Author: Baker

I’ve been very very busy writing music.  Tomorrow, my four Spring music releases will be out.  I’m excited, but exhausted.  I will post streaming links on my music page as soon as they become available.

2016 turned out to be an extremely productive year for me.  I composed over 7 hours of music, writing at my height one track a day.  You can hear all my publicly released tracks for free from my youtube page:

Baker Beltz Music

This is the first game of Free Cell I played with my new Art Deck.  I lost.  I kinda suck at free cell.  But the Tableau alone is beautiful, so I took a photograph.  Klondike doesn’t look quite as interesting because of how many cards are face down, but it is a card game, so it’s as easy to play with my Art Deck as Free Cell.

Anyone who was an Otaku in the late 90’s should be able to tell you who this is.  Her name is Asuka Langley.  She’s one of 3 heroes in an anime series called Neon Genesis Evangelion.  The show was made by an animation group called Gainax.  It’s unfortunate that the show became so popular because it overshadowed their later works, Kareshi Kanojo No Jijou and Furi Kuri which both had much more agreeable characters.  Let me tell you about the heroes of the story.

1. Shinji.  Shinji was a total wimp with a pathological fear of his father.
2. Asuka.  Asuka was a disagreeable know it all that didn’t mesh well with anyone.
3. Rei.  Rei had no personality whatsoever.  She was like a robot that did anything she was told regardless of how injured she was.

They weren’t exactly the greatest role models for a 7th grade Baker, but I was drawn to the series because of its absurd and strangely juxtaposed religious symbolism that has fans of the series perplexed to this very day.  In my opinion, if you really want to be really perplexed, go watch Serial Experiments Lain.  If you like the art, go watch Habane Renmei by the same animators.  But avoid Boogie Pop Phantom because it’s so absurd I couldn’t even make it through the first episode.

Back in the day, when college internet connections were un-capped, every college freshman and his roommate had an anime hotline server, and back then most of the files were legal to share as they hadn’t yet been licensed in the US.  Teams of individuals would scour the wasteland of IRC for new titles, and fansubs were available within days of the Japanese release.

Those days are over.  With the advent of Bit Torrent most hotline servers went away, and with international trade agreements, every title released in Japan was already licensed in the US.  Many things shared on bit torrent are illegal, and the fanlators shifted their focus to other projects like those few mangas that are so obscure, no American publisher would touch them.

Ariana is most definitely a 9 of clubs.  She’s impulsive enough that she starts a ton of creative projects, but she’s disciplined enough that she usually gets around to finishing what she’s begun with razor sharp focus and intent.  Ariana is the life of the party.  She’s that person in the group whose energy fuels the entire conversation whether she’s speaking or not.  She only gets into trouble when the 8 of Spades comes around and is all like, “Hey!  I thought I was the life of the party!”

In this post, I’ve included both my original painting, and the girls eyes from the source image.  I’m telling you man, I spent several capricious hours trying to capture those eyes, and I simply couldn’t do it.  If you know the art world well enough to know what the source image is, please do message me so I can give proper attribution.  The filename on the source image is all garbled up and I lost the photographer’s name.

This one is called Lilatato.  Who knows why?  I can’t remember.  Past Baker would know, but the newest upgrade to iOs still can’t send cell signals back to the year 2006 when I created this piece.  Bummer dude.  Maybe by iOs 12, they’ll have that time travel bit figured out.

One year when I was in college, I went to Washington DC on spring break.  We visited all the Smithsonians, and I walked the mall listening to trance music on my iPod.  I had recently bought a new digital camera, so when we visited the National Art Gallery, I took hundreds of photos because I knew the artwork was in the public domain which meant I could remix it when I got home.  That semester in school, I was taking a level 2 Photoshop class.  This image was my final project.  Almost every element in this picture was derived from the photos I took at the national gallery.

Many people from my generation should recognize who this is.  Her name is Aerith.  She’s a character from a video game called Final Fantasy 7.  Most millenials who played the game in their early adolescence will still tell you it’s their favorite game ever.  It certainly is mine.  But my very favorite part of the game was not the battles, and it was not the story.  It was the music composed my Nobuo Uematsu.  Aerith’s theme is perhaps my favorite piece of classical music ever composed:

When I was in college, I took this 3d animation class.  We were using this software called Lightwave, which is probably better by now, but back then, it was a little jenky.  The inspiration for this piece was a kids book called The Phantom Tollbooth which was one of my favorite books growing up.  In the story, there is one chapter in which the protagonist Milo conducts a symphony.  Anyone who’s read the book should understand the swirling colors in my own interpretation.