My Fantasy Holiday

Thoreau decided he'd had enough of things and moved out to the woods to escape from society. However, it turns out that Walden Pond is not a long stroll from the town he fled. He went to see his mum every weekend. With that in mind, this is what I'd like to spend a month doing this summer or in the autumn or sometime...

I want to stay in a cabin in the forest, next to hot spring, which I would go sit in for a bit at night. The nights would be very quiet and free of city lights. The cabin is stocked with a load of fresh veg and has a good library and some very comfy chairs. The bed is big and comfortable. All the rooms have nice windows. One of them has a couple of good monitor speakers a way to record and my synthesiser.

The internet is only connected between 11am - noon.

Every evening, a friend or two come around to visit and we have dinner, talk and jam or play board games or just talk.

I stay there for one month. At the end, I'm expected to have an LP.

So yes, even in my fantasy holidays, I'm still working...

The only thing I can imagine doing without working is a cycle holiday. And If I were planning one now, I'd probably try to arrange gigs along the route, alas. I'm feeling very motivated to be productive lately and also my anxiety is on the upswing and these are probably related. However, getting a lot done has been good for me in the past, but I wouldn't mind a day or two in a hot spring or even a ot tub.

Now that I'm 34

I'm going to eat my vegetables; I'm going to go to bed and get up at a reasonable time; I'm going to finish my damn degree and graduate and find a job.

Birthdays don't really feel like milestones anymore, just an excuse to go to the pub with friends. Or sometimes they feel like a yardstick, like by the time my parents were my age, they were actually kind of in the same sort of space I'm in now, so I guess that's ok. Still, no PhD, no tenure track post, no CDs out. I might not be the young hot shot I thought I was.

My laptop has been broken for almost 3 weeks. Apple support in Europe really bites. I have borrowed a laptop running Ubuntu Stdio, which is very nice. But I miss having RAM. Also, I'm somewhat shocked to discover that the phone in my pocket is probably as powerful as the laptop I had before the current, broken one. It's certainly more powerful than the one I'm borrowing. So I'm trying to compile SuperCollider on it. It's very strange to be installing developer tools on my phone. I keep stopping with an overwhelming, "oh my god, it's the future" feeling. And since the Brit police actually used a hovering drone thing to arrest some poor sod last week, it's not the Asmiov future I'd wanted.

I'm sometimes kind of amazed by the date, like, holy shit, it's 2010. I'm too young to be old. And yet.

The time is coming soon when I will have a 3rd date with a non-queer straight cis woman and need to disclose and I still have not figured out what to say. "Have you heard of Buck Angel?" seems like a poor opening gambit. So does invoking the pregnant man. I don't know how well people here have heard of Chaz Bono.

I'm entirely assuming that people are cis though. I remember when I came out as gay to my highschool boyfriend. I agonized about it for some time. How to tell him? Would he be hurt by this revelation? I called him up. "I need to tell you something." I said, and hemmed and hawed and finally, "I'm gay." In a casual voice, he said, "Oh, me too."

It's probably somewhat more unlikely that disclosing my trans status will lead to a 'me too,' alas.

. . .

When my dad was 34, he married my mom. He asked her to marry him on the first date. She said yes on the third. I seem to remember that he told me that she had decided she was going to say yes even before he'd asked. They knew each other already, through a group for Catholic singles. Everyone in the group coupled off, which was, of course, the point. But in the mean time, there was group socializing, camping trips, bike trips, going places, doing things. The days before OkCupid seem like they were a bit more fun, or at least more likely to lead to lifelong friendships.

Faithless

My last post was about loosing faith in "fate," an idea I left undefined. It wasn't a bearded sky god, passing judgement. But more like an intuitive, uninformed impression of the "Higher Power" of AA. Some sort of thing larger than myself. An idea that things would be ok in the long run. That's all crap.

Ok, obviously all of humanity is larger than myself. And the movement of chance and the actions of others are all out of my control, which is part of the idea I had. So the idea of serenity is still valid. But other ideas are impacted.

Let's imagine a metaphorical compass. The red side of the needle points at moral actions. You're walking through the woods of life and are trying to follow the compass direction, but taking into account local circumstances, including things like cliffs, trees in the way, streams, etc. And the terrain itself has a lot of magnetic rock, which makes the needle direction really unclear sometimes. But there is, out there, a set of right actions, which are handed down from someplace outside of ourselves. But that view of morality is crap.

Foes of prop 8 angrily insist that we can't put people's rights up for a vote. But, in effect, that's all we ever do regarding people's rights. People have rights because we've all agreed they do. Because of our human emotions and logic and ideas like the golden rule. Actions aren't moral or immoral because they adhere to some imaginary Platonic form, but because the people involved all pretty much agree on the action. One person leaving a comment on my last post called this "freeing." There's not one way to be good.

But, still, more questions. A lot of morality and especially the application of justice is configured such that "crimes" are what poor people can do to rich people. And morally-neutral actions are what rich people can do to poor people. This is crap. Are poor people less human?

Also, what the hell does humanness matter? If we're not created in god's image, what makes us better than battery chickens in cages laying eggs all day, unable to move with their beaks torn off? Aside from us having all the power and them having none?

All morality seems deeply vested in power relations. Deists think something is good because God demands it and he's got more power than us. Atheists think something is good because they want to preserve their position in life and understand this relies on mutual cooperation. The golden rule isn't just a good idea because it helps use empathy to figure out right actions, it is also the test condition and justification for right actions. And we can't imagine being chickens, and there's no danger of being reincarnated as one because none of that actually exists, so who cares about them? And in these circles of "us" and "them" and powers to enforce, we decide right and wrong. Can we see ourselves in an out group? Then they're in. Otherwise, they stay out.

Which is what it's been all along. And knowing that might be freeing because we're free to negotiate our relationships with others however the people in them want. And we take whatever life has handed us and try our best with it. Or not. And it won't turn out fine in the long run. In the long run, we're dead. And either other people stop caring or it all becomes somebody else's problem. And they might not solve it either.

So let's say you wanted to have faith because somebody told you it was a good idea. You want to put it somewhere. Where? You can't put it in god, because he doesn't exist. You can't put it in a happy future because that doesn't exist either. You can't put in humanity because they could very easily decide that 'personhood' no longer applies to queers or some other group you think it should. You could put in your friends, but in the short term, they might not be up to it. In the long term, one by one, they'll die or leave and then, you die. Despite that, you could have it in yourself, which would be a nice heartwarming thing to do, but what is that but the idea of fate and happier future? That's crap. So fuck faith. Drown your faith like an unwanted kitten.

I don't know if it's freeing, but I can live with it. What choice do I have?

I do feel better, though.

I'm probably sharing too much

(Note: I posted this and then decided I was perhaps being too dramatic and took it back down, but in the mean time, it got syndicated and a bunch of people saw it anyway, so here it is again.)

When I was in my first semester at Wesleyan, I used to worry I would start crying in class. The reason for this worry was that my mother had died less than a year previously. I knew that my friend Angela was planning on playing some music from the Brother Where Art Thou sound track and some Hank Williams and I had played these things by my mother's bedside because they seemed to give her some comfort. But, by the time it was Angela's term to give a presentation, I was on more solid ground.

Two years later, when I moved to Paris, I worried I would start screaming on the metro. I had anxiety, from several factors including gender, being foreign, normativity, etc etc etc and I didn't know that people with anxiety do not actually just start screaming. Nor do we die from our chests pounding. I just wait and it passes. So I never did scream.

I don't know what I'm worried about now, exactly, but lately, I often find I've been holding my breath. I feel dizzy more than is typical. I've always had a tendency to not quite be in my body, but now I sort of feel like I'm not quite in my head and that things might turn very white and blank. Which is similar to thinking I might pass out, sort of. But I think that this too will pass without coming to pass.

Reality or whatever seems to be something like a string or a thread, but I don't think it's something I could let go of. I think it's tied to my wrist like a balloon on a child at the zoo. So I'm not worried like I was in Connecticut or France. But when people ask me how I'm doing and I say, "ok," I'm not entirely certain if that's actually the truth. But it might be. In time, it will be.

. . .

I realized two things recently. One is that I'll always be crazy. I'm not screaming-on-the-metro crazy, but this tendency or whatever I've got is something I can manage, but not something that will evaporate away.

I was learning to deal with it by trying to acknowledge and even share my emotions instead of trying not to have them. And then, after that, trusting to fate. But there is no fate. Things don't happen for any kind of reason. We live until we die and that's it. There's no plan. There's no meaning. You just carry on until you don't anymore. Everything we have to sort of smooth over the abyss and make it seem nice is just a human invention. There's no soul. There's no god. There's no plan. It's just suffering with the occasional respite. And that's all.

I'd like to carry on as long as possible, but the emptiness of it all . . . is kind of a lot. It's a large realisation to get used to.

Riots

The year that I lived in Paris, a thousand cars were set ablaze in a single weekend. The cops there had chased a couple of youth, who hid in an electrical substation and got electrocuted and died. The people in the poor suburbs of Paris had enough of police harassment, and so there were riots. Cars were mostly burned out in the suburbs, but some were also set aflame in the area around my flat and, I think, on my street, although it's possible that the broken glass and scorch marks I saw were unrelated.

Shortly after that died down, an unpopular change to employment law passed. It changed the terms of contracts that could be given to people in their early 20s. There were large marches and people at the end of these marches tended to break windows and cause a mess. Then was the Mohammed cartoon in the Danish newspaper, which, as you may recall, was reprinted in France Soir and caused further unrest.

By the end of the year, French folks were getting kind of concerned about the level of unrest. But not so concerned that they didn't go ahead and elect Sarkozy, who helped spawn the initial batch of riots.

So I'm a little blasé about riots now. They happen. They're a way that a minority signals that it's really really pissed off with the way things are going politically. They're a protest turned destructive. They happen. And sometimes it's a good thing that they do happen.

Stonewall, which many regard to be the foundational moment in the modern queer rights movement, was a riot. People fought with the police. They broke stuff. They broke stuff that didn't belong to either them or the police and just happened to be there. For two nights, they rioted and broke stuff. They weren't going to take it anymore. The police had been attacking them for years and they were finally fighting back.

If you look not just at the latest BART police shooting, but also at incarceration rates in California, it's clear that poor and POC communities are under attack by the police. And when people feel rage at that, when they feel anger, when they take destructive mob action in spontaneous response, it's just as justified now as it ever has been for anyone. Oppression is not quiet or polite and it's end isn't either.

However, the news media would do well to learn, that attacking a car is not "violent." Shooting an unarmed man in the back while he lies face down, surrounded by cops is violent. Breaking a car? Not so much.

Thinking about Pagans

The folks who were hexed have been caught by police, and, indeed, one of them had his family involved in his turning himself in, just as predicted by the head-hexer. However, I think a double-blind study is needed before I'm willing to concede anything about the general efficacy of hexing. I'm not sure such a study is really possible. What coven would be willing to participate in calling up such negative energy in order to prove something to skeptics?

I wrote something about how I hadn't been to any pagan rites since university and that's so untrue I don't know what I was thinking. My friend Jean does something called "Burning Bowl" every New Years Day which has something to do with making resolutions, only not really. And, of course, Paul's memorial last year was pagan, and even more emotionally charged than the most recent thing I went to. These things, though, were familiar. Drinking cider with friends. Or a memorial service. They don't see outside of ordinary experience. And so they slipped my mind when I was writing about an extraordinary thing.

I spoke to a few people about the use of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the hexing. Apparently, pagans are practical and will use the goddess or god most likely to get things done for them. Because some of the suspects were described as Hispanic, the pagans decided to use their goddess against them. This, of course, relies on making some assumptions. Protestant churches are growing dramatically in the Americas, but let's put that aside for a moment and go with the assumption that the Virgin Mary has meaning to the Hispanic men in question and specifically, her appearance in Mexico is something connected to them. Something about this strikes me as problematic. The pagans are using the symbols of a person's religion against them. And it's a minority religion which has faced past discrimination. (Of course, pagans would argue they were in the same boat, there.) This is troubling to me. I was at the ritual, in retrospect, more or less as a tourist, as it didn't have meaning for me, so maybe there's an argument there that a hexing is just going to be troubling because it's a troubling thing to do in the first place and maybe religious rites are outside of arguments relating to axes of privilege. And maybe Mary of Guadalupe is a goddess figure subsumed into Catholicism and therefore belongs to all womyn. I don't know.

My friend in London is from Somerset, where the farmers still do pagan stuff that their ancestors did. She was describing some of the rituals to me. They seem to all involve drinking a lot of beer and did not seem to be womyn-centered. I think that some feminists look to this as a source mostly motivated by the myth of matriarchy. This is a cross-cultural phenomenon, where there is a myth that once upon a time, women held political power. Everything was backwards in this time: the moon was better than the sun, etc. Fortunately, (the myth goes) men wrested power away and saved us from such foolishness. For example, Eve briefly lead Adam in Eden and look where that got us. Still, the idea of some ancient time when women had power is obviously attractive to women now. Alas, it's all mythical, but it attracts them to old myths and old religions. And so a bunch of drunken, ribbon-wearing (male) farmers chasing a cheese wheel down a steep, rocky incline becomes a feminist religious inspiration, once separated by an ocean. Of course, they're probably not drawing on that particular ritual and the information has been mediated by books or Hollywood or expectations and turns into it's own thing. And just like the rituals in Somerset carry the cultural baggage of that region, and affirm power relations and privilege in that community, neo-pagans bring their own baggage to the circle.

Life, Dating

What would I say in a personal ad?

I'm looking for a poorly defined poly relationship or 12 with bad boundaries and low emotional investment.

He or she is between the ages of 25 - 50, can pay their own way, enjoys snogging, is politically progressive, musically adventurous, some interest in technology.

I'm an FTM from California, aquarius, vegetarian, messy, needy, prone to anxiety and depression, but have a cute dog and can offer mixed messages, sex, sex, and sex, plus will demand hugs and try to drag hir to free improv shows. I may also email hir inexplicable mp3s and/or try to get feedback on musical works in progress.

Let's have something extremely short term followed by weeks of awkwardness!

Location: London

. . . .

My shrink told me to "calm down" today. I've traveled enough to know that baggage around people's accents or languages is mostly silly. But her accent makes her sound so competent. It was like ebing told by the BBC to remain calm and carry on. Ok, I can do that.

Um, on other news, I think that I'm going back to injecting once every 3 weeks, as this last week has been crap. Also, I'm kind of tired of being tranzilla. I'm like super trannie. I go to trans bars. I go to trans community events. I talk to gender queer people. I worry about injections. It's all trans all the time. If I were just coming out as gay, I would be wearing rainbow-striped jumpers at this point, with this level of involvement.

So, um, other things. I'm writing music with samples of a trans rights rally I went to. . .. And I decided that what it needed was a good bassline. And the way to make a good bass line is to analyze tuning ratios and figure out what's consonant in an arbitrary scale and then do stepwise motion around consonant pitches. Samples will be forthcoming in a future post.

(Please note that I am not referencing any real people in this post aside from myself and my shrink.)

More navel gazing

For a while now, I've secretly wished not to have any emotions at all. (It was a very secret wish: even I was not informed.) I want to run around doing exciting things, but I want to dispassionately observe them at a distance. I want to watch myself on the telly. I want to be a perpetual tourist in my own life. I want an off switch on my emotion chip like the silly Star Trek android, Data.

On the other hand, I've been feeling more or less depressed recently, which I hadn't felt for a quite a while . . . and I have had virtually no anxiety. Are my choices anxiety or mild depression? It's much nicer to be sad for no reason than to be panicked for no reason.

I don't have data, but I suspect that it's very difficult to write music while striving to not feel anything. Which may also explain why it's been so hard.

Why try not to feel? Well, it often kind of sucks. A few years ago, when I used to sometimes get depressed or stressed or whatever, I had a feeling like I was at the bottom of a long shaft, like a smokestack of an abandoned factory. And on my shoulders, there was a flat, large board that fit perfectly inside the shaft, like the floor of an elevator car. I was holding it on my shoulders to keep from getting crushed while more and more things got dropped on to it. But this image is no longer current.

Now, I feel like a bag of parts. Like a cloth sack wrapped around something porcelain, that got smashed in shipping. I feel broken. But mending. Like Frankenstein's monster, the parts re-assembled, slightly misjoined, ringed by scars. Still in the midst of loose bits, nothing in quite the right place. Misshapen, ugly, absorbed in myself.

I want to go out and live and make mistakes and recover from them and have excitement, novelty, adventure, etc, but not feel it. I want pain without hurting.

Sophie says that I clearly hate myself. I want her to be wrong.

From Last Week

Nicole left very early yesterday morning, alas. By the time I post this, she will (hopefully) be in California. I spent all yesterday morning feeling sorry for myself, but eventually roused myself into action, at least to answer the door when my last delivery of boxes arrived.

My next door neighbor came over while I chatted with the delivery guy and Xena ran around loose. The neighbor chastised me because he had found dog shit on his driveway the day previous. "It wasn't my dog." I said, which was true as that the first and only time Xena has ever been allowed off leash on the street. It was like he didn't hear me, so I repeated it. He clearly thought I was lying. He wanted an apology. meh.

I set up my bedroom studio and it looks pretty good, but during shipping, the bolts came unscrewed in one of my synthesizer cases and the modules got slightly battered by bouncing and the loose screws. My favorite module, the MOTM 440 low pass filter, suffered visible damage. One of the knobs had come loose and the back cover of it broke off and now it catches when I turn it. I took it to school and asked the lab assistant about it. He lent me some tools and I re-tightened it and he told me to take it home and see if it worked. I screwed it back into the case, but I still haven't tried turning it on as I have fears of it suddenly catching fire or something equally unlikely. The moral of this story is to use the correct mounting brackets and not try to fake it with just bolts and washers. Or if you do try to fake it, tighten them before you ship. And then tighten them again before you strap them to your bike and pedal them home. And don't put it on a rack where it will bounce around a lot, but in the trailer.

Speaking of which, my trailer is also broken. I think it's from running into stuff and not from carrying around my synthesizer. It's wide and it sticks out on one side and lord knows i've bashed it into things a bunch of times. Anyway, it has a spring attaching the hitch part to the main part, so the spring lets it swivel some. the spring, however, is sprung. I think this is easily fixable. By somebody with tools.

My supervisor and all of my colleagues are off in Copenhagen, putting on a concert with an array of 80 speakers. They call this system BEAST. Apparently, I'm going to be a part of BEAST in the future, but for now, the only people I know in town are my housemates. They're nice people. But I have no friends here except for my dog, who is nice, but doesn't talk much and has a disturbing tendency to roll in horrible things she finds in the park.

I read Fingersmith last night. It's a thick book by Sarah Waters. It has a really good plot twist in it. And unlike the last book by her that I read, the lesbians don't die in the end. The book is kind of sexy, actually. So I woke up this morning feeling even more sorry for myself than yesterday.

I've read a lot of fiction lately, after a long run of none at all. The downside to this is that after I read a lot and sit by myself, I start narrating my life to myself in my head (c'mon, you know you do it too, sometimes) and as I've read two novels placed in the Victorian era recently and I'm in England, I've begun narrating to myself as if I were some sort of bloody Victorian (you see that "bloody" there? alas). I guess as long as I keep it to myself, it's not a big deal, but as you can see, it's sprung out and effected my blog, and thus yourselves, dear readers. . . . (Are those crickets I hear? Damn.)

The weather has been sunny the last two days, and thus at odds with my disposition, which is for the best. I need to find a book shelf, I think. I went to two charity shops today. I thought this term "charity shop" meant something like the Goodwill store in the US, and there is a passing resemblance in that they both seem to involve used clothes. But either I went to the wrong two shops or the similarity sort of runs out there. The "charity" part seems to just refer to the owners of the shop. The might sell a lot of new stuff. And the people working there seem to be normal shop keepers or maybe volunteers, I don't know, but they're not getting the sort of job training that folks at Goodwill are getting. No scent of lisol. No air of poverty. Maybe I went to the wrong shops.

The locals here are friendly and are getting gradually more intelligible. I've been talking with other dog owners in the park. And when I was strapping horrible, cheap dollar-store plastic junk to my bike, a bicycle enthusiast approached me to talk about old fashioned delivery bikes and the hilliness of Birmingham. When you look around you from where you're standing, it looks flat. But there are valleys everywhere. There is a nice, light Danish city bike that I want, but can't presently afford, nor do I have parking space for it. I've been daydreaming of putting a bike rack in the driveway. I've got myself convinced that it's a great idea.

Now, however, it's a great idea to stop typing and go do something else.

Address

55a Frederick Rd
Selly Oak
Birmingham
B29 6NX
Great Britain

Actually, I'm, alas, uncertain about the last line there. Should it say "England?" "United Kingdom?" Or what? I live in England, and I know it's a small part of the whole country, much like Holland is but two provinces of the Netherlands. But what is the name of the country in which I live? What's the difference between "United Kingdom" and "Great Britain?

While I'm on these sorts of questions: What's a licenced restaurant? What's an off-licence shop? Does "going around with your dog" mean brining her to the country or just to that particular establishment? How did I end up in a city with even worse weather than The Hague? Why are posh british accents like nails on a chalkboard? It doesn't matter if they look out the window and just say, "oh, it's raining again" I want to bash them with my laptop and shout "shut up, you insufferable twit!" but maybe that's what comes of eating tiny, cheap jelly donuts for breakfast and the resultant sugar crash.

In other news, my dog is a health and safety violation. Um, because she's rabid and will rip your throat out. And she covers floors with all sorts of dirt and germs that could not have found it's way indoors through any other means, especially not shoe bottoms.

I'm so dumb. Never ask permission! Just do it and when somebody tells you that it's not allowed say that you've already been doing it for weeks with no problem.

This country is extremely paranoid. I mean, I'm glad to finally live someplace where they've heard of smoke alarms. But the sheer number of fire regulations here . . . all explained to me in detail. I had to ask if the building burst into flame every tuesday. They act as if EVERYTHING is a ticking time bomb. The building will burn to the ground any moment now. the dog will go mad an attack. The kids will go mad and attack (why else are there so many stupid surveillance cameras in the student lounge?)

Lake Woebegone

I just started getting the podcast to the American radio show "A Prarie Home Companion". It's patriotic Americana for the left wing. Or rather, the slightly less right wing. People who theoretically favor rights for gay people and women and immigrants, but want to dream of the midwestern heartland, populated by lonely Norweigan farmers and their foibles and aren't we all struggling in this together, all of us straight, white, christian liberals?

I remember listening to a christmas episode and they were talking about the town Christmas pageant and the kids dressed as Mary and Joseph and the lights and the feeling of community and it made me feel terribly lonely. Because this community was not for me. I didn't know the word "heteronormative" yet then, but I knew this imperfect paradise of essentialist americanism was not for me.

And my patience for it and longing for it has since been replaced by annoyance. What makes white, heterosxual christians more american than black people or gay people or atheists or costal people or queer, atheist costal black people?

I'm really tired of Americannes being defined regionally such that minority populations are more likely to be excluded. If we stop and think for a moment, we know that Lake Woebegone is not only inhabitted by white, straight christians. People migrate within the US. Even people born to Christian families drop the ID. 10% of the kids will be queer. But the continuing refernces to Norweigan farmers implicitly excludes atheists and queers and explicitly excludes jews, latinos, black people etc. Garrison Keeler's America is not so different than Rush Limbaugh's America. Except in Rush's America, the enemies are at the gate. In Keeler's, the same people Rush calls enemies just don't exist at all.

And this is the choice for us in America. We can be normative and blend in, we can be invisible or we can be reviled. This kind of "choice" eats into you (and by "you" I mean "me") even if you try to reject it. Square peg, round hole. Trying to make your identity fit into the grid provided for it. Being a queer alone is suxxor, because you just don't exist. You have no mirror to reflect your existance. Affinity groups are essential for maintaining sanity, imo. Also, NPR sucks. Can we stop calling essentialist erasism "liberal?" Because it's not, and I'm tired of it.

Star Wars, Torture and War

During my morning showers, my mind seems to be turning often to the new Star Wars trilogy. Thankfully, not to Jar Jar Binks, but instead to the oft-repeated moral of the story: anger leads to hate. Hate leas to the Dark Side. (I might be forgetting a step in there, but anyway, don't get pissed off). When the movie came out, I read a short newspaper article complaining about this morality. The author said something along the lines of, you can't get pissed off at the Nazis or you become a Nazi yourself. Therefore, according to Lucas, there's no place for outrage in a moral society. However, I think there's another reading to this story.

Jedis aren't regular folks. You don't run into them at the super market. They wear funny robes and live in a temple. They're specifically a warrior caste. Therefore, advice given to a warrior caste might specifically relate to their day job. If you're going to use violence as a means of problem solving, you can't act out of anger. It's like spanking kids. People who rationalize that it's good teaching tool (almost) all agree that you shouldn't do it when or because you're pissed off. Being a Jedi is a sort of a parental role in society. Sometimes, they have to administer spankings, so they better not do it when they're angry.

Many of you, like me, probably think that's just not a good idea to hit a child. Violence is not really a tool for problem solving. However, this is an action movie. What's more, it's an American action movie. Most Americans (especially those watching action movies) beleive that there are circumstances where violence is a tool for problem solving and indeed, there are situations where it is the only tool. (for instance, see Nazis in the first paragraph). Therefore, advice given to a fictional warrior caste might be applicable to the voting public of a democratic war machine.

A newspaper (the Washington Post?) recently ran a profile of three torturers. One was from Israel, one from Northern Ireland, one an American stationed in Iraq. All of them acting as government agents. One of them said, "you can't fight evil and stay good." A lot of the debate about torture is whether or not it works, which is morally moot. (It doesn't work, but that really doesn't matter.) The point is trying to stay good. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to detainee abuse. Detainee abuse is the dark side.

I'm listing to a CD of Howard Zinn speaking of art in a time or war. In the part about Catch-22 he talked about the Allies - the good guys, doing bombing runs on towns and villages with no military targets. War makes you bad, he said. Even if you start out good, it makes you bad.

Is there a way to fight a war without anger?

Let's consider again the story of Anniken's downfall. A very smart, very promising kid has to deal with some very painful blows. He's got a phyisical, military sort of power and an incredible feeling of entitlement. He wants to do good and to protect what he values. At the same time, he wants to gain power for himself. In so doing, he starts making sacrifices. He sacrifices some of his values towards the greater good of protecting what he values. In the end, power becomes the most important thing for him.

Now, imagine a young-ish country, flush with military power. After a devestating loss, they turn outward to defend themselves and start striking in anger. In order to protect some of their values, they have to sacrifice some of them. They trade civil rights for some increased security. Eventually, the ruling class loses all sense of protecting the people and turns instead to increasing their own power.

Maybe the story of the entilted kid who is well meaning but also greedy is a story that really is logically consistent. The seemingly mututally exclusive motivations represent fractured motivations with himself and the differing motivations of different segments in society. Advice that is silly for individuals could be really useful to that kid, to public leaders and to entire societies. America: don't get mad!

Ebay!

The Gift Economy and Sustainable Music

Daniel Wolf of Renewable Music reported that I was the first person trying to market commissions as e-commerce. There may be some disagreement on that, but I'm pretty sure that I'm the first person who has tried to market a commission on ebay. (Auction 1, Auction 2)

There are a few reasons you should care about this. One is that you might be the first person (or in the first group of 30, since that's how many I'm putting up in this project) to commission a piece of music via ebay. The other is that this is a proof of concept for the viability of music in the internet age.

What is music but data? Data wants to be free. People love to share. On the one hand, we have the RIAA fighting the future (and the present) by suing all their customers. That business model is not sustainable and has numerous other problems. On the other hand, we have the sharers - people who love music and post their favorite pieces on the internet, via a website or p2p or whatever. And in the middle we have artists - me and others like me. The RIAA hasn't done much for me lately, but neither has p2p, really. When musicians ask me how they're supposed to cover the costs of recording if their music gets traded for free online, all I can say is what the blogosphere has been saying. Fans will buy merch. Fans will paypal you donations, like a tip jar. The fans will come through, somehow. But how, really? Merch is a logo on a piece of material. A logo is data. The logos, like the tunes they stand for, want to be free. So all we really have is the virtual tip jar.

Some of us do give virtual tips, but most don't. Freeing mp3s to your fans isn't like busking. There's no eye contact. There's no presence. This model is not sustainable, either. How many of us actually go and paypal every artist who we've downloaded and like? And what do the fans get in return? A moral satisfaction, sure, but not enough to make the model work. In practice, the fans get very little for their efforts.

Artists are left with the problem of how to distribute their music such that it makes it to their fans and they cover their costs and can live. Moreover, the manner of distribution and monetary compensation should capture the zeitgeist of sharing and direct involvement. The fans must get something tangible in return, in a time when tangibility itself is becoming slippery.

I think commissioning is the answer to this dilemma. The commission amount covers costs. The fans get something real in return - their name attached to the work - a credit as an integral part of the creation. Because as the RIAA knows and fears, the fans have been integral all along. This is one answer to the question of how smaller artists can thrive in a direct-to-consumer, sharing sort of environment. The gift economy! The commissioner gives money to the artist who gives music to hir fans. Like other gift economies, the value of the gifts grow as it spreads to more and more people. Instead of fighting the internet economies of data, this model requires it.

I think Ebay is a natural fit for this project. The auction aspect means that minimal costs are covered and the value of the fan's gift is in proportion to the value in which other fans hold it. In any case, some sort of discrete transaction method is required. A popular artist could get more commissions than s/he could hope to fill otherwise.

If somebody gets this concept to work in practice, then we have the new model. So here's my trial seeking a proof of concept. Music can be free and artists and fans can cooperate and thrive without leech-like corporations persecuting both.

• Past Commissions
• Auction 1
• Auction 2

Edit

See http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/?page_id=60 for more information

Complainments

Ok, it's true that I play the tuba. And I bike around town with a sousaphone attached to my bike. While wearing men's clothes. And I got to clothing stores to buy these clothes which requires trying them on. Despite all of these things that might lead one to a contrary conclusion, I do not enjoy being stared at. When I am trying to bike home in in the icy wind with a tuba attached to my bike via octopi (aka: bungee cords), and I hear the word "tuba" followed by squeals of laughter, it just annoys me. I'm grumpy that way. Other places I don't like getting stared at: public restrooms. If you wouldn't call me "sir" on the street, at a café or use male pronouns when describing the person you saw biking past with a tuba, then what on earth posses you to adopt them when I'm in the women's room? Oh, but you're Dutch, so you don't say anything about my obvious out-of-placeness, you just stare. Well, stop it already. Sheesh.

What I really want to complain about this evening is Pat. I've been thinking a lot about Pat lately. This isn't a person, it's a Saturday Night Live skit that was broadcast while I was in high school. SNL was a measure of coolness when I was a kid. It signified many things including being allowed by your parents to stay up late enough to watch it, since it started at something like 23:00 on Saturdays. So, therefore, you could talk about how funny the skits on it were at school on Monday, and everybody would know that you were allowed to stay up late enough to watch them. (If you complained about how the band's second song sucked (it always sucked for some reason. I think the sound engineers fell asleep by then), then you were super awesome because that part didn't come on until after midnight.)

So there existed a skit about a character named "Pat." I was trying to remember the theme song of the recurring skit, but I couldn't quite piece it all together. The internet was no help, but it did give me a few plot synopsi. Anyway, as best as I can recall, it went, "Is it a he or a she? A him or a her? Um, excuse me ma'am, um sir?. . . It's time for androgyny, here comes Pat!"

The one I remember best involved Pat going to a drug store and trying to buy personal items of a gradually more intimate nature. The druggist is desperately trying to figure out Pat's physical sex. Would you like T-Gel shampoo or VO5? Pert Plus, Pat says. Speed stick deodorant or Secret? Which is cheaper? Finally, Pat asks for condoms. The audience howls. The druggist asks Pat to chose between extra-sensitive or ribbed. The punch-line is when Pat says "I'm a very sexual being." The studio audience responds with an echoing, "Ewwwwwww."

Pat is repulsive. Ugly. Toad-like. Wears unattractive, unflattering clothes. Unkempt hair. Snorts through hir nose when zie laughs. Who on earth would have sex with such a thing.

One plot synopsis, found on the internet, had somebody who became so confused by Pat's gender that they committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Yes, violence is the correct response to gender ambiguity. But who makes a better target? Self-inflicted, or the person 'causing' this desperation?

Did I mention this was on TV when I was in secondary school, on an enormously popular program that conveyed status to those who watched it? The year I graduated, it was made into a movie, which, thank gods, was a major bomb. IMDB refers to the titular character with the pronoun "it."

I've known a fair number of genderqueer and trans people in my time. On average, those folks are about as attractive as the population at large. Many are sexy, some are not. This is in no way linked with their transition status. They're just people, obviously. Pat is an ugly caricature, with no basis in reality. but zie lives in my head. Even if it's clearly not true that trans people are ugly and horrible, well, there's Pat in my head.

So let's end this complainment with some true statements. Somebody like Pat doesn't 'cause' other people to commit violence, whether self-inflicted or hate crime. I don't cause people to stare at me in bathrooms. Other people's problems belong to other people, not to Pat and not to me.

but . . .

I was trying to buy a tweed jacket today and I went to the tweediest store I could find. Many of the stores here are kind of butcher than the same store is in Paris. Zara is way less twinky, for example. I've noticed that when I dress more casually, people don't respond to me as well, so I'm going back to dressing like a swanky Parisian man. Anyway, I was in my casual Dutch hooded jacket, trying to find classier jacket and becoming paranoid. There's that moment when people looking at me in the store realize that I'm looking for men's clothes for me. This is Holland. nobody says anything. Probably nobody thinks anything of it, once the connection is made. Or not very much of it, anyway. But I'm paranoid and when the shop clerk volunteers that he thinks I'm a size 14, which they don't carry, I don't know if he's being helpful in telling me the things I'm trying on don't really fit, or if he's trying to get me to leave his smart, tweedy shop. There's really no way that I can know which it is.

When I was in France, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed clothes shopping. But now it's gone back to filling me with dread. Things have returned to normal.

Freedom Machine

Last night, over dinner, the subject of bicycles came up. Who invented them? "It was the Dutch, certainly" asserted the Dutch woman. "No, I think it was the British" said the Brit. Nicole thought it was Americans. I thought it might be the French, given the large section on bicycles in the Musée d'Arts et Metiers.

After reading the wikipedia article, well, it's not so straightforward, but it seems like Nicole and I were both right. I remembered this morning that there's a plaque in New Haven, Connecticut which says the bike was invented there. What's more interesting though, is the bike's feminist import.

The big wheel bicycles were considered inappropriate for women (and were also very dangerous), but in the 1880's, an English inventor came up with a "safety bicycle" which had pedals, a chain, small tires: the modern bike. "It was the first bicycle that was suitable for women, and as such the 'freedom machine' (as American feminist Susan B. Anthony called it) was taken up by women in large numbers." The wikipedia article goes on to state,

The impact of the bicycle on female emancipation should not be underestimated. The diamond-frame safety bicycle gave women unprecedented mobility, contributing to their larger participation in the lives of Western nations. As bicycles became safer and cheaper, more women had access to the personal freedom they embodied, and so the bicycle came to symbolise the New Woman of the late nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States. Feminists and suffragists recognised its transformative power. Susan B. Anthony said: "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood." In 1895 Frances Willard, the tightly-laced president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote a book called How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, in which she praised the bicycle she learned to ride late in life, and which she named "Gladys", for its "gladdening effect" on her health and political optimism. Willard used a cycling metaphor to urge other suffragists to action, proclaiming, "I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum."

And then, alas, bikes fell out of favor in the US, replaced by cars, and the status of women dropped. But then, "In the late 1960s . . . bicycling enjoyed another boom. Sales doubled between 1960 and 1970, and doubled again between 1970 and 1972." And continued to grow while the second wave of feminism was also getting going. Coincidence? A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Take that bike away from the fish and give it to the woman, it's her freedom machine.

Um, seriously, biking has a number of leftist benefits, but perhaps among them is some sort of inherently democratic, egalitarian nature. Bikes to do not seek to dominate and control in the manner of cars. They are self-propelled and thus reliant only on the rider for power, but at the same time, close to the terrain. Power without dominance. Maybe bikes are inherently feminist.

2006

Here is an unexplained list of events in 2006 that effected my life, in no particular order:

• 2 gigs in France (well, 3, sorta)
• students riot in paris
• Vélorution (French Critical Mass)
• Lyme Disease
• Went to Tours, Nice, Orléans Joan of Arc Festival
• Went to Munich, Karlsruhe, Berlin and Cologne
• 4 gigs (2 on tuba) in California
• Dutch Radio play
• 1 gig in Holland
• Brother got married
• got my dog back
• Moved from Paris, France to The Hague, the Netherlands
• Started at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands (became a snob)
• Went to Brussels, many trips to Amsterdam and other Dutch cities
• Zoloft
• 60x60 Pacific rim Mix
• anti-squatting
• Best! Bike! In! The! World!

Self Acceptance

So it's the time of year when, once all the presents are purchased and wrapped, I start pondering New Years Resolutions. (I think last year I resolved to procrastinate less, so this bodes well for that. (um, ok I didn't, but it still bodes well. anyway.)) I think an important one for me next year is self-acceptance. But what does that mean, exactly?

If I accept myself just as I am, does that mean accepting that I haven't accepted myself? But self-acceptance would, itself, constitute a change. So I'm not accepting myself as I am right now, because that's a paradoxical sort of impossible. There's a version of the uncertainty principle at work. You can accept yourself (now) as you were. And you can accept yourself as you will be in the moment after self-acceptance. But you can never accept yourself right in that moment.

This is a perhaps silly way of pointing out that people are moving targets. We change constantly. I've heard music theorists talk about laptop artists as being the only folks who have to work with a constantly self-modifying instrument. (Software upgrades, etc can cause major changes fairly frequently in way which doesn't tend to happen to, say, a violin.) but it's not just laptop artists, it's also vocalists. Our selves, our physical presence, our internal image of ourselves, the conversation between the two, the control mechanisms of same are all constantly in more or less flux.

Therefore, change is inevitable. Self-acceptance itself is a form of change. to be meaningful, it must also embrace change. It's also a process. Which is to say it's not instantaneous, but rather a process applied to our selves. It implies a change in the conversation between our physical presence and our internal image of ourselves and this causes a change in in our internal image. That change in internal image is the goal of the process, but also part of the process.

To accept yourself, it is necessary to know what you are accepting. While it's possible to accept the unknown, this process certainly implies a level of self-awareness. It seems that in order to accept yourself, you have to make some sort of inventory of what exactly you are. This involves a questioning process and thus forms identity. The accepted self is more clearly defined than the unaccepted self.

But what of our physical selves? Their alteration may be included as part of the process. For example, imagine a man looking in the mirror and having a moment of acceptance. "I'm going bald." he finally admits to himself. If he truly accepted that, would he continue having a combover, or would he change his hairstyle to more accurately reflect the current state of his hair? If he truly accepted the state of his hair, he would react to it by changing his hairstyle. Therefore, self acceptance can imply physical changes, or under certain circumstance, may require them.

So we inquire to find ourselves and then apply changes to uncover the revealed self. But the revealed self is created through the process of discovery. The questioning creates the identity. What we accept, then, is not some "true self" that predates the process, but rather the self formed through experiences, questioning and the process of acceptance. We have agency through the process so therefore, we have agency as to what our accepted selves will be. But that agency has limitations. The bald man who accepts his baldness finds his choice limited. He cannot will his hair back into being. His baldness is like a closet that he comes out of.

Lack of self-acceptance stems from discord between our mental image of ourselves and our physical manifestations. We don't want to believe that we're bald. We want our actions to reflect what we think our principles are. When our physicality and our self-image are at odds with each other, this causes us pain. The way out of this pain is to go through it, but many of us instead turn away from it, letting out self images diverge from our physical selves. A reminder of the difference causes pain, so we put a block there and diverge further. Eventually, the divergence must be faced.

What if our image is very strong and very sure but is in missmatch with our physical selves? For example, we believe ourselves generous, but are not. We suffer pain from this mismatch in the form of guilt. Few would argue that the best path would be to accept our lack of generosity, but rather to practice changing our physical manifestations, our actions, to match our idea of ourselves.

Some of our sense of self seems to be immutable. Whether it is inborn or formed later in life is moot. The point is simply that some ideas of ourself are changeable and others are not. Self acceptance implies serenity then. We change what we can and accept what we can't. We bring unity between our inner sense of self and out physical manifestation then by changing our manifestation. After Joan of Arc's initial trial for heresy, the court forced her to wear women's clothes. after only a few days of it she refused. Her inner sense of self was in terrible conflict with her dress. For her, the path to self-acceptance involved being forced to chose death over compromise. Fortunately, few of us will be put in a situation so dramatic.

Joan's idea of herself was certainly a combination of factors including ideas of herself dating from childhood and her experiences as an adult. Her path included intense questioning, although from an external source. These factors lead her to form an identity surrounding her gender presentation. This sense of identity and the accepting of it limited her choices. She could not be at peace with herself and wear a dress.

In summary, self-acceptance implies questioning, physical and/or mental change, limitation and serenity. Lack of self acceptance and dissonance between our idea of self and our presentation of self causes pain. Self-acceptance implies a relief from this pain. It is a involved and possibly painful process, but a worthwhile one, as it brings peace.

Happy Holidays!

Ok, so there must be both sincerity and an appearance of dignity. sincerity, obviously, must be felt in the heart. But the dignity is something in between. To put on dignity entirely for show, would lack sincerity. However, the feeling of dignity in the heart is not specifically called for. What is called for is merely the appearance, but mixed with sincerity.

There is also immaturity, "the looking of a lad." Perhaps maturity would mean dignity felt in the heart. Perhaps for the immature, it is enough to work sincerely to appear dignified, which is to try to be dignified, but fake it when you have to. In any case, it's a call to grow up and to approach things maturely. Hildegard of Bingen (who I'm studying in Medieval Visionaries class) had a vision of seven vices and seven virtues. One of the vices had the appearance of a dog and said that it would run dog-like towards everyone and be playful and happy forever. The virtue responded by condemning the vice's immaturity. Running dog-like towards people both lacks maturity and dignity.

Therefore, the solutions called for are sincere, restrained and mature. Romantic comedy-type actions are therefore not called for. The failed actions of the past are similarly not called for. They don't work. And they're not mature: they are patterns formed in youth that have not been modified. They are regrettable in grown-ups.

The situation will be slow to change, but will end well. Taking action is advised. Even drastic action (presumably as long as it is sincere and mature and appears diginified) will lead to good things. However, it's presumable that the slow change along with the necessity of dignity means that any drastic action must be thoughtful. Large actions must be weighed carefully, as impetuousness is immature, even if it is sincere.

I explained this to my shrink and she asked if the appearance of dignity was a large concern of mine. I said I wanted to do the right thing. Of course, there are many right things rather than a single correct course of action. Indeed, there may be advantage in every movement undertaken, although there may be varying degrees of advantage and different kinds of advantage in different life arenas. My shrink points out that crises can lead to a lot of growth, for example.

I'm using this as a platform from which to try to maintain my mood of cautious optomism. It looks more dignified than despair.

Problems

As I see it, there are two kinds of problems. One is right-now problems and the other is past problems. Right-now problems are ones that areoccuring right-now. Example:

A: does this make my butt look big?
B: no, your butt is already the size of Romania
A: that hurt my feelings
B: I'm very sorry.

I think those should be addressed as they come up, like person A does in the example.

Past prolems are things lurking from the past. Example:

A: It hurt my feelings last year when you shot my dog.
B: It was rabid!
A: You don't know that for sure. We should have brought it to the vet.
B: It was chewing on a human baby!
A: That dog was very important to me!
B: You're a lunatic!
A: you're an insensitive jerk!

Past problems are lurking around and they must be addressed or they will erupt in bad ways, but as we can see from this example, bringing them up can also be dangerous. I think that in some cases, past problems require a professional referee to help people sort them out.

there are my thoughts about problems. thank you

Introspection

My relatsionship with Christi had many problems. We had different methods of dealing with them and different ideas about what they were. What we were agreed upon was that June 2002 - the end of 2003 was a messy, bad time. My way of dealing with this was simply not to deal with it. I wanted to focus on loving each other and hope of the future. Christi wanted to directly address these lingering issues. Neither of us has especially good communication skills, so when she would try to address these problems, I would not get what she was talking about and be upset and not want to think about the bad past.

She, however, wouldn't let go of the past and so the past rose up and bit me at the start of winter break. I spent the winter break contemplating the past and patterns in our relationship that had not changed since we were 19 even though we had changed and the patterns weren't good then and had gotten less good over time. The past was a huge ocean, rising up and threatening to drown me. It was too big. I didn't understand what Christi was talking about and it hurt me. The way she said it hurt me, but I didn't tell her that. If only we would just focus on the bright and hopeful future, it would all go away and everything would be ok.

The magnitude of past hurts, when I couldn't ignore it anymore, was overwhelming. How christi tried to talk about it (and I resisted) hurt in a correspondingly overwhelming way. Not only was it huge and horrible, but she wouldn't let go of it. I couldn't see a way to let go of it without letting go of her. It was the only thing I could think of to do. Trying to talk about it would just hurt me further. It would hurt her. There was no point in drowning ourselves in an ocean of woe. I stopped talking to her to avoid having to talk about this. I was frustrated by her unwillingness to simply embrace my vision of a future disconnected from the last 2 years.

Today, Alvin told a story about a guy explaining his compositional style by writing the word Beethoven on a piece of paper. then he wrote "19th century." then he wrote "minimalism." He drew an arc from "Beethoven" to "minimalism," bypassing the 19th century and then wrote his own name next to "minimalism." It's a nice notion to think we can ignore the 19th century, and indeed we try, but it's foolish to assert that it hasn't changed and affected us as composers. Lou Harrison editted Ives, who took all of his ideas from the 19th century. I listen to Lou and get ideas from him. I come from a 19th century musical heritage which I cannot escape from.

But I wanted to escape from the last 2 years. I wanted to draw a line from returning from Europe in 2001 (full of ideas and enthusiasm) to the present. And maybe this composer in Alvin's anecdote could make a reasonable claim to being unscathed by the 19th century, but I couldn't make a similar claim about 2002. I didn't want to talk about the last couple years. I didn't want to think about them. But with Christi arriving and the sort of introspection one engages in around the New Year, I did think about them. It was a deep chasm from which there seemed to be no way to get out. I told Amy later, "how much can two people hurt each other before it's enough?"

So I stopped talking to Christi, but I couldn't stop thinking about her. I got back to school and thought, "I want to run away from home." but I already had. running away from home doesn't help. Problems have an uncanny way of following you. Trying to ignore things doesn't make them go away. focussing soley on the future is not a way to fix problems of any kind. My denial of the past was as useful to our relationship as Dubya trying to fix the deficit by setting up a lunar base. Both ideas are fueled by a sort of optomism, but a ludicrous way to deal with any sort of present problem. Both require a solid foundation that needs/needed repairs before it support such a project. My refusing to talk about the past or deal with it was like Dubya ignoring WMD stuff in the State of the Union. It must be addressed. (I must stop comparing myself to Bush!!)

I never told any of this to christi. It didn't fit in my world view of "if we just ignore this it will go away." It certainly didn't fit with fleeing tidal waves from the past. and it was a tidal wave. The past had been steadily collecting behind me, waiting for me to examine it. It's like the reading backlog I'm already generating in my Mystic Voices class. (alas) I cannot explain how overwhelmingly huge the unexamined past was or be less metaphorical in my description. What is true is that I needed/need space to deal with huge personal demons. I could not discuss them with Christi then. It looked like I would never be able to. Breaking up with Christi seemed like the most sensible option and the least painful for me and for her.

Obviously, breaking up with Christi and fleeing to Connecticut did not make these demons disappear. I took with me two carry on bags, one checked bag, and the maximum limmit of emotional baggage (one day in therapy and I'm already in cheesy metaphor land). And I've been examining the recent past. And suddenly many of the seemingly hurtful things that Christi said seem to make sense. Suddenly, it's clear that she was trying to slay some demons instead of having them creep up on us forever. That our 19 year old patterns didn't fit anymore. That we had to talk about the future not in vague, hopeful terms, but in the concrete and rooted in our experience. She also hurt my feelings. Neither of us is good at this communication thing. It's hard to do over the phone. She may not have hurt me on purpose.

I love her

So now what?