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Thursday 21 October 2004

font-a-liscious

many of you are nerds, so you have opinions on fonts. nonono, this is a good thing. What font should I use for my thesis? I was thinking something serriffed would be easier to read when printed out. What is this important now? It's not. but cast a ballot early. and speaking of ballots, wtf is with all these propositions?

my laptop hard drive has the click of death. no immediate death, but eventual hard rrive failer, wich is disenheratening, seeing as i've only had it since december.

I am listening to a box set from Ou, a poetry magazine. They got into speech art / spoken word stuff. Some of it sounds just like music. I want to listen to other people working with words so I can say something intelligent about such work. I think I'm going to get some of Steve Reich's tape loops out of the library tomorrow. I tried something like Come Out with Rush Limbuagh and it just wasn't working for me. Also, I want to read the program ntoes. What the heck was the point of those pieces? Look, you can get a nifty rythm if you loop folks talking about being beaten by the police? I mean, there's political content, for sure, but especially in the case of Come Out, it seems sort of exploitative. That's a major claim to make, so I want to read what he wrote about it before I say anything. But to my ignorant self, it seems like he's using the words of African Americans and then slowly degenerating their meaning until it's unintelligible. What does it mean when a white guy does that? I mean, I specifically tweak the words of people I don't like as a form of disrespect. Furthermore, the piece Come Out: from the title you'd expect it to be gay. It's not. It's a snippet of speech by a preacher in a park, maybe Golden Gate park? I can't remember. The preacher does not deliberately seem to be invoking a gay phrase. To what extent was Rech aware of the gay meaning of said phrase? If he was aware of it, why was he highlighing it? I'm reading a book The Queer Composition of America's Sound, which talks about queerness and sexual otherness and a bit how that's tied into race. African Americans can stand in for queers and vice versa in our cultural language, which is why "black" music, like jazz, stands for sexual experience, fludity, queerness, etc. For instance, Four Saints in three Acts had many African American cast members. So is Reich invoking this? Must find out.

5 comments:

Jean Sirius said...

i'm very fond of goudy old style. it's a nice, round, fat, serifed font. it's the one i use in my books. (the 21st century ones, anyway.)

NIck said...

It's a recording of an inteview with an African American wrongly arrested for murder who was denied treatment by police because he wasn't visibly injured. He burst open a bruise on his skin in order to get treatment. The quote is from a longer sentence that says 'i had to let some of the bruise blood come out to show them' or something like that.

Charles Céleste Hutchins said...

Yes, and it was commissioned by an anti-racist group. The piece I was thinking of with the preacher is Its Gonna Rain.

I'm a bit embarrassed by this error, but this post is five years old.

Nick said...

By the way, I'm quoting some of this blog (it seems like he's using the words of African Americans and then slowly degenerating their meaning until it's unintelligible) in an essay for American Experimental Music for one Scott Wilson in Birmingham university... I believe you know him!

Charles Céleste Hutchins said...

He's my supervisor!

I think that the pieces were commissioned by an anti-racist group is a really important bit of context that I was missing when I wrote this.

People link to this post sometimes, so I don't delete it, but, yeah . . ..

Commission Music

Commission Music
Bespoke Noise!!