#231

Hello, friends.
Here's the art. . .

Apart from sewing and stuffing teeny tiny bits of cloth under a microscope this week, I worked on editing the second of my music video trilogy. I also did some brainstorming for the third and final video, which I haven't begun shooting yet. I want to do something different with the puppet heads in each video. The first one had photo faces cut out of paper, the second will have cloth doll heads, and this is my idea for the third. . .



Notice, this is just a rough photoshopped approximation of what it will look like. I plan on making the TV heads out of wood and putting the kids' ipod touches inside to supply the screens. I'm not sure if I will actually build a guitar that looks like an old cable box. Will anyone under 30 even know what it is? Scratch that rhetorical question. I don't really care if any of these two-thumbed-texters-today recognize these old electronic relics. I have fond memories of rotary phones, typewriters, and rabbit eared TVs that leave a little spot in the middle when you turn them off.
I just watched a six part documentary about Monty Python, and it took me back to a time when I had to actually stay up late to see a program, which I tuned into focus on my little black and white TV with the round UHF antenna.
Am I preachin' to the choir here? Can I get an amen?

-Dylan

#230

Good morning, students.
Here's the art. . .


We're back from our final visit to check out schools with our daughter, and a decision has been made. The winner is. . . Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington!



It's a prestigious school with a beautiful campus, but man is it out in the middle of nowhere. We passed nothing but wind farms for a hundred miles. If they could find a way to export isolation, they'd be doing alright.


Once at the campus, we toured resident halls with their trademark pianos, foosball tables, and laundry rooms. We attended mock classes with teachers giving lectures on a Saturday to prospective students and their parents. I overheard at lunch that an economics class got slightly heated with some parents lecturing the teacher. Glad I missed that.
We toured the radio station and stood quietly behind the peach fuzzed DJ while he introduced the next obscure jazz song.
And once our daughter knew that she was looking at the school she'd spend the next four years attending, we headed for the bookstore and loaded up on Whitman hats, sweaters, and shirts. They sold bowties too in honor of their president's fashion sense, but it's hard to rock a bowtie unless you're a professor or a politician. And as you know, I am neither.
Sometimes our daughter seems so ready for this next step, and then she'll say something like, "I could kayak home on the weekends there in the Columbia River. What? It would only take me like a day."

-Dylan

#229

4/9/10
Hello, readers.
Here's the art. . .

I'm writing this newsletter in a hotel room in Tacoma, Washington. I'll hunt and peck it out later on my computer at home. I've brought my daughter up the winding interstate, past countless gas stations and roadside restaurants, to visit one of her top two choices of colleges. Her list has been whittled down by financial aid offers to here, Pacific Lutheran University, and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She's not here with me now in this cheap but clean hotel room. She's fifteen minutes away, probably trying to get to sleep on the hard floor of a dorm room in her sleeping bag. At least, the dorm should have been only fifteen minutes away.
We set out from the hotel with our trusty Tom Tom calling out the turns with satellite guided precision. Only problem was, Tom Tom wouldn't stick to the inside of the windshield. It kept falling, and we kept resticking it, our thumbs all over it every time. Somewhere in that process, we reset it to navigate home. We were back on the interstate in rush hour traffic before we discovered the mistake. A short drive turned into an hour long fiasco, backtracking towards where my common sense would have taken me if I hadn't taken Tom Tom's advice to "turn right in 800 yards."
Later this year, we'll lose our daughter to one of these schools, calling to her with comprehensive art programs, and recycling practices that would make Jimmy Carter grin wider than usual. She will be painfully missed, but I wish her anything and everything she wants.

-Dylan

#228.5

Hello, all.
This is a rare and highly collectible Wednesday newsletter!
I have one announcement and one story for you.
Which would you like first?
Alright, the announcement. . .we are the featured sellers right now on etsy. It's a two day gig, so go be a witness to this monumental moment in history!
Ok, I may have exaggerated our place in the history books, but check out the interview anyway. . .


Now a quick family story, then I'll leave your Wednesday alone. Jo's aunt just sent us one of those cards in the mail that plays a song when you open it. Now I hate to think of something with batteries and a speaker hidden inside as being disposable, so I took the guts out of it and booby trapped our daughter's dresser drawer with it. But unlike the card that stops playing the song when you close it, the drawer would continue playing the song over and over. I knew it would startle her, because she's pretty easy to scare, but it didn't even occur to me that I wouldn't be the first suspect on her list after discovering what it was. It went off early in the morning as she was dressing for school, and her first thought was that a serial killer had gotten her whole family and was now toying with her. What an imagination on this one.
So that was a second use for those electronics. Now the batteries are going to replace the dead ones in our garage door remote.
If a serial killer doesn't get me, I'll see you on Sunday. . .

-Dylan

#228

Remember, Dylan, no religion. . . no politics. . .so. . . Happy Holiday!
Anyone have a nice holiday egg hunt today?
Wait, some people are offended by hunting.
Anyone have a nice holiday egg capture and release today?

Good grief, here's the art. . .


Apart from sewing and stuffing tiny dolls with my big old sausage fingers, I worked on my music video this week. I spent about three hours getting the trickiest shot of the video done. . .which only lasts about 5 seconds on the screen. By my calculations, I should be finished around. . .never. I needed my Lincoln puppet to smoke another cigar (like in the first video) but my hand rolled cigar of tea (not code for anything) wasn't working this time. So I got out my Grandpa Curry's old tobacco pouch, that I inherited about 25 years ago when he died, and rolled one seriously stale miniature cigar. I proceed to smoke it through a series of bendy straws hidden behind the puppet's arm. So if you were watching, Grandpa, that was for you.

-Dylan