Music Monday - Take III

House of Jeffrey - lyrics at end of post

This song was written on a front lawn one lazy Saturday, when Remy decided he wanted to write something with a slide guitar part. I hummed along a melody and slowly started patching words in, inspired and saddened by the fact that I would soon be leaving Davis and all my friends behind to start school someplace else. We came up with the idea of writing about a tree-house because it embodies childhood nostalgia.

The next day we set about recording the song, and rushed around the house "exploring" for sounds to compliment the whimsical mood of the song.  Everything you hear (aside from guitar and vocals) were made by the following:
-A guitar pedal
-A wine glass
-A parasol
-A cymbol
-A ruler
-A cellphone
-Wind chimes
-10 overlapping tracks of us yelling like pirates
Remy made a much better pirate than I did; I sounded more like an orc.
The song remains my favorite track from that particular collaboration. It stands as a monument to my best college years and very fond memories. I hope it invokes something similar in others who hear it too.

_________________________________________

Here are the lyrics:

I went home last summer
to get my roots back in the ground,
and I was back at the old tree house
with no one else around.
And I found myself thinking
of all the things it once had been:
spaceships and time-machines,
and Big Jeffrey looking in.
He was a mean old kingfisher
with a beak of plated gold,
and he'd sit upon the bow
as we'd let the day unfold.

Time-travel?
Not a problem.
Dinosaurs?
Yeah, we rode on one or two,
and the passers-by all swam in lava
though they never had a clue.
Yeah, we rode on for hours
'till the dinner bell was rung,
and we'd hitch our pterodactyls
and wash up for some grub.

Though seasons have changed and winters come along,
the memories remain and keep it standing strong.
The bones that we've broken and trouble that we've made
just help us to find the dreams we have today.

Aliens?
Green and slimy.
Flying saucers?
We flew them at light speed.
We'd drag race any comet
and explore the galaxy.
Pirates?
Fought 'em often
Treasure?
We dug up our fair share.
We made our sisters walk the plank
and hung their dolls up by their hair.
We'd sail on for hours
'till the wind blew out our lights,
and Jeffrey would sing us to sleep
it's how he liked to say goodnight.

Though seasons have changed and winters come along,
the memories remain and keep it standing strong.
The cannons have rusted. The crew has gone away,
but adventure lives on in the things we do today.

Remy became a river boat captain along the river Styx.
I work in a bar on Mars where I sing and do magic tricks.
We may not really be in the places that we claim,
but life looks a little more manageable through a childhood window pane.

Now a new crew has taken over
to get it running once again,
and they was up in the old tree house
with Big Jeffrey looking in.

My very first clone machine!

Over the past couple of weeks I've been messing around with urethane plastics and resins to create molds for casting sculptures. I've succeeding in breaking one of my favorite pieces and melting the corner off of my desk, but lo, I've finally succeeded!

 

I used Smooth-On brand rubbers and plastics and followed their very helpful tutorial videos. The main hiccup was finding the right area on the model to make the seam so that I could easily remove the mold without damaging the mold or the original. To see the piece I molded in better detail, click here. I ended losing about half of the original's hair, its ear, a leech on the shoulder, and the tip of the breathing apparatus. With a couple of carefully placed cuts in the mold I'm now able to get replicates that are completely intact without leaving bits in the mold (it also helps that the resin is less brittle than the original's sculpey form).

I used a quick-cure formula in my first attempt, and the resin started setting as I was pouring it into the mold. The catalyzed reaction burnt my fingers even through my glove so I dropped the melted cup on my desk which is now a warped mess. The picture above shows my second try which I went into much better prepared. The finished result unfortunately has a lot of bubbles, but every cast I do I learn more about the process.

Now I can paint copies and give/sell them to people. I'll add more pictures to this post once I've put a base coat of paint on so that the details are visible rather than transparent.

If anybody wants a monster to paint I'll happily make you a copy :-)

Lazy doodles

I'm in a bit of a rush today so I'll leave you all with some doodles, most of which were penciled while I should have been doing something more important or paying attention to something else.

Don't try to make too much sense of these:

These two are ant heads with their genus names above.

This one's an Alice in Wonderland homage.

Music Monday - Take II

Today's musical selection is another song from UCDavis days with Remy Chan on guitar. A cover of "Just like Heaven" by The Cure.




Like most of what I post it's not entirely polished, but it's nice enough to listen to given it's likely no other recordings will be made. It's compiled of multiple separate tracks (I harmonize with myself), and it could use a second guitar track to flesh out the parts with the picked line, but the result is a nice acoustic take on the 1987 alt-rock song. Dinosaur Jr. also does a cover if you like the song and are into them; it's a little faster and more heavily distorted.

This was probably the first thing I learned to play on the concertina that I bought online about 4 years ago. I've learned new material and have improved vastly since then, but I probably don't play it as much as I should. I still consider the purchase to be one of the best spontaneous and intoxicated decisions I've ever made.

Enjoy!

Dangly earrings

A gift for my sister (who has un-pierced ears) last Christmas. She wanted something "dangly" and was having a hard time finding options. Though I found "dangly" to be a vague descriptor, I aimed for something that would hang almost to the shoulder and had multiple points of articulation so that the earrings would flow when the wearer moves their head rather than move as one rigid piece.
The earrings are composed of thick jeweler's wire for the main swoop, thin wire for the attachments, and super sculpey for the twists. The twists were painted with acrylics as were the fronts of the clasps so that the color would match. Not only is it hard to find earrings for those without pierced ears, but it's also hard to find a diversity of means to make them from scratch. . . but it's nothing a little paint can't fix  :-)

A nice tip I got from craft-master Steve Bylsma involves using gloves or latex finger tippers when painting to avoid leaving finger prints on painted surfaces that need to be handled. I got that piece of advice after having finished these, but I'll know for the future if I ever want to make more pieces similar to these.

A letter home.

Today's piece is a Father's day card I "wrote" for my dad last year. It's an image of my parents' Victorian home in California where I grew up and was inked using an old typewriter. It was inspired by other works of typewriter created art, though I must say my finished product looks quite primitive compared to what other people are able to accomplish with the same tools. However, this was my first attempt at such things, I didn't sketch it out before hand which I should have, and I had limited control over where I could put characters. The page could be set to any position on the vertical axis but not the horizontal so, as you may note, the image is separated into delimited columns.

All critique (and typos) aside, I was quite proud of the result. I learned a lot in the process about positioning, character choice, and how much pressure to apply to yield the desired level of "shading."
If you have experience with other forms of 2D art and have access to a typewriter, I would highly recommend trying to draw with one; it's a wonderful exercise.

Music Monday!

I do have a handful of song recordings I've been meaning to share so I figured, "What better way to present them than by kicking off each week with a different song?"

After a rocking weekend spent reconnecting with old roommates and meandering the streets of San Francisco, I dedicate this post to Remy Chan, the song's composer.

Here's "Staying Out All Night":


Remy wrote the lyrics, melody, and guitar parts and plays guitar on the track, I'm on vocals, and our good buddy Erik Spickard laid down the saxophone unrehearsed on the first take. That's right: every note of sweet sax you hear is 100% improvised. For me the song really evokes the late-night streets full of weathered hedonistic individuals steeped in guilt from their weekend bender. . . in a good way. The track is almost three years old and still gives me little goosebumps when I put it on. The piece represents one of Remy's first solo-lyrical compositions and is a part of a project entitled "Once Upon a Greatest Story." The album was essentially a venue to lump any musical tidbits Remy and I had cobbled together while living in Davis.

Stay tuned to future Music Mondays for more tracks off that album, and newer musical ventures since the acquisition of my Concertina!