http://jon.ochshorn.org Blog. Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:04:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The song, Squints on a Triple, is based on a true story: my daughter Jennie beat me in a game of Scrabble by putting the word "squints" on a triple word square on her last turn. Scrabble fans know that putting the letter "Q" on a triple word square generates many ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/07/14/squints-on-a-triple/ Shadows Burn was written and recorded in 2007 and previously posted on this blog. I just shot and edited a YouTube video, including me walking all over Collegetown and the Cornell campus, (with historic shots of the Brandon Avenue sidewalk in Ithaca, NY prior to its obliteration and reconstruction in ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/06/23/shadows-burn-video/ Manifesto of Love is a song that I wrote in 1983, based on an interest both in manifestos and in gospel-tinged piano-oriented rock. The current arrangement adds guitar, drums, bass, and a touch of organ, but pretty much preserves the original feel of the solo piano. As has become usual, ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/06/10/manifesto-of-love/ I began Shrinkwrap in late 2007 and finished it early this year as a poem; only later was it set to music, unlike most of the other songs I've written, which have started as musical ideas. I created some animated sequences (frame-by-frame in PhotoShop) and tried out some keyframe-triggered effects ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/05/24/shrinkwrap/ We drove down to Merion, PA during Spring Break, to visit the Barnes Foundation before its extensive collection of artworks is dismantled and shipped to Philadelphia. I made a short movie with my Flip video camcorder of the trip; of course this meant I needed to write a soundtrack for ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/04/13/ballad-of-the-barnes/ I used my bottom-of-the-line Flip Video camcorder for the first time on a blustery March morning to film Dragon Day 2008 at Cornell. http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/03/18/dragon-day/ Ran Thru My Mind represents another experiment with live recording and videography. This is another "old" song (written circa 1980), but recorded for the first time in March 2008. Unlike the "live" recording of Almost Doesn't Count, this one has some basic tracks (drums, bass, piano) pre-recorded on GarageBand before ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/03/16/ran-thru-my-mind/ Two nights ago, I was lying in bed, thinking about how one might derive the critical buckling load of a column by considering such a column loaded instead like a beam (causing a similar deflected shape). The two equations governing the mid-span moment and deflection of such a beam are, ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/02/29/buckling/ I wrote Almost Doesn't Count in 1978, so this recording marks a 30th anniversary of sorts. After trying a few arrangements with drums, bass, and so on, I decided to just play the song live, using a single mic and acoustic guitar, pretty much as it was originally written. I ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/02/25/almost-doesnt-count/ I temporarily stopped writing songs in the mid 1980s in order to concentrate on other stuff; it is only recently that I started writing again, and even more recently that I started recording the songs. One Life  was one of the first songs I wrote after such a long hiatus, and ... http://jon.ochshorn.org/2008/01/24/one-life/