Rudy’s Blog

I got an iPhone for Xmas, and I’ve been playing with it a lot.

My first photo with the iPhone, heavily Lightroom-treated to “fix” it. Me and my skug. (But which is which?)

I put about 10 Gigs of music on the iPhone, and am now dreaming of ripping all my old vinyl records, which would take days. I converted a bunch of my photos to the native iPhone image size of 900 pixels wide or high, at 326 pixels per inch (!?) and used iTunes to put them on the iPhone. I even found a site explaining how to put my manuscripts on it in E-Pub format, not that I’ll ever look at them, I don’t think.

And I got some apps. I’d been to an “augmented reality” conference in 2010, so I was especially interested in augmented reality apps, that is, apps in which a live video image of the world is overlaid with information or with game elements.

[UFO disguised as a princess cake.]

My favorite among these is AR Invaders. You see UFOs flying across your sky, or, for that matter, around your living-room. And you shoot them, twisting wildly back and forth to see them all through your iPhone screen. My son Rudy was really into it. “There are so many UFOs in here,” he said. “And nobody else can see them.”

My family and I were in the SF MOMA for about twenty minutes the other day—no longer than that, as we had four young children in the party. On the top floor they had a show of recent art. It’s rather rare to see any real paintings at all in an art show anymore, but there was a good one by Amy Sillman, “US of Alice the Goon.” I found a lot more of her paintings online with a Google image search.

I also saw a weird video by Ryan Trecartin. You can find a lot of his work online at this great avant garde art site, UbuWeb.

[This is the only other iPhone photo I'm posting today, all the others are from my Canon S90. This is just a picture of a folded blanket, and should not be confused with the story line in Duane Michal's ribald photo series, "Take One And See Mt. Fujiyama."]

The iPhone camera is, as my nephew Embry puts it, “a nasty little camera.” I am getting better at using it—learning to tap on the screen to focus, and to zoom in a little bit to reduce the fisheye effect. I tried some photo apps, including Hipstamatic and Camera+, but neither of them really seems to improve such basic weaknesses as speckling and distortion. You can fix a little of that in Lightroom, but, really, that’s kind of a waste of time—if you want a nicer looking picture, you want to use a nicer camera. The iPhone camera is handy, though, and it’s fun for making videos to be viewed basically only on the phone.

Speaking of cameras, I read an interesting article about digital camera sensors in the New York Times the other day. I like this article because it speaks favorably of the Canon S95 that I’m using as a pocket camera these days (well, actually I have last year’s model, the S90). These guys have larger sensors than generic digicams, although not as large as the high-end SLR digital ones.

What else? My article “Lifebox Immortality” is on the h+ Magazine site.

Now for New Year’s Eve and Day.

Have a great holiday! This is a long post, with some stuff to read, it may have to last you till 2011…

This month I made some imaginative efforts and finished the next chapter “Dispatches From Interzone” of my novel in progress, The Turing Chronicles. As I mentioned before, I wrote this chapter is in the form of letters from my Beat hero William Burroughs, some samples of which I put in my post, “Burroughs Letters, Tangier 1954-1956.”

Molding an SF action-novel out of William Burroughs letters is like collaging a landscape out of frames from the Sunday funnies. And I had to draw all those wacky little frames too. Or it’s like building an epic out of haikus. But I like the way the chapter came out. It’s funny, I think, and deep as well. You can read an excerpt down below, at the end of this post.

Right now I’m unsure of the upcoming story arc. To some extent I’m back where I was a month ago, when I wrote my blog post, “Skuggers”

It’s daunting how many scenes and ideas a novel needs. But I don’t have to write the whole novel at once. All I need now is to write the next chapter. So now what I need is to outline Chapter 8 fairly well, and also get some clear idea of what happens in Chapter 9. And the chapters after that will take care of themselves.

It’s a long process, after all. And there’s no rush. But that’s not exactly true. My sense is that I don’t feel as if there is a rush, then I might not drive myself hard enough to actually finish the book. Onward!

No, wait, Christmas comes first.

Anyway, in my “Dispatches from the Interzone,” chapter I did indeed get Burroughs to organize a trans-Atlantic skugger-star teep antenna, as I’d planned to. By the end of the chapter the construct falls apart and the individual skuggers go their own ways. And this is as it should be, because it would be too much of an onus for Turing to have a skugger-star tracking him on his road trip to Los Alamos.

It’ll just be regular cops chasing Alan, although, for a while, there will be more and more of them. We’ll see an ongoing attrition in the forces of control, as more and more of them will be converted into being skugs.

I realized today, it’s as if I’m telling the story of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, but I’m telling it from the p.o.v. of the pod people, and I’m viewing these alienated mutants as a positive force. Which is, after all, precisely what happened culturally as the 1950s segued into the 1960s.

If near the end of the book, I have Turing pulling the skugs up into a higher reality, it vaguely correlates with Tim Leary lifting the hippies out of politics and into Lotus Land.

And what happened then in the real world in terms of the culture wars. What aspect of reality might I transrealize into Turing’s final move?

I’m thinking of the internet as being the thing that resurrected political action. And it could be that Turing starts manifesting himself via the web. I could even go transreal for the last couple of chapters, and insert myself as an authorial character, getting messages from Turing in “real time.” Like there’s an astral blog site that only I and a few privileged others (such as the readers of this blog), can see. Maybe I’ll give you the URL in 2011…

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the latest chapter. Burroughs is a skugger now, that is, a shapeshifting, mildly telepathic host for a symbiotic skug. And the British Embassy has engaged him to turn a basement filled with 64 captive Arab skuggers in Tangier into a telepathic antenna for tracking Alan Turing, who’s escaped to America. He knows one of the skuggers already, a youth named Driss.

The second day, Driss and the fellahs tell me they’re edgy at being in police custody. Only a few of them speak English or Spanish, but our short-range teep is working. The skuggers don’t wanna play ball. So I get the Embassy stooges to haul down a fifty-pound bag of refined white sugar. Everyone in the pit start feeling friendly.

The third day I double the sugar ration, and slime out some tentacles from my fingertips, plugging every navel in the room. Puppetmaster Bill. “Let’s all get soft,” I propose, teeping sexy images of mollusk reproduction. I chant whatever gone strophes come to mind, also feeding the skuggers’ real-time reactions into the mix. Feebdack feedback. The locals are easy-going people, if you give them a chance.

On the fourth day, even more sugar, also a carboy of olive oil. Everyone feeling festive—we shining and sticky with the sweet slick. I push my face against Driss’s so our heads merge. Plup! Feel real wiggy. I use my squiddy arms to gather ye rosebuds. And then we’re a starfish with a shared yubbaflop head on the Embassy basement floor, like the center of a wagon wheel.

I grow out a feeler with a lobster-eye to admire what we done. Our group face look like a gangland hit on President Eisenhower, a bald baby with slit-mouth scars and eye-puckers like bullet holes. Hopper and his boss upstairs are abreast of our session, they very pleased.

On day five, I engage three footmen to haul in hods of wobbly British pastries, barrows of dates, heaped trays of kumquats. The skugger fellahs are increasingly glad to see me. Great cheers. “Booo-rows! Booo-rows! Booo-rows!”

Driss and I plup our heads together, the rest of the gang piles on. We make a parabolic monster face, a dish-shaped teep antenna pointing towards the floor. We vibe our mind-rays through the watery gut of Ma Earth. You wave, we wave. Hopper is run a droopy tentacle down the basement stairs into my spine.

And then—lo! We pick up on Turing in Florida.

Happy X and a Great Y!!!!!!

Raining here this week. I love the rain. Everything gets green, including the moss on the trunks of the oak trees.

My son Rudy put a skylight in his living-room. It doesn’t leak!

I’m playing with Lightroom all the time. Used a blue filter on this color picture to kill the overbrightness of the light fixture.

I’d like to be reborn as a crow. People used to imagine that animals work really hard to get enough food each day. Turns out, they can fill up with about an hour or hour-and-a-half of pecking. The rest of the day is for hanging out. Cawing and flapping. And no computers.

We took two of our grand-daughters to this funny old place in Oakland called Fairyland this week. It’s very much a home-brew folk-art construct. When I was a boy in Kentucky, there were lots of places like this. Disneyland didn’t exist yet.

We even saw a puppet-show of Cinderella. I always wondered about the glass slipper. Would it be comfortable?

We hit a science museum the week before. “How many bones?” This sign made me laugh, remembering an Underground comic strip years ago that started off, “I’d just smoked two big bones of the good old green and…”

The year’s dwindling down. Around this time it gets to be hard to remember what day of the week it is. The calendar breaks and falls apart. And we take a little rest among the ruins of the decaying year, making merry with our relatives and friends.

Today I’m promoting my new Search Rudy’s Lifebox page. But first let me back up a bit, and tell you what this about.

Yesterday I met an interesting couple, Bruce and Sue Wilcox. Their chatbot Suzette just won this year’s Loebner Prize for doing the best job at the Turing Imitation Game, that is, the game of the chatbot program trying to convince a human judge that the chatbot is human too. They talk via an instant-message interface. If a program could reliably and consistently win at the Imitation Game, we’d be included to say it had achieved human-like intelligence. Looking at the chatbot site describing Suzette, I was surprised to see how widespread and popular this programming exercise has become.

I’ve always thought it telling that in Turing’s 1950 article proposing this test, he begins by talking about a different kind of test—in which someone interrogates subjects via instant-messaging and tries to decide whether they are male or female. I’ve integrated my thoughts about this into my novel in progress, The Turing Chronicles, in which Turing does in fact impersonate a woman.

The dapper and fanciful writer Mark Dery has a new essay online, “Hate is All Around: The Politics of Enthusiasm (And Its Discontents)”, and near the end (on page 6) he mentions my writings about my concept of the lifebox. He also gets off some very funny lines, as when he characterizes a petulant remark by Bristol Palin as “a characteristic display of the social grace and subtlety of mind that have made her mother so universally admired on the world stage”.

Given that I’d been talking about the lifebox with the Wilcoxes last night, reading the Dery article today was enough of a push for me to finally make an alpha-release version of a lifebox on my new Search Rudy’s Lifebox page. What’s a lifebox? Quoting from the new page:

I go into considerable detail about the lifebox in my novel,Saucer Wisdom, in my non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, and in my 2009 article “Lifebox Immortality & How We Got There” which I co-authored with Leon Marvell. In a nutshell, my idea is this: to create a virtual self, all I need to do is to(1) Place a very large amount of text online in the form of articles, books, and blog posts, and (2) Provide a search box for accessing this data base.

Again, you can find the Search Rudy’s Lifebox here. The reason it functions like a chatbot emulating me, at least a little bit, is that I have, over the last ten or fifteen years, placed really quite a large amount of my writing online.

But it’s still not going to write the next chapter of my novel for me, or draw a new view of Mount Fuji.

Another day wasted? Well, maybe not. Rudy’s Lifebox can function as a partial replacement for my fading memory. Remembering there was something about this in a book, Be Not Content, that I love, I entered be not content waste time into my Rudy’s Lifebox search box, and found this from an old blog post of mine:

I’m always worrying about wasting time, right, and I saw a great line in Be Not Content, the author-narrator Abel Egregore expresses this fear to one of his stoner friends, who guffaws, “Time? How can you waste time?” And I get a little enlightenment there. Time and space, the all-pervasive ineluctable modalities. What’s to waste? You use one second per second no matter what you’re doing. A wonderful teaching.

And—we decorated our Christmas tree today!

Here’s that Search Rudy’s Lifebox link one more time. Do try it and comment below.

The other day, I posted a lot of photos on my Flickr, I put the best shots of the last ten months or so into a collection, “2010 March-Nov”. In a sharing or deluded mood, I uploaded most of them at rather high resolutions—and I don’t feel like going back and changing this, so feel free to sample and print from there for private use, although I am still maintaining copyright over the pictures. If you want to buy a ready-made print, I have a lot of my photos on Imagekind as well.

I’m going to try and keep my Flickr photostream and my Imagekind gallery a little more closely in synch with the photos I put on the blog, so in general, you might find larger forms of the images there. Adobe Lightroom is making my photo-juggling a lot easier—with the downside that I’m spending more and more time doing it, even running outside and takiing more photos just so I have more raw material to work with. “Like a picture of a water fountain? You kidding me?”

I’ve been frittering away increasing amounts of time on delusional web activities like Twitter, Flickr, Imagekind, my blog, my email, Wikipedia research, my paintings website, free ebook releases, my book websites—it’s a little alarming, really. At some point I’ll cut back. “Only not today.”

Really, I get much more pleasure out of actually writing, but by now there are so many ways to avoid writing when I have my computer on.

When I remember to be an author, these days, I’m into writing my second chapter of fake William Burroughs letters. It’s an odd mind-set, to be using such a particular and quirky format to create text that advances the plot of a science-fiction novel. Like making a portrait out of collage snippets.

But certainly Burroughs himself did often think in terms of having his novel Naked Lunch or Interzone (as he called it) be SF. The juxtaposition seems odd in 2010, because, over the years, SF has ossified into a somewhat rigid genre, and the more literary or experimental kinds of work get classified as something else. Speculative fiction. But I generally still see publishing my novels as SF in a positive light. It gives access to a certain level of distribution and readership.

[Some cellular automata “Nested Scrolls” made my Capow software.]

We went and saw John McLaughlin and his group The Fourth Dimension at the Rio Theater is Santa Cruz last night. It was lovely music, sweet, rocking, and somehow spiritual. Sylvia noted a large number of men with gray ponytails in the audience. We first saw McLaughlin with a double-neck guitar and the Mahavishnu Orchestra about 40 years ago, in Princeton, here’s a video from that time.

Speaking of earlier times, here’s a photo from 1992, right before the appearance of The Mondo User’s Guide edited by me, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, and designed by Bart Nagel, who’s wearing the flashy “sperm jacket”. The photo was taken either by Bart using a timer or, I think more likely, by Mondo staffer Heidi Foley during a photo shoot by Time magazine. Thanks to Bart for sending me this photo.

Coming back to my concerns about wasting time on the web, a good benchmark of where I’m at is the kinds of things that I think about while I’m at a concert. It’s an ideal chance to space out and the mind roam. Sometimes, more commonly with rock, I manage to get so deeply inside the music that there’s nothing else. With McLaughlin, there’s some chance of a meditative state—for me, he often evokes the mental image of being in outer space free-falling into a giant star. But I noticed that last night, I was spending more time than I wanted in thinking about how to promote my writing and images on the web.

Once again it’s time for a walk in the woods.

I’m about to write a new chapter for my Turing Chronicles in the form of letters by William Burroughs—following up on my earlier chapter, “Tangier Routines”.

By way of getting into the right frame of mind, today I copied out some of my favorite bits from a book I’ve had for nearly thirty years, William Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957, (Full Court Press, New York 1982). This book is out of print, but many of these letters are also in Oliver Harris (ed.), The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959 (Viking, New York, 1993). All of the letters I’ve excerpted below are from Tangier, and are to Allen Ginsberg.

6/24/54. I’ve been thinking about routine as an art form and what distinguishes it from other forms. One thing … it is subject to shlup over into “real” action at any time. Do you dig me? I am not sure if I dig myself. And some [poser] is going to start talking about living his art.

6/24/54. I am surrounded by curious Kafkian hostility. A number of people seem to have taken a violent, irrational dislike to me. Especially people who run bars. … This is not imagination, Allen.

8/18/54. What am I doing here, a broken eccentric, a Bowery Evangelist, reading books on Theosophy in the public library—(an old trunk full of notes in my cold water East Side flag)—imagining myself a Secret World Controller in Telepathic Contact with Tibetan Adepts … Could I ever see the merciless, cold facts on some Winter night, sitting in the operation room white glare of a cafeteria—NO SMOKING PLEASE—See the facts and myself, an old man with the wasted years, behind, and what ahead having seen the Facts?”

8/18/54. I am having serious difficulties with my novel. I tell you the novel form is completely inadequate to express what I have to say. I don’t know if I can find a form. I am very gloomy as to prospects of publication … But still I need publication for development. A writer can be ruined by too much or too little success.

10/12/54 (date uncertain). Tremendous dream. … I walk along a dry, white road. There is danger here. A dry, brown vibrating in the air, like insect wings rubbing together. I pass a village of people sleeping, living under mounds—about 2 feet high—of black cloth stitched onto wire frames. … The vibrating is everywhere now—horrible, dry, lifeless. Not a sound exactly; a frequency, a wave length. The vibrating comes from a tower-like structure. A Holy Man is causing it. … I approach [the townspeople] and ask “How much will you give me to kill the Holy Man?” We … both know money is not the point.

12/13/54. You don’t study Zen and then write a scholarly routine, for Christ’s sake! Routines are complete spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fat a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate. … Sex mixed with routines and laughter, the unmalicious, unstrained, pure laughter that accompanies a good routine, laughter that gives a moment’s freedom from the cautious, nagging, aging, frightened flesh.

2/19/55. I guess all writers suffer from fear of losing their talent, because talent is something that seems to come from outside, that you have no control over.

2/19/55. The novel is taking shape. Something even more evil than atomic destruction is the theme—namely an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man, so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted … this drug eliminates the disturbing factor of spontaneous, unpredictable life from the human equation. … Novel treats of vast … malevolent telepathic broadcast stations …

4/20/55. Why do I always parody? Neither in life nor in writing can I achieve complete sincerity … except in parody and moments of profound discouragement.

5/17/55. Just back from 14-day cure in clinic. … Everything looks sharp and different like it was just washed. Sensations hit like tracer bullets. I feel a great intensity building up, and at the same time a weakness like I can only keep myself here, back now in this doughy, dead flesh I have been away from since the habit started.

8/10/55. [Describing a crazy man who keeps accosting him on the street.] In fact there is something curiously sweet about him, a strange, sinister jocularity, as if we knew each other from somewhere, and his words referred to private jokes from this period of intimacy. On Monday, August 1, he ran amok with a razor-sharp butcher knife in the main drag, killed 5 people and wounded four, was finally cornered by the police, shot in the stomach and captured. … I wonder if he would have attacked me? I missed him by 10 minutes. The whole town is still hysterical.

9/21/55. [He gets very high on opiates and makes a scene at his rooming house.] I could only remember snatches of what had happened, but I do remember wondering why people were looking at me so strangely and talking in such tiresome, soothing voices.

10/21/55. [He’s working on the novel he calls Interzone, and which will become Naked Lunch.] This writing is more painful than anything I ever did. Parentheses pounce on me and tear me apart. I have no control over what I write, which is as it should be.

10/23/55. I am progressing towards complete lack of caution and restraint. Nothing must be allowed to dilute my routines. I know I used to be shy about approaching boys, for example, but I cannot remember why exactly. The centers of inhibition are atrophied, occluded like an eel’s ass on The Way to Sargasso—good book title. You know about eels?

10/23/55. Yesterday I took a walk on the outskirts of town. Environs of the Zone are wildly beautiful. Low hills with great variety of trees, flowering vines and shrubs, great, red sandstone cliffs topped with curiously stylized, Japanese-looking pine trees, fall to the sea. … The knife fight potential was … one facet of that moment, sitting in the café, looking out at the hill opposite, stylized pine trees on top arranged with the economy of a Chinese print against blue sky in the tingling, clear, classic Mediterranean air … I was completely alive in the moment, not saving myself, not waiting for anything or anybody … This is it right now … Actually I am so independent, so fucking far out I am subject fo float away like a balloon …

11/13/55. Arab Café: Sit down and had three words … just three long words, with Miss Green … Watching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blow back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney … Some Arabs at a table .. It is unthinkable they should molest me … Suppose they do? And suddenly they have seized me, and are preparing to castrate me? It can’t happen … must be a dream .. In Interzone it might or might not be a dream, and which way it falls might be in the balance while I watch this tea glass in the sun … The meaning of Interzone, its pace time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world.

2/26/56. When I was a child I thought you saw with your mouth. I remember distinctly my brother telling me no, with the eyes, and I closed my eyes and found out it was true and my theory was wrong.

9/13/56. [Describing a boy who wants to spend the night at his apartment after sex.] I indicate as tactfully as such a concept can be effectively indicated that I considered this project inconvenient in the widest sense. … So come along to Europe, Allen, and have a good time with the boys. I can wait. But just remember I’ll always be there if you want me … creak, creak, creak … [sound of a rocking chair]

9/13/56. And you recall my dream (described in letter of 10/12/54) about the Holy man who was making with a Malignant Telepathic Broadcast? … I am developing Holy Man concept in [my novel] Interzone. Latest Control Concepts: Anyone using telepathy as means of coercion must cut himself off form all protoplasmic contacts. He must always send, but never receive … He becomes an automaton, a ventriloquist dummy, withers in orgoneless limbo.

9/16/56. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It’s the new frisson dearie … Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old characters find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make with the old switcheroo. What are those strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young [woman], little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror … He stumbled out into the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say “Who you think you’re kidding with the queer act? I know you, baby.”

10/13/56. Germs got no class to them. And the evilest of them all are the virus … So bone lazy they aren’t even hardly alive yet

10/29/56. My disregard of social forms is approaching psychosis. … It’s like the sight of someone about to flip or someone full of paranoid hate excites me. I want to see what will happen if they really wig. I want to crack them wide open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that will ooze out. … Kicks, man, kicks.

We were at the Los Gatos Christmas parade once again on Saturday. We’ve been attending it off and on for twenty-four years.

The Stanford band is always a highlight, playing like crazy, dressed to kill. What energy! They’re probably all A students, crazy though they look. The saxes were playing with one hand behind their back…

We always have a platoon of squash-growing Italians, as if airlifted in from the East Coast or Chicago, rough and tough, phallically thrusting their vegetables. A beauty queen rides in their Cadillac, chauffeured by a presumably venal official in a top hat.

The high-school drill teams are universal, lovely to see. I can vaguely remember being that age. The marching isn’t the center of your life, it’s just something you do.

I like this kid, he looks so cool. A horn man.

Back to the parade, there’s these three or four older men who show up every year in a giant self-powered shiny metal duck. They’re fans of the University of Oregon, who’s mascot is the most famous duck of all, Donald D. I bet they work on refining the duck-car all year. It’s great.

The tumblers are awesome. My autofocus has a slight delay, so I caught this young woman further into her flip than I’d expected, but this is in fact pretty cool. Gravity-defying.

There’s this corner-store market on Los Gatos Boulevard, the Jiffy Mart, with a full line of liquor as well. Every year they sponsor a crew of freestyle bicyclists; they drive a pickup along the parade route with curved ramps on the front and back of the pickup, and every few dozen yards they stop, and the eager biker-boys do insane high-air flips. Very California.

And now I’m back at my desk, pecking away at The Turing Chronicles—I’m going to write a riff off a Charlie Parker reverie I saw, I’ll use it for the stream of thought for Alan Turing who’s disguised as a black woman inside the Sunset Lounge in 1955 West Palm Springs, Florida. I’ve been reading the lives of some jazz players, recently Miles Davis, and last year Charlie Parker. And here’s the quote I’m eyeing, from Bird Lives, The Life of Charlie Parker, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse 1973), pl 55.

If he looked across the beams of the spotlights that shone toward the bandstand, he could see a lavender haze, shimmering like air over a street on a hot summer day. He watched the heavy smoke that curled and wreathed, floating lazily upward, borne along by the waves of music. It had a sharp, pungent, odor and made a biting sensation in the nose. It was smoke from sticks of tea that were being passed from one man to another on the bandstand below. After twenty minutes of the set Charlie would feel himself borne along in the pleasant lavender haze. Then the long narrow interior of the Reno Club would grow deeper. The bar, the polished glassware in front of the mirror, the waitresses poised like blackbirds, ready to fly to their customers—the tables, booths, dancers, musicians, orchestra, everything in the Reno Club seemed to be exactly where it belonged, as if it had been there forever and would never change, fixed in time and space, and time itself stopped. He was getting high. Now he could hear the things that he had missed, the miniature sound—Basie’s little blue comments, a silvery skein of notes played by Prof as a counter line to Herschel, muted chortling of screened brass under the saxophone choir, a light scurrying of sticks across the head of the snare drum as Jesse marked off a bar section, wispy little phrases that entered somebody’s mind because of something just played.

Love those sounds, Ross.