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.

I left my heart in San Francisco

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/12/GAYMARRIAGE.TMP Lesbian couple legally wed.

when I was a youth, before I was out, I checked all the books on being a lesbian out of the Cupertino library and I know I’ve read a bunch of stuff that Del Martin wrote. I think. She wrote a bunch of stuff about how homosexuality should be removed from the DSM, or whatever that book is that lists all the psychiatric diseases that people can have. the first ideas that I had about what it meant to be a lesbian were from reading what she wrote.

Some of my day

Went to the best colloquium of my time at Wesleyan. Korean drummers came and performed. Some of their stuff sounded a lot like house music. It was also at club-type volume. As loud as the Polo Club, for example. Some grad students complained later about the volume and talked about hearing loss. What about people who go dancing? do tey all go deaf? I quit wearing my earplugs because i am a slave to fashion. maybe i should start again. Anyway, the drumming was awesome. it made me want to dance.
then, later, I went to India House where there was an impromptu party, celebrating the coolness of the Colloquium, I guess, and acting as a wake for Leroy (Angela’s gerbil) and for Nick Hawkins’ relationship with his ex, too I guess. Most of the department came.
Leroy died early this morning of respitory failure stemming from a short illness. A funeral is planned for some time tomorrow, when he will be interned in the Connecticut river.
We toasted him several times and talked about other ways to honor his remains. Tom suggest a funeral pire in the middle of the street, or , failing that, in a parking lot. Several people suggested that instead of dropping him off a bridge into the river, we should put him in a boat and set it on fire, like a Viking funeral. I wanted to have a mourning procession down the street where we carried his remains and maybe played some instruments, but Andrew insisted that we would all be arrested. (Which, really, would just be a cool thing to put in a bio or mention in an interview, since we’re all planning on being famous.)
We are however, unrealted to Leroy (god rest his soul), starting a Drone Music Marching Band, which we will call the Drone Core and will have a Drone Major. I will be playing tuba. I knew there was a reason I dragged my sousaphone to CT. Of course, it’s really leaky, so it’s going to need a lot of gaffing tape on it before it’s up to playing a drone. I’m going to drag it to the electronic music studio and start repairs very soon.
the question has always been how to get new audiences to come to concerts. we’ll bring the music to them by playing in the student center at lunchtime!
feel excited about this. also have fun plans in store for my b-day. happy happy joy joy

terrorist!

Apparently, the white house only offers audio archives of radio addresses delivered in the last year. (This one is very instructive: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030208.html. what we without a shadow of adoubt know, or rather, maybe didn’t know so well.) This gives me less material than I had wanted, since I was going to mine all the radio addresses since Sept 2001. I was thinking of writing to the whitehouse and asking them to send me a CD of the old addresses. I was trying to figure out how to phrase this so that they wouldn’t figure out that i had artistic designs on the material or am registered Green. Also, since the web archives are all in Real format, I’ve been capturing them with Audio Hijack, which is time consuming and has the low quality associated with Real streams. But now I’ve got all the available radio addresses that mention “terrorist” or “terrorism” (but not just “terror”) and it’s 930 Mb of data. That’s way more than a CD will hold and CDs are 74 minutes. Maybe I’ll just work with what I have. ANyway, the low-fi could be nice.

not so shy

my shrink points out that people are normally shy approaching strangers and doesn’t seem to think that there’s anything wrong with me. I think she’s going to cut me off soon. then i’ll have to go back to whining to my friends.

acoustic awesomeness

but i did pay a compliment to a stranger today. I saw Mark Dresser play this evening and told him that his was the best bass playing that I’d ever heard. It was completely awesome. He’s got a pickup behind the neck, fingerboard sort of part of the bass, you know that thingee that people press the strings against to play notes… (go music shcool terminology!) So it pickups both the note he’s playing and the anti-note of the string left over. and he was doing this super cool finger buzz thing, where he intentionally didn’t press the string hard enough and it made this great buzzing sound. His string tunings were toally wild. He started writing the piece by coming up with the tunings. Then he wrote themes in those tunings. then he played the score by improvising on those themes. I’m not sure whether he just ordered them in real time or played variations on them. When I grow up, I wanna play standup bass. this very morning, when Alvin‘s composition seminar was waffling about what ensemble we’ll write for, Alvin threatened us, saying he would make us all write for solo bass. I think I’d be fine with that. If we get a string quartet,, I think I’ll write a bass feature.
bass = good
and speaking of Alvin’s class, we had a pianist come in to talk about John Cage’s Music of Changes and play it. He played the third and the fourth books. Alas, his name is escaping me, but he is an excellent pianist. and I was thinking, as I was listening to it, about what made the piece what it was. Every moment in it is beautiful. It’s a lovely piece filled with lovely and discreete (meaning totally seperated) events, which somehow blends togther into monotony. (i’m going to be burned at the stake like Joan of Arc by the music department. It’s bad enough that I like Phillip Glass’ new stuff.)
I read this book once about cartoon theory, which I can’t remeber the name of or the writer, but it’s pretty influential so far as comic books about the theory of comics go. and in it, they talk about using a lot of colors. Usisng a lot of red, for example, makes a bold statement. Or a lot of blue. Or a lot of yellow. or green. or whatever. But if you start using all of the bright colors, it starts to blend together somehow into grey. Or if you play too many frequencies at the same time, instead of getting the groovy complexness, it sounds like white noise. so what I think happens with Music of Changes is that you have to stay very much right in the present to enjoy it, because it is what it is while it’s going on. Every moment is pointalistic and lovely. and i think if i try to perceive it in any way but on a moment-by-moment or event-by-event way, it’s too complicated rfor my little brain and gets white-noisy.
However, the moments in it are so darn wonderful. I thinking of writing a program to generate some brass stuff based on the approximate algorythm that Cage used. But I think his timings are very virtuosically complex and are perhaps overburdening the player, so I want to combine the results with a performance algorthm invented by the total complexity guy. He wrote some pieces in the 60’s that players could play at the same time, but not togther, so as to create complex textures but still be fun to play. Music of Changes is an amalgamation of 8 parts, with incredibly complicatred timing. In fact, the timing is integral to the structure of the piece. My poorly conceived knock-off would have N parts, but be much freer on the timing. because it would be neat to have something with so many beautious moments that doesn’t take months to learn. and I want to write a brass ensemble piece, possibly as the second movement to my symphonic thingee

the plan

I’m going to capture all of the bush radio addresses since september 11th and get samples from them of him saying “terrorist.” I want to get all of his public pronouncements of “terrorist.” since he’s so rarely unscripted, it may actually be possible to download all his public pronouncements, since he usually just gives speeches and the white house (probably) archives those. I’m going to be listening to a lot of bush. And then trying to assemble all of the audio. I bet you’re glad you’re not my housemate (unless you’re Aaron, in which case you are my housemate).

class today

I co-lead a TA session on recording stuff in the electronic music studios and the recording studio. actually, it was 9:00 am, so i let Jascha do as much of the talking as possible. I’ve been told the way to cure my shyness in approaching strangers is to pay a compliment to a stranger every day. this makes me not want to leave my house, so I think I’ll start by saying “hi,” to strangers. but I won’t take candy from them.
My visionaries class will be discussing Joan of Arc on wednesday. Some of the reading makes claims disputed by Regine Pernoud, former head of the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans. I wish they offered a seminar just on Joan. That would be awesome. We’ve been reading all these visionaries and they’re just odd. there’s a whole lot of god talk, obviously. Some folks find Margery Kempe to be annoying because she’s extremely repetitive. She’s extremely trashy too. I don’t find the repetitiveness annoying. Is it because I’m a musician and music thrives on repitition? I don’t find the repititiveness annoying.
Wrote some stuff for my SuperCollider tutorial, which will hopefully constitute enough work to cover the two weeks that Ron was gone. If I may be so arrogant, I could put together the whole class project by myself in an afternoon (ok, a weekend), but I’m not sure how much flexibility is required or how much work I should do.

and then

I went to retrieve Xena from India House, but ended up staying for the evening and having my first encounter with what Connecticut terms “Chinese Food.” Oh dear, no no no no. The India House denizens were mocking me for my snobbishness in refusing to try local chinese food. I should not allow myself to be swayed so easily.
I’m starting to like the ice that’s everywhere. Yeah, it’s slippery, but it looks kind of cool and makes very nice cracking sounds when you step on it. Also, if it’s very cold out and you kick an ice formation, it makes a very satisfying shattering sound. Like breaking glass but lighter. And nobody cares if you break ice and it won’t cut anyone, but if you kick something too thick, it may hurt your foot. Last semester, an undergrad, Dan St. Clair, did a cool installation with sheets of ice shattering and I thought it was impressed, but only now do I get it. I’ve been trying to think of sonic things to do with ice, but Dan’s project covered everything that I can think of so far. He’s kind of brilliant.

and also

my personal website is out of date. it’s kind of embarrassing. Maybe it was hip in 1999, or whenever third generation web design was the hot new thing (indeed the layout is influenced by a very influential book about such design), but the content is um . . . kind of lame and third generation layout was never so cool as it was hyped to be.

I don’t have time to redeisgn my website. should i just take it down?
Proposed strip-down

Update

Of course I have time to alter my website. It’s a bit more interesting than my homework. besides, aren’t we supossed to rest on the 7th day?