Author: Charles CĂ©leste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Concert Review

Last night, I went to see two bands at 21 Grand. My primary motivation for picking this venue was that it’s a lot closer than the other two that were having shows. And it was awesome, so it was a good choice.
The first band was called Glass Bead Game. They’re a female-fronted quartet. the female front sings and plays guitar. Her male backband is drums, standup bass and a guy that doubles on violin and alto clarinet. Their songs are pop-y, but with definite new music influence. there was a high level of musicianship and the singer has a strong voice. some of the best playing came from the bassist who did some arco lines here and there. some of his bowings got didgeridu-like sounds and nice drones. the whole band had a nice improvisational feel, which may be because, as the singer explained, thay haven’t practiced together in a long time and not everyone knew all the songs. They were very entertaining and had good stage presence and banter. anyway, I would go see this band again. And I’m glad I saw them this time, since I was one of five people in the audience and I think christi and I were the only ones not personally known by anyone in the band.
The headline act was Peoples Bizarre. They play tunes based on Balkans and Eastern European folk songs. They have a stand up bass, a drum kit, an accordian, a cello, a violin and a guy that doubles on clarinet and bass clarinet. The clarinetest looks disturbing like The Onion columnist Jim Anchower, but played really well and wrote at least one of the songs, a nice mellow piece that mostly showcased the strings. the band was solidly good throughout, playing songs they composed. When they talked about the songs, they had a tendency to become academic, describing pentatonic patterns used in Albanian songs, for example. I appreciated the infomration, personally. They finished the set with a cover, which I thought was especially brilliant. The stock surf song that all surf bands play is actually a Hungarian folk song. So on their last piece, which had a section that either was that song or was very similar to it, their drummer switched over to a surf beat. It was awesome. I would definitely see this band again. In fact, I’m on their mailing list and I bought their record.
So I think I ought to strive to see a show (that I’m not playing in) at least once a week.

Update!

So in this last week, I went to go see the Chapel of the Chimes, since Christi will be making music there. And I added it to my list of of cool free tourist attractions in the East Bay. Also this week, Autumn and Steven came to dinner. It was oodles of fun. I’m thinking I should try to have dinner with someone once a week. Autumn has a vibraphone. That’s a marimba-like instrument with a motor attached, which causes it to make a wah-wah-wah sound. It’s cool. It’s a jazz instument, usually.
So yesterday, I was IMing Ellen about her plans to come down here and she mocked me for wanting to see the Matrix. Aren’t there a lot of new music concerts in the Bay Area? she asked. Alas. Thus shamed, I decided that instead of seeing the mainstream, popularly hyped fare, I would free my mind and do something different than those in control wanted me to do. (I like cheesy irony. Really. I took the red pill and saw a concert instead.)

Top 4 free things to do in the East Bay

  1. The Albany Bulb
    Located right next to Golden Gate Fields, this old dump now holds a ton of art made out of junk. There are paintings, sculptures, mosaics, installations and more. Even a very small castle. See it now before the city of Albany buldozes it. Open during daylight hours. Indy Media Artcile
  2. Chapel of the Chimes
    Located in Oakland on Piedmont Avenue. This is a big building, designed by local architect Julia Morgan, that holds the ashes and remains of many, many people. It’s seperated into a bunch of rooms. Some are tiny. some are medium-sized gardens, some are large chapels. The walls are display cases filled with urns. Floor to high ceiling. Many of the urns are shaped like books, with the name of the person who is inside on the spine like a title. The ceiling is glass, so sunlight filters in. the rooms are very echo-y, given all the hard surfaces and very interestingly resonant, with obvious resonant pitches. some of the glass ceilings slide back to let in a breeze. Many of the garden rooms ahve fountains. Parts of the place are maze-like. Part is big open rooms. There’s something for everyone and it’s really interesting to wander through. Not all of the rooms are accessable. Open 9-5 daily. Official Website
  3. Doggie Diner Heads
    This is the largest tourist attraction in Emeryville, except for the Ikea. the dog heads sit on a trailer, just off Ocean avenue, between Hollis and San Pablo. I think they might be in New York right now, though. The Doggie Diner, a local restaurant chain, closed in 1976, but it’s emblem, a mona-lisa like weiner dog head, has enduring fame and is often featured in Zippy the Pinhead. These dog heads used to sit on poled in front of the restaurants. They’re big. They’re weird. They will make you laugh. You can go see them anytime, but they do travel and there’s nobody to call, so it’s hit or miss. Roadside America Article
  4. Indian Rock
    It’s a big rock in North Berkeley. Some people practice rock climbing on it, but there’s also a couple of stairways carved into it. It has a terrific view, so you can climb to the top and look at the entire bay area. It’s a great place to look at sunrises (although facing the wrong direction), sunsets, eclipses, meteor showers, stars, whatever. Technically, it’s open during daylight hours, but I’ve seen plenty of people there after dark, especially for unusal celestial events. The rock itself is not accessible, but the park has a little path through it that is. And the route there takes you through one of Berkeley’s three roundabouts. the biggest one! It has a fountain or something in the middle. Berkeley Parks Department Offical webpage about the park

The Reply

you know, i’m really hurt that you’re not showing any appreciation for the
fact that i at least had an accident on the carpet instead of on the wood
floor. i mean, i was trying to be considerate – i didn’t want to ruin the
floors.

and the last time Y did that, she totally didn’t mop up after
herself and she never got in any trouble at all. you even kept letting
her chew on my toys.
it’s just not fair.

so, i’m sorry, and i’ll really really try not to do it again, but i’m a
little hurt by your reaction.

Housemate Email

normally I wouldn’t bring this up, and we don’t don’t want to jump to any
conclusions, (it’s too late for fingerpointing to happen now, anyway) but
we did notice that someone apparently had a little “accident” on the
carpet by the back porch. Now, just because you standing there looking
guilty for a few moments doesn’t mean that you necc. have anything to do
with it, but if you did do it (we won’t hold it against you — this time)
a more appropriate response than doing the dishes would be to mop the
floor!

again, we’re not making assumptions, accidents happen! everyone has bad
days, but the important thing is to make sure that you take responsibilty
for mistakes when they occur.

X, if we’re told you once, we’ve told you a thousand times! get
someone to let you out OR use the litter box. It’s not that hard!
Y can handle it, Xena can handle, even chicken can! jeez.

busy busy busy

Today I did not play music. I worked in the Other Minds office, counting all their inventory, then filing and typing in surveys. grunt grunt. My arms and shoulders are sore, but this morning, they weren’t as bad as I thought they would be. After moving boxed of books and CDs off of shelves today, to count them, though, they have become sore. I am going to be so buff!
After werk, we went to look at the Chapel of the Chimes, but it closes at 5:00. So we went to get a copy of the Oakland Tribune. My picture is on the front page, below the fold! If you look very carefully, you can make out the tuba bell and then a silouette of someone playing it. That’s me! about 1/3 of a centimeter high! I’m going to scan it for your benefit, but actually, Christi has to scan it since she has the only copy of photoshop (since the old imac went away yesterday) and Tiffany is asleep in the room with the scanner, so it will have to wait.
Christi was very excited, despite the smallness and showed everyone in Gaylords the picture.
Then we went to micheals to get material to make Tennis Roberts sweatshirts. The raw materials were somewhat more expensive than anticipated, but that’s the price one must pay fo X-treme craftiness. We got white sweatshirts and pink and blue dye for them and puffy paint and glitter paint and ink jet sheets to print patterns on. the good old days of buying iron-on patches of everything are gone. These days Martha Stweard wannabes print their own.
My days are frivolous, but long. I think it’s good running around all the time right before grad school. I’ll get in the habit of it. And my chops will be great. I will be a super player of the bass guitar (with fretless skills, I think I could play a double bass also, if I had some time to figure it out) and of tuba. All my basses will be covered.
I think I want to get sousaphone player buisiness cards made. So when cute actavists tell me they thought the tuba playing was great, I can whip out my card. It should say:
Celeste Hutchins
Sousaphone Player
Protests * Concerts * Parades * Parties
And then an email address or phone number or something. Maybe not. Mostly, I want to be invited to play sousaphone at parties. Just in case.

Sousaphone Protesting

I meant to post first about Tennis Roberts and then talk about the protest that I went to today, but I ended up digressing so much into tuning that I feared Tiffany would just stop reading the post, since she has no patience for rambling about tuning. So I’ve broken it into two posts.
Christi’s uncle came over today to pick up our old imac. Late last night, I reofrmatted the purple imac’s hard drive and put OS9 on it and a few applications. It’s really much happier as an os9 machine. It runs fast and has a ton of hard drive space. But there’s something very sad about about reformatting a computer and not restoring it. It’s soul is gone. even if azll your data is moved over and you finally figured out how to move your bookmarks, it’s still… No two computers are exactly the same. They all have bit rot. But they all have it in different ways. I should light a candle or something for the repose of the soul of the purple imac.
Um, anyway, Christi’s uncle came over and we chatted for a while and then got lunch and then Christi started showing him how to use word. Christi’s uncle, Forrest, works in a dump. He drives the forklift around. Maybe he runs the whole place. Apparently he sees imacs at the dump all the time, but he didn’t know what they were until now. He just fished a plasma cutter out and now has a very nice welding rig. He says that he’s seen every item in our house at the dump. He didn’t know people were like that. What are they thinking about, throwing away their imacs?? Anyway, Christi asked him to fish them out. We could do some cool super-array of imacs runnign supercollider or something. It would be awesome.
So I left them to go play at the Okalnd docks protest. Last month, protesters formed a picket line across the entrance to the docks for APL, a military contracter that ships war materials around. The Oakland police shot at the protesters with “non-leathal” weapons and ended up also hitting some longshoremen and others. This was roundly condemned. I was in Seattle for the first one and missed it (which is ok, since I don’t really want to be shot at). But the BLO was playing this time, so I lugged my sousaphone on to BART. My poor horn is covered with duct tape, which is sealing off several leaks. Many people felt obligated to make duct tape jokes about it. Yes, it is ready for biochemical attack. I just used the tape cuz I like John Ridge. Anyway.
A large croud of people was assembled outside of the West Oakland Bart at 5:00. At the same time, a group of people was protesting outside of the APL building in Seattle. Cool cross-costal actavism. People were handing out flyers and maps and stuff. Other folks were addressing the croud about non-violence and strategy and various important annoucements, whcih I ignored in favor of adding duct tape to the horn. You can’t have too much duct tape.
some body gave a me a free newspaper that had in the mast head linked female signs with fists in them an a hammer and sickle. I was very excited to get the radical, communist, anarchist lesbian newspaper, but I can’t find the queer content in it. Anyway, One of the organizers, named Gopal, decided that the band should lead off the march to the docks. I was darn hot and it’s a long way to the end of the docks. I had to stop and pant several time during songs, none of which I had ever played before. The sax player who was being drum major would give me a quick run-down of the notes in the bass line, which I would promptly forget. But I was getting the hang of it the more we marched. and it was very nice to get a break at the last dock. I laid on the ground next to my horn and was then surrounded by press taking my picture. I guess exhausted sousaphone pkayers are picture-esque. Also, the horn is quite a bit bigger than me. I can see the captions now, “tiny sousaphone player can’t actually play horn.” Anyway, I might be in the Oakland Tribune tomorrow and the Daily Cal.
The rest of the band was coming in a 6:30 shift and was marching up from the bart station, so we decided to march back to gate 3 and meet up with them. The BLO is cool, because it has a strong emphasis on improvisation. We’ll play the head of the song and them maybe a verse or something and then the drum major will point at somebody and they’ll solo over the chord changes of the head. This goes on for a long time. Some of the folks a great solosists. Then we’ll play the bridge section, then maybe the head again and then maybe end the song. Some times we’ll sing the words instead of playing. So we played several songs on the way back to the gate and then played a bunch of songs there. We had just finished playing a very upbeat rendidtion of “We Shall Overcome,” when Gopal announced that we had oversome and had sucessfully stopped work at the docks for the shift.
So we all marched very triumphantly back to the BART station. It was a huge, jubulant crowd. when you see pictures in the news papers of giant crowds of leftist europeans carrying signs and celebrating because they won some thing. It was like that. We played and sang “Le Internationale,” but I only know the Billy Brag words and so couldn’t sing along. During the entire evening, the cops just sat and watched. Some of them bobbed their head a long with the music. They were completely hands-off. A definite improvement.
During the triumphant march back, my back was having no more of it. I had already been playing and carrying the horn non-stop for more than three hours. It’s a heavy horn. So I staggered back to the BART station, without playing anything. I felt vaguely guilty, but it hurt more than I wanted to deal with. Pain while playing music is not a good thing.
It doesn’t make you better, it just makes you hurt. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have a reputatiuon for being the whiny new tuba player or something. I’m very embarassed that I couldn’t keep it up the whole time. I ought to be able to handle my horn. I expect that taking the sousaphone back up will get me back into shape though. And I expect that my shoulder is going to be screwed up for several days. All the weight goes on the left shoulder, high up, on the neck paert, right where I gave myself a nastly sunburn on saturday. But it wasn’t bad until the bitter end.
We got back to the bart station and I laid on the ground again. I think more news types may have taken my picture, but I’m not sure. After a while, my shoulder no longer felt like it was on fire and played a couple more songs with the band. Then I staggered towards the BART platform while they were still playing.
So we won! It was awesome! (“awesome” is the word of the day.) And very high energy the whole time. I couldn’t beleive it when I realized it was past 9:00 and I had been marching around for almost 4.5 hours. It’s also great because I don’t like going to things by myself and can’t always find anyone to protest with me. I can’t wait until next time. Maybe I’ll do some pushups between now and then to build some strength.

Musically Inclined

Well, yesterday was mother’s day, a day I had been actively dreading since October. It wasn’t actually that bad. I guess I worked it all out in the pre-dread. Unlike my birthday, where I didn’t expect to feel miserable around at all, and yet I did. It was horrible, despite cool people and cool events. Anyway, the next date on the dread calendar is June 21st, when my mom would turn 66, but will not. Christi is playing that night at the Chapel of the chimes concert. Yes, the one you’ve heard of. Yes, the huge, big deal. Yes, it’s in a mausoleum. I’m estatic for Christi, but still full of dread.
Perhaps keeping busy is what made Mother’s Day ok. I had band practice for about five hours with Tennis Roberts. Our songs are now ending ok. Chand has taken to mixing his electronic drum sounds (he plays an electronic kit) with a vocoder to other source sounds. It sounds very industrial and awesome with pink noise. With other source files, I’m not so sure about it. We’re a sort of a tonal band and it’s hard to play along with a tape where you don’t know the tones, especially if the tones are from a random sample and hold thing, so they’re not in any particular temperment. Which would be the tones on the mp3s that I made that Chand is using. Anyway, it doesn’t matter that much, since I don’t play in any particular temperment anyway. The open notes are in tune, but the rest is not.
I’m sort of getting into tuning right now. Ellen Fullman has a piece called “Harmonic Cross Sweep” on her album Change of Direction. The piece blows my mind. Go listen to the mp3. It’s just intoned microtonal coolness. So I started reading Harry Partch, since he wrote about Just Intonation and influenced everyone just intoned these days. But he can’t stop ranting. In his book Genesis of a Music, he complains about how cello players are so anal they won’t even let you take an awl to their finger board. It takes him a long time to explain the tuning thing, so I joined the Just Intonation Network and I’m reading their primer text on tunings. It’s a much easier read than Partch and is very informative. But really, the biggest influence on my thoughts about tuning was Kendon.
The last time I played bass guitar in a band before this one, it was called Trap Door Spirder Woman or the Kraft Ebbings or somehting. We never played outside of Kendon’s basement, except to play in my basement. Kendon had this guitar where the nech was cracked. It was nearly broken in two. He was always tuning it in between ever song. I kind of got into the sound of him tuning. It was very cool. It should have been a song. And he always had to tune because after the first three chords, everything was different, since the guitar neck wasn’t rigid. The situation made Kendon unhappy. He was saving up for a new guitar. But it was awesome. It was so completely out of tune screwed up bad that it was great. Really, equal temperment is all out of tune. This broken guitar was just the next step on a broken tuning. But it was beautifully broken.
So with Tennis Roberts, I started playing Tammy’s fretless bass with the thought that I could be out of tune all the time. I could put notes in between the notes. I could put four steps where three belong. I could be always completely, sharply off. It’s awesome.

Do you have a USB CD drive?

Yes you do. You should lend it to me, so that I can install stuff on the computers at Other Minds. Some of the old imacs have broken CD drives. One of them just needs printer drivers, but for another, I think the best way to deal with it is to reformat it, cuz something is hosed with the Operating System. Anyway, I would only need it for one day (9:00 am – 5:00 pm). So email me if you’ve got one.