I love Gavin Newsom

Ok, so he has problems. But goddamn, this a momentous thing he's done. February 12th every year should be Gavin Newsom day and events ought to be held to commemorate it. He's a striahgt guy and he did this. He's a mainstream democrat straight guy.

a happy couple. I met Hyde and Dawn when I went to the Michigan Women's music festival a few years ago. That's also when they met. Dawn moved to California shortly thereafter and I would sometimes see them around. And today they got married.

This is momentous. I wish i was home.

acadmic writing

"New paradigms of the responding self, capable of exemplifying the dialogic relation that structures the meaning space deliminated by the biblical canon, spring up along this trajectory of interpretation." (Riccoeur, "The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation." In Figuring the Scared: Religion, Narration and Imagination. p 267)

The debate:

Is academic writing bullshit or horseshit?

While heretofore the traditional cry of the beleagured student, representing an esprit de corps as much as a remonstrance against obfuscated elusitivty, has been to invoke bovine post-gustatory effluent, it is encumbent upon scholars to examine the lexical baggage surrounding this phraseology and unpack possible biases. For instance, exegesis of the prefix unearths an allusivity to masculinormative beastomorphism, clearly substantiating latent gender issues in the academy, a constituent of occidental scholastic heritage. This, conforming to the mysogonist preposition that congizance is a masculine endeavor. Contrast this now to the symbolic grid envoked via refrences to enquine imagery. The social gendered meaning space deliminated the academic tradition remains undiscerned, masking a recalcitrant responce to gynoschoalistisim or evoking the semiotics of tolerance? Given the subjectivity of differentiating the two prepositions and to avoid "looking a gift horse in the mouth," the communal recitation is quasi-mandated to equimorphise. That is, academic writing is horseshit.

what about academic music?

ah yes. What about academic music? My music is heavily academically influenced. this is my second round of music school. i read acadademic books about music. i talk to professors. i create stuff that is respected in academic settings (more or less), but doesn't have much of an outside audience. Just like the essays of the guy I quote at the top of this post. Academics like him. they know the lineage of his teachers and can recognize his influences. The read him and think about him and incorporate his ideas into their own writings. just like music.

well, ok, so is my music horseshit? Some people like it (mostly academics and other composers). But some people also like academic writing (mostly academics). So horseshit is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Or, maybe pretension is always horshit?

Morton feldman just wrote things as he wanted to. He didn't have a system. He wrote notes down on paper and people played them. No manifestos. No pronouncements on "invoking temoporal space." Just notes on paper.

I think music is nifty, but it's not like finding a cure for cancer or something. It's entertainment. People ultimately listen or don't listen based on how they like the sounds, not because of over-intellectulazised program notes. music is nifty. "nifty." not "secular quasi spiritual pathos."

Learning things

Last semester, I learned to tie my shoelaces so that they don't come untied. This semester, I think I'll learn about how to do bow markings, so string players can figure out how to play notes I write. Maybe next semester, I'll learn some social skills. I need to concentrate on the usefulness of bowmarkings, or i'll never do my reading again.

For Marek

Fxcked at 110 bpm 2'04

blogosphere

http://www.blogpulse.com/ does automated trend discovery in blogs. This means if a new phrase starts popping up in people's blogs, it will note it and provide links to the indexed blogs. So if you look at yeasterday, for eaxmple, you see a lot of variations on valentines day.

What's interresting, to me, is looking at terms related to gay marriage, which have popped up recently for obvious reasons. Every blog that they found that is talking about gay marriage is on the pro side. this means that either homophobes aren't smart enough to figure out how to blog (likely, but unfortunate, since they seem to be able to manage voting machines), or that the people who care about this enough to post about it are all pro. This means, that while the country may be split on the issue, those who really care about it (at least among the digerati) are pro. If this can be extrapolated to the general public, if Bush gets behind the evil anti amdendment, no antis will care about it enough for it to make up for his previous crimes, but pros will hate him for it, if they didn't already.

It is with mixed emotions that I look at all this stuff going on. I'm still pro gay marriage, of course. I'm also pro gay divorce. If we can go to Canada an enter into the bounds of holy matrimony, then it would be nice if there was a way to get out of it too. You know, should it become necessary. bleah.

Hangover Music

Yes, I am sitting alone on a saturday night, on my computer. What's more, it's valentines day. I woke this morning with a wicked hangover, after really not having consumed that much alchohol. Or maybe it wasn't that bad, but it took me a dern long time to shake it. Deborah suggests that I didn't drink enough water.

Anyway, I woke up with the idea that if I made more accessible music, I would be more able to impress chicks. My noise music is not working for me in this regard. I know I used to have a techno-dance generator that was somehwat finished, but it was for MAX/MSP for os9. SO why not do a dance thingee in supercollider? This is why not. I'm never going to get chicks with music. In fact, I may have to lie and tell them I do something else. It might be better to pretend to be an English major or something.

I did nothing productive today

[8812 messages expunged from folder "INBOX"] 

truths

1. Ice might sounds neat when it breaks, but slipping and falling on it while drunk (or presumably, while sober too) sucks. ice sucks.
2. Everything Tom says about Connectucut and CT women is true. Tom is Connecticut.
3. Email is as at least as untrustworthy as the telephone
4. Hangovers suck

Xena is locked in India House and no human is there to let her out. I want Xena to come home.

I'm 28 years old

I left my heart in San Francisco

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/12/GAYMARRIAGE.TMP Lesbian couple legally wed.

when I was a youth, before I was out, I checked all the books on being a lesbian out of the Cupertino library and I know I've read a bunch of stuff that Del Martin wrote. I think. She wrote a bunch of stuff about how homosexuality should be removed from the DSM, or whatever that book is that lists all the psychiatric diseases that people can have. the first ideas that I had about what it meant to be a lesbian were from reading what she wrote.

Some of my day

Went to the best colloquium of my time at Wesleyan. Korean drummers came and performed. Some of their stuff sounded a lot like house music. It was also at club-type volume. As loud as the Polo Club, for example. Some grad students complained later about the volume and talked about hearing loss. What about people who go dancing? do tey all go deaf? I quit wearing my earplugs because i am a slave to fashion. maybe i should start again. Anyway, the drumming was awesome. it made me want to dance.

then, later, I went to India House where there was an impromptu party, celebrating the coolness of the Colloquium, I guess, and acting as a wake for Leroy (Angela's gerbil) and for Nick Hawkins' relationship with his ex, too I guess. Most of the department came.

Leroy died early this morning of respitory failure stemming from a short illness. A funeral is planned for some time tomorrow, when he will be interned in the Connecticut river.

We toasted him several times and talked about other ways to honor his remains. Tom suggest a funeral pire in the middle of the street, or , failing that, in a parking lot. Several people suggested that instead of dropping him off a bridge into the river, we should put him in a boat and set it on fire, like a Viking funeral. I wanted to have a mourning procession down the street where we carried his remains and maybe played some instruments, but Andrew insisted that we would all be arrested. (Which, really, would just be a cool thing to put in a bio or mention in an interview, since we're all planning on being famous.)

We are however, unrealted to Leroy (god rest his soul), starting a Drone Music Marching Band, which we will call the Drone Core and will have a Drone Major. I will be playing tuba. I knew there was a reason I dragged my sousaphone to CT. Of course, it's really leaky, so it's going to need a lot of gaffing tape on it before it's up to playing a drone. I'm going to drag it to the electronic music studio and start repairs very soon.

the question has always been how to get new audiences to come to concerts. we'll bring the music to them by playing in the student center at lunchtime!

feel excited about this. also have fun plans in store for my b-day. happy happy joy joy

terrorist!

Apparently, the white house only offers audio archives of radio addresses delivered in the last year. (This one is very instructive: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030208.html. what we without a shadow of adoubt know, or rather, maybe didn't know so well.) This gives me less material than I had wanted, since I was going to mine all the radio addresses since Sept 2001. I was thinking of writing to the whitehouse and asking them to send me a CD of the old addresses. I was trying to figure out how to phrase this so that they wouldn't figure out that i had artistic designs on the material or am registered Green. Also, since the web archives are all in Real format, I've been capturing them with Audio Hijack, which is time consuming and has the low quality associated with Real streams. But now I've got all the available radio addresses that mention "terrorist" or "terrorism" (but not just "terror") and it's 930 Mb of data. That's way more than a CD will hold and CDs are 74 minutes. Maybe I'll just work with what I have. ANyway, the low-fi could be nice.

not so shy

my shrink points out that people are normally shy approaching strangers and doesn't seem to think that there's anything wrong with me. I think she's going to cut me off soon. then i'll have to go back to whining to my friends.

acoustic awesomeness

but i did pay a compliment to a stranger today. I saw Mark Dresser play this evening and told him that his was the best bass playing that I'd ever heard. It was completely awesome. He's got a pickup behind the neck, fingerboard sort of part of the bass, you know that thingee that people press the strings against to play notes... (go music shcool terminology!) So it pickups both the note he's playing and the anti-note of the string left over. and he was doing this super cool finger buzz thing, where he intentionally didn't press the string hard enough and it made this great buzzing sound. His string tunings were toally wild. He started writing the piece by coming up with the tunings. Then he wrote themes in those tunings. then he played the score by improvising on those themes. I'm not sure whether he just ordered them in real time or played variations on them. When I grow up, I wanna play standup bass. this very morning, when Alvin's composition seminar was waffling about what ensemble we'll write for, Alvin threatened us, saying he would make us all write for solo bass. I think I'd be fine with that. If we get a string quartet,, I think I'll write a bass feature.

bass = good

and speaking of Alvin's class, we had a pianist come in to talk about John Cage's Music of Changes and play it. He played the third and the fourth books. Alas, his name is escaping me, but he is an excellent pianist. and I was thinking, as I was listening to it, about what made the piece what it was. Every moment in it is beautiful. It's a lovely piece filled with lovely and discreete (meaning totally seperated) events, which somehow blends togther into monotony. (i'm going to be burned at the stake like Joan of Arc by the music department. It's bad enough that I like Phillip Glass' new stuff.)

I read this book once about cartoon theory, which I can't remeber the name of or the writer, but it's pretty influential so far as comic books about the theory of comics go. and in it, they talk about using a lot of colors. Usisng a lot of red, for example, makes a bold statement. Or a lot of blue. Or a lot of yellow. or green. or whatever. But if you start using all of the bright colors, it starts to blend together somehow into grey. Or if you play too many frequencies at the same time, instead of getting the groovy complexness, it sounds like white noise. so what I think happens with Music of Changes is that you have to stay very much right in the present to enjoy it, because it is what it is while it's going on. Every moment is pointalistic and lovely. and i think if i try to perceive it in any way but on a moment-by-moment or event-by-event way, it's too complicated rfor my little brain and gets white-noisy.

However, the moments in it are so darn wonderful. I thinking of writing a program to generate some brass stuff based on the approximate algorythm that Cage used. But I think his timings are very virtuosically complex and are perhaps overburdening the player, so I want to combine the results with a performance algorthm invented by the total complexity guy. He wrote some pieces in the 60's that players could play at the same time, but not togther, so as to create complex textures but still be fun to play. Music of Changes is an amalgamation of 8 parts, with incredibly complicatred timing. In fact, the timing is integral to the structure of the piece. My poorly conceived knock-off would have N parts, but be much freer on the timing. because it would be neat to have something with so many beautious moments that doesn't take months to learn. and I want to write a brass ensemble piece, possibly as the second movement to my symphonic thingee

Just had a personal-ad-related email exchange where somebody said i'm too tall for her to date. what's up with that? should i tell her that i slouch? I guess there's something to be said for knowing what you want.

the plan

I'm going to capture all of the bush radio addresses since september 11th and get samples from them of him saying "terrorist." I want to get all of his public pronouncements of "terrorist." since he's so rarely unscripted, it may actually be possible to download all his public pronouncements, since he usually just gives speeches and the white house (probably) archives those. I'm going to be listening to a lot of bush. And then trying to assemble all of the audio. I bet you're glad you're not my housemate (unless you're Aaron, in which case you are my housemate).

class today

I co-lead a TA session on recording stuff in the electronic music studios and the recording studio. actually, it was 9:00 am, so i let Jascha do as much of the talking as possible. I've been told the way to cure my shyness in approaching strangers is to pay a compliment to a stranger every day. this makes me not want to leave my house, so I think I'll start by saying "hi," to strangers. but I won't take candy from them.

My visionaries class will be discussing Joan of Arc on wednesday. Some of the reading makes claims disputed by Regine Pernoud, former head of the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans. I wish they offered a seminar just on Joan. That would be awesome. We've been reading all these visionaries and they're just odd. there's a whole lot of god talk, obviously. Some folks find Margery Kempe to be annoying because she's extremely repetitive. She's extremely trashy too. I don't find the repetitiveness annoying. Is it because I'm a musician and music thrives on repitition? I don't find the repititiveness annoying.

Wrote some stuff for my SuperCollider tutorial, which will hopefully constitute enough work to cover the two weeks that Ron was gone. If I may be so arrogant, I could put together the whole class project by myself in an afternoon (ok, a weekend), but I'm not sure how much flexibility is required or how much work I should do.

and then

I went to retrieve Xena from India House, but ended up staying for the evening and having my first encounter with what Connecticut terms "Chinese Food." Oh dear, no no no no. The India House denizens were mocking me for my snobbishness in refusing to try local chinese food. I should not allow myself to be swayed so easily.

I'm starting to like the ice that's everywhere. Yeah, it's slippery, but it looks kind of cool and makes very nice cracking sounds when you step on it. Also, if it's very cold out and you kick an ice formation, it makes a very satisfying shattering sound. Like breaking glass but lighter. And nobody cares if you break ice and it won't cut anyone, but if you kick something too thick, it may hurt your foot. Last semester, an undergrad, Dan St. Clair, did a cool installation with sheets of ice shattering and I thought it was impressed, but only now do I get it. I've been trying to think of sonic things to do with ice, but Dan's project covered everything that I can think of so far. He's kind of brilliant.

Lynn Breedlove is trans? Man, all the cool chicks are now cool boys.

and also

my personal website is out of date. it's kind of embarrassing. Maybe it was hip in 1999, or whenever third generation web design was the hot new thing (indeed the layout is influenced by a very influential book about such design), but the content is um . . . kind of lame and third generation layout was never so cool as it was hyped to be.

I don't have time to redeisgn my website. should i just take it down?

Proposed strip-down

Update

Of course I have time to alter my website. It's a bit more interesting than my homework. besides, aren't we supossed to rest on the 7th day?

ok then

how does one overcome shyness? Are there exercises that one can do? If I approach three strangers a day and say hello, will it make me more able to approach a clique of hot dykes? Should I just drink more?

It is not enough to go to queer bars. i must also actually talk to people. this shyness thing is not working for me. i think i must be feeling what hets experienced at junior high dances.

wanted:

field recording of a group recitation of the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed, such as is done in the catholic mass. You'd think that with google, I could find such a recording, but I'm having no luck.

So I was looking for some text by Emma Goldman on the connection between power and violence (power is violence, I think) and then I was getting back to my reading of medieval visionaries and i realized that god is all-powerful, which means he's all-violent. Which is why he's running around casting people into hell left and right. I'm sure that if I'd grown up in a fire and brimstone religion instead of namby-pamby catholics, the 'god = violence' thing would seem so suddenly interesting. Or maybe it's the gallon of earl gray tea i drank this afternoon. So I'm thinking of mixing a short text about "power is violence. absolute power is absolute violence" with a group recitation of "all powerful and everliving god" with dubya talking about "war on terror" and the taliban and (mystic) Julian of Norwich's thoughts on sin (everything god made is good, so sin must serve god somehow) and maybe some gunshot noises.

this is for open mic night at the local hippie cafe. who wouldn't want to ponder power, violence and religion while eating cajun tempeh sandwiches?

yanni

So I met somebody the other day who said she liked Yanni, and I realized that I'd never actually heard anything by him, despite his being a staple of pledge-drive season public television in the bay area. I asked Tom and he said, "Yanni's great! I actually really like him." But tom used these same words of praise on Britney Spears, so I thought I should investigate this for myself.

The offical Yanni website only offers 33 and 36 second previews of his work, so I can only talk about his introductions, of which I just downloaded a few. And listened to them while Xena stared at me with a confused and disapproving expression, the dog version of "wtf?" It sounds like an instrumental version of Celine Dion, but performed on Casio Tones.

Don't get me wrong. I love Casio tones. And I don't know what year's music I was listening to. Perhaps it was recorded in the heyday of Casio tones. anyway, someplace, I have one, I think. I'm fond of it. It's a midi controller and the accordian sound is really nifty when passed through an overdriven low pass filter. Actually, it's Christi's casio tone, so perhaps I will never see it again, since i'm not sure where it has gotten itself off to.

I feel like there may be a strong asthetic connection between Yanni, Thomas Kinkade and Chicken Soup for the Soul. It feels like it is strongly rooted in the middle class, perhaps distinctly American (except that Yanni is Greek and Celine Dion is Canadian). It's something born in the last decade? Perhaps earlier? The middle class is the backbone of our society. the silent majority who tromps off to work every day, pays taxes (most taxes? the rich aren't paying anymore) and sees little benefit except in public education. Without the middle class, the US would decend into chaos and open class warfare, or at least chaos, since open class warfare is already being waged in many places. The middle class, locked into debt, is locked into non-radicalism. they have the most to lose and the most fear of losing it. the cultural values that they embrace define us a society, as they are consumers, so the rich pander to them while ignoring the poor.

Therefore, the middle class asthetic is safe. the middle class is up to it's eyeballs in student debt, credit card debt and morgage debt, they can't afford to rock the boat. the asthetic is comforting. while existing a few paychecks or one serious illness away from bankruptcy, the need for comfort is strong. And it allows them dreams of togtherness, unity and a social safety net. While isolated in the suburbs, with no real community around them, who wouldn't desire to look at pictures of cohesive village social structures?

Or maybe I'm readin too much into this

I have a CD with an interview with a Dadaist on it and he's talking about how the thing to do seemed to be to attack the bourgeois, as apparently they were unaware that it had been done to death. then they did some investigation and found out that they were all bourgeois.

"Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . " (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html)

I want to write a manifesto for an art movement. analyzing capitalist systems and Yanni is optional

googling myself

randomness. It's too bad about mp3.com.

Maybe I should add myself to wikipedia

More

and this!. Ok, it bothers me that nobody told me that they were putting things i wrote in a book, but goddamn, i'm now a published feminist writer. a totally, uncontacted, unreimbursed published feminist writer. wow.

Google Bombing

EllenFullman.com (which resolves to deepmedia.org/ellenfullman) is now the number three search result for Long String Instrument on Google. Let's push her up to number one! Add a link from your blog or website.

There will be advantage in every movement

So yesterday, I went on a date

It was my first date since becoming single and, indeed, my first date since I was 18 years old. The last date I went on was with a 17 year old French horn player who was still in highschool. (Christi and I didn't date until after we were a couple, so it doesn't count.) Actually, the horn player may have been the only girl I ever went out on dates with. I had a girlfriend before that, but I didn't go out with her so much as . . . well, nevermind.

I have a memory of feeling awkward and thinking that dating girls was, suprisingly, as awkward as dating boys. I actually dated quite a number of boys when I was 15 and 16. It was awkward and stupid and confusing, because sometimes I would like them, but I never liked them.

Anyway, I went out to a coffee shop in town yesterday and met a woman from a personal ad. She's a Middletown resident, which means she can tell me things like where to get my car fixed and where folks hang out, which is very handy. I'm horribly shy with new people. I hardly spoke, I think. She told many stories. She's a security gaurd and wants to be a cop and is some sort of volunteer with the Middletown PD, where she actually wears a full uniform (minus the pistol) and responds to certain types of calls. (I am a nice girl and didn't ask about handcuffs.)

She's also an aspiring poet and sent me a poem she wrote last November which she is very proud of. It won some sort of contest at poetry.com, through which she can get a publishng deal of some kind (that sounds a bit scammy). I think she outght to hold out for Chicken Soup for the Soul. Her poem is better than some of Tiffany's mom's poetry and as I recall, Tiffany's mom was published in Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul.

I gave her the url for my music, but haven't heard anything back about it yet.

I didn't feel any sort of spark. I'm not sure we share an asthetic or a worldview, but she seems fun. I talked very little and was uncertain what to say. I said virtually nothing of my background. when I pulled out my post-it pad to write down my phone number, the top post-it had a phone number and said "divorce lawyer" in large letters. she must think I'm escaping from a het marriage.

The real situation is much too complicated. I want to work it out with Christi, but when she said "maybe later," the possible time she indicated was after my graduation. I told Angela last semester that it was foolish to pretend that I had any say whatsoever over my fate. I dunno what to do with myself over the next year and half, or indeed, any time after that either. I'm just putting one foot in front of the other and waiting to see what life gives me.

I've been making movements, with the idea that there will be some advantage in all of them, despite my lack of a plan or even a completely clear goal state. Then I looked again. The future state has advantage in every movement. And Change is slowly occuring. Right now, movements might bring disadvantage, for all I know. Or maybe it's just important to keep busy. Or maybe the only direction to go is up.

Telephones

Right now, we live in a very visual culture. People make biological explinations for this, which I'm not prepared to discuss, but it's important ot note that Western Culture was not always visual. During the Medieval period, most information was translated verbally. Thus listening was more important than seeing. Even literate people were trained to read aloud, rather than silently, so in literacy there was still a sence of an auditory component through which information was relayed.

Many factors in our modern culture have changed that. Television. Movies. Widespread silent literacy. Visual images have become the dominant communication medium. Sight is now culturally more important than listening.

Thus, when you sit in a room and talk with someone, you are doing so in a visually-dominated milleu. You look at them, looking for information cues, such as facial expression, twitching, body language, etc. This makes up at least half of the communication. You also detect other stimuli, which we are less aware of, such as pheremones. The voice alone is telling less than half the story.

This means, that under ideal circumstances of perfect audio reproduction, let's say 24 bit audio at 96 k sampling, with a perfect condenser microphone, you're getting less than half of the cues, especially the emotional cues. And most voice reproduction is not so ideal. Take, for example, the telephone. Under a perfectly clear connection, the sample rate is not so high, the bit rate is lower and many high and low frequencies have been filtered out so as to require less bandwidth. Most phones have very cheap dynamic mics and equally poor speakers. Subtleties are lost. Voice inflections, rich in emotional content, are compressed away, filtered out, not reproducable by the speakers and not picked up by the mic in the first place. This is under ideal circumstances, making a phone call to somebody down the street on a perfectly clear line. What percentage of content is actually getting through?

Now, think of a very long distance line. If you're calling Europe, for example, your signal is bouncing off a satalite or going through a very long trans-atlantic cable. Your phone is probably analog, with heavy filtering of highs and lows. The signal gets converted to digital part way through by the phone company, using A to D converters that are probably less than perfect, probably passing again through a filter to clear out analog line noise (and taking some of your signal with it), then it gets sent across the atlantic, then is re-converted to analog, again with not a studio-quality D to A converter, or recompressed and sent out to your cell phone, which does it's own D ot A conversion using whatever circuts are included in the thing. your voice has been routed a long way, filtered, compressed, converted A to D to A and maybe to D and A another time again, and otherwise mangled. Some of your packets were probably lost. You're lucky if there's not static or echo or both.

On the one hand, it's entirely astoundingly miraculous that you can be standing in Connecticut and hear the apartment noises of dinner being cooked in an apartment in France, while it's actually happening. On the other hand, how much data is really getting through? It's something like a cruel joke, in that it implies that communication is possible, but then drops so many pieces of it, making communication extremely difficult.

Having phone conversations with strangers works well because there's often very little emotional content. Having phone conversation with someone you see frequently can also work well. We are creatures of habit. You are used to reading their cues, because you spend time around them and have the full picture of their cues fresh in your mind. But that gets lost if it's not practiced. The cues that you can read over the phone, because you read them all the time in person, get less clear over times of seperation. Thus the phone, once a handy way of saying you'd be a few minutes late to dinner, subtly turns against you as the distance and time seperating you grows.

The parable of the frog not jumping out of a slowly heating pot and getting cooked, alas, is not based in fact. Nevertheless, it can take time to realize that the phone is not helping things. The seeming miraculousness of it disguises it's evil intent. It's like the devil appearing to the unsuspecting and performing false signs and miracles to lead would-be visionaries into heresy.

It is barely possible to have an emotional conversation in a long distance phone call. It is impossible to conduct a relationship over the phone. What is the answer to this dilemna?

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.

Grasping at straws

Christi's blog says "not now." Which means "maybe later." Right?

I was reading about John Cage's use of the I Ching. As soon as he could, he used a computer program. So I found one on the web. At least it's using the right algorythm, whereas I was not, since you have to toss a coin 18 times, not just six.

The present is embodied in Hexagram 20 - Kuan (Contemplation): He should be like the worshipper who has washed his hands, but not yet presented his offerings. There must be sincerity and an appearance of dignity, commanding reverent regard.

The first (bottommost) line, divided, shows the looking of a lad - not blamable in men of inferior rank, but matter for regret in superior men.

The situation is evolving slowly, and Yang (the active masculine force) is gaining ground.

The future is embodied in Hexagram 42 - I (Increase): There will be advantage in every movement which shall be undertaken, and it will even be advantageous to cross the great stream.

Appearance of dignity, well, um, moving right along . . . "slow evolution" and "great advantage" are sounding good. Polly told me that Jupiter is in retrograde for the next three months or so, which makes starting new projects difficult. I'm mixing astrology and the I Ching . . . because I am a hippy new ager with an appearance of dignity.

Anthony Braxton came over today and left his laptop behind for me to install stuff on. He's in the supercollider tutorial and it met at my house today because Ron, the teacher, is off in China.

Misery. woe. despair

I got up this morning. I co-lead a workshop on digital performer for two hours. i went to class and participated in a possibly intelligent manner although i had not done the reading. (apparently the paper due next week is about the class discussion i skipped last wednesday). i turned in my add/drop form. I purchased food. I opened all the bills and wrote checks for them and called on two of them to check the balences. and signed all the checks andput them in envelopes with stamps and return adresses. I found my missing sweater. I found a flyer i promised to post. i want a fucking medal. i'm not kidding.

will i flunk out of school?

doom. pain. weeping.

I told myself that if i paid the bills, i could take a nap. and the heat won't get turned off. i'm napping.

Alas, I am filled with woe and at a loss as to what to do with myself. Why did I break up with christi if I didn't want to breakup with Christi? after she told me not to come to paris, my feelings got hurt with a high percentage of the phone conversations we had. then she announced she was showing up suddenly. i wanted space from all of it. i wanted it to stop. i didn't know what to do. i was worried about things that we hadn't dealt with from the past. i needed time to think. i told her we were breaking up and then didn't speak to her for three weeks. and thought about it. and thought about what i wanted from a relationship. and realized that christi and pretty much wanted the same things and that i love her and she sent email saying she loved me.

but, of course, love conquers nothing.

I was picking up cues. i thought she'd want to work it out. who wouldn't want a low stress, low-drama relationship with me, where reliability was stressed and there were good boundaries and space and stuff?

of course, getting there would be a bit of work. it seemed possible. we had similar goals in mind. after thinking for three weeks, i understood more of what was going on. i felt guilt. i had told christi i would always be there for her and she was in distress, which i had caused, and i wasn't there for her. i always wanted to be more of an ameloriating factor, rather than a stressing factor. I thought about family. family is very important to me. i felt like a member of her family. she was accepted as a member of mine. a couple weeks before she died, my grandma told christi that she thought of her as granddaughter. how could I just walk away from that? what about responsibilities? what about marriage vows? what about nine years together? what about love?

not that it matters anymore, but i think it might have been better to tell her that i was distressed by our phone onversations rather than not speaking to her for three weeks. hindsight. alas alac woe

although i didn't act it, i did have a lot invested in this. my heart for example.

there's so much i wish i could take back or that i'd done differently. all is for naught. the past can't be changed. the future can't be fixed. if you make bad decisions, you have to live with them forever. it's very cold here. there's piles of snow on the ground. it can be below freezing and snowy for ten days in a row and then four degrees above freezing for one day and then ten degrees below freezing for the next month, but in that one warm day, all the snow disappears. what happens afterwards doesn't change the damage that's already been done.

everything is essentially hopeless

Verdicts

Christi called today to say that she doesn't want to work it out.

Not what I expected.

More pictures

Xena

Me in 2001
I'm trying to look debonair, but I'm afraid I might just look grumpy. Jess showed me modeling photos last night of a guy she dated and the guy was trying to look sauve but just came across as petulant or constipated.

Yesterday

I stayed up late the night before working on my symphony thingee, which nobody commented on, which must mean that you all hate it as much as i do. I'm thinking maybe i should move some of the brass stuff over to the bassoons or something, cuz brass is loud.

Got too early (well, actually, late, but it seemed too early), to go to the extra session of Ron's Recoridng Culture seminar. He's gone for two weeks, going to china to adopt his daughter and maybe do some skiing. Apparently she's right next to China's largest ski resort. Anyway, I crawled, slug-like to ron's class and than aftwerwards met with Ron and Jascha to discuss TA duties for leading workshops in ron's absence. I'm not at all clear, but I think Jascha is. Spacey normally, now spacey and tired. I think they're supossed to do a mix of some sound file to come up with a CD that they could shuffle play in their room for 24 hours without being driven to suicide. Jascha and I gave them sound files of a german guy playing billiards and some Maggi Payne and Brenda Hutchinson sounds. Maggi's sounds were BART, filtered BARt and something airplane-ish. Brenda's sounds seemed to be a maybe a close miced vacuum cleaner, perhaps and what sounded like it could have been a field recording of the exploratorium, which would be logical, since she works there.

Then, after that and doing some other non-essential stuff, I took a nap from 2:00 pm till nearly 8:00. It took me a long time to wake up. My neighbor knocked on my front door to complain that there was dog poop "all over" the back yard. My front door is broken and will not open. I called the landlord a week ago. She called me back. I didn't return her call. (ok, I just returned her call) Nor have I paid the heating bill, the phone or the electricity. I did however go out a few days ago and fix my cell phone and buy my textbooks. But I haven't read the textbooks enough. I'm behind on my reading for last wednesday, for a class that I skipped. I'm so not on top of things.

[you may wish to skip this paragraph] So I went out to the backyard and found one small piece of neglected poop. Xena is evil. If you walk up to her while she's pooping, she'll stop and then wait until you aren't looking and go someplace else. This is more than you needed to know about poop. As Renee once said, if you're talking about poop, you're a mom. So I went to pick it up and damned if wasn't completely frozen to the ground. I'm not a fan of this "winter" thing. I dug it out with a snow shovel. I've been peering around the backyard today in the daylight, and I'm not sure about this "all over" claim, all though there are a lot of chunks of frozen mud wich might confuse you if you need glasses.

Gay Bar

[This paragraph is ok again] So I ate all the leftovers and some canned soup and then went to Angela's house and then we went to the Polo Club in Hartford. The Polo Club was reccomended by Tom. He's het, but his girlfriend is bi and he's the only person I know who is actually from Connecticut and exists at all outside of the tiny grad community. He'd never been there. He'd go with me, he explained, but it was his 8 month anniversary with his gf and they had to have sex.

Male strippers

So angela and I show up and there's thumping techno music and the guy charging us the cover explains that the drag shows and male strippers have three shows at 11:00, 12:00 and 1:00. oic. The woman checking IDs is clearly a dyke, but the bar is full of boys (duh) and the woman who gets us a table and beers (budweiser) is not a woman.

Gradually, the place begins to fill up and the percentage of females starts to increase. I look around and decide they're either fag hags or straight girls who want to see naked gay boys. I go to pee and there's a conversation about whether getting your stomach surgically reduced is a good diet strategy. "Yeah, but she looks great!"

Angela is getting increasingly excited. It's her first drag show and mine too (unless you count Fairy Butch). Finally, the show starts and out comes a big, bitter, middle aged drag queen. "I'm in so much spandex that if it blows, it will take out the front two rows." she explains. "Four rows!" somebody shouts. "fuck you." she replies.

She starts making fun of the het boy in the audience and then turns to the women I had pegged as het. They're not het. They're all lesbians. I have no gaydar in CT. There were actually a lot of lesbians around. Who knew?

After mocking everyone who is not a gay man, she disappears and the first stripper comes out. He's wearing a police shirt, dark blue pants with handcuffs on them (definitely not police pants, tho), designer sunglasses, and bright, white tennis shoes. He undulated for a while and finally stripped down to small black boxer briefs. Angela kept whispering to me that he was crappy dancer. then he disappeared. The next performer was a man in a gold sequined dress lip synching some song. Angela was so moved that she had tears in her eyes. Actually, I saw many people with tears in her eyes. People kept comming up and tucking dollar bills into her dress or handing them to her. (and by "her" i mean the man in a dress, not angela. pronouns are slippery in drag.)

Then a guy came out in tiny white boxer briefs with a big tub and sat in it and pretended to take a bath while the song "rubber ducky" played. Then her got out of his tub and started stretching and squeezing a big sponge over his head to "rinse off." He removed his briefs and was wearing a white, not quite opaque, g-string. He was happy to see us. I shifted uncomfortably. Guys were stuffing dollars into his g-string, as this was a stripper sort of thing. He held up a towell to his waist and off came the g-string. He was sort of flapping his towel around, tittilatingly. la la la

Then the MC was back, in a blonde wig, wearing several layers of tutu, lip synching to Cindy's Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. She strutted around and revealed her grandma underwear. She caught sight of me and jumped in my lap to give me a lap dance. I was a bit taken aback, so she ground my head into her fake breasts. ack. Angela was falling over laughing. I gave her a dollar afterwards. then the 11:00 show was over. angela wanted to leave to go to the grad party, so we left and did not see the subsequent shows, nor did I talk to any lesbians. alas.

Grad Party

We showed upa round midnight. Everyone was pretty drunk. this one guy was very drunk. I hadn't talked to him since the start of the last semester. He went to wesleyan as an undergrad. Wes boys want to be sincere. They want to be your friend. So he touched my arm gently, perhaps to steady himself, and slurred that he was very sorry to hear of my recent breakup. I explained that I needed a beer right away and got a can of budweiser. It was a budweiser kind of night. I eventually caught up to the party's level of inebraition and was dancing to Abba's Dancing Queen and then It's Raining Men. campiness was all around me, everywhere I went. So we danced to 2:30 in the morning and Deborah explained that one of the astronomy grads, who was not at the party, wants to sleep with me. I have my own pimp now or something.

Tom just emailed me today asking if I want to go to the Polo Club with him tongiht. I think I'll say yes.

Multitasking

I'm sleeping and uploading a photo at the same time. go laptops. photo taken august 2003 by Judy Dater

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

Symphonic

I decided to a symphony arrangement of the piece that I did at the very start of my winter break that was so popular among my 4 blog-readers. The Wesleyan Orchestra is doing a reading soon and the American Composers Forum has a reading opportunity as well. which means it will get read by at least one orchestra (go me).

I'm not sure about the end. Also, I'm not using any oboes. Several instruments get to stay home. I dunno if that's ok for symphony writing, but fortunately, there's people around here I can ask. christi told me that a common mistake for beginners is to have the whole orchestra playing at once. (And this is one of the reasons I love Christi, cuz she tells me things like that. and because she likes Phillip Glass.) I hope it's ok to have brass and strings at the same time. When I saw the SF Symphony over break, on either the Hindemith or the Berg violin concerto, or both, I don't recall, the whole orchestra was playing, but quietly. It was super-intense. I met MTT afterwards and exchanged a few words about composition. He said that if you were writing for orchestra it was like you had to be historical or get back in time or something to that effect. It's a lost art, kind of. Maybe this is why so little new music gets programmed: because conductors think writing for orchestra is a lost art. but it kind of is. Very few of the composers here are interested in writing symphonies. Most composers in real life get their own pickup bands together, more or less.

anyway, Et sonnera le baffroy de la ville sans cesser durant l'assault is the midi file, which all of you can listen to. If you are a musik geek, you can look at (and listen to) the score, if you download a plugin from http://www.sibelius.com/cgi/plugin.pl.

Stuff

I read Christi's blog and then sent her email asking her to define "yelling," cuz I'm not sure what she means. But maybe this is a conversation we should to have until we're in-person and with a professional counsilor, if she decides to go that route. She said that she would wait a week and then get back to me. Maybe I should leave her alone and let her think. Clearly, I should leave her alone and let her think.

Communication is such a mess right now. How did it get like this?

Just skipped class

I just called Christi and asked if she wants to work it out.

I'm concerned. Previous post is nice introspection, but it's mostly about my errors. We cannot focus solely on my errors, but alas, this has been something of a pattern in the past. It's what comes of being raised catholic. I was trained at an early age to do examinations of conscience, where I would ponder my errors, confess them and then recieve pennance to atone for them. This does not work in a relationship if you're dating a protestant.

How can I fight the past and make it behave? How can we do something radically new in the future? Radical newness is what's needed. Stop and reboot.

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?

New Cell Phone

So apparently, it was not beating my cellphone against a pillar in Oakland that temporarily cured it of it's antenna woes (although that seemed to help). My pld phone existed on a different frequency than the new system in Connecticut. this explains why my reception was steadily degrading (as they changed the system) and why it would spring back to life in NYC and CA.

I have a new phone as of today that works on both the NY/CA frequency and the new CT frequency and it didn't cost me anything. The guy at the phone store assured me that my old phone would be sent to CA and sold as refurbished and not go into a landfill. He also gave me the name and phone number of a recording studio in Hartford that often needs bassists to sit in on pop/punk recording sessions. I also learned that the fancy new cell phone rings are actually mp3s. so my dream of composing cell phone rings is a bit odd then, since any song can already be a ring. I'm going to double check this last fact. But maybe I can play in a poppy punk band at least.

My personal ad is liove, but doesn't yet have a picture. So far, no replies. I'm feeling far less certain about things than I did earlier. My confusion and unhappiness is great. My tears flow freely. I went to the school shrink and cried a lot. She wants to see me for the next two weeks. she does a great concerned expression. It must be hard to listen to woes all day. I had dinner with some undergrads and said i had seen one of the shrinks and they all knew her. Everyone in Middletown is insane. The people in the mental hospital are insane. The people in the halfway houses are insane. the people in the grocery stores are insane. everyone connected to the university is insane. we're all damn crazy around around here. I want to go home. I kind of wish that I had never come.

On the other hand

If I had gone to gamelan, I probably would not have read Christi's blog and spent the evening crying.

Find me on yahoo

After 24 hours pass

I am a music grad student at Wesleyan and am new to Connecticut. I'm looking to meet someone for friendship or dating. I enjoy experimental music, radical leftism and long walks on the beach with my dog. I also like to read and program my computer. My friends say that I'm funny and a good bass player. I'm an idealist. I speak Esperanto. I'm looking for someone funny and kind who digs music.

aside from starting nearly every sentence with "I," how'd I do?

Personal Ad

Ok, so I'm thinking of doing it.

Nubile grad student seeks woman aged 23-50 for friendship, dating. I enjoy experimental music, radical leftism and long walks on the beach.

Apparently, I'm not "nubile" as I am not in a "marriageable condition." And I have virtually no idea what to say. Actually, I kind of like the second sentence.

Slacking

Apparently, I don't need to take Gamelan again and indeed, would not receive crtedit for it. I only need two semesters of ensemble and I've already got one of them. And Gamelan, from 8:00 - 10:00 pm, is my only thursday class. Therefore, I am about to drop out of it. I mean, I like gamelan, but it's my only thursday class.

Boston

Yesterday, Jess, Angela, and I went to Boston for a day trip. We left kind of late, which is fine with me because I was mostly into clubbing, but it disturbed Jess. She used to live in Cambridge, the suburb (?) of Boston which contains Harvard. She did not go to Harvard, but went to Brandeis (where she got her first masters), which she commuted to. She did her undergrad at Columbia. When in Connecticut, she likes to go to New Haven and hang around Yale. She clearly has an Ivy League fetish.

So we went and hung around her old haunts from her year in the area. She was intent on showing us everything cool. When some members of our group had to go to the bathroom, for example, she declared that she would take us to the public restroom voted "best place to pee" by a local free newspaper. (It was considerate, but I think the place voted "closest place to pee" might have been better suited to the occasion.)

My goal was to go hang around the gay district. Her goal was to take us to museums, but we left too late, so in liue of that, we went to the best coffee shops and bookshops in the area. She took us to a cafe called "the Other Side," which was very granola-crunchy and actually had really good beer. There is good beer on the East Coast! Hope returns to a cold, dark world.

We rode the MTA, but they kept raising the faire by a nickel, so we could never get off of it.

Ahem. We rode the MTA around and ate and drank coffee and visitted bookshops and esteemed restrooms and actually got a pretty good tour of Boston. It was kind of dark out and very very very cold. I was wearing two swearters, thermals, a ski jacket with a scarf inside and another scarf outside and a ski hat and the hood of the jacket and ski gloves and was feeling only a bit cold. Angela was suffering.

We went to a lesbian dance club at place called Club Hollywood Boston, that I found listed in a free weekly newspaper, but I dunno if it's the one giving out restroom awards. We showed up around 10:45 and left around 12:15, so thigs were pretty much just getting started as we left. This was because Jess wanted to park by Harvard and ride transit around, which was logical as she's new to having a car, etc. But like other transit systems that I can name, the trains stop running pretty early.

Anyway, I danced with Jess a few times which was fun. I realized that it was not going to help my goal of picking up chicks, as people would think I was with her. And furthermore, I'm much too shy to pick up chicks, they have to come for me. I know I'm awkward and not a great dancer and somehwhat (ok, very) nerdy looking, which is truth in advertising. But I also realize that there are women on earth looking for nerds. By which I mean that I'm much older than the last time I was single and I know I don't have to pretend to be something much hipper than I really am to get chicks. Not that I wouldn't mind being hipper. What am I trying to say? something about self-esteem, probably.

But this doesn't cure my shyness. The only stranger that I talked to, aside from telling someone that I was in line for the bathroom, was the coat check woman. And the bartender. Someone cute approached me and asked if I had dropped a sock, since there was one lying on the floor near me. I laughed. but I had to leave and spoke to her no more.

The dance club scene might not be the best place for me to cruise for chicks, but it is super-fun dancing with Jessica and I'd like to go again.

We got home around 3:00 am.

What happens next

Ok, so the HOA was vengeful. you can't do stuff without asking first. However, Ellen has been encouraged to work with the design review comittee (which includes an architect), to come up with a shorter version of the shack which is not nailed into the wall (big sticking point due to water penetration issues, which are really very minor, but you know . . .). Her plan, she told me, is to tear down the old shack and re-use the materials to construct the new one, which will keep her busy for a quite a while and hopefully will not fxck up her upcoming gig in Seattle.

Somebody on the HOA wrote an angry letter about the shack, condeming it and attacking me, saying that I had been asked to attend the meeting, but had refused. Indeed. I told everyone that I talked to that I would have loved to attend, but classes were starting. I'm sure that any other person in my compound would have skipped registration day and the first day of classes and bought a last minute new plane ticket, so I feel like quite a slacker. But there was this class I wanted to add, for which I had emailed the professor asking for approval, but she didn't write back. I felt like attending the first session was necessary to get the class. It was a hard choice for me, since the class isn't offered every year. Finally, my education won out, mostly because I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new ticket and also have to pay late fees. Sharon would not beleive this, but so far, I have avoided all late fees. I have not even asked the grad office for mellon balls, although they often have cookies out and actually, one time they did give me mellon balls, now that I think about it. this is the difference that a big endowment makes.

anyway, I didn't see this letter, since it went out after I left. But there have been many similar letters with neighbors denouncing each other during my time in that compound. I really like Berkeley. I live in nice area. I have neighbors that are actually very nice in social settings. Nevertheless, I'm very strongly thinking about selling after I finish with school. This would be after another 14 months at Wesleyan. a possible year in Germany after that (I hope) and maybe a PhD program, so not for a while. There's some sinister similarities between homeowners associations and Maoism. The denunciation thing. It's an exploitable part of human nature. I used to have a coworker at netscrape who said that the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that you didn't have to train people to be concentration camp gaurds, you could just get them to do it automatically (I'm so glad I'm out of the software buisiness). I think that Maoist denunciations work the same way. You can exploit people's natural tendencies to support your system. It's prolly easier than capitalism, since it doesn't require a gigantic media apparatus constructing rediculous myths and pounding people with them constantly.

I'm a good leftist. I want to beleive in a noble human character that would come out under a just economic system. People would farm in the mornings, code in the afternoons and write symphonies in the evenings, to paraphrase and mangle Marx. But there are people in the world (I'm no longer talking about my HOA, but more about political groups in Italy and the US) who are true beleivers in facism. There are people strongly dedicated to the other side. Some of these folks are paid by plutocrats. some of these folks are plutocrats. some are afraid of alien other. but there are some folks who just believe in facism. How do they get these ideas? How do you neutralize these ideas? How can you fight this tendency? Is it learned? Is it inborn? Is there some cultural meme that could be stamped out, thus leading to the utopian sisterhood of humans?

School

Anyway, this semester, I'm taking Mystic Voices, and undergraduate Medieval studies class that I didn't know if I would get in to, Alvin Lucier's composition seminar, a group tutorial in SuperCollider (taught by Ron Kuivila, my advisor), Colloqium, and Gamelan. Jessica told me that I have to take a different ensemble this semester and I can't keep taking the same one. If this is the case, then I'm going to take Anthony Braxton's ensemble, although I would need to ask him to waive the pre-req, which I think he would do. I plan to take his ensemble next fall, along with gamelan, and take fewer academic-type classes.

For the record, although I whine about back pain, I really like gamelan. The songs are groovy and the ensemble is low stress. We had our first meeting tonight. I played the gong, which is the most laid-back of all the instruments, since it only plays at the end of phrases that are 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 notes long. Hypothetically, phrases could also be 256, 512, or 1024 notes long. There's a cutoff somplace, the longest phrases ever actually written, but I can't remeber if it is 256 or lower. I feel very ethnomusicologically-oriented when I play gamelan. Last semester, the ensemble was the grad student social club. this semester, there is a teem horde of undergrads and few grad students. There's me and a small group of PhD students, but I feel good about it.

I'm sort of half TA-ing Ron's Recording Culture class. I'm not officially assigned to the class and the last hour of it conflicts with the Mystic Voices class. Ron said this would be ok. There's a parking garage in Middletown that plays loud Baroque music year-round in an unsuccessful bid to drive away youths from a coffee shop located in the first floow of the building. In the warm months, the youth hang around the coffee shop anyway. In the cold months, nobody would sit outside and get snowed on to drink coffee, but they leave the music on anyway. The parking garage is music is highly irritating. Somehow, Ron convinced the parking garage owner that his Recording Culture class should be allowed to do an installation there for 24 hours, where they use the Muzak system. He's involved in curating a seperate event, called Rock's Roll, at a museum where composers submitted stuff that's supossed to be played on top of each other. Composer A's tracks play at the same time as Composer B's. Ron's starting off his class by having them mix the submitted stuff, including things that were not picked for the museum. The submissions include works by Maggi Payne and Brenda Hutchinson (I think The Star Strangled Banner is among them). Maggi's stuff sounds really cool. I haven't listened to all the submissions yet.

I do not know if semi-TAs get to do anything for the parking garage, I'll keep you posted. But personally, I think the owner should permanently cancell Muzak and let me install some SuperCollider patches. I could just stick a laptop in their PA system, which would not only be more economical than paying Muzak fees, but would also be much more interesting and just as likely to drive people away. I'm thinking about that thing I did a long time ago with virtual memory. I'm thinking about just intoned triads that might make people want to hurl themselves in front of trains. I'm thinking about fingernails on blackboard type sounds. Dubya talking backwards about terrorists.

I want to do more stuff with Dubya. I noticed a certain melodic quality when he said "In fact, what the terrorists have done is caused us to take an assesment of what's important." There's interesting pitch material lurking there. It's higher pitch than the rest of his speech. Insincere. Sing-songy, almost. I went to the WhiteHouse webpage and fired up AudioHijack and started capturing the State of the Union address. Only when he started tlaking about Hydrogen-powered cars, did I realize that I was grabbing the wrong year. If you can stand it, go listen to last year's address. The text is very, very similar to this year's. I didn't get as far as weapons of mass destruction before I quit listening. For some reason, they haven't posted this year's address. I heard a rumor that Democrats applauded when he said that the Patriot Act was set to expire this year (thank god), so maybe they're editting that out.

I don't know what I'll do for political audio-mangling if Dean wins in the fall. I guess I could use his Iowa roar thing.

So, except for Mondays, I have a much more relaxed schedule this term. I'm also only taking 4.25 units this semester, instead of 4.75. I might even have time to write music. I heard a rumor that Alvin will require us to write a string quartet. So I'll be in the library with the score to Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet and the CD, trying to figure out how she did what she did.

Mood

Often hopeful (like right now), but with a tendency to slip in to anger or despair. In Berkeley, walking around often restored me to hope. Here, not so much. I'm speculating that it's the cold + people often don't bother shoveling their sidewalks, thus making the walks somewhat treacherous (what's with my neighbors? they pile trash in their yards. they don't shovel snow.). Also, in Berkeley, I felt a sense of belonging to a larger thing. I am a part of the universe, etc. Here, I feel rootless. I tell myself that I'm part of the universe, but I feel more like a Christmas tree, cut off from my roots and dragged to suburbia to eventually wind up being tipped over in the middle of the unshoveled sidewalk, next to garbage cans. I've got an appointment with Behavioral Health (aka: a shrink) on tuesday.

more

I ate halvah tonight, but the crushing pain of existence was only partially ameliorated. Had an annoying conversation with the housemate which has now been classified as a boundary for me. Feel very annoyed about the HOA descision and mad at myself for getting the night wrong. Need reassurance that I'm on the right track. There's a certain volitility to my outlook. Last night or the night before, had a long conversation with a some people about student mental health services. All the grad students are angsty. Jessica explained that people go to grad school when they don't know what to do with their life and want to put off real life for a while. I felt a strong sense of belonging and that I was in the right place at the right time. If only I had inner stability and could keep these perspectives instead of sliding away from them.

I miss Ellen a lot

arg

The homeowners meeting was last night. damnit. they voted that the shack must come down.

Why? Because we couldn't set a precident that people could do whatever they wanted with their backyards, now could we?

Ellen will prolly require assistance in tearing down the shack. If you want to help, I can put you in contact with her.

Now that's just weird

Handy guide to the Democratic primary candidates

Quick call for comments

The hoa is meeting tonight. i'm emailing a letter to the president this afternoon

Dear Members of the HOA,

This letter concerns the temporary structure in the backyard of Unit N. As implied, this structure is intended to be temporary. Ellen Fullman is occupying my unit while I am away for graduate school. I will graduate in May 2005 and dismantle the structure when I return. Ms. Fullman is an internationally known composer and the inventor of the Long String Instrument. When I offered her use of my unit, she said it was too short for her instrument and we came upon the idea of extending the instrument into the backyard.

Ms. Fullman has performed around the United States and Europe. In 2001, in San Francisco, she premiered a 45 minute piece that she wrote for her instrument and the Kronos Quartet. She was recently featured in the cover story of MusicWorks magazine. I feel that her work is both important and incredible. Having use of the temporary structure enables her to continue this work while she stays in Berkeley.

We are willing to be flexible and to take any action that the HOA deems necessary, up to and including the immediate demolition of the structure. Should the HOA decide to allow the structure to stay up for the next 16 months, I am willing to assume all liability connected to the structure. I hope that given the temporary nature of the structure and the value of Ms. Fullman's work, the board decides to temporarily allow the structure to remain.

Thank you very much,
Celeste

I'm considering cutting the middle paragraph, because when we had our "open house" (which nobody came to), the flyer had a bio of Ellen on it. So should I remind them, or should I stop going on about it?

Moving Targets

Asking a 15 year old to write about "who am I" is silly, because by the time the teacher gets around to grading the paper, the kid will have changed entirely. People go through some periods of intense change. I was talking to my housemate last night about Saturn Returns and he, who is the same age as I am, told me about how lately, he's been his moodiest since the age of 16. "something's going on." we concluded.

So, there are some things I know about myself: I'm queer. I like music and programming and I'm good at both. Aside from that, instead of trying to pin myself down as a moving target, it would be more useful to have a goal state. So instead of "who am i," "who do I want to be?"

I would like to be the sort of person that my astrological sign says I should be. (what I love about California: it's ok to treat astrology with seriousness. anywhere in the country. just say you're form from california). I would like to have creative ideas and follow through with them. I would like to be smart. I would like to be kind and caring and thoughtful and mindful and mellow and grounded and calm and serene and an activist and ambitious and driven and relaxed.

some of these things conflict, but there's contexts for everything. also, i would like to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

I met a woman during break who makes a list of what she wants to achieve in a year and then on the other side of the paper, she writes what she's willing to do to meet her goals. she carries the list with her and looks at it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I'm not sure that I want to be that driven, though. But it does raise the question of how I reach my goal state of being both highly active and very calm. What would I put on the reverse side of my list?

I'm back east

I got home about 5 minutes after xena did. My goodness, I left my room a mess. I was extremely distressed when I left Middletown for my unexpected trip to California. But if I wasn't depressed already, the room would have done. I'm launching an excavation to find the floor and to let in some natural light. but it's also necessary for me to get my laptop on my airport network (yay) and otherwise goof around.

Who am I

When I was a sophmore in highschool, I was assigned to write a paper on the subject of "who am I." This is what occurs in catholic highschool religion classes. I wrote a paper telling the teacher to bug off, it was none of his buisiness. When I was a junior in highschool, I was assigned to write a personal statement which would be useful for college apps. I started it with "'I am gay.'" explaining that my previous year's paper should have started with that sentence. When I was a senior, I borrowed the phrase from Socrates that "the unexamined life is not worth living." In college, they quit making us write these papers.

Maybe that's why I have so little sense of self now. I was talking with Amy, former housemate, on the phone today and she asked who I was without Christi. I have no idea. So I'm giving up on self-loathing, because I'm not even sure who I'm mad at. I used to rant about how individuality is over emphasised in Amerikan culture. I still think this is true. "Rugged individualism" is a myth put forth by people who want to renig on the govt's role in the social contract. But maybe some individuation is a good thing.

I've had a very crappy couple of years. My mom died. My marriage broke up. I think that I can't live for other people. Other people are unreliable. They die or leave. I have to live for myself (whoever that is). This is, of course, tempered by the idea of community. There's a fine line here. I need to be self-reliant, and I need to be conscious of how my decisions affect other people.

My plan was to explain the aimlessness of my mid-twenties by explaining that I was "finding myself." Unfortunately, I wasn't looking hard enough. Jean says that by the time my Saturn Return is done (I've got one year left), I'll be an entirely different person than I was before, so I'm guessing it means that it's ok that my sense of self is somewhat confuddled.

My friends and neighbors that I've been talking to all tell me "hey you look good!" Like I've undergone some sort of change. And a positive one at that. I was thinking that I've finally met my goal of becomming mellow as fxck, but then someone told me that it was having short hair. Alas, still angsty. Not yet mellow.

Saw Autmn and Stephen and my dad tonight at a show at 21 Grand. It was groovy, especially the first tow acts I saw, most especially the second one. Beforehand, I played my new tunes for my dad. He heard the triad one and asked if I was going to see a shrink at school. I enjoy this reaction, actually. I want people who hear the piece to think of throwing themselves in front of trains. I want it to sound more melancholy. I want people who hear it to feel the crushing pain of existence bearing down on them from all sides. I want them to realize that in two short years they can lose the two people who are most important to them. That love doesn't conquer all. It doesn't conquer anything. Everything that they have faith and hope in will eventually crumble and come to naught and trying to stop it is like trying to stop the tide. I want listeners to taste their own mortality.

So far, I have not come upon exactly the right sound design to get these reactions.

when next I post, I'll be back on the east coast.

what if you gave an open house and nobody came?

I think I will now go knock on my neighbor's doors. We have the tie, but I feel uncomfortable not having a margin. And zero people have come over, even though a lot of guacamole was made.

Tonight

I will be going to a show at 21 Grand. I will be getting there around 8:00. If you wanna hang out, show up there and we can hang out. It will be groovy. I leave the next morning.

tomorrow night

saturday night is my last night in the free (warm) world before heading back to school. something should be arranged.

one vote short of a tie

talked to more neighbors yesterday. two units agreed to abstain. two more said they would be fine with the temporary structure remaining. so i just need one more vote. but i should have more to be on the safe side. and of course, everything could go terribly wrong at the meeting.

the two abstaining units, both owned by the same person, didn't want to side with me against the whole compound. they voted last night at a proxy meeting, so i can't go back to them and say they'd be in the majority if they sided with me.

i dunno if i can get the one more vote. i talked to all the mellow people first.

yesterday was the deadline for applications to the Bang on a Can summer session, which I guess I will not be attending. Dunno what I'll be doing this summer. I want to go to the Michigan Womyns Music Festival. And the Deep Listening Retreat. And I guess I'll get a job and write some tunes. Which coast will I be on? dunno. know nothing.

leaving here sunday morning. If you are an east coast reader and want to give me a ride from the hartford airport around 9:00 sunday night, contact me for details! You could get onion rings out of the deal!

anti-bush ad

http://www.hauntedmansion.info/bushin41point2.htm. funny.

Scitilopolitics

Here is the two channel version of Scitilopolitics. Best heard with headphones, as it's supossed to be a spacialized, 4 channel piece. Thi is the thing I did last semester with samples from Dubya and quotes from Jeffner Allen's book, Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1987). More info about it was posted on my blog earlier: http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_celesteh_archive.html#107137905962361902. It is 11 minutes and 2 seconds long and is 9 megabytes of data. Recall that I just learned yesterday how to record the output of Supercollider. This peice is (like the triads recently posted) algorythmic, so this is just what happened when I ran the program this afternoon.

things that make me calm

• breathing
• eating
• beer
• cats
• conversation

feel like a human again

more

the hoa board president just came over and related concerns of people who are trying to sell their places and how the temporary structure might affect them. so we've got three yes votes and 11 probable nos. Ellen started talking about how she wouldn't have moved here. why didn't we talk to her before building the thing? i wasn't even around then, i was at school.

when my mom was sick, a group of people and I went to see Minority Report at the big megaplex theatre in Mountain View. It was a Tom Cruise movie with lots of action and random violence, although somewhat written by my favorite sci-fi author. I shook the whole time the movie was on, totally overwhelmed, and hoped that nobody would notice me shaking. Afterwards I panicked in the parking lot about whether my mom would take all of the toxic pills that my dad refused to put out of her reach.

i feel like that now.

I couldn't keep my mom safe. i couldn't make things work with christi. i can't garuntee that ellen won't be cast into fast food jobs. i can't cant cant do anything. cant do anything but sit here, tiwtiching, blog posting.

I think "i'm an asshole," but then i think it's been stressful lately, "this is not who i am." well, then who the hell am i? i am a failure in relationship. i am someone who lures people here with false promises of working space, then shows up unexpectedly, has a major crisis, acts like an ass, is unable to deliver the promised work space and is totally incabable of dealing with the stress. i can't go to the dmv without having to breathe deeply the whole time. but, hey, maybe this is not who i am. maybe there is a capable human lurking deep somewhere, maybe out for a holiday, maybe getting a bite for lunch, maybe hiding under the bed.

these woes aren't even that bad, not like mom swallowing a pile of god-knows-what in the middle of the night. (thank god she never got into the pills. i did not hysterically go insist in the middle of the night that something be done. i can't remember how this was resolved.) why can't i function?

today

Ellen told me the Halvah eases the crushing pain of existence. I think she may be right. I've been in the kind of mood lately where thoughts like "I'm an asshole" and "I am a bug splatted on the windshield of life" seem profound. So a short scene came to me on bart.

We walked into Mamounds. "You've been so glum lately," she said, brushing a wisp of her long dark hair from her face. She smiled encouragingly and her hands fluttered gracefully.
The woman behind the counter stared at us impatiently. "Can I help you?" she asked.
"What do you have that eases the crushing pain of life?" I asked.
"Halvah for $1.50" she indicated the display case on the counter.
"Can I have a chocolate one and a turkish coffee?" I asked.
"For here or to go?"
I shrugged at Jessica.
"For here." Jessica directed.

I got my truck smog checked and registered. It took a long dern time. And I figured out how to record audio on supercollider. The help file has a bug in it. and I wallowed in self loathing/pity for a while.

I talked to two of my neighbors about the temporary structure in the backyard. The Home Owners Association is meeting a week from today to decide if they will compell us to tear it down. Ellen was explaining to me this morning that if she loses the temporary structure, she'll lose her Seattle gig and be forced to take minimum wage jobs and live in a studio apartment and have a budget to buy a few pieces of drawing paper periodically and dabble in art on weekends.

Please light a candle dedicated to your diety of choice that the association decides to let it stay. their issues are twofold: 1. It didn't get pre-approval from the design review committee. (my defence: uh sorry. i wasn't here when it was built.) 2. It may cause water penetration (my defence: it's only going to stay up until may 2005. the possibility of structural damage in that time is remote. and i would of course be responcible for any repairs required as a result of it's being there temporarily.)

One neighbor was supportive. the other was on the board. she indicated that people have to face consequences for their errors. So because the review comittee was skipped, there is no way in hell that she would allow it to stay. also, it's important to keep art in perspective. it has it's place in life, but that is secondary to property values.

we're having an open house on saturday so people can see the temporary structure and get an idea of what things are about. of course, neither ellen nor i posses social skills in any significant degree. i fear it will be a disaster. i'm thinking of trying to pull in outside talent to pitch our case.

doom.

i don't have the energy for this. i have important self-loathing to do.

any suggestions from anyone would be extremely welcome.

New tune

This is a supercollider work in progress. i'm not sure what to do with it. Ellen says that it reminds her of train whistles. It makes me sleepy. Her too. so maybe it's just something to nap to. angsty yet soothing. 3-min-triads.mp3

Kucinich in the news

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/12/MNG57485GR1.DTL

I got email from his campaign a couple of days ago asking if I and others on his list would call people in Iowa. There was a link to click for a phone list and another link for a phone script. This guy is seriously grassroots. everything he does, he does with the support of people. Not plutocrats or mega corps, but dedicated people who rally to his message of peace and hope. It's rare that a politician gives a reason for hope. Rarely do they have the honesty. Nader's got it (hearing him speak is incredible) and Kucinich has got it.

Some dems hate Nader because it's easier to blame him than widespread election fraud. Those Nader-haters should love Kucinich because he can draw all the traitorous leftists back to the party. A huge number of people didn't bother to vote last cycle. Gore failed to sufficiently differentiate himself from Bush and many folks concluded that it didn't matter which of the two evils that they voted for. And, of course, voting for a third party would be "throwing away" a vote. Well, here's a guy that has a real difference who can bring back disaffected voters and who, as a major party guy, is not a throw-away vote.

Kucinich is the best hope for progressives and the best hope for the Democratic party and a real pacifist, the best hope for the world. We owe it to the world and future generations and to ourselves to at least try to get a progressive into office. Kucinich can win, more than Dean can win or any other dem can win. Kucinich is our best hope.

i feel crappy today

I want a picture of you

I only have a week left here in sunny California, and then I must return to the austere Northeast, which apparently is having a record-breaking cold snap. I would like it very much if all of my friends could give me a photograph of themselves looking at the camera and smiling. My plan is to thumbtack these to my wall, much as has been done with college dorm rooms since the photograph was invented.

If I don't see you in the next week, my mailing address is:
Celeste Hutchins
Music Department
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459

Xena did not run away

People who have called my cell phone have been alarmed at the message, which begins, "if you have found Xena . . .." This message is pre-emptive. One time, back when I owned a dog called Bear, he ran away from my parents while I was out of town and I got 231421 phone messages about him on my home machine and my worried parents got zero messages (but didn't contact me for some reason). So when I leave Xena with someone, I make sure that the number on her tag will actually get you some information about her. So my wife and I split and my pickup truck has expired registration, but at least my dog didn't run away.