it, and made my escape. Do you remember what happened to most of the children? You were in charge of the rolling stock.

Or

“I’m the only one left alive…aaahhh….live. I’m the only one left alive.”

Make you know that this person is doing something dramatically different to the thing that you call “song”. He’s somewhere beyond “song”.

The film footage shows vivid scenes of a percussionist beating pork loin in a syncopated beat with his bear hands. This providing core background to Scott’s vocals.

The impressionistic feel of horror and modernity and convenience and horror really work together in the track “30 Century Man”.

See the dwarves and see the giants Which one would you choose to be? And if you can’t get that together Here’s the answer, here’s the key You can freeze like a 30 Century Man Like a 30 Century Man I’ll save my bread and take it with me ‘Til a hundred years or so Shame you won’t be there to see me Shakin’ hands with Charles De Gaulle Play it cool and Saranwrap all you can Be a 30 Century Man You can freeze like a 30 Century Man Like a 30 Century Man Like a 30 Century Man

Through all of this Lauren and I have started to laugh a bit about the Walker dramatics. It’s a good laugh to drum arhythmically and recite the grocery list with Walkerian vibrato:

Tiiiiilllll a slap moooook slap Cereal Cereal cereallllll Salad Dressing!

But as I think about the miages and scapes I know that this man is doing Art and it disturbs and jars me, and that is rather rare.

Scott and Popular Music

I think under Walker’s presence I can understand the baritone over-vibrato’d stylings of Andrew Eldritch of the Sisters of Mercy or Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Their idol was this man, this man out of phase with the pop music which bore him into a fame he didn’t really seem to care for.

Video Game

I definitely hear Walker’s influence in Japanese video games of the late 90’s and even today. Silent Hill has got to be the most Walkerian soundtrack ever. Walker used rusty wheels as an instrument, their metal grinding metal. I hear it in the palette of Silent Hill. I hear it in the ambient mood shifts as the Silent Hill characters emerge from the other world, where neutral, but not hospitable], long tones re-calibrate but do not release.

It was an accident that we walked into that movie, it happened to be on when we left SXSWi, but I believe that Lauren and I both feel that our sonic palette is now ever so much more wide.

I’ve been in the closet about this for too many years. I was afraid that stating the following would put me into a repressed minority. I feared I would be laughed at by the intelligentsia, I feared that I would be a type of “free-thinker” iconoclast that is vilified by the conservative part of American life.

I suppose I was merely afraid. But I will be afraid no more. Let me say what I’ve known in my heart for oh-so-long.

Doonesbury is simply not funny.

Every time I read it I keep thinking there will be something funny happening. Or perhaps it’s not supposed to be funny ha-ha but rather funny poignant or funny boy-that’s-just-how-it-is. When I read it I think. Hm, that’s pictures with voice balloons.

Yesterday, after a walk around Town Lake, we stopped by Austin Java for a bit of lunch. While I was waiting for my salad and Lauren for her egg burritos, I noticed the Austin-typical amount of people there with books and laptops, no doubt hard at work on materials for their classes.

The guy next to me was working on something in Word. As I watched him fiddle with margins and tab stops, go clicky-click to mutate some words from regular text to bold I realized, again, just how incredibly painful it is to have presentation (bold, left margin of 12, or 30 picas) defined in the same place where you define content ( “When in the course of human events….” ).

That guy should have been focusing on the latter, not the former, yet here he sat, going through pages and pages of content so that he could make it look right. Imagine, had he, in the content left a bit of markup like…

bolditem {text-style: bold}

<span style='bolditem'>we must remember our friends properly</span>: their lives merit more than mere sentimentality

And then later if he decided ‘bolditem’ should get changed, a quick search and replace to change ‘bolditem’ ( a most unlikely word to type in your content ), to ‘italitem’ and then change the styling definition to italitem {text-style: italic} or red, or green, whatever, it would have taken but mere seconds.

Instead he was trolling through a document glumly selecting text, hitting the bold b button, and then selecting more text.

This design method is simply so wrong.

But this has been said elsewhere far more eloquently…

Ladies and gentlemen, let us discuss a truth.

There are times in life, when a person needs a beer after work.

It’s not my usual practice to drink very much. Sure the occasional glass of wine with pasta, or a ‘rita on the rocks with a fine mexican meal, or a Negra modelo with queso, but alcohol, on the whole, doesn’t find a daily involvement in my life. Although, by the previous sentence, if I ate a diet of “fine mexican meals”, pasta, or queso exclusively, it might just, but I digress.

With Lauren working until later in the evening, and me having too many hours to kill until she got home, the prospects for the early evening were go home (crickets) and surf websites or write code ( something I’d done enough of yesterday, thankyouverymuch ), watch DVDs, and I’d missed my yoga class. The weight of continued wranglings with my new LDAP infrastructure were heavy upon these shoulders and as 80’s era McDonalds used to say: I deserved a break today.

So I decided that it was a good opportunity to find a beer and a jukebox. I had received a ‘calendar reminder’ that Rosie Flores was playing the Little Longhorn saloon on Burnet, so I decided to go, have some bar food and a beer or two, and catch Rosie’s show. I arrived in the early evening and had a Shiner, some Fritos, and watched the Simpsons and Seinfeld power-hour ( some things about Austin’s TV programming never change ) and waited for the show to get on the road. Game 7 of the NLCS was on so the time flew by until the arrival of Rosie and her band. Local area musician Dale Watson even stopped by while I was waiting, i was hoping he’d hang around and do a bit of playing with the band that night, but, he left - alas!

The show was phenomenal. Rosie sings a honky-tonk, rockabilly style, with some espanol overtones mixed in - it’s just great! She came in, thin and leopard-print-panted, and pulled out a baby-blue, hollow-body Epiphone whose paint would not have seemed out of place on a ‘57 Chevrolet. With the music underway I sent Lauren a rapid fire series of text messages instructing her on how to navigate to the saloon.

Lauren arrived for the inter-set gap and we grabbed a small table. The 2nd set opened up with a trio of Elvis covers which included a bi-lingual love me tender, rendered both in English and in Espanol. Those 50’s crooners’ songs really translate well to Spanish ( See: “Llorando” from the Mulholland Drive soundtrack).

Rosie’s got a great stage presence, working with the crowd as she rocks away, fingers working bar cords up and down the neighbourhood between the 5th fret and the 10th. She’s got a great smile, a great spark, and the show was tons of fun. She tells stories about the old days of country music, before Hollywood Nashville got too big for its britches. She had a great song about LA’s legendary Palomino Club ( which closed in 1995, not to be confused with any burlesque houses in Las Vegas ).

Lauren and I ducked out about halfway through the second set after dropping some green in the tip bucket to grab some breakfast food over at Kerbey Lane before we headed home. Rosie thanked us for coming out in-between the verses and all was right as we wandered out into the rapidly winterizing Austin night.

Next time I go down for Rosie night I’ll have to invite my sister and / or The League.