I know you are all wondering, did I buy the André 3000 flute album? Yes I did. And I would link to it too, but I bought it on Bandcamp and apparently it’s not on Bandcamp anymore.
an image pulled from the confirmation email I got from Bandcamp when I bought New Blue Sun
Very strange. That “Download your purchase” link doesn’t go anywhere anymore. I’m kind of upset, actually, because I always thought of buying music on Bandcamp as having a built in backup, that you could always download your media again. Oh well. I hope it’s been removed from Bandcamp for good reasons. I also listened to the NPR Music interview with André 3000 and was surprised to learn he’s only a few years older than me, but also he’s done a lot of soul searching and also psychedelic drugs. I’m 100% here for it, and the album is good too. It is a little bit more background music that no one will complain about, but it rewards repeated listening.
I was a big fan of Big Boi’s 2010 album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, but I never really got into Outkast. As I was thinking about this someone on Bluesky posted about how great Outkast’s album Aquemini was. Well you can get that on CD on Amazon for $8, so I did, and it is great. I played it in the car with the three year old in the back seat and he said to not play that music and to instead play Rock and Roll. It’s odd because that’s probably what I would have said too, 20-30 years ago.
There was a nice moment on NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast a few eps back where Robin Hilton said something like that he never liked rap music as a kid and another host jumped in and said, you were told you didn’t like rap music as a kid. I definitely got that message growing up, that rap and hip hop weren’t “real” music, that if I wanted to be cool I shouldn’t listen to that I should listen to e.g. Nirvana and Led Zeppelin instead. It’s the long tail of effects of the racist foundation of our society. As for the three year old: he’s three, and he loves electric guitar. This kid thinks pizza is bad. His opinions don’t really count for much.
No new paintings updated or anything this week. I put in some extra time at the robot job, getting shit done, and I made some progress on something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: I made some stepper motors move back and forth!
So for thirty hours a week I hold the position of Senior Staff Electrical Design Engineer at Boston Dynamics. Making a stepper spin is not really a big deal, except it is when I’m doing it here in my home office with basically hobby stuff. I got a couple steppers from Adafruit as well as a Raspberry Pi stepper controller hat. I also told my final semester academic advisor from the MFA program I finished last year that I was committed to having at least one artwork in my May 2024 solo show that incorporates movement in it. So, that’s happening.
Look. I don’t have good ideas, but I do have ideas. I’ve been working on these wooden panels, and I think these things are robust enough to drill holes into and mount things too. I did a big 40 foot commission in 2021 where I did mount plywood cut-outs onto wooden panels. That worked just fine. My ideas so far?
make a thing spin in front
drill holes in the surface and make a thing spin behind the holes
make a thing move back and forth
etc
Well the nice thing is that now I can make a stepper go with a Raspberry Pi and a python library and if I just zip-tie this to a painting that’s probably halfway there.