Pictures from Boise

We call this old man, my Granpa. I think he's my mother's father.

These two freaks are my younger sisters. They get their looks from their fathers. They're probably embarrased.

Enjoy!!!!!

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So close to leaving Portland

Having had many flights cancelled and rebooked and cancelled again, then rebooked the Portland airport feels like a bad wine hangover. Like somebody frozen and thawed over and over again. The vacuous parking lots covered in snowy slush and ten foot high piles of snow plow pileup along the runways, suggest an organism scrambling to get it's shit together. But people are relieved, smiling a little and generally feeling like they might just make it out of here. We were in line for over an hour, and a woman fell over. Folks didn't know when they could approach the kiosks and the people behind the counter seemed happy just to avoid being shouted at for the first time in days.

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It's Christmas, and we're ready to board our flight. Being stuck in the house for a few days, with Tiff and my sister, who also has been delayed in returning home, is an opportunity to reflect and remember why I am with Tiff. We get annoyed with one another, yell a little bit, never really feeling mean and in the end it turns out that we still like each other - even when we're trapped in the house for a week.

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We did venture out after our friends lent us some chains for the car. Driving around in the snow is so much fun. It's too bad that Tiffani hates being in the car in the snow, cause I can pull some serious cookies when allowed. We had a nice little gift exchange last night and I received some new clothes. I always get clothes, even when I want motorcycles and bike parts and video games. . . I do like the clothes.

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2008 was a good year, my Mom beat Cancer. I started at PSU and passed a very difficult Japanese class. Tiffani has been very fit and happy, and I avoided death on the Hawthorne Bridge.

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It's snowing a lot right now, and everybody is sort of staring out the windows of the airport at the flakes with a laser glare. Maybe if we all hate those flakes enough, they'll melt and we'll make it out of here.

Cancelled. . .

Yep, looks like we're staying home for awhile longer.
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Snow!

We were supposed to be headed to Boise this morning at 8am. Our flight was cancelled, and luckily we found out yesterday. We were able to book tickets on the flight today that leaves at 4:15. Our car is frozen solid. My truck is buried under drift and it looks like we're walking to the bus stop. I am so glad that it's only 4 blocks. We don't have snow clothes, or boots and the suitcase that Tiff is packing is 3ft X 5ft X 1ft! I don't know why we need so much stuff in Boise, but I guess all of our families' gifts are in there. The folks on the news keep saying the same thing, which is basically that it's cold. All Southwest flights before 2:45 are cancelled. I sure hope we get out of town today! Hopefully my next post will be from Boise!

Damn you Orson, damn you!

I just watched Orson Welles' version of The Trial. It seems that shitty movie versions of great stories is nothing new. I hate this movie. You cannot change the ending of a story like this for the film adaptation without doing a disservice to the origin. GRRR! This is one of my favorite books. They added all this sexy bullshit and then change the personality of the main character and then the ending is a complete fabrication. Oh well. Not even the birthday is right!

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I've taken another snow day and I'm hoping tomorrow is the same. I slept late today and had steak and eggs for breakfast along with coffee nudges and this movie, which I've been trying to make it through for a couple days. I haven't ridden my bike in over a week and I'm thinking that I might have lost the skill. . .

Cold Weather Update

The freeze is here, and I don't need to talk about it aside from saying that I am thankful that I had a hundred pounds of sand in the car today. After work I was not going to make it out of the parking lot due to the ice. I poured that sand all over and made it out no sweat.

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Been holed up watching bad movies, worse TV and eating what we have left in the house. Listening to a lot of cold weather music. Low, Bon Iver and the 1st Testface record. Good stuff all of it. Brrr. School was cancelled yesterday on account of the snow and it's looking like it might be cancelled Thursday and Friday. I don't especially need to go to work tomorrow either. I've read everything I have in the house and I haven't ridden my bike in a week. I gotta say, I'm feeling shut in. So it goes. Time for some hot chocolate. Stay warm out there.

Work?

Sometimes it feels like my job is a complete waste of time. Sometimes it's great. Right now I'm standing in the hall to avoid being a disruption. In my youth I did this a lot, but because I was asked too.
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End of the term

Yay
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Death in installments. Three payments made.

I nearly died yesterday on my way home from school. I was riding my bike, approaching the Hawthorne bridge behind a "real cyclist", meaning he was wearing spandex, or lycra. . . As we approached the bridge, I looked up ahead and noticed that there was a man and his two sons walking our way. There was a lot of foot traffic in addition to the man and boys. We slowed as we made it up on to the bridge and were cruising along, when I looked past the cyclist to check where the boys were. They were probably 3 and 4 years old, so when I didn't see one of them, I thought to myself, "that's strange I could have sworn there were two kids with that dude." It couldn't have taken a whole second. When I looked back at the cyclist in front of me, he was stopped.

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The Hawthorne bridge is a steel mesh bridge with nice wide concrete bicycle/pedestrian paths on each side. The concrete path is about 12 inches above the surface of the road way. This keeps the cars off the path, but it doesn't keep the people off the road.

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When I realized the cyclist had stopped in front of me, I locked up my back wheel and hit my brake. Unfortunately, I was already too close to him and had to veer slightly to either side to avoid a collision. Worried about the boys, I turned left and ended up on the roadway. It all happened so fast, that I'm amazed so much went through my head. First I was worried that he had hit the kids, which was why he stopped so fast. Then I was concerned about running into his bike because it was much nicer than mine. Third I thought to myself, I'm glad I have a brake, because otherwise, I would be that douche bag on a bike without brakes that can't stop. The funniest part is that the fourth thing I thought, as I was headed into the roadway, was "fuck, I hope it's a small car right there when I land and not a cement truck." I might have thought "dump truck" I know the image in my head was a large vehicle. It wasn't a panicked sort of worry, but more of a resignation to the possibility that I might be in serious trouble.

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The other time I've felt this sense of calm is when I was on tour once, and lost control of my car on a truly treacherous stretch of highway in North Dakota. I ended up looking out the driver side window at the headlights of a semi truck carrying a load of pigs, though it could have been some other livestock. This time like that time, I managed to somehow avoid death or serious injury.

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The cyclist hadn't hit the boys, and just rode away. The kids were being scolded by their father for jumping in front of the him. The cyclists behind me rode away. The woman in the red toyota who had just screeched to a halt just inches from me. Covered her mouth and hyperventilated while I walked back over to the sidewalk. The two teenage boys that had been standing on the bridge right where it all happened looked like they might have shit their pants. The woman started her car, which had stalled from her slamming both feet on the brake and not deploying the clutch, and drove away. I rode home in a state of shock.

sheesh! That was crazy.

Tonight we invested! No, not in the failing stock market, or our futures, or in love; we invested in plaster. In fact it was roughly equal parts plaster, water and sand. The funny part for me, was when I decided to attempt to invest not one, but twenty pieces in a single investment. Another part that I thought was funny, was when after attempting to coat the inside seams of my investment with plaster, I splashed my wax forms and my professor says something along the lines of "oh shit, don't get plaster on the wax! it's going to be another hour before we actually invest the wax and that plaster will have set before the next plaster is poured." my translation: "oh shit, you just fucked up!" Here, I back up a bit. I thought it would be interesting to attempt a direct style pour in a trough system. The idea is to gate four pieces to a 1" bar so that we can pour bronze into the trough and it will flow into each piece. Then I thought, "why not put them all in one investment? Won't that save time, material and heartache?" So the irony, for me, is that after deciding to do something that very possibly might not work, and risking a waste of probably 8 weeks of work, I messed up in the early stage of a very technical process in a way that could very well have been prevented if my professor had ever done this sort of thing. So I'm a little bummed out, especially because I weighed the wax today for each of my pieces. Before I say what the weight of the wax is, I should mention a few things. 1lb of wax is equal to roughly 10lbs of bronze. We pay $8 per pound, which covers the cost of the investment, the wax and the metal. My wax figures weigh nearly 5lbs. I still have to cast 8 more pawns, 2 queens and 2 kings. So, yes if you've done the math, I'm already on the hook for nearly $400 in material costs without including the rest of the pieces. Including those pieces, I'm looking at nearly $600 in materials. I could pay off a credit card with that kind of money! SO if you know anybody that wants to buy a $1000 chess set that weighs roughly 200lbs(did I mention that the board is made of steel concrete and a tree stump?) Oh, but the board might have termites. . . I'll replace the board if that turns out to be true, hopefully before they eat through your floors. . .

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The investing process was really exciting. It was right up my alley. It was sort of like being behind the bar on a thursday night in a college town. Everybody had to be on, everybody had a job and everybody had something to gain by doing a good job. We were divided into groups and assigned to specific areas of the process. Time was of the essence so one person mixed the plaster while one group measured and provided the water, one group measured and provided the plaster and one group measured and provided the sand. A duo poured the mixture into forms constructed of chicken wire and tar paper. I was on the sand group. Out of all the groups, people would defect to maintain their piece during the process; as the plaster set, they had to hold their piece at the right depth in the plaster. Since I did twenty in one, we poured mine first and unlike everybody else, I didn't need to hold my piece at the proper depth(we invested it upside down). This meant that when we discovered that the mixture was setting very very slowly, I found myself hustling to fill 5 gallon buckets with sand, water and plaster while many in the class were stuck to their pieces. I was wearing a dust mask and sweating. Can I just say that panting into a dust mask is incredibly unpleasant. You know that thing you do when somebody attractive walks into the room? You breathe into your hand and try to determine whether you breath is offensive? As if halitosis would be so dull as to be discovered in the palm of one's hand. . . Well, panting into a dust mask reveals the nuance of one's halitosis. That's all, it's late. $1000 chess set.

Gated and ready to invest

These will all be "direct pour"-ed. Fun stuff. Guess i'll have to finish the pieces next term. The final is Thursday.
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Design homework

Been working on a styrofoam eggbeater for a couple days. Today we'll cost it with a super fine resin then paint it. The idea was to magnify an object which had dimensions of less than 8x8x8. This is 8 times it's original size. It measures 32 inches tall.
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Michelle, America's Bell

Happy Thanksgiving, but what I want to recognize is this; Jay Leno is a rerun tonight and the guest is Michelle Obama. The episode is from about a week before the election and they're talking about campaigning and issues. I don't usually watch Jay Leno; I'm more of a David Letterman guy. Seeing this episode and hearing Mrs. Obama speak, I am so impressed with her intelligence and charisma. She understands the issues in a way that seems so obviously necessary. She reminds me of Mrs. Clinton in the sense that she could very well be as capable of commanding the office as much as she is of providing the necessary support a successful presidency requires. She is articulate! She is brilliant! Mrs. Obama will lead America along side our President; I believe this to be true, and I look forward to her contribution!

I thought initially that Clinton was the best choice for the office because of her intelligence, experience and her spouse and his experience. Now, I'm convinced that the Obama family is the better choice because both Obamas are brilliant, the children will add a sense of innocence and spontaneity to the white house, and as a family the Obamas have so much to offer the country. Thank you Obama family.

Two am commute

Foggy night riding can be pretty spectacular.
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Afterwards is always a little hollow

Last night was the benefit show for the Leukemia/Lymphoma society. It was a tremendous success! Brian and Dave were Tractor Operator with me and we rocked some Pgun songs at the end of our set. Waking up today I found myself replaying the night in my head and wondering if it was all as good as it felt. It was. It definitely was. It started with a very out of tune soundcheck, and ended with Dave sleeping on the couch while I made bell pepper and corn quesadillas.

Eluvium played and was very good. His songs are constructed using guitar, piano and computer sounds. My friend Jessica says that she plays his stuff at Loyly, her Finnish spa, and nobody ever gets bored or annoyed by it. Laura Gibson played a short set. Much too short of a set since she is really wonderful. Every time I hear her sing I simultaneously fall in love with something and experience tender heartbreak.

Delorean played next and were very good. Kate, who organized the show, played violin with them.

Visual Artists were sketching the bands all night and the drawings were auctioned off for the fundraiser. Overall, the night was just great. We raised over $4000!

Menomena was awesome. I'd never seen them live. Their latest record is awesome, and I've spent hours listening to it. It was really cool to see them pull off all the weird changes all while the drummer struggled with some internal demons. He kept clutching his chest and grabbing his face. Very interesting. . .

Ok, I've gotta study for a quiz. Peace out. Check out Dave's blog for some pics. It's the one in the hot tub that says "run with the hunted".

Building an Army

Eddy Merckx was called the Cannibal and is widely considered the greatest cyclist of all time.

I learned how to make molds using Silicone Caulk. I made models out of plastilina then created molds. I'm working with wax right now and looking forward to investing these in two weeks. It's looking like we definitely are not going to be casting any molten metal this term, despite the title of the class, which is casting. . . I started casting my concrete sections this weekend. That is a much less interesting and aesthetically striking part of the process, but still very important. I'll be continuing this work for the next two weeks and then I get to assemble the whole thing. Should be interesting to see if it works the way I want it to. I was planning on using a stump for a base of my concrete and steel form, but I just realized that my stumps have termites. I'm not really sure what that means aside from, I don't want to introduce termites to someone's house, regardless of the fact that the vessel would be a piece of art. Improvisation is exciting.

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Sometimes you clap because it's over

This is the local band "eat skull" - give them some time to get over themselves

you might be asking yourself where the other drummer is, and also what is that guy doing? ? ? the answer is that he is playing his guitar behind his back and the drummer is playing drums on the floor surrounded by dancing crazy people!

These bands opening for the Dirtbombs are fucking terrible! Wow! I think the part about the first band that took them from bad to theruble which is cellphoneblogging speak for terrible, wa that they were so serious. The second band, eat skull, made the mistake of not getting me as drunk as they were.

Ok! Just watched the dirtbombs encore with one of their drummers on the floor killing it with his beats! The show was amazing! It mwkes watching two terrible bands perfectly acceptable! Fuck!

Al and I have to decompress over a beer closer to home before we attempt to sleep. What a great show! ! ! Agghhhhhhh!

We decompressed at the basement pub. I'm actually changing things up in the middle of a blog right now. You see, the first part of this post, including the pics, was from my cell. This part right here is after I arrived home safe and sound, although, I wanted to cry a little bit as I rode up and over MT. TABOR! Man oh man the Dirtbombs are a great band! I wish I didn't have to work in 6 hours. . .

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Weird writing get in my head!

Maybe if I just nap for a minute with my head on this book, i'll be able to read and write Katakana. . .
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Weird Weather

I had the craziest dreams last night about kids and music and all this weird waking sleeping stuff with the radio and a jealous butcher comp leaking into my dream. I have no idea what it was really about.

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The ride to work today was beautiful. The sun is shining, the air is warm and the streets aren't that slick. I might be going to the Dirtbombs tonight, which would be great! The Dirtbombs are from Michigan and they totally kill it. Two drummers, Two Bass players and a great singer/guitar player.

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If you have an opportunity to check out the band Weird Weeds, I recommend that you do so. I just remembered them from a Ferocious Eagle show in San Francisco. Deerhoof came to our show to see Weird Weeds, which pretty much makes it a Weird Weeds show, but Deerhoof still saw us play. 

Weirdness

It's really coming down today in Portland. There are flood advisories in effect and it's a dismal gray out. Yesterday was Veteran's Day and school was cancelled. I took the opportunity to try to find some rain gear. I have been getting soaked on my way to school lately and I figured that enough is enough. I ride 8 miles to school and by the 2nd mile, I'm not cold, just wet. The trick to finding the right rain gear is to find something that won't heat you up, but will keep you dry. The problem with a lot of the stuff out there in my price-range is that by the time I get to my destination, I've sweated so much that I'm just as wet as if I hadn't worn anything at all. . . 

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Bike Snob has been good lately, I read his blog everyday. Today he introduced a new system for dealing with the world, which basically breaks down to - take the anger away, and look at things that are messed up as weird, then you don't get mad. . . Or something. I'm thinking it's pretty weird that nobody in this school district communicates with one another. Hence, I'm sitting here for three hours twice a week without a student to assist, or anybody to help. Frustration would be my natural feeling, but I'm taking frustrating circumstances and applying Bike Snob's equation and now I just feel weird. Maybe more coffee will help.

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I'm excited about the show coming up on November 23rd. It's gonna be a doozy.

I am proud of America!

I'm exhausted! I can't sleep because I'm so damn excited! For the first time in my life, and mind you, I've voted a few times now for the office of the President, I've voted for the winner. Before now, I've felt cynical about the process and my options when it came to the office. So often the choice is made between the lesser of two evils. Tonight as I watched McCain's speech, I thought to myself, "Well, he isn't so bad." Then, watching Obama, my President, I felt elevated! I felt like I was capable of contributing to something important. I felt inspired to do better. I felt inspired to be better. The possibilities are riveting! My imagination is running wild with ways to honor this occasion when America finally honored the concept of Civil Rights and Equality, not by electing the first African-American President, but by electing the right person for the job; by electing the best person for the job. I am proud to be on the winning side, because for once, the winning side is better than the lesser of two evils. Barack Obama represents the possibility of America to affect positive change in the world. He represents a youthful optimism, a devotion to principal and a strength reserved for men free from the constraints of precedent. Barack Obama has proven that he can maintain his ability to inspire, as well as his demonstration over the last 21 months that he is not afraid of hard work. I'm concerned about the difficulties his Presidency presents, but I'm not afraid for us or him; I am confident that I voted for somebody who is not only capable of carrying out the duties of the position, but who is capable of thriving in the office. Barack Obama. Barack Obama. Barack Obama.

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I'm feeling pretty nervous today

Spend Regret Repeat

I updated my website today for the first time in months. As I continue to think about this election and it's implications, I wonder why I really care. The fact is, I voted and have voted for president now 3 times. Not once has my vote been cast for the winner of the office and while I think most Americans are in the same boat, nobody seems too concerned with the system that continues to fail us. What is the point of voting when an electoral college disregards and overrides the popular vote? Anyway, if McCain wins, I get to move to Mexico. A group of us are talking about it. Frankly, I love the idea of moving to Mexico finding some land with rich clay deposits and setting up a folk pottery. Tiff thinks I wouldn't make any money. I don't think she's wrong, and I don't think that would matter too much. We spend so much of our lives worrying about money that we forget to enjoy the things that don't cost anything. We miss out on major events in our lives because the only way we could afford to go is to pay for it with a credit card. We irresponsibly spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on small purchases while we pine away for home ownership. How many magazines and pairs of shoes and boxes with knobs do we need? I don't think that this election, regardless of outcome, will solve any of those problems. The new American mantra, spend regret repeat.

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And speaking of regreat - something I'm really genuinely concerned about is the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Both candidates say they're going to shut that place down. What happens when we shut it down and the men that we've been torturing and whose lives we have ruined are allowed to return to their countries? How does a nation make amends with them? What a terrible mess our country has made in the world. Why have we allowed our government to act this way? It is fucking absurd. I think it's time for some very serious discussions regarding dissent.

RED FANG VIDEO

I pulled this off of Snider's blog. It's amazing. These guys might be the best band in Portland. Their live show slays. It also sleighs. I gotta get to work. Cheers

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VOTE!

Pics from NYC

It needs to be said that I didn't take these pictures, they were on the WWEEK Flickr page. Not sure who the photographer is for all of them, but Scott aka Super XX Man took the one of me playing, Rob and I on the subway, and the Valiant Arms splitting eardrums. The other pics are of the PDX contingent of CMJ out front of The Knitting Factory.

Sometimes college is lame

Today I don't care for the education system. The highschool I tutor at is genuinly fucked up. They want me to assist students with little to no English with complicated language based algebra problems. Many of these students don't know how to borrow or carry much less distinguish a number from an integer. Furthermore, they are still learning to navigate basic English interaction.
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Then I found out that my credits from Oregon college of art and craft don't transfer because they're not accredited. $715 per credit and they don't help me graduate. What a fucking mistake. Sorry to sound so upset, but I am amazed at how frustrating these things can seem.
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Portland, oh Portland

Today Tif and I went for a drive in my truck. It gets pretty shitty gas mileage so I almost never drive the thing. It's great for many utilitarian tasks, but the seats don't stay bolted into the chassis, the seatbelts probably aren't properly attached, and the center link is completely messed up so the steering is totally unpredictable. I know my truck and am not surprised by the crazy response of the steering wheel and I consider driving it an adventure. In addition the brakes are going out. But somebody on Craigslist was giving away a heavy duty desk, which after tacking some hardi backer to the top,  I intended to use as a wedging table. Well, the woman with the desk never called back, so after a pleasant happy hour, Tif and I went for a drive, which I guess, brings me back to the first sentence. Great, I'm redundant. I'm redundant. I'm redundant. Err, anyway, we headed to the west side of the west hills. There, we admired some mansions, more mansions, nice cars, Aston Martins(which are not even in the same ballpark as "nice cars") - I might have seen a Rolls. . . and then I saw what, to me were a blessing, AND I was in the truck - a pile of tree stumps sitting on the side of a school. They had obviously chopped down the tree and taken the smaller pieces away and maybe were headed back for the larger chunks. I've been looking for some stumps for a sculpture installation I've been thinking about. When I pulled over and started tempting a hernia by wrestling them into the bed of my pickup, the nonchalant glances at my shitty truck by passers by, reassured me that folks assumed I was "the help". 500 lbs of stump later, I returned to the cab of the truck sweating, breathing hard and with scraped up forearms found Tiffani practically hiding under the dash. She was so embarrassed that she stayed there until I managed to navigate my unruly vehicle a third of the way down a very tall hill. They are great stumps. I can't wait to use them for something relating to compartmentalization and modular consumption.

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NYC was fun.

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Well, that's all for now.

Pickchers

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A bit of travel within the city

Dr Jones turned 35 today. We met up for a beer in hell's kitchen befor heading to Williamsburg. There, we met up with Jeff and his wife Ece(aycha), two very nice people! Also I met Scott from XX man. Also very nice.
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From there we went to a club in north slope and caught Laura Gibson's set, which was lovely. After, we went to a very good Italian restaurant where I had a delicious salad of dandelion greens, a poached egg and panchetta. It was finished with a sherry vinagrette. Next I had a folded pasta stuffed with sweet corn and mascarpone.
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Took a train back to time square and hoofed it back to hell's kitchen to call it a night. I'm looking forward to the shows tomorrow. Now it's time to rest.
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Happy birthday Dr. Jones

Heading to Williamsburg on the L train
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Am pica from nyc

Ah New York. So much action. So much to do. It's overwhelming.
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