Due to overwhelming demand, I've added the RSS feature of iBlog to the site. Look on the right-side navigation for the link under "RSS Feed". Yes, there were at least two people who stood outside my apartment. Not sure whether they were just lost, or on their way to throw away some trash, but I took that as a sign of my need to embrace glasnost. Thus, rest assured: I HAVE HEARD YOU AND AM RESPONDING! THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE SHALL NOT BE FORSAKEN!!

(now, please don't ransack my dacha...) 

As some of my faithful readers will know, I drove to the 2005 SAM conference, since it was only in Eugene, OR, and I have time on my hands for such indulgences. Wonderful drive northward, and it was great to escape the rain that had been suffocating the delta area for a few days nonstop. The sun was out in full force by the time I'd hit Redding and it stayed sunny all the way to Eugene. Rain didn't come to Oregon until Saturday, and my journey home Sunday was also an on-again-off-again rain affair. With some snow for good measure.

I drove home via a long, scenic tour of the Klamath region of Oregon and California. Partly this was to kill time -- R3's flight wasn't supposed to arrive in Sacramento until 9:30 pm so I needed something to do in order to make the timing of my own arrival at the airport work out. Thus, I decided to drive along OR 58 to US 97 and then down into California. I also wanted to take the opportunity to drive CA 161, the most northern east-west CA highway and one that runs parallel to the state line, about 25 feet south of said line. From there I wanted to see CA 265, a tiny little thing near Weed, CA.

So that's what I did. I climbed up to Willamette Pass, encountering slushy conditions along the way, and arrived at the pass in a light snowfall. I thought about putting on the tire chains I'd purchased for the SAM roadtrip, but the conditions really weren't that bad and simply driving carefully would be fine. So, on down the backside into the high scrub of the Klamath region. There I met up with US 97 and headed south toward the city of Klamath Falls, OR. Rain and light snow alternated depending on the change in elevation (I think this is what they call the "wintry mix" on the East Coast), and the outside of the car was a mess, but the road was straight. US 97 drives along the eastern shore of Upper Klamath Lake (partially frozen) and then arrives at Klamath Falls, where I stopped for lunch. After lunch, it was on to OR 39 for the remaining trip south, accompanied by the railings of some right-wing health nut on the radio.

The OR 39 leg was quite short and I was soon over the border into California. Immediately there was the turnoff to CA 161 -- not more than 25 feet from the border. CA 161 is a desolate road, straight except for a "V" shaped dip in the middle in order to take you to Lower Klamath Lake and the Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. I stopped to photograph the road signs of course and to look at the scenery. By this time the rain had stopped and the sun was just peeking through the dark clouds. CA 161 ends at US 97, so I resumed my travel down that highway, heading toward I-5.

Mt. Shasta dominates the skyscape of Siskiyou county, and yesterday was no exception. Once you leave the Butte Valley you're greeted with the massive presence of the mountain, and yesterday's partly sunny/cloudy mix made for some really impressive views. I dodged death in order to get a shot of the mountain from the middle of the highway and then moved on toward Weed. CA 265 was actually a little difficult to find, and I ended up retracing my steps along US 97 for a couple of miles to make sure I hadn't missed the turn-off somewhere. Eventually I found it though, right in downtown Weed. It's only about half a mile long, but it is signed once in either direction.

From there it was I-5 southward. The rain kicked up again as I listened to an interesting series of interviews on NPR, and soon I was greeted with signs indicating the upcoming exit for Shasta Dam. Remember, I need things to do until 9:30 pm, so I exited. The road to the dam also happens to be CA 151, so that was a slightly added incentive. Shasta Dam is the largest dam in the state and one of the largest in the country. Like Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam, it's a Depression-era structure, and like Grand Coulee it's one of those massively long gravity dams (Hoover is an arch dam). The rain had begun again, so I toured the small Visitor Center for a bit. Not too bad, but still not as cool as the Hoover's center. I saw cars driving across the top of the dam, but also saw security fences and barriers at the entrance, and walked over to ask about driving. The security person said you could drive across, but you needed to apply for a permit and background check at the sheriff's security hut. No thanks, especially since you can walk across without any government blessing. So I walked out onto the dam, camera snapping away. It's really neat, and the weather yesterday made for a unique setting. I got back in my car at 4:30 and decided I should get back on I-5: I didn't really know how long it would take to get to Sacramento, and you never know about traffic or accidents, particularly with all the rain. So I resumed the drive south, treated myself to Round Table Pizza in Willows (which is in Glenn county, don'tcha know), and moved on. I was still waaaaay early and drove around northern Sacramento for a while, randomly, until 8:15 or so before giving up and parking at the daily lot of the airport to wait it all out. Of course, all the rain in L.A. delayed R3's plane by 30 minutes, so it was a slow wind-down to an interesting exploratory day.

Pictures are here. 

A few weeks ago I got a somewhat frantic phone call from Chris, drummer of Madlife, desperate for me to put something, anything, new on the Madlife web site. Things had been quiet musically (har har) with the band the last few months and it was beginning to seem like they'd disappeared. They'd recently hired a new bass player and taken some new photos, and when Joyce sent me one of the photos it looked great. However, Chris wanted me to use it on the main navigation page. Problem: it was very orange and the current site was very blue. The only solution was to completely redo the site, also because the old bass player's face was all over the site and we couldn't simply put up a picture with the new bassist in it while the old one was still "around." Joyce sent me a few more pics, including a Photoshopped version of the first orange one that had a cool blur effect to it. I used those two in a simple Flash introduction over a short clip of music from the single the band is pushing via a radio promotion deal they signed up for, and then got to work designing a new version of the site. I'm particularly proud of it and the progress I've made with CSS, so come back if you want to read my posterity notes.

Funny how you stumble across an interesting visual hook by accident. Take the horizontal and vertical lines behind each of the navigation buttons. I knew we needed to keep the scary Quake font, but I've never had any experience giving more depth to my graphics. But, just futzing around in Fireworks, I came across the line types "Piano Keys" and "Toxic Waste," and combined with the Quake I instantly knew I'd found something cool. The orange-brown of the letters suddenly became a rusted industrial look when next to the sleek horizontal lines, and the freaky vertical line suddenly became strangely DNA-like. Whereas the previous version of the site was all about the cool efficiency of steel blue glinting in the lights, this new look seemed to be referencing Alien or The Thing as it might have been set in a burned out version of Metropolis or one of those other sci-fi movies where life isn't sleek and polished but strangely untechnological (can't remember the movie, but it's the one where the guys works in the office and they all talk to each other around the building using big black air hose-type things. Basically, the guy's trying to break out of the conformity, etc. It's pretty recent I think. MEC?) Anyway, that led me to the first challenge: color. I had the rust/orange, but where do you go from there? Since I was working on the navigation (oh, I also wanted to do a real vertical navigation thing unlike the three-column layout previously) I got familiar with Fireworks' frames feature (for rollovers -- it exports the images and the appropriate html which you then import into Dreamweaver. But you all had experience with that already, didn't you?) and came across the yellow, followed by the freaky greenish-blue on the vertical lines (that made it look like DNA). Briefly dispairing over the thought of a return to orange and yellow (which marked the 2001-2002 edition of the site, before the steel blue phase), I kept at it.

Next to be created was the large header graphic at the top of each page. The Madlife wording is a bitmap and until now I'd resisted putting in the effort to break it up manually in order to use with the letters individually. Well, this time I broke out the old lasso tool and lasso'd the "A" because I wanted a long version of the horizontal line to pass under that letter. That done, I brought another of Joyce's images into Photoshop for a general filterization. I came across the Cutout filter that messed with the image just enough to be cool. Truthfully, from a design standpoint I think it basically contradicts the rusted industrial of the rest of the graphics, but it was the best I could do and it didn't look completely terrible either so I kept it, and then the big header was done. Then I added the rust/brown double border around the big content <td>, deploying CSS border styles for the first time as well as setting the padding of that single cell with CSS. Small things, I know, but I hadn't used them in a real-world site before, and the feeling of CSS control (particularly for margins) is great.

Then came the hardest part: I've got rust, I've got yellow, but what color for the links? Something wild came out first: a bright green-blue that at first seemed wild enough to be cool. Then it quickly seemed too wild and I began darkening it gradually, to maintain the mysteriousness of things, you know. I still needed a third (and a fourth) accent color, and that dark green-blue (#003333 for those of you keeping score at home) worked (darker still became the visited links), but never as a full background color (far too green in that amount). It would only work as a thin line, and thus the idea for bordering interior tables and setting off divisions of the pages with those borders. Some more experimentation produced the fourth color: the table header color of #111111 -- just grey enough not to be black (on a Mac) but not visually distracting the way a brighter hue would be.

The dark gold text and the Courier font were easy to arrive at: Courier is mono-spaced and olde computer-like which fit with the trans-historical feel of the design; and the particular shade of gold looked cool both against the rust and with the #003333 interspersed for links.

From there is was a fairly simple copy and paste job from the old site files into the new. The Guestbook and Forums haven't received their makeovers yet because they'll require I redo some more graphics and set the colors through trial and error via a web interface, and I've not yet had the time to get to them. I spent about a week straight in the redesign and the necessity of getting back to the book has taken over for the moment. Still, I got rave reviews from the band and so forth, and all in all, I'm pleased. Comments and critiques are of course welcome! 

After fits and starts throughout January, I've been able to have a good February so far (thanks to R3 letting me borrow her svelte 15" PB G4) and my goal is to deliver a humble solitary chapter to my editor next week at the SAM conference. I've started at the beginning, reworking the first diss. chapter and have found some cool things to riff on (so to speak). For instance, at the end of the dissertation process I discovered a useful book on American hardcore punk but could only reference that genre in a footnote. It's been nice the last few days to bring the footnote into the main text and incorporate it into a bunch of new material about hardcore and the NWOBHM as they relate to thrash metal. Waksman's chapter on the NWOBHM (in his forthcoming book) was also very important in that regard. Since "Identity" is an important noun in my title, I've been trying to be conscious of putting all the new stuff into that context. So, I have a little bit about James Hetfield's juvenile vocal shriek (and his trepidation at being Metallica's "front man" initially) and the development of his voice into the powerful chest mid-range "bark" that's come to represent his popular image. I'm also looking forward to dissecting the development of his particular body language during performance. Basically, when you see pictures of Hetfield on stage, at the microphone mid-song, from the last ten years he has this really interesting hunched/squatted posture. The posture conveys a sense of immovable stability and with his center of gravity so low it sort of enacts the heaviness of the music. Combined with the way his upper body hunches over the mic, head pointed downward into the mic and tilted to the left slightly allowing his hair to drape over the right side of his face (but only for as long as he's singing -- in between phrases he flips his head back theatrically making the hair fly), it's a very unusual stance. But, importantly, it's one whose development can be documented by video: in 1983 Hetfield stood straight up, in 1984 he's got the lower torso somewhat in the squat but the upper torso is till fairly straight. By 85 and 86, the complete Hetfieldian stance is evident. From there I'll be talking more about the way the changes in rhythmic texture and intensity were represented physically within individual songs like "Whiplash." And from there, from there, I need to find an ending to the chapter because it originally went straight into the second half of the old dissertation chapter, which is now chapter 2 of the book. I have some ideas for the transition between the two chapters having to do with the band's gear being stolen on their first tour in 83, and that leading to the writing of "Fade to Black," the subject of chapter 2 -- so, the whole "young thrash metal band tours U.S. living the life until tragedy strikes. How do they handle it? Tune in next time..." -- that kind of thing.

P.S. My sidebar on Cliff Burton in Bass Player Magazine came out this week, so I am officially a professional musicologist (they say the check's in the mail). It's only 621 words, and judging by the tricks they had to do to get the layout to on the page to look good, I could have given them 1000 words and things would have been fine. Still, they only wanted 500 words to begin with. It's on page 56 of the February 2005 issue if you're browsing in the magazine section of a bookstore. If not, the article is available online as well.