The end of the world

So there’s a whole genre of books based on some crazy idea called Darbyism. The Left Behind books are en example of this genre. They have a set of weird ideas about the end times and the books have to touch on all the plot points. I’ve been reading a great blog detailing some of the problems with the Left Behind series and I thought I could write better than that. so here goes:

Mary Sue bent over her bicycle, jiggling the key in the rusty lock. She kept forgetting to get grease for it. She kept running late. “Merde”, she mumbled.

A clean cut, blonde, broad-shouldered Dutchman approached her, pamphlet in hand. “Wordt u gered?” he asked.

Mary understood but pretended not to. “Ik spreek geen nederlands.” She mumbled. Half true. She had rehearsal and no time for Jesus freaks.

The man, mercifully, did not pester her, but instead approached a sprawled junkie nearby. Mary turned away from them and started towards school. The junkie closed his eyes and cursed softly as the young Christian shoved a pamphlet into his hand. He prayed a silent prayer that all the evangelicals with their weekly Thursday public prayer meetings would just disappear. When he opened their eyes, they had.

Mary biked past the Jesus houdt van u – Jesus loves you van with the top mounted speakers, out of tune hymns blaring out at evening commuters. And then the hymn halted all at once, mid note, like somebody pulled the plug from the speaker. But there was no click and pop of a disconnection, just the clunk of the microphone dropping to the ground. And then the whine of feedback.

Mary braked and turned to look back as a collective gasp went up. The only previous time she had ever heard the Dutch gasp like that was the time her dog had attacked a guide dog in the middle of the shopping district on a sunny Sunday afternoon. This gasp was even more shocked, but without the air of titillation.

All of the street preachers were gone. A moment ago, they had been witnessing and now they were just missing, piles of their clothes were on the ground. Mary’s mouth hung open, like mouths all over the GroteMarktstraat. A woman with a baby stroller glanced down into it and began to scream. The scream echoed across the city, across the country, across the world. Her baby was gone. All the babies were gone.

—

Mary numbly sat where she was on the ground. Around her, people frantically rushed around. Around her were sobs, cries and sirens. “Mijn baby!”

This can’t be happening, she told herself. I have got to quit smoking pot before bedtime, the dreams are too weird. But then she thought of something else, Ralph’s crazy story of going to Israel to visit his boyfriend during the Ethiopian-Russian war.

“I saw all the missles,” he had improbably claimed while they sat at the bar at Cremers, sharing a joint and drinking beers. “They were all over, coming from everywhere, right towards us. It was terrifying. I swear I peed my pants.” His eyes were bright, although glossy and red-rimmed.

“Hmm” Mary said, too high to trust herself to say much more.

“And then, like, all of the sudden, all the power went off everywhere at once. I thought it was like an electromagnetic pulse, from a neutron bomb or something. I thought I was dead. Everything stopped. Everything. Every mechanical sound or electric thing just stopped. And the missles, seemed to be going in slow motion. They pulled up and turned, passing each other in the sky. And they were gone. It was unbelievable. I looked at my watch and it had stopped right then. It said 4:20.”

Mary suppressed a giggle. That explains it.

“But then I looked down it later and it had restarted. Not only restarted, but the time was right. Everything was like that. Everything turned back on as if nothing had happened with the new correct time. All the radios came on at once. It was crazy, unbelievable, but we all just stood there. Nobody screamed. We all stood and listened, totally calm, like the most peaceful thing in the world had happened. And then the news announcer came on and said in calm, cheerful hebrew that Moscow and Ethiopia had been nuked beyond recognition. They launched pre-emptive strikes at each other at exactly the same time! How is that even possible? I felt the hand of G-d there. I really felt it.”

Mary swallowed another sip of beer. “So that’s why you converted?

“Jews really are G-d’s chosen people! How else can you explain that?” Ralph was getting loud, but didn’t seem to notice the now-widespread eavesdropping.

“Mass hysteria?” Mary flinched at the look Ralph gave her. “No seriously.” she paused. “Ok, I was in the big earthquake in San Francisco in 1989. One of my high school teachers was in the gym. He absolutely swore he had seen the sky when the roof of the building popped up and landed back where it belonged. He really, really believed it. But it was impossible, even he admitted it. If the roof had jumped up like that, the building would have collapsed. He wasn’t the only one to see it, but it just couldn’t have happened. None of the bolts were even out of place. He just thought he saw it because he was so scared.”

Ralph sipped his beer and considered. “But that analogy doesn’t work. He was scared because he was in the earthquake. If what I saw didn’t happen, then I wasn’t in anything. I had no reason to see anything. None of the thousands or millions around who saw the same thing. But we all did.”

The lights at the bar flashed on and off then, signaling the end of the evening. Mary hadn’t thought about that conversation for the last week. She’d been so high, she’d barely remembered it the next day. But it came flooding back to her now. But this felt nothing like the hand of God. This felt like a bad dream. She sat where she was and cried.

Great moments in tuba performance

During the third part, a piece broke off of my tuba. I managed to reattach it before the 4th part, but when I started playing again, I was about a quarter step out of tune. During the rehearsal, the composer – not a student but a visiting artist, known and respected in California – had worked with me on the tuning, specifically because he didn’t want the fourth part to be out of tune. I tried lipping it up, but my god I was flat. Maybe I was on the wrong note? Maybe I was lost? The ensemble was getting thinner and thinner as the pitch of the piece dropped until it was me, the piano and the basses. I got flustered. My heart raced. I was sitting on stage in front of all of the composers and a good portion of the sonologists. Take deep breaths. My god, I’m having a panic attack on stage and I can;t play my part. Normally, I like playing because I specifically don’t get tweaky, but this is a panic attack in front of everybody while holding a tuba which is being held together by soggy gaffing tape. I stopped playing until the final section. The composer did not smile at me after the piece. I came home and drank.

I’m on a waiting list to see a shrink. Anxiety is treatable. Not with meds, but with talk therapy. Six to eight weeks and it’s gone. this is considerably longer than I’ve been waiting. If they keep me waiting long enough, I can start all over again when I move in the fall.
I can’t decide if the way to deal with tuba problems and stage fright is to take the tuba out busking this weekend or to throw the goddamned thing into a canal;

Run my ad, get free music

I want to start this with the offer that any new music or arts blog which runs my banner ad for the duration of my project will get a free commission. Email me or leave a comment if you run it.

I emailed three different blogs asking about advertising. Two did not write back. The third one decided to stay ad-free.
Some of you who know me from California are probably remembering a few of my anti-advertising rants. Is advertising inherently bad? If not, when is it bad and when is it ok?
One day, when I was still a dot com worker, I was driving some of my 80 kM commute (160 kM per day, every work day, in a small car) and I saw that a new sign had gone up over the freeway. There is no shortage of advertising signs, but this one was one of the more dangerous, new, traffic-jam causing variety. It was a gigantic flat screen monitor, several meters across. Drivers stare at the moving pictures. They slow down to watch. Or they run into something from the distraction. I looked up at the sign.
It was showing an photo of a tropical flower, rendered in millions of colors and luminous over the traffic. I felt profoundly disturbed. It was the only beautiful thing that I had seen that day. I have woken up in the morning, driven 80 km to an office building, in a heavily polluted area, sat inside my beige cubicle, staring at my computer screen, gotten back into my car and driven 40 km back towards my house. It was already dark outside.
But there, thousands of times larger than life, there was a beautiful flower. I felt like crying. The next week, the flower still remained but with the text “your ad here” at the bottom. The week after that, I was informed of a 10% discount on new tires for sale at a nearby store.
Around that time, I went to an exhibit at the SF MOMA. It was about packaging and design. I had finally escaped from my corporate work week to go spend Sunday at a museum and it was full of advertisements and product packaging. I had been telling everyone around me how this experience with the billboard had shown me that there was no art in my life. But then the MOMA argued with me. There IS art in my life, it’s just corporate art. Corporate designers are still artists, but with a different purpose.
the purpose of art is ethereal and may differ from artist to artist or from piece to piece. The point of corporate art is to get you to buy something. So is it bad because it has a crass purpose? Are aesthetics part of a gestalt or can they be separated from economic purposes? How much does commercial intent color a work? Is there a moral difference between a cereal box or an advertisement poster for a concert?
Some concert posters and some album coverts are high art. But they’re advertising target is art. Does that change their moral stance? Ironically, my day job was in marketing. To prepare me for the shift from engineer to marketing, I was given a book to read. It said the role of advertising was to inform people of things that are available to them. So when somebody puts a flyer for an upcoming new music concert in my mailbox, that’s an advertisement. When somebody puts a flyer for a sale on pork cutlets in my mailbox, that’s also an advertisement.
So some of the judgement about advertising, for me, at least, is connected to how well targeted it is. I want to know about concerts. I don’t want to know about supermarket sales. Some is about how obtrusive it is. I don’t want advertising to get in the way of other information that I’m seeking. Some of it is the appropriateness of the context. I don’t want to see advertising in a museum – exhibits about same possibly excepted. I also don’t want advertising to mislead, lie, or pass itself off as something other than an ad.
Therefore, the primary issue is context. Do ads belong in metro stations? No! Maybe. Yes? When I lived in Paris, I saw on a metro ad that the Ensemble Contemporaine was doing a series of music by John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Interesting. I also saw that Bang on a Can was playing. I also saw Naiomi Campbel in skimpy gold lamé posed on a chair that looked like a hamburger bun. I don’t want to pass judgement, because all I can say is that I care more about musical announcements than I do for department store ads. Visually, the gold lamé and tiny dog were far more striking than the concert announcements.
I put a banner ad up on this blog about four years ago. It was for Dennis Kucinich, who should have gotten the Democratic nomination to run against Bush (yeah, well, Kerry lost anyway and the debates would have been a lot more interesting and actually talked about healthcare and peace and women’s rights and other things that you won’t hear discussed if you go for loser “safe” bets . . . anyway). I didn’t get anything in return for running it. Is it “right” for me to run ads or ask others to do so? Well, ads aren’t inherently wrong, so that depends. I don’t know if my answers are as satisfying as I’d like, but I feel some truthiness around this. I don’t think my banner ads contribute to the corporatization of the world. They’re not beautiful by any means, but I can only hope people care about music.
I had an idea, back when I was doing my overly long commute, to do a visual project. I wanted to rent billboard space and commission artists to do mural installations. My conspirators and I had extra ideas like running a tiny FM station from the billboard, playing music, like some car billboards broadcast car commercials over a short range. I wanted other commuters to see something beautiful in their day. To experience public outdoor art with an ethereal purpose, not trying to sell them anything at all.

On etsy / getting royal / advertising

While I work my way through the eBay appeals process, I’ve moved my eCommerce to Etsy. I exchanged a few emails with them before setting up shop, and they’re totally cool with hosting music commissions. Their fees are also less than eBay, but there’s no chance of anybody bidding up the price.

I’ve got 22 opportunities for commissions remaining. Well, 21, because I really want to get one from Queen Beatrix. To show my appreciation for her allowing my use of the Royal Conservatory, I will wave my fee. It’s the least I can do. And, of course, I’ll use her equipment to make the piece.
Since I attend the Royal Conservatory, there actually is some connection to the queen. She regularly exchanges letters with the head of my school. So, to reach the queen, I have to convince his secretary that I’m worth his time, and then him that I’m worth the queen’s time and then the queen herself. I’ve heard that she likes ballet and goes to the ballet performances at school, so I could wait for one of those and attempt to approach her. And/or, I can try going through the three filter approach. I really am quite fond of Stravinsky, so I think I will aim for something like Stravinsky-meets-IDM-meets-noise, with emphasis on the Stravinsky. There’s now some documentation to use the OSC->CV converters at school, so I can get the kind of tuning I need to make a (micro)tonal piece.
I’m not sure entirely how to pitch this. I mean, I really want to write something that she’ll like. And all my pieces are really short. If I write something a minute long and she doesn’t like it, at least I haven’t taken up too much of her time. I think I’ll leave that last bit as unspoken, since it’s not really compelling.
Anyway, if any of you, dear readers, has some connection to the Queen of the Netherlands (or, you know, any royalty, but other monarchs will need to pay the $14), please let me know.
Of course, there are still the other 21 unpurchased commissions. Apparently, it’s possible to buy metro ads in Rotterdam for 17,50€ / week. According to an ad I saw. I haven’t contacted them to see if I can really just get one. I haven’t put any effort into buying banner ads on the web yet, but I think I’ll approach some New Music blogs. I’m not sure what to put in a print ad. a picture of myself? A cool closeup of some synthesizer knobs? A picture of myself in front of some close-up synthesizer knobs?
Yesterday, I discovered a pocket notebook that I got in 2003 to jot down my musical ideas. This morning, I went to read it. What half-forgotten ideas could I return to and realize? The sole idea that I wrote down starts with, “Patron system: possibility of running a commission service” and continues like a Marketting Requirements Document. Ha ha ha. Awesome.
Composers, of course, have something called cultural capital. They help forge identities for their communities. American composers bolster the American identity. Gay composers bolster the gay identity. And so on. Many composers are slightly outside of the mainstream of their culture. By writing music, they gain additional access to the shared culture, while having a hand in forming it. The problem for the last several years has been how to turn cultural capital into monetary capital.
But I see the commissioning/gift economy as something more than just a capital-based solution. One of the huge problems of the current broken copyright system is that people do not own their own culture. Our shared myths don’t belong to us, they belong to corporations! The gift economy of music puts our culture back into our own hands. Furthermore, commissioning directly involves the community. Commissioners have a say in the formation of their culture. They share cultural capital with the composer. They directly participate in society and culture. Commissioners are catylists for cultural creation and change. They help build a shared identity and strengthen their culture. Commissioning music is the patriotic thing to do.
What is a country? Is it just a land mass? Is it a particular government? Is it a collection of people who happen to live within certain geographical borders? No, a nation is an identity. A country arises from the people. When somebody loves a country, they love the people, they love the art, they love the history, they love the culture. And if you love something, you don’t passively watch it, you participate. You vote. You hike. You create community and participate in institutions. Art is patriotic.
I, like most folks, have many different identity affiliations. I’m American. I’m queer. I’m Californian. I’m a student. I’m a composer. I live and learn in Holland. (I’m a manly man.) I have an exerimental asthetic. etc etc etc. When I make music, I am all of those identites making music.
So how do you concisely, pictorally represent the possibility of expanding cultural capital on the basis of music and identity and sounds? Maybe a screen shot of Ardour?

New Phone Number

Today I learned that if you lose a prepaid phone, you also lose your phone number. My new number is +31 (0)6 42 83 1440

Also, losing a phone means losing all your phone numbers. Please email me back with your number or send me an SMS, if you think you will want to chat with me.

My old phone is someplace in Birmingham. Alas. I hope somebody gets some use out of it.
In other news, Polly (who is awesome) took a sign up sheet with her to the 21 Grand thing last night and got 4 more names! Hooray. Only 22 to go.
I posted to friendster and Craig’s List and haven’t gotten anything from that. I feel like I’ve lost a lot of cachet by leaving eBay. I need to start looking at banner ads or adwords with google.
I think next week, I will start going to school again. I’ve been sorta, um, not going except to lab hours. I dunno about bea 5 (the giant room of analog synth of doom). It would take me years to master it. I’m totally into the bank of sixteen oscillators (16!! 16!!! It’s obscene!) and the sequencer and the VOSIM and the third octave filter and something called the VTQ and anything that does the same thing as a module I own in my own synth. But the other things – there are just so many of them and it’s going to take a lot of experimentation to use them in a non-cliched way. Like the plate reverb is super awesome, but it only gets like one sound and that sound is full of a lot of hiss. If I want to do something really interesting with the plate, I’m going to need to de-ess it and then either do some sort of feedbacky tape delay or pitch shifting because the sound of that plate does not change ever – it’s always the same pitch. So I think I’m going to concentrate on the things I already understand and see what kind of sounds I can tease out of them. Because playing with the new thing or the splashy thing or the 200 kilo thing is a lot of fun, but the resulting recordings are really hard to work with. It’s possible to pull out a good minute from the exploratory noodling, but it’s easier and better to do something immediately interesting and record that.
Also, I want to think more about post-processing. I’ve got 178461978461 Audacity plugins and I thin I’d like to subtly apply the same fx to all my recordings, so they sound like they go together. All my MOTM recordings mostly sound right together and the bea 5 ones have their own sound, but some signature should unify them. Like if I just got the perfect impulse response to convolve everything with. The IR of the gods.

27 Commissions to go

eBay finally replied to my email and demanded a whole pile of documentation from me, proving my identity. Which I can get of course, but some of it is on a different continent than I and I can’t get it before Monday anyway. So I wrote back and asked if offering music commissions violated the TOS. Why not save both of us the trouble of dealing with my paperwork.

They wrote back within in minutes . . . to say that they hadn’t sent me any messages. This seems to be something of a pattern with them. It’s like a Monty Python skit. “No I didn’t. No, I didn’t say that. Wanker.” “Did you call me a wanker?” “No, no, no, off course not. Git.” “did you just call me a git?” “What? No, don’t be silly! Turd-bottom.” etc. It’s funny if you imagine John Cleese.
Anyway, 27 to go. There’s a cultural products market at 21 Grand tonight. If I was going, I would take a sign-up sheet with me and hopefully get the last 27 that way.
Nicole comes back on Sunday. I’ll have to resume showering. (Just kidding.)

Too Hot for eBay!

While I wait to hear back from etsy, I have my very own shopping cart program. Well, it’s not my own, it’s WP eCommerce Lite. (The emphasis there is on the “lite” – spelling and all.) It’s got *cough* a few bugs, but I think it should be adequate for my purposes at this time.

I’m still, theoretically, trying to contest eBay’s removal of me. I replied to their email saying I was removed and they wrote back saying it wasn’t them who sent the message. Maybe they removed me by accident? I looked at Yahoo Auctions, but commissions would be an unambiguous violation of their TOS. There is no eCommission infrastructure in place that I’ve been able to locate.
Obviously, there needs to be an eCommission portal site, like etsy but for composers or like Meet the Composer, but without such helpful text as “commissions can be had for as little as a few thousand dollars.” On the other hand, I’m mad cheap. Next round, I’m raising my rates.
Anyway, get the low prices while they last. I’m putting up two commissions at a time. As I finish them, I’ll put up more until all 28 are sold. There’s two up right now. Get ’em while they’re hot.

damn it

Dear celestehutchins,

We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the eBay community.

“Abusing eBay” of the eBay User Agreement states, in part:

“…we may limit, suspend, or terminate our service and user accounts, prohibit access to our website, remove hosted content, and take technical and legal steps to keep users off the Site if we think that they are creating problems, possible legal liabilities, or acting inconsistently with the letter or spirit of our policies.”

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account.

Please note that any seller fees due to eBay will immediately become due and payable. eBay will charge any amounts you have not previously disputed to the billing method currently on file.

Regards,

Safeharbor Department
eBay, Inc.

Bloody wankers.
Can I dispute this? Maybe I should move to another service?

And another one

Auction 3 got a bid, so I put up auction 5. Auction 4 is still bidless.

The bidder for #3 wanted to know if s/he could remix the track when done. What a fabulous idea! I told hir yes. It feels so collaborative. I love it.
The whole eBay process, though is kind of nerve wracking. What if nobody bids in the next 4 days and 22 hours? ack!. Note to self: eBay bids are not a good measure of self-worth.
I contacted an arts blog today about buying advertising space. I’m running out of ideas for free publicity, since I’ve gotten mention on most of the New Music blogs that I know of, I’ve posted on most of my email lists and I listed on Tribe. The publicity part of this project is kind of weird, but I see it as part of the project in a sort of conceptual-everythng-is-art kind of way.

OSC -> CV

In other news, I’ve been investigating interfaces between computers and analog information. I’ve ordered a nifty joystick brain and I’ve just been informed of a cool-looking open source device which can create control voltages to send to a synthesizer. DIY electronics are really big right now. And this is good for lazy people like me, because it means that people are designing and selling little boutique devices. So I don’t have to do my own designing. The Arduino is cheap, open source(!), and made by workers getting a living wage. It’s perfect and somebody has already written a SuperCollider interface. W00t. Now all I need is to decide whether to go with USB or bluetooth. Wireless synthesizer control with a modular might be a little silly, but is still tempting.