2016 NaPoWriMo Poem #2: Light Is A Bully

light is a bully
if you’re the wrong size
in the wrong place.

it will claw at your surface,
cracking and peeling
your very essence.
it will flip you around
and leave you spinning
until you break.
it will drag you
from a path you’ve followed
for millions upon millions of years
and beyond your control
send you to the heart of the sun
before blasting your ashes away
to the void of interstellar space.

light is a bully
but darkness a thief
that slowly takes and takes
until you equilibrate
with nothing left to give.



----

Video of YORP Spinup from Derek Richardson's multimedia page: https://www.astro.umd.edu/~dcr/gallery.html.
Related paper: Walsh, K.J., Richardson, D.C., Michel, P. 2008. Rotational breakup as the origin of small binary asteroids. Nature 454, 188-191
Also see: Walsh, K.J., Richardson, D.C., Michel, P. 2012. Spin-up of rubble-pile asteroids: Disruption, satellite formation, and equilibrium shapes. Icarus 220, 514-529

2016 NaPoWriMo Poem #1: To An Empty Place

there was enough sparkle
for the landing,
which was not
a small affair.
one flash of light
but no smoking pistol.


there's no sign of life,
just the power to charm.
but do you remember
the bills we have to pay?
after five years
of humble pie or bitter fruit
it seems there’s nothing i can do.




i heard a rumor from ground control
i won’t be king
but no, love, we’re not alone.
if there's life on mars
really never was the point.


---

I'm telling myself that I'm warming up. I'm not even convinced I can call this "my" poem.

National Poetry Writing Month 2016 Incoming!

April is National Poetry Writing Month, aka NaPoWriMo. As part of it, people are encouraged to write a poem every day. If you do that, you "win". While there's no requirement to do anything with these poems, every April since 2010 I've turned this site, nominally my music blog, into a poetry blog where I post that day's poem. And every year I've written a version of this post explaining what I'm doing...

For a variety of reasons that I won't get into here (but might leak into this year's poems) I've had a difficult March and may have a difficult April. I'd considered not writing at all this year, but it is something I always look forward to and get a lot of enjoyment from, so I think I'll give it a shot. :)

In 2010 I wrote about a different baseball team every day.  In 2011 I switched to chemical elements. Since 2012 I've been writing space poetry, beginning with writing about specific objects but of late wandering off into more expansive concepts. I expect to write more space poems this year, though I'm going to give myself slack to write about whatever I feel like.

I do hope you'll join us in writing something every day, or even a few days, this April. If you'd like to post something but don't have a space, I'd be happy to post it here under your name or anonymously.

A few of my favorites from previous years:
The Eighth Wonder, In Repose (2010)
Fourteen Atoms, Twenty Seconds (2011)
Am I Not A Planet? (2012)
science is a sometimes friend (2013)
The Summer Cottage (2014)
The Sea Haunts The Camp (2015)

Song for Sandra, Sort of

I have been feeling physically terrible for a few weeks. Today is the first day I felt like picking up my guitar, and I thought I'd make the best of it.  While I've been thinking about REM and the 25th anniversary of the release of Out of Time, I decided in the end to do an original of very recent vintage.

I started working on "Song for Sandra, Sort of" while driving across Arizona and California in January. I was thinking about some colleagues and the crazy things we put ourselves through to stay afloat and try to make things better in the field of research science. Most of the words came to me on that drive, though some of them were written along with the music in mid-February. The bridge isn't quite settled in my mind, though perhaps the act of recording will make this the final version. I'm not sure if this song has a future beyond this blog post, but I guess we'll see.  The name "Sandra" was picked to go along with the consonance of the other title words, and because I don't know anyone named Sandra (at least not well)--not unlike the decision to name the love interest in OBAFGKM "Suzanne".

In case it wasn't obvious, it was recorded live in glorious mono all at once. I tend to use Audacity when I record like that.

Voila:
Song for Sandra, Sort of

Test Me, Schaller

So, as has happened before, a meme for my local Twitter gang has turned into a song. This one took a few years to ripen and is slightly different from the actual phrase we use, but such is art.

Chris Schaller is a great guy and the ground system software guy for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He also can be kind of snarky (which is part of his charm). After he teased the nearly-equally-snarky Sarah Hörst, she responded "don't test me schaller".  Simple enough. For whatever reason, the term took off (well, for small values of taking off) among several planetary science tweeters, even leading to a T-shirt with the phrase.

I'd thought it would be a good song title. Turns out that "Test Me, Schaller" is even better than "Don't Test Me, Schaller" (at least for me). I'd had the first line/melody for a little while, but finally wrote the rest of it yesterday.  And in the interest of striking while hot etc., here it is:

"Test Me, Schaller" (live to mono)

Don't expect to see this on any albums or anything. It seems a bit too esoteric. :)

Also, Happy Mardi Gras!!

A too-quick, too-short post commemorating David Bowie

I woke this morning to find with shock that David Bowie had died. As many have said, it almost seemed like he couldn't die, but as with all the other people we felt similarly about, he could.

Bowie deserves a much longer, much more detailed post than I can give him, at least right now.  What I can do right now is post a snippet of a cover song. Back in college, we did a few songs by Bowie--"Suffragette City" foremost among them. But I'm going to post something I had much more recent involvement with.

At the most recent Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in November, we had an open mic night. I referred to it earlier as I was trying to decide what original to play.  I was lucky enough to have a few times on stage that night, but the one that had the most response from the audience was with Maria Banks and Joe Spitale as part of a trio we kind of called "Hot Ham, Jarlsberg, and the Deli Slicer" (it's a bit of a long but maybe not that interesting story). When Maria said she wanted us to play something together and she'd bring her travel harp, it was obvious to me that "Space Oddity" was the song to play. Some video may have been captured, though I haven't seen it.

What I can offer is a little bit of our rehearsal, which I recorded. It's rough, and the microphone is too close to me (so the mix is terrible and you can't tell that Joe is doing the lead singing), but it's something I can do right now.

Space Oddity (rehearsal)-- Hot Ham, Jarlsberg, and the Deli Slicer

RIP, David.

2015 In Review

It's a bit later than other years in review, but I figure it's still early enough in 2016 to recap 2015 on this blog.  It wasn't as busy a year as some, due to some big work projects and a lot of travel, but I still made 40 posts.

Despite this being my "music blog" the majority of those posts were poems, as usual. I took part in National Poetry Writing Month, and successfully wrote and posted a poem every day. It's hard to pick a single favorite poem from this year, I'll just point to two that I like:  The more whimsical "Very Different" and the less whimsical "When Collins Wakes".  I also posted, along with many friends, a poem for the Pluto Flyby by New Horizons.

There were a few musical anniversaries marked here. Personally-beloved original "Down From The Skies" turned 25, and I indulged in a re-recording that I posted here. "Passerby" turned nearly as old,  and I did a first-ever recording of it, which I also posted.  Two other originals also saw their first posting here: "The MANTIS Song" commemorating our Cat-1 mission proposal, and "Surf Titan", which is something I threw together in the mid-90s and then threw together as a recording shortly before posting. I also provided two versions of "The Astronomers Song"--an additional set of verses honoring women astronomers (with terrible-looking video of the performance), and a go at the original words. That latter version also came with a run-through of "The Girl Next Door", which was written nearly the same time and is connected in my head.  Finally, I recorded a John Lennon/Beatles song.

The other post of note is one commemorating the 15th anniversary of The Red Album.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2016, I've been doing some recording with The Gedankenband and I hope to get an album of music out to the usual places.  I have several songs already in decent shape. I'm going to try not to stick songs already on EPs onto the album, though I reserve the right. :)

I hope you've had a great year and have another great one ahead!