Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Old News, New News

Ok, well, at some point in Seattle, I think near the last day there, I went to a concert festival to see, or rather hear and see a collaboration that Ellen did with some dancers. It was very groovy. Ususally, I feel clueless about dance, but I totally “got” that one. And the sounds were cool. the next piece, I didn’t get as much. It had toys in it.
then there was an installation/performance art thing before the second part of the show. It was groos. It was supossed to be “deep.” something about economics and war, but it looked like a gross parody and mocking of homeless people.
then came the second part of everything, which I could try to give a review of, but it was several days ago and I don’t feel qualified. anyway, also at this event, Ellen’s missing teeth video was shown as a lobby installation. I have now seen pictures of many of my friends and acquaintances (and even perfect strangers) without all of their teeth. Ellen is a master of photoshop. She should work for dentistry jounrals and ads.
after all of this, we went to a piano bar, but neither Christi or Ellen (or me) could be persuaded to sing.
I left Seattle on sunday night, but not before having dinner with Ellen at an Ethiopian restuarant. fun was had by all. then Christi took me to the airport to fly overnight to Hartford Connecticut. Everytime I travel overnight, I swear that I’ll never do it again. anyway, I had to run through the airport. I was in the second to last row in the plane and didn’t want to recline my shair too much, because the row behind me couldn’t recline at all.
for some reason, despite the late hour of takeoff, they decided to show movies for hours and hours and hours. and since the folks behind me couldn’t recline to sleep, they yelled advice at the people in the movies. after a while of this, I decided that it would probably be ok for me to recline my chair back as far as it would go.
after one plane change and a long nap in Newark, I got to Hartford and rented a car. I drove one half hour to Middletown. folks tell me that it is imparative to have a car there cuz you can’t get anywhere without one. the transit situation must really suck if there’s no bus to take the half hour ride in. Of course, I’ve now seen middletown and I beleive the people who say there’s no transit.
People in Connecticut are very friendly. The airport people wanted to tell me how to get where I was going and the students wanted to tell me where I was going and it was all very nice. but where are the outdoor drinking fountains? I saw two drinking fountains in the whole state and both were indoors. also, the gas stations are not immediately visable. How do they find gas?
One of the first people I saw on campus was Judy‘s friend Anne. She very helpfully suggested that I stay in some grad student housing and the grad boys there very thoughtfully put me up in their house. It was really very kind and hospitable of them and I’m very grateful. It must be exciting living in such houses, since I was living in a stranger’s room without his knowledge or consent. In fact, he came home the last night I was there, at 2:30 AM, to find his room occupied. And so he slept on the couch. He’s a visitting artist at the university and he didn’t seem to be at all angry that I had been in his room.
So I met some teachers and walked around. The buildings are interesting and mostly underground and all connected underground, which I hope isn’t because of the weather, but I think it might be. apparently, it snowed less than a week before my arrival.
so I signed the paperwork and that’s where I’m going in the fall. And I decided to go home, rather than New York, cuz I couldn’t find a place to stay from any of my meager east coast contacts. Not that they’re individually meager, just that there aren’t many of them. So I fly from Hartforn to Columbus and from Columbus to Vegas, over Texas cuz of weather problems. the couple next to me lived in Columbus and tried to get to Vegas whenever they could. As we were getting to the airport, they started pointing out casinos to me, surprised that I didn’t know of them. “See that red and purple one, that’s the [whatever].” I didn’t have much to contribute, so I said, “did you know that Vegas uses five times as much water per capita than any other place that gets it’s water from the Colorado River?” they sat in silence for a minute and then said, “see that? that’s the replica of the Eifel Tower.”
The vegas airport is loud like a video arcade, but, of course, the games are for adults only. were the gamblers just passing through? Were they anxious to get started or wanted just one last chance before leaving? What makes people want to feed coins into a machine? I mean, I play arcade games sometimes and they eat my quarters. I think maybe it’s like trying to save the princess, but no particular skill is involved, so it’s relaxing and exciting at the same time. but what would I know?
there’s two different competing groups of men who take off their clothes. One is the chippendales. I think the attraction and fantasy of the Chippendales (this is gleamed by looking at the poster in the airport) must be that there could be men in leather pants and bowties who aren’t gay. Straight women hold out hope for men who care about their appearance, like musicals, wear leather pants and are stright. good luck. there’s also an austrailian groupd. they all have long hair like Fabio. Is Fabio straight? With his name and appearance, he should be in a pulp novel dating a guy named Rod.
By the time I got to Oakland, I was convinced that I had taken the wrong flight to the wrong airport. None of it looked familiar. Where was I? but the Christi lead me gently home. And I slept all day yesterday, except for waking up at 9:00 PM to see a movie with Jenya called Chaos. It’s French. It may be a comedy. All ends well. there were some problematic aspects to it. Clearly, French culture is having some problems dealing with immigrants. But it’s not a bad movie. The Sf international film festival apparently likes it. I went back to sleep after seeing it.
and now, my gosh the house is messy. There’s boxes full of drums and a beat up sousaphone and luggage all over the place. the end.

Don’t leave a message

BTW, can’t get messages on cell phone. Email access is very spotty. You can call, but don’t leave a message. Or if you do, don’t expect an answer right away. Thank you and goodnight. I love jetlag! *snore*
The best return flight is the shortest and also the cheapest but leaves at 6:00 AM. bleah. I think I’d collapse.
Some of you will come see me in Connecticut, right? You know, until I get all my new, cool east coast friends. just kidding.

Far Away

You all would come visit me in Connecticut, right?
I got invited to see a new Robert Ashley Opera in New York. Holy Cow! This is amazing for two reasons: 1. I love his operas & 2. New Operas get staged out here??!!
It’s 2.5 hours to New York from here, so it should all work out unless the rental car company gets upset, or I am unable to book a return flight or find a hotel or something.

Connecticut

This will be brief. I dunno if somebody will tell me if I’m not allowed to use this computer. So I flew into the east coast overnight a couple nights ago. Yesterday I was a bit of a basket case from that two hours of sleep I received. This caused me to corner the medieval music teacher and fire at her questions about the Burgundian school of music during the hundred years war. What would posess me to tell her I had an avid interest in writing motets?
Anyway, I met Alvin Lucier. He told me how to make Boston Baked beans. First, soak the beans overnight. Put a quartered onion in the bottom of the bean pot, then put in your drained, soaked beans and honey (or maple syrup), water and dried mustard. You also stgick in a bay leaf or salted pork. Cook in the oven at low heat for a long time and then take the top off for the last half hour so they brown on top. We also talked some about music. I asked if I could be his assistant, as I could tell that the semi-random bit of conversation I was having with him would sometimes contain musical information as well, and he’s good to talk to anyway. Judy was his TA when she was here. She said it involved hanging out a lot and doing writing work for him.
I also met Ron, the computer music guy. He told me that the community here was warm and not competitive (like some other schools), and from what I’ve seen, he’s correct. His TA would do kind of cool stuff. Fixing electronics, doing computer maintaence, soldering, etc. Stuff I kind of want to more about. But stuff I haven’t done because of laziness, not ignorance, if you know what I mean. I have a soldering iron at home, I just rarely use it. Anyway, he also said that Christi could get her music done by the student orchestra. Judy told me that the orchestra isn’t that great, but Christi might be able to get an ok recording and would get money from ASCAP this way. There’s also a pipe organ. Every spring Alvin makes his students write a pipe organ piece and they get played at a midnight concert that is somehow connected to the gay pride festival.
The campus seems kind of queer friendly. There’s an upcoming drag prom or something. A sign in the music building stairwell advertises a men’s group to talk about men’s issues. It says it’s for all self-identified males, which makes me feel better about it. I saw one anti-war sign in the student center. The school newspaper is probably considered to be on the left, or maybe moderate. It has an editorial that worries about embedded journalists, perhaps they’re endangering troops. right. ok. Middletown has a lot of flags. This is Joe Lieberman’s state. Lots of military. A lot of flag poles fly POW/MIA flags below the US flag. There are a lot of flags just around. The Italian Catholic church is St. Sebastian parish. They have a statue of St Sebastian standing at attnetion (not shot full of arrows) outside. An engraving says that he’s the parton saint of Catholic vetrans (my emphasis). Er… yeah. At first this pissed me off. But then I remembered that St. Sebastian was murdered heniously by his own army after refusing to commit an atrocity, so maybe he is a good war saint. On the other hand . . .
In counterpoint to all the flag waving, the Episcopals have a US flag with a dove carrying an olive branch. No stars on the blue. I guess that’s flag waving too, but it makes me feel better about things. The town is um, what berkeley would be like without Telgraph Avenue and without any of the towns around it like Albany and San Francisco if there were no gas stations and it didn’t have Peets or Codys or the gormet ghetto or hills or . . .. I don’t get small towns. This is suburban for sure. It’s only two hours from New York though. If it were SF, it would be one of those outlying suburbs that people insanely commute from, like Davis kind of is. But a two hour commute must be consdered long here or something. A lot of people said hi to me on the streets of Middletown, but they might all be crazy, I have to ask somebody. Yeah… well, there’s a nice looking playhouse which isn’t part of the school. And a new espresso shop. I had a dismal macciato this morning, but at least it was coffee and had soymilk, even if it was just a bitter wet cap. Maybe they’ll get better. And there’s a ncie fruit shop. A lot of itallian markets. Apparently an entire Sicillian village relocated here several years ago.
I must go try to meet with the department head. I think that I could spend two years here without going insane. And if I do, there’s a large mental institution in town.

April 11, 2003

We really did not do much today. Woke up late. Walked to Jack Straw to see if anyone wanted to have breakfast with us. Heather did, but she was the only one there, so we went to breakfast without her, but brought her back a muffin. Then we did laundry. Then we called Ellen to try to get her to have lunch with us, but she was busy. So we walked back to JS and got Joan and Heather to take us to lunch. Then, after they went back to work, we called Tiffany and Ed and got coffee and looked at area music shops. I saw minidisc player, but it had no digital outs. Stupid consumer stuff.
Then we went to the Meet the Artist Night at JS. The first artist was Folasayo Dele-Ogunrinde, a poet. Her poems were short and about wisdom and inspriation, but mostly about love. She was excellent at presenting her poems, with great emoting. Christi bought her book. The second artist was Ben Larson. He’s a evolutionary scientist who beleives that music can evolve like living organisms in people’s mind. To demonstrate this theory, he gave a theme to three different musicians and asken them to interpret it. He played us a tape of the original theme and the re-interpretation. Then he did some computer loop-based thing to it that sounded granular. It was interesting, but I still don’t see the advantage to doing live laptop music than just making a tape ahead of time. The tape and the laptop have equal performance value as far as giving the audience something to look at and you can slave over a tape and make it perfect. Why not play a tape while checking your email? But this made me think that it would be interesting to do re-sampling stuff live. With an ensemble and a laptop. Like Tones. It would be just like playing a tape with an ensemble, but more interactive and hence, has the laptop and the performance aspect. And it’s interesting to re-assmble sounds in tape, so it’s also interesting to re-assemble sounds as they happen. Something to think about.
At the intermission, I discovered that the woman sitting behind me was a Mills alum. She talked about seeing John Cage play piano in the Mills concert hall in 1951. She also said that then all the “Mills Girls” got to play one piece from their senior concert on KPFA radio. This explains all the Mills names in the KPFA tape archive. Very exciting.
The next artist was Hannah Palin. She did a this American Life-esque radio segment called The Day My Mother’s Head Exploded which was about how her mother had a brain aneurism 15 years ago and survived, but changed completely. She played the radio segment. In it she described her experiences in the hospital with her mother. And how her mom changed and stuff. It was funny and poingant and interesting, but it was hard to listen to.
The last guy was a vocalist who recorded traditional ballads and his own lyrics in a folk style. One of the tapes he played was one of the same songs that Ellen played us a recording of herself singing. They both used a similar vocal style. It’s not a song I had heard before, nor a style that I was familiar with. So it was nice to hear this guy, even though his songs were longer than radio-ready format and it made me appreciate Ellen’s music more. cool.
I talked to Hannah Palin and her mother a bit afterwards. We talked about her experiences a bit more. Then we changed the subject to alternative brain healing technigues. Crystals, candles, St. John the Baptist. It’s a lot easier to talk about St. John the Baptist than hospital scenes. But she told me that she cried when doing the show even though it was 15 years later and her mom survived. Scars.
The Christi and I went back to our hotel room and watched When Harry Met Sally. I’m ready to go home, I think. But I’m not going home. I’m going to Connecticut with all my Seattle springtime clothes and none of my wintery clothes, while my poor sousaphone sits at home unplayed.
I’ve only ever watched when Harry Met Sally on vacation. It must get played on hotel cable a lot.

April 6,2003

We decided that we need nice clothes to wear on April 9th. So we went out to the mall in Portland and looked around for a while. Gap. Baby Gap. Gap kids. Large pictures of anorexic models. Over prices flimsy clothes sown in the third world. What is a young pinko transvestite to do? So we went to the Nordstroms Rack, which is a store that seels factory seconds originally destines for Nordstroms. I bought some trousers. Trousers are just like Men’s pants except that they’re made of wool and they’re unhemmed. uh yeah. this is an exciting story. i bought some rayon trousers with no hems and a blue shirt after trying on all the shirts at two stores and none of them fit because apparently nobody who wants a button down shirt with collar is skinny with long arms. the end. Then we went to Powells and I bought Jarhead. Christi’s dad had to rush back to Roseburg to be at an 8:00 AM meeting in southern Oregon.

song! http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~makarov/anthems/internationale-en.mp3

April 7, 2003

We needed to do laundry before we left, but we overslept. Then the soap wasn’t rinsing out of things, so we had to run the laundry twice. Then the dryer took forever. But that was ok, because Christi’s mom ended up hemming my trousers twice. Finally, late in the afternoon, we loaded our car and drove to Coffee People.
And then we went to Seattle. Our hotel is acorss the street from Jack Straw, which is much more convient than the other-side-of-the-university location we had last time. The room is nice. They gave us two beds without asking our preference, though. We could switch for a cheaper room, but we’re lazy. Remember, when you make an ASSUMPTION, you make an ASS out of U and MPTION.
Ellen Fullman invited us over for curry, so we had grabbed a jar of homemmade chutney from Christi’s mom on the way out and gave it to Ellen. The chutney was good. One of her friends came over with computer problems. I gave him a bunch of probably useless advice. I like sounding like I know what I’m talking about, but, of course, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve never owned or trouble-shot a computer running anything microsoft past windoze 3.1. My advice on fixing windoze problems is less than useful.
Ellen is doing a video project called Bridging the Gap and it’s about how arts funding has gone to heck. She was in a bike/car accident last year and lost a tooth. A new tooth will be made, but not yet, so she has a gap in her smile, which is not very noticable. But it’s a front tooth, so , well, you know how you would feel about it if you had a front tooth missing. So she’s getting folks that are artists or work at arts organizations to grin in photos and she’s photoshopping out of their smiles the same tooth that she lost. She’s going to fade from a “before” pitcture to an “after” picture. She showed us the video. It’s very funny.
and she played us a bunch of songs on an album she hasn’t released yet. She’s singing on all of them. They’re all kind of creepy, but in a good way. One of them has sounds that would work well in the incidental music of the doctor Who TV show. I didn’t write this in any of my personal essays, but the Doctor Who music is a big influence of mine. It’s the best music that you’ll find on a TV show. I like the rest of the show too, because the plots are silly and the lighting is bad and the costumes are funny and it’s so darn nerdy, but my appreciation of the music is real, un-ironic enjoyment. The only reason Christi would initially consent to watch Dr Who with me was because she liked the music. Anyway, so I compared some of Ellen’s music to Dr. Who. I’m not sure if the compliment came across 100% clearly.

April 8, 2003

We tooled around Seattle some. We decided we needed haircuts, so we went to a barbershop reccomended by Ellen. It’s in the Freemont district, which is kind of hip. We noticed that on the corner was a giant statue which evoked a strong resemblance to Lenin. We parked near a rocketship perched on a building. On the way, walking down the block to the barber shop, we came upon a thai restuarant and stopped for a really good lunch. Then, after lunch, two doors further, we passed a place offering vegan waffles and vegan bisquits and gravy! Too bad we just had lunch. We also bight biodiesel fuel nearby. My reference said to call the retailer first so I did and he said sure. So we showed up to the address and discovered that they were selling biodiesel out of the back of a van! So we filled up.
Later, we discovered that a coffee shop near our hotel has wireless networking, so I could check my email. Wesleyan wants to know whether or not I will attend by the 15th. I sent them email explaining that I would be back the 15th and could visit them after that. They said that the very latest I could get back to them would be the 17th. So I booked a flight from Tacoma to Hartford flying overnight, Sunday night. Arg.
We went to a copy place to print and copy programs. We asked for 16 copies and they gave us maybe ten times that many. Anybody want a program?
We got James from the airport and introduced him to Joan at Jack Straw and then went for dinner. It was late, so we didn’t go to a movie or a concer or a protest or anything. Seattle is not at it’s most exciting on tuesday nights anyway. This week is spring break.

April 9th, 2003

Early in the morning, we retrieved the rest of our ensemble from the airport. We walked over to Jack Straw to stash the cello and head out for breakfast. We introduced the ensemble + Tiffany and Ed as our “entourage.” Joan was excited that so many people came up from the bay area. We researsed all of our non-tape and normal tape pieces. Those were the ones that either were just the ensemble or only had a normal two track “tape” (actually a CD, but whatever). after we felt happy with those. We took a lunch break. My dad showed up just as we were leaving, so we piled him in to our six passenger rental car too. We went to Capitol Hill, the gay neightborhood, because James said he wanted to go where the cool people were. We ate at a Russian place that served perogies. Then we went to a coffee shop that Ellen took us to last time we came to town.
We went back to the hotel so the ensemble could nap. Christi and I went to JS to lay out the audience piece that Christi wrote. Then she re-editted The Greek of the River to You. Then we came back to change and then showed back up at JS at 5:00, when the sound engineer said he’d be done with the folks before us, he was going to throw them out at 5:00 whether they were done or not.
That didn’t actually occur, but it was ok. I asked him to setup pieces that needed rehearsing first. So we tried to setup MyMom which uses a three track tape. The tape didn’t work. He explained that tapes never work. Right. So I burned a copy of the protools session from Christi’s computer, where thankfully, I had put a copy of it just in case. I put that on the studio computer and we got sound out to the right places and rehearsed that while he hung the projection screen for Aelita. Then I asked him to setup mics so we could practice Tones, while he set up the projector. At every possible phase, equipment failed to work as expected. He would look angrily at the gear and say, “Why aren’t you working, you stupid, goddamn son of a bitch?” This is how engineers talk to their tools. I could tell he was an excellent engineer. However, as every single thing seemed to go wrong, it became kind of unnnerving. When at 7:20, we had not yet checked the CDs, and we were suppossed to start at 7:30, I started to become alarmed. Apparently, I looked alarmed.
We were actually, amazingly ready to go at 7:30. But Joan thought more people would show up, so we waited at least ten more minutes to start. More people did not show up. The Bay Area delegation outnumbered the locals.
All of the pieces went as planned, except for a minor snafu on Tones. I was still nervous as all heck at first, but got more confident as things worked right. When we played My Mom, my dad started crying, which I expected (I should have warned him, but I didn’t…), but so did other people. I co-wrote something that made people cry….
I had been worried about the in-progressness of Aelita. It’s still very rough. But we did it right after My Mom, so I guess they decided they liked us. People laughed at my jokes, even the lame ones. Of course, they mostly liked us already, since Christi or I knew practically everyone there. Maybe I was just un-nervous enough to try making lame jokes. Anyway, Aelita went perhaps more smoothly than I had ever seen it go. In a stroke of luck, James’ drum pattern happened to match up with the on-screen hammering where the worker is forging a sicle. We hadn’t wanted to close with aelita, becase it wasn’t the strongest thing, but we probably should have anyway.
Then the audience got to ask questions. Trimpin asked why I called tape music “tape music” is it was really a CD. Ummm. I don’t remember all the other questions an asnwers. Nobody offered feedback. And nothing got recorded cuz they can’t record while using the speakers in the room. But at least 4 extra people have now heard our music, which is good. I hope they liked it.
Our whole entourage, which had grown by Christi’s mom, Joan and Heather (who also works at JS) went wandering into the restaurant district to find a place that would make us all food at 9:45. We had a nice dinner. Good conversations. Christi’s mom and Carolyn talked about how happy they were that Christi and I had put on nice clothes for the event, for example. The conversations I heard though, were more about arts and stuff. My dad paid for everybody’s dinner. It was very nice of him.
We walked back to the hotel and I said goodbye to everyone who would be leaving early the next morning. Sleep.

April 10th

I promised that I would ride to the airport with everybody this morning, but it was the first night I actually slept since I got here and I sleeply broke my promise in the morning. Christi is letting me sleep so I won’t be as completely exhausted when I get to Connecticut.
Lisa didn’t leave this morning, though, so we went over to Pike’s Market with her. Christi bought a jaw harp and baby clothes aglore for Owen. I wanted to get him a dress, but Christi said that his mother might not be happy about that. Then we went over to the Freemont district to have lunch at the veagn-frienly co-op that I had seen there earlier. It was great. We went to look at the Lenin look-alike statue to see who was made tolook like Lenin. Christi and I had been joking earlier with returning in the dead of night with a brass plaque falsely labelling the statue as of being a statue of Lenin. Anyway, we looked at the plaque and discovered that the subject of the statue was . . . Lenin! It had been salveged from Solvakia. Then we went to look at the rocket ship and found out it was salvaged from the cold war also. the plaque explained that Freemont was the center of the universe. It certainly is a self-consciously funky place. The plaque made the area sound very enamoured with itself. Still, statues of lenin and rockets ships are cool.
We took Lisa to the airport and then sort of hung around for the rest of the day. I’m not in my traveling rythm. Also, it’s a real pain scheduling meetings with professors next week from here via Christi’s laptop. We should meet back up with Tiffany and Ed tomorrow, I hope.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Lenin!

So a couple of days ago I went for a haircut in the Freemont district of Seattle. I kept telling people that the statue there was funny because whomever the illustrious personage that the statue was erected in honor of looked a lot like Lenin in it’s rendition. Today, I went back to the district to eat a vegan freindly co-op and went over to see who the statue was really of. It’s Lenin. There’s a monumental statue of Lenin in Seattle. I kept telling folks that I suspected that Seattle was left of San Francisco.
But, perhaps in the spirit of capitalism, the staue is for sale. For $250,000, you can have a stue of Lenin emerging from gunas and flames. One of the only statues where he is depicted as a revolutionary rather than an intullectual. If only I had an extra quarter of a million dollars for a monument to Communism.

Email

I got some email about my website:

I had a badly sticking CD, and — finding advice for repairing same on your Web
site via Google — applied toothpaste (Crest for Sensitive Teeth). Worked like a
charm: many thanks! Let me know if you ever need advice on getting a sticking
antiquarian book repiared.