a week without travel

[gurdonark]

My Prescott, AZ trip got postponed, which frees me up to get more work done here. I went yesterday afternoon to a meeting in Fort Worth with folks from the deaf advocacy group I'm going to try to help do some fund-raising and members of the theater group whom they hope to get to do "The Signal Season of Dummy Hoy", the play about the historical 19th Century deaf baseball player. I have never done "grants" type fund-raising, though I have a nodding acquaintance with it, but instead have only done a slight amount of the more routine populist "folks can you pledge" type organizational fund-raising. My sentiments are always in the "get x,000 people to pledge 10 dollars" camp rather than "get 8 foundations to pledge x,000 dollars each" way of thinking, but I know that my way of doing is impractical This should be a learning experience for me. I hope I can learn about grant writing while I am at this.

Two people paid for "Vibrating Electric Fields" through eBay and Paypal, and one wrote a very kind e mail. I packaged up their orders, as well as some of the LJ friends mailings that did not make the first mail-out. I also got asphalteden's re-addressed to his new homestead, so that he can warm his house with the whirring hum of vibrating metal.
I mailed one out to a fellow I know who reviews ambient CDs, who actually asked me for a review copy. Maybe I should ask the Dallas Observer to review the thing as well. I have a few more to mail out to LJ folks, but I'll knock it out steadily.
I seem to have run through my next mini-print of jewel case inserts, so I'll have to get some more done up. In the meantime, I'm sending them out jewel case and disk only.

A very nice chess poet sought me out by IM with complimentary words about my poetry about chess. I believe that I must have some AOL Hometown website of Chess Poems still up and running,
about which I had forgotten. She complimented me on my poems, and referred me to a website with her own. I'll check it out later this week.

Meanwhile, "Chess Poems for the Tournament Player" has a purchaser for the third auction in a row. In fact, there's a bidding competition in play, for which the highest bid is now the princely sum of 5 dollars and 50 cents. Because my deal with my (self) publisher is that I keep one hundred percent of the royalties, I figure I stand to clear upwards of 3 dollars here. I will endeavor to spend it in more than one place.

I'm closing in on finishing that Burns biography. People live such complex lives, even "simple men". I am concerned that in many ways my life is not picturesque, but I'll live with the knowledge in good grace.

Comments

[asphalteden.livejournal.com]

YAY!

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

It went out in this very day's mail. I am glad to send it to you, as it's been a fun joke for me for nearly a year now.

You must have mentioned it to Jim B., because he IM'ed me for a review copy :)! I had to tell him it was not so very ambient, but his copy went out today, too!

[milly-bogtrot.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've read your blurb about this CD thingie..but what actually IS it? How was the music made exactly?

I'm just interested because my partner loves many weird and wonderful musical genres (we have some old French silver vinyl that consists of taps dripping and the like), and I was hoping to tell him about it.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

The electric football game is a toy which uses a vibrating metallic "football field" to cause little plastic men to "move" up and down the board. It uses a little electric engine to cause generate the vibration effect, which can be accelerated or decelerated by turning a little control bolt. The resulting effect aurally is a set of sounds which vary from a very low, slow hum to a high pitched highly annoying whine, rather like one imagines a razor would sound like on a synthetic pharmaceutical.

Our goal was to make improvised songs using both traditional instruments and the sounds of this curious electric football field. My idea was that we would aim for something ambient, a sort of "space music" in the style of artists who make soundscapes of alien slow moving sound.

But we actually ended up doing 12 improvised-on-the-spot songs.
Some, like "Mind the Gap" are frankly experimental pieces based on using the sound of the field as a driving rock force.
Others, like "Saturday Afternoon", barely use the field at all,
and qualify as conventional amateurish pop songs. We had a lot of silly fun, as well (i.e., 12 songs' worth), including a mock soundtrack done entirely by a kazoo duet, and the like.

So I guess you might say we started out "ambient", but soon went "weirdbient". That's what I call it, anyway.

[milly-bogtrot.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a lot of fun. I love kazoo =o]