Arts
The Arts section of Orient Lodge
Living The Great American Novel
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/28/2011 - 12:20The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for jouissance, l’objet petit a.
The words of Emerson, Ginsburg and Lacan rattle around in my mind as I confront the blank page of a blog post yet to be written and the discussions on Facebook of my high school class mates from over a billion seconds ago.
One of them wrote, “Is anyone (else) having any sort of mid life crisis?” and we all shared stories of the difficulties we’ve faced, the broken marriages, bankruptcies, frustrations with our careers, and other struggles that those of us who have crossed the half century line have confronted.
In another post, there was a mention of a play a bunch of us had been in back in high school.
You see, she was gonna be an actress
And I was gonna learn to fly.
Well, I did take flying lessons in the years between high school and where I am now and I sure my classmates have had their successes as well, but
Dreams have lost some grandeur coming true.
Ah yes, grandeur. I always used to talk not about having delusions of grandeur, but aspirations of grandeur. I still dream of writing the next great American novel.
I’ve often been told that you should only write what you know about, so until I get ready to write that great American novel, I guess I have to live out parts of it. Yet maybe, that is the best we can do, live our lives as if we are living the great American novel.
It is great to be back in touch with some of the characters from the early chapters and to wonder what the next chapter brings.
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.
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
Party With A Purpose
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/15/2011 - 20:38Monday evening, I went to a birthday party for Mark Masselli and Jennifer Alexander. Mark is the president and CEO of Community Health Center, Inc, where I work, and his wife Jennifer is a co-founder of Kid City in Middletown. They billed the event as their 105th birthday party, combining the age of the two of them.
The event took place at Eli Cannon’s in Middletown and was well attended by friends from work, various political figures that I knew and numerous other people whom I didn’t know or whom I was meeting for the first time.
In many ways, it was not really all that different from so many big birthday parties that I’ve attended. However, there was one thing in particular that set the event apart. Not only did they encourage attendees to donate to local non-profit organizations, but they pledge to match the gifts with a donation of their own to a local non-profit.
One of the nonprofits that benefited from this is Oddfellows Playhouse which lost 36 years worth of props and costumes when the building they were stored in collapsed earlier this year.
Another nonprofit benefitting from the support is The Buttonwood Tree. This is the music venue where I went to see Harpeth Rising during their Connecticut tour.
All in all, it was a great event, and hopefully others will be inspired to have similar parties with a purpose.
How Do You Tell Your Children Not to Paint Each Other Green?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/29/2011 - 15:07Yesterday, my middle daughter who skipped high school to go to art school, and a couple months after she turns 18 will start her master’s degree program in art in Boston, posted a picture of me on Facebook. It was from when we went to pick a Christmas tree last month. To the photograph, she added the caption, “This is the lecture face.” Her older sister responded, “ Or the ‘...Mairead, did you really HAVE to paint your sister's head green?’ face”. Miranda responded, “ I think it's a similar idea :P”
When they were much younger, Mairead did in fact paint Miranda’s head green. It was hilarious and made the Blue Man Group look like amateurs. Fortunately, it was some water soluble poster paint that would come off easily in the bathtub. Unfortunately, there was paint everywhere, some of which may never have gotten completely removed from the floors, ceilings, walls, grout around the bathtub, etc.
It raised an important issue. How do you tell your children not to paint each other green? Somehow, bursting out laughing and acknowledging the great creativity seemed fraught with risks. While it was greatly imaginative, it wasn’t something I wanted to encourage. They were, after all, at that tender age where if you tell them something funny, they would keep repeating it long past it stopped being funny, and I suspect that it wouldn’t take too many times of cleaning up paint everywhere for such art projects to become pretty annoying.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to stifle the budding creativity. So, I took as close to a middle course as possible and put on my ‘lecture face’. I don’t know what I said, I hope I complimented them on the creativity, compared it to Blue Man Group as well as to rites in various aboriginal cultures, and then spoke with them about what a mess it made and told them they had to clean up, and not make any more messes that large.
I don’t recall how they reacted to the lecture, but they did take a bath, or perhaps two, and watched the green water go down the drain.
Did I strike the right note? It’s hard to say. Miranda is heading off to a graduate program in art. However, Mairead may have felt the rebuke more strongly. So, how do you tell your children not to paint each other green?
