(2002.05.02)
Lately, I've been watching my odometer go through various pleasant palindromic and silly numbers, none of them of any significance except possibly to a savvy mathematician. (There's a story about Ramanujan, lying in his hospital bed, and some visitor, and a license plate on a car that was visible out the window, but I don't recall enough of it to tell it here. I mention it because you can almost certainly find it on the Web if you begin with that much info and search cannily.)
A while ago, I saw 19 20 21. Then there were some palindromes, on the order of 199991, 200002, and even palindromes made of other palindromes, like 191 191 and 202 202. Recently I almost saw it go through 21 20 19, and it should reach 21 21 21 today. (It did, on the way back from rehearsal this evening.) Within a few days, it will reach 212 212, another happy little palindrome of palindromes.
It's a good car, despite having been crashed before I got it (I've had it since somewhere around 154,700) and the fact that I was informed about the previous crash by the guy who repaired the damage from the recent crash (argh). Hey, not my fault -- someone decided to turn north on what he didn't realize was a divided road and was one-way-only southbound. He was a newbie, and he was looking off to the left to be sure nobody would hit him. Sure enough, nobody was coming from that direction, so he pulled out. Didn't stop even after I floored the brakes and was attempting to screech to a halt. (In fact, if he had stopped, I probably would have been able to miss him.) Alas, his instructors had neglected to stress the fact that you must always look in ALL directions before you take off.
But, so, anyway, various electrical peculiarities
ensued, the worst of which was that if I turned on the
headlights, the engine would instantly die. I could use
the turn signals, but only if the parking lights were
off -- instant engine death, film at 11. All of that
turned out to be a grounding problem, but I'm not so
sure about the other issue, which remains: if I turn on
the fan, it only runs on settings 2, 3, and 4. At
setting 1, I get nothing. I thought it was just a bad
fan motor or something, but eventually I tried the air
conditioner, which didn't seem to work at all... until
yesterday, when I discovered that it does work. It works
when the fan is switched to 1. It ONLY works when the
fan is switched to 1. Argh.
(2002.05.03)
This is off topic, but who cares? I just wanted to mention the fact that I have found a local source for breadfruit, something I regard as significant for at least two reasons: first, I'm allergic to wheat, and second, I really like roasted breadfruit in any case. Now if I can just find a source for breadfruit flour...
But, so, anyway, here's a rather anemic little guy being cooked. (It was the runt of the litter, and at the end of the exercise I decided that it hadn't been worth it. If you go after breadfruits, buy one that is large and dense.)
(2002.05.02)
As I have probably mentioned, I don't own a TV set. My ADD is bad enough that if I see a TV that's on, I find it difficult to tear myself away from it, even if what's on it is trash, so I refuse to have one in the house. I always figured that if there was something I desperately needed to see, someone would show it to me. Sure enough, Chris Daniel dragged his tapes of The Secret Life of Machines over to Dave McGuire's. (Definitely recommended, btw. Excellent look into the guts of various household items.)
Then, however, Things Became Difficult. Not only did several folks turn me on to Iron Chef, but when Geri (my ex-wife) died she left me a videotape that she had made for me, containing an Iron Chef or two and a Junkyard Wars or two. I had already participated in micro-Junkyard Wars at two Science Fiction conventions, and was anxious to see The Actual Item.
At about that time, I found a broken VCR lying on the street in Washington, DC. Well, hey. Am I Mister Bodger, or what? (What a fine idea for a somewhat less competitive show -- "Mister Bodger's Neighborhood"... You saw it here first, unless someone else made it up independently before the 2nd of May, 2002.)
There was this one little problem: where do I connect up the video out? Fortunately, I have a fat ol' Beige G3 Mac here, which is entirely happy to run MacOS 9.2, and which has RCA inputs for audio and video. Problem solved: I run the Apple Video Player, and voila, I have a magnificent 11-inch screen.
It didn't take long for Consumer Envy to set in, however, abetted by the fact that the dead VCR really is kinda only almost working -- most of the time, if I try to put a tape into it, things don't really happen, and it spits the tape back out, or tries and fails, whereupon we engage in a small tussle. Fortunately, no tapes were injured during the making of this Biscuit, but it certainly got tiresome.. A couple weeks ago I made my way to one of the local thrifts and bought a stereo (goshwow) VCR, also broken, for $10. Upon close inspection, this device appeared to need a belt. (Am I not Mister Bodger? Nevermind, we did that already.) I happened by Sam Brown's office and asked him where he would go to get a belt for a VCR.
"Belt?" he said. "Belt? You want a belt, you go to Beltsville. Where else would you go for a belt?"
He was laughing, and I thought he was kidding, but no. He sent me off to Mark Electronics, in Beltsville, and I bought a belt. So now I have a stereo VCR, and I watch Scrapheap Challenge (original British title) on my Macintosh.
(2002.06.10)
I never did figure out how to set the channel on the
tuner on that VCR, but a day or two back I was given
another one by a friend. The new one is HiFi stereo, and
came with its remote control and a manual. Mirabile
dictu. It was not quite working, and I had to fuss
with it for a while (the remote gave me no end of
trouble, in fact), but I think I have it fairly well
ironed out now.
(2002.05.02)
We've been gearing up for a few performances lately, down at the old Gamelan. I'm not sure I should attempt more than a modest explanation here, because it rapidly gets intensively recomplicated, but I should probably state for the record that I play in the central Javanese gamelan at the Indonesian Embassy, in DC, and that a gamelan is a classical Indonesian percussion orchestra (not just one instrument!), the most common versions of which are central and western Javanese, and various Balinese forms. There is also gamelan in Sunda, though I know very little about it, and it does exist in various other places in that general area.
I like Balinese gamelan a lot, but that isn't what I play, and I don't have any photos worth mentioning. I do, however, have some images of one of the largest and loveliest gamelan on the North American continent. (Indonesian plurals are very much like Indonesian singulars. One gong, two gong, a dozen gong. One gamelan, two gamelan, etc.) This is the gamelan of the Schubert Club, in Minneapolis.
Here's a panoramic view, in three pieces (for some reason, I seem to be missing a little slice just about in the middle. Sorry about that!) --
1600 x 1200 px 1600 x 1200 px 1600 x 1200 px
I have practiced with the regular performing group that plays these instruments, and they are a good bunch. Their teacher is a youngish fellow named Joko Sutrisno, who is from Java. (I think there's more info about Pak Joko on the Schubert Club Website.) I think the group has at least 25 regular members, and you really need that many to play this monster. It sounds very nice, btw, but it is tuned just about one note away from the tuning of the gamelan that I regularly play in, and I have considerable trouble getting used to it whenever I'm out there trying to play.
If you look carefully, you will observe that in most cases there are two copies of each instrument. This is because there are two scales, so they have almost two complete orchestras. The scales are Slendro (pentatonic, numbered 1, 2, 3, 5, 6) and Pelog (heptatonic, numbered 1 through 7). Because most of the "melody" instruments have seven keys or pots (or whatever serves in the active positions), the Slendro ones have an extra #6 at the bottom and an extra #1 at the top.
The notation, which Pak Joko is always exhorting his players to set aside or discard, is largely numeric. Here's an example:
Ladrang Wilujeng, Laras Slendro, Patet Manyurå
Buka: • 1 3 2 6 1 2 3 1 1 3 2 • 1 2 (6)
Ompak: 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 6 3 3 • • 6 5 3 2
5 6 5 3 2 1 2 6 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 (6)
Ngelik: 6 6 • • 1 5 1 6 3 5 6 1 6 5 3 2
6 6 • • 1 5 1 6 1 1 3 2 • 1 2 (6)
A bit of explication is probably in order. First, a few definitions. "Ladrang": a type of piece. A Ladrang is generally a simple thing. "Wilujeng" is the name of this one; I don't actually know what it translates to in English. "Laras": reasonably equivalent to "Scale". This particular version of Wilujeng is in the pentatonic (Slendro) scale. "Patet" is somewhat akin to "mode", or even to "mood". There are several, some of which are numbered ("Nem" = 6; "Limå" = 5, "Sångå" = 9), but "Manyurå" is not a number. I'm not entirely sure what it is or what it means, in fact. "Buka" is an intro. A buka is usually performed by a single instrument, or in the case of a vocal intro, by a single person singing. I think there are exceptions, but let's not get into that here. "Ompak" may be correctly used here, or possibly not; I'm not entirely sure what it means, but I usually see it in front of the main or usual section of a piece. I am told that "Ngelik" literally translates to "going up"; sure enough, when you are about to make the transition from the Ompak section to the Ngelik section in this piece, the elaborating instruments will go up to a high 6, which the people playing the melody instruments generally regard as their signal to go up as well.
If you hadn't guessed, a dot is a rest. You'll note that the notes are generally presented in groups of four. Each group is called a gåtrå. (The "å" is pronounced just about the way it is in Swedish, which is why I use it. It's not currently in favor in Indonesia, but I find it very helpful. If you aren't familiar with the Swedish letter, think of it as being somewhere between "ah" and "aw", with a bit of nasality and perhaps a bit of "oh" hiding somewhere in the back.) You'll also note that there is absolutely no indication of tempo. As played, Wilujeng speeds up and slows down as required by circumstance, and as directed by signals from the drum.
The way this music works is that what you see in print is just the skeleton. (I'm told that the word they use to describe what's written down here, "balungan", means just about exactly that -- skeleton, or bones.) Most of the instruments either don't play what's on the paper, or play a tiny fraction of what's on the paper. The "melody" instruments, however, typically do play what's written, or something very close to it.
One concomitant of this is that the last gåtrå of the buka rarely sounds like what's written. Whichever instrument ends up playing the intro will diverge into its own playing pattern for that last set of four notes, and may end up playing more, or fewer, depending. I've even seen that last set written out specifically for some particular instrument; in the case of Wilujeng in Slendro Manyurå, it was 2 15 61 (6). (the "15" and "61" pairs are played as "halfnotes", if you want to think of it that way.)
You'll note that the last note of the buka and the last note of each section are enclosed in parens. This is a weak attempt at enclosing them in circles -- a circle around a note indicates that the big gong is to play at that time. In addition, the last two gåtrå of the buka are identical to the last two gåtrå of the piece. This is common. In some cases the entire buka is identical to a line of the piece, usually either the first or the last.
The last note of the buka also serves as the first note of the piece, and the melody instruments play it too. I should note that those circled notes are all low sixes, whereas some of the other sixes in this piece are high. We generally indicate a low 6 by putting a dot under it, and similarly indicate a high 1 by putting a dot over it, but I can't easily do that here.
If I get a chance, I'll try to put up a sound file of someone playing this version of Wilujeng (there are others), so you can get some sense of it. Expect to hear the intro, followed by two repetitions of the Ompak and one of the Ngelik. This "A - A - B" pattern (minus the Buka, which is only played once) will probably be repeated a time or two; if one needs to be really leisurely, it can be repeated quite a few times. (If things must be abbreviated, the piece can end at the end of the Ompak, omitting the final repetition of the Ngelik and even a repeat of the Ompak.)
At the end, everyone waits to play the last note until after the big gong has been sounded. (This is not generally true in fast endings, which occur occasionally; in a fast ending, everyone tries to play the last note simultaneously.)
There is one other term that I want to mention, and that is "Irama". We don't have a direct equivalent for this one in English; it refers, in part, to the ratio between the number of notes that the elaborating instruments play and the number of notes that the melody (balungan) instruments play. The usual ratios are 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, and 8:1, and I believe that 16:1 also occurs from time to time. At high ratios it becomes very difficult for the balungan instruments to avoid getting lost, because the time between notes gets very long, there being a limit to how fast the elaborating instruments can be played.
Not to bore you to tears (if anyone is actually still reading), I shall defer further discussion either to email or to some other page specifically devoted to it. As I say, if I get a chance I'll include a link to an audio track of this piece.
Here's an image of Dean Gahlon, my contact in the Schubert Club gamelan, with some gong and kempul on a gongstand. (kempul look like gong, but they're smaller.) The gong in this photo are at the ends of the stand.
(2002.05.07)
Let me leave you with an image from the Indonesian Embassy, from last Sunday. This is the gamelan I play in. (The photo was taken by Bill Jensen; I've cropped it.)
Wendy Lindboe is on the left; I'm on the right. We were
getting ready to play in a short Wayang Kulit performance
that afternoon.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org or
jon [at] joss [same thing goes here] com
Last modified: Mon Jun 10 22:34:36 PDT 2002
