I am suspending my blog indefinitely.

Date: 2008-09-17 02:48 Subject: It Winded! Security: Public

First, I'd like to point you towards my Flickr album, which has a pretty good visual account of the whole event. Even if you've seen the gallery, I have added a bunch of stuff to it. All the pics and videos in this post are from there.
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Date: 2008-08-12 05:43 Subject: O no, a drum corps show Security: Public

  As if driving to Cleveland, having lunch with Hayley, and having a bassoon lesson wasn't enough for one day, I went to a drum corps show on Monday, August 4th. Though the show (and the entire drum corps season) is now in the past, with World Championships ending on Saturday the 9th, I feel like it's good to blog about my show experience. Also, I have included picture on my blog for the first time, but my camera battery was running low during Blue Stars and finally died during Blue Devils, so there are no pictures of Spirit, Santa Clara Vanguard, or Bluecoats. Sorry.

    A word of advice for anyone going from Cleveland to Massillon (or Massillon to Pittsburgh, for that matter): don't. There were no major highways taking me where I wanted to go, leaving me to pick my way through a mess of back roads, secondary highways, and small NE Ohio towns (on the plus side, I did pass by a Macedonian Orthodox church, which opened my eyes to the wonders/existence of  Macedonian Orthodoxy). To add to the frustration, the traffic flow into the stadium area was atrocious, and it ended up taking nearly half an hour to get from the nearest main road to my parking spot. The show was held at Paul Brown Tiger Stadium, next to Massillon Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio. The stadium itself is a truly top-notch facility for a corps show, with a new turf field, relatively tall concrete bleachers (topped by an acoustically enhancing metal overhang), and no track to put distance between field and audience. Bands of America held a regional here for a while (they might still have one here) and I'd bet a lot of smaller colleges would kill to have a stadium this nice. This is the same show Hayley came to visit me at two years ago when I performed here with The Cadets. At the show, I met up with my former Capital Regiment corpsmate Callie (who had graciously taken Hayley to visit me at this venue back in '06).

-Finish the books on my summer reading list
-Go to DCI drum corps shows in Erie, PA on June 30th and Massilon, OH on August 4th
-Go to DCI World Championships from August 7th to 9th in Indianapolis Bloomington, Indiana, with my old friends from Capital Regiment; hopefully, I will also visit people in the Oxford/Cincinnati area on the way
-Attend the Shore Leave sci-fi convention in Baltimore from July 11th to 13th with steve_mollmann and company
-Practice my bassoon a great deal, and hopefully find someone to take weekly private lessons with
-Familiarize myself with next year's repertoire in symphony/opera orchestra
-Exercise regularly and eat good things in the hopes of losing some weight
-Finish my long-suffering drum corps ethnography project
-Revise my final ethnographic paper from Panama in order to use it for graduate school applications
-Study for the GRE, even though I've already taken it once
-Work on letters of purpose and other things for grad school so I won't have to worry about them as much during the semester
-Begin finding and reading sources for the independent study project on the bassoon works of Francisco Mignone, which I will hopefully finish and present next semester
-See my sister-in-law's pieces on display when she comes here in late July for an art show
-Blog about Panama and other fun things!

    It will be a busy summer, but hopefully productive without being too crazy. I think it will be better than last summer, since I don't have any classes now that Panama is over. I considered taking introductory Spanish at Pitt, since the Panama experience has increased my desire to learn the language; however, the class was four days a week from 6 to 9:30pm every night. Not worth it.

These are the books I hope to finish before the summer is over:

2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
The Path Between the Seas, a nonfiction account of the creation of the Panama Canal, by David McCullough
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
If on a Winter's Night Traveler by Italo Calvino
Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie

I'm sure there are a few more that I am neglecting. 2010, The Left Hand of Darkness and the Italo Calvino belong to steve_mollmann, so the goal is to have them finished them when I see him in mid-July. I am enjoying The Path Between the Seas; thick historical nonfiction of this type is easier to read when you've been to the place in question. McCullough's discussion of the Chagres River's temperamental nature are a lot more meaningful when you've gone up said river in a dugout canoe while it is dangerously swollen, and his descriptions of Panamanian rain were so vividly poetic that I used them in my photos and videos of the same. My goal for the summer is to read 80 pages a day; so far, that has proved to be slightly optimistic.

     So, I've just been a bit busy in the last five weeks or so, and as a result my main form of disseminating information about my trips has been my Flickr site, which at the time of this posting contains 383 pictures and videos of my adventures. I elected to not go anywhere this weekend (except a soccer match between Panama and El Salvador on Sunday), since it's the weekend before the last week and I need to get some work done. It's nice to just have unscheduled time; I haven't spent a Friday or Saturday in Panama City in three or four weeks. So, to kill time before going to a (hopefully awesome) Indian restaurant downtown, I am going to start the arduous task of blogging about my Panama experience.
 

    I've decided to interrupt the staggering lack of content on my blog, not to bring you news of Central America, but to bring YouTube videos to your attention! Of course, these aren't just any YouTube videos. They're a three-part series of Disney edutainment films made in 1956 and '57 (largely for the purpose of creating interest in Tomorrowland), and they're interesting mainly because they feature Werner von Braun himself explaining his ideas for space missions of The Future! The projected space mission segments are a nice mix of 1950s best-guess science (from some heavy hitters like von Braun and Stuhlinger) and science fiction.

Hopefully I will make some time soon, but in the meantime, please go to my Flickr site for a bit of visual narrative and some brief explanations of what I'm up to.

I need to do a lot of real blogging, but this will have to satiate my adoring blog-hungry public for now.
Wed, 5/7 - High 97, Low 73, scattered thunderstorms

Thurs, 5/8 - High 93, Low 74, scattered thunderstorms

Fri, 5/9 - High 94, Low 74, scattered thunderstorms

Sat, 5/10 - High 95, Low 74, scattered thunderstorms

Sun, 5/11 - High 94, Low 74, scattered thunderstorms

...you get the idea.

I'm so excited. Actually I am, but the heat and humidity will take some getting used to. Also, the UV index is 10+ (Extreme) every day. Nothing I haven't done before, but I'm gonna be really brown.

    I am taking my time home alone on spring break to catch up on some NetFlix action, since my queue has ballooned to over 90 films. Over the weekend I viewed "The Pianist," a very good (and depressing) Holocaust drama, and "Battleship Potemkin," Sergei Eisenstein's classic 1925 Soviet propaganda epic.
   

    Special thanks to Steve for inspiring my title.

    This summer, I will be taking classes at Florida State University's branch in Panama City, Panama. The university has a small campus directly adjacent to the canal itself, and offers a host of classes. The reason I am going is that Dr. Dale Olsen, the director of FSU's ethnomusicology program, is going to be teaching there. Dr. Olsen is a major figure in the field of ethnomusicology, having served as the Society for Ethnomusicology's first Vice President as well as publishing many volumes based on his field research, ranging all the way from the music culture of Venezuela's Warao Indians to Japanese classical music and popular music in modern Vietnam.
   

If I were only going to read three fiction novels this year (which is optimistic at best), which three do you recommend?

    I like my new semester.

    I decided to drop linguistics (a 4-hour course for anthro credit) because it interfered with bassoon studio and I really didn't need to be doing 20 credit hours again after the last two semesters. This gives me a lot of time to actually live, as well as practice my instrument, which I want to make a top priority this semester. Dropping linguistics is a calculated risk, since I'll probably need to take it at some point and it might be at an even worse time then, but I think it's worth chancing it. It does make me a terrible anthropology major, since I have taken so few anthro classes.

    The other day, whilst perusing Facebook, it came to my attention that someone I had marched with in Cadets, a girl who is only a year older than me, gave birth to a healthy baby girl last week. This was something of a shock. I have been aware of people my age having kids, of course, but it's never actually happened to someone I sortof knew and spent a whole summer with.

    The next day, a girl in the bassoon studio, who is my age and year in school, got engaged.
 

"Revenge is a dish best served cold" - Old Klingon proverb

    Today I ventured out of my place with my old high school pal Mindy, and we took in a film: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Mindy's crazy about musical theater (and Stephen Sondheim in particular), I'm all for the same, Maura has been talking about how great it was going to be at school, and the reviews have been super positive.

Ever since my brother sent me the link to this music video, I have been somewhat obsessed with this song. It gets into your brain pretty good. It's by the British "folktronica" band Tunng. Folktronica combines folk/folk-rock (yay!) with electronic samples (like the quirky sounds in this song). I like it, at least here. I'd like think the course on electronic music I took this semester makes it more interesting for me, but it's really just a catchy song, and the video is a bit hypnotizing. Anyway, that's all for this post, just sharing a song and weirdly cool video that I like.

"Mah car! Mah car!" -George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), It's a Wonderful Life

    At school, my noble conveyance is a 1992 Honda Accord sedan. It's very important to have a trusty steed at college because it's nearly impossible to get from there to anywhere half decent without one. In addition, it makes you a lot more popular, since you become a transport device for the rest of your friends. Heck, a good half of my socialization this past semester stemmed from it.

Blog blog blog. Bloggity blog. 

This is just an announcement that my blog is being resurrected and will hopefully feature new content soon, probably over winter break, which starts Friday.

2005 Capital Regiment: Chiaroscuro: Symphonic Dances in Shades of Darkness and Light (15th place, final     score 81.4)

    It seemed like everything was going for Capital Regiment for 2005. The corps had just completed its first full-scale touring year, one it which it had jumped a huge five positions from 2003. The staff was good (even more ex-Cadets people) and a high member return rate was hoped for. A lot of people--members, staff and outsiders alike--predicted that there would be three Ohio corps in Finals for 2005.

    Last night I trekked across Pittsburgh to the little Mon River town of Elizabeth, PA to watch a drum corps show. This is the first show I have been to as simply a fan since July of 2002--a lot of things have happened since then. Before my little review of the corps, I'd like to take a moment to point out that driving in Pittsburgh is really crazy--nothing seems to make any sense, the signage is terrible, and everything is so convoluted that neither the Google Maps directions I printed off nor the road atlas were much help. This was classic guesswork navigation by me for most of the way, and it took and hour and 45 minutes to get there. On the bright side, I got to see some interesting Mon Valley infrastructure (like steel mills, crumbling bridges, massive coal power plants, etc.) that I had no idea even existed. In other words, an adventure.

And now, my review of a late-June drum corps show.