Spring?  Is it really you?  Could it be the easter bunny?  Or have I finally knocked something loose?  It seems nearly everyone got smacked with a beyotch of a winter this time around.  Everyone, that is, except California, where the koalas laze in the sun any damn time they please, year-round.  In fountains of Ciroc.  But toughing out the occasional “hard” freezes (ow, my plants!), dustings of snow (look at my filthy filthy snowman!), or sheets of ice on the road (sheet!  sheet! ice, mang! slow down pendejo!), it’s worth it to get slipped an early glimpse of the pink glistening nipple of Spring herself, blowing a kiss that sends the leaves of Autumn Past skittering like Skeksis.  If you’re too young to get the reference, you’re not old enough to be trying to get all sexy with me in “anonymous” games of Words With Friends, so that should weed out some of the “competition.”  Your feeble little Generation tXt minds couldn’t think of where to put an apostrophe if it was dick-shaped and made of chocolate, much less count to eleven without taking off your damn pants, so don’t get all huffy and accuse me of cheating when I score a double triple-word on your ass with “tentacle.”  Resign all you want, or stick around and get spanked.  Either way, I’ll sleep on a pile of your sweet sweet losses.  Except for you, GasMaskBeauty.  Your kung fu is strong.  The saga continues..

In the meantime, I’ve been out on the road with Graham Reynolds, Utah Hamrick, and a van with a freaking piano in it, spreading the news of the Golden Arm Trio release of DUKE! Portraits of Ellington, available on Amazon, iTunes, and anywhere respectable music is sold.  A quickie to the east coast was a swirl of horns, food porn, and cocktail orgies.  And all the rumors I heard as a child were really true; there is FREE PORN on NYC hotel TVs.  Channel 69.  St Marks Hotel.  Lower East Side.  Best in tha freakin’ city..    But seriously folks, we had a blast.  We took in history (Duchamp exhibit, Rocky statue, Washington’s office, Stonewall’s headquarters, Alamo Draft House in Winchester VA, Liberty Bell), we drank the finest of libations (Milk & Honey, Draft House, Mayhuelo) and ate like kings (Veselka, H&H and Sullivan Bakeries, Morimoto).  Thanks to everyone that came out and for those in Austin, keep an eye on the gigs calendar for a few upcoming appearances with the mighty Graham Reynolds.  West  Coast, we’re coming to make sure your shit’s up to code in June.  At least we know the porn will be fresh..

Lastly, I’d like to give a quick shoutout to my kinfolk with Grupo Fantasma, who after 10 years of hard work and a tour schedule that just don’t quit, brought home a Grammy.  I’ve still not heard as to whether they each get one or if I get some sort of keychain model for my service in the “trench years,” back when a poor white child had to bang on snares without bottom heads, only the chaffest of cowbells, and another bottom-headless drum simply referred to as “the Grupo drum,” to help create what would grow from a rugged gang of “Young Silly Bitches” into a wandering street gang with instruments, enforcing the fundamental law and right of enjoyment and celebration through music.  It’s been years since I’ve been in the band, but getting on stage at the recent 10 year reunion show and now this Grammy, it’s really enough to make all that shit I have to hear with the “what, you’re not married yet?  do you even have a girlfriend?  you’d make such a great dad!” and other such mess slide off even faster than usual.  You see, I don’t need no kids.  I don’t need to see what I’d look like if I “didn’t eat so much cake.”  I adopted some nice young boys from Laredo back in ’96.  Or rather, they adopted me.  And now those nice young boys are grown men, many fathers, some of them in very tight silk shirts and Sheila E microphones but still, all kicking ass and bringing home something we couldn’t have dreamed of if you jerked us out of our sweaty summer days of jamming at the Manor House and pumped us full of mescaline..  Not that a few of us would have complained or lacked for trying, but those were different days and Laredo was a different place.  Kinda..

So a tip of the hat to my boys.  From keggers to Prince, Austin City Limits, a Grammy, and beyond.  Wherever you are, Ash Corea, I hope you are smiling.  For Brian, Wolfie, Alex, Rudy, JoJo, Lobel, Q, Gibas, Abuelo, Lou, Johnny, Toe, those fuckin’ new guys, Phrog, Mimi, Jaime, Ceci, Lilly, The Laredo Bucks, um..  Sammy The House, Bambi, AireSol Records, my Granny, all of you that were there from the beginning..  the haters, all of you.  Thanks.  We couldn’t have done it without you.

(cane pulls me off stage to exit music, curtain falls on head, security roughs me up)

So one afternoon I was flipping through my dog-eared copy of Handmade Electronic Music, and paused at Chapter 25 to ponder what might happen if I gutted a dead flat panel television and ran some basic clock signals through it.  As it turns out, the result is not unlike some sort of Lite Brite for adult nerds, and quite literally, HOURS of fun.  For a reasonably-detailed explanation of the particulars, read on.  Otherwise, simply click the video and enjoy all the blinky fun.  Giving new life to deceased electronics is not only incredibly-satisfying creatively, it’s also a form of recycling you might not have considered.   ..so, by NOT giving in to your stifled inner-geek, you’re KINDA being a dick.  Stop it.

(teasing)

So, for those of you still reading, what you’re seeing is a Hex Schmitt Trigger inverter chip with all six inverters running individual oscillators, all adjustable by 1meg potentiometers and capacitors ranging from .1uf to 10uf.  I also ran the audio signal from my stereo through a 2222 NPN transistor, and attached several alligator clips to all of the outgoing signals.  The LCD panel was rescued from a 15″ flat screen that I disassembled and harvested for whatever valuable organs were on the board (mostly audio/video jacks) before focusing on exactly how incredibly-tiny the connections to the LCD screen were.  There were four ribbon cables coming off of the clear panel, each one lined with what seemed like fifty metallic pads no more than a millimeter in width.  The alligator clips were my only option, and connected to more than one pad at a time, but this didn’t really prove to be a problem.  While one particular arrangement brought a small wisp of smoke, simply removing any actual connections to the signal circuit’s power supply and allowing the signals themselves to do all the work seemed to eliminate that possibility.

I ran the whole thing from as little as 3v DC and got the best results at 6v.  After a bit of hunt-and-peck action, I found arrangements that would produce different patterns, colors, and ones that would turn the whole screen from clear to pitch black in a sudden flash.  For a “what-if” project where anything could go wrong (and almost always does), this was one where everything went right and the parts used cost under five bucks!  Future tests will attempt to run the entire thing off of a small solar cell with the sun itself providing the kind of lighting needed to illuminate the patterns being created..  A weird kind of organic digital window art installment?  It could happen..