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3-29-03
Walked into Ted Brown Music Wednesday to buy some sheet music for my guitar. I'm way behind on the last decade of good songs. While I have a huge collections of sheet music dating back to the sixties, I only have a few songs from the nineties. I found a nice collection of tunes titled "Chart hits of 1999-2000" which had several of the songs I've been hearing on the radio, but never learned how to play. Among them were two by Sarah McLachlan: "I will remember you" and "Angel" along with a very simply put together (and easily played) classic made famous by Pearl Jam called "Last Kiss". Interestingly, this song was written back in 1964 before before Pearl Jam was born. I'd never heard Pearl Jam's version, but was instantly able to play "Last Kiss" due to hearing other groups who have recorded it over the years.
I've not been to Ted Brown's store since they moved out of their downtown location a couple years ago. This new store is quite the edifice. The architecture is very grand, with sheets of brushed copper covering the entire front of the building. Inside they have the huge room divided up by instruments. There are individual rooms for drums, piano, guitar, brass, violins and electric guitar, plus another huge wing that is strictly sheet music.
I wandered into the guitar section to see what Martins are selling for these days, but they have stopped carrying them. The salesman says the Tacoma brand is almost as good as Martins, at one quarter the price. He said the $1500 Tacoma 6 string acoustic would be $6000 in a comparable Martin.
The best part of wandering around Ted Brown's store were the intoxicating sounds drifting out of the various specialty rooms. Artistic talent is a rare thing in these days of TV and Computers where everyone sits in front of glass screens, pressing plastic buttons. People of all ages who refuse to be entertained by Hollywood or Bill Gates can be found any day of the week taking quality instruments for a test drive inside the copper gates of Ted Brown...sounds like a sales pitch...maybe it is. My brother in law works there on the loading dock of the sheet music department.
More importantly, I have always worried about the lack of artistic talent in modern society. I believe the reason old fashioned talent is so rare these days is directly related to the amount of time children spend pressing plastic buttons for entertainment, instead of looking inside their own minds for the muse.
3-27-03
Governor Gary Locke presented an award to one of my students today in a ceremony in Olympia. Six months ago I got an email from my dean asking if I had any outstanding students. She said there was a national organization of community colleges called the Phi Beta Theta something or other that recognized academic excellence and provided awards and scholarships to deserving students. M G is one of my favorite students due to her positive, can do attitude about everything she tries. What is amazing about M G is that she can keep this up while working full time.
Her work was always excellent during the 3 classes she took from me, but best of all was her cheerful smile, and determination to excel. I actually sent emails to two students advising them that I thought they had a good chance of winning, and that they should fill out the paperwork to begin the process. M G is the only one that took it seriously, and she ended up being one of two students from our school who went to the state ceremony today.
I'd never seen the governor in person before. He was an awesome speaker, totally lucid and inspiring as he gave a 30 minute speech about why people go to community and technical colleges, and how inspiring it was for him to see people change their lives through acquiring knowledge, sometimes under very difficult circumstances...mid life career changes, working full time while going to college and commuting 3 hours a day at 50 years of age.
He rang a lot of bells for me as I sat at the table with the President of our college, our two honored students, my Dean, our Vice President of Instruction (my Deans boss) and several fellow faculty members. In fact, the entire chain of command was there. Starting with the Governor, the Senators and Representatives from our district, the statewide Administrator for community colleges, one of our college board of directors, the college president...you get the picture. It was a big deal, and all just to honor serious scholars; 250 of them in a packed ballroom.
After my student got her picture taken with the Governor and assorted luminaries, we stepped outside for a group shot, but M G was hovering off in the distance talking animatedly on the phone. Her involvement with this Phi Beta Theta thing has brought her to the attention of the nationwide college headhunter network. She has had offers from 3 different major Universities, each offering her a free, all expenses paid 4 year scholarship. She was waiting to see which one had the best 3D animation program before she accepted an offer. She may have settled on Texas A&M.
On the way back, I dropped off JH, one of the other faculty members in town. The weather looked so nice we decided to get some exercise. I always carry my rollerblades in the car, and he had a mountain bike in garage so off we went on an 8 mile tour across town. Most of the time we were on a bike path where we were able to get up some nice speed. He clocked me at 20mph at one point before I chickened out. I should wear a helmet when I skate crazy like that. Still it was great to get some aerobics in good company.
3-22-03
Bombs are falling in Iraq. We've seen it all before of course, back in '91. This time it looks like we will try to finish the job. So far the "mother of all dictators" hasn't put up much resistance. I have mixed feelings about the whole affair. I see comparisons between Hitler in 1935 and Saddam in 2003. They were both ruthless, surrounded themselves with henchmen and managed to lead their brainwashed countries into war against the better judgment of calmer minds.
While history has proven America right in WW2, things are much harder to define with Bush and Iraq. He may be right, or we might all be dupes and he is wrong in a big way. I don't have the energy or conviction to have strong feelings either way.
School is out for spring break. My Presentation class did some very fine interactive final projects. They started out hating the class (jeez, it's just PowerPoint!), and ended up getting totally absorbed in high end interactive PowerPoint with heavy reliance on Photoshop images for the interface work. I was proud to be a part of contributing to their Photoshop skills and general knowledge of interactivity.
Sue, Lisa and I went down to see mom and dad yesterday for a few hours. I'd brought along some email filtering software for dad's new computer. I also brought along 6 mp3's featuring the voice of grandma. She had made a series of cassette tapes before she died in 1992 talking about her life. I'd converted the old cassettes to mp3's. When I clicked on them and grandma's voice began coming out of dad's computer speakers my mom walked into the living room and froze in her tracks, listening intently.
She looked at me in wonder and said, "That's mother Webster!...Dave, honey, come in here!" Dad wandered in and listened for a minute before recognizing the old tape. I tried to show him how his computer could play mp3's, but it was totally beyond his comprehension. They are both in their eighties, and mom has never touched the computer. Dad used to be the family guru on a 386, and even wrote and published a book on older computers far before I'd ever touched one, but now he has fallen behind the times and struggles with anything new. I keep encouraging him to take a class at the senior center, but he finds endless reasons why he doesn't have the time for formal learning.
Mom loaned me a great book by Helen Thayer, author of "Polar Dream". They met the author after hearing her speak at a dinner club. This lady is one hell of a go getter. She is a lifelong mountaineer and at 51 walked to the Magnetic North pole alone and un-resupplied except for a dog. Her stories of fighting off stalking polar bears is gripping in the extreme. She has large sections of the book online at oneearthadventures.com . For those of you who are into photography, her camera was a Nikon FM2 which works even when the batteries are dead...similar to my 35, the Pentax MX. I just checked on ebay and saw a Nikon FM2 with an awesome lens for $350. Rough weather service is only a concern if you are a mountaineer as I was for many years. Dead batteries on a hard one summit makes battery dependent cameras as useful as a brick.
3-17-03
This site is moving to http://www.websterart.com . Yes, finally, after 3 years I got around to buying a domain name. There will be duplicate entries here for a few more days while I give everyone warning. After that I will put up a Javascript switch that will automatically forward your browser to the new http://www.websterart.com. Nwlink has been a fine hosting service; very reliable. However, the competition overseas (yeah, I know, I didn't buy American) is simply to good to pass up. http://www.icdsoft.com offers 333 Megs of storage space, plus registering your domain name for a year; for $65. It's unbelievable but true. My good friend G at school uses them, as well as several other people I know. She says the customer service is awesome. They respond to email questions in 5 minutes or less.
In comparison, nwlink kept me on the phone for twenty minutes yesterday, and charges me $25 a month for dial up with 30 megs of storage. But worst of all, they won't allow me to put my prices on the site unless I sign up for their "commercial" plan and pay even more a month.
All the guitar playing I've been doing has finally begun to pay off. My fingers are hurting less and less, and my fretwork is becoming more instinctive, allowing me to feel the emotions behind the words in the melody, instead of constantly fretting about the next chord change. It's a very liberating thing to play fine music, singing the songs of my youth, hearing the fine old guitar filling the room with sound. Usually I play songs from my large collection of sheet music, but I have a few instrumental riffs I've "written" all by my lonesome, and can easily spend twenty minutes expanding and building on their simply chord repetitions.
A friend of mine at school tells me he comes here to read when he wakes up at night and can't sleep. Says it puts him to sleep. I think that's a compliment...at any rate, I'm glad I have a few readers. I'd like to open this up to the public again someday, perhaps when I stop teaching and no longer find myself in the public eye.
3-15-03
My students are working on their finals now, and while I have been doing a lot of one on one teaching during lab, I've not had to prepare a lesson plan all week, and won't until the break when I begin preparing for my new classes...assuming I have some. I've heard indications that I may have one class for sure, and possibly as many as 4, but I won't know for sure for a couple weeks.
Lisa has taken an interest in playing the guitar. Neither kid has ever had any interest in learning an instrument, so it surprised me a couple weeks ago when she asked if she could learn to play. I have three guitars: one, an old classical guitar up in the attic turned out to be totally destroyed by dampness with a huge crack in the sound board. It was cheap to begin with, so no great loss. My other two guitars, both steel strings, have always been indoors and are holding up beautifully. Lisa has been practicing on my 'camping' guitar: an old beater picked up in a pawn shop.
When we have our "lessons", she plays that, while I play my 1976 Martin. Watching her try to place her fingers on the strings I marvel at how easy it is for me. Not that I am a great guitarist, far from it, but I have fun, and can play and sing anything as long as it uses the 30 or so chords I've memorized. I have only distant memories of learning to play. It was back in high school, during the Vietnam war years when I and a group of friends around town loosely associated with a food co-op would gather to make music.
There was always one of us who was far better, and he would share his knowledge of the chords for the latest hot song, and we'd all sit around and try to play the song.
Most of us had taken band in junior high, so we could read music after a fashion. Folk was big back then: James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Carole King and Gordon Lightfoot were all the rage. Their fret work was generally simple, often only 6 chords in a song, and if you knew the chords, and had the melody memorized you were off and running.
Life was a lot simpler back then, mom and dad were paying the bills, or I was staying with friends whose parents were footing the bills. Many times I was simply traveling around the West Coast on a wish and a prayer...doing the walk-a-bout thing. I must have made a sight standing by the side of the road in my patched blue jeans, my long strawberry blond hair blowing in the wind, wearing my backpack; one hand holding my guitar, the other held out to the traffic, thumb up for a ride. I haven't the foggiest notion why I spent three years in that lifestyle. Looking back, I can only shake my head at the extravagance of youth.
Even stranger was that I was not alone. There were thousands and thousands of us doing it. It was the Woodstock generation, and the freeway entrances would be lined with 20 hippies at a time, all waving their thumbs for a ride. While many of our contemporaries were in college learning skills to earn money, we were out on the highways, pursuing...what was it...freedom? I've written about those years in more detail here, complete with pictures.
Anyway, water under the bridge and all that. My students have been doing some amazing work. Watching them take my simple concepts and create magnificent designs is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
3-10-03
Clint and I went out looking for used trucks Sunday. Crawling around in the rain and mud under other peoples cars is not my idea of fun. Still, it was a good father/son kind of activity, and I was glad to be able to share my knowledge...or lack thereof...about cars with Clint who has saved up enough money to buy a pretty nice used vehicle.
We test drove a gutless Ford Ranger in Puyallup, then headed out to used car row in Tacoma where we test drove a couple other small pickups. The contrast between the private seller in Puyallup and the used car lot salesman was an eye opener for Clint. The private seller in Puyallup was very laid back, telling us that he was in no hurry to sell the car, call any time if we decided we wanted to take it to a mechanic. He said he had a couple other people interested and I told him not to wait on us, but to go ahead and sell it to the first guy with cash.
In contrast, the used car salesmen were perfectly willing to let us test drive their cars, as long as we submitted ourselves to the grueling interview in the office afterward. They couldn't understand that we truly did not want to buy their cars at any price. We were simply there to get a feel for what the different truck and motor combinations felt like.
They had a Chevy S10 priced at $6000. We'd told them that we only wanted to spend around $4000 max. By the time we walked out of there, they had dropped the price to $4000 and were practically prostrating themselves on the floor to get us to take a "shiny new car home tonight". Clint is a serious buyer, and they smelled that, but they couldn't understand the word NO.
3-3-03
As a result of going climbing and skiing on the weekends during the last 2 weeks, I've gotten behind in my lesson plans and had to spend the weekend at the computer. I took short breaks to be a dad, and a husband, but basically I was a lump of warm flesh plugged into a laptop all weekend. Now, I'm sitting here at work on my lunch break wondering when my mind is going to make an appearance. We are approaching the end of the quarter, so my lesson plan time should go down as students begin work on their finals.
My son Clint is taking an unusual drawing class in high school this quarter. His teacher last quarter was so impressed with his work that she  let him do independent study this quarter. He's technically enrolled in a silk screening class, but she is allowing him to work independently in the corner of the room on traditional painting and drawing projects. For his homework he is using my still life box out in the garage as a stage to draw one of my set ups.
I'd planned on drawing the crystal glass and the sheet again, with a slightly different arrangement, but had been distracted by lesson plans. Clint has taken over on my still life arrangement and is doing a bang up job. This is not just biased fatherly pride. The kid has talent. He is drawing accurate renderings of metal vases and crystal glasses that are light years ahead of what I was doing at his age. The ease with which he draws complex subjects amazes me. I've been advising him on the subtleties of the various pencil types ( hb, 2h and 4h) and how they can make drawing the delicate mid tones of a still life much easier.
He listens well, and spends hours out there drawing quietly to the most irritating hard rock music. Still, I'm not complaining...he's having more fun than I am these days. Over the weekend he had asked me to show him how I drew the same subject, so I put my drawing up on an extra easel for him to refer to as he drew the new set up.
Sue got up early Saturday morning, went out into the garage and saw my drawing on the easel. She didn't notice his drawing laying down on the table nearby, which is quite good, but instead saw mine and thought it was his. When I got up later she was beaming with excitement about the AWESOME drawing her son had done, had I seen it? how had he gotten so good so fast etc., etc.
When I went out there and explained things to her she said something along the lines of: "Oh, it's just you". This is an illustration of the hazards of being married a long time. To her my art talent is an irritating hobby that keeps me from focusing on being a good provider. She's proud that I am talented, but doesn't think I can ever make money at it. Clint thought the whole affair was hilarious. I have to admit I got a chuckle out of it too. An artist without a sense of humor is in deep trouble.
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