DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A slow-motion animation of the vocal folds vibrating during speech
(not really safe for work)

This is grotesque, and yet strangely compelling. I’m going to leave it running in a tiny browser window on my desktop for the rest of the day.

I wonder what the person was saying when they shot the video. (“Get that #@!$&* camera out of my mouth!”)

Update: I was wrong — it’s not strangely compelling. After four hours, it’s deeply disturbing, and I’m afraid I’m going to dream about it.

Last week I wrote about Greg Gaylord’s custom snare drums. I subsequently visited his shop — I needed to get my own drums repaired, and I wanted to get a closer look at those gorgeous snares.

Greg hand-builds “segment shell” drums. In a nutshell, this means gluing short segments of wood into rings, then gluing rings together into a cylinder, and then milling a shell out of the cylinder. Such shells are strong, perfectly round, and visually beautiful. And they retain the sonic characteristics of the wood from which they’re made, as evidenced by the different sounds of the 33 snare drums in his snare gallery.

Greg then goes on to hand-mill low-mass, minimal-contact lugs from brass because brass lugs sound better. He cuts his own bearing edges, and does all his own finish work on the shells. It’s no wonder the drums are beautiful; he performs every step himself. This is beyond meticulous. This is art.

Ironically, Tama sells a series of snare drums called Artwood. They’re made of plywood. In contrast, Gaylord makes what are very likely the nicest drums on the planet. There just isn’t anybody else doing what he does.

When I visited, he was getting ready to mill a 16x16 floor tom of salvaged Claro walnut, aka California Black Walnut. (What to buy for the rhythm section that has everything? How about a matching Ken Smith bass? I hope 5 strings is enough.) The pictured shell will probably spend eight hours on the lathe; there’s a lot of material to remove, a tiny bit at a time. Judging from the thickness of the cylinder’s walls, about 3/4 of the shell material will end up on the shop floor. (Greg Gaylord makes not only amazing drums, but also exotic hardwood dust.)

To give you an idea of what a segment-style tom shell looks like when finished, here’s a 12-inch tom shell, also in walnut, fresh off the lathe. (The real tom, unlike the picture, is in focus.) This shell will need bearing edges, finish sanding, paint, lugs, heads, rims, and then about five more toms in incrementally bigger and smaller sizes, and then I’ll be right over to pick it up.

My sense is that snare drums form the backbone of Gaylord’s business. Here are ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots, showing a raw 14'' shell, and a finished 6x14'' drum (in cocobolo). The finished drum is a thing of wonder. It’s the best-sounding snare drum I’ve ever played.

The August 2004 issue of Modern Drummer contains a review of a segment-shell jazz kit, made of cherry wood. I haven’t seen the review but I find it telling that the magazine didn’t want to send the drums back.

It’s Chank’s font sale time. Deals change weekly. Through July 31.

Fresh off the letterpress:

• dollar fonts: Cocaine, Cosmic family, Transam03
• three-dollar fonts: Rosemary, Chub
• five-dollar font: Gobbler

You can’t hardly not buy a font for a dollar.

Here’s a welcome update on the California privacy bill that’s been kicking around Sacramento for years: it finally passed!

Senate Bill 1, which was passed and signed last year, will go into effect beginning today. The law requires banks, brokerages, insurance companies and other financial services companies to obtain their clients’ permission before selling or sharing information about them with outside parties, as well as giving consumers the right to “opt out” of information sharing within the same family of companies.

“We think this is an enormous victory for California consumers,” said Shelley Curran, a lobbyist for Consumers Union.

Here’s the text of the bill: SB 1: Financial institutions: nonpublic personal information.

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I think I learned more about my town than about the Bush administration.

The local theater often sells out shows on Tuesday nights, because they drop their prices for selected films to $3.50. “Tightwad Tuesday” is a local tradition; I know people who go to the theater at 7pm on Tuesdays without knowing or caring what’s showing — they pick a movie from the “cheap” list once they arrive.

Fahrenheit 9/11 tickets were not on sale, but the auditorium filled up faster than for any other movie I’ve seen there. Not only did it fill up, not only did it fill up early… my row was asked to move one seat to the right to consolidate open seats at the other end. This wasn’t about entertainment; this was a community education effort.

After 9pm, the theater lobby is a ghost town, usually. After Fahrenheit 9/11, it was full. Sixty people were standing around in small groups, talking about what they’d seen, exchanging horrific Bush anecdotes that didn’t appear in the film.

So, the movie didn’t shock me, but the scene did. I knew this to be a pretty liberal town because it’s populated almost entirely by aging hippies. (BTW, that’s not a slam; I aspire to be an aging hippie.) But getting a bunch of liberals, especially the aging-hippie variety, behind a single cause takes a compelling story. Like a war, I guess.