Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

Sketching is a great stress-reducer. This afternoon the weather was beautiful and I sketched this scene on N. Linn St while waiting for my laundry to finish tumbling:


(Click for the large non-crap version.)

The car looks a little funky, proportionally. And I think I would have done well to use a little atmospheric perspective to keep the background at bay. Compositionally, I like it though. The tree seems to be "sneaking up" on the unsuspecting car.

I just saw eighth blackbird. Until tonight, a big part of me thought that contemporary music was a lost cause, and that true innovation was impossible anymore. This was making my life as a composer somewhat pointless and stupid. But wow. I walked away from this concert with a severe dent in my concept of music, indeed art itself.

I'd already shedded the notion that "classical" music is inherently different than all other types of music. I'd always suspected that there's a magical aesthetic thread that connects all art forms. But what I'm starting to think now is that all art forms are just the same, and that any differences between them are mere formalities of realization.

As I watched eighth blackbird play Tied Shifts (2004) by Derek Bermel, I was pretty shocked by how they were playing it: having memorized the music, the players meandered around the stage, grouping, entering, exiting, conversing, basically "acting out" the music on the stage as they played it. And then it struck me that it's ridiculous that this could have rattled me so much... I've been to rock concerts, ballets, plays, sporting events, and here it's revolutionary that classical players can do something on stage besides sit in chairs and scowl into their music stands? If music is drama, can't it be theatre as well?
Can't any art form be any art form?

My head is spinning! I know, it doesn't take much to freak out fans of classical music, does it?

(From EB's website I learned that the group "especially loves Iowa." Why they do I couldn't begin to imagine.)

My internet connection has been down since Friday. "Information Age" my left ass!

I tell you!

I'm looking at a little box of paper clips, and it's funny how its label in English, French and Spanish is sort of like a miniature, postmodern poem:

55 Paper Clips
55 Trombones
55 Clips

Say that in your best William Shatner voice. Moving!

Those curious about how the "big date" was I will refer again to this page from the QPQ archives, because it is, detail for detail, how things transpired. To no one's surprise, really. I'm a bit of a hard sell, I've come to realize.

Compounding the crushing disappointment of this week, Robert Mankoff couldn't make it on Wednesday and his lecture was cancelled. I flew into a violent rage at the Iowa Memorial Union when I found out. By "violent rage" I mean I gently kicked one of those folding floor signs and left.

It's always fun to parody somebody else's style.



On Wednesday, one of my heroes - Robert Mankoff - will be giving a lecture here. I'm sort of hoping he'll pick up a copy of the DI that day and see this cartoon.

Of course, I'm not even sure if it'll get printed, as I am not sure as to the DI's stance on publishing weird cartoons that intentionally don't make any sense.

I had a busy weekend. Three days of running back and forth between Oscaloosa and Ottumwa to play in these communities' symphony orchestras. The former was actually a decent concert; a bunch of "child prodigies" doing concerto movements, and then the orchestra did Schubert's Eighth. The latter was a horrendous pops concert with us backing a local Jazz combo, the result of which was probably the Whitest music I've ever heard.

I've got a date Tuesday. I'm trying not to get too excited about it. I'm also trying not to be too pessimistic (despite how my reckless optimism burned me earlier this year with my last unrequited love). Love is like a blank cheque: you can write in any dollar amount you want, but you shouldn't be surprised if it comes back marked "insufficient funds".

And to quote myself... Eh heh.

You can tell I'm a little bit tired of this job. This is the worst art I've created in a while.

I check Wikipedia every day just for its Featured Article. Today's was on just about my favorite thing ever: the Hubble Deep Field.

The HDF came out in 1996, when I was a 12-year-old amateur astronomer, and was probably a formative thing in my life. I can recall long periods of staring at it in an issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, trying to comprehend it. A magnified picture of a tiny speck of the sky which contains literally thousands of galaxies is a difficult thing to wrap one's brain around. Look at it. That image captures all the romance of the universe.

I'd better stop looking at this, before I decide to move to New Mexico again.

I was feeling crappy this evening, until I stumbled on this video of Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood. That cheered me right up. It's incredible how fresh this film is today, more than 62 years after it was made.

Not that I'm a paragon of entertainment knowledge or anything, but I can't think of anybody (other than Walt Disney perhaps) who contributed more to the American popular cultural vocabulary than Tex Avery and his Termite Terrace retinue. Avery, who never intended his own films to be for kids, was sort of the anti-Disney; uncensored, unselfconscious, wild creativity.

I think we have Disney to thank for creating this weird universal sense that animation is only for children (a mistaken notion the company perpetuates to this day). The very word "Disney" has wriggled its way into most folks' brains as a synonym for "children's movies", and indeed among the less knowledgable, also a synonym for "animation" (it's still a very common mistake even in the media to credit almost any animated feature that comes out to the Disney studio). Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if Disney in the early years had done more adult animated films. We probably now wouldn't have shows like Family Guy, whose appeal seems to come from subverting the perceived "kiddie"-ness of animation. "You wouldn't expect this gay/disabled-person/80s-pop-culture/penis joke from a cartoon, would you, so it's funny, right, ha ha?"

Unfortunately, Disney's influence has apparently been too powerful. Or else Tex Avery's legacy would have rendered Family Guy unnecessary.

I'm starting to doubt that I'll be able to stretch my meager income to cover rent, utilities, food, and the hundreds of dollars of textbooks that I charged and haven't yet paid for. I'd work more, but that would involve spending less time on school stuff (I'm stretched pretty thin in that respect as it is). Indeed, school events force me to sign off work shifts. As I write, I am skipping work, because I forgot to sign it off for this dumb orchestra thing I have to do this afternoon. I was supposed to get a raise in a few months, but going AWOL for a shift will probably affect that.

Meanwhile, it's getting colder and yesterday I spent $78 on the cheapest jacket at Active Endeavors; money which I had been preparing to pay my Verizon bill.

If I don't pay my University bill, I won't be able to register for classes next semester. This means I have about a month and a half to come up with that money, and I'm not too confident I'll be able to do it.

I'm seeing a societal metaphor in this. Here we have a huge international economy that is entirely formed on fickle and finite resources (petroleum). As long as we hold on to our precious lifestyles without asking ourselves how we're going to pay for them down the road, we will never be sure we aren't in for a long, cold winter.

Not to be a Gloomy Gus or anything.

My editor has been begging me, or rather assertively reminding me, to give him two cartoons a week like we agreed on, instead of the one a week that I've actually been doing. So instead of using my one big elusive chunk of free time to actually do a cartoon, I spent much of it making a new page on brianlenth.net for my DI stuff. Oh, and of course writing a blog entry to talk about this.

A 90 degree day in October is much worse than a 100 degree day in July.

Text is hard to draw. And it never comes out looking exactly right. I could just do it in Photoshop and use a font, but to me that always looks even more wrong for some reason.

Anyway, to explain: right now the citizens of Iowa City are preparing to vote on a referendum to investigate forming an independent city-run energy utility to replace the current service provided by MidAmerican Energy Inc. It's been a hotly-debated issue, with the "vote yes" crowd claiming that communities with municipal power usually pay less for it; and with the "vote no" crowd claiming that starting something like this from scratch requires a lot of capital, and MidAmerican already does a pretty good job anyway, so if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Truthfully, I'm still not entirely sure which side I want to sympathize with. But I came up with a pretty funny cartoon for the "yes" side, so there we go. Also, MidAmerican, to combat the possibility of losing customers due to the democratic process, has unleashed a blitzkrieg of letters to the editor, newspaper ads and yard signs to attempt to influence the peoples' decisions, and I'm getting a little annoyed with all of it.