It was a rather eventful weekend here with a film project and then a bit of unexpected excitement around a show at Berkeley Arts last night featuring Pitta of the Mind. In the end, everything went well, though Luna would have preferred less excitement. Here she is coming out of hiding after my friends from the film project left and reclaiming her territory.
She is quite fond of this toy piano. I have even heard her press the keys, though I haven’t been able to capture it yet.
The latest, and second-to-last, episode of the World of Wonder is up and posted for your listening pleasure.
For a complete playlist, please visit Spinitron.
This show will be coming to an end soon, with a final show on October 10. It has been a great experience, but no longer sustainable given an increasingly frequent performance schedule, maintaining this site, and making sure to set aside enough time each week to take care of myself and Luna. It is possible that I will start up an independent podcast in 2014, so stay tuned…
Today we mark seven years since CatSynth first went online!
Here was the photo of Luna from that first post on July 19, 2006.
As we do every yeah, we celebrate this occasion with some stats.
2,278 posts.
12,218 comments.
538,771 visitors.
760 “cat-and-synth” posts.
Some overall stats for the past year:
Our top day for visitors was January 26, 2013. This was during NAMM.
The greatest number of visitors came from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.
The top cities are San Francisco and New York. The top city outside the U.S. is London.
iOS and Android are among the top five platforms used by our visitors, surpassing Linux.
Our top commenters over the past year:
| Tillie and Georgia | 187 |
| meowmeowmans | 142 |
| Gattina | 70 |
| Snowcatcher | 57 |
| Kitty | 56 |
| CatSynth | 53 |
| Beth F | 45 |
| Sukhmandir Kaur | 42 |
| AVCr8teur | 42 |
| Louis la Vache | 40 |
| Sue St Clair | 39 |
| KatzTales | 37 |
| Cafe au lait | 34 |
| Marilia | 33 |
| The Chair Speaks | 29 |
| Sweet Purrfections | 27 |
| Cats of wildcat woods | 25 |
| Marg | 24 |
| Team Tabby | 23 |
| Beth @ 990 Square | 22 |
| SandyCarlson | 22 |
It’s great to see longtime readers continue to participate over the years, and always good to see newcomers as well. Interestingly, the number of comments has gone down significantly over the past year. My conjecture is that an increasing amount of the engagement around CatSynth has migrated to our Facebook page, and to Twitter, where we have lively communities of commenters. In terms of Facebook, here are our most shared/liked posts over the past year:
It’s gratifying to see a mixture of “cat-and-synth” posts and art/music reviews in this list. It supports my belief that mixing all the different topics together into one stream is worthwhile. I particularly enjoy our many cat enthusiasts commenting on the music reviews or highway posts.
We hope to continue this project for a long time, and hope it continues to be a valuable and worthwhile resource. And a big thank you to all our readers and fans! You make this a joy to work on.
Last Sunday was the big annual Pride celebration in San Francisco, and with the recent court decisions restoring and expanding marriage equality, it was the largest and most celebratory that I had seen in my five years here. It was already quite crowded when I arrived at usual perch along Market Street at 7th.
Marriage equality and the court cases were of course a common theme in signs and displays.
But there was also lots of perennial displays and entertainment. There are beauty queens, for example.
And the obligatory bare-chested men.
The above float does signify one of the big complaints about the event, that it has become very commercial and “corporate”. How should one react to a festive float like this one below, which has a positive message, but it also sponsored by one of the much-despised big banks?
In corporate displays, perhaps none was larger than Facebook, with hundreds of employees marching in colorful t-shirts, and Mark Zuckerberg doing a goofy dance on a bus (sorry, I did not get any good pictures of that). On the positive side, many community organizations were also represented, including the San Francisco SPCA:
The Contemporary Jewish Museum also had a contingent centered around their current Allen Ginsberg exhibition.
There was music, including a rolling live performance from Hedwig and the Angry Itch.
Many ethnic-based groups march in the parade. This year I managed to catch Trikone, a representing LGBT South-Asian Americans (i.e., individuals whose heritage comes from the Indian subcontinent).
Individuals from many countries were also more prominent.
This is a long all-day event. The parade always goes much longer than planned, and then there is the big festival in front of city hall. Certainly there were plenty of complaints to be heard about the crowds and slowness of things. But overall it was a very positive day.
Today, June 10, is the eighth anniversary of Luna’s adoption, otherwise known as her “gotcha day.” We woke up to find this wonderful graphic waiting at The Cat Blogosphere:
After eight years, Luna continues to make every day a delight I certainly hope I do the same for her.
We will celebrate this evening, but in the meantime, please join me in wishing Luna a Happy Gotcha Day!
Last weekend, SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) remained open all night Saturday into Sunday, ahead of its three year closure and renovation. Thousands turned out for this event, and plenty has already been written about it. But here are a few words and photos from my own experience.
I finally had the opportunity to see the Lebbeus Woods exhibit. I am glad I did. Woods’ architectural sketches were fantastic and whimsical, but still had a sense of modernism to them with strong lines and geometric shapes. There was a sense that these ideas could be realized as actual structures, even if most of them never were.
I did a quick tour through the permanent collection to see a few favorites one last time, including this piece by Yves Tanguy. There were other familiar works, like the room of pieces by Clyfford Still. But the room with minimalist works (like the chrome wall piece by Donald Judd) were not on display.
Then it was up to the rooftop courtyard for nighttime views, mingling, and some live performances. The first group branded themselves as “eco-sexuals”, with a performance that blended eco activism with a variety of things one might associate with the word “sexual.”
SUE-C and Kevin Slagle presented a series of beautiful hand-made films.
And Rick Prelinger presented some of the home movies collected from his archive, particularly those documenting U.S. cross-country road trips.
Then it was downstairs to the reception room for more performances. First up was jazz singer/chanteuse Veronica Klaus with a very retro set of jazz standards:
Emcee Marga Gomez delivered her interstitial schtick from a desk on the side, in the style of late-night shows.
More performances followed, including some randomized musical readings by Sofía Córdova and a performance descending the landmark SFMOMA staircase by Chris Sollars. Both fun, but challenging to photograph. The next performance by Dia Dear was fairly mindblowing both visually and sonically:
Up next was a trio featuring Dale Hoyt with David Lawrence and Liz Walsh.
They presented a sing-a-long with a somewhat more wistful view of the museum’s closure, lamenting the time away and those who might never have the opportunity to come back. THey closed with a version of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” (made popular as the closing song in the movie Dr. Strangelove).
As it was approaching 3AM, I decided it was time for me to depart. The celebration continued with more performances into the morning and next afternoon and a final processional to mark the closing of the museum. They will be having off-site exhibitions over the next few years at other locations in the Bay Area, and I look forward to seeing them.
For this week’s Photo Hunt theme of lazy, we have a photo of Luna napping in an extraordinary sun patch.
While Luna may be able to enjoy a lazy time this weekend, I do not have that luxury. Both today and tomorrow are filled with band rehearsals – three rehearsals for two bands, including preparation for an album release next week – plus stops at an art exhibition and a cat video festival in Oakland tonight. Yes, a cat video festival. There are all of course rewarding experiences and I freely chose to commit to them, so I’m not complaining. But I do sometimes think there is wisdom in the path of the “lazy cat.”
I did hesitate to write this post because of the pejorative use of “lazy” to describe cats. It’s not uncommon to hear cats’ propensity for napping described this way, and I read frequent unfair comparisons to dogs. But domestic cats fill the roles they were bred for, and do so quite well. There are working cats, on farms, in wine cellars, and even at one of our neighborhood arts institutions, SOMArts. The role of the house cat is to provide companionship, an important social and emotional function. Luna does this spectacularly, as do many of the other cats I have met though blogs. And it not a role without risks, as companion animals are especially vulnerable to abuse (sadly, so are humans in domestic situations). So let us honor the “lazy cats” and maybe learn something from them about being in the moment.
The Saturday Photo Hunt is up. This week’s theme is lazy.
The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this Sunday by the Florida Furkids.
And the Friday Ark is on hiatus this week, but will be back on May 17.
Today we look at back at the show “Noisy with a Chance of TEXT” that took place at the Turquoise Yantra Grotto in San Francisco earlier this month. The program of experimental music with textual elements intended to “break the ultimate taboo in noise: meaning” and featured performances by Pitta of the Mind (my duo with Maw Shein Win), Red Thread (CJ Borosque and Laurie Amat), and Pet the Tiger (David Samas and Peter Bonos). A secondary theme of the night was cats – with abundant animal print in the setting and attire of the participants.
The concert opened with an introductory set by Pet the Tiger, combining David Samas’ vocals and custom musical instruments with instrumental performance by Peter Bonos.
Their performance combined a wide variety of sounds into a short period of time, with experimental voice, instrumentation and electronics. It set the tone for the evening of sometimes complex music but also warm and inviting at the same time.
Next up was Red Thread, a duo of CJ Borosque and Laurie Amat.
The set started (and ended) with extended-technique trumpet and voice, but in between it was a very sparse and captivating presentation of CJ Borosque’s poetry. Throughout, there was a counterpoint between the straight recitation of the text and Laurie Amat’s virtuosic vocal techniques.
Then it was time for Pitta of the Mind to take the stage.
We took the animal-print theme quite seriously with our costumes, and Maw Shein Win read a selection of animal-themed poems while I performed music on a variety of iPad synthesizer apps. You can see our full performance in this video:
Pitta of the Mind at the Turquoise Yanta Grotto, April 5, 2013 from CatSynth on Vimeo.
I particularly liked how well timed and structured the performance turned out, including the “cat piano” interludes. It was also great to see how much the audience got into the theme, meowing back at us. Afterwards, I was joined on stage by David Samas in an impromptu duo where he combined his extended vocal techniques with my improvisation on an analog modular synthesizer. It’s amazing how much Samas was able to “sound like a synth” with his voice. Again, you can see the full performance in the video below:
Amar Chaudhary and David Samas at Turquoise Yantra Grotto, April 5, 2013 from CatSynth on Vimeo.
Overall, this was one of the most fun experimental-music shows I have participated in for a while. Not only was it strong musically, but we had a large and appreciative audience that packed the intimate space of the Turquoise Yantra Grotto. I certainly hope for more shows like this in the near future.
