All Walks of Life
studio scenes and call for animal facts
Hello all!
This weekend I recorded more for the new album with Nate Brenner of Tune-Yards and Naytronix and the longtime rhythm of my heart and albums Jason Slota.
Scenes From a Session:
Me not doing any takes, just producing/making demands.
Nate, engineering and producing. We didn’t end up employing traffic cone. THIS time.
Jason, being so good. There will be at least one dance song on new album.
Shifting gears this week into more writing for the book. One thing to navigate around multiple projects at once is deciding on a thing, even if only for the day (and by day I mean 3-4 hours of creative time, if blessed and lucky) and working on only that thing. Today I am having trouble with the zeroing in. Am using this post to help me organize my thoughts, so thank you.
Anyone who knows me knows I do not have any real kind of tactile relationship with animals, nor do I see that changing. But I wish them all well and I appreciate their humanity and I am so sorry to and for them that we are total assholes and I find their capacities remarkable. I have in recent years felt called to incorporate their virtues into my prose writing. How? In a cool, subtle, beautifully poignant, TBD kind of way.
Here are facts of life I’ve picked up in conversations/readings/my friend’s kid’s 4th birthday party that have been with me for upwards of YEARS. Somehow they have hit me emotionally and I take all emotional hits as signals to figure out a way to incorporate them into my work. Now that I am writing in creative non-fiction essay form there can be a place. I’m not the typy of songwriter who can fit “trail pheramone” into a lyric.
This NYT article has haunted me since I first saw it in 2016.
Pizza- I’m so sorry.
I will probably use this as an opportunity to compare/contrast with how my family communicates:
From the 4 year old birthday party.
To be designed for clean eating? Come on, fantastic.
Friends: are you willing to share some of your favorite animal facts with me? Will help with my personal essay writing.
my best,
t
Hippopotamuses can't swim--they just walk across the bottom of a body of water. They can stay submerged for 5-6 minutes.
Here's a random animal fact -- the wrinkles on an Elephant's trunk are formed in utero:
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-elephant-got-its-wrinkles
"Many baby animals—including humans—are born with random wrinkles because they have too much skin for their body shapes. Baby elephants’ trunk creases, by contrast, are consistently in the same places and form before birth, suggesting they have a specific purpose. “We think these wrinkles are very underrated,” Brecht says.
To learn more, Schulz, Brecht, and their colleagues turned to two elephant species, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and African elephants (Loxodonta africana), which are known to use their trunks in different ways. African elephants have two tough cartilage “fingers” at the ends of their trunks that allow them to pinch objects. Asian elephants, by contrast, have one finger and one bulbous projection that they use to clamp large objects such as melons between their trunks and lower lips.
The researchers examined differences between the species in museum specimens, zoo animals, and photos. Asian elephant trunks, they found, contain more wrinkles: 126 of them, on average, compared with the 83 of African elephants. The extra creases might give the Asian species more flexibility to make up for not having an extra “finger,” Schulz says. In both species, the wrinkles were concentrated at a pivot point, which works like a muscular elbow to allow the trunk to wrap around objects.
To study how these wrinkles form, the team gathered two Asian and three African elephant fetuses in museum collections, along with dozens of published photographs or drawings of fetuses at different ages. By lining these up sequentially, the researchers were able to form a visual timeline of prenatal trunk development. Wrinkles, they found, begin to appear as soon as the trunk does—about 20 days into the elephant’s 22-month gestation. Over the next 150 days, the number of wrinkles increases exponentially in both species, doubling every 3 weeks, and concentrates around the pivot point. Asian elephants acquire even more wrinkles later on in development."