Here at last is the re-designed Night Note, which we hope will accommodate lots of entries and big, beautiful photographs in the year to come.

It has been a busy Fall and holiday here on Covina Ave. Since the Global Economic Meltdown, gone is the season for being a philosopher-artist burrowing her way slowly into the heart of paint. This is a season for readiness. This is a season for keeping the tools sharp. A time to work.

And since the beginning of October, we have been working full-throttle. In the last week in November, Val and I and partner Donna Wares launched Seal Beach Daily — a hyperlocal news project. Think: an online publication — updated multiple times a day — with a mad devotion for one little corner of the world, for its lost pets and city council meetings, for its beach clean ups and Christmas tree lightings, its traffic jams and cable company woes and artists and food and sales tax revenues and what its people have to say.

It’s going great — glowing feedback, good numbers, advertisers, regular contributors, an encouraging community — but it is an all-consuming job. Want to jump into the hyperlocal game? Be ready to get your work on. Be ready to do it all: report it, write it, shoot it, code it, sell it, track it, love it into existence. And you better get yourself an exceptional partner or two, because it is not a one worker business.

So we’re working very hard to start a new business in an historic economic downturn, to be journalists during an historic meltdown of the newspaper industry, to do something satisfying for a living, when most people are just glad to have a job. But, since it has quickly become such a central thing in my life, there will be plenty of time to write about all that in the months to come.

For now, I’m so glad we managed to squeeze in the long overdue Night Note redesign. New: the “latest tweet” in the sidebar in my latest Twitter post. Foodie friends will note I post a picture of our dinner every night on Twitter. And for browsing fun, there’s a continuously updated list of suggested web reads. I’m determined to get posting here into the big blogging mix, so keep an eye on this space.

Above: An osprey photographed taking off at the Seal Beach Pier, the picture originally appeared with this post at Seal Beach Daily.

Wow, things are suddenly so busy here — only time to bang out a roundup.

Doing: With Val’s hot, under-the-hood stylings, I’m redesigning a new and streamlined CaliforniaAuthors [sketch], with a simultaneous rework of thenightnote [sketch]. Also: I’m still on board with Claudio, helping him with the lightning-fast launch of his dream practice. While he works with other designers on a corporate image and web presence – because I swear, I am not in this buisness anymore – I’ve put together an interim web presence for him. Also: I’m working with Lynette and the Louisiana Creole Research Association on their corporate ID and site. Val at Work is still on the easel.

Field Trip #1: Long Beach Museum of Art exhibit “About Face: Portraiture Now.” The museum touted the exhibition as a show of artists who “defy modernist conventions of abstraction and non-representational imagery to produce breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly realistic human portraits.” It is true that the show contains the work of some very skillful artists who have produced some very skillful and occasionally beautiful and insightful portraits. But — with only a few exceptions — as a group, they touch on only a small part of what today’s representation of a real human figure can be. There was just too much super-slick photo-real work in the show. Made me wish for a Lucian Freud — something “incredibly realistic,” but something more about paint. Believe me, I am in no way knocking John Nava, who has a couple of pieces in the exhibit and whose famous super-real genius is scary-good; I’m not down on any of the individual artists in the show. It’s just that “Portraiture Now” is much more that what is hinted at by this collected group — it is the collector, the curator, that leaves me dry on this one. One long smooth note, hit repeatedly, turns the individual achievements into a monotonous hum.

Still, it is always good to see and think about art and I am glad that I went.

Field trip #1 sidebars: A) I went to museum on the first day after the vertigo cure and while walking on the pedestrians-only sidewalk in bluff park, I was buzzed by a man on a bicycle. He startled me, and I tripped and fell. He didn’t stop. It was weird, after a week of being obsessed with falling, there I was on the sidewalk, looking up at the perfect blue sky. Then I got up and went to the museum and I was pretty thankful that it was so easy to do. B) I ran into Lynn and Blair at the museum, colleagues from my long ago Orange County Register days. They said they were enjoying retirement and they looked it. It was nice to see them.

Field trip #2: Val and I took a trip downtown to go to the Superior market on the hunt for cool Mexican and Latin American food ingredients. We got different kinds of peppers–fresh and dried, some yummy sauces jarred in tall thin drinking glasses that will be great for having a cold cerveza with our home-made enchiladas, also some fresh tortillas, crema, and empanadas from the bakery. Yum.

Something for you to look at: Enjoy an existential moment at Garfield Minus Garfield.

Just purchased: New lights for painting (woo, up to 1000 watts of day-stretching light) …

… and a set of round bristle brushes. I usually work with flats or brights. (Here’s a comparison.) I’ve enjoyed experimenting with the rounds, which load up great and seem to encourage more gestural brushwork. I was inspired to get them when watching Duane Kaiser’s little time-lapse painting videos.

Up next: Taxes — barf.

Thank you! to everyone for all your kind comments during the vertigo days.

Did you know that the The Night Note has been involved in an existential struggle with the robot minions of the spamlords? (Odin curse them!) Yes. Thus, the presence on our virgin soil of ads for bogus penis creams and criminal Nigerian gold brokers. The insult! The injury!

So, we’ve had to pull out the big guns. We’ve installed reCAPTCHA in our comment form. Wikipedia tells us “a CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human.” It is very hard for a robot to fill out the little CAPTCHA form like the one here, but it is easy for a human to do it. (Even though it is a slightly annoying extra step in leaving a comment here. Drat those spambots!) Anyway, now when you leave a comment, you’ll have to type in the words in the CAPTCHA form to post to The Night Note.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but to dull the sting a little bit, it might help to know that you’re doing three good things at once: 1) you will be part of a global effort to stick it to the spamlords, 2) you are keeping The Night Note community vibrant and 3) you are helping to digitize books! That’s right. reCAPTCHA uses your sharp and discerning human mind to decipher words that are giving the book digitizers trouble. From the reCAPTCHA docs:

By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see were taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, we are using the results of your efforts to help decipher them. Learn more.

… What’s with that Amazon store?

It’s not greed, but another deadly sin, sloth, that lead to The Night Note Amazon.com Store. It lets me create links to things I’m writing about with many fewer steps. And too, it becomes a kind of nifty collection of links in and of itself.

And, although The Night Note will get referral fees for clicks through the store that end in purchases, trust me when I say the payoff wouldn’t buy me one Triple Grande Non-fat Latte a year. So rest easy, greedy: not-so-much. But lazy, well, that’s another story.

1) I did not win a date with Bill Clinton. Boo. But Hillary’s Campaign Manager, Patti Solis Doyle writes to say she’ll send me an e-mail reminder of the debate and that I can console myself with a live blog from the debate watching party. Sigh. [original post]

2) I am getting less junk mail. It hasn’t stopped, but it dropped off significantly when I followed the few simple steps at stopjunkmail.org and the FTC. [original post]

3) We are still collecting corks for recycling. We are waiting to get a good boxfull before sending them off. [original post]

4) DVD cases are now accepted for curbside recycling in Long Beach! Yay. They now take plastics 1 – 7. Greendisk is still great for recycling drives and other media — they do data destruction! [original post]

5) There are still some Old Guys Rule goods left from my OGR going out of business sale. Do you know an Old Guy who needs a cheap shirt? Visit my ebay store and take them off my hands! [original post]]]> http://thenitenote.com/2007/10/19/friday-followups/feed/ 1 http://thenitenote.com/2007/09/17/the-nightly-possum-visits-the-vine/ http://thenitenote.com/2007/09/17/the-nightly-possum-visits-the-vine/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:39:18 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/index.php/2007/09/17/the-nightly-possum-visits-the-vine/

… and finds neither grapes nor Val’s first installment. The grapes are safely harvested and done for the year, but Val’s first post is still to come. (Patience dear readers, we’re taking a rest after mom-in-law’s visit, so tonight was all about lounging around and disc 3 of Heroes.) Poor possum, too late and too early.

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I feel joyful.
Breathing out, I feel joyful.

Breathing in, I feel happy.
Breathing out, I feel happy.

Breathing in, I am aware of my mental formations.
Breathing out, I am aware of my mental formations.

Breathing in, I calm my mental formations.
Breathing out, I calm my mental formations.

Repeat until the page is loaded; enjoy the refreshment and the nightnote goodness!

[Learn more about the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing in this good little book.]