Tag: celesteh

The Latest

Theoretically, I should have full functionality on my school’s wifi network on Monday. Tomorrow, I am driving to Paris. Gasp, yes, driving a car across three countries. Yikes. I will fill it up with boxes of stuff and drive back to put all the stuff in my new apartment. Huzzah, it is two rooms right in the middle of town. It is awesomeness. The air mattress at the anti-squat sprung a leak, so this is just in time.

I ordered a bicycle. I kept waffling back and forth between getting the cheapest bike possible because it will get stolen anyway and I’m only here for a year or get the bike I want but couldn’t get at home and be worried about parking it all the time and ship it home. I went with option B and in 4 weeks, I’ll have my very own 60 lbs bike (yikes). In the meantime, I am trying to assemble a bike from pieces of incomplete bikes. I feel I am close to this goal, but I left the major piece someplace on a rack with no lock (I don’t have one yet) and I’m worried somebody will think it abandoned and throw it in a dumpster. After careful consideration, I’ve decided I should probably give it some brakes. So it needs a tension arm for the chain, some derailer type thing (it doesn’t need to move, but it does need to keep the chain from falling off) and some sort of braking device and it’s all good. w00t.
School is cool. Housing crisis is solved Bike solution in progress. all is well.
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Online Again!

Welcome back to me. Here’s a week old post that I couldn’t put up earlier:

Reminiscing

When I was a student at Wesleyan, I left town for Spring break one year without cleaning the refrigerator at all. Milk and soymilk sat open. Other food items lay inside while I was gone for three weeks. Some time during that three weeks, a fuse blew in my home and the fridge was left to get warm. This was either during or before the heatwave.
When I opened the door to my Wesleyan fridge, a cloud of green spores filled my kitchen. Literally, a cloud of particulate matter. Aaron cleaned it all, god bless him. (I wonder if he wants to move here to be my housemate again?) The situation was something of a disaster. However, it did not smell as badly as the refrigerator in the anti-squat where I stay. I’ve been eating out a lot.
If Aaron did want to come out here for a while, he might find it familiar. In many ways, this is a lot like when I started at Wesleyan. Holland’s food culture is on a par with Connecticut as is, I’ve been told, the weather. The course load is also similar. In my first semester at Wesleyan, I took way too many classes. Here, I’ve found my course schedule to be even more packed. I have classes five days a week. I’ve gone to four so far. I have three more tomorrow, two or three on friday, two on monday and tuesday. I don’t have to actually take all of these and indeed I have some that I am considering dropping.

School

So far, I’ve learned that Sonology’s origins are from the Acoustical Research department at Phillips. So Sonology has the tapes for Poème Electronique , which they commissioned.
I’ve also learned that women are good at communication, which is why Pauline Oliveros writes the kinds of audience pieces that she does and that a lot of music is male exhibition just like peacocks, so biologically speaking one could conclude that women were unsuited to music and thus probably don’t have a cross-cultural tradition of same and wait, how does Pauline Oliveros fit in this? and yeah I found one possible class to drop. yay gender essentialism.
Also I had a long and math filled lecture on convolution and I’m ashamed to admit that I dozed off. When I awoke, there was a formula on the backboard. I think I get DSP except for the formulas are confusing. What does h refer to again? There needs to be some sort of key provided next to every equation to remind you what the hell the letters are referring to. I took trig a long time ago, so I think I can hack it, even if I could not remember the frequency relationship between a sine wave and that same wave squared. (Octave higher + offset. It’s how frequency dividers work.) Finally, I learned that convolution is a linear process and therefore is reversable, although Curtis Roads claims otherwise. hmmm.

Housing

Cola has been off looking at apartments. Today we looked at two. One was at the very high end of the price range, but comes furnished and with a possible 6 month contract. The other was way too expensive and won’t be ready until next week. But the landlord called up tonight and offered us the bigger, more expensive one for the lower price. Also, no agency fee. Hope on the housing front.
Also went today to Stroom and signed up to try to get housing through them. They’re an arts group which offers help to artists locating housing or studios. To qualify, you need to be part of the group or a student at the art school or the conservatory. There is a waiting list. I wish I had looked into this when I was here over the summer.

The Next Day

Last night, somebody dumped a pile of stuff in the street in front of where I anti-squat. And it’s not even Sunday. I kept hearing scavengers coming by to look at the stuff, so this morning, I took a gander and grabbed a mirror. Huzzah, there is now a mirror here. There was also most of a bike, but the front end looked kind of messed up. If only I could weld!

First Period

So there are ballet students at my school, because I go to the Royal Conservatory (oh my god, how did this happen exactly?). The ballet students have changing rooms near the music practice rooms. The changing rooms have mirrors ringed with lightbulbs, just like backstage-y stuff. The changing rooms also have showers. Showers with hot water. At 9:50 this morning, I handed the front desk my student card and in return got a key to a room with a hot shower in it. Then Cola and I ran down there, became clean (yay!) and I ran up just in time for my 10:00 class which doesn’t start until September 14th, something I would have known had I gone to the meeting or if I spoke any Dutch. I am seriously going to take some evening classes or something.

Second Period

Afternoon class number one was on the roots of computer music. We talked about the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot, the RCA Mark I synthesizer and Music I – Music V among other aspects like timbral limitations fo repeating wave forms. It was mostly review for me, but I hadn’t heard sound samples of the Mark I before. The teacher, Paul Berg, also asserted that new instruments and technology tend to be first used for old applications. Clara Rockmore played Rachmoninov with the Theremin. The first Mark I stuff was old warhorses arranged for synthesizer (this thing, btw, took up an entire room and was not voltage controlled. It had 12 discrete oscillators – one for every equally tempered step, an octave switching device and some wave shaping. crazy). Berg sees this tendency as regrettable, but I think it’s just part of human nature. People relate new tools to old frameworks. Many people now carry around in their pockets little computers with fast disk access and D->A converters. The use them for playing recordings, because that’s how they think about pocket-sized musical devices. It’s using a new technology for an old idea. If you want a CD player or a casette player, by all means get one. And it’s not bad to use your Ipod as a glorified one of those. But really, it could/should be more.
Also, I counter that not every application of new technology to old aesthetics is bad. Ipods are a case in point. Also Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach is really wonderful. It’s fun, it has interesting sounds and it was a good idea. She got great timbres and it deserved the popularity that it achieved. Old music with a new instrument is only a problem if it’s not done well.
Also, Ondes Martenots are cool and I want one. They’re expressive as heck and very well suited to some solo performance. Also Messiaen wrote great stuff for them. They also have interesting timbres, partly because the speakers are sometimes behind sympathetic strongs or gongs or otherwise modified. Pure awesomeness.

Third Period

My last class today was one of those first meetings where the teacher talks about what he’s going to talk about. It’s a class largely about spatialization, but also sounds in space: how they work physically. The teacher is involved with wavefront synthesis. From what I gleamed from just the introduction to these subjects in general, my SuperCollider spatialization classes work the right way. I am going to add support for reflections very soon as my suspicions on how to do it are apparently correct. Anyway, if you get a really fast processor and a whole bunch of D->A converters, you could generalize my code to do wavefront stuff for you. Maybe I’ll make it automatically for n channels, just in case.
Also, the speed of sound varies according to atmospheric pressure and air temperature and humidity and whatnot. Perhaps I should get a little USB meteorological station. People are sensitive to very tiny differences in timing, so it may actually be perceptible.

The evening

I hate Dutch food. Why must everything have so much sugar in it? I am listening to Not Made of Stone by Polly Moller. It seems to be partly about our road trip to Vegas in 2003. I hope I am not Deep Eddie.
I really like my school. I have wanted to live in The Netherlands for a long time. I’m so happy I came.

And More Recently

Well, I haven’t posted for a while, but I haven’t written anything for a while either. Who wants to read through a glut of week old news? I’ve now been to every class at least once. I felt kind of negative about today’s classes, but maybe just because it’s Monday. Maybe if I didn’t take any Monday classes, I’d start to feel negative about Tuesdays. Class #1 is in MIDI. For real. Not “‘MIDI’ but really OSC” or really hardware devices or really anything else, but MIDI. Today we talked about the MIDI spec.

MIDI

MIDI should be dead technology and CV should be alive and kicking (maybe if they were, my opinions would be reversed… (probably would, alas)). The teacher gave a lengthy explanation, but didn’t talk about binary or hex representations, and the sick logic is not apparent without such knowledge. Let’s look at the anatomy of a midi message in binary. First, the first 4 bits: 1wxy. the 1 indicates a a new event of some kind. wxy indicates which event it is. Astute observers will note this leaves 8 possible events. This is kind of true. The next 4 bits (almost always – unless the first 4 bits are 1111) indicate the channel number. Obviously, there are 16 channels. Then you get two more possible bytes (some events only use one more byte. Some use no more.). Those bytes must start with 0 to indicate that they’re not new events. So you get seven bits to work with, which is to say, 0-127. Possible values thus range from 80-FF for byte 1, and 00-7F for bytes 2 and 3. A note on on channel one in binary is: 1001 0000 0 followed by a seven bit number indicating which key, followed by 0, followed by a 7 but number indicated amplitude. Half amplitude (“velocity”) on note 60 would be 1001 0000 0001 1110 0011 1111 (or 90 1E 3F)
Let me note that 7 bit amplitude really sucks.

Life

I want a PolyMoog. And a pony. And a bicycle. I’ve talked myself into getting one worth bringing home at the end. I also want an apartment. I have a landlord, I think. Having a landlord and not an apartment is definitely the worst of both worlds. Anyway I should have lodging any day now. Which is good because the guy at the reception desk today told me I couldn’t shower.
The analog studio here was two walls of synth modules including 16 oscillators. OMFG.
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terrorist!

Apparently, the white house only offers audio archives of radio addresses delivered in the last year. (This one is very instructive: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030208.html. what we without a shadow of adoubt know, or rather, maybe didn’t know so well.) This gives me less material than I had wanted, since I was going to mine all the radio addresses since Sept 2001. I was thinking of writing to the whitehouse and asking them to send me a CD of the old addresses. I was trying to figure out how to phrase this so that they wouldn’t figure out that i had artistic designs on the material or am registered Green. Also, since the web archives are all in Real format, I’ve been capturing them with Audio Hijack, which is time consuming and has the low quality associated with Real streams. But now I’ve got all the available radio addresses that mention “terrorist” or “terrorism” (but not just “terror”) and it’s 930 Mb of data. That’s way more than a CD will hold and CDs are 74 minutes. Maybe I’ll just work with what I have. ANyway, the low-fi could be nice.

not so shy

my shrink points out that people are normally shy approaching strangers and doesn’t seem to think that there’s anything wrong with me. I think she’s going to cut me off soon. then i’ll have to go back to whining to my friends.

acoustic awesomeness

but i did pay a compliment to a stranger today. I saw Mark Dresser play this evening and told him that his was the best bass playing that I’d ever heard. It was completely awesome. He’s got a pickup behind the neck, fingerboard sort of part of the bass, you know that thingee that people press the strings against to play notes… (go music shcool terminology!) So it pickups both the note he’s playing and the anti-note of the string left over. and he was doing this super cool finger buzz thing, where he intentionally didn’t press the string hard enough and it made this great buzzing sound. His string tunings were toally wild. He started writing the piece by coming up with the tunings. Then he wrote themes in those tunings. then he played the score by improvising on those themes. I’m not sure whether he just ordered them in real time or played variations on them. When I grow up, I wanna play standup bass. this very morning, when Alvin‘s composition seminar was waffling about what ensemble we’ll write for, Alvin threatened us, saying he would make us all write for solo bass. I think I’d be fine with that. If we get a string quartet,, I think I’ll write a bass feature.
bass = good
and speaking of Alvin’s class, we had a pianist come in to talk about John Cage’s Music of Changes and play it. He played the third and the fourth books. Alas, his name is escaping me, but he is an excellent pianist. and I was thinking, as I was listening to it, about what made the piece what it was. Every moment in it is beautiful. It’s a lovely piece filled with lovely and discreete (meaning totally seperated) events, which somehow blends togther into monotony. (i’m going to be burned at the stake like Joan of Arc by the music department. It’s bad enough that I like Phillip Glass’ new stuff.)
I read this book once about cartoon theory, which I can’t remeber the name of or the writer, but it’s pretty influential so far as comic books about the theory of comics go. and in it, they talk about using a lot of colors. Usisng a lot of red, for example, makes a bold statement. Or a lot of blue. Or a lot of yellow. or green. or whatever. But if you start using all of the bright colors, it starts to blend together somehow into grey. Or if you play too many frequencies at the same time, instead of getting the groovy complexness, it sounds like white noise. so what I think happens with Music of Changes is that you have to stay very much right in the present to enjoy it, because it is what it is while it’s going on. Every moment is pointalistic and lovely. and i think if i try to perceive it in any way but on a moment-by-moment or event-by-event way, it’s too complicated rfor my little brain and gets white-noisy.
However, the moments in it are so darn wonderful. I thinking of writing a program to generate some brass stuff based on the approximate algorythm that Cage used. But I think his timings are very virtuosically complex and are perhaps overburdening the player, so I want to combine the results with a performance algorthm invented by the total complexity guy. He wrote some pieces in the 60’s that players could play at the same time, but not togther, so as to create complex textures but still be fun to play. Music of Changes is an amalgamation of 8 parts, with incredibly complicatred timing. In fact, the timing is integral to the structure of the piece. My poorly conceived knock-off would have N parts, but be much freer on the timing. because it would be neat to have something with so many beautious moments that doesn’t take months to learn. and I want to write a brass ensemble piece, possibly as the second movement to my symphonic thingee

the plan

I’m going to capture all of the bush radio addresses since september 11th and get samples from them of him saying “terrorist.” I want to get all of his public pronouncements of “terrorist.” since he’s so rarely unscripted, it may actually be possible to download all his public pronouncements, since he usually just gives speeches and the white house (probably) archives those. I’m going to be listening to a lot of bush. And then trying to assemble all of the audio. I bet you’re glad you’re not my housemate (unless you’re Aaron, in which case you are my housemate).

class today

I co-lead a TA session on recording stuff in the electronic music studios and the recording studio. actually, it was 9:00 am, so i let Jascha do as much of the talking as possible. I’ve been told the way to cure my shyness in approaching strangers is to pay a compliment to a stranger every day. this makes me not want to leave my house, so I think I’ll start by saying “hi,” to strangers. but I won’t take candy from them.
My visionaries class will be discussing Joan of Arc on wednesday. Some of the reading makes claims disputed by Regine Pernoud, former head of the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans. I wish they offered a seminar just on Joan. That would be awesome. We’ve been reading all these visionaries and they’re just odd. there’s a whole lot of god talk, obviously. Some folks find Margery Kempe to be annoying because she’s extremely repetitive. She’s extremely trashy too. I don’t find the repetitiveness annoying. Is it because I’m a musician and music thrives on repitition? I don’t find the repititiveness annoying.
Wrote some stuff for my SuperCollider tutorial, which will hopefully constitute enough work to cover the two weeks that Ron was gone. If I may be so arrogant, I could put together the whole class project by myself in an afternoon (ok, a weekend), but I’m not sure how much flexibility is required or how much work I should do.

and then

I went to retrieve Xena from India House, but ended up staying for the evening and having my first encounter with what Connecticut terms “Chinese Food.” Oh dear, no no no no. The India House denizens were mocking me for my snobbishness in refusing to try local chinese food. I should not allow myself to be swayed so easily.
I’m starting to like the ice that’s everywhere. Yeah, it’s slippery, but it looks kind of cool and makes very nice cracking sounds when you step on it. Also, if it’s very cold out and you kick an ice formation, it makes a very satisfying shattering sound. Like breaking glass but lighter. And nobody cares if you break ice and it won’t cut anyone, but if you kick something too thick, it may hurt your foot. Last semester, an undergrad, Dan St. Clair, did a cool installation with sheets of ice shattering and I thought it was impressed, but only now do I get it. I’ve been trying to think of sonic things to do with ice, but Dan’s project covered everything that I can think of so far. He’s kind of brilliant.

yanni

So I met somebody the other day who said she liked Yanni, and I realized that I’d never actually heard anything by him, despite his being a staple of pledge-drive season public television in the bay area. I asked Tom and he said, “Yanni’s great! I actually really like him.” But tom used these same words of praise on Britney Spears, so I thought I should investigate this for myself.

The offical Yanni website only offers 33 and 36 second previews of his work, so I can only talk about his introductions, of which I just downloaded a few. And listened to them while Xena stared at me with a confused and disapproving expression, the dog version of “wtf?” It sounds like an instrumental version of Celine Dion, but performed on Casio Tones.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Casio tones. And I don’t know what year’s music I was listening to. Perhaps it was recorded in the heyday of Casio tones. anyway, someplace, I have one, I think. I’m fond of it. It’s a midi controller and the accordian sound is really nifty when passed through an overdriven low pass filter. Actually, it’s Christi‘s casio tone, so perhaps I will never see it again, since i’m not sure where it has gotten itself off to.
I feel like there may be a strong asthetic connection between Yanni, Thomas Kinkade and Chicken Soup for the Soul. It feels like it is strongly rooted in the middle class, perhaps distinctly American (except that Yanni is Greek and Celine Dion is Canadian). It’s something born in the last decade? Perhaps earlier? The middle class is the backbone of our society. the silent majority who tromps off to work every day, pays taxes (most taxes? the rich aren’t paying anymore) and sees little benefit except in public education. Without the middle class, the US would decend into chaos and open class warfare, or at least chaos, since open class warfare is already being waged in many places. The middle class, locked into debt, is locked into non-radicalism. they have the most to lose and the most fear of losing it. the cultural values that they embrace define us a society, as they are consumers, so the rich pander to them while ignoring the poor.
Therefore, the middle class asthetic is safe. the middle class is up to it’s eyeballs in student debt, credit card debt and morgage debt, they can’t afford to rock the boat. the asthetic is comforting. while existing a few paychecks or one serious illness away from bankruptcy, the need for comfort is strong. And it allows them dreams of togtherness, unity and a social safety net. While isolated in the suburbs, with no real community around them, who wouldn’t desire to look at pictures of cohesive village social structures?
Or maybe I’m readin too much into this
I have a CD with an interview with a Dadaist on it and he’s talking about how the thing to do seemed to be to attack the bourgeois, as apparently they were unaware that it had been done to death. then they did some investigation and found out that they were all bourgeois.
“Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . ” (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html)
I want to write a manifesto for an art movement. analyzing capitalist systems and Yanni is optional

There will be advantage in every movement

So yesterday, I went on a date

It was my first date since becoming single and, indeed, my first date since I was 18 years old. The last date I went on was with a 17 year old French horn player who was still in highschool. (Christi and I didn’t date until after we were a couple, so it doesn’t count.) Actually, the horn player may have been the only girl I ever went out on dates with. I had a girlfriend before that, but I didn’t go out with her so much as . . . well, nevermind.
I have a memory of feeling awkward and thinking that dating girls was, suprisingly, as awkward as dating boys. I actually dated quite a number of boys when I was 15 and 16. It was awkward and stupid and confusing, because sometimes I would like them, but I never liked them.
Anyway, I went out to a coffee shop in town yesterday and met a woman from a personal ad. She’s a Middletown resident, which means she can tell me things like where to get my car fixed and where folks hang out, which is very handy. I’m horribly shy with new people. I hardly spoke, I think. She told many stories. She’s a security gaurd and wants to be a cop and is some sort of volunteer with the Middletown PD, where she actually wears a full uniform (minus the pistol) and responds to certain types of calls. (I am a nice girl and didn’t ask about handcuffs.)
She’s also an aspiring poet and sent me a poem she wrote last November which she is very proud of. It won some sort of contest at poetry.com, through which she can get a publishng deal of some kind (that sounds a bit scammy). I think she outght to hold out for Chicken Soup for the Soul. Her poem is better than some of Tiffany‘s mom’s poetry and as I recall, Tiffany’s mom was published in Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul.
I gave her the url for my music, but haven’t heard anything back about it yet.
I didn’t feel any sort of spark. I’m not sure we share an asthetic or a worldview, but she seems fun. I talked very little and was uncertain what to say. I said virtually nothing of my background. when I pulled out my post-it pad to write down my phone number, the top post-it had a phone number and said “divorce lawyer” in large letters. she must think I’m escaping from a het marriage.
The real situation is much too complicated. I want to work it out with Christi, but when she said “maybe later,” the possible time she indicated was after my graduation. I told Angela last semester that it was foolish to pretend that I had any say whatsoever over my fate. I dunno what to do with myself over the next year and half, or indeed, any time after that either. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other and waiting to see what life gives me.

I’ve been making movements, with the idea that there will be some advantage in all of them, despite my lack of a plan or even a completely clear goal state. Then I looked again. The future state has advantage in every movement. And Change is slowly occuring. Right now, movements might bring disadvantage, for all I know. Or maybe it’s just important to keep busy. Or maybe the only direction to go is up.

Telephones

Right now, we live in a very visual culture. People make biological explinations for this, which I’m not prepared to discuss, but it’s important ot note that Western Culture was not always visual. During the Medieval period, most information was translated verbally. Thus listening was more important than seeing. Even literate people were trained to read aloud, rather than silently, so in literacy there was still a sence of an auditory component through which information was relayed.
Many factors in our modern culture have changed that. Television. Movies. Widespread silent literacy. Visual images have become the dominant communication medium. Sight is now culturally more important than listening.
Thus, when you sit in a room and talk with someone, you are doing so in a visually-dominated milleu. You look at them, looking for information cues, such as facial expression, twitching, body language, etc. This makes up at least half of the communication. You also detect other stimuli, which we are less aware of, such as pheremones. The voice alone is telling less than half the story.
This means, that under ideal circumstances of perfect audio reproduction, let’s say 24 bit audio at 96 k sampling, with a perfect condenser microphone, you’re getting less than half of the cues, especially the emotional cues. And most voice reproduction is not so ideal. Take, for example, the telephone. Under a perfectly clear connection, the sample rate is not so high, the bit rate is lower and many high and low frequencies have been filtered out so as to require less bandwidth. Most phones have very cheap dynamic mics and equally poor speakers. Subtleties are lost. Voice inflections, rich in emotional content, are compressed away, filtered out, not reproducable by the speakers and not picked up by the mic in the first place. This is under ideal circumstances, making a phone call to somebody down the street on a perfectly clear line. What percentage of content is actually getting through?
Now, think of a very long distance line. If you’re calling Europe, for example, your signal is bouncing off a satalite or going through a very long trans-atlantic cable. Your phone is probably analog, with heavy filtering of highs and lows. The signal gets converted to digital part way through by the phone company, using A to D converters that are probably less than perfect, probably passing again through a filter to clear out analog line noise (and taking some of your signal with it), then it gets sent across the atlantic, then is re-converted to analog, again with not a studio-quality D to A converter, or recompressed and sent out to your cell phone, which does it’s own D ot A conversion using whatever circuts are included in the thing. your voice has been routed a long way, filtered, compressed, converted A to D to A and maybe to D and A another time again, and otherwise mangled. Some of your packets were probably lost. You’re lucky if there’s not static or echo or both.
On the one hand, it’s entirely astoundingly miraculous that you can be standing in Connecticut and hear the apartment noises of dinner being cooked in an apartment in France, while it’s actually happening. On the other hand, how much data is really getting through? It’s something like a cruel joke, in that it implies that communication is possible, but then drops so many pieces of it, making communication extremely difficult.
Having phone conversations with strangers works well because there’s often very little emotional content. Having phone conversation with someone you see frequently can also work well. We are creatures of habit. You are used to reading their cues, because you spend time around them and have the full picture of their cues fresh in your mind. But that gets lost if it’s not practiced. The cues that you can read over the phone, because you read them all the time in person, get less clear over times of seperation. Thus the phone, once a handy way of saying you’d be a few minutes late to dinner, subtly turns against you as the distance and time seperating you grows.
The parable of the frog not jumping out of a slowly heating pot and getting cooked, alas, is not based in fact. Nevertheless, it can take time to realize that the phone is not helping things. The seeming miraculousness of it disguises it’s evil intent. It’s like the devil appearing to the unsuspecting and performing false signs and miracles to lead would-be visionaries into heresy.
It is barely possible to have an emotional conversation in a long distance phone call. It is impossible to conduct a relationship over the phone. What is the answer to this dilemna?

Ok, so there must be both sincerity and an appearance of dignity. sincerity, obviously, must be felt in the heart. But the dignity is something in between. To put on dignity entirely for show, would lack sincerity. However, the feeling of dignity in the heart is not specifically called for. What is called for is merely the appearance, but mixed with sincerity.

There is also immaturity, “the looking of a lad.” Perhaps maturity would mean dignity felt in the heart. Perhaps for the immature, it is enough to work sincerely to appear dignified, which is to try to be dignified, but fake it when you have to. In any case, it’s a call to grow up and to approach things maturely. Hildegard of Bingen (who I’m studying in Medieval Visionaries class) had a vision of seven vices and seven virtues. One of the vices had the appearance of a dog and said that it would run dog-like towards everyone and be playful and happy forever. The virtue responded by condemning the vice’s immaturity. Running dog-like towards people both lacks maturity and dignity.
Therefore, the solutions called for are sincere, restrained and mature. Romantic comedy-type actions are therefore not called for. The failed actions of the past are similarly not called for. They don’t work. And they’re not mature: they are patterns formed in youth that have not been modified. They are regrettable in grown-ups.
The situation will be slow to change, but will end well. Taking action is advised. Even drastic action (presumably as long as it is sincere and mature and appears diginified) will lead to good things. However, it’s presumable that the slow change along with the necessity of dignity means that any drastic action must be thoughtful. Large actions must be weighed carefully, as impetuousness is immature, even if it is sincere.
I explained this to my shrink and she asked if the appearance of dignity was a large concern of mine. I said I wanted to do the right thing. Of course, there are many right things rather than a single correct course of action. Indeed, there may be advantage in every movement undertaken, although there may be varying degrees of advantage and different kinds of advantage in different life arenas. My shrink points out that crises can lead to a lot of growth, for example.
I’m using this as a platform from which to try to maintain my mood of cautious optomism. It looks more dignified than despair.

Grasping at straws

Christi’s blog says “not now.” Which means “maybe later.” Right?

I was reading about John Cage’s use of the I Ching. As soon as he could, he used a computer program. So I found one on the web. At least it’s using the right algorythm, whereas I was not, since you have to toss a coin 18 times, not just six.

The present is embodied in Hexagram 20 – Kuan (Contemplation): He should be like the worshipper who has washed his hands, but not yet presented his offerings. There must be sincerity and an appearance of dignity, commanding reverent regard.
The first (bottommost) line, divided, shows the looking of a lad – not blamable in men of inferior rank, but matter for regret in superior men.
The situation is evolving slowly, and Yang (the active masculine force) is gaining ground.
The future is embodied in Hexagram 42 – I (Increase): There will be advantage in every movement which shall be undertaken, and it will even be advantageous to cross the great stream.

Appearance of dignity, well, um, moving right along . . . “slow evolution” and “great advantage” are sounding good. Polly told me that Jupiter is in retrograde for the next three months or so, which makes starting new projects difficult. I’m mixing astrology and the I Ching . . . because I am a hippy new ager with an appearance of dignity.
Anthony Braxton came over today and left his laptop behind for me to install stuff on. He’s in the supercollider tutorial and it met at my house today because Ron, the teacher, is off in China.

Alas, I am filled with woe and at a loss as to what to do with myself. Why did I break up with christi if I didn’t want to breakup with Christi? after she told me not to come to paris, my feelings got hurt with a high percentage of the phone conversations we had. then she announced she was showing up suddenly. i wanted space from all of it. i wanted it to stop. i didn’t know what to do. i was worried about things that we hadn’t dealt with from the past. i needed time to think. i told her we were breaking up and then didn’t speak to her for three weeks. and thought about it. and thought about what i wanted from a relationship. and realized that christi and pretty much wanted the same things and that i love her and she sent email saying she loved me.

but, of course, love conquers nothing.
I was picking up cues. i thought she’d want to work it out. who wouldn’t want a low stress, low-drama relationship with me, where reliability was stressed and there were good boundaries and space and stuff?

of course, getting there would be a bit of work. it seemed possible. we had similar goals in mind. after thinking for three weeks, i understood more of what was going on. i felt guilt. i had told christi i would always be there for her and she was in distress, which i had caused, and i wasn’t there for her. i always wanted to be more of an ameloriating factor, rather than a stressing factor. I thought about family. family is very important to me. i felt like a member of her family. she was accepted as a member of mine. a couple weeks before she died, my grandma told christi that she thought of her as granddaughter. how could I just walk away from that? what about responsibilities? what about marriage vows? what about nine years together? what about love?
not that it matters anymore, but i think it might have been better to tell her that i was distressed by our phone onversations rather than not speaking to her for three weeks. hindsight. alas alac woe
although i didn’t act it, i did have a lot invested in this. my heart for example.
there’s so much i wish i could take back or that i’d done differently. all is for naught. the past can’t be changed. the future can’t be fixed. if you make bad decisions, you have to live with them forever. it’s very cold here. there’s piles of snow on the ground. it can be below freezing and snowy for ten days in a row and then four degrees above freezing for one day and then ten degrees below freezing for the next month, but in that one warm day, all the snow disappears. what happens afterwards doesn’t change the damage that’s already been done.
everything is essentially hopeless