I know, in my life, there have been many people who loved me, but maybe two people who i feel like have ever really understood me. Yesterday was the funeral of one of those people. Timanna’s memorial service started with her family speaking, then her best friends and exes. People spoke about how accepting and understanding she was. She would accept one person and simultaneously accept her other friends being judgmental.
T was queer and genderqueer. She could grow a sparse moustache (better than mine), which she often did. For the inauguration, she decided to wear a wig and a muumuu to go to the Parkway Theatre and watch Obama get sworn in. She also would sometimes butch up in a suit or a tux, and cut quite a dashing figure. Several butch women spoke very movingly about how T helped show them that it was ok to be a masculine woman. Alex talked about how she and T used to go to thrift stores and buy old man clothes together.
Other people spoke about T being unconventional and flamboyant. Somebody mentioned getting thrown out of a movie theatre. Nicole told me about a road trip where they had been thrown out of a Denny’s (for playing Madonna on a boombox). When I was an undergrad, I had an overdeveloped sense of propriety and T liked to shout “penis!” at the top of her lungs in grocery stores and whatnot when I was with her, just to watch me squirm.
Sophie wrote a eulogy where she shared that when she was a freshwoman and new to Mills, a group of new students had decided to go skinny-dipping in the fountain in the middle of campus, during the night. Timanna grabbed all their clothes and ran off with them.
T was almost larger than life. She was the most creative person I’ve ever met. Frustratingly, she didn’t do that much concrete with it. Her senior art show was really cool and she did an awesome zine. I always hoped she’d have more frequent output. It seemed like she was always helping other people be more creative. When I was a youth and put out my first album with Mp3.com, a vanity label, T bought a copy. I think she’s the only one to have bought it. A couple of years ago, she commissioned me to write a short piece. She was one of two people who encouraged me to start blogging.
Somebody said how T seemed to have trouble figuring out her life path. Lately, she had some problems with drugs, but it seemed like she was really sorting herself out. She was trying to quit and was volunteering at a law center to help victims of domestic violence. She had just applied to do a MA program at Mills in public policy. T was an activist, always working for social justice and change. One of her professors from her undergrad days talked about how she had written a recommendation letter for T, how she was going to get into the grad program.
The professor wants to set up an institutional memorial for T at Mills. T has been around Mills for over a decade now, involved in the community. Her mother spoke about how T had never felt she fit in anywhere, until she got to Mills. There was a stirring of recognition in the mourners, many of whom were Mills women (and another Mills man aside from me). I started crying at that moment and haven’t stopped much since.
There’s so much I want to ask T, about herself and about gender issues – like what it means for me to have felt so strongly validated as a Mills woman then, but a man now? And I just want to talk about Madonna or whatever pop culture thing she was into at that moment.
The last time I saw her, I was home for Christmas and it was a stressful visit. I saw my family for the first time since starting transition and my ex girlfriend for the first time since breaking up and I almost didn’t want to be in California at all. Timanna came over and we went to the White Horse, her favorite gay bar, in Oakland. It was karaoke night. I’ve barely got any control of my voice since it started to change, but the overall quality of singing was on a par with what I could manage. We sang a duet of “I Touch Myself,” a song I hadn’t even heard in years. If we got any notes right at all, it was by happy accident. But we acted like “horndogs,” according to the MC. T didn’t even seem embarrassed, even as I was blushing.
I think all the queers and butches and femmes and transfolks and academics and activists and friends packed in the pews of the chapel and standing in the back could tell a story like that, about how T was a bright spot in their life. And at this dark hour in mine, I keep thinking that if I’m in the Bay Area and I’m so sad, I should call her up. It’s hard to even conceive of a world without her.
Tag: celesteh
Will be in California . . . for a funeral
Timanna Bennett died. I don’t really know what happened. T was a good friend for a long time. I’m flying out tomorrow. T’s memorial service is at the Mills chapel on Saturday, 14 February, at 11am. There will be a potluck reception afterwards. As far as I know, T was the first of my Mills friends to die. A lot of people who knew her then seem to be planning on coming. I think some of them fell out of contact since, but T was just such a remarkable person.
I will post more about her later, but right now I just can’t. I should be packing to travel anyway or washing some of the many dishes that I shouldn’t leave in my sink for two weeks. I’ll be in the Bay Area until the 23rd. I hope to be able to see as many friends as possible while I’m back, especially if I haven’t seen them for a while. I didn’t see too many people when I was home for Christmas, but I did see T, thank gods.
My cell phone number is 917 355 5064. That’s a New York number, but it rings in my pocket.
This is all very distressing.
Questions for composers
When you compose, do you start with the form or with the content? Do you decide on the structure before you gather materials? Do the materials suggest a structure to you or vice versa?
I’ve never been so good at structure and I really need to do something about this. I wonder if there are any good books on musical structure? Maybe I should try to write some stuff with historical structures. Not sontata form, though. When I was at Wesleyan, I realized that I wrote everything in sonata form and stopped doing that, but I didn’t really replace it with any other structures, just sort of trying to intuit things for every piece.
What pieces are best to study for cues into form and structure? I’ve been thinking of looking at John Cage’s Square Root pieces, something my supervisor has encouraged.
But I think I should also get a book. Back in my miss-spent youth, I thought I wouldn’t need to know anything about non-electronic music because the world was shiny and new and out with the old and in with whatever I was doing. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention in some of my classes. Much like when I was 17, and similarly had an idea that I would never need to know statistics.
So, due to a lack of diligence in my studies, I’m totally unclear on how this works at all, really. I imagine that it’s like having a bunch of plastic boxes, like you use for food storage. And in each one, there’s a different sort of food. Each like a course of a fancy meal. So they all go together, but they’re all separate. However, they probably have ingredients in common like olive oil. Or pumpkin both in the pie and the soup. However, this metaphor is crap, as it’s non temporal. Pumpkin soup is a gestalt. It doesn’t change over time. Maybe it’s like stanzas in a poem or chapters in a book? I imagine that stanza length is decided a head of time, whereas chapters seem to stem from the content that fills them?
Is it ironic not to have a structure of understanding to apply to structure?
Riots
The year that I lived in Paris, a thousand cars were set ablaze in a single weekend. The cops there had chased a couple of youth, who hid in an electrical substation and got electrocuted and died. The people in the poor suburbs of Paris had enough of police harassment, and so there were riots. Cars were mostly burned out in the suburbs, but some were also set aflame in the area around my flat and, I think, on my street, although it’s possible that the broken glass and scorch marks I saw were unrelated.
Shortly after that died down, an unpopular change to employment law passed. It changed the terms of contracts that could be given to people in their early 20s. There were large marches and people at the end of these marches tended to break windows and cause a mess. Then was the Mohammed cartoon in the Danish newspaper, which, as you may recall, was reprinted in France Soir and caused further unrest.
By the end of the year, French folks were getting kind of concerned about the level of unrest. But not so concerned that they didn’t go ahead and elect Sarkozy, who helped spawn the initial batch of riots.
So I’m a little blasé about riots now. They happen. They’re a way that a minority signals that it’s really really pissed off with the way things are going politically. They’re a protest turned destructive. They happen. And sometimes it’s a good thing that they do happen.
Stonewall, which many regard to be the foundational moment in the modern queer rights movement, was a riot. People fought with the police. They broke stuff. They broke stuff that didn’t belong to either them or the police and just happened to be there. For two nights, they rioted and broke stuff. They weren’t going to take it anymore. The police had been attacking them for years and they were finally fighting back.
If you look not just at the latest BART police shooting, but also at incarceration rates in California, it’s clear that poor and POC communities are under attack by the police. And when people feel rage at that, when they feel anger, when they take destructive mob action in spontaneous response, it’s just as justified now as it ever has been for anyone. Oppression is not quiet or polite and it’s end isn’t either.
However, the news media would do well to learn, that attacking a car is not “violent.” Shooting an unarmed man in the back while he lies face down, surrounded by cops is violent. Breaking a car? Not so much.
Thinking about Pagans
The folks who were hexed have been caught by police, and, indeed, one of them had his family involved in his turning himself in, just as predicted by the head-hexer. However, I think a double-blind study is needed before I’m willing to concede anything about the general efficacy of hexing. I’m not sure such a study is really possible. What coven would be willing to participate in calling up such negative energy in order to prove something to skeptics?
I wrote something about how I hadn’t been to any pagan rites since university and that’s so untrue I don’t know what I was thinking. My friend Jean does something called “Burning Bowl” every New Years Day which has something to do with making resolutions, only not really. And, of course, Paul’s memorial last year was pagan, and even more emotionally charged than the most recent thing I went to. These things, though, were familiar. Drinking cider with friends. Or a memorial service. They don’t see outside of ordinary experience. And so they slipped my mind when I was writing about an extraordinary thing.
I spoke to a few people about the use of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the hexing. Apparently, pagans are practical and will use the goddess or god most likely to get things done for them. Because some of the suspects were described as Hispanic, the pagans decided to use their goddess against them. This, of course, relies on making some assumptions. Protestant churches are growing dramatically in the Americas, but let’s put that aside for a moment and go with the assumption that the Virgin Mary has meaning to the Hispanic men in question and specifically, her appearance in Mexico is something connected to them. Something about this strikes me as problematic. The pagans are using the symbols of a person’s religion against them. And it’s a minority religion which has faced past discrimination. (Of course, pagans would argue they were in the same boat, there.) This is troubling to me. I was at the ritual, in retrospect, more or less as a tourist, as it didn’t have meaning for me, so maybe there’s an argument there that a hexing is just going to be troubling because it’s a troubling thing to do in the first place and maybe religious rites are outside of arguments relating to axes of privilege. And maybe Mary of Guadalupe is a goddess figure subsumed into Catholicism and therefore belongs to all womyn. I don’t know.
My friend in London is from Somerset, where the farmers still do pagan stuff that their ancestors did. She was describing some of the rituals to me. They seem to all involve drinking a lot of beer and did not seem to be womyn-centered. I think that some feminists look to this as a source mostly motivated by the myth of matriarchy. This is a cross-cultural phenomenon, where there is a myth that once upon a time, women held political power. Everything was backwards in this time: the moon was better than the sun, etc. Fortunately, (the myth goes) men wrested power away and saved us from such foolishness. For example, Eve briefly lead Adam in Eden and look where that got us. Still, the idea of some ancient time when women had power is obviously attractive to women now. Alas, it’s all mythical, but it attracts them to old myths and old religions. And so a bunch of drunken, ribbon-wearing (male) farmers chasing a cheese wheel down a steep, rocky incline becomes a feminist religious inspiration, once separated by an ocean. Of course, they’re probably not drawing on that particular ritual and the information has been mediated by books or Hollywood or expectations and turns into it’s own thing. And just like the rituals in Somerset carry the cultural baggage of that region, and affirm power relations and privilege in that community, neo-pagans bring their own baggage to the circle.
Hexing
I went to a hexing this afternoon. In the past few months, I’ve made it a point to say yes when somebody asks me to do something that I wouldn’t normally do. So when an old friend forwarded me an email about a hexing ritual, open to “both women and men,” once I found out the targets were hate crime committing rapists, I said ok.
We went to Ceasar Chavez park in Berkeley, which is also an off-leash dog area, so I’d been there loads of times before. We were in a stone circle, built to be a solar calendar, with the waters of the San Francisco Bay on three sides of us. Nearby, there were a million happy dogs, kids flying kites, a guy with a remote controlled glider. The grass was green from the recent rains and there was a cool breeze blowing from the West. It was all rather lovely.
As it happened, I was the only guy to go. All but around two of the women were Baby Boomers. Most of us were white, also. I went to Mills – a woman’s college, so I’d dabbled in wiccan stuff and been to a few rituals, but didn’t go on to do it after that. So I’d been to do pagan stuff a few times before and had mostly found it empowering, but not enough to overcome my atheism.
Despite this atheism, I was raised in a superstitious household and come from a superstitious country, so I couldn’t help but think that going to a hexing might be marinating myself in some bad energy. What goes around, comes around. If I wish ill on others, it’s going to come back to me, I guess I believe. I wonder if this sort of thinking is to keep women from being angry or from stewing in it. In any case, I was taking the negative energy seriously, as were the women there.
However, once things were under way, my mood changed from trepidation. The organizer had a bunch of 8.5×11 sized printouts of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She had cut eye holes in them to sort of function as masks and she passed them around with string. So I tied a sheet of paper with a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary to my head. And they set up some banners of her also.
I spend all day yesterday with a member of the Catholic clergy, so the sacrilege was actually getting to me, as much as feel goofy wearing such an odd non-mask. But also, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a symbol which belongs to the Hispanic populations of California, of which, as far as I was aware, nobody was present. My biggest negative issue with wiccans is not that it violates my unbelief, but that it appropriates the beliefs of others. And borrowing this symbol is cultural appropriation. So I felt kind of goofy and awkward and the only guy there and guilty for violating a heritage that both belongs to my people and belongs to others.
We formed a circle and she set up two very small cauldrons. We started by smudging everybody with incense. The woman who did the smudging sang a song while she did it. I didn’t know what to think when she singingly called me her sister. I don’t think she did it in response to me not passing, but because I did pass. Because if a guy was going to come into this space, he could deal with being left out of the language like women have to deal with it too, more often and in more places. Or maybe as she sang that I belonged, she sang the opposite also.
After we were all smudged, we hummed and then the leader invoked the four “grandmothers” of the four cardinal directions. Some coals were put into the cauldrons. She put frankincense on one of them. She had some yarn which represented the four rapist gay bashers who we were hexing. And their younger brother who knew about their crimes and was going to rat them out. I think she had a psychic vision of the brother. She cut the yarns and put them into the empty cauldron. And then she put in extremely foul incense. And we chanted about how they were bad people who were going to get caught and have bad things happen to them, while holding out our arms towards it.
Some of the dog walkers stopped to watch this, but only for a few moments. And also, one of the women had a movie camera with which she was documenting us. It’s Berkeley, so I don’t know if people thought we were making a fictional film or if a bunch of middle aged women dancing in a circle around the BVM, hexing rapists in the dog park is just entirely unremarkable.
The yarn she used was bright red. I don’t know what it was made of, but it was clearly treated with some sort of flame-retardant chemical and wasn’t burning as quickly as expected. So this required dumping on additional incense and some flammable stuff while we clapped and walked in circles around the altar thing.
At the end, when it finally, burned, we were to go around the circle and give blessings. Because calling for justice is positive. So even though it was a hexing, it was a positive thing to do. Thus neatly sidestepping the problems of calling up negative energy or other unseemliness. The first women to give a blessing was the smudger and she went on at length about womyn, and the womyn of the circle, etc. The next was my friend, who made a point of saying “people.” Then it was my turn, so I said “queers.” We all said something and afterwards, people said “blessed be” and then, thank goodness, it was time to remove the Virgin Mary from my head.
My friend and I took off right about then, without helping to tear down, as my friend could tell I wanted to escape. She said, “I swear they said ‘all genders.'” I wondered if I felt more uncomfortable about being in a women’s space or wearing such a goofy mask.
I think the most striking thing about the whole proceedings was that it was not symbolic for the women involved. It was not a protest. It was taking action. They believe that they’ve done something concrete in response to a terrible hate crime.
When I got home, I washed my face and hands, to get the smell of incense off of me, but it also felt like a kind of ritual, getting the previous ritual off of me. And it felt concrete too.
Fortunately, there is more concrete action that can be taken. There’s a fund set up to help the victim. Unfortunately, this kind of hate crime is way more common here than you might guess. What’s unusual is how much attention this one is getting. Gay and lesbian people are especially politicized since the election. Hopefully this energy continues. And as people take away our rights and and say we’re like deforestation and literally assault us, hopefully, our protests and our actions create change, so hate crimes become uncommon, our rights are restored and people are ashamed that homophobia was once so apparent.
On the road to Oregon
I’m on my way to Portland via car and there’s a wee bit of ice on the ground. Which is to say an epic amount. Brother Bob and I have stopped at a motel in Salem.
On my first two days back in the states, I started my day by biking on the wrong side of the street. The first day, for a few blocks until I was confused by oncoming traffic. But returning to the customs of one’s birth are never confusing for long (except when they are (i love tautologies)) and I look forward to many days of biking to wrong way in England.
Today was my first time driving a car since last July and only the second time in the last year. But I’ve got several hours under my belt from today. Brother Bob is from Los Angeles and has no experience on ice. It’s truly an alarming situation when I am considered the more winterized driver.
This area hasn’t had a significant snow storm for the last 50 years and therefore: no plows. No salt. No sand. Just bare packed ice. The blizzard was days ago and as far as I can tell, there has been no effort to clear the roads. Oregon is some sort of asinine libertarian paradise, which means the state has no resources to deal with anything. And to enhance our freedom, it’s our own personal liberty whether to use snow chains or not. For x’s sake, I want a nanny state to tell me about how to most safely use the roads. If chains are required, a bloody sign of some sort would be nice. And I swear, nobody can drive here even under the best of circumstances, so a layer of bare, packed (un salted, un-sanded, un-gritted) ice on the freeway is not helping matters.
So despite being less than 50 miles from my destination, I am spending the night in a naff hotel in the naff town of Salem. Because it’s the capital of this low-tax utopia, it is probably worse off than any other town in the state, but it’s also the southern end of the ice. So hopefully, in the morning, I’ll be able to slowly roll to a place that has heard of the idea of snow plows.
The airport here has been closed. The Amtrak stopped. Greyhound, put to sleep. This actually the only way I could have come to see my family. And despite all the many wrong pronouns, I’m sure it will all be worth it.
I am in Califronia
I am here until the 23rd, when I’m off to Oregon, and then back again for a few days after xmas and then back to London.
If you want to hang out, call my cell phone: 917 355 5064. That’s the same number I’ve had for the last year or so. Heh, but I’m using the physical phone that I bought in 2003. It doesn’t take pictures, but it does calls and SMS which is all I really ever want to do. People look at me funny when I pull it out though. I feel dinosaur like. That and the only sweater I have here is one owned by my dad in the mid 80’s. I’m very retro with the prehistoric phone and the Cosby sweater.
My plans for this evening have fallen through. Everybody is busy for the holidays, which is reasonable and to be expected. It’s really weird being here for some reason. When I left last February, I wondered if maybe I was making a huge mistake leaving someplace where I so thoroughly belonged for someplace that I so totally didn’t. Now I don’t feel it here either, but maybe that’s jetlag.
I wish other people still blogged. It was easier to keep up with people when we were all reading each other’s blogs. Twitter is just not the same.
OS X Network
I have two macs. One is a laptop and one is a mini. The mini has not mouse, monitor or keyboard. I control it with VNC. This works out great 95%-99% of the time. Except for last week when it didn’t. I told the Apple Updater to do some install it wanted to do and the computer didn’t come back on the network. I hooked up the computer to a video projector and discovered that it wasn’t booting. The round sunburtsy thing it does during startup was just going and going and going.
I borrowed a mouse and keyboard and re-installed the OS from a 10.5 disk and then re-enabled Remote Management and then installed all the updates, etc and it works now. What a pain, though.
And, also, there’s a slight difference. On my laptop, finder windows have a left-most column which list the drives on my computer under “devices” and “places” and “search.” There’s also a section called shared and it shows my Mac Mini. If I click on that, I get a big icon of the disk and two buttons. One says “Disconnect” and the other says “Share Screen.” Below those are a list of shared directories and drives. Before my computer had it’s troubles it listed the external firewire drive in the list. Now it does not, but still has the internal drive, my home directory and shared folders on the internal drive.
I’ve gotten addicted to doing network file transfers via drag and drop, and now I can’t get to my data disk? I have no idea where one would configure it to show up. It was not a shared disk, I just had access to it because I was logged in as me. Why has it gone away? How do I get it back? Woe is me! What search terms do I type into the help menu? I’m stuck!
Edit
According to some help file someplace, since I’m connected as an admin user, I should have access to the entire computer. Bugger it.
Unpopular Music
Once in a while, I get the idea of doing algorithmic pop music and labor intensely on it and then come up with something and then walk away horrified. So, um, if anybody’s interested, here’s the latest incarnation of this cycle: S’onewall.
The samples are recordings of the largest-ever transgender rights protest in the UK, which took place last month. And then there are drum beats. The bassline uses a subset of the Bohlen-Pierce scale, in just intonation, with notes chosen according to a variation of Clarence Barlow’s “digestibility” formula. To determine the relative consonance of two ratios, divide one by the other and then take the result and add the numerator to the denominator. A lower number indicates greater simplicity of the result and thus a higher degree of consonance. There is ugly code, available for your perusal. Quick examples are at the bottom of this post.
This is not on my podcast because I’m not so into it. I have ideas of what might fix it, but I suspect those ideas are wrong and it’s taken up so much time already. However, as un-enthused as I am, I think somebody, someplace might want to remix this. Or maybe I’m flattering myself.
I wish I could offer the pieces sent to different tracks, but, ha ha, the only way I could get this to record was with Audio Hijack, because there’s a logic problem somewhere in the code which causes it to hang right at the end and chasing that bug is just more trouble than it’s worth.
Code Example
Ok, using the ScaleLattice: First declare a scale with some ratios in it:
~scale = ScaleLattice([[1, 1], [11, 9], [9,7], [7,5], [5, 3], [9, 5],
[11,5], [7,3], [27, 11], [27, 25], [25, 9]], 3);
That’s not the scale from the piece, but it’s also a nice one. We can then try to construct a melody, by getting some step-wise motion:
~melody = ~scale.getNsteps(4);
And them maybe jump to the most consonant note from the tonic, followed by one step down:
~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.getIstepsBelowJconsonance(2, 0);
Um, and then let’s get the most consonant pitch from the last one in the melody:
~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.consonanceAtFloat(0, ~melody.last);
Yeah, this probably sound bad, but we could play it:
Pbind(dur, 0.3, freq, Pseq(~melody * 440, 1)).play;
I have a hypothesis that with the combination of relative consonances and stepwise motion, you could abstract music theory to the point where you could construct a meaningful melody from an arbitrary scale. Such that the program doesn’t know the scale ahead of time. The missing piece is notes that are too close to each other, which I suspect will have very high relative dissonance. I may think on this further, or I might go back to doing whatever else it is that I do.
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