Travel Blog

This sewing project went very quickly. I cut out, assembled, and finished this Burnoose in one afternoon.





All of the things I noted from working through The Ranger Burnoose were appllied here. The project went much faster due to having some experience with the design. I used the same pattern as before, which can be found in the Folkwear book.

The green outer fabric is a "silky brocade" (55% nylon, 45% polyester). It has a design dominated by Chrysanthemum blossoms.



The white lining is a polyester-type heavily textured fabric with about the same stretch as the brocade. The binding is quilt binding in green and white. The fabrics stitched together very easily even though they are both fairly heavy in weight.



The tassel is pink. There are pink accents in the green brocade. Initially, I had selected several pink fabrics for the lining, but this particular green brocade has some blue in it. The pink against the green made the green look muddy, but a very light cream white didn't give the same effect and the pink accents still stood out. The pink tassel provided more than enough coordinating accent color.

All the pieces, ready to be sewn together.



Trying out different arrangements for small play mat.



Constructed play mat. It's about 18" x 18"



Small stuffed snake to go with play mat.

Tibetan Panel Coat Completed tonight around 7pm.



There are some flaws. The side vents have a disparity between the lining and the outer layers which causes the sides to not lie completely flat.



The decorative shoulder facing on one side is more wrinkled than the other. My seam ripper got a workout today because I failed to read through the directions as well as I should have. Other than those things, the project turned out as pictured! It was fun and I am plotting the next panel coat.



Panel coats are similar to swing coats or pea coats in the way they hang and wear. They are narrower than the aforementioned styles, but the general shape is of a swing coat.



Here's a full-length view.



Here is one of the final seams going in.




This is a view of the collar facing.

Pho Hocali Express on Mira Mesa Blvd. is my favorite vietnamese food restaurant in San Diego, CA.

Testbed inteferometer located right outside 200 inch dome on Palomar Mountain.

Diagram in Palomar Mountain 200" telescope observatory visitor's platform. Telescope is behind the poster, in the darkened dome, and was too large to photograph very well with the camera phone.

200 inch telescope, palomar mountain.

"It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the grain of sand in your shoe." - Robert W. Service

My favorite poem by Robert W. Service is Carry On. It's from Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.



It's easy to fight when everything's right,
And you're mad with the thrill and the glory;
It's easy to cheer when victory's near,
And wallow in fields that are gory.
It's a different song when everything's wrong.
When you're feeling infernally mortal;
When it's ten against one, and hope there is none,
Buck up, little soldier, and chortle;
Carry on! Carry on!
There isn't much punch in your blow.
You're glaring and staring and hitting out blind;
You're muddy and bloody, but never you mind.
Carry on! Carry on!
You haven't the ghost of a show.
It's looking like death, but while you've a breath,
Carry on, my son! Carry on!
And so in the strife of the battle of life
It's easy to fight when you're winning;
It's easy to slave, and starve and be brave,
When the dawn of success is beginning.
But the man who can meet despair and defeat
With a cheer, there's the man of God's choosing;
The man who can fight to Heaven's own height
Is the man who can fight when he's losing.
Carry on! Carry on!
Things never were looking so black.
But show that you haven't a cowardly streak,
And though you're unlucky you never are weak.
Carry on! Carry on!
Brace up for another attack.
It's looking like hell, but -- you never can tell:
Carry on, old man! Carry on!
There are some who drift out in the deserts of doubt,
And some who in brutishness wallow;
There are others, I know, who in piety go
Because of a Heaven to follow.
But to labour with zest, and to give of your best,
For the sweetness and joy of the giving;
To help folks along with a hand and a song;
Why, there's the real sunshine of living.
Carry on! Carry on!
Fight the good fight and true;
Believe in your mission, greet life with a cheer;
There's big work to do, and that's why you are here.
Carry on! Carry on!
Let the world be better for you;
And at last when you die, let this be your cry:
Carry on, my soul! Carry on!




A short biography and an *excellent* photo of Robert W. Service can be found here.

This poem, as with almost all poetry, really, should be read out loud. The turns of phrase, the pacing, and the subject matter (courage as grace under fire, the ability to choose to be bigger than our destiny, etc) are so very good.

It's easy to become melodramatic, dark, or maudlin when writing about war, violence, struggle, despair, and our relationship to nature. However, Service handles what it means to be human in his writing with such an unflinching, honest, and artistic eye that when you read his work, there is a feeling of transparency and immediacy that is almost unparalled in poetry.

"infernally mortal"
"You haven't the ghost of a show"
"When the dawn of success is beginning"

The arc from self/soldier, to son, to old man, to soul is good too. I like the way the use of the passage of time reinforces the idea that struggles aren't just limited to a particular battle or even a particular war. Fighting the good fight is a daily choice. Service was not one to glorify war, but he didn't paint warfare or the struggle with/against nature as entirely brutal, either.

Here's a bit from Time Magazine's archives. It's the beginning (free) portion of a book review from 1945.

"Books
Rhyming Was His Ruin

Oct. 1, 1945
PLOUGHMAN OF THE MOON — Robert Service— Dodd, Mead ($3.50)."I was always in love with rhyme," confesses Robert Service. "If two lines could be made to clink it seemed to go a long way to justify them. . . . Rhyming has my ruin been. With less deftness I might have produced real poetry." Many a middle-aged American would not trade The Shooting of Dan McGrew or The Cremation of Sam McGee for all the "real poetry" in the language. Robert W. Service rarely shows up in the better anthologies or in college English courses. But in money-talking terms of copies sold, he is a..."

If you are a Time magazine subscriber, or have a few dollars to spend on getting the article, the link is:

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,776216,00.html

Another Robert W. Service inspired work of art is an album by Country Joe McDonald. Here's a blurb about it and the song list.

"COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD, WAR-WAR-WAR
Composed by Country Joe McDonald from the poems of Robert W. Service. music copyright by Joe McDonald Music Corp., BMI 1971. Produced by Country Joe McDonald, recorded at Vanguard 23rd Street Studio, New York, engineered by Jeff Zaraya, cover produced by Robin Menken, cover by Thut-Wainwright, San Francisco, California. Note: all songs about WWI except The March Of The Dead which is about The Boer War.

LP Vanguard VSD-79315
Side 1
Part One
1 Forward 4:39
2 The Call 2:35
3 Young Fellow, My Lad 3:47
4 The Man From Aphabaska sic (Athabasca)

Side 2
Part Two
1 The Munition Maker 4:22
2 The Twins 1:53
3 Jean Despres 9:48

Part Three
4 War Widow 2:02
5 The March Of The Dead 6:27"

There comes a point in time in many sewing projects where the visual progress slows. Now is that time on the Tibetan Panel Coat. It doesn't mean, of course, that progress isn't being made. However, an hour's worth of work yesterday is dramatic. However, an hour's worth of work yesterday is dramatic. An hour's worth of work today might be overlooked by a casual observer.

Today the seams are almost all hidden. The lining was permanently added, the hems were evened up, the slash for the side vent was selected, and the facing was constructed and placed in with long stitches so I could see what it looked like.



The decorative facings for the armholes are going in. I've laid out the collar pieces to see what more red looks like.

I was a bit worried about choosing the green for the contrasting decorative facing around the armholes, but after letting it sit for a while I ended up liking it as much as I did when I sketched out the design at the fabric store.

The side vents are not centered in the panel. If I make another panel coat, I won't make slashes in the lining before construction, like the instructions tell you to do. I'll wait in order to choose the location of the side vent after the lining goes in. That way I can stitch the seams for the slashed vent, then cut, making it a quicker and more stable process and allowing greater freedom in choosing where the vent goes. Cutting the pieces beforehand assumes perfect execution in cutting and sewing. With heavy or tricky fabrics, that's not going to happen easily. It was close, but not exactly centered after the lining was placed. I cut as accurately as I could, but things shift and some fabric does shift.

I like the colors and hope that this garment finds a really good home. I'm going to offer it at a charity auction.

I owe a debt of thanks to Keith M. Wheeler for introducing me and many other people to the poetry of Robert W. Service. I still think Keith can recite it the best. I say this having heard several professionals attempt to perform his work. They did well, but Keith would easily own them on a stage.

Once, Keith recited The Men that Don't Fit In from memory at a bonfire. It was art.




Here is one of the more humorous and therefore accessible poems that Service wrote. His work breaks down into to main types - the humorous poems and the poems about World War I. This one is about being cold and cranky in the ice and snow.

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Actic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lac LeBarge
I cremeated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold til I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead - it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn, but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate these last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows - O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent, and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Til I came to the marge of Lac LeBarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the 'Alice May.'
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then, "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared - such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow;
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked;"... then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door!
It's warm in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm--
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Actic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lac LeBarge
I cremeated Sam McGee."

There are 33 pattern pieces to a typical Tibetan Panel Coat. This sounds like a lot. It actually is a lot. Quilts can have hundreds of pieces, but clothing usually tops out at ten or eleven. 33 is plenty.

In order to organize the pieces, I wrapped each type of pattern piece in a paper towel. On the paper towel I wrote down the name, type of fabric, quantity, and label from the instructions. I stacked them out of the way and kept cutting. There were five different fabrics, thirty-three individual pieces, and fourteen paper towel packets.



Here I am beginning the process of sewing the long strips together to make the back, sides, and front of the coat. Tibetan coats don't have sleeves. The coat is formed from long rectangles and skinny triangles. I used a rotary cutter to slice the fabric into the pattern pieces, following the Tibetan Panel Coat design in the Folkwear book.



Here is the center back panel coming together with the side panels.



This is the center front panels coming together.



Front, back, and side coming together. The colors are red and green, with peach lining and peach and gold fabric for the facing, which I hope to get to tomorrow. Cutting out the fabric took most of the first day, working very lightly. Sewing the body of the coat took most of the second day, also working very lightly.

I've noticed that I've chosen a large amount of green fabric for these three projects - the Ranger Burnoose, the Chrysanthemum Burnoose, and the Tibetan Panel Coat. I do really like green and I tend to go with my gut when picking out colors. I originally intended to get some rich blues for at least one Burnoose, but there were not any blue brocades available at the fabric store that day. Since the post-holiday sales were in full swing, reds and greens dominated the fabric store landscape, and ended up being the colors I brought home.



Here is the coat, with lining pinned on the inside, on the dressform.



This is the bottom half of the coat on the dressform. Not sure why it's so uneven after all that careful measuring, but whenever I do the hem, I'm sure it will all work out.



The book that I got the patterns for the Burnoose and the Tibetan Panel Coat is called The Folkwear Book of Ethnic Clothing : Easy Ways to Sew & Embellish Fabulous Garments from Around the World and is by Mary Parker. It's a beautifully illustrated book with solid descriptions and only slightly cramped sewing instructions for the projects within it.

Glass wave at enchanted gallery, del mar, ca.

Enchanted gallery, del mar, ca.

Here's my sewing machine, set up in the kitchen. Disregard the mess behind the curtain.



Here's all the fabric in the holding tank for the Tibetan Panel Coat. You can tell I check the mail on a regular basis, can't you?



OK here we go. We're beginning to cut out all the pieces for the panel coat. There are four brocades and a lining fabric. I'll count up all the pieces for my next update and tell you how many strips of cloth go into a typical Tibetan Panel Coat.

This is a view of the hood and inner lining. Note cute tassel. I had to repair tassel after it started to unravel.



Here is a close-up of the inner lining (white patterned fabric) against the dark green outer fabric (microfiber suede). You can see the forest green binding I used to put the two fabrics together. I didn't try to stitch in the ditch to hide the seamline as it would have taken a long time and I didn't mind seeing some topstitch-style threads. For the Chrysanthemum Burnose, though, I might try and finesse the binding like you're supposed to.



Here is the closure. A burnoose is actually sewn shut at the front. The silver closures are there as a decoration and are not really functional.

High, fast water at torrey pines state beach. Penasquitos Creek empties into Penasquitos Lagoon which empties out into the ocean here under this bridge. The beach is being eroded away and the heavy brown river is a marked contrast against the deeply green ocean today. The standing waves at the interface between the river and the ocean are dramatic. Water is moving fast and thunders up against the pilings of the bridge.

Water level up almost even to roadbed along Carmel Valley Rd near Del Mar and Torrey Pines neighborhoods.

Fifth day of rain, large surf, heavy river runoff pouring into the sea. Huge clouds are collecting over the mountains again, but the forecast is for a break in the rain. Major deadly mudslides have occurred to the north, but here the damage is local and so far only a few intersections are flooded out.

For more information on this fascinating art form, see BONSAI POTATO! YAARRRR!

All right, this one was supposed to be the easy one. I say "supposed to be" because it was, really, supposed to be easy. The fabric isn't as fancy or expensive or textured as The Dandelion Burnoose will be. The effect is supposed to be simpler. Plus, it's the "practice" burnoose to get the design, pattern, and execution down before cutting up ten dollar a yard fabric. Ok so it's not as bad as the forty dollar a yard dupioni silk I managed to turn into confetti one time, but it's expensive enough to have to make sure I know what I'm doing.

I'm one of those people that follows directions. A whole other subject is the instructions that came with Frank, my new coffee machine. I'll post about that soon. But, in general, I follow instructions. That is, when they can be interpreted. I could not understand approximately 72f the instructions to make this particular item. So, I winged it.

There is this strange thing that happens with fabric. Either the bias is really stretchy or it's not. When you try and sew a stretchy fabric with a not-so-stretchy fabric, the result is... Interesting. So, that's what deal was tonight. It was like the fabrics came alive, and slid around to escape The Great Needle from the Sky.

It wouldn't be that much of a challenge if it wasn't a huge amount of fabric. Over the course of 9 inches, a lot can be fudged.

Ok maybe that idea didn't come out quite right, but you get the idea.

Here are some photos of tonight's progress on The Ranger Burnoose. The outer layer is a dark green microfiber type suede. The lining is a polycotton "burnt out" leaf-themed design. White tassel is from the home decorating section.

Heavy rains continue for the fourth straight day here in North County Coastal, San Diego.

Six inches have fallen since I dumped out the rain gauge forty-eight hours ago, and two inches fell overnight.

We aren't in danger of mudslides here, but San Diego county has a large amount of hillsides with no appreciable vegetation due to the October 2003 fires.

Mudslides and flooding have occurred in the Southland, but the particular area I live in has not suffered anything more than downed trees.

Some of the foothills have received over a foot of rain and Palomar Mountain has had three significant snowfalls. We're all hoping the snowpack and the reservoirs will be back to normal or above-normal levels and that what we consider to be a five-year drought on Palomar Mountain will end.

ALNY

It's a stock symbol for a company named Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. They describe themselves as an early-stage, biopharmaceutical company. They seek to develop and commercialize therapeutics based on a biological pathway called RNA interference (RNAi).

Direct RNAi therapeutics will be applied directly to the site of disease. These therapies will probably be developed before systemic RNAi therapeutics, which move through the bloodstream to sites of disease. The direct RNAi therapies are focused on treating age-related macular degeneration and Parkinson's disease.

You may have heard of Parkinson's disease more often since the disease afflicts Michael J. Fox, who started a foundation to find a cure. Parkinson's is a disease mentioned often in the debate over whether or not to use fetal stem cells in research programs, as Parkinson's might be stopped or reversed by cell replacement therapy. Embryonic stem cells demonstrate qualities that some researchers feel makes them excellent candidates for cell replacement therapy.

The interface between science and society is one of historic forces. Like tectonic plates, these forces can work togehter, work against each other, work orthogonally, or lie dormant, layered and silent. There is hardly anyone on the planet that is not affected, driven, or impassioned by the human need to figure out how things work. The heart of science is the how. The heart of religion is the why. Although these two mostly mental disciplines answer different questions, their answers in practice can and do create conflict on the ground. Where and how to spend money, what and when and where to do something, and whether or not the negative repercussions can be contained. The application of science is called technology. The application of technology is often, in capitalism, commercialized. Commercialization creates democratization of products. The democratization of products allows for the dissemation of power. Redistributon of power creates new questions, which science and religion (or philosophy, or ethics, or spiritualism) seek to answer.

In Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution, better instrumentation (often through commercialization of a technology, such as the spyglass in Galileo's era) reveals things that were not seen before (like craters or Jovian moons). These new things must be explained, and new theories that may augment, contradict, or supplant the old are proposed. Through a rapid period of Great Strides Forward, competing scientific ideas are allowed to compete in the "marketplace" of peer review under (mostly) objective conditions. Once the dust settles from this "step up", the plateau of "normal science" kicks in. This is where scientists and engineers spend most of their time, to be honest. Ideas are refined. Things are explained. Better methodologies, processes, tools, and products are created and refined.

When enough people, for example, have mobile phones with cameras in them, that can seamlessly connect to the internet and provide not only still images, but video and audio, there is a subtle shift in the balance of power. We saw something similar to this change in the balance of power (and were not surprised) when blogging "helped bring down Dan Rather." Many people, working together, analyzed the documents that CBS claimed were legitimate, and found they were not. Several hundred "instant experts", with libraries and resources a click away, with intellectual curiousity and a desire to figure things out, circumvented the authority of the traditional media to tell us what the truth was. That story - the story of the distributed analytical blogger brain - was the story of the year, hands down.

It's hard to beat the distributed process. It's hard to beat a large community, working together in brownian motion. The mechanics can be found in books such as The Wisdom of Crowds. People, even when they don't know they're working together, can accomplish a staggerly large amount of work when focused on certain types of work, and certain types of questions. Some would say that collaborative effort trumps all individual effort, but some problems are not solved by adding more people, as The Myth of the Man Month points out so well.

So many of these things can be appreciated when you study a company like Alnylam.

Their market cap is only 150 million. Ken thinks it could be a ten-bagger. He followed the genesis of the RNAi concept and wrote a bit about it recently.

"you know that their technique for RNA interference gene silencing was discovered in flower research? I told you this story right? they were trying to make a blue petunia. fascinating how a nagging oddity that they observed in the botanical field blossomed (pun heh) into this area of genomics and medicine possibilities. I think I follow the biosciences enough to recognize this really has some merit. last time I felt this was was with Angiogenesis and Judah Folkman's remember me getting buzzed on that - stopping cancer by stopping capillary construction in tumors. other thing that fascinates me in the area is prions and stanley prusiner's work there to show the causative agent in mad cow. Amgen and Genetech both are commercializing the anti-angiogenesis drugs. been mixed bag so far. cancer so hard to nail - working in human-gene mice doesnt always translate into success on human trials
but this RNAi really has a lot of potential in many many diseases - hopefully ALNY has some fundamental core IP on it - from what I can tell they do
startups just burn thru cash takes years to get a product out. reason i'm into this one is seems they have some IP that will extend beyond any one drug."

IP stands for intellectual property. ALNY has staked a claim on the particular sequence of events that must happen in order to make RNAi work. For companies working in biotech, having defensible intellectual property is very important. The power of the idea becomes science becomes technology becomes product becomes therapy, which allows life to continue on longer and better than before, which allows more ideas to be considered.

Science cannot be planned. Petunias have next to nothing to do with Parkinson's. Yet research on making something blue that doesn't have the genetic capacity to be blue (like the continuing search for a true Blue Rose) ended up having everything to do with something that might break the back of an awful disease. The decline of pure research, whether real or imaginary, has powerful consequences.

House of Flying Daggers
rotten tomatoes review
review
review

I saw House of Flying Daggers last night. I was compelled to see the movie after watching the trailer at apple.com at for about the fiftieth time.

If you include the first Matrix movie and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you have an international foundation class of the Wu-Xia style of film.

The triumvirate of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" "Hero" and now "House of Flying Daggers" is a three-pronged attack on your visual cortex. Each has particular strengths, interesting weaknesses, and are complemetary movies. The shifting political, visual, social, individual, romantic, and militant templates of each find that sort of chaotic balance that can be expressed so well in moving pictures.

I especially like the comparison to opera in one of the reviews. House of Flying Daggers does have some strongly operatic themes. It prompts the question of defining what "operatic" means in the modern context of film, and whether or not Wu-Xia is opera, a subset of opera, a superset of opera, or something different.

Temp 32 f, wind picking up,gusting to 20 mph, heavy clouds, snow beginng to fall, storm expected soon. sat tv out due to snow on rx, might try to clear it.

about to go outside and get more wood for the fire.

On the road to palomar mountain, snow on ground, road clear.

Shoveling snow in san diego.

Heavy rain in san diego, flash floods have happened.

Someone isn't as interested in the journey to the hobby store as i am.

When I recently started playing the violin, I thought it might be a good idea to read up on the history of the instrument and get into the swing of the violin subculture. Boy, did I underestimate what I would find. Here’s an introduction to two violinists I really like, and a bit about my experiences learning the instrument.

Of all the instruments I've tried to learn how to play, the violin seems to be the most viral. It infects you, if you are so chosen, and instead of "someone who plays the violin" you often end up being "a violinist."

The beginning of wisdom being the definition of terms, let’s be pedantic for a moment and see what the real difference is between the two terms. A violinist is n : a musician who plays the violin [syn: fiddler]. The denotation doesn’t offer us much, but the connotation of violinist does. Imagine a violinist and you might conjure up the image of an itinerant solo magician, with long black gothic locks of hair, disheveled tuxedo, and not-quite-sane glaring staring bottomless eyes are used to stab out at the bourgeois audience, daring them to applaud at the wrong moment.

There being a grain of truth in most every stereotype, like this exchange in an interview on Juliard violinist Chee-Yun’s website shows.

What do you do when you’re not practicing?

I like to go shopping, I love to eat, go walking—but only if the weather is nice and [I like to] go dancing with my friends.

What other kinds of music do you listen to?

Blues, jazz, pop and R & B.

What sign are you?

Taurus—do you really need to know?

What’s the dumbest question you’ve been asked during an interview?

Can I take the 5th on that one?

When I read the last two questions and answers, my first thought was “oh, what a spoiled brat diva.” Of course, if you have the chops to back it up, then you’re not a “brat”, you’re “inspired.” It reminds me of the saying “Poor people are crazy. The rich get to be eccentric”.

Another violinist that I’m completely enamored with was in San Diego this past week, but not to play the violin.

Recent News
On Dec. 29th Jasper Wood proposed to the love of his life Grace Cho in San Diego, California and asked her to be his wife.
(She said YES!)

He just finished recording for an upcoming CD in Ontario, Canada. He’s been appointed as professor of violin at the University of British Columbia, and is just amazing to watch.

Here is a set of videos you can watch online. Check out the one on the bottom left, the “East Coast Music Award Concert Jasper Wood with Denise Djokic Handel/Halvorsen Pasacaglia”. Wow! Check out the speed, accuracy, and just plain bombastic fun that these guys have playing this piece.

I have a goal of being able to see both Jasper Wood and Chee-Yun in live performance. Along with Diana Krall.

The one on the bottom right, “Prokofiev Sonata for 2 violins (2nd movement) Jasper Wood with Judy Kang” is remarkable. I detest Prokofiev because it’s of the sort of music that I like to snidely call “inferior Stravinsky wannabe angry bee music”. But, they do it pretty well. I might have to rethink my prejudice against angry bee music. His partner for the piece, Judy, really pulls off that violinist aura I’m talking about here.

So, when I play the violin, am I angry? Do I wander around wearing ball gowns sawing at the strings with impassioned renaissance spirit? Well, no, because I currently suck pretty hard. If you want to hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, that’s like the star of my repertoire right now. That and a wheezing rendition of Simple Gifts. But, I have to say, I’m a hell of a lot better than I was a week ago, when something kind of similar to Go Tell Aunt Rhody could be heard emanating, over and over, choppily, from the upstairs office.

There is a saying in music and that saying is “no personal Everests.” That’s good advice. You don’t want to kill off a dream by having a goal that is truly unattainable. Most western-European/American types need some sort of mid-term goal that can be worked towards and achieved. I said screw that and picked the violin pieces from Howard Shore’s work on The Lord of the Rings. That’s what I would like to be able to play from memory. Along with a lot of reels and jigs and a good number of Metallica solos.

Yesterday I took my violin with me to choir at church. After we sang (and boy did we pull it together on a really hard piece we’ve been working on for a long time) I reported for inspection to the violinists that accompany the choir. They’d demanded to see “the new horn” a few weeks ago and I’d promised to bring it with me so they could see it. Now, imagine, a set of identical twins, who both play the violin, and who dress very similarly and can be nearly indistinguishable.

They descended upon the violin with fervor! One took the bow, disassembled it in short order and repaired or adjusted something. The other took the violin, put a shoulder rest on it, and started playing it. In four seconds he’d tuned it. In eight seconds he identified a leaning bridge and then shifted it back where it was supposed to be. The violin got flipped, turned, tightened, briefed, debriefed, stamped, numbered… ok, wait, that was from The Prisoner television show. But, within a few minutes, the violin was declared quite good, well worth the money. The strings were pronounced inferior and they ordered me to change them. I was told my bowing was pretty darn good. I was asked why I didn’t have tape on the fingerboard to mark where the notes were. I dissembled a bit about how I was trying not to use tape, and that I was hitting the notes pretty well as it was, but they gave me a rousing speech about Tape and how All Great Musicians Start with Tape. I wasn’t entirely convinced about using tape to mark positions on the fingerboard, but I thought maybe an old Def Leppard sticker on the side of the violin case might look good.

When the twins talk (Father Nick refers to them as “the fiddler boys”), they alternate sentences. They seamlessly communicate, never talking over each other, and often finishing each other’s sentences. They are charming, nice, smart, and funny, and I can’t wait to get better at playing the violin in order to maybe play with them. I enjoy singing with the choir very much, and am active in supporting it, but if I were to change jobs in the music ministry, it would be to play the violin.