Charles Céleste Hutchins – Page 64 – Les said, the better II

Crossing Borders

The first time that I realized that I was consistently passing was the San Francisco airport. It’s an odd thing to realize at an airport. I further realized that it meant if I had to go, I had to go to the men’s room. I start rationing fluid intake at that point. I’ve used men’s rooms before, but not such high traffic ones. It would be just my luck, the first time out, to end up next to Larry Craig, who got busted in an airport. Right.
In general, it was really, really weird. I was walking around the non-secure parts of the airport, holding hands with Nicole and straight people smiled at us. Later, a straight, older woman acted flirty with me. Nobody treated me like a criminal. I forgot to take off my hat before going through the metal detector. The TSA guy asked if he could see my hat. I apologized for having forgotten it. He said it was ok and just peered inside it. Later, when a TSA person checked out my synthesizer, she apologized for the inconvenience. Either SFO has changed for the better recently, or TSA agents treat white guys with a lot of respect.

I was not suspicious or threatening or criminal or degenerate. I was a pillar of society. I was . . . I don’t even have words. I wasn’t even dressed that nicely. Being middle class white guy is really different than being a middle class dyke.
Fortunately, as soon as I got to England, I resumed criminal status, by nature of being a foreigner. Or maybe it was the ‘F’ on my passport. Who knows. I thought I was being all smart, as I put my landing card in my passport next to the page with the student visa. In any other country that I’ve travelled to, a visa gets you a stamp right away. And it seemed to be going that way when the border guard scanned my passport through the computer. “Why were you denied entry in November?” he asked. Shit. “Because I didn’t have that student visa yet.” He told me to wait and I did for about an hour. Then he came back and asked me again and I repeated my answer. “Doesn’t the computer tell you?” I asked. “Yes, but it says medication was found on you and maybe you were returned because you were sick.”
The whole brouhaha where I had to get a doctor to let me take my zoloft last time. . .. Augh. Jetlag makes me feel like shit and I didn’t want to have Zoloft withdrawl at the same time, so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to be allowed to take it. And now it’s in my permanent record. And of course, I felt a slight wave of panic. If they searched my backpack this time, they’d find a collection of hypodermic needles. Augh. I imagined the exchange. Was I planning on coming to England to get free medical care? Yes. But damn it, I’m a postgrad student and postgrads are fucking people and people have fucking medical problems. I’m not some kind of fucking money-bearing robot here to stimulate your fucking economy and get nothing in return.
Anyway, I was admitted, obviously. Later I saw a news story saying that immigrants seeking citizenship would have to “earn” their rights by taking a test to prove that they were worthy. What the fuck? First of all, rights aren’t “earned.” The whole point of rights is that they’re not earned. You have rights by nature of being alive, by being a human, not because you somehow earned it. The whole concept of “rights” is meaningless unless they’re bestowed intrinsically.
Secondly, I’d have to take a test to prove that I’m as good as the fucking Brits? Why do they think people want citizenship? Do they think immigrants are just hopeless anglophiles enthralled with every stuffy, tawdry aspect of British culture? Do they just wish we were? Of course, the reason they want us to pass a test to prove that we’re maybe (never) as good as them is because they hate us. They know we don’t worship them and wish we did. I’m not opposed to tests for immigrants gaining citizenship. I’m against the presumption of unworthiness. I’m against the presumption of criminality and guilt. I’m against being treated as a suspect every time I try to come into the country. If I wanted citizenship, it would be to avoid harassment and to make bureaucratic processes simpler and so I could vote. So I could come and go with my benign prescriptions without having to disclose my mental health issues to a fucking cop every time I try to cross the border of this tiny country.
So to prove my Britishness, I plan to get so fucking pissed that I fall into a canal and then have drunken, sloppy sex with an 18 year old and regret it the next day. Then, I’m going to riot after a football match. Um, and I don’t know. I don’t want to be treated like a criminal, but I don’t know what to do with the straight, white, male privilege that Americans were suddenly foisting on me. I was anticipating the actions of the border guard during my whole trip. In North America, I thought, “Any second and they’ll read me and I’ll go back to being a dyke. These aren’t bad people. I mean, it’s not just the TSA agents. It’s the guy the other day at REI. It’s everybody. They’re good people, or at least as good as anybody.”
I don’t get it. I don’t get why Nicole has always been invisible when standing next to me. I don’t get why even women and POC are immediately ready to treat a white guy like he’s special. Why don’t they treat everybody that way? Of course, I knew that sexism and queerphobia existed. I mean, I’m 32 years old and have been read as a dyke for a long time. But SFO was astounding. White guys: you have no fucking idea. Dress in drag for a day for comparison.

I haz a Xena!!

Hooray, Xena just got dropped off!
When I got her back, first thought was, “she’s gotten fat again.” Second thought was, “What’s that smell?” Third thought was, “augh, she needs a bath.”
She was all awag. Apparently, I still smell enough like myself that she recognized me instantly. I was worried that my lower voice and higher testosterone levels would confuse her, and maybe they do, but she still knows me. Hooray.
So I took her to the park. On the way back, she jumped into the street in front of a car. They drive on the wrong side of the street, so it was only after I pulled her back on to the sidewalk that I realized that she was nearly run over. That would have sucked.
We walked to the store to get dog shampoo. When we got back, I discovered that the shower is broken and probably has been for a while. Then, when washing her blanket, I found out the kitchen light is out. Well, it’s not out, it blinks on occasionally. And, I found a stack of final notices from the ISP. Three of them were last and final. 2 of those said they were going to turn it over to a collections agency. Yeah . . .
And my luggage just came. Huzzah.Blogged with Flock

Berkeley Politics

My home town, the city of Berkeley, California is in the public eye for objecting to a US Marine Corps recruiting station downtown, near both the university and the high school. The right wing blogosphere went kind of nuts at this and you can read more about it here, at the Berkeley Daily Planet.

I went today to see the protests. The anti-war group, Code Pink was set up in front of the City Hall. They had camped over night. This is a women’s group and most, but not all, of the women seemed to be retirement age. There were also a lot of very energetic young people running around, most ly on the other side of the street.
Also across the street were a bunch of right wing pro-war types. Even in Berkeley, alas. They had a very loud sound system set up playing Sousa marches and country songs. While I was mingling with the Code Pink types, somebody I knew from Mills came up to me. She said that when the pro-war folks showed up at 5AM, they started chanting “Burn! Burn! Burn!” at Code Pink. “They just seemed very angry.” She said.
Parked behind all the action were a bunch of news vans. Whenever the police started herding people around, something they were fairly aggressive about, the news cameras sprung into action.
I didn’t stay at the demo long. I was enlisted to help distribute water to the Berkeley High students. Many of them had cut class to go protest. I heard one girl telling her friends that her “mommy” had given her permission to skip school and protest. The kids involved seemed to be very diverse – girls and boys, many races, many teen sub groups. Skaters, goths, and jocks were all out there, all having a good time.
I quit distributing water when the kids started throwing it on each other. I’m not going to carry several liters of water around on my shoulder so they can play with it. As I got on my bike to leave, I went very near one of the news vans. Inside, I heard the anchor ranting about how this sort of thing has been going on for 40 years. The unbiased media was full of scorn for the peace movement. Isn’t it tired to spend the last 40 years advocating for social justice and non-violent conflict resolution?
Even if some individuals have been advocating the same thing in the same way for almost half a century, that doesn’t make their cause less right.

Racism vs Sexism: This is not a Contest!!

I’ve talked before about why I like Obama. It was mostly emotional. He talks about the future. He links it with the civil rights struggles of the past. He invokes destiny and progress in nifty ways. A big component of this is that he stays positive. His charisma is a whole big ball of being positive.
When he gave a speech on MLK day talking about the need for queer equality, that was a strong statement and it was specifically against the queerphobia found in some black churches. But it was positive all the way. He’s a uniter. Emotionally, he tells folks they’re wrong without ever telling them that they’re wrong. It’s like he’s got a great big tent set up and keeps inviting people in. And he’s not telling folks that they’re wrong as much as he’s asking them to scoot over a bit to make some room for the new folks coming into the tent.
I wish everybody on the Democratic side would stay positive. Not just the candidates, but everybody. When pundits or whoever try to frame this as white women against black men, that especially gets my hackles up. Sexism and racism are related. It’s not meaningful to argue about which is worse. Historically, advances for People of Color have been linked with advances for women. The same folks who worked to end slavery worked on suffrage. Many of the same folks who worked in the civil rights movement worked in the women’s rights movement.
Ok, not everybody who is anti-racist is anti-sexist. And not every feminist anti-racist. That second case is getting a lot of attention right now. White, second wave feminists tended to ignore black women’s issues and write about white women as if all women were white. Some of these folks are writing op-eds now that have this same problem and it’s incredibly annoying. Gloria Steinem wrote a piece that, yikes, I wish she hadn’t written it. Unfortunately, though, when folks react to this kind of op-ed, well, their reactions can be problematic too. Instead of arguing with the specific author or even the school of thought of the author or even second wave feminism in general, they paint with a broader brush. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to blame all of second wave feminism. There were influential and important black women in the movement. And, with a broader brush, I really don’t think it’s fair to blame all feminism. Third wave feminists are specifically anti-racist and feature more contributions of POC writers and also tend not to see things solely in terms of white vs black. (Shockingly, there are additional races in America.) I know third wave feminism has it’s own problems which will probably seem glaring in a generation, but right now, there’s a conscious effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, especially in regards to racism and homophobia, etc. Going yet another step further, it’s really, really unfair to blame white women in general as a group.
There are pundits on TV that start talking about white women as if they’re a homegenius group of suburban, middle class soccer moms, all implicitly or explicitly racist. Many of these pundits are white men! Yo! Get off the high ground, Mr. Chauvinist Pig! Right, contrary to what many seem to think, white women vary in age from 18 to over 100. They vary in income from grinding poverty to extreme wealth. They live in rural areas, in the city, in the suburbs. Not all of them are, will be, or want to be moms, soccer or not. Not all are straight. Not all are cisgender. So white, male pundits, complaining about racism, treat white women as a big group of identical, interchangeable, (not quite) people. Ironic!
The brilliant part about this is that it lets white men off the hook. Who profits when the disadvantaged fight each other instead of the advantaged?
So, can we all stop arguing about whether racism is “worse” than sexism or vice versa? They’re different beasts! But they serve the same purpose of maintaining inequality and keeping the rulers up top. Instead, let’s talk about who is going to help the most.
Position-wise, Obama and Clinton are pretty much identical on feminist issues. I don’t want to cal them “women’s issues,” because it’s kind of foolish to assume that these issues only effect women. If abortion is illegal, that increases unwanted fatherhood, not just unwanted motherhood. Every man that’s tied economically to a women gets hurt by income inequality. Heterosexual men don’t bear many of the direct costs of sexism, but they bear costs. Feminist issues are good for everybody, not just for women. And Obama and Clinton are both great on feminist issues. A single-issue voter can go for either of them and end up doing well policy-wise. Of course, somebody who actually IS a woman, well, if I were a single-issue voter, that would push it over the edge for me.
But, position-wise, Obama and Clinton are not equal on race issues. An anti-racist, single-issue voter would pick Obama.
There are a lot of reasons to back Clinton. There are a lot of reasons to back Obama. There are other policy differences,although not overly many. How about we keep it positive, eh? And can we lay off white women? (If we start in on sexist black men . . . .oy, let’s not do that.)

Public Service Announcement

For all of you who switched your registration to vote on Super Tuesday, don’t forget to switch back to the Green Party. We need you to stay on the ballot, not just in national races, where maybe voting Green isn’t s useful, but in local races. We’ve got folks in state legislatures. We almost got mayor of San Francisco. Stay Green!

Camera Idea

I just had an idea after seeing something in the Make blog about re-using antique lenses with new cameras. I’m not linking to it. I can’t even believe they took apart such a beautiful old Zeiss. Nicole had one that she got in Germany, but alas, it got “lost” in the mail. Anyway, I think it might be better to go about this in the other direction.

The Zeiss and a lot of other old cameras use medium format film. The film is 6 cm wide and the part exposed by the camera can be 4.5 cm or 6 or some other sizes. This means that any medium format camera can fit in a thin addition of 4.5 x 6cm or larger. So instead of taking apart a beautiful old film camera, why not disassemble a digital camera?
My first thoughts on how to do this are that I would want to avoid modifying the holding camera. So in order to signal to my digital module that it’s time to take a picture, I would use a light sensor as a switch. The shutter opens, the sensor says, “ooh, light!” and snaps a photo.
That doesn’t leave much time for light metering inside the electronic bits. Would this work as a DIY project?
I bet somebody already did this. I just stumbled across a whole bunch of stuff at bamboo cargo bikes tonight. Duuuude, I totally wanted to do that.

HIDden Options

I’m trying to plug a new joystick into SuperCollider. I got a Logitech Attack 3 joystick which I want to do a short act with, maybe next week at a drag king bar. But I can’t get SuperCollider to talk to it.

The newer version of SC broke all of my joystick code. That’s fine, except I can’t get the newer stuff to work. When I try running the examples under GeneralHID, it can see my joystick and knows about all the buttons and the XYZ stuff, but it doesn’t seem to notice when I push one of those buttons or wiggle the stick. I tried the joystick briefly with JunXion, so I know it works, but SC just isn’t getting data from it.
I wonder if there’s some sort of trick or secret to this? I had to switch my audio stuff to an aggregate device to read in and out. Is there something like that for HIDs? Some secret magic?

A Stopped Clock . . . ?

Embedded Video
I just want to re-iterate that I think Obama is the best candidate.
Um, and also that I kind of secretly like Anne Coulter. Most of the things she says and does are kind of dumbed down, like all of her recent books. But her first book was solid, even if evil. And I think her analysis here is actually right. Goodness.Blogged with Flock

Les Hutchins & Matt Davignon and Polly Moller & Co

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Les Hutchins & Matt Davignon and Polly Moller & Co, originally uploaded by celesteh.

Tuesday, Feb 5 2008 8:00 PM

1510 8th St Performance Space
1510 8th Street
Oakland
Map
Matt Davignon and Les Hutchins will interweave their amazing electronic sounds at 8:00 p.m., followed by Polly Moller & Co., consisting of Polly Moller (flute, bass flute, & voice), Jim Carr (bass), Amar Chaudhary (electronica), and Bill Wolter (guitar).
Cost : $10.00
Venue info: www.bayimproviser.com/venuedetail.asp?venue_id=39
Matt Davignon is a master of the drum machine. His recent album Soft Wet Fish should be required listening for any drum machine user. I’ll be playing some synthesizer with him. It would make a great instrumentation for a techno duo, except that no actual techno will be made.

We’re opening for Polly Moller, who will be appearing with the lads. It’s an eclectic group doing inspired improv.

This venue is new to me, but it won a best-of last year in the East Bay Express. I’m looking forward to playing there. It’s also located very near West Oakland Bart, making it easy to get to from all over the Bay Area.

Movies

Trans Movie

We’ve been watching queer movies at casaninja, thanks to Netflix. I just saw Ma Vie en Rose, a French and Belgian movie about a 7-year-old transgender child. Um, wow. I wasn’t so self-aware at seven, but man, I can relate to parts of that film, like being dragged to therapy. And stressing the heck out of my parents with no idea why or how. Also, the part where hir mom says that everything is going to hell and its all hir fault. . .. Maybe I’m over identifying. Yikes.
The basic plot of the movie is that a heterosexual fmaily moves to some very heterosexual suburbs in Belgium. Their little boy IDs as a girl and wears dresses and scandalizes the neighbors who fly into a homophobic rage. The parents drag the kid to therapy. The kid gets thrown out of school. The father looses his job. The family relocates to France. In France, the family has a transgender kid for a neighbor who forces the main character into a dress to get hirself out of it. The new-to-France mother freaks out and assaults her mtf kid. The nieghbors interviene asking her what the hell is wrong with her. Because they’re in France and not Belgium and don’t freak out over crossdressing seven year olds.
Then, I think there was sort of a forced happy ending, but I can’t say because the disk was screwed up and it wouldn’t play past the start of the reconciliation, but I can imagine the dialog (translated into English for your benefit):

Mom: You’ll always be my child.
Kid: Even if I’m a girl?
Mom: It’s ok, we’re in France now. Our neighbors are no longer filled with irrational hate against anybody even slightly different from themsleves.
Kid: So I can be a girl?
Mom: You can have freedom of gender expression until puberty!

The moral of the story is to stay out of Belgium. Sure, the beer’s good, but the people are nothing but trouble.
As an aside, are there any happy trans movies that have FTMs in them? Are there any FTM movies at all besides Boys Don’t Cry?

Lesbian Movies

We started our movie queue with Go Fish, a lesbian movie form the early 1990’s. It tries so very very hard to address all issues relevant to young, urban dykes. And it does pretty well at that quest, even if sometimes unsubtle. There’s a lot in about the difficulty of maintaining a minority identity in a hostile culture. One of the main characters worries about dropping into straight society and disappearing. There’s a lot of angst like that. Another lead points out that it’s easy to be labelled a dyke when you’re in a cozy couple, but if you’re single and mess around with a guy, man, everybody thinks you’re bi. (Well, it was the 90’s).
I liked it then and I like it now.
After that we watched Sister George from the late 1960’s. It’s a British flick. ~~I think the moral of it is to stay out of England.~~. Hollywood wasn’t ready to talk about lesbians, even if it was as relentlessly negative as this movie.
It’s based on a play, whose script I happened to read a few years ago. I read the whole thing and had absolutely no idea what was supposed to be going on. It was based on some stereotype of female queerness to which I had never been exposed. I can’t say watching the movie cleared it up overly much, but I can say that I think they took the entire play script and put it in the film and then added in scenes that were talked about in the play, just to fill in gaps. The movie was like 3 hours long.
The plot of it is that a woman who plays a nurse in a soap opera is getting written out of the plot, despite being popular and having been on the show for decades. The reason for her firing is because she molested some nuns in a taxi cab. Obviously, she’s coming completely unglued. The movie ends with her jobless and with her girlfriend stolen away by her (female) boss, which was played out with perhaps the creepiest sex scene ever put on film. The evil/aroused expression in the boss’s face is like something out of 80’s German lesbian porn. Aieee!
Given the dearth of other lesbian images in film, this movie was very influential, and I’ve seen references to it other places. Halberstam writes about it in Female Masculnity, noting that it’s not entirely negative. It has the most swniging, happening lesbian bar on film. The bar is packed with happy dancing couples and a girl band. Butch/femme couples abound. One of the femmes even comments that she thinks Sister George is hot. So she’s left lonely and jobless at the end, but it’s clear she has savings from having been a TV star and living modestly through that time. After she gets out of jail for smashing up the BBC studio, she can pop over to the bar and get a more loyal girlfriend to mistreat. Or therapy. She could really use some therapy.Blogged with Flock

Ardour Report

I have advice. I spent some time with the native version of ardour yesterday, and, of course, a lot of time previous to that with the X11 version. If I were on OS X 10.4, I would run the X11 version because it’s very reliable and it’s pretty easy to install. The only drawback is that you have to first install X11, but that’s worth doing anyway.
On Intel 10.5, I’m going to run the native version. While using it, I encountered a crash bug, (which I reported). It crashed very reliably, but, unlike Audacity, crashes do not result in the loss of saved data. The way I work with audio software is that whenever I make a change to a project, I save. Record audio. Save. Adjust panning. Save. To use the native version of Ardour, you must work this way, but you should be working this way anyway. Save early and often!
(I’ve worked in higher education as a lab assistant and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve comforted weeping students who’ve just lost hours of work. Every program crashes occasionally. My sad students were all using commercial software and lost their data. Save. And backup!)

Getting Started

First do all the configuration and whatnot in my previous post. Then

Start Jack Pilot
Click it’s start button
Start Ardour

That’s either version, native or X11. (The other issue I encountered with Ardour is that I keep forgetting to turn on Jack. This is not a big deal, as the friendly GUI will altert you and you can go do it. I’m forgetful enough that I created an Automator script to do it for me. If there is demand, I will distribute some version of the script.) After you start it, Ardour will open a dialog box in which it asks you to eiahter make a new session or open a previous one. Then, a large window opens which should look familiar to you if you’ve used other audio software before.

A Wee Bit More Configuration

Go to the Options menu, then go to Autoconnect. Put a checkmark next to “Auto-connect inputs to physical inputs”. Then, again in Autoconnect, put a checkmark next to “Auto-connect outputs to physical outputs”. Finally, still in the Options menu, go to Monitoring and select “Software Monitoring”.
These options are what I think most users will need. If you have fancy hardware or whatever, you may need to do something different.

Why I Recommend Ardour

Quality of product – Ok, the version I’m using has a crash bug, which sucks, but it’s beta. However, this is software does everything I need it to do and does so well. It might crash occasionally, but it doesn’t glitch. And let’s face it, protools has bugs too (what version is it where sometimes, inexplicably, it wouldn’t bounce to disk?). Ardour’s bugs are less annoying than the bugs I’ve faced with protools. And the developers tend to respond to bug reports.
Economic – This is a fully-featured audio workstation and it’s free. The developers would like it if you donate, but if you’re an impoverished student and you can’t, that’s ok. And if you’re an impoverished non-profit/NGO and you can’t, that’s ok. Or if you’re just impovershed and you can’t, that’s ok. Sliding-scale software means access for everybody. (The corollary is that if you’re not impoverished, you should make a donation.)
Support – Help is always available via IRC or the forums on the Ardour website. Also, unlike certain other software companies (grr), the developers of Ardour aren’t going to suddenly drop support for you to force you to purchase an upgrade.

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