We (Janelle and I) are very proud to announce that our first children’s book, “Sadie Meets a Bee,” is now out at Tweepea Press and available from amazon.  We want it to be accessible to everyone, so it’s also available to read online (for free). People have been telling me for ages that my drawings would be very appropriate for a children’s book, but I’ve never really had a story in mind.  Last fall, Janelle came up with this lovely story, I made some initial sketches, and we were off!  Well, of course it wasn’t quite that simple; otherwise, it wouldn’t have taken us nine months to produce the book.

So far, we’ve learned an incredible amount about publishing, book layout, formats, variations in color reproduction, and more just getting the book to press, and I plan to blog in much more detail (as well as create an ignite talk) about this process.  However, in some ways, the story of this book has only just begun – having the book on Amazon means that anyone could buy it, but there’s no reason they ever would because they’ve never heard of it.  Thus far, nearly every parent who has seen the book has wanted to get a copy for his or her little ones, so we’re trying our best to spread the word far and wide via local book release parties, social networks, online advertising, and much more.  This is a tricky road to navigate: if we can make good progress on our grassroots promotion efforts, we’ll definitely do some documentation of what we tried and what worked/didn’t.

Also, now that we’ve learned the process, the second and subsequent books should be far easier, and we’re already brimming with a multitude of ideas for what might come next.  Stay tuned, and in the meantime, please check out our book online!

So here it is.  One of my favorite acts, the Glitch Mob, will be playing at the Showbox Downtown on June 5 (event details).  Hooray!  J and I were very excited, and I volunteered to get the tickets.  Since I live in Capitol Hill and the I take home from work stops within a few blocks of the venue, I went down to the box office to get my tickets: $21.00 a piece, with a $2.00 ticket fee; a total of $23 per ticket or $46 for the both of us.  Not bad at all for a great show.  The $21.00 is split between the band, the concert promoters, and the venue (not TicketMaster, according to the wikipedia article); the $2 is a mystery fee which is likely going to TM, but it’s pretty small.  As a bonus, I walked by beautiful Pike Place, saw a guy standing on his amp belting out wacky blues music, and strolled about the city that I love on a typically damp April day.

Then, for my entertainment, I decided to look up what the price would have been had I bought the tickets online.  In a process most of you are familiar with, you can’t just click on the link for the concert and get the price – first you select your tickets, then you wait a while, and then you see $21.00.  Yay!  But that’s just the base price for the ticket.  And then you see the $8.65 convenience charge per ticket, and then the additional $0.44 in additional tickets due to the convenience charge.  So now instead of $23 a ticket, it’s $30.09, so a total of $60.18 per ticket.  Then it looks like you’re done, and you just have to enter your email/password to go further.  But we’re not done, no no no!  Once you enter your info, there’s an additional order processing fee of $5.94, a TicketFast Delivery charge of $2.50 (this is the cheapest option – you’re paying $2.50 for the privilege of printing the ticket at home), and some more taxes of $0.13.  So now we’re at $34.38 per ticket or 68.75 for two tickets.  Had you bought only one ticket, it would have been even worse, since all the final fees would apply – i.e., $38.66 per ticket (ok, maybe a few cents less in tax, but literally only a few cents).  Folks, that’s an 84% markup from the original ticket price.

So let’s think about this.  There’s nothing on the ticket that prevents you from reselling it (in fact, they only take cash, so they can’t track your ticket) – some individual states have limitations on ticket resale (ironically, in PA, you can only resell a ticket for $5 or 25% more than the face value).  So, an enterprising and trustworthy person in the community could buy up tickets at the box office and then sell them for, say, $30 a ticket, still make $7 a ticket, but undercut the TicketMaster price by $8.66 (and use the money for something more useful, presumably, like paying their rent).  I’m not the one who’s going to do this, but I definitely see an opportunity for some enterprising person to take this on.  Is TicketMaster trying to prevent this?  Of course!  Remember that $2.50 print-it-yourself cheapest delivery option? The awesome thing about that is that it ties the ticket to your name/ID, and they require you to show ID at the door that matches the ticket – i.e., no resales of that tickets. 

So why did I say “terrible yet amazing” in my title?  They’re amazing because they can pull this shit off.  They are charging you – me – us – an 84% markup, and we’re accepting it (for the most part), and with good reason.  They control access to nearly every worthwhile venue. What’s even more brilliant is that they have us thinking they’re entirely to blame.  “Oh Ticketmaster, I hate them!!” is a much sanitized version of a commonly uttered epithet amongst concert goers.  Well – have you ever wondered why so many of your favorite venues use Ticketmaster?  Because the venues get huge kickbacks from Ticketmaster (you can read more about this on the wikipedia article, as well as this much more frothing-at-the-mouth assessment of their business practices).  Ticketmaster even tells the venue (perhaps not in so many words), “you can tell them to hate us, that your hands are tied, it’s that evil Ticketmaster, etc.”   Is it evil? Yes.  Is it price-gouging? Yes.  Is it also brilliant? Yes. 

Is there anything you can do about it?  No.  Congresscritters have tried, British parliament has tried, Canadian parliament has tried, not to much avail. Well, that’s not quite true – there is something you can do.  You can take a rainy afternoon and have a nice trip down to the Showbox, or Neumo’s, or wherever, and get your tickets in person -  a big shout out to those venues for letting us do that.  Who knows – if you’re lucky, you might hear some awesome, wacky blues music on your way in.  And if you’re really lucky, like I was when I went to get tickets for Bassnectar last summer, you might even hear that night’s band (in my case, the Shins), practicing for their evening show

1. Fructose is mostly bad for you (note fructose and High Fructose Corn Syrup are not the same, see #5 below); it is entirely metabolized by the liver, and turns mostly into fat and triglycerides; its metabolized in the body in a manner very similar to alcohol. The small amount that occurs naturally in fruits comes with a great deal of fiber and helpful enzymes; fruit juices (even 100% fruit juices) are much worse, as they are delivering only the fructose without the fiber. Fructose also does not trigger a glycemic response, which is your body’s signal to stop eating more, thus your body doesn’t get satiated and you keep having more of it. This article tells more about the problems with metabolizing fructose (the talk below goes into much more scientific detail, but this article is a good summary). Glucose, on the other hand, is the "fuel of life," and can be used by every cell in your body; a relatively small fraction of it turns to fat; most of it is stored as glycogen in the liver.  Recent, peer-reviewed work has showed that fructose has a much greater impact on obesity. The one advantage of fructose is that it can be turned more rapidly to ATP in the bloodstream; so if you are in glycogen depletion (i.e., running a marathon and totally out of your glucose reserves), fructose can be effective at giving you instant energy. See the talk "Sugar: the Bitter Truth", by Dr. Robert Lustig, a research physician at UCSF for lots more information on this – it’s 90 minutes long, but after the first 10 minutes you’ll likely be as hooked as I was.

2. Most common sugars/syrups are a combination of fructose and glucose, see this chart of common sweeteners and their ratios. In some sense, the lower the fructose content, the better (unless you’re diabetic), given the problems with fructose above; however, an excess of glucose in the blood will be converted to fatty acids and triglycerides in the blood, it will also provoke an insulin response (sugar crash).  It’s likely not practical to sweeten with just glucose, though, since (a) glucose is less sweet than ordinary sugar (sucrose), about 70%; fructose is more sweet, and (b)  a tablespoon of glucose powder has twice the glycemic index of a tablespoon of table sugar, since sucrose is only 50% glucose.

3. A corollary to #2 is that eating too much is really bad for you, especially if you’re trying to lose weight or lower your cholesterol, since the excess glucose will all become fatty acids/cholesterol/etc.  This is why nutritionists are always recommending eating many small meals instead of one big one.

4. Table sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide, with one fructose and one glucose for every molecule linked together with a weak chemical bond; as such it’s 50% fructose and 50% glucose. This bond is broken down in the small intestine by the enzyme sucrase.

5. High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS, is not nearly as bad as pure fructose: common HFCS (HFCS-55) is 55% fructose, 42% glucose, or (HFCS-42) 42% fructose and 53% glucose; HFCS-90 is rarely used in foods. In other words, the proportion of fructose and glucose are about the same as in table sugar (sucrose), the only difference is that they are in solution as monosaccharides and as such sucrase doesn’t come into the picture. As such, other than the invocation of sucrase, HFCS is basically equivalent to sugar in terms of the fructose/glucose content delivered to your body.

6.  A cup of "100% pure" fruit juice is much worse for you than a cup of soda, at least in terms of fat impact/obesity, as it will typically contain more sugar, and since the sugars in the pure fruit juice are entirely fructose.  Furthermore, the juice is typically entirely devoid of fiber (I’m not sure how much orange juice "with pulp" alleviates this).  This study, referenced in WebMD, showed how individuals consuming fructose showed more weight gain/obesity than those consuming the same amount of sucrose.  Note, however, that there are other benefits to fruit juice, such as providing essential vitamins, amino acids, etc., which soda does not have.

7. Pure corn syrup is almost 100% glucose, however, it’s hard to find on the market. Karo, for instance, sold as corn syrup, has a substantial portion of fructose. It is sometimes sold as "Dextrose," “corn sugar,” or "Brewer’s Sugar" and is common in bodybuilder products.

8. Most natural "high-carb" starchy foods, such as rice, potatoes, etc., are all glucose, but come with a good deal of fiber. This means it will take a little more time for the body to absorb the sugar, as opposed to the instant high/crash of a soft drink, fruit juice, or spoonfuls of table sugar.  Depending on how much effort it takes for the body to break it down, though, it may not take much more time; how much of an insulin response it produces compared to pure glucose determines its glycemic index.  White bread, for instance, which is very low in fiber, seems to produce 70% of the insulin response of pure glucose.

9. Maple syrup has a surprisingly good glucose to fructose ratio: about 4:1.  As a result, it has a high glycemic index, but will result in less of the fat/poisions one gets from metabolizing fructose.

Artificial Sweeteners

Caveat: the following points are much more controversial; there’s not a lot of conclusive evidence about the long-term effects of any artificial sweeteners.  That said, you may still find the following points interesting, as I certainly did!

10. Sucralose (splenda), while superficially similar to a sugar molecule, has more in common with insecticides; don’t be fooled by its -lose suffix. In fact, sucralose was discovered by scientists trying to come up with a new insecticide. It contains a Chlorine atom, which is very stable in salt (NaCl), but not nearly so much in its covalent bond with carbon.

11. Aspartame (Nutrasweet), when metabolized by the body, produces (amongst other things) formaldehyde. This is an extremely toxic substance, and does not occur naturally in the body. I found it curious that the wikipedia page for aspartame says that it does occur in the body, and the page for formaldehyde says it doesn’t.   Proponents of aspartame argue that it does occur naturally in some food, such as tomatoes.  However, this article does a good job of reasoning about the actual amount of formaldehyde that ends up in your body after having 1 Liter of diet soda (600 mg ingested, 40 mg absorbed is the most conservative estimate); this is enough to cause gradual damage according to the article, and much more than ordinary foods have (tomatoes, for instance, have 10mg/kg or 4.5mg/lb ingested, so likely around 0.3mg/lb absorbed, i.e. one Liter of soda results in more than 100 times the amount of formaldehyde in your body than a pound of tomatoes) – see this document for a list of formaldehyde content in common foods. 

12.  Artificial sweeteners may actually make you fat:  this fascinating study shows that diet sodas are highly predictive of later obesity across a wide variety of factors.

After a few months of doing paper sketches and putting them up to share on facebook, flickr, etc., I realized what a valuable and motivating experience it was.  Valuable in that with every new sketch, I was learning new things, developing my technique, etc.; motivating in that I could get it out to the world (and occasionally get feedback) instantly.  Even people who wouldn’t make comments on the sites would comment on them when they saw me in person; as time went on, it felt more and more like I was drawing for an audience (which added a bit of pressure, but it was still fun).

Given that I’m often reluctant to sit down and work on songs because it can seem so onerous and ponderous (what if I screw it up?) to do on my own, I thought I’d try applying the same philosophy to playing with music.  The result is a set of what I call “song sketches,” of which I’ve made nine so far (in the grid above), roughly one a day.  So far, it’s been great – I haven’t gotten as much feedback as with the sketches, but I find myself motivated to work on some music when I come home.  I think this is for several reasons – first, because these are sketches, it’s pretty low pressure – I’m not worried about making something that sounds produced and perfect.  Second, because they’re short, I know I can finish and post the new piece every night.  Third, it gives me a chance to play with different instruments and types of music than I usually do, since I’m not making complete songs.   Finally, it’s actually quite a nice way to document song ideas – there’s already a few that I want to make into more complete songs.

Hopefully I’ll keep doing this for a while – my initial goal was 30, but who knows where I’ll end up: maybe 10, maybe 100.  Stay tuned   You can can see the playlist of all the songsketches here.

As many of you know, I’ve been doing a lot more sketching recently, and now that I finally got a decent scanner, I’ve been getting higher quality scans of them to put up on Flickr, Facebook, etc.  For now, I’m enjoying the sharing and commenting on Facebook, but of course the photo management (multiple resolutions, view count, etc.) is much better on Flickr.

You can see the current batch of sketches on Flickr here.  Most of them are just drawn with a fine-point Sharpie in a Moleskine sketchbook (they’re the only ones with thick enough paper such that the Sharpie doesn’t bleed through).  The sketch above is from a recent Facebook project where I offered to draw sentences submitted by my friends.  The sentence for this one was from Andy, who said, "I don’t want to dodge this rain cloud."  Heh.

1. Jack Conte: multitalented musical genius like noone else you’ve ever heard. It’s true. Start with "Yeah Yeah Yeah" and then move on to his "VideoSongs" on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzr32OqGlOA

2. Andie Francoeur: Tori Amos and Fiona Apple had a secret love child: Andie! Listen to Cloud Number 9 and be thankful I told you about her; her voice is simply unbelievable; she’s also an awesome person. She’s in Singapore right now but will be back in the PNW and touring in a few months. http://www.myspace.com/andiefrancoeur

3. Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s: you’ll hear their songs and be like, "uh, so why haven’t I heard this before?" Yup. It’s like that. Start with "Quiet as a Mouse" – the video is pretty spectacular as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na7xJ7wQ-iw

4. Red Sparowes: basically the Cure without vocals; surprisingly compelling. I learned about this one from a personals ad (go figure!). Another cool fact – their first album’s track titles, when stitched together, form a poem – that’s why they’re so long. Start with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LuvSLRYEec

5. FighterX (FighterXtreme): the crunchiest 8-bit techno you can possibly dream of played at 10x the speed and 100x the awesome. HEADRUSH!!! When playing live, one of his instruments is a Nintendo DS. You will fall in love instantly… rock on: http://www.myspace.com/fighterxtreme

6. Copy: if robots wrote each other love songs, this is what they’d sound like: computerish melodies in a warm electronic stew. He’s also an awesome guy; I met his parents for his first CD release party (he’s out of PDX). Mobius Beard is my favorite of his albums, though Hair Guitar is fun too. Start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb0BXpojJlQ but then move on to his myspace page (you know how to find it).

7. The Books: Crazy bits of sampled reality configured in ultra-sparse-mode and lovingly arranged with contemplative goodness. Start with "Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again." Listen to it in stereo with someone you love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cx10MrMYB4&feature=related

8. Kate Isenberg: the kind of warm folk music that will make you curl up with happiness on your favorite couch, close your eyes, and smile and cry yourself to sleep. Her album is like a lullaby, a soundtrack for falling in and out of love. As you might expect, she’s a wonderful, genuine person in real life as well. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=73273271

9. Kent: Radiohead, but from Sweden. If you liked Ok Computer, you’ll love Isola as well. They do all their songs in Swedish (Svenska) and English; the Swedish version of my favorite song (Celsius) is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCBxNjqpT3o .Their myspace page has some English songs – I’d recommend "747": http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=6733769

10. Panther: this guy must be taking so many drugs he’s on a whole other plane. I saw him live, freaking out all over the place with a 1980′s casio keyboard – blew my mind. Put on a good hat and listen to this crazy dude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUu5gO4RUxo

I haven’t written about new art I’ve seen in a little while, mostly because I’ve been terribly busy, but Jody’s work is so exceptional I feel I have no choice.  Some friends had convinced me into the Angle gallery with talk of an amazing room (which I later found and had seen before).  I don’t often go to the Angle given past experiences, but was convinced enough by their enthusiasm to wander in.

On my way to the room they described, though, I caught a strangely disturbing sculpture out of the corner of my eye and walked into a room full of wild characters and dark imagination.   Throughout the small gallery there were mixed media sculptures, paintings, linoleum cuts, painted dolls, and other exhibitions.  Each piece was darkly twisted:  a child sneaking up on a hapless beast in the linoleum cut above ("Little Harry Closes In"), two children waiting in a nest (for their mother?  to be eaten?) in "Lester Tells Charlie His Dreams", a twisted creature in his underwear surrounded by images of naked women (and severed heads? or dolls? in "The Cranky Bachelor").  This is the work of a beautifully dark imagination, a genius of mythic noir.  In her mind there is another world that breathes dark fairy tales, and like her fragile deer I was powerless to look away.   As Ani DiFranco once said, it’s "beautiful & grotesque & all the rest of that bug stuff."

I’m always a sucker for technical prowess, of which Jody has plenty, but for me this came through most beautifully in her linoleum cuts (like the above).  The level of detail is simply phenomenal, and her execution is flawless.  The photos on her website are great, but to really appreciate the intricacy and composition (especially of the sculpture pieces) you should go see it in person.  I’m hoping she continues to show her work at future artwalks; directions to her gallery as well as her contact information are available at her website.

I would have loved to look further at each piece in detail and ask her about her process, but I only had time to say hello and compliment her work – I was off to see Jack Conte at the Mars Bar, which I’ll also write about shortly!

[Since many have asked - the video above is intentionally super-cheesy and meant to be ironic/funny.  Enjoy! ]

I don’t usually post about work stuff, but so much of my work, heart, and passion have gone into this product, I just had to say something.  Songsmith is a music creation tool that we just released at CES today:  you sing into it, and it comes up with appropriate chords to make a backing track for you.  It’s aimed at both singers who don’t have a musical background, to give them a means to make a full song out of just their voice, but also at songwriters/musicians (like me), for whom this is an excellent musical scratch pad.  As a songwriter, I’m always coming up with little melodies, but coming up with appropriate chords is a slow and painstaking process.  Though I can do a reasonable job at it, I often find myself using the same basic chords and patterns.  With Songsmith, I can just move around some sliders, lock a few chords, select a few alternatives, and very quickly come up with a great musical “sketch,”  i.e., chords for my melody, that I can then flesh out myself or take to my more proficient guitarist/keyboardist friends.  I use this product for an hour or more almost every day, and will be posting some of the songs I’ve written with it shortly now that it’s been released.

Songsmith is certainly not something I made all by myself – far from it!  Dan Morris (also at MSR) and I had been independently thinking of the problem before we even met for the first time, and started working on it almost as soon as Dan came to MSR in late 2006.   Then he, Ian Simon (an intern from UW), and I went on to do the bulk of the initial research in the summer of 2007; at that time it was called the  MySong project.  In fact, it was the user studies for that research that led us to seek a means of productizing it: singers who had never been able to make full songs before were so amazed and psyched at being able to do it in just a few minutes; almost everyone asked us if they could get a copy of the software.  Well, a year and a half later, with a ton of help from the awesome folks at the MSR Advanced Development Team (a special shout out to Richard Hughes,  Behrooz Chitsaz, Gavin Jancke, Jim St. George, Darren Gehring, ThuVan Pham, Rick Guiterrez, and Ann Paradiso), as well as our partners (PG Music and Garritan), we’ve made it into a product that folks can download and use. 

Part of what makes this release particularly exciting to me is that (1) it came from real and interesting research, which forms the core functionality of the product (2) it involves music and especially songwriting, which is a huge passion of mine, and (3) it’s a tool that I personally find indispensable in my music!  Well, as you can tell, I’m gushing: like a new parent, I’m extremely proud but also extremely protective of our new creation, and am hoping that the world will love this as much as I do    I’m loving the press coverage so far, but the most gratifying thing has definitely been seeing other folks download the product and make their own songs with it, like this one by “Luna Jade.”  Love it (and her song is awesome, too)!

You can find out everything you want to know about Songsmith and download a full-featured trial version here.  Also, if you love it, please become a fan on our facebook page here!

After many months, I’ve finally put together another song and made a little animated video for it.  This one’s called "Stay with Me" – it’s a song I wrote back in the spring/summer of 2007 about a year after breaking up prematurely with someone special.  It took that year to distill what I’d learned from that experience, to understand the mistakes I had made and the things I hadn’t been able to appreciate at the time, and that spirit found its way into this song.  I’ve put up the mp3 recording of the song here; if there’s interest I’ll put up the lyrics later as well.

This is also the first song that I recorded with a large-diaphragm condenser microphone (specifically, the Audio-Technica AT3035, highly recommended by my friend and colleague Dan Morris, and an awesome deal on special at $140).  From hearing my past recordings and singing, Dan felt that a condenser would really make a big difference (especially given the lighter character of my voice), and I think he was quite right.   As he has often said and I now firmly believe, dynamics are great for live performance, but for recording, condensers are the way to go.

The video for this one was pretty fun too.  I’ve been wanting to animate some of my little sketches for a while and had been flailing around trying to find a good platform to do it in and contemplating writing my own.  In the end, I decided to draw everything with a Wacom Graphire tablet (the cheap 4×5 version) and then animate them using Powerpoint (!).  Several people have asked how I actually used Powerpoint to do that, so I may make a little tutorial video on that later – it’s actually quite easy and fun in the 2007 version.

Before I did the animation, I storyboarded the video on paper (below).  I actually like the drawings on the storyboard far better than the ones I did on the tablet – I’m just not as comfortable drawing on the tablet and not being able to see where the lines go, etc.  My incredible artist friend Sam Trout was telling me over New Year’s that he does everything in pen, scans it in, then manipulates it on the computer.  I think I may need to go that route as well and invest in a scanner, as I’m much happier drawing on paper.    Also, I’d have much better pictures of my drawings (like the storyboard below!)

I finally put together the video clips, sketches, and stills from tuesday night to make a little video of election night.  The camera motion is a bit much (I was walking while recording), but it’s worth watching until the end .  Enjoy!