Arts
The Arts section of Orient Lodge
Miranda's Senior Ceramics Show
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 06:36Okay. I'm still a little out of it after my road trip. This was going to be a Wordless Wednesday post, and I initially entitled it as such. Then I remembered, it is only Tuesday. So, I'm updating this with words and a title.
This is one of the pieces from Miranda's Senior Ceramics exhibit. you can see more of her work if you follow the link to Flickr.
Music Monday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 20:46It has been a long weekend, and I’m finally sitting down to write a little. I don’t have the energy to do this justice, but here goes.
Forty years ago tomorrow, the song ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ was released. I thought of it a little bit as I drove through West Virginia on Saturday and Sunday. I looked at the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance and references to the Shenandoah river along the way.
Further south in Virginia than I this last road trip took me is the Blue Ridge Medical Center in Arrington, VA. On Thursday, they are having a Campaign for a Healthy Community Kick Off. There will be music there with Liza Bance, a local singer/song writer who composed a beautiful folk/bluegrass song inspired by the services of BRMC and RHOP. (You can download the song off of CDBaby.
And So, It Begins A New
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/03/2011 - 16:54Saturday morning, I sat up front at the Beecher Road School South Auditorium to see a production of The Wizard of Oz. Fiona, my youngest daughter, was a narrator in the rainbow chorus. The floor was mostly filled with young kids with the parents in seats behind us. A few other parents joined me on the floor so they could take better pictures of their young stars and sitting next to me was Mairead, my eldest daughter.
Mairead commented about how it seemed strange to be on this side of the fourth wall as she watched her youngest sister perform. She compared the experience to her childhood performances. It was a good production, with more effort put into scenery and props than many children productions have.
Afterward, we talked about going down to Virginia, where Miranda, my middle daughter is finishing up her senior year of college. Her senior exhibition in painting was last month. Opening on Tuesday will be her senior exhibition in ceramics and next Sunday will be her senior piano recital.
What role will arts and performances take in the life of Fiona? Will it lead her in a direction similar to her sister Miranda? Will Fiona find other paths? As I reflect on the day, the words of William Carlos Williams comes to mind. About a red wheel barrow he once said, “So much depends...”
Perhaps the prop of a cow carried across the stage during the cyclone is a lot like that red wheel barrow. And so, it begins a new...
Spring Cleaning
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/20/2011 - 09:40Yesterday was a day of spring cleaning, of getting done several tasks that have been waiting too long to get done.
Tasks around the house
Besides the typical laundry and dishes, which had been compounded by my being gone for much of the week and Kim and Fiona being sick, I spent time out side repairing the ravishes of winter on our yard with a rake.
Winter also took its toll on the black car. It was shimmying pretty badly and pulling to the right. I took the car in to get the wheels aligned, and saw that one of the front tires had worn way to thin and needed to be replaced. I should take a moment to note that Danny at Town Fair Tire in Orange was a paragon of customer service. If you are looking to get tires replaced, go to Town Fair Tire in Orange and ask for Danny.
Kim picked me up at Town Fair Tire and the two of us went over to Village Bagel for a cup of coffee. I had a great bagel to go with it. By the time we were finished with our coffee, the car was ready and Kim headed off to get her hair cut, and I headed home to get some projects done that have been waiting too long to happen.
The first project that I tackled was to create a stop motion video of the construction site at work.
First, I found a website with a webcam of the construction site. Then, I wrote a small script on one of my Linux machines that would run a wget command every minute to pull save a copy of the image. I then loaded the stopmotion program for linux, imported the images and saved the file. It came out much better than expected and leaves me with a few different projects.
One is to gather the images over a longer time and show the building as it takes shape. Another is to create other stop motion videos. For example the Cape Cod Coast Guard Beach Cam might make a great video. I could also check other webcams around the world. If you have suggestions, let me know.
I might even take my shell script and generalize it to make it easier to create these movies. I’m also interested in exploring Gimp Batch Mode so I could do some preprocessing of images between capture and being added to a movie.
Public Mapping
Another project I’ve been wanting to kick off is setting up a Connecticut instance of the Public Mapping Project. This is a project to use open source software to make it possible for anyone to create new legislative districts online. They have a sample that people can use with Virginia data. They also have an image set up on Amazon Web Services.
I hadn’t worked with Amazon Web Services before, so I spent a little time exploring it. Finally, I got it working properly. Maybe I’ll write a quick description of how to get it to work nicely later. During my testing, I set up a Drupal 7 instance on AWS. It was fairly quick and easy to set up, and I may write more about that later. As I worked on it, I discovered that my Smartcampaigns domain had expired so I renewed that.
Unfortunately, the Public Mapping Project instance ran incredibly slowly. Also, I couldn’t find documentation on how to prepare Connecticut data, so I fired off an email to the project head and am waiting for a reply.
Upgrading this server to Ubuntu 10.04
However, the Public Mapping Project also works on straight Ubuntu. This site has been running Ubuntu 8.04 for a long time. I had tested earlier versions of the Public Mapping Project on various versions of Ubuntu, and couldn’t get it to run. I had particular difficulties on Ubuntu 8.04 and eventually upgraded my workstation to run Ubuntu 10.10, but still haven’t gotten the Public Mapping Project to run smoothly there.
I’ve hesitated to upgrade this server out of concern that it might be down for an extended period, especially if I screwed up something, or simply that the process might take a long time. However, last night, I bit the bullet and tried the upgrade.
The upgrade was fairly uneventful. A few minor problems cropped up. Apparently, the old tspc package that I’ve used for tunneling IPv6 is no longer supported, but there is a new package gw6c which does essentially the same thing. So, my IPv6 is back up, different address, slightly different configuration, but up and running.
I also had problems with locale and installing Postgres. I set them aside and went to bed. This morning I tried again, and Postgres appears to have installed properly and I’m not seeing locale errors right now.
So, I’ll return to the Public Mapping Project later.
Other Stuff
This morning, I saw a message from Miranda that she has posted her Senior Thesis, Full Artist Statement. It is great and I wanted to highlight it. You can see photographs from her senior exhibition Composing Through Color: A Senior Thesis Exhibition
Music Monday - @kevinmasch
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/21/2011 - 07:32I've probably been reading the news too much recently, and I am weary. I followed the pro-democracy demonstrations in the Middle East, mourned the martyrs, rejoiced at victories and shared with everyone the uncertainty of the days to come.
I've read about the battles in Washinton over the budget and the continuing resolution, the reckless cuts being proposed and the threat of shutting down the government if the cuts do not pass the Senate and get signed by the President. I've read about the battle in Wisconsin about whether or not public employees should have the same rights of collective bargaining as everyone else. All of the unrest leaves me weary.
So, as I thumbed through the SonicBids submissions to the Orient Lodge Music Review, I tried to find sometime matching the times.
Kevin Masch's describes himself as "a classic, American Roots musician in a proud tradition that goes back to before Woody Guthrie"
Seems like we need a little Woody Guthrie now, and Steve Earle's words echo in my ears:
So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
I don't suspect Kevin has "This Machine Kills Fascists" inscribed on his guitar. Kevin has a different sort of sound. Yet Kevin, like many of the great roots musicians get back to the basics of life, love, death, traveling, trying to find home.
The commentary about one of his songs on YouTube starts:
Kevin's music is perfect for the music lover or the background music lover. Just try this, play this video, open up another tag (no music or audio needed to go to other site), and surf the internet... before you know it you will feel as if you are in your own movie with a sound track playing while you blog or are reading about everyday life
Yeah. I've got that song playing as I write this blog post, it does take me back to everyday life. The life of people struggling to get by, to find their way home.
Unfortunately, Youtube says that the embedding the video has been disabled at the user's request, so I can't share it here. Instead, go to Kevin's website, poke around, and see what you can find.
Instead, I'll end off with Christmas Time in Washington:
