influences

The Bahá'í Faith

I try to live as a Bahá'í. There are laws, prayers, scriptures, holy days. Each year there's a 19 day fast, that's a month in the Bahá'í calendar. I try to be of service to my fellow-travellers. I am quietly guided, and grateful.

I know there are a lot of "Eek, religion, run!" people out there, and I don't want to scare you off from the rest of this page. So if you would like to learn more about the Bahá'í Faith, please visit the faith page on this site.

The Beach

I grew up in a Southern California beach town, and spent many a happy day in the salt water. Swimming, body-surfing, biking down PCH, brown as berries with contrasting zinc-oxide tattoo patterns. Sailing around oil islands in the harbor. Challenging summer mountains at the Wedge. Revisit as often as I can (not often enough) to recharge solar power cells.

But the Washington coast, north of Ocean Shores, is the place where I feel most at home. On the long, wide, windswept stretches of sand, rock and tidepools, out in rubber boot territory where the clams squirt at low tide, is my favorite place in the world. You need to be aware of the tide and currents, but the shallow sands slope off so gently that you can squelch out a fair way from the shore. Not only is this my favorite place, but it's my dog's favorite place too. He's convinced it's his mission in life to splash through the surf chasing waterbirds that can fly circles around him. We've been there in the summer and got suntans, flew kites, had weenie roasts over driftwood fires. We've been there in the winter, in huge storms that knocked the power out. When Miles was about four I took him out on the beach in a strong blow. He was wearing a poncho and, holding my hand, generated lift. My desk at work is covered with little shells and pieces of driftwood picked up on long dog walks. Our treehouse in the backyard has a handful of crab pot floats dangling from the branches that we dragged back from one trip or another. Read some good books there, ate some fine spaghetti, built some jigsaw puzzles, and sketched a bunch of old logs and stumps and driftwood and stuff like that.

I've lived within walking distance of salt water most of my life, and can close my eyes and hear surf on a downtown sidewalk. A lot of my piano music has a rolling undertow going on in the lower registers. Inspiration comes from the source.

CSS Zen Garden

Ok, all you web design folks could see this one coming from about a mile away. Pow! This site blew open my ideas about what could be done with style sheets, and sent me on a deep chase into the web standards realm. I thought about contributing a design to it, but then wondered what it would be like to do personality changes on an entire site. Thus deepgraysea.com, which doubtless will keep me busy for eons. But do visit CSS Zen Garden, the original multiple-personality design site, and get powwed yourself. You'll also want to pay regular visits to mezzoblue, Dave Shea's blog. He thought up the whole thing.

Dance

Imagine my surprise when the work-study job they wanted to give me at Evergreen was as a Dance Accompanist. "You mean," I asked, "you want me to play piano for girls in leotards and get paid for it?" And they did. I wasn't very good at first, but the teachers were patient, the dancers enthusiastic, and I was hooked. From tiny seeds grow big trees - this led to all manner of collaborations, dance scores, love affairs, professional accompanist work, travel and lasting friendships spanning years. And irony: I remain a terrible dancer.

Had some great moments along the way. Loved working with the Bill Evans company, they pushed me hard. Pam Schick and I had some intense collaborations, sometimes making design decisions assisted by the I-Ching. Whenever I could, I tried to enlist dancers to make some sort of racket for their scores, yelling or shaking bell chains or something. I scored one long environmental dance piece with synthetic jungle drums and mixed-up foreign language instructional tapes. Still use some of the Effort-Shape stretches in the gym. But alas, dancers have even less money than surfers. After a solid year of unpaid spec work, I sold off a lot of gear and decided to be an amateur musician again. Sound choice.

The Evergreen State College

I went to school in Olympia at The Evergreen State College. I studied music and performance, joined a theatre troupe, learned how to work a synthesizer back in the olden days when they were voltage-controlled novelties with patch cords. Did live concerts on the radio. Played with some good musicians, played a lot of solo piano. Met some great people. Hung out with sculptors. Traded concert tapes to friends for artworks. Went off to be a professional musician for a time, came back later to finish my degree with a year of computer studies.

I learned important things, mostly by accident. Being in a street-theatre troupe taught me not to be afraid of public speaking or performance. Being in a tangled school bureaucracy taught me that patience and good manners make for better days all around. For a couple of months I was between houses, and lived hand-to-mouth, thankful for the kindness of friends and strangers. I learned to work steadily over long periods of time so that I could play some impossible piece of music I heard in my head. I learned to work well in groups. Plus, my brother Paul was an Irvine student at the time, so we could trade quirky logo gear: my Geoduck for his Anteater.

Family

This is so obvious, I mean all of us were molded and shaped by our childhood, steered in various directions by family influences greater and lesser. I grew up in a family of doers, swimmers, engineers, artists, musicians, and a bit of all of those stuck. Now my own little family again shapes me, and we share many simple happinesses with each other.

Miles and I spend as much time together as we can - at the gym, playing catch, working on computer things together, doesn't matter, we have a good time. Barbeques, gardens, swims, vacations, music practice, long dog walks and a hundred other happy little things go a long way towards keeping me cheerful.

Gardening

Gardening is fresh in my mind at the moment. Today was a glorious sunny Spring day and I spent it digging a new planting bed. My wife is a devoted horticulturalist. Walk through a park with her and she knows the Latin names, bloom period and color, ultimate size and growing habits of most of the plants growing there. She and other plant devotees have some very high-bandwidth conversations. I'm much simpler about it - I dig the holes where she tells me to.

We had a fine garden on the upstairs deck of our houseboat. I used to water our plantings there from a bucket on a rope, and I'm now the star of dozens of boaters' videos. The plants lived in pots, and many moved with us. We had a great time reworking the yard of our first house in Shoreline. One of the most satisfying things I've ever done was to plant a small grove of fruit trees there.

My parents worked in the yard and taught me practical things, like lawn mowing (my first job) and pruning. My father was raised on a farm, my grandparents grew up in the Tuscan countryside and settled down on an apple orchard in Northern California. They took their work seriously, after all it was their livelihood, but I'm cheerfully non-intellectual about gardening. I simply enjoy it. I like the lifting and digging and all that, and especially like turning my brain off and working happily in the out-of-doors.

Alex de Grassi

Alex de Grassi is a brilliant virtuoso guitarist who has influenced my musicianship in odd ways. One of them is that he can play both fast and quiet at once. You have no idea how difficult this is to do, to create a swift real-time acoustic river of notes that sings of peace, like many light drops of rain on a cabin roof. I'm not there yet, but I work at it. Another parallel is the way that his folk songs sing in transformed, deconstructed ways. Traditional and completely new all at once.

Maybe I should try to learn some of his songs, the ones I listen to all the time, just to see what they sound like on the piano.

Google Image Search

I find the Google Image Search invaluable in my professional design work. I do informal surveys of imagery, especially when I'm trying to create an icon or graphic for some difficult concept. By looking at what the rest of the world uses in a similar situation I can learn if some common idea exists that I should tap into. I suppose it's a bit odd to list a tool as an influence.

The Gym

I'm a pretty faithful member of our gym. During the dark, cold, wet winter months (this is Seattle, alas) hard workouts help keep me sane. I'm not really much of an athlete - I won't run the fastest or swim the farthest, and I'm a lousy shot with a basketball, but weightlifting makes me feel good. Working out at the gym is a big influence on my state of mind - if I go there steady, I'm cheerful, confident, happy at nothing. Miss it for a week or so and I start getting tense. My family has been known to tell me I ought to go work out when they've noticed me being crabby about something.

Hawaii

I have a big stack of slack-key guitar CDs, my closet is full of aloha shirts, and my car looks like it just drove here from Honolulu. We're regulars at the L&L up in Lynnwood. I've done a Hawaiian language website. Will never be a native, but love the place deeply and especially love the Hawaiian look. Some time back I learned that it's really hard to be unhappy when you're wearing a cheerful aloha shirt - this comes in especially handy during Seattle winters. The discovery of aloha neckties has made dressing up for work more comfortable - now if they could only design dress shoes that felt like slippahs. Our whole family loves Hawaii and we've had some great times there. Many happy returns.

Humor

People seem to laugh a lot around me. Maybe I'm funny-looking, I dunno. But I do seem to employ a lot of wisecracks, silly faces and odd hand gestures as conversational components. I grew up in a family of jokesters and it must have stuck. Even now it's a challenge for me to be completely grown-up adult serious for long stretches of time.

Keith Jarrett

I've played piano for most of my life and here's a funny thing - I don't really like listening to piano music all that much. I listen to a lot of acoustic guitar music, a fair amount of electronica, go through stages where I listen to nothing but unaccompanied sacred choral music, but hardly ever listen to other piano players. With one exception: Keith Jarrett does it for me. I didn't really have the courage to do an improvisational solo piano concert until I heard some of his work. There was a time when I think there was a fair amount of Keith Jarrett that could be heard in the background when I played piano. Now, I think there's more Alex de Grassi or Keola Beamer perhaps. But I learned from Keith Jarrett that you can play really big, right there on the edge of your seat making it up as you go along.

Languages

I'm more or less obsessed with stuff that happens in languages other than English. Which is pretty strange, because I don't really know any other languages all that well. Enough Spanish to keep track of what's happening in a soccer game on TV. Odd words in Hawaiian, Farsi, Russian. I suppose it's sadly typical for Americans to be lacking in foreign language skills.

That said, much of my recent personal work has focused on bringing foreign language content to the web. I've done sites in Albanian, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Kiribati, Chinese. Each language informs my choice of photographs and colors, and helps shape the design of the finished site. Along the way I've learned to scan the web for content in different languages so that I can link to work done by native speakers. This work over the years has made for fascinating contacts and long-distance Bahá'í pen pals. I love getting surprise email messages where someone asks me if I'd like a copy of the Bahá'í Prayers in a new language.

Don Lee

I met Don Lee my first day of kindergarten. He was in my class, along with a dozen other kids from our new suburb. There wasn't a school building there yet, so our class was held in a meeting room at the local racetrack.

Imagine a friend you've grown up with since you were five years old. Then imagine this friend lives half the time in Hawaii, where he learns to play slack key guitar. And you're a musician too, and you both live near each other and spend entire days and weeks together practicing. Imagine dreaming of playing music at night, waking up and getting together to play, and then discovering you both had the same dream about the same music.

Imagine your friend introducing you to his new religion, adopted on a trip to the Big Island, that you can't even pronounce the name of right at first. And then you become a Bahá'í too, and your whole life changes.

Even my living in Washington had something to do with Don. He moved to Oregon and I hadn't seen him for a couple of months, so I came up to visit. While at his house, I phoned friends in Southwest Washington, who told me if I didn't come visit them too they'd never speak to me again. So I did, got offered a job, and there I stayed.

Don left us young for the Abhá Kingdom, and you can't imagine how much I miss him. I still have a few of his handsome raku ceramics; one sits now on my best shelf, next to Miles' most beautiful baby picture. I would absolutely not be the person, musician, Bahá'í I am now if not for Don. To absent friends...

Longboarding

When I go out the front door, Arbor Rail in hand, I'm on the way to my happy place. Longboarding is an emerging branch of the skateboard art involving, well, longer boards, along with wider trucks and wheels with larger diameters. The boards lend themselves to different riding styles than the vert or street styles you may have seen on X-Games broadcasts. I'm more of a surf-style cruiser, working on learning classic boardwalking and turnaround tricks from the dawn of the longboard surfing era.

One of my favorite rides is to take my stick on the bus downtown, ride through the Public Market, walk down the Pike Street Hillclimb to the Waterfront, and then sidewalk surf the mile or so north to my office on Elliott. I usually take detours down some of the docks along the way, riding all the way out to the end to check the status of the sunrise on my way to work. On my way home I slalom around all the fine people walking.

I'm seeing longboards begin to catch a fire now in our neighborhood. I was one of the first here in Shoreline, but now my son and his friends are into it too. We have three boards in our house (an Arbor Rail, an Arbor Hybrid, and a Sector 9 Bamboo Pin) so we can go out together and bring a buddy along. Miles' Hybrid is everybody's favorite - we had Daddie's Board Shop down in Portland build it with Randall 180mm trucks and red Krypto 70's wheels, so it's stable, easy to ride, and glides like a breeze. Plus the red wheels and koa top deck look great together.

I'm convinced that just about anybody can have fun on a longboard. You don't need to do nutso things like jump down stairs or launch yourself into orbit off a ramp - just riding and carving turns down a hill is fun. If you want to learn more, check out Silverfish Longboarding. The best longboard-oriented skate mag is Concrete Wave.

Robert McGinley

There was a time some years back when Bob McGinley and I lived in adjoining storefront studios in the Central District and collaborated on all manner of work. Bob was the Artistic Director of On The Boards, and I did lots of sound and tech work there. We started a strange and annoying performance art group together called the Techno-Primates, and did pieces involving ferry-boat percussion, amplified shock cord cages, ambient racket. When Bob moved into the film world, I tagged along happily, scoring his first two short films using quirky primitive electronics. We had some great years working together, and a lot of good times, including some ripping Taser sailing adventures off Shilshole in full-on winter honks. He and his girlfriend introduced me to my wife.

Bob is now deeply involved in the independent film world and has made two features that I know of. No doubt he's working on a screenplay now for the next one. Shredder Orpheus is a kick; the myth of Orpheus and Euridice set on skate punks. Fun!

Photography

I seem to think in terms of photographs when I do web design work. This summer, I've started wandering around the yard with an antique 35mm camera, taking pictures of flowers and bugs and stuff. Every once in a while I like what comes back from the developer. But there's no need for any professional photographers out there to get all worried about new competition, and I'm still a pretty steady customer of Royalty-Free photo services. Some of my favorite sources include stock.xchng where I have a small photo gallery and where all photos are free, Dreamstime that looks after both photographers and designers, Thinkstock which seems to have a different viewpoint and superior images, and Corbis, where I've purchased many images over the years. A new favorite is Artzooks in Canada. Not only do they sell Royalty-Free CDs for less than their competitors, but they sent me a cute little lamp that changes colors as a surprise present when I bought something from them.

Work

Most musicians work at some other job to pay the rent. A friend of mine thinks that the crappier the job is, the better you play rock music, bemoaning how his drummer quit his job as a dog groomer and got all mellow afterwards.

In my early years, I had some jobs that qualified me to play outstanding rock music. Logger. Janitor. Airplane mechanic. Baker and jazz musician at the same time (I seldom slept). Recycling truck driver. Then I stumbled into the computer, design, software and web worlds and found work worth doing for its own sake.

Now the boundary between vocation and avocation blurs. My personal work finds its way into my commercial projects. My commercial projects become personal. Design work does not seem to compartmentalize well, so I don't much try to anymore. I learn, grow, work and practice my craft, and the nice people pay me.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman's blog at zeldman.com was something of a starting point in my realizing that there was a unifying conceptual model for web pages. Jeffrey has long been a champion for something called "Structural Markup". In practice, this means using the HTML components most like the content you are trying to render, and then controlling the appearance with Cascading Style Sheets. Benefits include easier HTML coding and graceful degradation of the design in lesser browsers.

Considerable technical challenges await for those who embark on this path, but Jeffrey helps out there too. In the content and links he shares lurks a huge amount of expertise. A big influence on just how I go about building web stuff now. Oh, and he wrote a book too. I enjoyed reading it, but the index frustrates me a little.