fling93 loves fishies

Reconnecting with a few dormant artistic interests

I apologize for the lack of posting lately, and since I’m not actually writing a real post right now, let me at least explain what’s been going on (nothing to worry about!).

Anyway, there was my vacation in Montreal (and in case you missed them, here are all of the ridiculous number of photos, and my sister has some as well, although many of hers are visible only to her Flickr friends). I’ve jotted down a lot of notes and memories and have been meaning to post them, at least on my LiveJournal, but I haven’t had the time. And alas, I know that it’s going to be harder as time goes by.

This is because work has been dominating my life for the past month. I’ll refrain from going into more detail, because that’s how bloggers end up getting fired. But I really just don’t have the energy to be working 60-hour weeks anymore and still be able to craft a blog post that I feel is worth putting up here. In fact, it’s been rather overwhelming, and most of my free time has been spent just vegging out in front of the TV or PS2. When I’m not vegging out, I haven’t really been in a mood to write, but have instead been exploring other creative areas that I’ve been neglecting, namely music, drawing, and even photography.

LibriVox (aka Podcast Gutenberg)

Hugh has a new project that I’d like to draw attention to:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then you, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this weblog/podcast every week (?).

More information here. The first book chosen is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (a work chosen, no doubt, for its renewed relevance today). Although all the chapters are already claimed, anybody interested in volunteering for other works can do so at the forum. Be sure to read this guide before recording.

I’m signed up to read chapter 4 (even though I was disappointed to learn that it did not include a hot sex scene with Natalie Portman), and I’ll be sure to post a copy here when I’m done.

Update 10/24/05

Librivox has now moved to a new domain. Oh, and I recorded chapter 3 of The Secret Agent instead of chapter 4. Here’s the audio file. You can get the other chapters at LibriVox, of course. And LibriVox’s profile is definitely on the rise after Boing Boing mentioned them.

Free Jazz (and Tibet too, while you're at it)

So, as I mentioned earlier, one of my most memorable experiences in Montreal (and indeed, ever) involved an atonal avant-garde-like free jazz improvisation at Hugh’s. I met up with Hugh for the first time when I vacationed in Montreal. I still plan on recounting my experiences there at my LiveJournal account. Sorry it’s been taking so long (don’t worry, I’ll be sure to link to them when I put them up), but as I said, I’ve been keeping myself occupied.

And as I said earlier, one of the things I’ve been spending time with is music, which I think is partly because of the free jazz experience. It all started as a dinner party at Christine and Hugh’s to celebrate his good friend Devlin’s birthday. They had a nice piano, and so I was tinkering on it for a while, playing some show tunes and pop songs (e.g. “On My Own” from Les Miserables and snippets of “Linus and Lucy” from Peanuts).

Eventually, I ran out of things to play, and went outside to smoke a cigarette, and when I came in later, Devlin and his partner, Alisha, were picking at the piano, and Hugh’s fiancee, Christine, handed me an accordion. I’ve never ever touched one in my life, but I was game to try, and I twiddled around with it a bit, mostly exploring what the different buttons did, but sometimes trying to play off of what Devlin and Alisha were playing. Eventually, my shoulders got tired (man, that thing is a workout!), and I handed the accordion off to my sister, Alvina, to take over.

I got promptly sat down at the piano next to Alisha, and she simply said to me the following four words:

Oh no! He's got a camera! Run away!

Yeah, I don’t plan on turning this into a photo blog or anything, but since I already talked about my recent exploration of some more artistic endeavors and posted a musical example, I figured I ought to post a photographic one as well.

I guess everybody who starts off getting into photography inevitably takes these generic pictures of flowers. Oh no! Run away! Run away! Yeah, I don’t think it’s anything special or that I have any talent. It’s just the culmination of what I’ve learned so far starting to come together, namely depth of field, the importance of holding the camera steady, shutter speed, ISO settings, and grain.

I had trouble getting a clean shot — everything was coming out blurry — and so I tried bumping up the ISO and shutter speed. It worked, but this introduced some grain into the shot. And I recall hearing an episode of the Tips from the Top Floor podcast that talked about how to introduce grain to add character to black and white shots, and so I figured a photo that already had grain might look better in black and white (especially since the flower was white anyway).

And so it did.

As always, you can see other pictures I’ve taken at my Flickr account. Warning! I don’t always do a thorough job of filtering out the bad shots — sometimes I dump everything on the camera to Flickr so that I can go through and filter and tag them at my leisure from multiple computers. So there’s a lot of junk in there.

And also, for anybody out there who has never met me, you can see what I look like. Yeah, I’m kinda goofy-looking. That’s why I put them fishies on the blog instead.

Adventures in Podcasting

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking part in “an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain.” Namely, LibriVox. Essentially, a bunch of us volunteered to record ourselves reading chapters from books available freely from Project Gutenberg, and Hugh is assembling them into a podcast.

The book we’re doing right now is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I was originally assigned chapter four, but the guy doing chapter three needed some more time to sort through issues with his recording setup, so I got bumped up in the batting order (despite the fact that I have a lousy on-base percentage).

Anyway, that’s how I spent the last weekend. So without further ado, here’s my reading of Chapter 3. It clocks in at 33:48. For those who missed out on the earlier chapters, you can get chapter one here, and chapter two here (these are read by other people). You can also subscribe to the LibriVox RSS feed or their podcast feed.

And if you don’t care about the minute and uninteresting details of the story behind the making of this recording, you can stop reading right now. Those of you who are too bored to bother to look for something else more interesting, continue on (there’s a cute kitty cat picture!).

Look out! He's got a brush!

Well, a virtual one anyway. Okay, to be sure, I do have some real ones too, but I haven’t touched them in years. Painting is pretty messy, and the condo doesn’t have enough room for me to have a dedicated studio. Not that it’d be worth it anyway, since I’m just a dabbler. So I’d been meaning to try working with digital painting for a while, but never got around to buying any painting software. And then over a year ago, Mark blogged about ArtRage, a free painting program for Windows and Mac OS X.

I tried it out, but found that it didn’t make drawing with a mouse any more easier, and in fact the makers recommended using a graphics tablet with it. And so I finally bought a Wacom tablet, and I’m very glad I did. It came bundled with a bunch of software, including procreate Painter 7. This was a much more sophisticated program than ArtRage with features that I really wanted to use, so I tried learning it but kept getting frustrated with the user interface. So I bit the bullet and upgraded it to Corel Painter 8 (choosing 8 over 9 because I wasn’t sure my old computer met the system requirements of the later version, and because I’d read that most of the usability issues were addressed in 8).

It’s still a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can satisfy my urge to scribble without having to invest that much time in setup or cleanup, which was pretty much the goal. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, art is competing for my time with a plethora of other interests.

But the neat thing about abstract art is that it doesn’t take too long to get something that looks kinda cool (I whipped this up while sitting on the couch, watching/listening to various music videos). Plus, as you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of Wassily Kandinsky, specifically his Blue Rider period. Indeed, I have a huge print of his “Improvisation ‘Klamm’ Ravine” piece on my living room wall (although my favorite piece is “Composition VII”, which is the background wallpaper for my iBook). I’m not as fond of his later geometrical work. And I also like Willem de Kooning. Shouldn’t be surprising, given my interest in jazz.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some great talent, but I have taken a few art classes and also read a couple of books, which is far more than I can say about photography. And I thought this came out pretty interesting enough to post here. I’ve also uploaded it to deviantART, but it doesn’t seem to be drawing much attention.

I won’t go into much explanation of what I was thinking when I painted this, as that kinda spoils the point of art. But I just thought I’d point out that this is not a completely abstract work. Not sure if it’s obvious or not. It looks obvious to me (especially from the thumbnail), but when I showed it to Erika, she couldn’t see what it was. She guessed it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which has been amusing us greatly as of late (I first heard of it from Hank, and you can read more about it at WikiPedia). But that’s not what this is.

Of course, now that I’ve mentioned the FSM, that’s probably what all of you are going to see in this. Argh. Well, I’ll be sure to try and paint it next, I suppose.