Rattlebrained

A few picture from yesterday’s boat ride around the east – upper lac – side of the Lac Léman (lake Geneva). We were…

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I’ve been using an Intuos 3 8×6 for the last couple of years and really consider it the most useful tool for working at a computer so I guess it’s no surprise that I’ve been looking at the Cintiq series screen tablets with some curiosity and desire since I focused on them a few months ago. It also seemed that my mom, who is also an artist, could profile by using one. She tried a Intuos 2 way back when, but drawing on the pad while looking at the screen didn’t work for her so after some hesitation I suggested she try one… Which is why she asked me to install it on her Mac a couple of weeks ago, which I quickly tried to do (being in a bit of a hurry at that time), but wasn’t able too. Which led to it coming home with me so I could figure it out first… So here I am adapting, kind of, to a Cintiq 12WX.

Sticking it onto my Windows 7 machine worked fine and it didn’t take long to figure out that it had probably also installed perfectly on my mom’s Mac. The issue was simply that since it’s screen was set as an extension of her main screen I hadn’t realized that unless you set the “display toggle” to “pen display” and “force proportions”, when you switch between the two screens you can end up with the mouse pointer on the main screen but off to one side of it… As it was I couldn’t set anything up since whenever I toggled over to the main display the mouse pointer disappeared. So I’m like “where’s the pen? This isn’t working…” :P

Which is why “what I dislike about it” gets listed first.

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It’s has been a while since I’ve made it back to the states, unfortunately, especially since there have been a number of events past and future that I’m really sad to miss. A recent one was a niece’s wedding over in the dark lands of far away Vermont, where the sun rarely shines and the trees are thick with eery creeping plants (shudder) and although this blog usually avoids subjects like family going ons I couldn’t help but want to share the fantastic vampire couple wedding cake adornment that her sister Ava made for this special occasion!

Well, here it is: Swamp Train as seen last Saturday night @ the Blues Club Fribourg! Sorry the sound isn’t any better but it’s what you get with today’s automatic level technology…

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The contest started earlier than announced on the poster, irritating since G. was coming with his girlfriend and hadn’t arrived yet and wasn’t the only one. But Bonny B. had someone pull paper slips from his hand for the starting order so we were ready to roll and guess who was first in line…

There are advantages in playing first, the obvious one being you’re the leading reference the jury gets so if you do good, all the better. Especially when, as it was the case here, the jury had 5 criteria to judge by putting notes from 0 to 10. Stage presence, originality, sound, energy and nuance. I didn’t look at the scores so don’t really know but I can imagine we did well on sound and energy and possibly originality although that’s kind of a far fetched notion in today’s blues… I would have preferred: Fun!

Either way it’s all pretty subjective and depends on what music you like to hear. As this blog’s regulars have certainly already figured out my heart goes to acoustic, roots, country, folk, ragtime, good time & lonesome blues and if it has to be electric: I need energy, lots of it!…

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There I am trying to find information on the web for Washboard Doc, see my Doc, Flash, Lucky & Red – Pretty Woman post, and re-reading the Early Morning Blues record credits the following stands out: “His first recording was with bluesman Ralph Willis about 1950. About two years later he cut with Sonny Terry for a Folkways LP, playing washboards and spoons”. So I whip out my Sonny Terry’s Washboard Band CD== and once again go through the pdf file wondering if I missed anything…

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The museum was packed with folks when we got there at around 17h00 to finish setting up and all and by 18h30 there was a line of people waiting for the workshops to begin.

At 18h45 we were swamped in the crowd…

I had inherited the Tonatem table, being a “specialist” of this instrument since I’ve made quite a few of them helping Bill on various projects these last years. He had surprised me earlier by telling us that he thought two participants at a time was enough, I had imagined more like 4 to 6 but it’s a fact that after considering the workspace and tools at disposition it seemed that three was probably a good number of instrument builders to begin with.
How it worked out for my colleagues at the other tables is anyone’s guess, the first ten minutes were shear pandemonium, crowded by the mass of folks trying to see the different going ons, it was almost impossible to move and so the next two hours just went by step by step, drill two holes, screw this piece there, choose a piece of styrofoam, watchout! that wire can be pretty nasty…

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