Everybody sing now!

I’m proud to be an American
Cuz my womb is property
I’ll never forget the men who voted
To make it that way for me

Just saw a video about politics in South Dakota (you too can watch at PBS or via Susie Bright). Well. wow. Here are some choice excerpts for the transcript:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Digby pretty much says already everything to be said about that: “Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. . . .. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite clear in his mind. ”
Back to the transcript:

STATE REP. ELAINE ROBERTS (D), SOUTH DAKOTA: We’ve chipped, and chipped, and chipped; now we’re here with this full fledge. What will be next? What will be next?

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Democratic Representative Elaine Roberts is one of South Dakota’s few pro-choice legislators. What’s next, she fears, is a host of measures that regulate women’s private lives.

ELAINE ROBERTS: We already have a law that says that pharmacists by conscience could refuse to fill my prescription for contraceptives. There is already a move from some groups who have worked on this to say that there should be no contraceptives, that sexual intercourse is for the purpose of reproduction.

A return to traditional values

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Much of what she fears as an assault on basic rights Senator Napoli sees as a return to traditional values.

BILL NAPOLI: When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.

So, right, if you have sex, no contraception for you. If you get pregnant and are unmarried, “the whole darned neighborhood” is going to force you to marry the father of your fetus. Is he abusive? Drunk? All wrong for you? Tough! Because, unless you were a virgin and this guy fulfilled Sen Napoli’s darkest fantasies, you HAVE to have this kid and you HAVE to marry this guy. Or will the forced marriage bill make an exception for rape?
Marital rape is illegal in every state in the United States. Not because of a federal law. Not because of a court case. But because incredibly determined activists got the law passed separately in every single state. This is the next logical target of South Dakota, where women are clearly property. And as goes South Dakota, so goes the nation. (Time to cancel that trip to Mt Rushmore.)
Oh and this being a “states rights” issue is clearly bullshit because the first the US Congress is going to do if this gets past the Supreme Court is pass a bunch of laws. First Roe Vs Wade, then Griswold.
And this, my friends, is why I don’t want to return to the US. I miss my friends and a lot of things, but I like freedom too. Freedom means human rights. It means a right to privacy. It means a right to health care.
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Job Offer

So if we agree on salary, I’ve got a job. How much should one expect for 19.5 hours/week of web monkeyness in Paris? It’s some ASP and helping people figure stuff out. Part time office geek. Why does nobody list salary ranges on craig’s list? Anyway, if it works out, they might be interested in helping me stay for another year. I explained that I was not alone in France, and they seemed interested in Cola’s skill set and said they could at least give her connections to find a job if not hire her.

Whee! I will soon join the ranks (hopefully) of those who leave their house nearly every day. They want to know how much I can work in the summer. I need to talk to Cola . . ..
I dunno about another year here. On the one hand, I like the friends I’ve made, I can get my dog mailed to me (maybe), I like a secular government and adequate healthcare (for contrast, check out this NYT article about immigrant healthcare in the US. Including legal immigrants, not that it should make any difference whatsoever.). Yeah, it’s nice to live in a country that believes in human rights. But I left my heart in San Francisco. Actually, I think in berkeley. Or maybe it’s my tuba I’m thinking of. Why can’t California be more like France? Or why can’t France be more like California?
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Is this thing on?

I haven’t been posting here for a while because it was dropping older posts. I sent tech support email to blogger, but they have yet to respond. I just made backup with wget and so I’ll try posting again, but I’ve become tempted to move this blog to celesteh.com and host it with WordPress or DotClear. I suspect the second option has strong bilingual support, which may be handy, as I’d like to do my composer site in 2 or more languages.

So what have I been up to? I’ve decided to make a list of interesting schools worldwide. Right now, I am especially interested in the SF Bay Area, Canada, France, Berlin, London (and the UK) and the Netherlands. I’m taking suggestions for anywhere. (No small towns though. Middletown was too much for me.) Then, come September, I’ll start putting applications together. Then I’ll have lots of lead in, no rush and I’ll make all the deadlines. Then, hopefully a year from now, I’ll have a list of schools that have accepted me and pick the best one.
I should be out right now bar hopping, but I don’t wanna. I have to do publicity for my concert in a week and go put up some flyers. I think I will go around early in the day tomorrow and do it. It’s too crowded right now and I don’t want to try shouting in French at a bartender asking if I can put up a poster. Cola is in London. I’m too wimpy to brave such crowds alone.
I had a REALLY frustrating day on Wednesday and so didn’t do much yesterday because I can get away with being so lazy. Actually, I can’t. There are two people I really actually have to call tomorrow. Really.
I have a job interview on monday. It’s very exciting. I’m pretty happy about it. It requires geeky web experience, fluency in English and some French and the person I’ve met from the company seems to be really cool. It’s an oil company. Well, a company that does research for an oil company. You can have the perfect location, the best coworkers, the best environment and the perfect social consciousness. But you can only have three of those things. (Unless you work for a gay porn site and then you get everything.) Maybe research will reveal that it’s time for biofuel.
Oh and I’ve got an RSS thingee from filckr now, which holds my 200 most recent photos and will send them out via RSS to your aggregator or friends list.
Y’all should come to my concert on March 11 if you are female and in Paris.
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York?

Anybody got anything good or bad to say about the PhD program at York? They’ve got a new music research centre. Application deadline is 31 March. Trevor Wishart said it looked interesting. He stopped short of recommending it because it’s new and he therefore couldn’t say anything definitive.

It might be rather late for me to apply, since I’m coming from overseas.
What’s the town of York like? It’s got the second most important cathedral in Britain, but I’m guessing it’s not much like New York.
This is my first possible “bright idea” for next year…
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Recently

So I know you’re all wondering how I’ve been spending the 4th decade of my life, since it began a little over a week ago. Mostly, I’ve been behaving in accordance with the maturity becoming somebody of my age and feeling sorry for myself because I didn’t get into grad school. But that got boring, so I spent a lot of time working on a sound collage thing Les Radios Francophones which is a burning, wrecked hulk of a piece. I have no idea how to fix it.

My dad blew through town yesterday morning. He’s on an airplane for California by now, after spending last night in London. And last night, I talked with my conversation partner for the first time in a long time. I’ve been working actively on trying to understand more french, so I was a little disappointed when I was as confused as ever during our chat. Alas.
There are some french podcasts which I listen to which I find to be somewhat helpful: Les Journaux français facile, France Blue L’horoscope, Arte Radio and Les bulletins Nouvelles de Radio Canada, which covers some US news. There are others. In fact, there are too many. But those are the best, I think. The Easy French one is great because I can understand almost all of it and I can figure out the rest from context. I think it’s much more helpful than the jumble of words I get when listening to normal news on RFI.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

what to do next year?

I’m 30 years old, I should have a bit more of an idea of what I’m doing. On the other hand, I was in the midst of posting “tried the american dream – house, wife, car, two cats and a dog – and it sucked (well, except for the dog)” when I found my rejection note in my inbox, so I can’t say I haven’t welcomed some sort of instability. Or perhaps realized that stability is all pretend anyway.

Many or most universities in the US want their new professors to have PhDs. 10 or 15 years ago, this was not the case. Statistically speaking, since women need more education to be considered equal to their male peers, women especially must need PhDs.
So there is a new demand for PhDs. Universities are responding by adding PhD programs. Since these are new, their reputation has not been established. Berkeley, however, has a fairly solid reputation AND it is a funded program. Meaning that unlike most other schools, instead of paying them, they pay you. Of course, no true artist would let such petty concerns dictate their choice of studies, but, uh, Berkeley gets a lot of applicants, I’m sure. They take one electronic music person every year. therefore, out of hundreds of applicants, there only needs to be one person better than me, which apparently, was the case.
Eh, so applying to schools on another continent is really even more annoying than doing it in your home country. Like 2 or 3 times more annoying. So I only applied to Berkeley, even though it would have been wise to also apply to Stanford. I don’t want to move outside of the Bay Area in the US, not that it matters because all the deadlines for American schools have passed. There’s always next year.
There’s also Europe. Sophie tells me that the schools are easier to get in to. However, I’m not so hot on IRCAM, so I’d be looking at some schools in England or maybe the new center in Marseilles or McGill (Canada is practically Europe) or I could, you know (gasp) get a job and join the legions of MA-degreed musicians toiling away in the Leap Frog audio department. bah.
I’m too old to get another student visa. Nicole needs to be doing something wherever I go. Moving any place outside of Paris or Berkeley means doing the whole making new friends, figuring out the city, learning the local dialect thing AGAIN, which, yikes, but on the other hand, who wants to live in America? Do I need a PhD to get a job at GRM?
I’m taking suggestions.
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Using the Scientific Method to Improve Your Life

Problem: I don’t understand very much French

Hypothesis: If I read a lot of French blogs and news and also listen to varions French-language news podcasts, I will learn a lot of French.

Method: Read News in English to figure out what’s going on. Then Read news in French to figure out french vocabulary and grammer for terms like “hunger strike.”

Observations

Day 2

Augh!! Everything in the world is fucked up!!!!! Bird Flu! Hunting accidents! Toxic ships! Sarko! Prison Torture! Hunting accidents! Anti-democratic sabotage! Racism! Censorship! Evil evil evil!!!!!

Conclusions

Il y a un grave danger pour la sante d’esprit si on lit trop de nouvelles

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cross-posted do to blogger problems