This weekend is the Redmond Digital Arts Festival. You can find out all about it on the festival website so I won’t go into the details here other than to say we’re off to a great start and you all should come to Redmond when we do it again next year. Seriously.

I was slated to work all day in the digital lounge - a large dark room with a number fascinating interactive installations and, sadly, Rock Band 2 on a 14-ft wide screen. Fortunately the 80s rock covers that were drummed into my head all afternoon were hammered out by the pounding techno DJ later in the evening.

Anyhoo, knowing I was going to be working in a dark room, I decided to make a sort of blinking purple tiara out of the light string. It worked great, but that wasn’t the half of it…

One of the most popular activities was an interactive light show created by Seattle artist Amir Stone. An infrared camera picked up lightsources - mostly glowsticks, though any source would do - and projected persistent images of the movements onto two 14′x10′ screens. The screen cleared for a new artistic endeavor every 60 seconds. It turns out that a purple light tiara makes fabulous noodly streaks of color on the screen - a terrific contrast to the broader glowstick paths.

It was all squiggles and swooshes until we discovered that a camera flash would capture a still image of the people in line of the projector. That’s me below (and my tiara squiggles all over the middle).

Nine hours of it was about enough though.

UPDATE: YouTube video added:

Bailout Man
Music and Lyrics by Eva Moon
Bailout Man - mp3

I want a man who’s a mortgage lender
Oozing assurance and dripping wit
I want a man with risky assets
Who wants to achieve a strategic fit

Supply my demand, I’ll deliver the goods
Meet in the middle and let it begin
Don’t even think of a hostile foreclosure
Let’s try a merger that’s win/win

Chorus:
You’re my target market. My billion dollar plan
My subprime obsession. You’re my bailout man

I want a man who’s hedging options
Fast and loose with securities
He’s not afraid to think outside the box
Not the type to go for plan B

I want substantial return on investment
I want a man who fills the right niche
Ready to sign a long term agreement
Won’t even think of the bait and switch

You’re my target market…

Looking to make a new acquisition
Snatching financial institutions
Looking to maximize penetration
This is my value proposition

You’re my target market…

Keys & vocals: Eva Moon. Guitar and bass: Tym Parsons: Saxophone: Ferko Saxmanov. This bit of bailout humor is a free download with my compliments as long as you cite the source. Check out our other music: Eva Moon & the Lunatics

“I don’t get it. Is it about environmentalism or BDSM or what?”

“Cut the middle verse and repeat the first verse.”

“Dog Chow from China? No one will get the reference in a few months.”

“Nah. Not latin. How about funk?”

“Too tame. If you’re gonna do it, go all the way. Be outrageous.”

Most of the time I like being a band girl. My band is my second family. But like most families, they are not just my main support but also my harshest critics. One of the toughest things I do is lay a new song on them. On one hand, I’m excited and impatient when I’ve written a new song. It’s possible to sing alone, but it’s masturbation: A substitute for the real thing. When you sing to someone, it closes a loop. The song goes out, but it comes back, it’s meaning amplified by the response of the listener. It’s sex.

Sharing a song with a band runs the gamut from group sex to mind meld to all out war. Whatever the result, it’s on another plane of intensity altogether. Prodding your toddling little baby-song into such a dangerous playground can be nerve-wracking.

This new song met a harsher fate than many in the past. She was dragged from one style to the next, stripped, examined, slapped around, and found wanting. It’s never easy to take, but sometimes rough is good. There’s a fine line between bending and breaking.

In the end, the only thing that makes the torture bearable is trust. These people I play with want everything to be not just good enough, but great. They push me. I struggle and fight. In the end I’ll rewrite. Salvaging bits and scraps where I can, taking some suggestions, deciding against others.

It will be a better song.

Not that that is exactly a rare occurrence here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m cozily ensconced in a cabin on tiny Lummi Island sitting by a blazing wood stove. We’re here editing our novel. It’s hard to believe we’ve reached a point of having an actual beginning-to-end draft of the thing. It stands at about 105,000 words and is far from ready for publication, but with nothing much else going on and all this rain, we’re about a third of the way through the first complete edit and it seems to be coming together. I hope I’ll be this optimistic on the seventh edit pass.

Sitting here watching the clouds reveal and hide the mainland like the veils of some meteorological Salome reminded me of a day when another rainstorm changed my perception of the world.

I was a kid. We’d been visiting my grandparents and it had been raining all day. On the way home, the rain stopped. My father commented from the front seat that it was likely still raining back at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

This was a complete and stunning revelation to me. Up until that moment, I’d never once thought about geography away from my immediate surroundings. It was either raining or not raining. The idea that places existed and had things going on in them when I wasn’t there was profound. It changed everything. Suddenly, I was not infinite. My parents were people who had lives that didn’t have anything to do with me. My grandparents had rain when I didn’t. If I died, people would still have dinner and birthdays and school.

Of course on some level, I already knew this. But I’d never thought about it before. For the first time, I understood and the world took on a shape and an existence in time that I was one small part of.

The rain has stopped here for the moment. Looking out over the Sound, Mt. Baker and Bellingham have disappeared again. I wonder if it’s raining there?

We have decamped to Lummi Island, a lovely wooded little island within sight of Canada, for three days of intensive editing of our own novel. The cabin is secluded, tucked into a cedary hillside with a view of Puget Sound. It’s one of those cabins that’s all knotty pine and antlers, heated by a big pot-belly stove and decorated with ducks. The kitchen window frames Mt. Baker with an assortment of silly glass pendants. We’re cooking on a 1919 gas range and boiling water for tea in a pot over a gas flame of all things. I’ve landed in Grizzly Adams estates. With wifi, thank you very much. (Chris, if you’re reading this, you and V have got to come stay here. It’s so you.)

Lummi Island is the most northeasterly of the San Juan archipelago. Located near Bellingham, it is served by a small ferry which makes the crossing in six minutes. Right now the car ferry is in dry dock, so we went by boat, dragging our suitcases and ice chest. The island is wooded, rural and has no RV parks, campsites or state parks. There are a total of 18 miles of quiet roads. It’s what you call a getaway with a great deal of away in the mix.

The local natives, the Lummi Nation, did not originally call themselves that. When the Spaniards first arrived and saw the locals’ bonfires, they gave it the name “Luminara” which the Lummi later adopted. (And here I thought they used ‘lectricity for lummi-nation. Ar ar. I just kill myself.)

But back to simmering Dutchmen.

One of the highlights of our little abode is a home-made outdoor hot tub. It’s a Japanese-style wooden cylinder lined with blue plastic. A wood stove sits along one side, immersed in the water. It’s very effective, although there are certain differences between this and the hot tub we enjoyed on our last vacation. For one thing, we have to stoke it. After several pounds of damp newspaper and twenty-nine matches, I felt like Jack-Freaking-London in the Yukon, but we finally got it lit. Then, it takes several hours to heat. And, since there are no whirlpool jets, you stir up the water with a boat oar. It feels very much like tending a big soup pot and I hollered to Mike to send up the first victim.

Temperature control turns out to be something of an art - an art we have not mastered. We’d built the damn fire, tended it for three hours and goddammit, we were going to sit in the water if it killed us. Which it damn near did. After the first abortive attempt to force a toe in, I ran cold water into the steam, stirred it up, damped the fire, waited. But still. Fuck. That was some seriously hot water. I’ve been out for an hour and I’m still pink. I hope my skin stays on.

I contacted my friend Squid, who knows dives and he gave me an excellent check list. I recommend you print it out and carry it with you if it’s been more than five years since your last bar crawl:

1. Beer. Lots of it. And not microbrew, neither.
2. Harleys. Lots of them.
3. An excess of gaudy neon, preferably for brands of beer that are no longer available.
4. Those strings of triangular flags hung up around the top of the walls for a sporting event from at least 3 years ago.
5. Either no door or a door that won’t latch on the bathroom stall, so ya gotta hold the door closed with one leg while ya go.
6. The toilet seat does not fit the toilet it’s bolted to.
7. The owner of the bar is also in some sort of service business, such as plumbing, HVAC repair, or metal fabrication.
8. There’s a stuffed animal head of some kind on a wall in the bar, preferably with a baseball/cowboy hat on and sunglasses. Extra dive-ness if there’s a Jackalope head above the bar.
9. The jukebox contains Georgia Satellites, Bob Segar, Lynnard Skynnard, Molly Hatchet, Allman Brothers, Kid Rock, Hank Williams Jr., or Nazareth.
10. People fight over mat drinks.*
11. There’s a pay phone.
12. Happy Hour starts at 9 A.M.

So, yeah, it was a dive. And even though I was trying to be cool and all, I couldn’t stop the burbs from slipping out. The barmaid comes over to our bit of peeling Formica and asks what we want to drink. My first mistake: I shoulda ordered beer. But I wanted wine. Second mistake? Opening my mouth:

“Do you have a house red?”

She looked at me blankly for about a week before the light finally flickered on, “Oh, you mean wine?”

I nodded.

She grabbed a menu and peered at it, mouthing the words as she read. Then she found it.

“We have a car-bo-nay.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll have that.”

*Mat drink: An alcoholic beverage consisting of everything that slopped onto the bartender’s mat poured into a glass at the end of the night.

What would you add to the dive check list?

Ring…

Sorry, wrong number. Sigh.

I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation for getting pulled over for driving down a streetlight-drenched avenue at dusk with… my headlights off. Pulled over! WTF?

Bored and without purpose or direction, our police are like gangland youth, spoiling for a little action. I know they say ignorance of the law is no excuse, but what about ignorance of the dark? It was so bright in the parking lot and on the street, I couldn’t tell they were off.

Or perhaps I left the lights off out of kindness and an urge to provide a bit of excitement in their sad, empty lives.

I just read “Sock” a novel by Penn Jillette. I’m a fan of Penn and Teller and I enjoy Penn’s rants immensely. I wish I could say the same for his novel.

“Sock” is the story of an NYPD diver who pulls the body of his former lover from a river and becomes obsessed with tracking down her killer. The story is narrated by the diver’s childhood sock monkey. It’s a promising premise and the sock monkey is an entertainingly deranged tough guy with miles of attitude.

Elmore Leonard, in his excellent essay “10 Rules of Writing” says that good writing is not about the writer, but about the story. The writer must remain invisible.

This book is full to overflowing with the writer from start to finish. The story is buried in steaming piles of writing. Even the sock monkey, who had such a distinctive strut at the start can’t stand up to Penn Jillette’s overpowering need to be in the book. He adopts a cute gimmick of punctuating a scene with a single line quote from a popular song and then goes on to end virtually every paragraph that way. After a while, it becomes a game of “Name that Tune” rather than a novel. (Though I’m curious to know if he paid for the rights to quote the songs. There’s not even an afterword with credits.) He breaks completely out of character to talk about the process of writing a novel - including tossing in advice to other aspiring novelists on how important it is to have a consistent narrator’s voice!

In the end the book is not much more than an anti-religion screed. No problem with that, but when I read a novel I want the author to have enough respect for me to trust I’ll get the point through the actions and dialogue of the characters.

Tempted to cudgel your readers with your thesis? Please put a sock in it.

Don’t do it. But if you have to tilt your seat back, warn the person behind you!

One of Dave’s friends actually lost a laptop to a sudden tilt back that trapped the lid between the tray table and the latch and cracked the screen. Please, friends, it only takes a second.

I don’t expect this plea to work. No one wants to gaze into their victim’s despairing eyes. It’s easier to just pretend the seat behind you is occupied by a sleeping munchkin. Suck it up. Don’t assuage your conscience pretending this is a victimless crime.

The man in front of me on a four and a half hour flight from Detroit to Seattle last night was not tall or even particularly fat. But he was massive. He rumbled down the aisle like a Subzero refrigerator in denim. When he sat, the seat creaked and expanded. The seat back shuddered and bent. I wondered if anyone had ever been decapitated by an exploding tray table.

But worse was yet to come. As soon we were airborne, he cranked it back. I was expecting that. Not happy, but resigned. What I wasn’t expecting was the casual toss of his hands over the top of the seat back. I suppose that’s how he lounges in his Barcalounger at home. But on a plane? Four and a half hours of shrinking confinement with meaty paws dangling in your face can mess with your mind. At one point I was seized with a sudden perverse urge to lick his fingers. I should have done it. It probably would have cured him of hand-dangling forever.

For the record, I never lean my seat back.

But it is the sort of trip where one follows one’s feet and doesn’t get too attached to any particular outcome. Had I been on the briny I would have missed a stumbled-upon outdoor jazz festival. When one hatch closes, a porthole opens. In this case the porthole offered a rented chair, a glass of chardonnay and some sweet tunes.

Thus ended the leisure portion of my trip.

A while back I wrote about a restaurant concept we came up with called “Pitchers” where all the food comes served in pitchers (Pitcher o’ Bacon, etc.). Ok, we were drunk, but admit it - the idea is brilliant. Subsequent drink - I mean business development sessions led us to the conclusion that Americans might find it intolerable to have to wait for the pitchers to arrive so we dumped that idea for the even more brilliant “Hoses” restaurant concept. I had a preview Thursday and Friday at an event innocuously called a “user conference” where the hoses descend to sluice great heaving mounds of information directly into the pried-off top of ones head. The jury is still out on how much of it will actually be digested and how much will simply pass through, but I feel sufficiently stuffed to justify the trip.

Sailing home now, but the ship is becalmed with a three and a half hour delay in Straights of Detroit. I don’t recall signing up for the Detroit tour of duty. If the Northwest winds don’t fill our sails soon, I may volunteer to walk the plank.

Myth #1: I’m good at it. I have the idea that I’ve got this down. I’m not sure where I got the idea, but it saves hours of planning and prep time. Just fling things in the general direction of a suitcase as the airport shuttle pulls up, zip and go.

Myth #2: I’m psychic. It’s not like it would be difficult to check a weather report. But it would be cheating. I need only close my eyes and connect with my inner doppler radar. NOAA with a gazillion dollars of geosynchronous flying hardware can’t predict the weather outside my window today, but I can sense conditions two weeks out and thousands of miles away. Except when I can’t.

Myth #3: It’s not like I’m in the wilderness. So what if I didn’t bring something. I can make do without it or find a store. This one is actually fairly accurate. Except when it’s not. One of the entertainments of a light traveler is smugly watching the struggles of heavy packers at the airport hauling carts piled high with refrigerator-sized suitcases. What do they have in there? Are they heading to the Klondyke with a year’s supply of bacon and hardtack? Heavy travelers take note: Your smugly entertained moment is at hand:

This trip’s miscalculation: Footwear. I brought sandals for walking. No socks, no sneakers, no stockings, no bandaids, no morphine. I love to walk and believe there’s no better way to get the feel of a new town than on foot. So you’d think I’d know better. I’m sure some part of me does, but she wasn’t around for the packing. I’ve put a solid twenty miles on these sandals the past two days and my poor dogs are panting. I tried slapping on some blister bandaids early on, but you might as well duct tape the space shuttle. The only thing left to do at this point is apply Madison’s best anagesic. That and a foot dangle in the lake and I’m good to go. To the #3 bus.

I’m convinced that everything we know, see, hear or feel is held in our brains somewhere, each memory tucked cozily into its niche. But the door keys are slipping off the ring, one by one. Or by the hundreds. I really have no way of knowing for sure.

I first became aware of this phenomenon years ago, when I realized I could never retrieve the word “sublimate” on demand. Not that I needed it often, but each and every time I needed it, I’d rattle the doorknob in vain. It was only when I’d given up and moved on that it would waft out through the keyhole and chuckle smugly from the sidelines.

I developed a theory that the connection to that particular memory was broken in some way; the path to it severed by some random lesion. It was fascinating. I felt like a scientist unraveling the secrets of the brain. And it was a word that I was willing to sacrifice in the name of research.

Continuing my experiments, I managed dig under the floor of its little cell and break in, even though the door was permanently bricked up. Now I can grab it by the scruff of its gaseous little neck and drag it out, blinking in the sun, at will. Sublimate sublimate sublimate. Hahaha!

But time moves on and I’ve started to notice that more and more memories are trapped in inaccessible cells. Suddenly it’s not an interesting fluke but Frankenstein’s monster run amok. The latest evidence is pictured below: A lovely little coffee house in Madison (where I am now seated) with a name that will NOT stay in my head.

Mother Fool’s Coffee. I have a picture now. I have fixed the name in pixels. Perhaps it will be enough. But yesterday, time after time I’d look for it and find the flat, blank face of a locked door. I didn’t really need to find it, but once I noticed it was MIA, it bugged me and I couldn’t let it go. I finally had to just come back. Will these measures be enough to burn a new pathway? Stay tuned.

-=-=-

Yesterday was another lovely day in Madison. I walked about ten miles through Capitol Square and along the shore of Lake Monona. I found the local gay pickup alley and the state mosquito preserve. I retract my previous statement that Wisconsin is unrelievedly white. The pedestrians around the capitol, at least, were reassuringly diverse. It’s not what I’d call a melting pot, but hey.

I had a traditional Wisconsin lunch at a traditional Wisconsin supper club, The Old Fashioned on the square near the state capitol. I was assured that the grilled summer sausage, red onion and muenster cheese sandwich (No. 38) was about as Wisconian as you can get and several other people have confirmed it after the fact, nodding contemplatively in agreement. No doubt reliving past sandwiches. I did not order the batter-fried cheese curds or the beer cheese soup. My lunch companion had the soup. It comes garnished with popcorn crumbs. Also apparently traditional. It may be ambrosia, but it looks like someone forgot the tortilla chips for the nachos and scrounged in the sofa cushions for a bit of flotsam. “They’ll never notice…”

I’ll end this on the happy note that it pays to sit in coffee houses. I now have an invitation to go sailing tomorrow evening on Lake… um…

Madison, Wisconsin was totally hitting on me today. The weather was transplendant; clear, sunny, low-70s, light breeze, low humidity, no bugs. A music festival beneath the leafy canopy of Orton Park directly across the street from where I’m staying rang with really excellent jazz all day, capped off with an amazing set by a band with arguably the best name ever: Garaj Mahal. (Do check them out.)

The houses of Madison are quaint, old and colorful (There are two purple houses across the park). The residents may or may not be quaint or old, but they are certainly the whitest bunch I’ve seen in a long, long time. And I live in Redmond, Washington which is pretty relentlessly white. Politically, Madisonians run the gamut from Obama supporters representing the far right and moving left from there. And all those babies that aren’t getting born in Seattle? Madison is picking up the slack. Sticky blond toddlers swarmed the park in scampering hordes. Every third belly was festooned with bump or a Snugli. I was hesitant to drink the water.

As you may have guessed, if you’ve been following this thread, I finally did escape from Detroit. I was a bit confused about the length of the flight. Looking at the schedule it appeared to be an 18 minute flight. Eighteen minutes? I could have walked! (Looking at a map, it became clear that Madison is WEST of Detroit across a time zone and walking would entitle me to start a religion, since Lake Michigan is on the route.)

About the free beer. In Seattle, if you want to have a beer at a public festival you must do so penned up in a corral euphemistically called a “beer garden.” It’s hard to imagine any place less like a garden. It is drinker’s purgatory. To get into a beer garden you must present a photo ID or no beer for you. Queen Elizabeth II recently tried to snag a brewski at the hemp fest, but they weren’t buying the “left my driver’s license in my other palace” line. Make no mistake: This has nothing to do with preventing underage drinking. It is a shakedown. The City can come in any time and check for IDs. If they anyone in the beer garden without, whatever their age, they fine the vendor. Easy revenue. We’ve gotten so used to the indignity of having to sit in time out with our beers that we’ve started to think it’s normal.

But in Madison, beer roams free. You step up to the booth, slap your three bucks down and ask for a beer. If you look like you might be a grown up, they hand over the beer! I felt oddly naughty, walking around with my beer open. In front of the kids!

Tomorrow, Madison might show a different face. But for today, I am a stressball that was compressed into a small ugly wad suddenly released to slowly unfold to its original shape. If the city is hitting on me, I am totally falling for its lines.

The plane staggered in three hours late, so of course everyone missed a connecting flight. My suitcase is already partying in Madison. I expect a breezy “wish you were here” postcard from it any moment now. It will slip in under the door of the Detroit hotel where I am languishing without so much as a toothbrush. The one time in the last dozen years I check a bag and this is the time.

When my kids were little they had a PlaySkool airplane with little peg-assed people. (I recall being seriously torqued that the girl pegs had hard plastic dresses on that made it impossible for them to fit in the cockpit.) By the time we were making our approach into Detroit, my ass felt like it was pegged into something of about that size and comfort. But relief was near. Or so I thought. (Cue ominous music.)

As we were landing, the flight attendant announced that everyone was to go to gate 41 to rebook for another flight. We landed at gate 75. I found out later that the distance is nearly 3/4 of a mile. This is a significant point.

When I got to the head of the refugee line at gate 41, I discovered I had already been rebooked on a 7:09 pm flight to Madison. It was 6:59. The flight was leaving from… gate 71. (Cue Olympics theme music)

I raced the 26.2 miles back to gate 71, hurdling luggage carts and small children. I’m not sure, but I think I passed Usain Bolt. And he didn’t have a flapping purse, laptop, jacket and entirely inappropriate sandals. I staggered and wheezed across the finish line, but no podium for me. The medal winners were on the plane. The door was locked and there was no one even to beg. Next flight? 12:15 pm. The next day.

But hey, a hot shower and couple glasses of merlot later the aches begin to fade. Tomorrow’s a new day. What could possibly go wrong?