I’m into health and safety, but here’s evidence that I’ll play with a camera while driving. Unwise.

I’ve worked in Palo Alto for two weeks. I’m familiarizing myself with one neighborhood. It oozes plainness and strangeness.

My co-engineer at a soon-to-be-renamed startup is Jon. We’ve worked together at two jobs in the past. Working with him again feels triumphant. When our last job ended, I told myself I would take the opportunity to work with Jon if it ever came along. Opportunity knocks.

In Palo Alto I played with double exposures. This portrait of Jon provides me with a good lesson: the light of one exposure can wash out the other. Obvious in retrospect, the lesson is learned.

Trivia night frustrates me because I don’t care to know the answers to most of the questions. But I love spending time with my roommates drinking and chatting. When tonight is trivia night at Cato’s Alehouse, the two come hand in hand.

I bow out before the end to walk up Piedmont Avenue home.

The most well lit signs indicate businesses that have the most to lose.

The moon-sign indicates nothing to lose.

Inspired by Casey’s Framed Fractions, I purchased a Holga 135 from the FourCornerStore.

In past photo experiments I used SLR and digital cameras. They easily answered my biggest questions:

• Where is the edge of the frame?
• What object is in focus?

The Holga is a simpler camera. So simple that it unasks my primary questions. The camera provides neither precise framing nor accurate focus. The viewfinder, wholly independent of the lens, provides only a good estimate of the films edge. The lens offers only a primitive guide for the focus. The Holga’s lack of immediate feedback has led me to an easy-going “best guess” philosophy when pressing the shutter release.

Free of my usual questions, my brain has discovered some obvious new ones. I now question the most obvious subject for this artform: light! The camera is a light-capturing device. I now have all new questions when walking with the camera:

• How much light is there here?
• What speed is the film?
• How much contrast is there in foreground and background light?

As a musician, I’ve felt sensitive to sound for years. I’m excited to be more aware of another wave (and particle) in my environment. And I’m excited to share some of the artifacts of this awareness.

4 quarts of food, cooked in the Badlands during a rainstorm. Uneaten.

The badlands campsite.

Nighttime Cooking.

Crabill’s Hamburgers

Tiny burgers in a tiny diner

Mug n’ Buns Drive-in

Paper menu and big metal box to summon the server

Rainy day soda shop

Campsite Cooking

Sour cream raisin pie and a sticky roll

Bob’s

The mega bob meal – burger, two sodas, fries

A threshold of response: point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to generate a response.

[From Latin limen (threshold).]

Pygmalionism (pig-MAY-lee-uh-niz-uhm) noun

1. The state of being in love with an object of one’s own making.

2. The condition of loving an inanimate object such as a statue or image.

[In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was the king of Cyprus who carved a female
figure in ivory so realistic and beautiful that he fell in love with her.
The goddess Aphrodite took pity on him and responded by bringing the statue
to life as Galatea. Pygmalion married her.]

cathect (kuh-THEKT) verb tr.

To invest mental or emotional energy in an idea, object, or person.

[Back-formation from Greek kathexis (the investment of emotional energy in
something). Ultimately from the Indo-European root segh- (to hold) that is
also the source of words such as victory (to hold in a battle), hectic,
scheme, and scholar.]

cerebrate (SER-uh-brayt) verb tr., intr.

To use the mind: to think, reason.

[Back-formation from cerebration (act of thinking), from cerebrum (brain).
Ultimately from the Indo-European root ker- (horn or head), which is also the
source of words such as unicorn, horn, hornet, rhinoceros, reindeer, migraine,
carrot, carat, and Hindi sirdar (leader, from Persian sar: head).]

psychopomp

A guide of souls, one who escorts sould of a newly-deceased to the afterlife

[From Greek psychopompos (conductor of souls), from psycho-, from psyche (breath, spirit, soul) + pompos (conductor, guide).]

A low-riding Volvo from New Jersey to Philadelphia…

…drove to Kooser State Park in Pennsylvania on June 7…

…through Ohio to Shades State Park, Indiana on June 9…

… to a campsite off the Mississippi in Illinois on June 10 …

… then Great River Bluffs State Park in Minnesota on June 11 …

… outside of Bob’s Diner on June 12, we check in on low riding-ness …

… still low. Continue to Vermillion State Recreation Area, June 12 …

… and then see some Presidents on June 15th …

… and also Crazy Horse …

… but before all that, we got to see The House on the Rock’s Infinity Room …

… which looks like this from the outside …

… but not backwards, forwards, cross the Utah Salt Flats …

… and into Sonoma county …

But, the reason we’re here (or clicking the back button) right now is to read a list of definitions of words that I picked out of the book. There were many more I didn’t know so well, but we’ll just stick to this short list for now.

Star Chamber

A court or group marked by arbitrary, oppressive, and secretive procedures.

Locum

A person filling in for another, especially for a doctor or clergyman.

Steenth

1. Latest in an indefinitely long sequence.
2. One sixteenth.

[Alteration of the word sixteenth.]

Also, the Wordsmith included this:

Notes: The formation of the word “steenth” from “sixteenth” took place through a process called aphesis (from Greek, literally “a letting go”). Aphesis is when an unstressed sound from the beginning of a word get lost over time.

Some other examples are:
“cute” from “acute”
“’tis” from “it is”
“gypsy” from “Egyptian”, from the belief that Gypsies came from Egypt (they actually came from India).

Trichotillomania

A compulsion to pull out one’s hair.

[From Greek tricho- (hair) + tillein (to pluck, pull out) + -mania (excessive enthusiasm or craze).]

paper tiger

One who is outwardly strong and powerful but is in fact powerless and ineffectual.

I wake up in a smelly motel room. Time to talk awake, and take a walk. I start on the sidewalk.

Then I take to the road. My destination, a big statue, stands 40 feet tall in the distance.

Walk walk walk.

Stand proud, giant hobo. I wonder who would have put the fellow here.

A plaque sits on the hobo’s pedestal…

… and leaves me more confused. It reads:

Hobo Joe
Built by and
stands in memory of
Marvin Ransdale
(1928-1988)
by
his good friend
Ramon Gillum
July, 1989

Did Marvin build it in his own memory? Did Ramon build it for Marvin? Perhaps they build it together, but come July, 1989 only Ramon was around to remember Marvin’s contribution? I’m not sure.

But the hobo lives near a meat processing plant.

I begin looping back to the hotel, and meet an owl guide.

He reveals to me the mysteries of waste and tools left out by citizens of Buckeye.

Done with waste, I continue with the drive thru to the motel.

8-bit Nintendo video game music charms me still. The Nintendo could have five channels of sound, one capable of a sampled sound (thanks, Wikipedia article “Video Game Music”). This restriction lends a chamber music feel to the music that I really missed once game technology improved.

This may be a blasphemous to some, but here’s a Bach fugue with four voices for comparison. I would like to hear the Nintendo perform some Bach fugues one day.

What delights me about the game music is also presenet in chamber music. Chamber music is named as such because it could be performed in small palace chambers. Composers for the game had to cope with a technological limit while composers for the palace had to deal with a spatial limit – but for each the limit was the same. Only so many voices could be happening at the same time. I like how composers for each platform had to deal with the same limit for such different but parallel reasons.

I’m not the first to notice: here’s a video of a string quartet performing a medley of themes from The Legend of Zelda.