Tag: celesteh

Now that’s novel!

Instead of doing the many, many things that I need to do this week, I’ve been reading about premillenial dispensational estatology on wikipedia. Doesn’t that sound like something very scientific or researched and reasoned? See, esatology is the science of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Premillenial dispensationalists believe that normally only so many angels will fit, but due to certain prophetic circumstances, infinite angels can be accommodated. (This in contrast to postmillenialists who believe . . . I forgot joke I was going to make here. I can’t even satirize something already so outrageous.)

Ok, so those are a bunch of fancy words for trying to do sekrit magik with the bible. It’s got sekrit prophesies in it, which you can learn about in bible “college” or via wikipedia. Or via my coming potboiler end times novel. Thanks to my exhausting exhaustive research, I can now provide an very rough outline, including some character names and prophetically required plot points. It gets less structured as the tribulations drag on.

Outline

World Currency: Euro used for international trade
AntiChrist: Angel Caduto, head of UNICEF
Whore of Babylon – heads religion

Back story: ww3 expanded Israel’s borders and lead to the breakup of the US

Mary Sue is a very famous composer who teaches at the conservatory.
Ralph teaches art at the art academy.

  1. Ruso-Ethopian war (told in flashback, witnessed by Ralph)
  2. Rapture
  3. Dutch disaster services
    1. this is not ww4
  4. Caduto, head of UNICEF addresses world
    1. no human technology could have caused this
    2. “To be frank, we have no way of knowing what has happened or if the missing will be returned.”
    3. no country has been spared
    4. therefore, must be natural or alien – at least not originating on earth. Aliens!!!
    5. North America may have been hit so badly because it was facing the aliens
    6. Kids are smaller and maybe easier to transport (also, tastier)
    7. We don’t know why some people disappeared and others didn’t, but are looking into factors. Many did not drink alcohol. (not pre-marinated)
    8. We must unify to fend off possible invasion
  5. Ralph wonders why Jews weren’t spared. Mentions passover, Lot and Noah. Meanwhile, TV shows pictures of huge disaster in North America – crash planes, fires burning, whole government vanishes live in C-Span.

WOB commissions memorial piece from MS for the disappeared at world-wide interfaith memorial. Calls for spiritual unity.

Caduto calls for everyone to have an RFID chip implanted in them to make a better tracking system.

Ralph goes back to Israel and joins sect making sacrifice on temple mound.

WOB or Caduto reveals that all the adult disappeared were Christians and children. To insure the protection of those left, alcohol is required and xtianity is outlawed. “There is no heaven or hell, there is just survival!”

War breaks out (war and rumors of same)

giant earthquake (maybe change this to a meteor? “The sun goes dark, the moon turns blood-red, and meteors fall from the sky. “) 25% of those remaining die

illegal religious group gets radio implants and organizes black market

fire, smoke and sulphur hit

Caduto is murdered along with 2 underground religious leaders and another political leader

Caduto rises from the dead after 3 days – lightening storms. moves to temple

Those who have UN RFID chips get sick from them

Oceans turn to blood & rivers too and whatnot

sun scortches

darkness – (finally some relief from the sun. oh no, it’s dawn again and still august! augh!)

Rivers dry up – which is probably not such a bad thing,s ince they’re full of blood

giant hailstones (do these melt to restart the rivers?)

Jesus comes back and kills a lot of people. (The lion of god, the prince of war. Reveals the Beatitudes were a bunch of bullshit thrown in to fool people who couldn’t crack the sekrit code, just like dinosaur bones, but for pacifists.) All the disappeared and killed underground folks come back to life. Zombies!!!!

a bunch of other crazy shit happens. jeebus, USA foreign policy is based on this crap?

Crossdress for Success: Passing for Ken when you look like Barbie

Clothes Make the Man

You have two goals when it comes to clothing: 1. Pass, 2. Avoid getting treated like dirt. Probably you have a narrow chin and hairless cheeks. If you pass, you look young. Looking young is fine, but going from being read as a 30 year old woman to a 17 year old boy can entail a starting loss of status. Therefore, you want to convey not only masculinity, but also age and social status. Simply put: life is easier if you look rich.

Therefore, you want to avoid dressing in a sloppy manner. It will drop your status AND you’re less likely to pass. You want to wear clothes that are unambiguously masculine. Nothing too gender neutral.
But if you’re on a budjet, aside from hitting sales and “dress for less” type stores, also check out thrift shops.

Shoes & Socks

Men’s shoes. No sneakers unless they’re very masculine. Clunky high tops will make you look like a teen boy. I recommend men’s dress shoes or wing tips, but working boots and the like are also possible. Argyle socks are casual. Black socks are dressy. White socks go with shorts. I wear argyle almost all the time, cuz I think they’re manly.

Pants (Trousers for you Brits)

Avoid gender neutral pants. This means that jeans are risky, but if you can find some that are manly, then go ahead. Get pants that hang on your hips rather than your waist. Men’s pants are baggier in the crotch and a bit baggier in general. Don’t go overly baggy, though. Get something that fits.

Underwear

Boxers or briefs? Or boxer briefs? It you’re going to pack (fun!), you probably want boxer briefs or just briefs to keep your sock ball or whatever in place.
Also, go for a wife beater or other loose-fitting tank top. It may be possible for you to avoid binding.

Shirts

Button up, collar, cotton, vertical strips. That’s the general guideline. Men’s shirts have buttons on the right and button holes on the left. You want cotton or some other non-clingy fabric. Vertical stripes are you friend. Plain colors are ok, but not as good. Same with plaid. Avoid horizontal stripes! Vertical stripes make you appear more box-shaped, which is what you want. Also, the tend to have a horizontal section across the back shoulders. This makes your shoulders look broader. This is also what you want.
Tuck you shirt into your hip-hugging pants. Voilà! Your hips disappear! Do a check in the mirror to see whether you want to bind or not.
Get a shirt that actually fits. Men in the US often wear tents that double as shirts. This looks terrible on scrawny guys and on you might look like you’ve raided the closet of your dad or boyfriend. Get slim fit if you have to.

Sweaters, jackets, etc

I suggest blazers. Button the middle button (and maybe the top button) while standing and unbutton them all when sitting. Never button the bottom button. Blazers are manly and they convey some social status, but, of course, they’re not practical for every event. If you need a sweater, get a men’s one that’s not tight. Avoid sweatshirts as they’re too ambiguous.

Ties

I want to give a shout-out to the bow tie. I directs eyes upwards to the collar and away from the chest, while neckties do the opposite. However, neckties are also cool.

Hats

Hats are very regional. So, what are the dapper men in your area wearing? Look for what guys dressed like you have on their heads. Don’t wear it if women also wear it. Unless it’s winter and you need to wear a ski cap or something. It’s best to avoid suffering for fashion.
I wear a newsboy type cap (‘casquette’ in French) on cool days and a pork pie on warmer days. Brimmed hats are great, because they double as sun block! I also have a tilley hat, but people tell me it looks silly, alas.
If you live in San Francisco, go get whatever Willy Brown is wearing. That man is a sharp dresser, especially when it comes to hats!

Square Hair

Head

Go find a haircutter that’s trustworthy. This often means a gay man. Other people may try to argue with you about your hair, like it’s not on your own damn head. This can be easier if it’s already really short. If you want to loose longer hair, get your friend to give you a terrible haircut first. (Ok, I’ve never tried this, but it might help.)
You want something boxy. Longer on the top. Short on the back and sides, blended high.
Gell it up and out, to add to the squareness. Move hair away from your temples. If you’re brave, you can take a razor to square up your hairline.
Your sideburns should be square as heck. This is key. If you keep them high, they will probably look better. Trim them so they are a bit above where your hair stops growing like head-hair.

Face

That fuzz that you’re so proud of on your cheeks, chin and upper lip is not actually helping you, unless you’re able to grow a real beard. Shave it off. Shave your cheeks, your chin, your upper lip, and under your chin, to a couple of centimeters on your neck. You might want to get the fuzz below your ears too, but careful of nicking yourself. Don’t shave your lips. (Who would do that?)
Use shaving soap and warm water. Shave with the grain and not against it. Don’t do it too often, or your face will hurt. If you just have fuzz, you can do it every 4 days or so. Change the blade after 2 or 3 weeks or if your face feels scraped.
Don’t put Rogaine on your face. Don’t put fake hair or stubbly makeup on your face, unless you’re doing a drag stage show. Facial hair comes from hormones and that’s it.

Now let’s look at you

My, aren’t you a dapper young fellow!

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.

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.