you have to claim your space

look at all the beautiful blues!

colortown explosion...zero fatalities...one casualty?...oops...

untitled and untilted

i started a tumblr a while ago, and thanks to the infamous cody gordon, genius that he is, i realized i don't need to figure out how to stream audio files from my blog...instead i can just post them to my tumblr! it only allows you to post one audio track a day, but i'll probably be adding tracks pretty often. so if you don't feel like downloading the tracks below to listen, you can just visit my tumblr! go! now! look! listen! who knows...perhaps my tumblr will replace this blog thingy...

a few more improvised morsels for download

since kyle's ac adaptor for his four track was being wack, these ones we recorded with a mic directly into my computer:

1
2

more duality exercises:

flesh/spirit 1
flesh/spirit 2

and since my computer died toward the end of our sess, this one we recorded using the voice memos app on my phone:

last

fyi/btw: working on figuring out how to stream music from my blog posts so you won't have to download them to listen...

rebirth

many of you who are reading this may remember (the) giants of gender (andy meyer [reeds], kyle farrell [percussion] and myself [violin, viola]) and string gone deaf (kyle and myself; this myspace seems to have disappeared...): two music projects in which i was involved from 2oo6-2oo9. due to some geographical and personal complications, both of these projects (unfortunately) fizzled out.

however, i have some exciting news to report: kyle and i are playing together again! he moved into a new apartment with a beautiful view of prospect park and an enormous bedroom in which he has room to set up his vibraphone. until a couple weeks ago, we hadn't played together (in the specific configuration of vibes + violin) in over a year. it's been so wonderful to be able to make music with him again. we've been playing together for so long in so many different capacities, and we've both grown so much (musically and otherwise) since we were last regularly playing together. thus far, we've been revisiting some compositions from long ago and trying out some new methods for improvisation.

one of these methods comes from a book called essential musical intelligence by louise montello, which kyle is using for one of his classes. i'm not going to attempt to explain the entire method, but suffice it to say that it involves the application and integration of dualities. the first one we attempted last week was austerity/wild abandonment. we recorded two takes on kyle's four track, and i attempted some post-production in sound studio and garage band. it clips quite badly in a couple spots, and i'm still learning how to do all this shit, but i wanted to get it out into the world, so here it is. enjoy!

I painted this! :]

Nate at The 24 Hour Church of Elvis

Sarah + Julian + Jenna : Art Explosion

Birthday Breakfast from Sarah!

Progress

It's Been a While

It's been a while since I've posted anything more than pictures to this. I always think I'm actually going to keep up with these sorts of endeavors, and, almost inevitably, I never do. I would try to recap the events of the past week and a half or so, but that would take a long time, and at this point the days are all mixed up in my head. So instead, I'm just going to make a list of some notable people, places, and things in no specific order.

1. Nate, Holly, Jesse, and Sen: 4 coworkers from Brooklyn who are also out here doing the same thing I'm doing for WFP. I've been spending lots of time with them, and I love them all, and they are wonderful.
2. Team Dinner No. 1: This past Sunday, Nate, Holly, Jesse, and Sen had us over for a cookout. It was fantastic. We ate lots of food and drank lots of drinks and listened to lots of music and played lots of cards. We are going to do it every Sunday.
3. Julian: I met him last weekend, and we had a really long, intense conversation about life and people and the universe and all those crazy things hippies talk about. He's been living on his own since he was 16 and walked/hitchhiked from San Francisco to Seattle pretty recently. One night we walked around Portland and took pictures. It was awesome.
4. Superbad: Very funny movie. Watched it for the first time last weekend.
5. Reed College: Beautiful. Walked around it with Sarah, Neehar, and Kyle (new friends picture) on a really sunny wonderful day. Saw lots of ducks and geese.
6. Bowerbirds: One of my favorite bands for a little while now. Saw them at Mississippi Studios in the NE on Tuesday with Sarah and Jesse. Not my favorite kind of show to see live, but I'm glad to have seen and supported them. They played "Bur Oak" for me!
7. Pub at the End of the Universe: Sarah and I played an open mic there last Monday. It was pretty cool.
8. Scooter: My friend Will's kitten. The cutest kitten? When you open the door he prances toward you. He is the most adorable thing.
9. Amelie: The best movie I've seen in a really long time.
10. Laser Tag: What I want to do for my birthday tomorrow!

Okay peace out for now. :]

Soon to be Green

Sarah Drew on my Arm :]

Sarah + New Friends Watching Ducks on a Beautiful Saturday Afternoon

Goose!

Sarah in a BIG Coat

Team Dinner No. 1

Gray Wednesday

Sometimes I love humanity so much. It constantly astounds me that
every person has a completely unique experience of life and living.

Sent from my iPhone

Lots of Days and Parentheses

Before I get into the nitty-gritty details of what I’ve been up to the past few days, I would like to note that I just made a BOMB spinach and artichoke dip in a casserole dish Sarah and I bought last night while grocery shopping (it will make us many many good eats). I will be consuming the dip (next time I will put more spinach in it) with tortilla chips as I write this next to Sarah, who is making spreadsheets (one of her favorite pastimes). So enough with parenthetical remarks; I believe some updates are in order…

Monday Night

Sarah and I checked out some websites that had lists of open mics in Portland and decided to play one to showcase our new song. After getting really excited to share our music with the People of Portland, we went to both of the open mics that were within walking distance, only to find that neither one of them was actually happening for one reason or another. It was a bit too late to trek out to the one that really was happening, so we decided to console ourselves with some Old Town Pizza. Obviously we had our instruments with us, which led to a conversation with one of the employees (Mark) who (surprise surprise) happened to be in a band (is everyone in a band?). We told him what happened, and he told us he was playing an acoustic set the following night that we could probably also play at. What an offer! He didn’t even know what we sound like…ha. (Most everyone in Portland is really nice and super friendly and really chatty but in a genuine way. It’s just not weird to have conversations with strangers here…everyone does. It happened last night when we were grocery shopping…this kid just started talking to us when we were trying to decide what kind of beer to get. There are so many good beers here from all these different brewing companies in the Northwest! Apparently Portland is the microbrewery capital of the country.)

Tuesday

After a long day of making necessary materials and recruiting in the SE for people to work for WFP, we went to Bar of the Gods for the show. Mark very kindly arranged for us to play a couple songs before his set, and they were received quite well for the kind of crowd you can imagine being at a place called Bar of the Gods. He played after us; his band is called Westfold, but it was just him and his guitarist. They were pretty good, and we met some good folk and had some good conversations with them all about art and politics and kitties. We left at closing time, so we took a cab home. Our cabbie was really awesome; he inspired me to share the following facts:

There are 13-14,000 cabs in NYC. I couldn't find how many cabs there are in Portland, but I'm sure it's significantly less...

Wednesday

Finished prepping lots of materials for the canvass, went grocery shopping, made food, watched Amelie (SUCH a good movie! Definitely in the top 5 I've ever seen). Doesn’t sound like a lot, but all of those activities are pretty time-intensive.

Sidenote

Do you remember the days when you didn’t have to dial area codes before local calls? Is it like that anywhere anymore?

Today!!!

This morning I woke up really early. Okay, actually I woke up at 9am. But that’s really early for me! I’m going to make a concerted effort to wake up early. It’s so nice to have free time in the morning, and the morning is a wonderful time of day. I met Janice (one of Mother’s best friend’s younger sister) for coffee at Backspace, which was lovely. Her 9-year-old daughter goes to a Waldorf school, which sounds like the shit. Janice seems really awesome, too. She bikes with her daughter to school and offered to take me to the gorge(!), which I’ve heard is breathtaking. After the hang with Janice, I finalized some documents and spreadsheets for work, made an awesome lunch, and headed to the WFP office in the SE to meet up with Aimee and Ted (coworkers…more on them later). Today was our first day canvassing in Portland! It went okay…it’s going to take some getting used to, especially since we’re in a new place with a new rap and having not canvassed in 2 months. This is a really liberal part of the country; there aren’t very many conservatives, but I talked to a lot of people who believe that the political system in this country is fundamentally fucked, which I agree with, but isn’t it better to work within a broken system than to do nothing at all? This is a question I’ve struggled with for some time…

It's Hard to Capture the Glory

Sarah and I make really good meals...tastes better than it looks. Yay
for food!

Waiting For The Number 9

On the way to the office. The bus stops here have electronic screens
that tell you how long you have to wait for your bus!

Improvised Evening of Improvised Music

This link has an explanation and audio files from a show I played in Columbus, OH when I was there for the holidays. Beware (Mom): it is "experimental."

Sleepless Nights

A few days ago, Free Advice (a.k.a. Ben and Travis, really great friends + musicians from Brooklyn) sent out an email with a link to a video of a new song of theirs called "Sleepless Nights." Sarah and I liked it so much and like them so much that we decided to write our own "Sleepless Nights" as a response to theirs. Enjoy!

Mom: click on the song titles; they're links to the YouTube videos :]

Yet Another

Test

Sent from my iPhone

Broken Phone and Pirates

Sarah showing off her broken phone..she can't read anything on her
screen, so every time she gets a text, she forwards it to me and I read
it to her...a silly system, but it works! Also, I just found out that
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is September 19...that leaves us
all lots of time to practice!

Oh. Yes.

And I can post pictures from my phone too! This is very exciting...

Colorful Things

Testing...1...2...3...

This is a test...I'm learning how to post to my blog from my phone!

Hollow Monday Morning

So hopefully I'll get in the habit of posting on this thing everyday, but since I clearly have not yet done that, I will now recount the events of the weekend...

Friday Night
Sarah and I didn't end up going to the dance party on the moving dancefloor. But we did make a really awesome dinner of chicken and veggies, accompanied by "500 Days of Summer," which I had been wanting to see for a while. As much as I would not like to admit this, I am a sucker for romantic comedies. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is really cute, a mantra that Sarah and I repeated many times throughout the movie. :]

Saturday
Took a nice walk around downtown Portland, stopped in some stores, ran into Ted and his girlfriend, and spent a long time at Buffalo Exchange, an awesome vintage thrift store. I hadn't been clothes shopping in a while, so I binged a little bit. It was well worth it; I got some really interesting pieces... After chilling for a bit back at the apt. and making some grub, we headed to the NE for an event some kids we met were putting on. It was called Eclectic-Electric, sort of a small-scale electronic dance music show. It wasn't so happening, so we hitched a ride back downtown to check out another bar. As soon as we walked in, I looked at this kid, and he looked at me, and we looked at each other for a while, and then I very skeptically questioned, "Nathan???" His reply was, "Jenna???" We went to college together! He's a pianist and had been living in LA for a while but recently moved to Portland. I had no idea he was living out here, and he didn't know I was out here, so you can imagine our surprise and disbelief...such a small world, yet again! These kind of coincidences are so abundant in my life, and I am grateful for them. I like to think that serendipity follows me; it has shown itself many times. When we were in middle school, my friend Mariana and I would jokingly say things like, "There are no coincidences," and "Coincidences do not exist," which I only half believed then. Their frequent occurrence in my life makes me wonder about these things again...

[I don't think I mentioned this before: after further conversation with the kid I met on the plane (his name is Neehar), we established that I know one of his roommates from Cleveland because he has a small label called Banana Seat Girl, which did a tape release for (the) giants of gender. See what I mean??? Crazy stuff! I couldn't make it up if I wanted to!]

All the bars here close at 2am, which seems early to me after living in NYC, where everything is open until 4am. So when the bar closed, we took a walk to Voodoo Doughnut for obvious reasons...such good donuts!!!

Sunday
Overall a pretty lazy day...lots of lounging and eating and watching cartoons and internet T.V. But we did write a new song! We decided to write it as a response to a song that a couple of our New York friends wrote and posted on YouTube. Both songs are called "Sleepless Nights." We're going to try to make a video recording of it later today, so as soon as it's up I will post the link!

Backspace is my Homebase

Not too much to report today. Sarah and I had an awesome night of dancing last night at Someday Lounge, which is very close to her apartment. Today was a lazy day, except we had a short meeting with Ted Fertik, another transplant from the Brooklyn WFP. We're starting work on Monday, which I am pretty excited about after having quite a long time off...

Tonight we're going to make some dinner and perhaps go to the Crystal Ballroom for an 80s video dance party. Apparently there is a floating dance floor...should be interesting.

Also, I put some pictures up on my facebook from the garden, so check them out!

First Days in Portland

After a couple hectic days of packing and preparation, my flight to Portland on Tuesday went off without a hitch. I had a 3-hour layover in Seattle, which has a very nice airport and very nice people. On the final leg to Portland I met someone who grew up in NJ but had been living in Cleveland for the past 6-7 years, and we know some of the same people...such a small world!

Sarah met me at the airport (so good to see her!), and we took the MAX (the above-ground rail) back to her new apartment, where I'll be living until Feb. 26. It's in the Old Town/Chinatown part of Portland, which is in the NW quadrant. Portland is divided West-East by Willamette River and North-South by Burnside Street, making 4 quadrants (NW, NE, SW, SE). We dropped my stuff off and then walked to Fred Meyer (a really nice grocery store) to do some grocery shopping and pick up some things I forgot. We made a lovely dinner and hung out at her apartment, which is really nice and clean and spacious and bug-free and has a balcony and a dishwashing machine and lots of closets!!! Most of these things would be completely unaffordable in Brooklyn. I will post pictures once I take them!

Yesterday (Wednesday) we spent most of the day wandering around the Pearl District, which is in the NW and is filled with cute little shops and restaurants and bars and galleries. Sarah says it's Portland's Park Slope. If I had to pick one word to describe Portland after being here for a very short amount of time and after seeing not very much of it, I would pick the word "cute." Everything is really cute. We got lots of supplies for collage-making, some dishes, and a coffee table that is low to the ground. Thrift stores in Portland aren't as good as the ones in Ohio but are so much better than the ones in NYC...and you don't have to worry about bed bugs!

One really awesome and unique amenity that exists here (and nowhere else?) is the pub theater. It's exactly what it sounds like--a movie theater where one can consume beer! What a novel idea! So we went to one in the NW that's called Mission Theater to see "The Men Who Stare at Goats" with George Clooney. I (a little bit surprisingly...) highly recommend it to you (Momma and Poppa, I'm talking to you! I think you guys would get a kick out of it...). It was really cheap, too; we got admission, a burger, and a beer for 11 bucks or something.

Today we went to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden (a.k.a. the Lan Su Chinese Garden) because they're having 10 days of free admission in celebration of their 10th anniversary. It's the most authentic Chinese garden outside of China's borders, and it's so beautiful! I wish I could see it in the summer when it will be brimming with life and flowers. I did take some pictures here, which I will post as soon as I put them on my computer. I thought about my trip to China many times when we were walking around the garden, even though I never went to a garden when I was in China. I really want to go back...Chinese culture, art, and philosophy are beautiful...so different from Western ways of life. I'm thinking about getting a tattoo of the yin-yang on my inner forearm. It's such a beautiful symbol that carries so much weight.

After lunch/dinner over the movie "Le scaphandre et le papillon" ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"...also really good...receives the Jenna-stamp-of-approval), we headed over to Backspace, which is a really awesome coffee shop/bar/gallery/show space that's really close to Sarah's apartment. Actually, EVERYTHING is really close to Sarah's apartment; she found a great spot! I'm still at Backspace...I've been here for a while and am quite caffeinated! Also, there just happens to be an art opening here tonight! It seems like there is so much art here! And so many artists! Okay I'm going to go get some sushi with a new friend...more soon!