Jes and Ian

When I worked as a caseworker, with 50+ hour workweeks and late nights in bad neighborhoods, I came to rely heavily on my teammates to just manage the burnout. One of these teammates, Vanessa, came all the way out to Baltimore from California to join us. After her time at Choice, she moved back to California. The rest of us from Choice have missed her a lot. She is a ball of energy, emotion, and generosity; things have been much duller with her return to the West Coast.

This week, Vanessa celebrates her birthday and those of us still in Baltimore had meant to meet up and make a care package. The meet-up fell through, but the package will get sent soon. I don’t know what everyone else is giving her but I thought I’d show off the gifts I made her (and others) in a rash of crafty, homemade art.

Origami paper rocks. Having bought a pack of origami paper at the local thrift store for $.50, I had a good set of ready-made squares to make snowflakes. I also ended up making small ones with left over candy cups/muffin paper. Since Vanessa is missing out on our record breaking snows here in Baltimore, I thought it appropriate to send her as much snow as I could. 30 snowflakes later, my thumbs were getting pins and needles.

I used the more lively origami paper to make a string of jewel-tone cranes for Vanessa too. I always associate origami cranes with her; she made me a few during our caseworker stint. Using beading wire and small glass beads, I emulated a string of cranes that Niff and Sutter have at their front door. All in all, I’m happy with the results. I just hope they ship well.

I added a couple of smaller less exciting wares to the package, but I’m not sure they’re worth mentioning in greater detail. However, I haven’t seen much of my Choice teammates this past year, so I have missed out on their birthday celebrations as well. For them, I made a range of homemade toner sprays. The spray bottles are left from our brand of deodorant, and I always keep them because they seem so full of potential uses. In the picture, from front to back, are my rosemary toner, my rosemary & lavender toner, and my mint tea toner. They’re pretty basic, made with a little alcohol, witch hazel, herbs, and water. I had added vitamin E to them as well, but that just clumped all the herbs together and didn’t really mix at all. I got to worrying about the likelihood that it’d clog the sprays too, so I didn’t add any more after straining them.

Happiest of birthdays, Vanessa! I hope you enjoy your gifts this week. They were sent with lots of love.

It’s been 10 years since the day I met and recorded Bob McElroy.

Who the Hell is Bob McElroy?

Bob McElroy was a musician I met while living in at the Santa Fe International Youth Hostel in 1999. He was in town from Monroe, Louisiana to meet with Gary Johnson, then-governor of New Mexico, on the topic of marijuana decriminalization legislation. To this meeting he dressed in an all-white suit with a bolo tie, which at 78 years old, scruffy beard and head of white hair, made him look too much like Colonel Sanders for comfort. Later that night, I found him in the common room singing folk songs to an audience of touring Japanese girls. I asked if I could record him and he was happy to oblige. I immediately ran to Radio Shack, purchased a cheap boundary microphone that I could connect to my MiniDisc recorder, grabbed a six pack of Lone Star talls at the pharmacy, ran back to the hostel and sat Bob down outside the hostel kitchen where he played and I recorded until quiet hour.

Not everything he said was the truth, but enough was.

Bob was an extremely interesting person. A former member of a biker gang and psychedelic enthusiast. With his skepticism of organized religious ideals and anti-establishment attitude he’s exactly the type of person you’d expect to meet while living my life. As he puts it while talking about being “locked up for crazy,” “[Mad houses are] all about separating out people who are constitutionally opposed to following the rules other people have set down.” Or when I ask him to play the song where “the bad guy gets away at the end” he retorts, “the cop’s the bad guy.” He had a special way of looking at things that resonated with me. I didn’t want to be him, or even spend a lot of time with him. That evening, extended for ten years by recording technology, was all I needed. Bob died in 2002.

It’s my pleasure to share the entire evening’s recordings with you.

My friend Matt Sutter has initiated an all-new new movie-making project. It’s a lot like the 48-hour ones that I’m notorious for participating in. Each month we have to create a film based on requirement from the other participants. I’m told there are four teams competing– Sutter’s team in Philadelphia, Rob Weychert’s team in Boston, a team of dudes from New Jersey and my own team, Redstar KGB. It’s called Rentcheck because it’s due at the end of the month.

We’ve just completed our first Rentcheck Film

Since we’re in the midst of Holiday Madness, Sutter threw us a softball and instructed us to simply introduce our team. We had a month to do this, but we were already in production on another project, Mortar, and so we gave our Rentcheck film a good 40 minutes of our time. In case you’re wondering, no, this isn’t acting. This is exactly what happens when we get together to discuss making a film.

The Pitch Session

In the early Fall of 2008, my partner in all things film, my go-to-shoot-this, main man, Chris Harring was asked to record a J Roddy Walson and The Business show at The Ottobar in Baltimore. He obliged and decided that we should take the footage and roll it into a quirky music video for one of the group’s songs as a promotional piece for our work.

The plan was to record the live show, edit a cut of one song and project it onto canvas screens set up on a stage. Chris asked for nothing from me but advice as to how best to pull that off. I suggested that instead of using the existing footage from the show that we invite the band to a studio and shoot them on green screen. Then instead of video recording a light projection (which would be difficult to do correctly) we do a post-production composite of the screens on a stage with the green screen footage.

Fixing it in post

Chris scheduled the shoot and booked the studio, I borrowed an HD camera and we shot the band, stage and screen. We also shot the screens in public places around Baltimore, supporting the idea that the band is Baltimore-based. The band was told that the video would be available in a few weeks.

A couple weeks into my post production, watching playbacks of my composite I found the concept didn’t support the song. The driving force of the music was completely juxtaposed by the stillness of the image of canvas screens sitting on the stage. This video was going to be painfully boring to watch for four minutes and ten seconds. I stopped working on the video for six months.

Stop! Animate!

This past July I borrowed my friend Ben’s Sony Handycam to work on a small personal project. While I had it in my possession I tried out some techniques that I was curious about. Namely how to do a faux stop animation of paper elements on a desk. In my tests I reached for some placeholder footage from the J Roddy folder.

I decided that this could actually be an interesting method of presenting the band while they performed their song. I presented the idea to Chris who basically told me that the band had apparently completely forgotten about our promise and to just do whatever I wanted.

Below is the completed project. I’m happy with it for the most part and wish that I could look at it objectively. Enjoy.

There are maybe ten times a year that I really wish I had a website. Maybe I think I’ve discovered something great and I want to share it, maybe I want to rant about my ISP’s deplorable customer service, whatever – the fact is, all those times I’ve had a site. Right here at jesandian.com.

Of course, I’m very lazy

And the previous site was so tedious to update that the very thought of posting annihilated the inspiration to do so. I had to do all the XHTML markup for the new post by hand, add the prior post to an archive directory then create and update links to and fro. I updated infrequently enough that I had to re-learn the process every time. It was a retarded system that my limited understanding of web development was content with but it drove Jes and I nuts. To the point where we only updated four times in two years. The other expression-crippling limitation was the lack of photos and video support. But that’s all changed.

Go? Go where?

The erstwhile jesandian.com was hosted by Go Daddy. They were the most convenient place for me to get a domain back in 2004 and their service suited me fine. As I worked in web longer though, I realized that they weren’t the best deal in the world. For example, my 3MB jesandian.com mail account was always teetering on the brink of overflow, I begged them to up the capacity rationalizing that I’m paying for service with them whereas Google was shooting 1GB of email storage out of one of those tee shirt cannons. They robotically offered to sell me more space for some laughable $9.95/mo. Stan suggested Dreamhost to me and even gave me a promo code so I got my first year’s hosting for free one penny. The options for administrating your hosting are a million times better than Go Daddy’s were. Their savvy is right up my alley and they know how to communicate with me– Dreamhost: monthly, text-only newsletter, Go Daddy: telephone calls while I’m with clients. To get a taste of what’s what, compare their homepages: 1, 2. I’ll wait. I currently host four sites on my Dreamhost hosting plan (about $100 per year), they add on additional server space to my plan monthly and they offer free installations of content management systems for those of us who can’t wrap our heads around managing a site, but are too proud to settle for a Blogger page.

Which brings me to my apologies

Apologies to this Scott fella. Apologies to the people who think that using someone else’s work is unethical. The theme of this blog was called Barthelme, created by Scott Wallick. My original intention was to take the PHP modules inside a basic WordPress blog, re-arrange them for my own use, create a slick stylesheet and publish a unique jesandian.com. That proved to be way over my head. So instead, I chose the template that used type the way that I liked most and modified the stylesheet until I was happy. I know, it’s a cop-out. But I really can’t justify spending hours and days learning something that I don’t really ever need to know. Besides, there’s license that says that it’s okay to do what I did. Thanks, Scott.

This new site is simple, there’s no links to our web buddies, no dumbass calendar, no archive. It’s just as basic as a book about two people called Jes and Ian. Thanks for reading.

It’s simple…

If you ever want to sell me anything, wrap it in green. There’s a good chance I’ll buy it. Not neon green or puke green. Moss green. Fern green. Pea green.

Just as the heat of Summer brings nostalgia for deep blues and fiery oranges of snowy Winter nights, Spring reminds me how much I adore green. It’s all around, beginning in the bud stages, light and pale greens, peeking out from winter’s husk of brown bark and dirt. They give way to brilliant greens as translucent leaves yield to warm sunlight. Vibrant and deep greens roll across marble-smooth hillsides of short, damp grass. Wispy tops on tall grasses form an ocean of pastely, Easter green that wave at me as I pass with my windows down. Dirty greens mix with mossy reds and lichen browns to paint the rocks at the edge of the stream. Pea green wraps the torso of my buddy as she tills the soil in our humble backyard garden.

And it grew…

We started with an idea mid-Spring last year and it pushed out a pretty good yeild. I say “humble” but our plot is actually rather substantial as far as backyards in our neighborhood go. We’ve got about 100 square feet. Enough to have 8 rows about 20 feet long. I’ve been so excited about this thing since early March that I’ve drawn up plans in Illustrator so that we can map out what would go where (pencil gardening, if you will), I’ve ordered loofah seeds online so that we can have free loofah all year long and I bought my best friend a pair of tank tops (mentioned above) to wear out while working beside me. Weeding, watering and watching are the fun parts of the work. The free food is merely a reward.

Breakin’ it down to the ground…

Moving your face to knee-level in everyday life is reserved for things like changing the cat box or tying your shoes; but for a short time each year it changes the atmosphere. Suddenly, on a still, cloudy day it’s humid and cool, you smell the dirt and the insects invite you in as one of their own (mosquitoes included). Once they reach the proper timber and pitch, the plickets of water pattering the evening-lit puddles on the trough floor give you an auditory signal that a given row has been saturated sufficiently. Witnessing things you remember as black specks on your kitchen table blossoming into entire heads of lettuce and cabbage, crawling across the ground and up the fence to personally hand you moutains of cucumbers, exploding into giant florets of broccoli and cauliflower is a reward only a child could top.

Of course, you can’t eat children…anymore.