(denver) signs

i'm a master of misinterpreting signs from the Universe, but i still have this superstitious belief that whenever i see an honest-to-goodness spiral cement truck, it means something. my sister expertly snapped this photo of a gorgeous red spiral with my iphone (as i expertly chased it down in our rental car). i will leave it to the reader to interpret. in the meantime, it's the wallpaper on my phone.

and my friend jodi sent me this stunning beauty from europe:

(dc -> houston -> denver -> delta) class of 87

a surprisingly large number of members of my class of 1987 assembled tonight at confluence park (what a nice name for a park). i think something like half the class was there. tomorrow we will ride on a float in the deltarado day parade and take a group photo before our semi-formal dinner. i learned tonight that "delta semi-formal" means jeans instead of shorts.

rebecca is here with me. although both of us have been up for more than 24 hours with little sleep before boarding our planes this morning, we still decided to go to wanda's bar next to the egyptian theater and play pool till just a few minutes ago. it was fun, but i really wanted to play shuffleboard. plus rebecca kept winning. except when we were on the same team.

(dc) ding ding ding! biggest sucker!

i win the prize! the most prized prize of prizes! biggest sucker in Du Monde! woohoo!

i feel better now. boy the wind was really out of my sails there for a couple of days. nothing like a good dose of the Truth to get the boat moving again.

thanks for your courage, L.

k

(dc) radio silence

kills me.

(dc) wondering

rebecca and i are going to delta and boulder, colorado this weekend for my two 20 yr high school reunions. go panthers. go centaurs. i'll post links.

i'd cancel this trip if i could. i may cut it short after rebecca goes home. i don't think it will have the same appeal now.

(dc) potent

i feel a blog post is in order, but i'm not sure what to say. in cases like this, it is probably a cop-out to turn to quotations and mixtapes, but i think that's what i'm gonna do.

but before i do,
i've been noticing what happens when my brain has hours upon hours just to think, especially in the absence of communication. i've been noticing how easily i make things up and what percentage of time those made up things have anything to do with reality.

last night i was listening over and over to a song that sara solstice recorded at my studio last year. the words are from the Baha'i writings and feel particularly relevant right now:

"Grant, O my God, that I may not be reckoned among those whose ears are deaf, whose eyes are blind, whose tongues are speechless and whose hearts have failed to comprehend. Deliver me, O Lord, from the fire of ignorance and of selfish desire, suffer me to be admitted into the precincts of Thy transcendent mercy and send down upon me that which Thou hast ordained for Thy chosen ones. Potent art Thou to do what Thou willest. Verily, Thou art the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting." the Báb

sara chose the words "POTENT art thou to do what thou willest" to repeat over and over again, so i thought about this a lot.

i was also listening over and over to "my brightest diamond," and i've had a few lines of one of my favorite songs of hers stuck in my head all day, going around and around:

"now you've gone away
where there isn't a telephone wire
still i wait by the phone
you don't even write
to say good bye..."

i always liked these lines.

(dc) call box

(houston) insomnias

this is my favorite rumi poem:

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”

[also, praise God for apostrophes.]

(Pasadena) today's fortune cookie

"not every soil bears all things. be practical."

(dc -> chicago -> LA) the gods must be crazy about the south pacific

on live earth day, i rode two big gasguzzling jets from dc to la, with a diminishing connection time in chicago as my first leg was delayed and delayed. that's ok. it gave me a reason to sprint through the chicago airport, which i've been dying to do for quite some time.

prior to taking off, i did what was possibly my fastest mix of a record in (my) history. my friend hillary, the country music songwriter, had traveled to tahiti last year and had made some ...well... let's call them "rustic"...recordings of local tatitian baha'is singing prayers and hidden words. his goal was to bring the recordings back, re-record the guitars and ukuleles, and return to tahiti with a cd that could be duplicated and spread from island to island so they all know the same songs. he asked me to do the mixes. i'm not sure i ever actually officially agreed, but suddenly 2 weeks ago he filled me in that he's going back july 15, and could we get it done before then? ack

he did some web research and found a professional traveling ukulele player in baltimore who was willing to learn the songs and come record. we scheduled the session for friday (this past friday). and then, one week before the session (a week ago friday), i got my iphone. i haven't written yet about the chaos that caused in my studio, but the short version is that iphone killed my studio main drive and i spent a week trying to recover it, with no luck.

on thursday night i wrote to hillary and told him that my studio was currently unfunctioning, and that i'd do my best to get something working so we could at least track the ukulele, but i didn't think i was going to be able to mix, since it would mean reinstalling all my plugins from scratch and reauthorizing everything and reconfiguring all the hardware, etc etc. in the past, this has been weeks of work.

friday came and i had to go to work (of course). i worked as long as i could and then rushed home at 3pm. the session was to be at 8. somehow, magically, in 5 hours, i rebuilt my studio system (from scratch), downloading and installing the operating system 4 times, downloading and installing the recording software, plugins, and everything else. also in those 5 hours i converted the bathroom closet into a recording booth (installing acoustic foam, etc), cleaned the bathroom, picked up the studio, washed the dishes, and set up the microphones. i was like a machine and suddenly all my machines started working. with no additional work, my SCSI audio drive that had all the tahiti audio on it started talking to my computer. the recording hardware just worked. seriously, it was spooky.

the ukulele player, victoria vox, was delightful and the session was fun. we ended around 11, and hillary planned to be back the next day (yesterday) for some additional guitar work. i told him i dind't think we'd be able to get everything done if we waited till saturday, so we turned everything back on and laid down the guitars.

yesterday morning i went back over the studio, immediately found my waves plugin disks, installed them, and they worked first try. by the time hillary showed up (with coffee), the system was up and running - just protools and waves, but that's enough to mix tahitian music. i then got into a super intense zone of mixing, flying through each song, making huge improvements (doing things like tuning entire ukulele tracks and guitar tracks down 44 cents - oof!) where i could.

i edited and mixed all the songs - scarcely more than rough mixes, but still, i think they will be suitable for their purpose and intended (noncritical) audience) - in about 5 hours. for me, this is a record. there are some mix engineers that can blow through a record like that - like clockwork - especially pop music - but this wasn't your standard pop music, and i usually take my time. not this time. i was on a mission. there would have been no time to work on it when i return from this trip, and i knew it was now or never. so i focused. hillary kept saying, 'how can you hear that?' or 'whoa, how'd you do that?' and kept repeating 'you're a surgeon. you're a surgeon.'

in the end, we achieved hillary's goal of, "just make it sound better." the disk was burning as he drove me to the airport.

now that my system is up and running again, if the gods continue to favor me, i will with any luck be able to finish my film scoring homework that disappeared with the disk wipe.

and now i write you from los angeles (again), as i prepare to shower and begin approximately 14 hours of meetings about mars and the search for life in the universe. (with tahitian prayers stuck in my head)

(dc) nasa hq culture photoessay, part 1

when i first got to goddard, i did some photoessays of things i thought were particularly interesting, quirky, or characteristic about that place. i'd love to do the same thing at hq, but somehow i feel this is a bit trickier.

maybe i can start with something fairly benign. this photo of saturn is how i know i'm on the right floor and can easily spot which direction to walk in the hallway. the building can sometimes be a bit disorienting, depending on which elevator and which floor you're on. i kind of feel like saturn has been with me all my life, so i like that i see it so much every day.

dear saturn,
i love you.
thank-you for being so pretty.
love,
kelly

(dc) explosions

inside and out

(dc) awed