The mug, day 5 (Day 346/365)

Posted on by Dale

Morning report:

After a couple cups of coffee, I toddled down to the ceramics studio to work on my mug. You will recall, perhaps, that my decorative goal was to replicate the stone carving labyrinth on the side of the mug.

In the previous two versions of the mug, I went ahead and carved the labyrinth while the clay was still moist and workable. This didn’t work as well as I had hoped, because in the course of finishing the mug, I’d mush the labyrinth a bit and have to re-carve parts of it on a regular basis. So yesterday I decided to let it dry a bit and then carve the labyrinth. This morning seemed the opportune time to get it done.

The mug had completely set up, so there was no question of messing it up by handling it. I grabbed my little tools and a water spray bottle and got to work.

Here’s what I found interesting: whereas previously I just scooped out the wet clay, now I was actually having to carve the path of the labyrinth into the dry surface. I had to proceed slowly so as not to break the path outlines, and although I could wet the surface to make it a little easier, I was still scratching a little bit at a time. And that was more or less what the original artist/priest/person did on the prehistoric rock carving from Spain.

Another difference was that in the wet clay I was able to draw out the entire labyrinth and then follow the path. In the dry clay, I had to plan how to scratch the paths so that they hooked up and flowed correctly. I ended up drawing it on a piece of paper and shading in the paths I had done.

I started in the center with the round mound and proceeded outward. It was interesting that after I got the first three rounds done, I began to realize that the figure was placed so high on the mug that I would run out of room for the last four rounds. So, just like the prehistoric artist before me, I had to make the last four rounds a lot thinner than the rest of the course. I went ahead and scratched in those four thin lines at the top; that made sure that everything cohered and jumped.

The bottom part was another challenge. One reason I chose this particular petroglyph as a tattoo was its solution of the opening of the labyrinth: a rather phallic entrance area, flanked by a squarish area (with a breast-like engraving in it) and a semicircular area. As I approached that area, I wished I had printed out a copy of the thing to bring with me so I could approximate it as closely as possible.

Then, of course, it dawned on me that I had a copy on me. Literally. I just pulled up my shorts and studied my upper thigh. Should have done it sooner, because the balance of the thing that appeals to me so much relies on a specific shaping of the courses, but you know what? This one is mine.

Here’s a photo:

It has to be fired, which will shrink it a bit more, and then glazed. I’m thinking a dark greenish glaze, if one is available.

My only concern at this point, other than hoping I got the clay right throughout so that it doesn’t blow up in the kiln, is that the etching is deep enough for the labyrinth to show up through the glaze. I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose the dot and line in the bottom left area. Maybe I can paint that one with glaze. I’ll check with Andy.

The mug, day 4, et al. (Day 345/365)

Posted on by Dale

This morning I went back to the studio and made another mug. I worked smarter, using a thinner slab and more appropriate construction techniques. I also left the etching of the labyrinth until tomorrow, when the thing has dried a bit.

It appears to be a much more within-limits size.

I also met with the double bassists and the marimbist to go over my piece. That was fun. The boys had learned it well, and responded very well to my direction on attacks and phrasing. Ryan Smith, the percussion teacher, was there, and Stephen dropped in soon. Between us all, we hammered it out. I think it’s going to be more than acceptable.

The notation issues Ryan had mentioned to me previously turned out to be very simple. Near the end, I gave the marimba some sixteenth-note arpeggios, the same pattern over and over, and just to make it an interesting challenge, I left out notes here and there. Ryan pointed out to me that it was hard to read (which I thought when I wrote it) and suggested that instead of a sixteenth note followed by a sixteenth rest, why not just make it an eighth note? The marimba can’t sustain it anyway, and it would be a lot easier to count. Duh.

I’m going to print out a complete score and parts for all concerned, with the names of the boys listed as “first performed by.”

They’ve scheduled the world premiere for next Friday’s Prism II concert, which is super cool. This is actually the first time I’ve written a piece that is being performed without my being the one who schedules it.

The rest of the afternoon was spent being busy preparing end-of-program paperwork: evaluations for students, evaluations for faculty, dance cards for the Grand Ball on Sunday night.

And then it was finally time for the faculty’s surprise present for the students. The theme for tonight’s dance is “Versus,” which can be interpreted any way you wish: good vs. evil, paper vs. plastic, and in one genius RA combo, sandwich vs. Mary Kate. Having failed to get our act together for the “Fantasy” theme dance, we decided we could use this one for our Hogwarts staff night.

So at 5:00, we began to gather in the lobby: Professors McGonagall, Trelawney, Snape, Lockhart; Albus Dumbledore, Hagrid, Harry; Rita Skeeter, Moaning Myrtle, Tonks. We made our way, in the rain, over to the dining hall, where the reaction was immediate. These sophisticated, oh-so-cool 17-year-olds reverted to their 10-year-old selves without batting an eye. Cameras appeared from nowhere. We were rock stars. They wanted pictures of us, with us, with their friends. (Gilderoy, of course, ate it up, handing out bookmarks for his new book.)

They giggled with delight when I (Snape, of course) snarled at them and ordered them around. They lined up, lined up!, to be sorted by McGonagall and the Sorting Hat. They declared that their lives were now complete, having experienced the ultimate nerdgasm.

It truly was a lot of fun. We did this last year, when the Palms was under renovation and we were being fed in the Old Gym. From day one we called it the Great Hall (when we weren’t calling it worse), and Bill McCullough suggested that we all dress up as Hogwarts faculty for dinner on the day of the fantasy dance. Justin Keith printed out huge house banners, which we hung from the basketball goals, and we set up the head table on the stage.

Like this year, the kids went nuts. I had one request for a photo of “the murderer and his victim,” so Michael Jenkins (Dumbledore) and I stood together, and suddenly there was this long line of kids waiting to take our picture. It was such a hit that we decided to make it an annual thing.

The fun of the thing is that it’s a surprise. We don’t tell the kids it’s happening, and so it’s great to watch their faces as they come into the dining hall and begin to realize what we’ve done. Cell phones come out, and suddenly the place is full. Makes it very hard to get around in my voluminous cape, and the immediate, heartfelt apologies I get from kids who step on it are a hoot.

The faculty has just as much fun. Those who were new to the game this year responded just like last year’s team: they went as all out as they could in putting together their costumes, actually sewing things.

The most amusing were Dave Francis and Tamara Brooks, two Comm Arts teachers who have neither read the books nor seen the movies, yeah, I know, but otherwise they’re brilliant teachers, so whattaya gonna do?, who were completely taken aback at the response of the kids. Especially since neither of them knew anything at all about Hagrid and Moaning Myrtle respectively. Tamara only discovered she was dead and lived in a toilet on the way out the door.

I’ll post photos when I get them.

20 days to go.

The mug, day 2 (Day 343/365)

Posted on by Dale

I went to check on my mug today, and it’s enormous. It’s a vase. It has not shrunk at all.

Nevertheless, I took it down off the drying shelf and worked on the labyrinth, cleaning that up. I didn’t have a lot of time, but I got that done.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to go in and whittle down the handle. Or maybe start over.

Actually, tomorrow I get to sit in on a runthrough of “Dance” for double bass duo and marimba.

And now for something completely different (Day 342/365)

Posted on by Dale

I roused myself this afternoon and went to the ceramics studio, where I made a mug.

Here’s the deal: twenty years ago (!) I made a mug at GHP. It’s quite a lovely thing. Here it is:

It’s very beautiful. I think it at least approaches, if not attains, wabi-sabi.

So I figure, what the heck, every twenty years, I’ll make a mug. It’s good if you can be creative on a schedule.

I‘m not sure how this new one is going to turn out. I calculated for shrinkage (13%), and aimed for a mug 3.5″ across and about 6″ high. I engraved a seven-circuit labyrinth on it and attached a big thick handle. That’s where I left it, to dry a bit.

It seems awfully big and clunky, not unlike the second mug I made in 1988 or so, which didn’t shrink as much as I needed it to and remains a big huge heavy ugly thing which sits in the back of the cabinet and never comes out.

In fact, I made this one once, didn’t like it, and crunched it and started over. Andy was kind enough to stop by and give me a couple of construction tips that helped a little, but basically it’s too big. But who knows, maybe it will shrink to my calculated size by tomorrow and I can buff up the labyrinth engraving a little and fire it.

If it doesn’t actually fall apart. I’m not sure that I got all the joints joined together. If there are air pockets embedded where there should be clay, the whole thing could just crack apart in the kiln. That would throw me off my twenty-year schedule.

But if working here for 20+ years has taught me anything, it’s that art is what you salvage when you stop working on it. We’ll take another look tomorrow and see if I’ve managed any art at all.

Things to do (Day 341/365)

Posted on by Dale

Tired of getting nothing done, and yet not up to the sustained effort required to write music or lyrics, I headed over to my super-secret website, Things to Do Before You’re 60, and made a concerted effort towards my goal of contributing 25 items to the list this summer.

I wrote ten, which is pretty good. I do wonder about Mike, the coworker from Newnan Crossing who talked me into this. Where has he been all summer? He probably lost the URL or his password. I should email him.

Oh, you want a list?

  • Travel to another country
  • Keep a journal
  • Give someone a surprise party
  • Develop an expertise
  • See Casablanca
  • Be alone
  • Read children’s books
  • Learn some constellations
  • Streak
  • Read a great classic
  • Write a thank you note

This is not as easy as it looks.

Here’s something else that’s not as easy as it looks: writing 100 facts about yourself. Try it. I have started a list, somewhere on my computer, and even including things which I would never tell anyone else, I’m only up to 73.

24 days to go.

Nothing, really (Day 340)

Posted on by Dale

We’re getting into that phase of the program when my duties start to pile up. Just like at the opening, my “free time” is spent getting paperwork done and the stars aligned for an easy exit for everyone.

I have noticed something, as I’ve walked around campus. Often I will be struck by a very real sense of unreality, that is, somehow I’ve fallen into an alternate reality. Very PDM.

This is not to be confused with a dream state. It doesn’t feel as if I’m dreaming. It feels as if I’m walking down the street in Newnan, perhaps, or down my hall at home, and yet everything around me is this other place. Perhaps I should say it feels as if I should be walking down the street in Newnan, and yet here I am.

This is curious in so many ways. For one thing, other than my family and my kitchen, what is there in Newnan that have even half the allure of this campus during the summer? What would I be walking down the street in Newnan toward?

As I often do at times of transition, I check my computer calendar for what’s coming up next, mapping out the next few months. Library training, preplanning, school opens… and then nothing. My calendar is absolutely blank after August.

Yes, I know, it will fill up pretty quickly, with Masterworks, social occasions, perhaps even Lacuna getting back to work on William Blake if someone steps up to head the organizing committee, but in general one can appreciate why being yanked out of this alternate reality back into the regular time/space continuum can be a bit of a drag.

Piddling (Day 339/365)

Posted on by Dale

For some reason my brain would not engage today. For once I had gotten plenty of sleep, but nothing would make my head start working. I listened to the two songs from Moonlight a couple of times, but nothing new occurred to me. I thought about getting through another handful of pages in the Logic Express book, I’m only on page 141 out of nearly 600, but even just following instructions was too much.

Finally I decided to open up the lyrics for Moonlight and see if anything happened there. Nothing did, exactly, but I decided while I was in there I’d go ahead and create pages for each song.

I’ve been using a little program called CopyWrite to work on the lyrics. Why not just a word processor? I don’t know. This popped up at some point in my life, and its quasi-notebook approach seemed a good place to work. It allows me to scratch out lyrics in the writing window, and keep notes about the song in a little “drawer” out to the side, and since it’s a notebook, I have all the songs at my fingertips. It also allows writers to tag pages with things like “chapter,” “draft,” “character,” etc.

However, it has some shortcomings that have begun to bug me. For example, its text formatting is very limited, with no strikethrough, which is very odd for a project manager, I think. Changing the name of a page, from “Harrison’s song” to “Sheer Poetry,” for example, was a matter of right-clicking instead of just hitting enter like it is everywhere else in the Mac world. Lots of other little things as well.

The last straw was when I went to create a page for “We’ll Run Away” and it wouldn’t allow an apostrophe in the page title. That’s just stupid. CopyWrite saves all your pages as separate files in a project folder it creates, and Finder naming conventions do not prohibit apostrophes, so why was CopyWrite balking?

Online I go to look once again at Circus Ponies’ Notebook. I’ve been eyeing this program for a while, but every time I download it, I think that I really don’t need it. But now I think perhaps I do. I look at all the screenshots, I watch the rather long video tour, and I am impressed.

Just to make sure, I head over to MacLife’s website and double-check for all the similar programs. I’ve looked at most of them over the years, and none of them have ever gotten me excited enough to download them, and Notebook seems to have the edge. So I download it for at least a 30 day trial.

(It also occurs to me that Grayson might find the voice annotation function useful. I know if I were sitting in a political science class being conducted in German, I’d like to be able to take notes while recording the lecture for later listening, on a Cornell note-taking page, no less.)

So I spend most of my morning transferring the pitifully few lyrics I have from CopyWrite over to Notebook, and then tracking down my post where I list all the songs and transferring that information over.

Notebook doesn’t have a little drawer for notes on a page, but I decided to create a separate “divider” for the notes on the songs, then link them back and forth.

I can also drag the Finale files into the Notebook to link each song to its score. For “Sheer Poetry,” for example, I could drag a couple of poetry websites onto the page for quick reference.

All in all, not a bad decision.

In other news, the All-Campus Chorus concert was this afternoon. Vivaldi’s Gloria went off without a hitch, and then the orchestra played Smetana’s The Moldau and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, both of them fabulously. The Moldau especially is just a beautiful piece, a work of genius undimmed by its lush popularity.

And finally, tonight I taught my last Period Dance lesson for the summer, the “ragtime” dances: tango, foxtrot, Castle Walk. The kids have had a great time, and it’s been fun watching the regulars get into it. What’s really neat about the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice is how hard the kids will work to have fun. My heart is always especially warmed by the number of boys who show up every week to learn these dances. Next Sunday, the Grand Ball!

Chorus (Day 338/365)

Posted on by Dale

My free time today was devoted to rehearsing with the All-Campus Chorus. This year, we’re doing Vivaldi’s Gloria. Yes, I know, nothing particularly challenging about it, and I have raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips at its selection. When Stephen bragged about how well the runthrough with the music minors had gone, I reminded him that we can all do it with our eyes closed.

Still, it’s a very pretty piece and singing it with a full orchestra is always fun. Thank goodness our oboist this time is wonderful. Somehow it’s the oboist who in the past has just lain down and deflated, but Jordan Dale seems to have what it takes to thrill us. It should be a good concert.

Quick work (Day 337/365)

Posted on by Dale

It dawned on me that I had better print out the music I do have, if Marc and his mouselings are going to use it, so I went to do that. It was then I discovered that I hadn’t finished harmonizing Thurgood’s tango.

So I just squeezed out some chords, and I’m not sure whether they’re interesting or just wrong. Oh well, for the mouselings’ purpose, it will serve.