Tag: celesteh

The moral panic of ‘Adolescence’

They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.

Hilary Clinton in 1996, about people roughly my age.

If Adolescence had been made a few years previously, it would have been against a backdrop of fear of video gaming. Or before that, rap music. Or before that, Dungeons and Dragons. Whatever it is that makes kids today more alarming and violent than kids of previous years. As they always are.

US trends in violent crimes. source https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/publications/trends-in-youth-arrests.pdf The UK doesn’t make such nice graphs so easy to find.

When I was 13, in 1989, many, if not most, 13 year old boys felt hatred and entitlement towards the bodies of their classmates that they perceived to be women. They were horrible little thugs.

They grew out of it.

Mostly.

So are we to believe that the 1980s was a more enlightened time for feminism for young teens? Or the 1970s, then? The 1990s? In exactly what year of pre-internet were boys respectful and well-behaved towards girls while seeing them as intellectual equals? One of the creators of Adolescence is trying to get phones taken away from kids, so there must be a year in which boys respected girls for their intellect, did not ever see them as meat, and in which students had equal opportunity across all genders. A year that we can return to, if only kids didn’t have phones!

Or not.

I do not mean to suggest that everything happening online is fine – far from it. But the same mobile phone and social media account that allows boys to access objectionable YouTube videos allows trans teens to find the community and support they need to keep going. So what can we change to prevent radicalisation into hatred without harming vulnerable youth?

Regulatory changes that might actually help

Automated, algorithmic news feeds take whatever demographic data they have and serve back what, statistically, the user will most likely interact with. Australian researchers found that for entirely blank profiles of “young men” – new email addresses of fictitious people – what those algorithms served back was intense misogyny. This is actually a problem. Keeping kids away from this until they turn 16, even if it were possible, would not meaningfully solve this problem.

A 17 year old boy being bombarded with sexism will still be impacted by it and, by extension, so will the girls and women around him. The solution is not to hide away intensely damaging content recommendation systems until people reach a threshold age, but to change legal regulation into how feeds are constructed and presented to people. Showing people things they’ve subscribed to in chronological order is fine. Showing them things we surmise they may like, based on algorithmic predictions. cannot be left out of human control.

It turns out that pandering to our basest instincts is not good for us. Computers cannot be held responsible, so nothing should happen with them without some human review. Not just for children, as everyone is vulnerable to radicalisation.

Indeed, YouTube’s radicalisation engine guides users towards more and more extreme versions of their interests. Someone who watches a video about jogging will be gradually lead down a path to ultramarathons. Running is innocuous enough, but the implications here with political content, sexism and health and wellness is highly concerning. My father might still be alive if he hadn’t started getting “health” information from YouTube. Again, children are only one category of vulnerable users. Information outlets, like libraries, used to curate their information.

I’m not suggesting that YouTube employ humans to look at every uploaded video, but their recommendation engine must be under human control. If it’s not vetted, it shouldn’t be pushed at us. Videos advocating for sexism could be made to be against the terms of service. They could be excluded from platform-provided recommendations. Google should have humans in the loop, to tie their brand identity to their curated lists. If they want to be the brand of sexism, they can be, but they need to have a human sign off on that and the rest of us can decide if we want our free time and our own videos associated with that.

What’s wrong with banning kids from social media?

Let’s start by talking about the impact on adult users of social media.

Right now, I can open a web browser and go sign up for a social media account with minimal fuss on a gigantic corporate network, or a tiny independent website. Usually, I have to give an email address, but I usually don’t need to supply a real name, a phone number or any other meaningfully traceable information.

This is valuable to me, because I may want to discuss a health problem anonymously, an identity I’m exploring, or anything else I’d rather that advertisers or bad actors not trace back to my actual home address.

If I wish to post to some of the amateur porn sites, however, I have to send them a picture of my face next to my passport so they can verify my identity. This has to be kept on file. This means that if upload a video that is not otherwise identifiable as me because of cropping or whatever, it’s still forever tied to my government ID. If the site gets hacked, all of my images could suddenly be very tied to my actual home address. These rules in most countries are only applied to adult content. It’s for age verification.

This is how age verification works in practice. If I wanted to make intimate videos, the de-anonymisation of age verification would be very likely to dissuade me. If this became required for all social media use, I would be also dissuaded if I was seeking help for an embarrassing or private medical condition. Or if I was exploring my gender identity, or trying to write heartfelt poetry about a girl who got away, or any number of things a person ought to be able to do with others without it being tied to their government ID.

Humans sometimes need to be able to access community anonymously. Because they’re dealing with addiction. Or they are questioning their gender or sexuality, and would be unsafe if some people in their lives learn of this; people seeking help trying to leave an abusive spouse or family member; anybody who wants or needs privacy. This isn’t all queers and people cheating on their wives – it’s also people who are in danger and are trying to get to safety. These are people we should support in a free country.

Meanwhile, kids under 16 are also sometimes trying to find out how to escape abuse; question their gender or sexuality; or just want and need some level of agency and privacy. There are things we should protect them from, but finding community and safety with others should not be on that list.

Good entertainment makes bad law

A lot of people like the massively overwrought series and I’m glad they found something they think is nice to watch. However, just because somebody is inspired by kitchen sink dramas does not mean that we should all lose significant freedom as a result. Especially the kids.

Bullying wasn’t invented with the internet. In 1988, “slam books” were made out of spiral notebooks, polaroids, glue and hatred. (I wasn’t popular enough to be allowed to look at them.) Unpleasant rumours, unkind judgements and even inappropriate photos weren’t invented yesterday.

What was invented yesterday were safe communication networks for agender furries.

Don’t take that away from them.

Take Action for Trans people

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Nobody on the Right Actually Cares about Women Athletes

The Trump administration has moved to deny visas to trans athletes ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games. The US State Department does not have the right to dictate policy to international sports organisations. But what’s more, the way the memo is written does not limit the ban to athletes.

Most of the MAGA movement is openly hostile to women. They ended the right to abortion in the US. They are actively working to make it harder for women to vote. It defies reason that people who want to entirely shut women out of public life actually see any value in women’s sports. They don’t care about women athletes. But they do care about hurting trans people.

This rule change has serious implications for trans people’s freedom of movement. It labels trans people’s documentation as fraudulent, which also has serious implications for any interaction a trans person may have with the federal government. The purported target is foreign athletes, but the victims will overwhelmingly be trans Americans. The Trump administrations is using the Olympics as an excuse and a first step to seriously impacting the ability of trans people to exist.

The International Olympic Committee has yet to comment on this development. The latest thing on their website is an announcement of a sponsorship deal. This is certainly not what the sponsors signed up for. But Anheiser-Busch InBev, as the world’s largest brewer, has acquired this problem. They also have influence. I am therefore asking you to write to them. The form below gives suggested text. When you hit the “send” button, it will put the message into your email program. I will not collect or have access to your addresses.

Email Form

Your name:

Your Country:

Subject:


Technical Issues

The form should open in your email client. If it did not, it did not send. You can still email manually:

In Europe: eu_media.relations@ab-inbev.com

In North America: media@anheuser-busch.com

Africa: mediarelations@sab.co.za

Asia Pacific: abimedia@cn.ab-inbev.com

South America: accomext@ambev.com.br

Middle America: media.relations@ab-inbev.com

Global headquarters: media.relations@ab-inbev.com

Note: I am not collecting your data.

Changes

When my mother died, it was just as the dot com bubble was bursting. I was between jobs. Tech was pivoting to spyware and I felt burned out by Silicon Valley. I decided to move to music full time. I applied for Masters programmes and started playing in a flute-fronted rock band.

My dad died in June and I’ve realised how burned out I feel from my teaching job. Years of Tory cuts are hitting British higher education hard. Kent decided to stop offering music and I decided not to participate in the teach out. My other university Goldsmiths, is also doing major cuts. I haven’t asked if my job there will exist next year, but I’d bet that it won’t. I saw an advert for a band and answered it. They’re a flute-fronted rock band.

(Honestly not sure how I feel about that.)

What’s next? I don’t know. I went back to uni to get better at writing music and instead I threw all my energy at teaching. I want to write music.

A friend of mine, only a few years older than me, just died of cancer. Her funeral is the day after tomorrow.

And I keep thinking of the composer of my favourite string quartet. Ruth Crawford Seeger got diverted into musicology for several years, due to her association with Charles Seeger. And at some point, she had enough of it and decided to return to composing. She felt her best music was still ahead of her. Then she got cancer and died. No music was ahead of her.

I feel like I’m stepping off a cliff into an unknown, with death nipping at my heels. Will I survive this change? Probably. Probably. Probably.

Book me for a gig. I need to stay busy.

Live blogging flossie: Pulse Project- touching as listening

(Last year, Flossie was women-only and a bunch of men complained. This year, they bowed to pressure and decided to let anyone attend. I’m the only boy in the room.)
Talk by Michelle Lewis-King, an American who uses SuperCollider(!).
This is based on pulse-reading and some Chinese medicine principles. She has an acupuncture degree.
Occidental medicine is based on cutting apart dead bodies. Whereas Chinese medicine is more ‘alchemistic’, she says. Western medicine is from looking at dead bodies. Chinese medicine is based on feeling living bodies.
Pulses are abstractly linked to a type of music of the spheres.
She started drawing people’s pulses at different depths. This is sonic portraiture.
She found the SuperCollider community to be problematic to ask questions due to differences in ‘architecture’ differences. Some of the tutorials are not easy. She says the book is great because of the diversity of approaches. People at conferences have criticised her code, which is not a fun experience.
The community also provides a lot of support. The programme is free, community oriented and a useful tool.
She’s playing one of her compositions. It’s a pulsing very synthesised sound.
More info: journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a12 4th issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies
Twitter @vergevirtual

Kronos Quartet at the Proms

I’ll start with the lows

I’ve been really grumpy about music lately and the at the start of this concert, my heart sank and I thought my grumpiness would continue. My friends and I got the promenade tickets for the arena area of the Royal Albert Hall (which is laid out somewhat like the Globe theatre, such that people stand around the stage). I had reasoned that string quartets were intimate, so it was better to be close. In fact, the acoustic of the hall are such that even standing not that far from the stage, the only sound I could hear was from the speakers. I might as well have been up way above, at least then freed of the burdensome expectations of non-amplified sounds.
The sound seemed slightly off the whole evening. At first, I thought the group lacked intensity, but they certainly looked intense. Somehow, it just wasn’t getting off the stage, lost somewhere in the compression of the audio signal. Lost in the tape backing they had for nearly every piece? Which (can we talk about this?) seemed to be really naff most of the time. There also seemed to be subtle timing issues throughout a lot of the concert and sometimes it just sort of felt like the seams were showing.
Kronos was my favourite string quartet for a long time, largely due to their distinctive bowing, but also due to their willingness to take risks, defy genre, etc. Unfortunately, this has becoming more and more gimicky as of late. One of their pieces, a BBC commission (so it’s not entirely their fault), had a Simon toy in it. The cellist would do a round of it and then play back the pitches in time, along with the other string players who also copied it. Along with tape backing, of course. Some of which seemed to be samples of Radiophonic sounds. I thought I recognised a single bass twang of the Doctor Who theme and I hoped they would just play that rather then the piece they were actually slogging through.

The best bit

However, they also played Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No 4: Amazing Grace, which was the piece I was most looking forward to. I didn’t know the piece, but I know the composer. The piece’s setting is lush Americana – Copland-esque but in a twenty first century context. The piece has a lot of busy-ness in it. It’s Americana glimpsed through the windows of speeding trains and moving cars. America between facebook posts. Constant distraction, the theme fragmented and subsumed in the texture of life. At one point, the violins and viola are busily creating their densely fragmented texture, while barely audibly, the cellist was playing the noted from Amazing Grace on the overtones of the highest parts of his strings. The notes of the melody become metaphor for Grace itself. Something transcendental and beautiful is always going on, giving meaning to a jumbled whole, sometimes so subtly that it’s difficult to perceive. The occasional moments of thematic clarity thus reminded me of tragedy, as that’s when grace becomes most apparent and evident.
It was really really beautiful and I teared up a bit.

The Good

Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No 4 was well-played and my friend Irene especially considered it to be a highlight. It’s a very good piece, but I’m sure I’ve heard the work before and I think it came off a bit better on those previous performances.
I thought the Swedish folk song Tusen tankar was also a high point. The piece was short, unpretentious and well played.
In general, they seemed to warm up and get going over the course of the concert and if they had ended with the last piece on the program, I would have gone home and felt pretty happy about them, but then they played an encore.

The tape part

I like tape (by which I mean any fixed media, like CDs or whatever). I write tape music. I like it when ensembles play along with tape. Tape is great.
Tape music is also sound that doesn’t immediately come from an instrument. So if it’s playing really processed or artificial sounds, that’s perfect, because those sounds couldn’t easily come from an instrument. But when it’s just filling in for a backing band that nobody wanted to pay to hire…. it’s naff. It’s inexcusably naff.
If Kronos wanted to play an encore with a metal band or whatever, I would have thought it surprising and maybe slightly gimicky. But they played an encore with a tape of a rock band. A tape that at one point got really loud with synchronised lights, while the quartet kept sawing away an unchanging string accompaniment. At that point, they played backup to a tape and tried to make it seem ok with lighting tricks. A tape of a rock band, not any kind of acousmatic tape. A let’s-just-play-a-tape-it’s-cheaper.
The high point of the concert was fantastic, but the low point . . .. I give them a mixed review overall.

Composer Control

I am writing this on my phone, so please pardon any typos.

I’ve just gone to see a piece of music, which I won’t mention the name of here. It was an interesting idea and technically competent and well-rehearsed, but it fell a bit flat in performance. The best moment of it was a long pause in the middle. The conductor and performers froze and the audience held its breath, waiting. What would happen next? Was the piece over? Was it still going? I had a composer once tell me that pauses add drama and this was the first time I would agree with that pronouncement.

I had a look at the score afterwards and it had a bar of rest with a fermata over it (that means ‘hold this’) and a asterisk to a footnote that said to hold it much longer than seemed reasonable or necessary. Interestingly, and i would say not coincidentally, this did seem to be the only thing not precisely notated in the work. Everything else about the sound production had been pre-decided by the composer and the ensemble was carrying out his eaxcting instructions.

This does seem to be the dominant theme of 21st century music composition. Composers seem to want complete control over musical output. Some, like Ferneyhough with his total complexity, approach this at an ironic distance. They intentionally overnotate in a way they know is unplayabe, to produce a specific kind of stress in the performer. But more recently, the trend is to overnotate but remain playable with the sincere intention of getting exact performances every time. Or, at least, to control what elements are exactly repeatable and treat the freer parts as one might treat a random generator or a markov chain in a computer program.

I played very briefly in the Royal Improvising Orchestra in the Hague and I have very positive things to say about that experience and the other members of the group. However, the control thing was still evident and creeping in. They had borrowed from another a group a very large set of hand signs, designed so the conductor could tell the supposedly improvising players what to play. Indeed, with those hand signals in use, it was no longer accurate to say that the players were improvising. Instead, the conductor was and were mechanisms for carrying out his musical will. Fortunately, that was only a small aspect of our performance practice. When we were doing this, we all took turns conducting, so we got a tradeoff and still were improvisers, at least some of the time.

I mentioned above being treated as an aspect of a computer program and, indeed, I think that is the source of the current state of affairs. Many younger composers (I’m including myself in this group, so read “younger” as “under 50”) have become reliant on score notation programs and write music without being able to read it very well. With MIDI playback, it is possible to know what notes will sound like together even if you can’t read the chord or find the keys on the piano.

The major drawback on relying on MIDI renditions of our pieces is that they sound like MIDI – they are precise, robotic and unchanging. Pieces that are written to sound good for that kind of playback often don’t work very well with live ensembles. One solution to this dilemma seems to be to treat ensembles more like MIDI playback engines, rather than adapt our style of writing for real conditions. This is a failure of imagination.

Those who are pushing notation and musical ideas in new directions are not so naive as the above paragraph suggests, but we still have become accustomed to being able to control things very precisely. When I write a musical structure into a program, I know it will be followed exactly. when I want randomness, I have to specify it and parametrise it precisely as well. In the world of computer composition, adding randomness and flexibility is extra work.

For humans, it’s the exactness that’s extra work and one that has faint rewards for audiences and for performers. It sucks the life out of pieces. It makes performing dull and overly controlled. It is an unconscious adoption of totalitarian work practices, informed and normalised by the methods of working required for human computer interaction. The fact that most professional ensembles barely schedule any rehearsal time does not help with this phenomenon, as they do not tend to spend the time required to successfully interpret a piece, so we seek to spell it out for them exactly.

Composers would do well to step back and imagine liberating their performers, rather than constraining them. We would also do well by learning to read scores. Computers are fine tolls for writing, but could you imagine a playwright using text-to-speech tools in order to create a play? Imagine what that would do to theatre! I think that’s happening now to music.

But, as in today’s performance, the most magical moments in performance are the ones where performers are empowered. If you don’t think you can trust them, then you’ve picked the wrong performers or written the wrong piece. In the best musical performances, the emotional state of the performer is followed by the emotional state of the audience. Give them something worth following.

The Last Days of Dog

When Xena was first diagnosed, I started trying to think of nice things to do with her. We did some of them. I stuffed her into my bike trailer and took her through the canals into Vicky Park. The thing is that she was still seriously unwell, even if she was functional with pain killers. Her favourite activities almost all involved physical activity, which she had trouble with.

We went on some nice walks, but not long ones. Her favourite low impact activity was always going to parties, so we went to parties. Sonia’s going away party was large and crowded, with densely packed people, all merrily drinking. Xena weaved among them, charming people and nicking unguarded food. She was a social butterfly. As it got very late, I got worried about her getting tired or trampled, so I took her upstairs to chill out. I was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, in fact. A lost party guest opened the room door and she darted out and rejoined the stragglers, happy to be in the midst of things.
That was probably her happiest night after being diagnosed and I’m glad she got it.
I found a new flat in time for my eviction. Sonia left the country for the year. Xena slowly, but surely kept declining, with brief rallies. Meanwhile, all the pills she was taking meant she needed frequent walks, during the day. And during the middle of the night. She often seemed at her perkiest, happiest and most mobile at 3 AM.
When I finally moved to a ground floor flat, it seemed to greatly increase her mobility. This week, on Tuesday morning, I took her to the park and she actually ran a bit. Wendyl, my new housemate, took her out for a walk, and Xena excitedly tugged on her lead the whole way.
Wednesday, maybe from overdoing it, maybe from just reaching a threshold, she was much more stiff and limped to the park. On previous days, she would often limber up as she walked, even if she got off to a rough start, but that day her limp just got worse and worse. I gave her pain killers and they didn’t help. I accidentally left treats within reach and she left them alone, preferring to lie on the floor. So I called the vet to make an appointment.
Then I fed her every treat in the house whilst waiting for the cab. I knew this would eventually upset her stomach, but I thought she would not actually experience the ill effects of this. But then the vet was running behind and we waited over an hour. She looked miserable from being in the vets’ office, from the pain in her leg, and presumably from an upset stomach.
Because the euphemism is “putting her to sleep,” I assumed it would resemble sleep in some way, but it did not. She did not tire and relax as much as she crumpled.
Vets say these drugs are humane and painless and kind. Anti-death penalty activists say they’re painful and cruel. Somebody here is wrong.
I wish they had sedated her first.
I’ve never seen anyone die before. The dog I had as a kid apparently got into rat poison and died 10 minutes before I arrived to see him. I was not at the bedside of either of my grandmothers or my cousins. My uncle died in his sleep without warning. When my mum died, I was at opera, seeing Messiaen’s St Francis of Assisi, feeling unhappy about how the hugging of the leper was treated. My experience of death is funerals and loss and digging my first dog’s grave and fetching my neighbour’s drowned cat from the pond. Xena won’t have grave, won’t have a funeral. The only thing left is to give away all her things.
The vet said I did the right thing. I tried to explain I hadn’t just let it go until she was staggering. That she got suddenly worse. That I hadn’t carried her because I knew that also hurt her shoulder.
Today, I woke up extremely early and got on a train to Birmingham to sound check for a gig I played in this evening. Because my life goes on, at least, even if hers doesn’t.
And when we finished earlier than I expected, I got a train tonight back to London instead of waiting for the morning, as that’s easier, so I was feeling kind of good about it and thought I should send a text to … nobody. There’s nobody waiting for me. There’s nobody who cares if I go back today or tomorrow. I have no particular responsibilities. No job. I am uneeded. I can sleep through the night without having to wake up for a walk. If I reach to my side while I sleep, my bed will be empty and my floor bare. I can go wherever I want and do whatever I want. And if what I want is a walk to the park, I’ll go alone.

I killed my dog today

A while ago, I posted that Xena had cancer. The vet sent me home with steroids and tramadol, a pain killer. Gradually, she needed more and more pain killer until today, when something got much worse overnight and she could barely walk at all.

I called the vet to ask how much it would cost to get a housecall and then I started calling for cabs that would take a dog. I wish I could say something nice or reassuring about her death. I showed up at the vet’s office and they were running more than an hour behind, so Xena lay in the middle of the waiting room floor and looked around nervously. Then she limped around with me to a back room, where she was frightened and hurting. She lay down on a blanket they put out. The vet shaved a section of her leg to give her a shot. She sniffed my eyes where I was crying as he pushed in the injection and just collapsed her head down and had stopped breathing within a moment.

He said she felt no pain, but how would he know that?

I took her collar off and her head flopped easily in my hands. Her body was still warm, her ears still soft, her eyes still open.

I wish I had done it before she got that bad. I wish I hadn’t had to do it at all. It doesn’t matter what I wish.

London Flat Hunting

I am currently house sitting for a council tenant. This is perfectly within the rules for eighteen months. It has been longer than that. I am going to be evicted, but I don’t know when. Ergo, I am looking for a new place to live.
Despite the many tales I’ve been hearing of people being evicted in advance of the Olympics, this seemed to get off to a promising start.

The Art Space

I went on a web site that caters for people looking for a room in a shared housing situation and found something that seemed ideal. It was a live-work space, catered towards artists. I arranged to go look at the rooms, without Xena, as, at the time, the vet still thought she might have a sprain and she was not allowed to walk very far.
The rooms were tiny and seemed overpriced, and the organiser was overwhelmingly hispterish, but the shared space was good and it seemed I could get a ground floor room with my dog. There were 10 rooms going in each warehouse space. Given the prices, I worried my future housemates might be trust-funded artsy wannabes, but then I decided to get over myself. I emailed the organiser the next day and asked to arrange a meeting between him and Xena in order to get the room I liked. He said he did not want to force an injured dog to walk and I could have the room if I wired him the deposit the next day. Alas, I still do not have internet banking and asked to put it off to Monday.
On Monday, I was feeling too glum about Xena’s impending demise to leave the house and warned him I couldn’t do it until Tuesday morning. He wrote back something with a smilely in it and thus on Tuesday morning, I sent the wire, intending to email him saying I had done it when I got home at the end of the day. But, alas, at the end of the day, I found he had emailed me that afternoon to say he had rented the room to somebody else. I had a moment of panic and asked for the last room in the building with a window in it. More than half the rooms he had for rent had no windows or outside light, which I know from experience will mess with my head. This last room was smaller, more money, and up a flight of stairs.
But wait a second? How could the room be gone if I wired him the money that morning? I called him up and he explained, basically, that he had undercapitalised the project. The building owner would not let anyone move in until he paid the full deposit for the entire building, which was not money that he had. Therefore, in order to get things underway, he had decided that whoever sent him deposits first could have whatever room he had for offer. He had promised the same room to three different people and I was not first to prove that I had wired him money, ergo, it couldn’t go to me. I briefly explained that I needed both a window and ground floor access, due to my dog’s mobility issues and he said he would try to see if we could shuffle around a bit, but I would still need to pay the higher rent in that case. I said ok. I have to move. I have a dog. I need a place.
My friends, however, said I should get my deposit back, so I called the landlord and said I didn’t really feel comfortable with how things were going and as I had wired him money for a specific room at a particular price, I would like my money back. He sounded unhappy and I apologised at length for the inconvenience I had caused, but he agreed to return the money. Again, I have no internet banking, so I don’t know if he has done this yet. I have his real name and bank details, so I am confident that my money will get returned.

The Recording Studio

I was cycling past a set of studios that are in high demand and was surprised to see for lease sign on the building. I phoned up and found that the sign was out of date, but the company had several other things on offer. Would I like to live in a three bedroom recording studio around the corner from my current address? Would I! The price was high, but if there were three of us, I could just about do it.
The recording studio turned out to be in the basement of an office building. It was two bedrooms, a small living room, a fantastic kitchen, a large recording area and a control room. The guy previously living there had done it up himself in a kind of haphazard way, which the estate agent kept describing in terms of the ‘architectural vision’ of the DIYer, as if he were an undiscovered Frank Lloyd Wright. The man had not merely stapled budget-rated acoustical foam to all the walls and then decided to cover them with shabby black coverings that did not hide exposed pipes, he had left it unfinished on purpose as part of his great aesthetic.
Indeed, he did seem to love black walls, as the entire studio was black, as was a wall of the living room and was the bathroom. This was a daring choice for a basement apartment with no windows of any kind. But not as daring as the shower.
The shower was attached to the master bedroom, which was really the only proper bedroom, as the other one had hanging sheets instead of a wall separating it from the living room. He had clearly run out of room to put in a shower, so he put in a bath tub, in the interior, windowless, black painted room. The ceiling was not high enough to support a shower. But then inspiration must have struck him. He dug into the ground and made the bathtub deeper. Approximately 5 feet deep, so it was a long, narrow enamelled space that he had put footholds in so one could climb in and out. Or, possibly bleed out the corpse of an animal slaughtered for dinner. I may yet have nightmares about that shower.
With the sound proofing and the black walls it would have made a great SM dungeon if it was not so shabby. As it is, it would make a perfectly great rehearsal space and a nice place to live if I wanted to go slowly insane. Especially if this manifested itself as cannibalism. It has a really nice kitchen.

The Missiles

The Ministry of Defence has decided that the best way to defend the Olympics from terrorists is to put surface-to-air missiles on the top of a gated community in Bow. The people living in the flats under the missiles were not consulted about this and are not pleased to have military weaponry on their roofs. (It turns out that the 4th amendment in the US Constitution is more useful than you might have guessed in the modern age.) Much to my delight and surprise, I actually met two people who live in the missile buildings.
Bow is not London’s most sought-after area, so I asked if ‘gated community’ meant something posh. One of the residents explained that the area was being gentrified street by street. Some squares were very rough and others were fine and others were posh, all right next to each other. The gated area is a posh enclave of 20-something yuppies who are buying their first flat before moving to a more desirable post code. She explained they had not yet gotten beyond the ‘stage’ of doing lots of coke and behaving like children. The missiles on the roof are an accident waiting to happen, she opined.
I asked if there was anything going in my price range, because who doesn’t want to live right underneath an embarrassing military accident? She said there was and then emailed our friend in common a link to an advert for a one room flat. It was more than twice as much as she had estimated the average cost to be and well out of my range.
It’s just as well as can’t afford coke either.

The search continues….

And if you know of a place that wants a not-yet-employed recent graduate and a short-term dog, which is on the ground floor, with a ramp or with a lift, do let me know.

Xena has cancer

Leggings
Xena has been gradually slowing down for the last year. I thought it was her arthritis at first, but when her limp got bad, I took her to the vet and an x-ray showed that she’s got a tumour in one of her shoulders. He suggested that she might have a few more years if her leg was amputated, but she also might not. As far as they can tell, it hasn’t spread, but they can’t say with certainty and I think it would be a very difficult change for her, since she’s nearly 12.
So, she’s getting pain killers and is home with me. The vet thinks she’ll probably have about 3 good months.
I’m glad that we don’t put dogs through what we put people through.
Xena’s a good dog and has had a good life. She’s been to 10 countries. She’s lived in 3 and in multiple US states. She’s been to parties, weddings, concerts, camping trips, festivals, offices, universities, cars, boats, trains, trams, bicycles and buses.
It would be difficult to overstate how much my life has changed in the decade she’s been my dog. She’s been there for the death of my mum, the end of my software engineering days, the end of my marriage, the entirety of my post-graduate career, my transition, half my time in Holland and all of my time in England.
I’m trying to stay cheerful, since she’s not gone yet and she’s concerned about me being upset. It’s difficult to adjust.
Xena has many friends in many places. If any of you want to come out and see her, I can find a bed or a sofa for you to sleep on.