I love Gavin Newsom

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

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

This is momentous. I wish i was home.

acadmic writing

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

The debate:

Is academic writing bullshit or horseshit?

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

what about academic music?

ah yes. What about academic music? My music is heavily academically influenced. this is my second round of music school. i read acadademic books about music. i talk to professors. i create stuff that is respected in academic settings (more or less), but doesn’t have much of an outside audience. Just like the essays of the guy I quote at the top of this post. Academics like him. they know the lineage of his teachers and can recognize his influences. The read him and think about him and incorporate his ideas into their own writings. just like music.
well, ok, so is my music horseshit? Some people like it (mostly academics and other composers). But some people also like academic writing (mostly academics). So horseshit is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Or, maybe pretension is always horshit?
Morton feldman just wrote things as he wanted to. He didn’t have a system. He wrote notes down on paper and people played them. No manifestos. No pronouncements on “invoking temoporal space.” Just notes on paper.
I think music is nifty, but it’s not like finding a cure for cancer or something. It’s entertainment. People ultimately listen or don’t listen based on how they like the sounds, not because of over-intellectulazised program notes. music is nifty. “nifty.” not “secular quasi spiritual pathos.”

Learning things

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

blogosphere

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

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

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

Hangover Music

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

Anyway, I woke up with the idea that if I made more accessible music, I would be more able to impress chicks. My noise music is not working for me in this regard. I know I used to have a techno-dance generator that was somehwat finished, but it was for MAX/MSP for os9. SO why not do a dance thingee in supercollider? This is why not. I’m never going to get chicks with music. In fact, I may have to lie and tell them I do something else. It might be better to pretend to be an English major or something.
I did nothing productive today

truths

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

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