too drunk for homweork

ok, i'm not really drunk. i had less than one pint. but ifeel like i shoudl not drive, for example and i'm eschewing going to the library due to the late hour and the rain and my level of confusion. So not TV. People I would instant message are offline. I'll post to my blog.

I just got back from a bar-hangout after a concert. One of the concert pieces was 4 blogs set to music. These two guys culled funny blog posts and harmonized them. It really shows how stupid blogs are. Yes indeed. Glad they didn't pick this one. The concert was very long seeming, but it closed with some excellent steve reich. I want to sound like that guy. I played in Aaron's piece, which was very nice.

On tuesday, my composition seminar went to Mass MoCA to see the sound installations. Mass MoCA is a museum of modern art in the Berkshires, which is a mountainious region where new yorkers go on cultureally themed vacations.

There are four sound installations in the museum, of which we only managed to hear two. One is a free way piece. There is a long pipe, open at one end and with a mic at the other end on an overpass. The sound from the ic is amplified and played back on two speakers under the overpass. The mic and the speakers are far apart. It's nice cuz it sounds like pipes and pipes are cool.

The other piece was by Ron. Mass MoCA used to be a power plant before it was a museum. So there's a bunch of power plant and power plant -closure related stuff. Ron has a permanent sound installation about the plant and it's closure that's set up in a narrow walkway between two buildings. There's speakers set up overhead. And if you look through the windows, there's electric generation equipment laid out all installation-y and a long table with capacitors on it. The big coke-can size capacitors - one for every worker employed before the plant shut down. The apeakers had sounds from the plant's history and workers talking about the plant shutting down and the museum moving in.

This next one was temporary. It was the best installation ever. It's not really pink. It's a big white room with papers all over the floor. The room is as big as a foot ball field. And those things hanging down that look like lamps are loudspeakers like for making announcements. And attached to the roof are penumatic devices dropping down signle sheets of paper. So periodically one or more of them would go off and then a piece of paper would flutter to the ground. The whole thing was monochromatic except that the windows had pink film on them. nd the loudspeakers were making announcements, but sort of like poetry inspired by reading too much critical theory. In the very back was a door to another smaller, dark room with concert-type speakers whirling around overhead, playing choral parts by meredith monk. In the big room, you can hear the chorus, the announcements and the paper dropping. I think it's the most beautiful piece of art i've ever encountered. Awe inspiring. When I'm sober, I'll look up the name of the artist.

Chris sits, watching a piece of paper drop to the floor. It was so beautiful how they twisted and fell. It was onion skin paper, it said, thin and light. There were big, slow spinnign fans on the ceiling, changing the pattern of falling. they driften bauetifully to the ground, twisting in the air. The annoucements were about text and bodies and representation. It was really very wonderful.