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Someday we'll look back on this,
laugh nervously, and change the subject …
November 26, 2009
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I couldn't repair your brakes
so I made your horn louder.
November 27, 2009
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10,000 years ago, the Egyptians worshipped cats as gods.
The cats have never forgotten this.
November 30, 2008
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Speaking of which, dear readers, it’s time for a detour: This is a whole ‘nuther story and I’ll let Leslie Williams-Cain tell it, from her point of view. But first let me tee it up by saying that before we started on the Po’Boys, we knew we would need a space (out of view of our wives and mental health specialists) to conduct our, shall we say, protracted listening sessions. So we set about converting the large and tall two-bay garage (sited forward of Pete’s office) into a sanctuary—or den of debauchery, depending on your perspective.
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Then along came Ms. Leslie: "In the Beginning there was the Wall....and the Builders of the Wall stood back and beheld the Work and were sore amazed (or maybe just sore). And one among them fell at my knees and cried, ‘Oh baby...I want it!! Pleeeeeeeezzze?’ I almost fell to my knees confronting something so overwhelmingly huge*. Hmmmm, this is gonna’ be some work.
"Hey Pete, you want a river on your wall...?"
It's been like working the bugs out of a prototype design. You have an idea—Pete's a fly-fisherman, the Umatilla was a favorite fishing river of the artist's father—a basic concept of where you'd like to end up but know that you've got to jump off the cliff and see what happens on the way. I've always painted this way and Terry worked out his speaker designs this way. I've tried to design a project down to the last detail but they either end up over-designed or I invariably forget something. When things evolve over time (that's a luxury Pete's given me here), they get to surprise you. Details get resolved when you focus on something else for awhile (other work, your life) and hopefully in the end, the sum is greater than the parts."
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*Leslie told me over the phone a few days ago that Pete’s was the biggest - the largest mural she has done to date. You can see more of her work here.
My wife and I love her art and have one of her very large framed chalk pastel landscapes adorning our formal dining room wall. She was featured in the Daniel Smith Reference Catalog 2004-05, Cover A thusly:
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"Leslie Williams Cain's chalk pastels capture the openness and quietude of the region east of the mountains in Washington state. As a Walla Walla native who continues to live and work in the area, Cain renders the character of the land and the nuances of the light throughout the seasons with profound understanding and care. Cain conveys the freedom felt when encountering the expanse of fields and rolling hills, yet also suggests a sense of isolation with images of lone weathered barns amongst the crops and empty skies."
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These are the photos that Leslie is working from. If you go from left to right, you can get a sense of the mural she’s created for The Garden. Imagine being wrapped in this landscape!
Back to Pete's email to David:
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Now dear readers, before we get to the finale let’s take another—but shorter—detour and look back at what prompted this flurry of insanity.
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Here we have the magic midrange driver: "The MI 9584a permanent magnet midrange compression driver. A number of different models exist virtually identical with the version shown here. The primary difference between these models is in the phase plug, which in earlier editions was comprised of a number of holes; and this example, which uses a single slit and hole at the apex of the phenolic diaphragm. This simple-looking phase plug is actually extremely well designed and along with the tremendous build quality, large Alnico magnet and phenolic diaphragm, accounts for the fact that this may be the best-sounding permanent magnet compression driver ever made for its passband of 300Hz to 6khz."
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