music – Page 6 – Les said, the better II

It’s that time of year

At the very end of December people’s minds turn to two things. Submissions for ICMC and New Years Resolutions!

Resolutions

Every year I resolve to do the same things. Play more gigs, write more music, work harder, etc. But I know a few people who have made much more extreme, massively life-style altering resolutions. I’ve contacted them recently to see how those went and will be reporting on it, citizen-journalist interview style, in the next few days. If you made a major resolution and want to tell people about it via my blog, please contact me.

ICMC

When I was working on my MA, I actually had a much better method of workflow. When I was writing a piece, I would blog drafts of it and solicit feedback and I would make presentations of it as a work in progress at public venues. I need to start doing this again. Now, I mostly work alone, only demo-ing my stuff for my supervisor and then submit it to things that want a premiere. And I don’t write about my ideas as often. This results in me having weaker pieces that take longer to write.
Unfortunately, these kind of CV boosting events, like ICMC do want premieres. I’m submitting to the piece plus paper category and I haven’t quite work out what to write about what I’ve written. Heck, the piece doesn’t even have a name yet.
Like most of the pieces I’ve written since my MA, it actually started out as several unrelated ideas that coalesced together. For a long time, I’d been thinking that I should record the sounds of trains, so when I was home for my uncle’s funeral, I recorded CalTrains and Amtrak to go with my collections of UK and EU train sounds. Also, I had been listening to a lot of drone music, especially the music of composer David Seidel. I noticed that though his music was drony, it was not at all static, but had a lot of variation. It was also calming when I was having anxiety issues. It seemed to involve FM tones and I had just coded up some libraries to deal with Dissonance Curves and FM tones, so I wanted to do something that could tune drones on-the-fly based on randomly generated FM parameters. Finally, I analyzed some of the bell sounds I recorded with trains and used those also for tuning.
So basically, I just took a bunch of sounds that I like and put them together. I don’t know if it’s interesting to talk about why I like train sounds. My flat in Berkeley is a block from the tracks and I could hear train whistles blowing through the night. Some of my neighbors object tot his, but I found the whistles kind of mournful and haunting. They are a bit siren-like to me. Sometimes, when I hear the train whistle blow, I get an incredible longing, that I wish I was on the train as a passenger or a hobo, going someplace – anywhere the train is going.
One day late in 2001, or early 2002, I was sitting at a café near the tracks and a freight train started to go by, loaded with hundreds of army tanks. They were clearly going to be deployed to Afghanistan. The café fell silent as well started uneasily at the military cargo.
I focused on my California train sounds instead of European ones just because American train sounds are just much more train-y. My mom used to complain that the “new” diesels sounded dull in comparison to the old steam engines, but the diesels are more interesting than the electric ones. Also, the signals and many of the trains have bells on them. CalTrains, in particular is loud and full of very characteristic old-fashioned train noises. There’s something kind of ironic about such old-timey-sounding trains serving Silicon Valley.
But there’s also something kind of not-ironic. Infrastructure and transit in America has been neglected for decades. Like, trains are the future, I think. But the glass-topped observation decks of the Pacific Starlight Express, while being a good way to get to Oregon or Washington, is more of an antique than the future. The romance of train sounds comes from it’s sort of time capsule quality.
I took my train recordings and put them through feedback and comb filters and plate reverb and other things to make them slightly less obviously field recordings. I used the drone tunings for tuning these effects also, which has hopefully created a bit of glue between the train sounds and the drone sounds.
Perhaps, I should also talk about Dissonance Curves. Tones are considered consonant if they are close enough together in pitch to have slow beating or if they are far enough apart to be outside of each other’s critical band. (http://jjensen.org/DissonanceCurve.html) Any sound is made up 1 or more tones, so if you want to know if two sounds are consonant, you can compare all of the tones of sound A with all of the tones of sound B. In order to create a Dissonance Curve, you compare a sound with itself at a shifted tuning, and then graph how relatively dissonant all of the possible tunings are. The minima on the curve are places where consonance is high, and thus make good tunings. (http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/consemi.html)
I wrote and published some code for computing Dissonance Curves in SuperCollider, which I used in this piece. I like open source code and I like sharing, which, incidentally, I think it related to why I like trains, because they both involve collectivized solutions and building useful infrastructure.
So the underlying drone sounds are FM tones which are tuned according to their dissonance curve. On top, there are train recordings, run though filtering processes using the same tuning. Then, closer to the end, the tuning and timbre both shift to one based on some of the bell sounds. Some of the tuning is kind of fudged, though, because I detuned the left and right by 10Hz. I did this because of dubious claims that such a detuning effects brain waves and makes people feel more relaxed. I wanted ot write music that would do good things for my general anxiety levels. This makes the tuning not work in one channel, but it’s only slightly off and this isn’t rocket science.
I need 4 or 8 pages in proceedings. How many words go on a proceeding page?

TuningLib

Yesterday, I added a new Quark to Supercollider, called TuningLib. It requires a recent version of MathLib, one with the Bessel.sc file included. There are several classes in the new Quark, all realted to tuning.

Stuff from Jascha

Scala – This class is based on the SCL class from Jascha Narveson, but updated so it’s a subclass of the newer Tuning class. It opens Scala Files, which means you can use the large and interesting scala file library of thousands of tunings.
Key – Jascha’s SCL file also did a bunch of other interesting tuning-related things that the newer Tuning class does not, so I put these features in Key. It tracks your key changes and can interpolate between a given frequency or tuning ratio and the current active Scale.

Dissonance Curves

DissonanceCurve – is, I think, the most interesting part of the TuningLib. It generates Tunings, on the fly, for a given timbre. Give it your spectrum as lists of frequencies and amplitudes, or as a FFT buffer or as the specs for an FM tone, and it makes two different scales.
The first kind of scale it makes is the sort described by Bill Sethares. If you want to see the generated curve, you can plot it. Or you can get a Tuning from it. Or, you can get a scale made up of the n most consonant Tuning ratios. This is used in the second section of my piece Blakes 9
The other sort of tuning it does is based on a similar idea, but using the classic Just Intonation notions of consonance. Like with Sethares’ algorithm, every partial of a timbre’s spectrum is compared against every partial of the proposed tuning. It calculates the ratio between the frequencies. This could be 3/2, for example, or 115/114 or any whole number ratio. The numerator and denominator of that ratio are summed. In just intonation, smaller numbers are considered more consonant, so the smaller the sum, the more consonant the ratio. (This sum is related to Clarence Barlow‘s ideas of ‘digestibility.’) Then, the resultant sum is scaled by the amplitude of the quieter of the two partials. So if they are 3/2 and one has an amplitude of 0.2 and the other of 0.1, the result will be 0.5 ( = (3 + 2) * 0.1). This process repeats for every partial, and the results for each are summed, giving the level of dissonance (or digestibility) of the proposed tuning.
After computing the relative dissonance of all 1200 possible tunings in an octave, the next step is to figure out which ones to select as members of a scale. For this, the algorithm uses a moving window of n potential tunings. For a given tuning, if it is the most consonant of the n/2 tunings below it and the n/2 tunings above it, then it gets added to the Tuning returned by digestibleTuning.
I don’t have any sound examples for this usage yet, but I’m working on some. I don’t know of any pieces by anybody else using this algorithm either, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of it. If you know of any prior work using this idea, please leave a comment.

Tuning Tables

Lattice – This is based on some tuning methods that Ellen Fullman showed me a few years ago. Based on the numbers you feed it, which should be an array of 2 and then odd numbers, it generates a tuning table. for [2, 5, 3, 7, 9], it creates:

 1/1  5/4  3/2  7/4  9/8
 8/5  1/1  6/5  7/5  9/5
 4/3  5/3  1/1  7/6  3/2
 8/7  10/7 12/7 1/1  9/7
 16/9 10/9 4/3  14/9 1/1

You can use this class to navigate around in your generated table. For otonality, adjacent fractions are horizontal neighbors, so they share a denominator. For utonality, neighbors are on the vertical axis, so they have the same numerator. Three neighboring ratios make up a triad. You can walk around the table, so that you’re playing a triad, and then pick a member f that triad to be a pivot. Then, create a new triad on the other axis that contains your pivot as one of the members.
For example, one possible walk around the table, starting at 0,0 would be [1/1, 5/4, 3/2], [5/4, 1/1, 5/3], [3/2, 4/3, 5/3], [8/5, 4/3, 8/7], [8/7, 9/7, 1/1] etc. As you can (hopefully) see, the table wraps around at the edges.
I’ve done several pieces using this class, usually initializing it with odd numbers up to 21. Two examples are Beep and Bell Tolls

Undocumented

There is also a class FMSpectrum that will compute the spectrum for a FM tone if given the carrier frequency, the modulation frequency and depth (in Hz). I would like to also add in a class to calculate the spectrum of phase-modulated signals, but I don’t have the formula for this. If you know it (or where to find it), leave a comment!

Terre Thaemlitz says

When I look at members of the transsexual community who are actively seeking out physical alteration of their bodies… on the one hand, of course, I have this anti-essentialist reaction against it – that it’s about transforming bodies towards something that is, in the end, I think, conservative. But on the other hand, I do have this envy of their body transformations, which I feel are beyond my capacity. And part of that is because of the mythology in the media about the beautiful, successful transsexual. Because that’s who you see in the media. You don’t see the people who got totally fucked up, and look totally fucked up – which I would say are the majority.
— The Laurence Rassel Show “On Transgendered Authorship”

Terre Thaemlitz thinks that “the majority” of transsexuals “look totally fucked up.” And published an mp3 saying so. Why should we care what this Julie Bindel-wannabe thinks about trans people? Because Thaemlitz is one of two serious composers that I know of who are out as trans.
Yes, he says, “I’m a transgendered identified male (both my transgenderism and maleness are documented in different public spheres)” (http://www.chaindlk.com/interviews/index.php?interview=TerreThaemlitz) No, that doesn’t mean that he’s ftm. He’s a very subversive guy who dresses up like a woman sometimes in order to fight patriarchy. Or something. I’m not being terribly respectful of his identity in that description, but I’m afraid I’m infuriated by his failure to respect mine.
And terribly, terribly disappointed. I wrote about this guy in MA thesis and thought he was awesome, especially since he was not only out as trans, but tackling trans issues head-on through his work. He would show up to very technology-based music institutions in Germany and give lectures that were full of gender theory. He, like me, wants cis people to have to think about gender sometimes and how it’s constructed. Heck, the purpose of this project I’ve quoted from is purportedly, to “[deal] with issues of authorship and copy-left from feminist and transgendered perspectives.” (Ibid) But for him, despite using a plural form on “perspectives,” I guess there’s only one legitimate gender position and that’s his. People who transitioning are “reactionarily conservative,” passive victims of the “medical industry” He says, “The transsexual community that focuses on transitioning the body . . . in the end, it’s capitulatory.” (“On Transgendered Authorship”)
He says, authoritatively, as a cissexual,

For me, transgenderism arises out of the problem of not fitting in. and it comes out of those crisis – not only a gender crisis, but a larger crisis of social relations. It’s not so much a crisis of the body, which Gender Identity Disorder and the medical industry want to present it as being about.(Ibid)

It’s really great for him that he’s never experienced dysphoria. But he goes from “I’ve never experienced dysphoria,” to “therefore it must not exist.” Well, a lot of men have never experienced any kind of trans identity. So if bloke A has never experienced wanting to cross dress, does that mean that it also doesn’t exist as a valid perspective?
A big part of Thamelitz’s problem is that he sees trans a a radikewl thing to do. A way to challenge patriarchy. Alas for him, my goal is not to “[indtroduce] a new breed of masculinity into the male workplace, into the male social structure.” (ibid) Heck, I don’t think my masculinity is especially new or in any way subversive. Indeed, I object even to the idea of “the male workplace.” Alas, the gender balance of some workplaces is not ideal, but I can’t imagine terming any place the male workplace. What kind of feminism and transgenderism in this, pushed forward by a male-identified man? I’m starting to think he doesn’t actually understand what these words mean.
The piece I really loved from him before dealt with problems faced by intersexed people, who were often forced into surgery as babies, which was treated as an emergency when it was not at all life-threatening, just a social crisis. But now I fear he doesn’t see IS people as people, just as symbols of non-gender essentialism. Living examples to prove his theory. The ultimate gender queers. And I wonder why he feels like he has to exploit trans identities and IS identities to prove his point.
This is profoundly disappointing and an example of how divisions can be sewn among trans people. If there are multiple perspectives, one of them must be wrong, because I can be the only right one. And in his case, it’s not enough that he be the only true transperson, he has to fall into a load of transphobic, sexist, and transmysoginist language. Does he really think he isn’t just repeating a tired old trope when he says that transwomen are ugly? Trust me, this idea has been well circulated previously. It’s tiresome, untrue and sexist as hell. Judging women by their appearance is not feminist. Maybe the reason the German government backed out of broadcasting this is not because feminism is not “sexy” (http://www.chaindlk.com/interviews/index.php?interview=TerreThaemlitz) but because he’s failing at it.
Terre Thaemlitz, I used to think you were cool.

Who’s Streets?

I found a call for recordings for a politically themed musical thing, which always makes me happy because this sort of thing motivates me a lot. It’s got an item for consideration, “How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?” (the whole thing is at http://www.sonoscop.net/pop-up/convzepp09ENG.html)

So I was thinking I could use some recordings I made of people chanting at the G20 protests in London and then juxtapose that with recordings of military chants that I could steal from YouTube.

And I am astounded, perplexed and unnerved that pretty much, crowds watching troop drills sound exactly like crowds at protests with chanting. I would not be able to listen to a recording and know if I’m watching an implicitly normative crowd cheering for marching at a football game or a bunch of leftists out to reclaim the streets. (I mean, the words are different, but playing recordings for a non-english speaking audience looses that signifier.)

This is kind of worrying because it suggests that there’s not so much difference between how these positions are articulated or perhaps even between the positions themselves as they manifest in a public space.
Which manifestations are empowering and which are alarming would only seem to have to do with whether your own advantage is the one being promoted. Of course, I think there’s more to it than that. Are we supporting the rights of people who already have power or people who do not? But this suggests that both positions might fill the same needs for observers and participants. And somehow that’s disturbing me. Maybe people are more empowered by being reactionary. How can we reach out to them in that case?
Speaking of protests, there’s one today about biofuels and I don’t know whether or not I want to go. Burning acres of rainforest to grow soybeans for fuel has a worse carbon footprint than burning a whole lot of petrol. Is there a role for non-waste oil biodiesel in a green, sustainable model for fuel? I don’t know. I really believed in biodiesel.

Questions for composers

When you compose, do you start with the form or with the content? Do you decide on the structure before you gather materials? Do the materials suggest a structure to you or vice versa?
I’ve never been so good at structure and I really need to do something about this. I wonder if there are any good books on musical structure? Maybe I should try to write some stuff with historical structures. Not sontata form, though. When I was at Wesleyan, I realized that I wrote everything in sonata form and stopped doing that, but I didn’t really replace it with any other structures, just sort of trying to intuit things for every piece.
What pieces are best to study for cues into form and structure? I’ve been thinking of looking at John Cage’s Square Root pieces, something my supervisor has encouraged.
But I think I should also get a book. Back in my miss-spent youth, I thought I wouldn’t need to know anything about non-electronic music because the world was shiny and new and out with the old and in with whatever I was doing. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention in some of my classes. Much like when I was 17, and similarly had an idea that I would never need to know statistics.
So, due to a lack of diligence in my studies, I’m totally unclear on how this works at all, really. I imagine that it’s like having a bunch of plastic boxes, like you use for food storage. And in each one, there’s a different sort of food. Each like a course of a fancy meal. So they all go together, but they’re all separate. However, they probably have ingredients in common like olive oil. Or pumpkin both in the pie and the soup. However, this metaphor is crap, as it’s non temporal. Pumpkin soup is a gestalt. It doesn’t change over time. Maybe it’s like stanzas in a poem or chapters in a book? I imagine that stanza length is decided a head of time, whereas chapters seem to stem from the content that fills them?
Is it ironic not to have a structure of understanding to apply to structure?

Unpopular Music

Once in a while, I get the idea of doing algorithmic pop music and labor intensely on it and then come up with something and then walk away horrified. So, um, if anybody’s interested, here’s the latest incarnation of this cycle: S’onewall.
The samples are recordings of the largest-ever transgender rights protest in the UK, which took place last month. And then there are drum beats. The bassline uses a subset of the Bohlen-Pierce scale, in just intonation, with notes chosen according to a variation of Clarence Barlow’s “digestibility” formula. To determine the relative consonance of two ratios, divide one by the other and then take the result and add the numerator to the denominator. A lower number indicates greater simplicity of the result and thus a higher degree of consonance. There is ugly code, available for your perusal. Quick examples are at the bottom of this post.
This is not on my podcast because I’m not so into it. I have ideas of what might fix it, but I suspect those ideas are wrong and it’s taken up so much time already. However, as un-enthused as I am, I think somebody, someplace might want to remix this. Or maybe I’m flattering myself.
I wish I could offer the pieces sent to different tracks, but, ha ha, the only way I could get this to record was with Audio Hijack, because there’s a logic problem somewhere in the code which causes it to hang right at the end and chasing that bug is just more trouble than it’s worth.

Code Example

Ok, using the ScaleLattice: First declare a scale with some ratios in it:

 ~scale = ScaleLattice([[1, 1], [11, 9], [9,7],  [7,5], [5, 3], [9, 5], 
     [11,5], [7,3], [27, 11], [27, 25],  [25, 9]], 3);

That’s not the scale from the piece, but it’s also a nice one. We can then try to construct a melody, by getting some step-wise motion:

 ~melody = ~scale.getNsteps(4);

And them maybe jump to the most consonant note from the tonic, followed by one step down:

 ~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.getIstepsBelowJconsonance(2, 0);

Um, and then let’s get the most consonant pitch from the last one in the melody:


 ~melody = ~melody ++ ~scale.consonanceAtFloat(0, ~melody.last);

Yeah, this probably sound bad, but we could play it:


 Pbind(dur, 0.3, freq, Pseq(~melody * 440, 1)).play;

I have a hypothesis that with the combination of relative consonances and stepwise motion, you could abstract music theory to the point where you could construct a meaningful melody from an arbitrary scale. Such that the program doesn’t know the scale ahead of time. The missing piece is notes that are too close to each other, which I suspect will have very high relative dissonance. I may think on this further, or I might go back to doing whatever else it is that I do.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Room for Improvement

Five months ago, I posted a video to YouTube. A few weeks later, I played it for my supervisor, who gave me some very good feedback. He suggested that I vary the sounds of it and put the voice nearer the end, in order to not give it away and consider doing something about the sameness of the video. He indicated that it was too short to be minimalist, but too unchanging to fill the entire duration.
So this is what I’ve been working on. And working on. And working on. Every change I make seems to make the video worse. Which is hardly encouraging. It’s hard to work on for that reason. And also because I picked sounds for it that make me feel very nervous and edgy. And also because the subject matter makes me squirm.
It’s not that it couldn’t be better, it’s that I can’t seem to make it better.
The deadline is fast approaching for the Transgender Film Festival (indeed, if it is not already passed) and I’ve shown this video once to a small group and gotten some feedback from the YouTube posting. It seems to resonate well with women and gender minorities / queers. If straight men aren’t moved by it as much, should I care? Or am I just annoyed because the changes I’m making are really not helping?
Can it still be part of my PhD if I can’t repair it?
None of the composed music I’ve done in the last year has been especially engaging.

Oy, I’m knackered

Tired and going native in my speech habits, but not, so far, my drinking habits. A normal night on the town here can quite often involve vomit from over-indulgence. This just doesn’t sound fun to me. So my tiredness is from appropriately puritanical sources. I’ve been working at something called a “test setup.”
We took a hundred or so speakers and arranged them as if we were giving a concert, but there was no concert. Instead, we were testing things. We’ve got a cool Berlin guy to build us a box with 64 motorized, touch-sensitive faders. He flew in with the prototype and there was discussion of firmware. The plan is purchase three of these.
Then we tested Ambisonics which is a method of positioning sounds in space with an oddly cult-like following of users. People who like it really really like it. It sounded weird on our system. One outside observer informed us that we were sending in the wrong sort of sounds for it to work. The easy comment is that a panning system that only works with a few types of sounds is not the most useful, but that comment is unfair. A speaker array like ours turns into a sort of architecture and not all sounds work in all spaces. Gospel music is great, but sounds bad in cathedrals. It needs a room with a short decay time. Similarly, plain chant in an acoustically dead church is going to fall very flat.
Obviously, people compose for the kinds of spaces and instruments that they have. Modern concert halls are very dry and sound really good with the sort of stochastic-like short pulses of 20th century music. So it shouldn’t be surprising that our rig is going to have a body of work that sounds good with it and not as good with different controlling software.
We normally use something that’s pronounced as “V-bap”, but I don’t know what the acronym stands for. It’s equal power pan spread across three speakers to localize a sound in space and it seems to require quite a lot less math. Basically: you know that you can make a sound seem to move back and forth by twisting the balance knob on your stereo. Well, add a third speaker above and a second knob and you can make it go up and down too.
For my part, I carried things around and otherwise did grunt work, which can be a good way to learn about a system without having to ask too many questions or go to a lecture. I tried to play my phone phreaking piece, but I couldn’t get it to work on the computer attached to all the speakers, alas.
One of my favorite students in the program flew in from Spain to work on the test setup, so it was good to talk to him. Apparently he used to have an internet addiction and now he talks about strategies to stop using the net aside from getting email and how much better his life is net-free. I remain unconvinced. Besides, I can quit any time.
Still the internet has kind of begun to bore me. The social network sites are dull and give me little for my time. The news is still valuable. But blogs . . . so many of them are narcissistic and dull. Maybe I should stop.

Direct to Consumer

Well, I’ve been doing this commission project for over a year now. There were a few months of it that I wasn’t pushing it very actively. Most of the people who got commissions from me, though, were people with whom I already had a connection. This is not surprising. You wouldn’t buy a CD from a band that you’d never heard, so why would you buy a commission from somebody whose music you didn’t know at all.
Still, I wanted to get the idea of the project farther out. I think the best way to spread is organically, by word of mouth and via social networking. But the idea of direct-to-consumer advertising is also compelling. So I approached the writer of the Comics Curmudgeon, which is rated as one of the top 100 American blogs. His blog has nothing to do with music. I asked him if I could trade a week long banner ad for a commission. Josh was extremely enthusiastic about the idea, so I made a one minute piece for him.
So far, everybody that’s gotten a piece has been happy with it, Josh included. I think that people are more likely to like a piece of music that they feel a connection to. Personally, I’m more likely to think positively of music written by bands I already like or by my friends. Everybody has that. This seems to be especially true for people who commission pieces. In this case, Josh was happy enough that he dedicated a blog post in which he recommended me and embedded a YouTube video I made of the piece.
It’s been a couple of weeks and the banner ad has timed out. The number of people watching the video has slowed to a trickle. I don’t know how many thousands of people saw the post, or subsequently subscribed to my podcast, but I know that more than 3800 watched the video, which is a fantastic reach for me. I got zero new commissions.
This is exactly why my career in marketing was so short (no really). While it’s true that I want to reach everybody, a one-off ad in a totally unrelated medium is not the way to do it. So my failure to get any new commissions is not necessarily an indication that the project is doomed. Most people have to hear about something three times before it clicks. Commissioning music is a totally new idea to many people. So if I want to get people to understand the idea, I need to make certain they hear about it multiple times. This effort was, therefore, much too small to work. However, there’s another problem in that I can’t do 100 commissions in a week. I can do maybe three. If four thousand people suddenly understood what I was up to and thought it was cool, if less than 1% of them tried to commission me, I’d be swamped.
However, one thing that I learned when I worked in marketing is that competition is correlated with growth of the category. For example, if there was just one time of sugary, fizzy water, the manufacturer might have to explain to people why they would want to drink such a thing (I, for one, am unconvinced it’s a good idea). However, having multiple pop companies means that more people have heard of pop and the overall demand is higher. Is this cause or effect? Who knows. However, in the case of commissioning music, every other composer who starts doing this is also letting people know that such a category of goods exists. So I want more people to start doing this. I can’t say for certain that it’s going to work, but the startup costs are low.
I wonder, also, if I should retreat to a lower cost. At a time when people are losing their houses and the price of food is rising, commissioning noise music is definitely going to seem like a luxury.
Finally, while my advertisement experiment failed to gather me any new business, I’m still quite pleased with the number of ears that I reached. A number of them probably considered it to be a novelty, but that’s the path musical genres take to reach popular acceptance. One small step for noise music, one giant leap for my hit counter.

Sound and Fury

I went to a noise show tonight. It was really really fucking loud. That was probably the primary adjective: loud. It was brilliant. I mean, most of my classmates did not fully agree with this assessment, but I think there’s a certain value to just hearing really fucking loud noise once in a while.
Also, there was a full room of people in the audience. A whole bunch of people turned out to hear really fucking loud noise. And there was a table selling records. I talked to the record people. There’s a local record company that just does noise music and dark ambient. Brilliant. I decided to purchase a record with the headline act on it. (It’s less fucking loud on my home system, but it would still be a wall ‘o noise.)
The record table was lit by candle light. The kind in those red glass containers you see at nightclubs and cabarets. I got the wrong CD. I didn’t notice until I got home. So I was slightly disappointed, but still popped it into my computer to put it into my itunes library. I started typing in the track names. “iii. is it wrong to love a transexual”
. . .
You know, I was in a really good mood. I had a couple of pints of beer. I hung out with people. I had some really good chips. I heard fucking loud noise.
. . .
It’s like somebody hit the pause button on my enthusiasm. I stopped breathing for a minute. I typed in the rest of the track names. And then I hit eject.
so if anybody wants a CD of dark ambient or noise, it could be yours. Unless I drop it in the trash first. I don’t think I have the energy to try to get a refund from the record company. Alas, I’ve had this conversation before.
It’s always, like, I’m excited about something and then all of the sudden, wham.
I was reading a scifi webzine. And wham. I spoke up. The editor literally told me not to worry my pretty face. The writer gave me a little lecture on what “passing” means, as if, possibly, I might not know (where would minorities be without white straight men informing of us of our own subculture?). And then explained he couldn’t transphobic because he’d had a transgender girlfriend once. Just like I could never possibly write or say anything racist because of my girlfriend. And why no straight guy could ever possibly be sexist.
I feel like the ur-queer lately. Somebody says something about gay men, and hey, I’m a queer man. Somebody says something about lesbians, and I was a lesbian. Somebody says something about about women, and I was a woman. I’m noticing sexism more than I used to. The scifi story I worried my little head about . . .. I got as far as a minor character sketch in which the main baddie was shown to be bad because he owned a woman that he used for sex. Your worst nightmare is just an aside.
Sci-fi can be dystopian. My favorites are. Sci-fi can contain slurs. Again, Man in a High Castle is slur-filled and completely dystopian. And it’s fantastic. But they’re not asides. If you’re going to have the third person narrator use a slur that’s currently in common usage and just throw in as an aside human trafficking, well, it’s fair to assume that the writer hasn’t really thought things out.
But, being ur-queer isn’t not all negative. I feel solidarity with everybody too. I feel like I can kind of fit in with any group of people. Well, as much as an Esperanto-speaking transsexual is ever going to fit in, if you know what I mean. I feel more at ease around people than I’ve ever felt. It’s a weird transition, to being much, much happier and at ease and, at the same time, a gigantic target for hate. So alien other as to not really even be a person anymore. And yet, I can go to the pub, have a pint and chat with anybody.
I need to toughen up and not let the little shit get to me. And I need to be prepared for it coming from any direction at any time from any one under any circumstance.
It’s a lot to get used to.