Mise En Abyme

Okay, so first order of busi­ness: Hot Dawgz rule the fuckin’ school!

Secondly, there are a lot of peo­ple that I really miss down in the SoCal crew. I’m not going to name ‘em all, and a lot of them are com­ing up to Portland to visit and I’m super stoked about that, but I owe a lot of hugs to a lot of peo­ple. Tons, in fact. Actually I owe a super huge hug, a deli­cious meal, a drink, a long talk, and then some seri­ous chill time to a lot of peo­ple. I really love you guys. This doesn’t always come off eye-to-eye or any­thing even close to that but I am really hurt­ing for some of that love. Just hear­ing Laura’s voice on the phone tonight made me feel like climb­ing into one of her adorable bear-hug embraces. I miss that. I miss know­ing where are all the cracks in the streets are. I miss late nights with Daniel and the Village Bakery and the euca­lyp­tus tree that smells like dill and park­ing really far from Azusa Gardens and…I don’t know.

I do feel really good about this new place — so good in fact that it’s tempt­ing to think about not leav­ing. I think often about the fact that I’m spend­ing another year, the fifth year, at school and that maybe there was some­thing I could’ve done, some class I could’ve worked harder at or some part of myself that I could’ve under­stood bet­ter to get “on track” sooner, to fin­ish in four and then now have the option, the abil­ity to run with the feel­ing I have now and begin. It’s hard to think about begin­ning this new excit­ing part of my life con­tin­u­ing on back at school. I’m feel­ing the heavy vibe of the peo­ple here and now with the drive, the pos­si­bil­ity to run. I sort of feel like when fall rolls around it’ll all be reversed into the same school year drone — and this time with­out most of my clos­est class­mates. Without a bunch the core homies. Now that ain’t no way to roll. Shit…

But a cou­ple of close bud­dies are gonna be back in the fall and my friend Kurt is one of them, a friend I’ve know since fresh­man year. This guy is music itself. He’s a timid fel­low, soft and full of light. He knows what’s hap­penin’ with music trends before it drops and he’s informed me about some­thing I’d like to pass along. It’s called Reactable and it looks a lit­tle some­thing like this:

Interactive through a camera-sensitive sur­face that com­mu­ni­cates with a mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer through objects placed on top of the “play­ing area”, it’s not a far leap from this graph­i­cal musi­cal envi­ron­ment called MAX/MSP made by Cycling ’74. I’ve been want­ing to tell ya’ll about this for a while — it’s super cool! MAX/MSP is an graph­i­cal envi­ron­ment for con­trol­ling var­i­ous mul­ti­me­dia objects, specif­i­cally designed for per­for­mance art. It can be used with light­ing schemes (make a door light up with a pur­ple hue when you walk through it at a cer­tain speed), inter­ac­tive audio pieces (read on), audio visual incest to the max kind of shit (let your mind do the math). Lucky Dragons explains it pretty well and uti­lizes it with a key idea: every­one is not only involved but shares in the unique expe­ri­ence of that exact moment’s energy. Basically, the sound is effected by peo­ple touch­ing strips of wire embed­ded into a tapes­try and when two peo­ple are touch­ing oppo­site ends — or even bet­ter, each other (!) — the fre­quency wave evolves by the ten­sion and flow of the par­tic­i­pants. The com­puter inter­acts by pro­vid­ing the sam­pling but the peo­ple act as the actual con­nect­ing wires that allow the music to be cre­ated. Together they bring the expe­ri­ence into exis­tence. Not with­out the other is this pos­si­ble. And speak­ing of metaphors, this is kinda how I feel, and I miss you…yeah, you.