There’s never a convenient time to get a sex change. I mean, really. There’s always other things going on in your life that are going to get disrupted. 90% of you reading this think I’m talking about surgery (and are quietly crossing your legs, I’m sure), but it’s like a million fucking things. (Such is the poor scheduling of post teenage puberty.) One of the most annoying is the name thing.
I have a tiny smattering of people who may search for me under my given name on the internets. I’m not a famous composer (yet), but I’m out there a bit. I would like people who have got something from the first 10 years of my production to be able to find me.
If I were more radical, I would leave my name unchanged Right now, though, that’s not working for me. So I started going by the middle three letters of my name. And then I started doing music with the appellation, but I think this is a mistake. People from earlier won’t find me. It makes the “C Hutchins” on my podcast kind of inexplicable. It’s not the thing to do.
So if trying to leave my name unchanged will make me unhappy and ‘Les’ isn’t the answer, what to do? An ideal name would: Start with C. Somehow be related to what my parents might have named me (I would have my brother’s name, so I think about what they would have named him) or have a connection to my family. Contain a “Les” in it someplace, so I could keep using it as a nickname.
My uncle and great grandfather were named Charles. Ok, perfect.
So, for people searching for me on google, I can go by “Charles Celeste Hutchins.” So I’m going to publish music under that name from now on and I’ve stuck it on my email. It will go on future business cards, etc.
And you can keep calling me whatever you call me.
Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins
Supercolliding since 2003
I’m in the newspaper
I wrote a letter to Jon Carrol of the Chronicle and he ran it. The topic is bike routes and traffic in the East Bay. I tried to make it really short, but I worry that I sounded like an asshole.
I run stop signs all the time on the Berkeley Bike Boulevards. These are bike routes that run parallel to main streets in Berkeley. The roads are very residential and have stop signs on them quite frequently. There is not much cross traffic at these signs , nor much car traffic on the streets. In some places, they are blocked so that bikes can get through but cars can’t. The system is imperfect because the frequent stop signs technically apply to bikes, but the routes would be unusable to anyone who actually obeyed them.
What I didn’t say is that I don’t cut people off or aggravate car drivers or risk my own safety. I slow down for stop signs, which, honestly, is all the many car drivers do as well. Also what I didn’t say is that the problem could be mitigated by better signage. They need to put in one set of “yield” signs for bikes only and leave the stop signs for cars. Most issues with bike routes in suburban cities like this could be alleviated with better signage, but the ideas for how to post them are foreign and would not occur to somebody who hadn’t biked overseas.
Also what’s not obvious is that taking out stop signs would greatly increase safety. People are more cautious in uncontrolled intersections and this increases safety. Accidents aren’t avoided by just carefully following the law. Accidents are avoided by people seeing each other and being careful. So either better signs or no signs would help a lot. And roundabouts. How to design to increase safety isn’t some deep dark secret. The information is easily accessible and sometimes discussed in the newspaper and whatnot, so the city planners are aware that they’ve created a situation that’s dangerous to bikers and annoying to car drivers, but they make no major changes, even when the cost would be low. Why?
Well, I’ve dealt with the city of Berkeley planning commission and I suspect that they want to share the pain of their bitter twisted lives with others and also are frequently drunk at work plus they are resistant to any kind of change at all, even when it’s entirely sensible.
Carroll cut the part of my letter where I talked about the end of the California/ King bike boulevard. The bike route just dead ends at a major street with a median strip. The Oakland bike route picks up on the other side. There is no legal way to get across the major street without getting off your bike and walking it across a zebra crossing. Cops don’t give you tickets for biking across it, but they could. Also, it’s dangerous and scary. I hate that intersection so much and yet it still seems safer than biking along a more major street.
My hope and expectation is that since we’ve passed peak oil, there will be more and more and more bikers and numbers will increase safety.
Isn’t it amazing that I can live on another continent and still be opinionated about biking in the East Bay. Don’t worry, I have suggestions for London as well, starting with replacing the congestion charge with an outright ban on private cars for non-disabled people.
Wrong Pronouns
In the last week, I’ve twice experienced old friends using the wrong pronouns in front of a third party. In the first case, I was buying lunch at a counter and my friend said, “she” to the cashier, to refer to me. The cashier stared intently at me for several moments, but was otherwise polite and didn’t say anything. It was a bit uncomfortable. Afterwards, my friend apologized profusely.
In the second instance, I was talking with a neighbor that I’ve spoken with a few times before. My friend (a different one) said, “she. I mean he. Sorry.” The neighbor stared at me a few moments, but the conversation carried on. A few minutes later, he said something about “we boys” including me. Later, my friend apologized.
Ok, wrong pronouns happen. I’ve done it to other people. People will do it to me. It’s not the end of the world. I appreciate your effort. I know it’s a challenge.
How to deal
When you use the wrong pronoun, correct yourself. You had a moment of space out, so treat it like that. We all misspeak from time to time.
Obviously, I’m not stealth, but I don’t want to be out loud and proud every moment of every day. Imagine starting every conversation with every person with “Hi, I’m queer.” Like, “Hi, I’m a queer. Can I pay for my meal.” “Hi, I’m a queer. I’d like a half pint of Guinness.” It would be a bit much. And as weird as straight people are about LGB people, it’s a bit more intense with trans folks.
My Bank
Ok, I signed up with my bank, despite witnessing what looked a lot like open racism towards Chinese foreign students. I was disturbed, but it didn’t effect me, right? Because a culture of discrimination could never bite my ass. (Attention white people: it will bite your ass.)
I went in over a week ago to change my address. The form I filled out said that I would receive a letter in the mail confirming this. The guy at the desk said it would take 24 hours to go through. He asked for my passport to photocopy. When he got the copy out of the machine, he studied it and frowned, but was polite to me. Until I turned to leave. I could feel him staring after me. As I got out on the street, I could see him, through the window, looking at me like I climbed out of the Black Lagoon.
Obviously, he must have noticed the gender marker on my passport. If I were a stronger person, I would have gone back in and asked if there was a problem, as he seemed to be looking at me as if he wanted to say something. Instead, I felt shitty about myself, lost my passport for a few days, panicked, found it again and wondered why my letter for address change never came.
I went in today to get my automatic rent payments straightened out and discovered that my address was changed. To Berkeley. All of my statements are going to California, which is not really helpful and also not at all what I asked for.
There is some possibility that the bloke that originally took my paperwork thought he was preventing fraud. Somebody came into my bank in California, impersonating me, complete with fake ID, and tried to cash a bogus check. The teller got suspicious and the lady buggered off. The bank got highly concerned, froze the account, and called me to tell me about it. And that’s what you do if you think there’s fraud.
In this case, the guy pretended to be polite, didn’t ask for any other documents or security questions and must have noted that the picture on my passport is obviously me. It has the weird reflective thingees embedded in it, so it’s also clearly the photo that came with the passport. In short, he knew that it wasn’t fraud and he didn’t act like it was fraud. He might have told himself that he suspected fraud when he threw all my documents in the bin, but I highly doubt that he was following the set procedure of the bank. Why would he ignore procedure? Because he knew it didn’t apply.
So if bank workers feel empowered to stare at me like a monster and fuck up my bank account metadata on the basis of me being a trannie, you can see why I want you to use the right pronouns. It’s my lot in life to have to deal with a certain amount of bullshit, but I’d rather not. And speaking of outing people, why the fuck is there a gender marker on my passport in the first place? It’s got my name age and picture. Isn’t that enough? Having a legally defined sex is bullshit and it’s only practical use is to discriminate against queers. You can’t marry that person. You’re going to be fucked with every time you go to the airport. It’s bullshit.
Oy, I’m knackered
Tired and going native in my speech habits, but not, so far, my drinking habits. A normal night on the town here can quite often involve vomit from over-indulgence. This just doesn’t sound fun to me. So my tiredness is from appropriately puritanical sources. I’ve been working at something called a “test setup.”
We took a hundred or so speakers and arranged them as if we were giving a concert, but there was no concert. Instead, we were testing things. We’ve got a cool Berlin guy to build us a box with 64 motorized, touch-sensitive faders. He flew in with the prototype and there was discussion of firmware. The plan is purchase three of these.
Then we tested Ambisonics which is a method of positioning sounds in space with an oddly cult-like following of users. People who like it really really like it. It sounded weird on our system. One outside observer informed us that we were sending in the wrong sort of sounds for it to work. The easy comment is that a panning system that only works with a few types of sounds is not the most useful, but that comment is unfair. A speaker array like ours turns into a sort of architecture and not all sounds work in all spaces. Gospel music is great, but sounds bad in cathedrals. It needs a room with a short decay time. Similarly, plain chant in an acoustically dead church is going to fall very flat.
Obviously, people compose for the kinds of spaces and instruments that they have. Modern concert halls are very dry and sound really good with the sort of stochastic-like short pulses of 20th century music. So it shouldn’t be surprising that our rig is going to have a body of work that sounds good with it and not as good with different controlling software.
We normally use something that’s pronounced as “V-bap”, but I don’t know what the acronym stands for. It’s equal power pan spread across three speakers to localize a sound in space and it seems to require quite a lot less math. Basically: you know that you can make a sound seem to move back and forth by twisting the balance knob on your stereo. Well, add a third speaker above and a second knob and you can make it go up and down too.
For my part, I carried things around and otherwise did grunt work, which can be a good way to learn about a system without having to ask too many questions or go to a lecture. I tried to play my phone phreaking piece, but I couldn’t get it to work on the computer attached to all the speakers, alas.
One of my favorite students in the program flew in from Spain to work on the test setup, so it was good to talk to him. Apparently he used to have an internet addiction and now he talks about strategies to stop using the net aside from getting email and how much better his life is net-free. I remain unconvinced. Besides, I can quit any time.
Still the internet has kind of begun to bore me. The social network sites are dull and give me little for my time. The news is still valuable. But blogs . . . so many of them are narcissistic and dull. Maybe I should stop.
Moby Dick Monday: Chapter 3
(Late Tuesday Edition)
The Spouter Inn
Most chapters of this book are quite short and seem kind of unworthy of the being rightfully called a chapter. Not 3. It goes on and on, in the manner of a proper chapter and even takes place across multiple scenes. We start inside the hotel with a discussion about a painting hanging in the entry. In the first sentence, the entrance’s wood work “remind[s] one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.” Just to keep up the cheerful mood.
The discussion of the painting is funny and drags on at great length. Due to poor lighting and smoke stains, it’s difficult to make out and so Melville discusses several theories as to what it might depict. Finally deciding that, it “represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-floundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.” A painting worthy of a Monty Python animation. Dark and full of doom but completely ludicrous.
The rest of the decoration at the inn is briefly discussed, all of it exceedingly non-cozy, most of it whale-killing weaponry. Then he describes how the main room resembled the inside of a troubled ship. And then, with an astonishing lack of subtlety, the barkeep is named Jonah – this also being the name of an Old Testament figure who was swallowed by a whale.
Having established this as the most alarming hotel ever, prior to the establishment of the Bates, a dramatic situation is introduced: there are no free beds. He will have to share with a harpooner. Although the introduction and the painting stuff is typically wordy, half of the reason for the exceptional length for this chapter is describing how much he doesn’t want to sleep with the harpooner. Ishmael won’t leap into bed with just anybody. Also, lest you think he’s too easy, he tells us, “I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.” Yes, indeed, very butch, I’m sure.
The harpooner is much speculated upon before he appears. And Ishmael comes up with some schemes to avoid sleeping with him. He planes down a bench in the frigid dining room, to sleep on it, but this turns out to be a bad idea. So he pushes the landlord for information and gets only surreal replies. “I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be he can’t sell his head.” I wonder to myself, what would I make of such news. Would I become frustrated and angry like Ishmael and decide the harpooner must be insane? Or would I, more likely, decide the landlord was nuts? Or would I make silly jokes about the subtext of the harpooner selling of himself? tee-hee. … Something about this exchange makes me think of Holland, for no good reason I can place. The only time I’ve had a hotel owner who seemed so insane was in Belgium and if I ever run into one like that again, I’m just going to leave.
So this mysterious harpooner is actually selling shrunken heads on the street. This news doesn’t fully mollify Ishmael. The landlord notes that it’s a very nice bed and that he and his wife slept in it on their wedding night. There’s a lot of fluff in this novel and not every phrase is necessarily going someplace. But we’ve talked about this harpooner so much as this point, he’s got to turn out to be important. And this news about the landlord having used the bed with his wife is probably intended to convey some sort of foreshadowing. Given that they used the bed on their wedding night, I think it’s fair to assume a sexual innuendo. Or maybe it’s just supposed to symbolize the beginning of a relationship.
Ishmael gets let into the room before the harpooner comes in and promptly begins snooping in all of the other guy’s stuff, going so far as to try on some of his clothes. Then he goes to bed alone, with some thought that the other guy might not be back that night. But he does. Ishmael silently watches the other guy undress and whatnot, in a scene lasting several pages. Most of these pages are talking about how weird the other guy looks and how frightened Ishamel is. The harpooner is a cannibal and this very alarming. Finally the guy gets into bed and is surprised and alarmed to find somebody else already in it and scuffle ensues. The landlord arrives and explains the situation. Both parties are happy and Ishamel sleeps well.
All of the above drags on and on across several pages. It’s amusing and sets a mood. Of waiting and expectation and finally of revealing. Ishamel is fascinated watching the other guy get ready for bed, as he lies in bed waiting. This fearfully witnessed uncovering all takes place in what’s been established as a bridal bed. Although Ishamel is constantly horrified by the strange appearance of the alien other, there’s some undertone constantly, of the very intimate nature of their situation. In another era, if one of them were a woman, this would be a scene from a love story. This implicitly has that kind of vibe.
“Cannibal” in this context, means a non-Christian from any tropical region, as far as I can tell. The guy is selling shrunken heads and he’s got tattoos and is of another race and religion, so therefore, he’s a cannibal. I don’t know if that means he must also eat people or not. Anyway, Ishamel is ready to accept him, “he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.” ‘Comely’ tends to mean attractive as in ‘hott,’ so again with the homoeroticness.
Recall further the ashes of Gemorrah, kicked aloft in the previous chapter. I think perhaps it was love that was in the air.
Need Doggy Day Care in Brum
I’m going to be in Birmingham very shortly and I’m looking for somebody to hangout with my dog during the day Monday – Thursday. I would drop Xena by you in the morning. She would sit around and probably sleep most of the day. You would take her on one walk, or maybe two. I would come get her in the evening. I would give you £10 for your trouble that day. She could be left alone while you ran errands, for like 4 hours at a stretch. It’s a really low stress gig. Fun, too, since she’s a good dog.
If you’re interested, drop me an email at celesteh@gmail.com .
Bells!
I was walking home from the dentist, and i noticed a building which said ‘Whitechapel Bell Foundary’ on it. The papers posted in the door indicated that it was actually still a functioning foundary and that people could come in, so I did. A woman greeted me and told me to look around. Their front room is a tiny museum.
While I was looking, I could hear occasional dings coming from the foundary area, where I guess they must have been tuning bells. This foundary was established more than 400 years ago. They cast the bells for Big Ben and, less successfully, the Liberty Bell, which cracked on its first ringing and was subsequently recast in the States.
They also make smaller bells, including handbells and offer sheet music for sale.
I peeked out into the courtyard and saw a group of new bells resting there.
This is very exciting. In my first semester at Wesleyan, i got really interested in bells and their physics, but some of my questions about how shape effects sound didn’t seem to have much published material. Ron suggested that I get in contact with a bell foundry. I put the idea aside instead.
I had gone to a lecture about medieval monestaries. The professor giving the talk mentioned archeological remains of bell molds. In medieval times, bells were usually cast on site, so archeoligists have found pieces of the molds. Bell sounds were very important to Joan of Arc, so i started to wonder: if we could find enough mold fragments to project from it the shape of the entire mold, could one construct from that the timbres of the resulting bell? Could i feed some arcs into a program and get from it a synthesized bell sound that matched?
So, the material has a little effect, but not a lot. But bells are tuned after they’re cast. Parts of them are cut off. So, i don’t know if it could work or not. Also, is there an existant mathematical model which predicts timbres based on shape? Hey, bell founder, give me your trade secrets!
I did learn, though, that new bells were often based on old bells. They would form the mold directly from the old bell and them melt it down for the material to cast. So you can’t hear the bells from 1429 in any cathedral, except, sorta you can.
Anyway, now i have a bell foundary very conviently located near my abode. Do i want to actually do this project? Is the math beyond me?
Bells are so cool!
My address
For those who desire to reach me via post, here’s my mailing address:
9 Matilda House
St Katharines Way
London
E1W 1LQ
United Kingdom
Also, I have some ability to offer short term lodging, so if you’re planning a trip to London, contact me and maybe you can sleep on my couch. And if you don’t want the couch, contant me anyway and we can hang out.
Hopefully, this is my last day of no internet.
Gig report: Edgetone Summit
This is highly overdue, alas.
So, officially, my reason for my last visit home was to play in this concert. Alas, a travel budget was illusory, so it was more like a working holiday. I spend a lot of time practicing with Polly and pulling the piece together. It’s really hard to practice for something when you don’t really know what’s going to happen.
I arrived in California with working hardware, a vague idea of some structure, a working visualizer and one drone sound. While there, Polly and I hashed out a slightly less vague structure and got the ‘working’ hardware to actually function. I added another texture/drone and recorded some samples. We also talked about what we thought might happen. Polly envisioned something intense and serious.
We showed up to the venue and did a sound check, which took forever because of the wonkiness of my hardware setup. Also, processing.org, the video language that i used, plays everything in a window with a top window bar. I hadn’t thought to research how to get rid of the top bar, so the ‘solution’ was to point the projector such that the top bar mssed the screen and went up towards the rafters. This was suboptimal. I also had to do some code changes to make the window bigger, which, fortunately, didn’t cause side fx. (I wonder if i can embrace a top bar as part of my lo-fi asthetic, or if that’s too lazy.)
There was a pre-concert talk, which had more attendees than i expected. It turns out that many or most of them were working at the festival, but there were as many folks present for the talk as there were for my last edgetone gig, so i was a trifle intimidated.
The theme for the evening was ‘sonic light,’ which meant anything with a video projection. Technically, that fit us, but my projection was just, literally, a moving graph of the data. I think our piece needs the graph or else the tie to biometric data is just way too unclear, but it’s not like great art or anything. One of the other groups had a real-time changing holographic projection. The other had a really high-seeming hippie filmmaker who was so brilliant that he could barely form a coherent sentence. (Note: not snark.) I felt outclassed. Thank god we were opening.
Our video was more of an aside, an adjunct. Worse, only the third one i’d ever let into the wild. I’m a beginner. I kind of expect all my videos to be asides. We live in a really visually dominant culture, on the one hand, so if there’s a video, it tends to dominate. But some folks think that laptop music has too little of a performance aspect. So the challenge is to come up with a video that functions as a perofrmance aspect. The visuals must not dominate, but just augment the piece. That’s my aim, but these guys were much more visually oriented.
Polly explained, during the q&a, that she had this idea because she felt separated from the audience when she improvised and performed. There was always some artifice between her and them. She hoped that by being wired to a truth-decting device and questioned that they could really get at her inner self. Pretence and division would be stripped away.
This was really interesting. I had never thought to ask why Polly had the idea for the piece. Also, it’s an interesting idea. I mean, sometimes what’s interesting about a piece is the peek into the mind and heart of the creator. Certainly, as a creator, i expose myself in certain ways. As a listener, do i listen for the art – the artifice, notes, spaces, sounds? Or do i listen to what i must presume to be the heart of the creator? Or some combination? Also interesting is how one-way this exposure would be. Actually, there’s quite a lot there that’s intersting, but moving along . . ..
Our audience ‘ringer’ was justifiably miffed by being caught in a trans-continental miscommunication (one of many, alas. Colaborating via email is challenging.) and so did not show up. I hastily recruited my girlfriend, who is shy and was displeased to be asked to be the first to speak.
We came on stage and i got everything started and began reading the pre-arranged ‘control questions.’ “Is your name Polly?” “Are you on a stage?” Etc. After she answered in the affirmative, i pressed the ‘true’ button. Then, still as control questions, “Have you ever told a lie?” Polly said no. I pressed the ‘lie’ button and the word ‘lie’ flashed on the projection. The audience burst into laughter. So much for revealing her inner soul.
Casual listeners didn’t know what to ask, being somewhat limitted by the yes/no format. So most participants already knew Polly. They were all game too, which is nice because if they’d left us questionless, we would have floundered. People sort of struggled to come up with questions. Most didn’t stick in my mind. One person asked Polly if she had any intention of ever returning some equipment that she’d borrowed. She said yes. I hit the lie button. Lughter ensued. A co-worker asked if she had been the one to allow a soda can to explode in the break room freezer. She said no. I hit the lie button. Matt Davignon asked if I was just hitting true or lie buttons on a whim. Towards the end, in a dramatic moment, Pamela Z asked if Polly wanted a cracker. Despite owning a pet parrot, Polly is sensitive to this taunt from her youth. Her heart rate sped up, her palm became sweaty, her temperature rose. I don’t know if anybody noticed, but it was the least-faked moment of the evening.
Then, at the end, Polly rose and began asking questions of the audience. She asked them en-masse and so they shouted back their answers. “Should I quit my day job?” got mixed replies. This section made me uncomfortable. There’s a sadistic streak to american humor, which has always been present, but has risen greatly in prominence since i’ve bewen gone as the dark and mean mood of the ruling party penetrates even san francisco. I couldn’t tell how friendly things were. When Polly ad-libbed “Are you fantisizing about Les right now?” I ended the piece. Earlier than I was supposed to.
Peolpe talking about the piece later were generally positive. Ellen Fullman said it was ‘weird.’ Was it music? Was it theatre? (Was it comedy?) It is weird. I still really don’t know what to think about. I put the musical bit kind of in the background, to enable the question and answer to flow as smoothly as possible. I haven’t heard a recording yet, but i suspect that’s it’s not a piece friendly to that medium. Was it carried by the novelty? Would anybody ever want to see it twice? If you allowed more than yes/no questions, could it work with strangers? Would they be interested? Was it more a sort of elaborate party game?
As a final thought: lately, i’ve had the problem of people asking me too many questions. Alas, this is a side effect of transitioning. I’ve been trying to discourage folks from asking me stuff. So its weird putting my friend in a situation that i would not consent to occupy. I mean, except for PZ, nobody pushed any boundaries and she had me moderating and it was all very polite, but I wouldn’t do it. How many people would?
Shall i compare thee?
Was it Shakespeare who wrote, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more temprate and more sweet.”? It was some Brit. Frankly, if somebody from London or the Midlands said that about me, i’d be fairly displeased. Shall i compare you to summer in san frabcisco? You’re just like Ocean Beach on a cold day in June.
I’m glad I got a couple of weeks in Berkeley, Oakland and the South Bay. Anyway, that’s my quota for whining about the weather. Life is hard for expats from Camelot. “It rains after 10:00am!”
I’m nearly unpacked. Alas, my landlord’s furniture has the dual disadvantages of being large but unroomy inside in addition to being already full of his stuff. There also seems to be something of a moth issue. I wonder how to discourage them without permeating my clothes with the smell of pesticides. Clothing-type moths are new to me. My previous experience is mostly with the sort that want to lay eggs in my rice. (Beware the segmented rice grains that move!) The anwer to that is airtight containers- but this seems inapplicable to my duvet- or would seem inapplicable if i could find a place to put it.
You may be wondering how i manage to post these vitally important missives. There’s an open wifi network which reaches a nearby park. Picture me with a little PDA, standing in the rain while a highly impatient dog strains desperately against her leash towards a tree barely a meter out of reach.
Um, anyway, it’s easier to post than browse or get email. I can blahblahblah ahead of going out, like putting a message in a bottle. But i don’t have offline mail reading. I don’t know what’s going on in my city. So I’m having a week or so of relative solitude. Like, even more than normal. I wonder if my life would be easier if i just never went home. But: This will all pay off somehow. And soon. Or else i can just go buy a Time Out or something. Heh. In the mean time, Python tutorials!