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February 28, 2007
Checkpoint Five
The Metamorphosis project is ahead of schedule, and we reached stage five today. That linked image's text (scroll down a bit) gives brief descriptions of the process for each numbered stage, and as we near the finish line those descriptions should expand. This photo series covers only what's going on at the top end of the flute, so we'll probably do another one later on for the fingerhole region. I'll at least mention what's going on farther down the tube in the descriptive text for the next few stages, even if there aren't photos of that yet. --r.
Posted by Romy
08:11 PM PST
February 27, 2007
First three stages
First3Meta (Picture) Following up on the "Metamorphosis" idea we discussed yesterday, the first three steps are pictured above. Remember, all pictures are of the very same piece... on top is the raw, uncut bamboo, in the middle shot it's been trimmed, drilled and flame-treated, and at bottom the loose carbon is sanded off to reveal the darkened skin. More stage photos coming in a day or two... --r.
Posted by Romy
06:17 PM PST
February 26, 2007
Metamorphosis
Today we conceived a small project: a photographic series following an individual piece of bamboo through each step of its transformation into a flute. An early-stage photo or two may appear here, or perhaps we'll just wait until the entire metamorphosis is complete-- we'll see. In either case our rough target for project conclusion is approximately ten days, or sometime around March 7th-- so let's set the 11th as the latest acceptable completion date. Incidentally, the significance of that date is that it's the day on which the majority of Amerikanskis return to Daylight Saving Time. This Great Leap Forward sets our clocks one hour ahead, which means that we gain an additional hour of light in the evenings. Prior to 2007 this springtime shift has happened in April, but this year it's been pushed a month earlier by Congressional decree -- one of the few worthwhile decrees those sociopaths have issued in quite some time, if you ask me! I'm certainly looking forward to that extra hour of light in the evenings: at last we night-owl types get to stick it to the Morning People! Society's timetable is horribly skewed to favor early risers, with "normal" business hours starting viciously early-- and we on the USA's West Coast really get the short end of the stick, in so many ways. For starters, let's take a business on the East Coast which opens at the "routine" hour of (shudder) eight AM. At eight Eastern time it's still just five AM in the west-- so those devious easterners have a full three hours to instigate all sorts of mischief before we westerners even wake up and smell the coffee! And once we're finally up and running, our first few productive hours are invariably spent in attempting to repair whatever those arrogant, feebleminded easterners have already screwed up for that particular morning! Then, at the tail end of the workday we might as well be on Mars as far as the easterners are concerned: they've long since flown the coop and are off sipping $12.00 appletinis while we westerners schlepp onward, putting in three-plus more hours of damage control. Lather, rinse, repeat... This scenario is no joke for those who work for a large company with offices across the country. In fact, the Swamp Witch is in that boat and has related many firsthand tales of such travails. Another example of eastern oppression: discount telephone hours. Typical long-distance rates are highest during the day when business traffic is booming, and drop drastically in the evening hours. By the time an overworked westerner finishes work and manages to straggle homeward, it might be nine or ten Eastern time, already late for social calls-- but the easterners have already had hours and hours to make their leisurely post-work connections. The situation's even worse with personal-business calls. By the time westerners are off work, eastern businesses have long since closed-- but easterners have three leisurely postwork hours for private business calls to the west! A westerner would have to make such calls in the grim, dank, groggy, mentally sluggish predawn gloom. The most disadvantaged personal temperament of all is the western night-owl type. Eastern night owls have several advantages: for one thing, they can make social phone calls at midnight and still reach westerners at a reasonable time. Western morning types can easily rise early with vigorous cheer, to take care of their eastern business needs -- or get to work early in order to keep pace with the easterners. Finally, eastern morning-types get a fiendishly early start, far ahead of everyone else! So pity the poor, downtrodden western night owls: just about everything works against us. Boy, we really went off on a tangent today-- originally this was just supposed to be about daylight saving time. Fight the oppressive social hegemony of the Morning People! Actually, I'd be happy if the clock jumped ahead three hours and stayed there permanently. Since those Morning People seem to love getting up in the dark so much, let's let them do it all year long... I'll take my extended daylight in the evening hours, thank you. First installment of the "Metamorphosis" project coming tomorrow.... --r.
Posted by Romy
11:42 AM PST
February 22, 2007
Quickie
Ebony_Lip_Plate (Picture) Above is a photo of one of those ebony slivers we mentioned in the previous post. The actual width of this lip plate is about 2-1/4". Hmmmm.... come to think of it, one of those touristy African masks would provide enough salvaged wood for quite a few of these... The ebony plate pictured above is notably narrow and rectangular as opposed to oval, and points toward a sleek, postmodern bamboo-flute aesthetic-- don'tcha think? Anyway, I rather like this slim, squared-off look, and we'll be exploring extensively in this general direction for the Spring/Summer 2007 bamboo flute season. Coming to a runway near you soon... --r.
Posted by Romy
09:29 PM PST
February 20, 2007
The Price of Ebony
This is a delicate subject related to the global "Free Market" and economic dissonance. Today I wandered into a somewhat tacky import shop while waiting for lunch. They had dozens of tourist-quality African masks displayed on the walls, many of which were carved out of ebony wood. It's sobering to realize that here in North America, the sizable chunks of wood required for those masks would have cost more than the ultimate retail price of the masks themselves! In other words, the value of the raw material consumed exceeds that of the finished product-- which after all encompasses the labor of carving the masks, the subsequent cut for sundry middlemen, a final retail markup, etc., etc. Might one dub this a subzero-sum game? Sure, people in the countries where those rare woods grow have the right to pursue their traditional crafts in order to make a living, but this is a very strange state of affairs. It's not that I mind paying top dollar for my small bits of lip-plate wood -- but realizing that the craftsmen who so laboriously carved those masks would have been much better off selling the raw, unworked wood itself if they had a direct avenue to do so? --Brrrrrrrr. The world of economics works in strange ways indeed... Time to raise our flute-production volume and establish some contacts in Africa. --r.
Posted by Romy
08:19 PM PST
February 19, 2007
Medieval Mindsets
Sorry about the recent spam rants. I should try to be more philosophically placid: after all, the Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away. In the grand scheme of things, taking a few minutes several times a day to HUNT DOWN and EXTERMINATE the GARBAGE that those VILE, SPAM-SPEWING LOWLIFE SCUMBAGS strew so maliciously throughout this site.... (ahem) Anyway, it's really no big deal, just terribly annoying-- almost enough to spawn fantasies of violent revenge. --r.
Posted by Romy
07:31 PM PST
February 18, 2007
Spam fatigue
It's become quite tedious checking the comments several times daily in order to intercept and delete obnoxious, vulgar spam "comments," much more of which arrives than does legitimate commentary. For whatever reason, the spam seems to pile onto certain entries: that is, once a blog entry has been hit once, it's much more likely to attract repeated attacks. Several of our current frontpage items below show no *add comment* button, and in every case this was due to repeated spamming. Unfortunately, in our current operating platform there's no way to shut down latecoming abusive spam assaults while preserving earlier, legitimate submissions. Therefore, quite a few worthwhile comments have been sacrificed in order to preserve our sanity in the hardest-hit entries below... sorry, guys! So here's the deal: we're going to get medieval on those spammers' asses for a while to see if that helps. In other words, as soon as ANY entry has attracted a SINGLE attack, comments will be closed for that entry-- even if five, ten, or twenty brilliant, witty and incisive comments have to be sacrificed in the process! (Har, har-- likely scenario.) More in the morning... It's ten PM Sunday night as of this writing, so we'll either add to this tomorrow or start afresh with a new entry. And NO SPAMMING! --r
Posted by Romy
09:26 PM PST
February 16, 2007
A Real Blog?
Know what I oughta do? Set up a "real" blog on one of the many available platforms, and arrange for most of these Journal postings to also show up over there, possibly in altered form when appropriate. Thing is, this here site journal doesn't quiiiite fit the mold for a pure blog: after all, in order to get to this point readers must first click through this site's opening page -- you know, the screen before this one, with those pictures and that stale schtick about bamboo flutes, Britney Spears and the pope? -- And after that, one still has to scroll down past our eternal opening entry (top of this screen) in order to skip even more tedious bamboo-flute pontificating. So, given those awkward realities it's difficult to recommend this Journal in normal blog terms, as in "Dude! I, like, TOTALLY have a blog-- here's a link, and it'd be so cool if you'd add me to your blogroll, man!" --See how that sooo doesn't work? One can't really expect people to schlep past all that static stuff in order to get to this semi-daily, more legitimately bloglike material. (A bit later... OK, so we could skip ahead one more screen-- romyb'sblog --but this still isn't really set up like a pure blog would be.) Also, it'd be liberating to maintain a more stripped-down blog since I'd be free to post some REALLY wack material: stuff so completely irreverent, flute-irrelevant, profane, insane, or political -- oops, those last two are synonymous -- stuff far too imprudent and/or impudent to post in a putatively flute-tootin' milieu. There still could be flute oriented material over there, but it'd frequently be spiced up with less family-friendly fare. I'd have to survey the Archives to check, but it feels like less than half of our overall blog content has much relevance to flutes-- and yet the need to maintain at least a thin veneer of professionalism puts severe constraints on what's appropriate. So, shall we unleash the ranting beast that lurks within our mild-mannered bamboo flute reporter? Now why didn't I think of this sooner? (Ducking into telephone booth)* --r. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Kids, "telephone booths" were narrowly upright, freestanding cubicles with a closeable door for privacy; these booths contained "pay phones," into which you'd insert coins in order to make a call. (Really!) Such telephone booths used to be very common on street corners in towns and cities; in fact one seldom had to walk more than a block in order to find one, if you can imagine anything so quaint! Anyway, that bit about "ducking into a telephone booth" is a reference to old Superman comics, as is somewhat superficially (har) explained here.
Posted by Romy
05:30 PM PST
February 15, 2007
Flute Studies
Whew-- I just sent a 650-word reply to a casual inquiry from a prospective customer whose prior flute experience was limited to a year's casual tootling on a fipple-type flute. She had inquired whether it was realistic for someone in her position to even aspire to play a transverse bamboo flute. Can you imagine? Naturally, this impudent question was an insult-- a waste of my valuable time. Does it appear that I have infinite time to expend in answering such foolish questions from complete strangers? Of course my reply was not quite so blunt: diplomatically granting her the benefit of the doubt, I suggested an interval of fasting and penitence, followed by several years of musico-spiritual studies and world travel-- all complemented by multiple rereadings of every single word in our Journal Archives. Such activities might sufficiently prepare her mind to frame the question more constructively-- and then and only then should she approach again, humbly beseeching advice from a more enlightened perspective. ---NAAAAHHHH. Just funnin'... actually such inquiries are our bread and butter; reassuringly answering in the affirmative to such tentative questions is what I've been DOING for the past twenty years! Variations on the following reply already appear in a couple other places on this site, but here we go again: Of course it's not "naive" to wonder whether you could play a transverse bamboo flute! The most important factor in achieving musical success, however you define it, is a strong desire to learn. People with the sort of personality that sees a long, gradual learning process as enjoyable and rewarding in itself, and who can take pleasure in tiny incremental improvements from day to day, are bound to be "successful." That element is MUCH more important than whatever measure of talent or natural aptitude a would-be amateur flutist might possess.Anyway, that's enough dime-store flute philosophizing for today... y'all get the picture. Now go practice some more! --r.
Posted by Romy
02:42 PM PST
February 14, 2007
Mid-Feb Ramblings
sorry! (Picture) Someone was asking recently about commissioning a flute in the alto range, and specifically what the price would be for a seven-hole flute in A minor. As you may know, A is the largest key/size that I make in the seven-hole, minor-scale system, for the simple reason that it's the largest size with that configuration I can handle myself. Even so, I wouldn't want to play a seven-hole A all day long, since operating at maximum reach can be tiring. An hour or so on an A flute is no problem, but keeping at it for hours and days on end is asking for cramps and tendon trouble! As I wrote to the customer, if he wanted a "premium" flute -- that is, with the highest possible musical and aesthetic qualities -- what I'd do is begin working on about three instruments in the desired key, and at some point midway through the process select the one showing the most promise. Extra time and care would then be lavished on the chosen flute in order to achieve the best possible results. Incidentally, there are already a couple of finished instruments sitting around the studio which might have worked out OK for this prospective alto-flute customer, but I refused to recommend either one. If one of those flutes had been "pitched" to the customer in a favorable light, he might well have been persuaded to buy it-- which would be good for business, but not our style. As has been pointed out here previously, the Internet has greatly improved the overall quality of my work, since I don't feel comfortable recommending an instrument unless I'm convinced it's exactly right for the customer's needs. It sure would have been a lot easier to sell one of those existing flutes... we could use the money right now, too. But instead, we've plunged into an ambiguous process that could take months or even years to resolve. Sad fact: I've blown off, waffled into oblivion, neglected, procrastinized or otherwise spoiled at least as many viable flute orders as have been successfully completed over the past few years. [Climbing onto soapbox] After all, true Art cannot be forced into being just because of a mere "order!" One does not stick-up Inspiration at the point of a gun! The Muse is not a common strumpet, grubbing for material gain in the gutter of the crass "marketplace!" But at the same time, as of today there are 25 or 30 finished instruments languishing in the studio-- and some really great ones, too! How is this possible? Well, it's just that nobody's asked for precisely what's on hand now-- they've all wanted something else, something with a different key, style, size, scale, finish, wrappings... you name it. It's about time to go back to doing two or three art/craft fairs per year in order to generate some "walkup" business. Let's get those languishing, unseen flutes in front of the public, so that they can find buyers who pick them out on the spot! (Or perhaps we could photograph, catalog and price the available flutes and get that information up on the site! --Naaaahhhh: too businesslike.) More on this general subject soon. Happy V-Day! (Could have been worse; you could have given your current or would-be significant other this... what a bitter lesson to learn.)
Posted by Romy
05:02 PM PST
It's a start...
Gosh, it sure would be nice to be much smarter and better educated. I hold no college degrees other than a few But nevermind that... after all, we're not here to compare "credentials" competing for "laurels." Anyway, I promised that *something* would be written here tonight, and tomorrow this entry will be extensively repaired. Not necessarily lengthened by much, though...
Posted by Romy
12:12 AM PST
February 12, 2007
Green Beans
GreenBeans (Picture) Here, have some green beans! This is a gallon-sized #10 can, so there's plenty to go around. Last Saturday our Iron Potluck group staged a Battle: School Lunch! and my contribution was a green bean casserole. Made it with canned beans for the sake of authenticity, and actually it wasn't bad at all: this recipe with a couple of slight modifications. For one thing, a light grating of fresh nutmeg gave it a nice extra aromatic dimension... Amazingly, we've already managed to use up most of those beans, despite the fact that I normally don't buy canned veggies these days, except for tomatoes. (Speaking of which these are wicked good, and if you watch for them to go on sale they aren't overly expensive.) Made a big batch of soup yesterday and threw several cups o' beans into that. Hate to waste perfectly good food, even if it's just canned green beans. Only two or three cups to go... c'mon, have some! And speaking of canned veggies, here's a blast from the past. --r.
Posted by Romy
05:49 PM PST
February 11, 2007
Obscure bamboo flute reference du jour
In your country, a television program called "The Grammys" is apparently very popular. In fact, according to our sources this program is being "broadcast" at this very moment! It seems that the musical group known as "Teh Red Hot Chili Peppers" is due to appear on stage at any moment-- which brings us to the "point" of this entry. Long ago, these Chili Peppers wrote a song which evoked a flute of bamboo: Don't loot, don't shout, give comet the boot And so, there you go. Bamboo flutes occupy the cutting edge of culture in your country the USA! For the evidence, you can go yourself and see the complete lyrics here. (And by the way, Iceland is building the nuclear bomb to attack Americans with Terrorism. Act now or die!)
Posted by Romy
10:30 PM PST
February 9, 2007
?ô Back to flute roots ?ô
It's high time we returned to this site's Core Mission! A quick scroll through our currently front-paged blog entries reveals a shocking fact: not a single one of those 21 or so entries, dating back to December 19th, says anything substantial or informative about music or bamboo flutes! A few do make vague noises about future plans and resolutions, but that's about it. Who would have thought it was that bad? Sure, plenty of enterprises far more big-time than ours are prone to "mission creep," but this is absurd. So be it resolved: as of mañana we'll get back to serious business. Gorilla Suit Day, Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, Groundhog Day, Waitangi Day... all of the heavily commercialized holidays for this time of year have finally passed, so such distractions are out of the way at last. Say, I just discovered a fun feature on the new laptop-- yes, we're talking Windows. (So sue me, you pretentious "creative class" Mac types.) *Ahem* It's called the "character map," and apparently has been around for quite a while: Start > Run > CharMap.exe. Anyway, this function offers all sorts of diacritical marks and foreign-language characters which are easily copied and pasted, and that's where the tilde for "maňana" above came from. In fact, the character map contains so much craaazy stuff that it can be hard to spot the one you're looking for. Unfortunately, quite a few of the more unusual characters don't work on this blogging platform. (But on second thought, that might be a good thing, if you know what I mean.) ♀ ♣ ▓ ﻕ Ώ ۩ Ữ ♪ ♪ (Odd: the single musical eighth notes ♪ copy and paste just fine, but the beamed ones -- that is, two notes connected by a bar -- don't work. Also, the two weird symbols in this entry's title were supposed to be single eighth-notes too-- so that character works fine in the post's body, but not the title area. Go figger...?) ♪♪♪♪♪♪♪, rb
Posted by Romy
01:58 PM PST
February 7, 2007
Time for some video!
It's high time we jumped on board for the surging Internet video trend, so watch for some cutting-edge footage here soon... Say, is it still "hep" to refer to movin' pictures as "footage," kids? After all, that term's a holdover from Ye Olden Days when actual feet of actual film moved past a shutter, creating that miraculous illusion of motion. What's it called now, "bittage" or something? Clue me in, 'kay-mmm? Consider this a solid, unbreakable resolution for the year-- come hell or high H2O, we'll come up with a movin'-picture show for y'all sometime in the next few lunar cycles. Update on our progress coming *soon...* in geological time, anyway. Some months ago I had the pleasure of attending a festival in which Ladislas Starevich's 1912 film "The Cameraman's Revenge" was screened, accompanied by live music from a string ensemble. It's astounding, utterly charming, and far ahead of its time, and if you ever get a chance, check it out! So far I haven't located a freely viewable version on the 'net, but there's probably one out there somewhere. Can anyone vault the rainbow and find it? If so, let us know. (Update) Wow, here it is! There are many small and wonderful moments in this film which are easy to miss, due to its poor state of preservation. Just watch closely, and transport your imagination back to 1912... --r.
Posted by Romy
06:37 PM PST
February 6, 2007
This entry will be revised After all, in the traditional pre-blog print world It's no wonder that blogs still struggle to earn respect from traditional print-based media, since even the most brilliant bloggers are prone to post sloppy material from time to time in the heat of Printed magazines and books have the luxury of much more careful editorial oversight than do newspapers-- I often wince at the writing of my own favorite bloggers: how can they make such rookie mistakes at this stage of the game-- and why don't they go back and correct their most blatant blunders ASAP? Part of the problem seems to be a certain stigma about "revisionism" in the blog world, where immediacy is prized and subsequent alterations are viewed with suspicion. Although we've studiously avoided political topics here for the most part, much of my own day-to-day blog reading is in the political sphere-- where any substantial alterations might leave the writer exposed to charges of revisionism in its most sinister and incriminating sense. I've gotten better over time, and used to revisit these entries repeatedly for days on end, searching for possible areas of tweakage. Nowadays, I generally finalize each entry within a day or It sure would be nice to have a[n] Revisions coming soon... ---r.
Posted by Romy
06:24 PM PST
February 5, 2007
Photography stuff
I remember being astonished by this photo as a kid, and also remember reading at the time a description of how it was done in those ancient, pre-Photoshop days. Can you believe that they had to toss the water (and the cats) twenty-eight separate times, mopping up after each take, before a satisfactory version was in the can? Now that's doing things the hard way. This might be a good image to spoof digitally, with some demented flutist playing the crazed-artist role of Dali in the original. Auditions for that insane-flutist role to be held soon... But seriously, I'll get right on it-- it's not easy dreaming up these frivolous new projects to distract myself from actual remunerative work, and this idea is as entertaining as anything else I can think of right now. Speaking of pre-digital days, yesterday we attended a 45-piece exhibit of Ansel Adams photographs. I'd seen a few individual AA prints in the past but never such a substantial collection, in which his stunning technical expertise was displayed in the printmaking process alone-- in every square inch of the exhibit. Mere book reproductions don't begin to do justice to those prints, which left me feeling nostalgic for film; it's astounding how quickly digital photography has conquered the world, and rather bittersweet to reflect on the particular artistry that's been lost in the process. As I remarked to the Swamp Witch while viewing the exhibit, Adams's work struck me as being predominately in a "minor key." That is, the tonal range was weighted toward the shadowy side, and even snowy-white scenes had a muted and exquisitely detailed textural restraint, with none of the blasted-out highlights which have been such a frequent problem with the compact digital camera used for nearly all our gallery shots thus far. It all comes down to dynamic range, as was discussed last October in this space. It's pathetic, but I still haven't broken through the paralysis and committed to a digital SLR! That would surely result in a huge improvement-- and yet I'm not sure that ANY digital camera can quite duplicate the voluptuous detail and tonal range captured in those Adams photographs-- although you might be able to at least come close with something like this... Twenty-six thousand bucks, and I don't think that even includes a lens. *Sigh* guess it's time to break out the old film SLR again and start building a darkroom in the basement. --r.
Posted by Romy
02:12 PM PST
February 2, 2007
Hey, nice marmot!
 Here's our commemorative Groundhog Day photo. I found this snapshot in a second-hand store several years ago, and firmly believe that it's the finest groundhog photo currently available on the Internet! The faint inscription on the bottom margin indicates that this picture was taken in July of 1970. Judging from the background landscape, it may have been taken on the Olympic Peninsula, or perhaps in the North Cascades...? Hard to tell for sure. Feedback? Note that the groundhog's shadow is clearly visible-- and that he's munching on what appear to be Cheetos. After all, we all have our price... --r. (Marmot)
Posted by Romy
03:17 PM PST |
