Tag: celesteh

Musically Inclined

Well, yesterday was mother’s day, a day I had been actively dreading since October. It wasn’t actually that bad. I guess I worked it all out in the pre-dread. Unlike my birthday, where I didn’t expect to feel miserable around at all, and yet I did. It was horrible, despite cool people and cool events. Anyway, the next date on the dread calendar is June 21st, when my mom would turn 66, but will not. Christi is playing that night at the Chapel of the chimes concert. Yes, the one you’ve heard of. Yes, the huge, big deal. Yes, it’s in a mausoleum. I’m estatic for Christi, but still full of dread.
Perhaps keeping busy is what made Mother’s Day ok. I had band practice for about five hours with Tennis Roberts. Our songs are now ending ok. Chand has taken to mixing his electronic drum sounds (he plays an electronic kit) with a vocoder to other source sounds. It sounds very industrial and awesome with pink noise. With other source files, I’m not so sure about it. We’re a sort of a tonal band and it’s hard to play along with a tape where you don’t know the tones, especially if the tones are from a random sample and hold thing, so they’re not in any particular temperment. Which would be the tones on the mp3s that I made that Chand is using. Anyway, it doesn’t matter that much, since I don’t play in any particular temperment anyway. The open notes are in tune, but the rest is not.
I’m sort of getting into tuning right now. Ellen Fullman has a piece called “Harmonic Cross Sweep” on her album Change of Direction. The piece blows my mind. Go listen to the mp3. It’s just intoned microtonal coolness. So I started reading Harry Partch, since he wrote about Just Intonation and influenced everyone just intoned these days. But he can’t stop ranting. In his book Genesis of a Music, he complains about how cello players are so anal they won’t even let you take an awl to their finger board. It takes him a long time to explain the tuning thing, so I joined the Just Intonation Network and I’m reading their primer text on tunings. It’s a much easier read than Partch and is very informative. But really, the biggest influence on my thoughts about tuning was Kendon.
The last time I played bass guitar in a band before this one, it was called Trap Door Spirder Woman or the Kraft Ebbings or somehting. We never played outside of Kendon’s basement, except to play in my basement. Kendon had this guitar where the nech was cracked. It was nearly broken in two. He was always tuning it in between ever song. I kind of got into the sound of him tuning. It was very cool. It should have been a song. And he always had to tune because after the first three chords, everything was different, since the guitar neck wasn’t rigid. The situation made Kendon unhappy. He was saving up for a new guitar. But it was awesome. It was so completely out of tune screwed up bad that it was great. Really, equal temperment is all out of tune. This broken guitar was just the next step on a broken tuning. But it was beautifully broken.
So with Tennis Roberts, I started playing Tammy’s fretless bass with the thought that I could be out of tune all the time. I could put notes in between the notes. I could put four steps where three belong. I could be always completely, sharply off. It’s awesome.

Back from the South

So Thursday afternoon, Christi and I drove down to LA. We were down to visit my cousin, the 86-year-old nun. This time, we decided to get a hotel room instead of staying at the convent, which was good because we didn’t get in until 11:00 and the convent locks up at 9:00. But the convent lodging is free and actually, the beds are more comfortable, which is not what one would expect. The hotel room had a gigantic king or perhaps emporer sized bed. It was bigger than Mitch’s boat. Anyway, the convent does not offer beds that sleep six, but I’m digressing here.
On Friday morning, we found Catherine, my cousin. If you ever ask her what she wants to do, she says, “Walk.” Her vision is very impaired, so she can’t walk very quickly by herself, so she likes it when folks take her hand and take her jogging around. So we walked around the grounds of the Carondelet center and then took a lunch break. She then required a nap, so Christi and I talked to some of the other nuns in the convalescent wing of the convent. Christi was wearing a T-shirt that said “Oakland” on it, so one nun kept repeating that she loved Oakland and wished she was there now. This is actually a common theme among many of the women there. My cousin used to also frequently express a desire to be in Okaland rather than LA. Strangely, I feel the same way.
We took my cousin out to dinner at a place called Hamburger Hamlet. The food was better than the convent food and there were actually a lot of disabled people patronizing the place, so the waiter was cool. Catherine ate a ton of food and talked about how her last visitor took her to the beach and they rented a tandem bike. I can’t quite picture it. And Catherine ordered a martini with dinner. As we went back to the convent, she instructed us to not let anyone catch on that she had this martini, so I shouldn’t be telling you this (keep it quiet), but she was totally loopy. It was like sneaking into a college dorm. Actually, it’s exactly like a college dorm, since the convent is attached to Mount St. Mary’s College, which the nuns run (ran?). It seems like everyone at the convent now went to the Mount and my cousin tuaght there. Many of the sisters were her students. Catherine did research on disease carrying insects, mostly ticks but also misquitos. One of her former students reminisced about volunteering to let the skeeters bite her. Apparently, Catherine had asked for volunteers to feed them. Anther sister said she had taken logic from Catherine, which was not her normal subject. Catherine had told them that next she was going to teach the chior because her mother played the organ.
Anyway, she has a half a martini limit and it was 5:00 and she was going to bed.
Christi had picked up a copy of the LA Weekly and we looked for music listings. They were very very sparse. To read that paper, you would think there was no music in LA. I know that’s not true, but I have no idea how to find out about music. We probably should have gone to a play or something, since that what’s the region’s forte, but instead, Christi proposed that we go to Amoeba music. This destination had the advantage of being on Sunset Blvd. We knoe how to find Sunset. We have no map of LA and for some reason are never going to acquire one, even though it seems like having one might be a good idea.
We drove all the way down Sunset from Brentwood to Hollywood. This takes one past Bel Air, UCLA, the Sunset Strip and a few other landmarks.
The Sunset Strip seems to be a part of Disney Land that escaped and decided to cater to grown ups. And how many valets work in the LA region? Why do LA folks love their cars so so so much when there’s no room to park them and they have to hire other people to do it for them?
The Amoeba in Hollywood is extremely huge. The 20th Century Classical section, however, is smaller than the Berkeley store. There is a section dedicated to Daniel Lentz. To find Alvin Lucier, you have to look under the shelves in the back. So went back to our hotel.
The Denny’s attached to our hotel had a C rating from the health department. the best thing about LA is that all the restaurants get grades from the health dept and then have to post them. I wish we had that around here.
Saturday morning, we went back to the convent and took Catherine to Santa Monica. We walked on the beach and rode the ferris wheel and then bought a giant box of jube jube candies. then we decided to go to an Indian place that Christi knew about, but alas it was closed. Catherine was disappointed. “I’ve only had indian food once before.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Well, I had a lot of it in Kenya, but I’ve only had it once before in the US.”
So I asked her about Kenya. She’s been there twice. Mostly, it’s best to let Catherine reminisce on her own rather than ask questions, because it’s easier to follow when she’s just telling a story. She’s been to forty countries in Europe and Africa doing research. She discovered the existance of pheremones in ticks. When she was teaching in Prague, she had special dispensation nto to wear a habit, was not allowed to talk about God, belonged to the underground, and suffered a massive stroke, but didn’t come home because she didn’t want to abandon her students. One of the nuns is recording Catherine’s stories and transcribing them. I’ve very glad to hear that.
We went to another restaurant and Catherine ate a mountain of food and then went back to the convent so she could nap. It was graduation day at the Mount, so there was a lot of extra traffic and protesters.
The Sanchez sisters, some local politicians, were giving the commencement address. A bunch of white protesters, many of them men, were holding pictures of white dead babies (not fetuses, they use real, murdered babies for those photos) and signs explaining that the Sanchez sisters were in favor of abortion and shouldn’t be speaking at a Catholic school. I talked very briefly with a cmpus administrator and she said that the protesters felt like the school was hipocritical and insufficiently Catholic.
You could see the protesters from the convent, but not from the school. I don’t know much about the Mount, aside from talking to many elderly alumnai and former teachers, but I have a hard time beliving it could be insufficiently Catholic. The nuns are intensely, completely spiritual. They pray constantly. Everything many of them do is thoughtful and prayerful. (There was note on the announcement board asking them to pray for the Lakers to win.) Anyway, while my cousin napped, Christi and I went to sit away from the graduation and the protesters in a little garden. One of the nuns, clearly stressed out from being picketted, came and told us to leave. She thought we were wayward protesters and apologized when we explained that we weren’t, but we left anyway to go get coffee.
when we came back for dinner, most of the protesters had left, but one white guy in a suit was holding a sign that said that Kathy Ireland opposses abortion. I often get my moral direction from super models. Also my financial advice. How does she feel about my mutual fund?
The nuns were all abuzz about being protested. “I think it was a bunch of pro-lifers.” one said. There is a big banner on the front of the convent (which you can’t see from the road, where the picketers were gathered), which announces that the Sisters are for peace. I imagine that few of the “pro-lifers” were for peace. Real-live humans aren’t as important as unborn ones, I guess. I strongly suspect that the majority of the nuns are pro-choice. Anyway, apparently the TV news was giving a lot of coverage to the protest. And we talked about mother’s day. Prayers were offered for everyone’s mother. I mentioned that mother’s day used to be “Mother’s Day for Peace,” where pacafist women marched sayin that they weren’t raising their children to be killed off in wars. I dig it a lot. So did they.
And then we left, to drive back in time from band practice today. My cousin is the happiest person I know.

Don’t Worry, It’s Art.

So we showed up early in the castro and assembled our water jug and bowling ball wind chime and T & L were untangling their climbing gear in preperation for scaling the traffic light, when it started to rain heavily. So we started assembling another wind chime instead. It has some pipes, bike parts, a mailbox, a christmas tree stand, an empty gas can, a piece of shelving. lots of metal. It was really pouring, so we crossed through the undercrossing, to hang it from the railing of the Muni station at Harvey Milk Plaza. We had hoisted it down and were about to clip it into place when the station agent appeared with a cop who told us “no.”
We must have been called in as a homeland security threat, because there were suddenly about ten cop cars cruising the castro (where no cops had been earlier) and a news van kept driving around looking at the Muni station also. All the cops slowed down to look at us as we packed it back in. So we went to brunch. It was still early. We decided to abandon the lightpole idea, as it would have the cops back out again in a second. So we decided to wait until other musicians arrived and set up then, to dilute attention and because we realized that we probably wouldn’t be able to just leave the windchimes up all day. We could put them up during the Music Circus and take them down when the cops told us to again. Good plan.
So noon, the start time, came and went with no sign of anyone connected to the festival. Around 12:30, the tuba player from the BLO showed up and said his group was starting at 1:00. Some people from our mass email started to arrive, but still no other musicians. We decided that one other group was good enough and went to grab the water bottle and bowling ball chime, because it looks innocuos and was 100% ready to go. It was up within 5 minutes. Pictures were taken. Jesse, the tuba player and his friends played saint candles for a while and then packed it in. So we did too.
We hung one of our windchimes for about 1 – 1.5 hours with no incident and very little notice by anyone. We debated hanging the mailbox and gasoline can one again (was it the gasoline can that started the controversy with the muni station agent and the police?), but we were tired. None of the festival organizers appeared. No other musicians arrived. It was very strange.
I felt like our installation needed a label, so people would know what it was and then engage it somehow. But also felt like they needed to be reassured, so that ten cop cars and a news van wouldn’t appear. So we need two signs. One will say “Windchimes” and have an arrow pointing at them. And the other will say, “Don’t Worry. It’s Art.”

Band Practice

Rehersal with the flute band went for four hours today. 4.25 hours, actually. That’s a long time to be pressing a scab to a string. And I had an important realization: I like Tammy’s bass a lot more than I like my bass. I thought it was 3/4 size, but it’s actually the same, but the neck is narrower, so it feels smaller and is easier to play. But maybe it is smaller than a fretless would normally be. Anyway, it has a great sound and is very comfortable. My bass is theoretically considered to be better than hers. Maybe she’ll trade. OTOH, my grandma gave me my bass as a graduation present, from highschool. Everything becomes sentimental when it’s a gift from a dead person. I have a copy of the book Lonesome Dove, which I have zero desire to read, but don’t want to get rid of because my mom lent it to me. Anyway, maybe I could trade something else to Tammy for her bass, like a semi-functional church organ. Or we could just trade while I’m at school with an option to trade back later? Perhaps I should discuss this with her instead of rambling on about it in my blog.
My other band, Tennis Roberts may or may not have a gig tomorrow night, but I have no idea because Mitch has not called or emailed. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow morning when we’re hanging installations in the castro for the IDEA Ensemble as a part of the thingamajigs festival. It’s a very musical weekend. Anyway, if it turns out that TR will be playing tomorrow night, I’ll be playing Tammy’s bass! Isn’t that exciting? It would be nice if I knew, cuz we could make an email list and tell folks, and maybe somebody could make little quarter-size flyers about the band with contact info, so that if anybody wanted to book us or something, they could do that. It’s the sort of thing you want to know ahead of time. *cough*cough*

Getting Rid of Books

I have a lot of books. Christi’s dad built us a great bookshelf to hold all of our books, but we filled it up and had to get several Billy bookcases from Ikea. This is partly because we live down the street from an almost-free bookseller. Christi used to walk past the bookseller every day after work and come home with an armload of books. After she quit working for Nolo, the influx of books slowed, but did not stop. Christi’s parents live in Portland, and every time we isit, we go to Powells Books (http://www.powells.com), the world’s largest bookstore and buy even more books. We could open a library of books on orchestration and leftist political tracts. Whenever we go to Powells, Christi makes a bee-line for the music section and I head over to the Chomsky shelf. We rendezvous later in science fiction. But we don’t have as many sci-fi books as you might expect. Probably because our arms are already full of other books.
Anyway. I really like books, although I do not read nearly as often as I used to. I even went through a period of no reading at all. The boom years were really a culturally dark time. I read again now, but not nearly as quickly as I get new books. Fortunately, Chrsti reads extremely quickly and has read almost everything in the house, which now has more books than my grade school’s library, although less science fiction.
Since I will shortly be moving a long distance away, I’m making a stack of books to be sold. It is a very small stack so far. I look at a book and I either have read it through, have started it, was assigned it for school, but never read it, or just never read it. So either I started or finished it and I liked it, or I feel guilty for not finishing it or not reading it and want to keep it until I do finish it. There are very few books that I don’t like. Really. So the stack of books to sell includes science fictions that are too auful to even be campy (although I kind of liked hem anyway, in a campy sort of way) and right-wing political tracts. All of the rest of our books are either nice, have the potential of being nice, once I get around to reading them or must belong to Christi. I know I didn’t buy Monica’s Story, so it must be hers.

Learn Language Audio Course

Man, those things are useless. what’s the gender of the noun? who knows? but my suitcase is on the train! (oh no!)
Piece idea: Audio course in esperanto. starts out straightforward with sections you would expect. “Section 1 – Greetings” “Aro Unu – Salutojn” But starts getting progressively stranger. and the “boing” between sections gets more elaborate, until it starts overlapping with the language section and turns into full pieces of music. “boooing zooom bewww bweeee excuse me, my hamster is rabid…” etc. all of this will be microtonal, of course…
I need a fluent esperanto collaborator. i wonder if ed would do it?
wait, maybe i should do it in german, since i’ll have to take a test in it. Verzeihung! Mein Hamster hat die Tollwut. (I wonder if “rabies” will be on the exam…)
Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, did a funny, short phrasebook for interstellar travellers. It has phrases like, “That is my travelling companion. It is not a tip. I will call the manager.” It would be perfect, especially with “hello”, “goodbye”, “nice to meet you” spliced in at the beginning. The language would have to be Esperanto or Klingon or something, since a national language might be offensive in that context. I wonder if she would go for it.

Tuning (or Math Is Hard)

I’m readin Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music to try to find out how this just intonation thing works. Briefly, Just intonation is “natural” tuning based on ratios. Think of a guitar string: if you divide it in half, you get an octave. If you divide it by three you get a fith (sort of). All tunings until recently were based on fractions. Then we switched to irrational numbers. So your piano is now tuned irrationally. (I always suspected as much.)
Harry Partch’s book is out of print. This is not actually shocking. The first section is a history of opera and vocal music from Plato through the early twentieth century, seen as a fight between those who think notes out to mirror words and those who think words ought to be bended or exaggerated to fit notes. There are definitely bits of wisdom in there, but my goodness, it’s not an easy read. He certainly has a liking for five dollar words. Why use a short word when a longer one will do? His thesis (whatever it is) becomes a victim of unintended irony. The notes ought to be working for the words, but with the words he uses, I think Webster’s dictionary is driving his writing. Or maybe he studied for the GREs much harder than I did.
Then comes the mathematical part. I foolishly thought I had some idea of just intonation because of a computer program I wrote around fifth or eigth grade. I had programmed the computer (in BASIC, of course) to play several Christmas Carols. But I thought it would be cool if I could program it (in BASIC) to write new songs and play them. This started very simply:
playsound(random(), 2); play a “random” pitch for two miliseconds. This is, incidentally, the sound played by the computer game Gauntlet when you exit a level. My brother was kind of excited. But it’s not really very musical, so I decided to generate arpegios.
An arpegio is a “broken chord.” It is all the notes of a particular chord played sequentially instead of all at once. An arpegio on C would play C, then E, then G, (then maybe high C followed by G,) then E, then C. Do Mi Sol Mi Do. My program picked a pitch in the scales that we’re used to (A= 440 Hz) and generated an arpegio on top of it using fractions. Let $N be the starting pitch.
$sol = $N * 3 / 2; This is easy to deduce because of the overtone series on a brass instrument. (I’m ignoring transposition here.) The pedal tone on a trumpet is C. The low open note on a trumpet is C, one octave higher. The next open note is G. A pedal tone is a note that isn’t usually played as it’s too low and hard to produce. The wavelength of a pedaltone is equal to the length of the horn. The low open note, one octave higher, has a wavelength equal to half the length of the horn. The next open note is one third of the length of the horn. The next note, another octave of C, is equal to one quarter the length of the horn. All open notes on a trumpet or baritone or tuba or whatever have a whole number relationship to the length of the horn.
The frequncies are related by the same whole note ratio, but inversely. The first open note (above the pedal tone) uses half the horn and is double the frequency (in Hz). The next open note uses one third of the horn and is triple the frequency of the pedal tone. So it you had a brass horn where the pedal tone was A (220 Hz), the first open tone would be 440 hz (the note A) and the next open tone would be 660 Hz (the note E). Ok, now, see how A is both 220 and 440? It’s also 110 and 880. Every octave is a doubling of frequency. If you want to find a pitch one octave higher, then you multiply by 2. If you want the octave lower, you divide by two. This sounds right. If your piano is perefctly in tune, every A on it will be double the frequency of the A below and half the frequency of the A above. If you could see the sine waves, they would line up exactly and be perfectly in tune with each other.
Ok, back to my arpegio program from my youth. The fifth note in the major scale, Sol, is the second open note on my trumpet and the frequency is equal to three times the pedal tone. So if you take the first note of your arpegio and mutiply the Hz by three, you get a fifth, but it’s one octave too high. Ah, but we can lower it one octave by dividing the frequency in half. So
$sol = $n * 3 / 2; Yay!
I also figured out the third and was able to play arpegios with wild abandon. I’d pick some pitch from an array that contained the Hz for one octave to the Equally Tempered Scale, generate an arpegio on top of it, then pick another pitch from the same array and then play an arpegio on top of it, then pick . . .. I really liked infinite loops. My favorite command in BASIC was “goto.”
And so, with great anticipation, I started up my program and the first arpegio sounded great, but the on the next one, the first note sounded . . . off. And on the next one, the first note sounded terrible! What was going on?
Luckily for me, my father had designed an electronic organ only a few years earlier. (He wasn’t great for camping trips, but man, he was 100% there for technology explainations, even if he couldn’t quite manage to disuade me from my goto obessision, he was great for helping me debug stuff.) The problem? Mixing tuning systems! things that sound “right” in fractional, just intoned systems, sound really really right. But it has some problems. Everything is tuned perfectly to the starting pitch. But if you switch keys, without retuning, everything sounds off. All the distances are perfect from C for the notes in the C scale, for example, but the fractions are off from what they ought to be if you start playing in D. Take my word for this, I don’t have a soundfile to illustrate it, nor the math to work it all out here. But this a problem in tuning, for every tuning, is that the tuning can only be perfect in one key at a time.
this was “solved” with equal temperment. everything in equal temperment is equally out of tune. Tuning is based on irrational numbers instead of re-tweaked fractions. All the octaves in equal temperment are perfect. Everything else is off. If you have pitch N, to figure out the pictch one semitone above N (remember that there are twelve “semitones”, or “half steps” or distinct piches in every octave),
N[m+1] = N[m] * (1 + N[m] *2^^(1/12)); or, more generally, N[m+x] = N[m] * (1 + N[m] *2^^(x/12)); Got that? It’s irrational. It’s logarythmic. All the thirds sound kind of wrong. It’s lead to all sort of dissonance and twelve-tone systems and post-diatonic harmony and hell, post-tuned music like noise. Or maybe all the debauchery would have happned anyway. But you can see how fractions are a LOT easier to think about.
which brings us back to Harry Partch, whom I am reading to better understand tuning, so I can do perfectly just intoned, tuned works for computer. Because the computer can re-tune instantly, should a key change be required. Also, there’s no reason why the octave need have twelve tones in it. It could have thirteen, or twenty, or five. And with a perfect understand of these fractional systems, I could write even more music-producing computer programs, but not in BASIC and with fewer GOTO staements (you can see that this has been a work-in-progress for a long time.)
So you’d think, with my (admittedly, minimal) experience with just intonation, I would be able to get something out of this book. This is what it says:

In the ratio 3/2, 2 represents 1/1, the lower limit of the 2/1. the tone at the upper limit of the 2/1 may be represented by 4 (a doubling of 2); hence the interval from the 3 of 3/2 to this upper limit of the 2/1 is the interval from 3 to 4, or 4/3, which is therefor the complement of 3/2 within the 2/1; the two intervals might be expressed thus: 2:3:4. . ..

ummmmmm  yeah  ummmmm  I have no idea what that says. Not even a little clue. It cuold all be in German, for what I can understand of it (disturbingly, I have forgotten all of my German…). Maybe I should stick to equal temperment. Or to noise.

Improv Music

Not long ago, I comment to a friend, “I don’t like improv music.” That’s not actually true. I love Deep Listening Band and I enjoy the Circle Trio, both headed up by Pauline Oliveros. And heck, I play in an improv rock band. And I like jazz solos. I like non-competitive improv music. For a while, I thought I could make a claim about female-dominated improv, versus male dominated improv, but it doesn’t work. Pauline Oliveros may well be the best improv artist ever, but Anthony Braxton is also very good and he’s definitely not female. I think it just must be very difficult to play improv music and many bands, for whatever reason, become competitive and play thoughtlessly. Certainly competitive, thoughtless music is not limitted to improv, but I think that it’s harder to get to the next level while improving. So, I’d like to clarify my comment. “I don’t like improv music unless it’s good.”
I think I also need to make a resolution to be less negative. What I mean is, to be more positive. Yeah. I love making resolutions for the same reason I like predictability. I can keep making the same resolutions year after year after year. I just need to change the date. I resolve to be more positive, to quit picking on Christi and to play more gigs, put out a new CD and generally improve my music career. yeah. this year will be different. this year will be great. I know it’s April and not January, but it takes me a few months to get the hang of new years.

Bathtubs for tubas

So I spent yesterday trying to get my new sousaphone into working order. It’s not actually new. It’s very very used. It came in a refrigerator box filled with packing peanuts, shredded paper and trash. I emptied out the box looking for the gooseneck. Whoever oppened the box openned it from the bottom, so at the very bottom of the pile, I found a note explaining that the gooseneck was “mislaid.” But it was all worth while, because Tiffany discovered a tuba mouthpiece amid the rubble, which included dirty, used foam, house insulation, bottle caps, used matches, etc all smelling like ashtray. Very odd packing maeterial, but the shipping was hella cheap.
I took the horn outside and started hosing it out. Inside were spiderwebs and spare packing peanuts. Every solder joint leaked water, but that’s ok. If they have bad air leaks, I can either try to resolder them or just duct tape it. Eventually, the odor of the tuba went from nasty-old-tuba smell to odorless, so I left it in the sun to dry and maybe disinfect. I mean, would you want to put your mouth on something you had just hosed spider egg sacks out of, unless it spent some time in the sun first?
Of course, before hosing it out, I pulled out all of the valves. They’re piston valves and they seem to be made out of brass, which is kind of unusual. I wanted to clean them, but I don’t own any brasso, and I didn’t really want to buy any, so I hit the ecology center website looking for some earth-friendly brass cleaning alternative. it suggested katsup. I swear, if some enviro group told me to cure headaches by hitting myself on the head repeatedly, I’d try it. And then, in conversations about headache remedies, I would casually mention it and then add, anecdotally, “but it didn’t work for me.”
So I rubbed katsup on all the vales and then rinsed them several times. Then I hauled the tuba back inside and yanked all the tuning slides out. There’s a trick to this. Loop a dishtowel through the slide and use it to yank it out. You won’t hurt the horn, but if the slide isn’t frozen, it’ll come out. So I pulled the slides out, ran a trombone snake through them a bunch of times and then rubbed the shiny parts of them with katsup. I think Christi and Tiffany think that I’m insane.
The valves move pretty well and the slides will budge if you pull on them. They’re not perfect, but I don’t feel like I should invest the money to take them to a shop. the main body of the horn is still filty, since I coulsn’t submerge it, I didn’t run a snake through it. I’d need a jacuzzi tub. I always thought those were silly and useless. They take a kajillion gallons ot fill up and then they get gradually cold and you have to drain the whole thing and start over next time. I mean, why not just get a hottub? But you can’t wash a tuba in a hottub! Old tuba grease would cause all sort of problems. But you could wash it in jacauzzi tuba! You’d probably want to keep the water jets turned off while doing it. So these giant bathtubs make sense for tuba players. I’m sure that when my parents had one put in, they somehow intuitted that I would one day take up the tuba, and then, in my late twenties, long after I had left home, I would come back to my dear widowed father and ask if I could wash my sousaphone in his bathtub.
As soon as I find a gooseneck, where “find” means “buy,” I can check out how playable the horn is. Hopefully, I can do this tomorrow, since the Brass Liberation Orchestra is playing at a protest outside of Lockheed MArtin in Sunnyvale on Tuesday morning.

Holiday Madness

I was going to write a letter about this, but I’m not sure who I should write a letter to. I would like to adress a serious problem in christian traditions. That problem is that they got the holidays in the wrong order.
Let’s look at Easter. First, look at the pre-christian aspects of it. The symbols associated with it are eggs, chicks, baby bunnies, flowers, etc. This holiday is clearly about fertility and birth. Obviously. It’s spring time! The leaves are coming back on the trees! Sumer is a cumin in, loudly sing cuco! The bulls now farteth, etc. It’s time to mate your livestock and dust off your plow. But what is the christian holiday about? Death! Death and resurrection. It’s a great theme for midwinter, or even autumn, but it has no place in springtime.
Now, take a peek a Christmas. The pre-christian traditions associated with the solstice are harder to sort out, as the non-christian aspects of it continue to evolve. Santa Clause is a new figure on the Christmas scene. But some symbols, like stars and Christmas trees and wreaths and evergreen stuff is part of a very old tradition to remind us that even though much of the world is dead, life will return. The Christian holiday, instead of being about something sensible like death and resurrection is a birth holiday. How does that tie in to the winter solstice??
The autumn holiday, at least makes sence. Halloween (Sam Hain) is not a major holiday on anybody’s calendar except for Mars candy company. But the Christian feast of All Saints and All Souls (Day of the Dead) is about death, as it should be. There, at least, things are as they should be.
I know my analysis here is terribly northern-hemisphere-centric. Does a birth celebration make more sense at the summer solstice instead of the winter one? At least Easter works with the seasons there. It’s almost as if the folks scheduling the holy calendar had a hunch that the season were backwards someplace else that they might one day sail to, colonize and convert. And they thought to themselves, “some part of this thing has to make sense, or the folks with backwards seasons will never sign up.”
Now, as a legacy of some counsil held hundreds and hundreds of years ago, it seems like we’re stuck with a non-sensical system. But we can work together to change this. Write your Cardinal! We must demand that the Easter and Christamas be switched around in the norhtern hemishpere and appropriately re-ordered to match the seasons in the southern hemisphere.
Write your archbishop! Write the pope! We must lobby at all levels!