Tag: music

Managing Extremes

Puberty . . . wow. I won’t say that being 20 years older than last time isn’t making it easier, because it is. But getting used to a really different hormonal situation still takes some time to get used to it, like probably several months. In the mean time, I’m kind of feeling at extremes. I’m not neutral about much of anything. Things are either amazingly great or the worst fucking thing ever. Sometimes my mind can change on whether something’s fantastic or awful within a a very few moments. It’s emotionally exciting and as such is completely awesome! It totally fucking sucks!
I try to moderate my responses when I’m around people, and this actually helps keep them moderated. So I’m trying to get out more. Also, music helps. My appetite for loud, angry punk rock has recently re-emerged. And, again similar to my youth, making music helps a lot. Even esoteric, algorithm driven, computer pieces that sort of play themselves. They almost help more because of the emotional detachment necessary to get them working, but the need for emotionality in evaluating the results. It’s like slowly releasing pressure from a canister.
Although, it doesn’t sound like slowly releasing pressure from a canister. It sounds like the canister has just fucking exploded and killed three people. Or something. Yesterday morning, I was actually shaking the music building. I feel a little guilty about that, because the studios are supposed to be soundproofed, but I kind of forgot about how low frequencies will travel through soundproofing and through walls and apparently disturb a class next door. Oops. My supervisor came by afterwards to see what was going on, mentioning only once his class was over that it had been hard for them to hear. Oops. He left, telling me to “rock on.” So maybe it’s ok in moderation, as long as I don’t disturb all his classes?
I could get night hours and not disturb other people, but then I would lose all the value of interacting with other people. Valuable interactions like, “what are you doing??” and “I feel sorry for your ears.”
A couple of years ago, Brum got a gigantic grant of something like £500000 to buy speakers and fix up the studios. And they did a great job. We can gig with well over a hundred discrete audio channels and speakers. It boggles the mind. When I was a wild and crazy youth, I really wanted to have a million dollars worth of speakers and A/D converters. Think of all the things you could do! But my laptop only has stereo outs, and it turns out that if you have 8 or 16 or N number of speakers, you have to carry them and all the cables and everything, so I learned to love stereo. I don’t think that I had a real idea of what to do with 60 speakers then, and I really don’t now. I mean 60 speakers! You can do it just to show off your vast speaker wealth (and thus how incredibly sexy you must be), but I think it’s better to justify it somehow. The piece you do with 60 speakers should really need that many of them. My colleagues all succeed at this, but I want to work within my pre-existing vocabulary of very artificial sounds. If you’re using recordings of water drops, you can just send a bunch to the upper left side and then that part of the audience feels like you’re going to drip on them. But what do you with sine tones?
Well, obviously what you do with sine tones is to come up with something that will hurt the audience! You assault them with sine tones! Out of tune, slowly phasing low frequencies shaking you from every direction! Muahahahaha.
I think I want to do an installation. There’s a lot of hierarchy and social control inherent in the concert hall paradigm. People come in before everything starts, sit quietly and appreciate your music, clap at the end and the shuffle back out when everything is finished. But 60 or 100 speakers really creates a physical space. There’s no one sweet spot in the middle where everything sounds best. There’s sounds coming from every direction. If you’re close to one particular speaker, that’s entirely different than being in the center or at another edge. I don’t want to dictate to people how long they should listen or where they should listen or how they should listen (or if they should bother at all). I’d like to give them something that slowly evolves over several minutes and gradually returns to it’s starting state and then re-evolves. That kind of music requires a patience that I don’t want to enforce. I don’t want to make people wait it out if they’re not drawn in on their own. I don’t want to tell them them what to do. Of course, anything presented has some hierarchy, it’s inescapable. I’ve got control of the speakers and they don’t. But it does have a slightly more anarchist edge to it when they don’t have to just sit and suffer through if they don’t want to.
So I want to hurt people, but in a non-heirachical, listener-empowering fashion. I can’t decide if that’s the most fucking stupid contradiction ever, or the most fascinating idea to ever emerge from the academy.

Music Discovery

Ok, it’s no secret that most radio stations are kind of disappointing, especially commercial ones. If you live in an urban area, you might have an awesome local radio station that actually plays good music. You should listen! However, alas, most of the good music might be on 10PM – 2AM on Thursday nights. Or maybe you live some place with Clear Channel, Sony and nobody else? How do you find out about music?

Pandora – for Americans

There’s a couple of very interesting online services to aid you in this task, with sort of opposite philosophies. If you live in the US, you can try out something called Pandora. (Outside, the US, scroll down) Alas, it doesn’t work outside of the US, but if you can get it, it’s actually pretty cool. It’s got a very top-down approach. You tell it a song that you like and it guesses what songs you might like based on that one song. You can refine the results by telling it when it’s correct or wrong. It’s an interesting way to find out about music within (or near) a genre that you like.
How it works is that expert musicologists listen to stuff and classify it. This piece of music is electronic, is 130 bmp, has glitch elements, has IDM influences, uses minor key harmonies, blah, blah, blah. It can alternately make you feel smart when you understand what they’re talking about, or it can make you think they’re smarter than you. They don’t tell you everything about a track, because that would be giving away secrets! But it’s not secret that part of what I like about this is that it provides jobs to people with graduate degrees in music. We need the work!
So, you say you like Tag by Agf and it guesses you might also like a few tracks by Boards of Canada. Cool! But, part of the shortcomings of this is that you can’t give it more exact feedback. I had a Riot Grrl station set up, which meant I was pretty much only interested in female vocalists, aside from Huggy Bear and the few other Riot Grrl groups with male singers. It just did not get it. And I certainly couldn’t tell it that I didn’t want to hear sexist lyrics. I could only give it a lot of thumbs down and hoped it would guess that’s what they all had in common.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting and I would use it again if they offered it in the UK.

Last.FM

Where Pandora is top-down, organized by people who are smarter than you, Last.FM is bottom up, organized automagically using some smart computer algorithms and it’s user base. Pandora is like Yahoo, or the Open Directory Project and Last.FM is like Google.
Last.FM is more general and can be used in many different ways. A typical user pattern would be that you go install the spy software called a scrobbler. This software spies on what you’re listening to and reports back to last.fm. Ok, it’s moderately creepy. However, you can see when it’s running and when it’s not. When you don’t want people to know that you’re secretly listening to Esperanto Subgrunda, you can turn it off. Note, also, that Pandora is also tracking what you listen to. If you want to keep your listening habits secret, then you’re not going to be able to use any music discovery tool that I know of.
Ok, so you have last.fm installed and you’re listening to Madonna, Justin Timberlake and The Coup. Based on that, it’s created a sort of radio station of stuff you might like. This doesn’t happen because smart people have noted that these artists have a pop sensibility, make heavy use of sampling, have major key and pentatonic harmonies and have a beat you can dance to. No, this happens because a bunch of other users also these same three artists and also like a bunch of other musically-related acts. The correlation happens automatically based on people’s listening habits. Nice!
Additionally, you can find your friends on the service (I’m celesteh1). You can go listen to their radio station and see what they like. Maybe mock them behind their back. And find out they like some cool band that you’d never heard of. Boom, musical discovery based on your friends. It’s like the old days of tape trading, but less interactive. In addition to being able to check out your friends, it gives you a list of users who have closely related tastes to yours. You can scope out their stations and also find stuff.
Finally, you can use it like Pandora in that you can just ask for stuff based on an artist or song that you like. It generates a play list and will play it in a web browser or in it’s own client. The client doesn’t have ads and uses a lot less CPU than a web browser, so it’s much less resource stealing to have the last.fm client than it is to have pandora in a browser. But since all the playlists are generated based on what other users have listened to, they can lack subtlety and can be way off for lesser-known acts. I almost never use this feature. However, for example, the similar to Maggi Payne station is really interesting, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
Ok, I don’t know about you, but I hate making choices. It is possible to use last.fm and pandora at the same time. This is left as an exercise to the reader. Or, if there’s interest, I’ll do a follow up.
Finally, let’s admit it, you think your musical taste is stellar, cutting edge, amazing. You secretly relate to Indy Rock Pete. Ok, maybe that’s just me. But you can get some sort of listener creds through last.fm. You can show of how cool you are. (White people like that.) It’s appealing, at least at first. And then you miss the new Madonna album or SexyBack and it’s all downhill from there. (But seriously, the Confessions on a Dance Floor is awesome. Timberlake? Not so much. But still somehow compelling.) Take it to the bridge.

For Musicians

Ok, what about artists? People are listening to our sol la ti, so we should get some do re mi, right? Indeed. Pandora will only consider CDs with UPC codes. And they don’t take everything. “Top down” means curated. But they do pay royalties. Anyway, you can be on both. If you want to be on Pandora, mail them a CD. The pay according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Last.fm keeps track of everything that people report to it. If you listen to that mp3 of your best friend’s garage band while scrobbling, they know about it. Which means that they know about a lot more stuff than does Pandora. If you have mp3s in circulation or a released CD, they probably already know about you. Go look yourself up on the service. Maybe they already have a bio and a picture for you. If they do, it’s because some friend or fan set it up – or because you’re already famous. If they don’t, you can add that stuff. (and terrible candid shots of your musician friends. ahahahaha!) You can also upload some of your own music.
Last.fm has a plan in place to pay royalties, but have not yet started to do so. However even in this pre-royalty time, it’s in your best interest to give them a couple of tracks for the same reason that it’s in your best interest to put some tracks up on your website. The point is to get people listening to your music through a sort of word-of-mouth(-like) buzz. People see that a friend or musical neighbor has been listening to you. They get curious. They try to listen also. Make sure there’s something there for them.

May Plans

Spring time is nearly upon us. As are several cons, which is always a cause for joy. A con is like a festival, but better because there’s also stuff during the day. Music festivals are nifty, but they’re usually only in the evenings. I’m thinking it would be fun to do a small tour of the continent in May.
May 2 – 4 is Transgender Europe in Berlin. I used the feedback form to ask if they were interested in booking some music. I think they have an obligation to present work by ftm composer/performers of ‘art’ music. As I type this, I’m drining water out of a cup with cartoon of Tigger on it. I want to find out if, like Tigger, I’m the only one. Anyway, they haven’t written back yet, which is frustrating, since I’d like to try to get other gigs around Germany if they take me. And now is the time to be trying to get booked.
May 6 – 8 is the fêtes de Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans, France (an hour or so away from Paris by train). I’m several centuries too modern to play at this event, but I’ve been going to it every yar since I moved to Europe and I’d like to go again. And do some biking around the Loire. Last year, I decided not to go to Cherveney, despite it being the origin of my lap tuba – and some fine wine. I don’t know how cool it would be to do a bike tour like that by myself. I think I’m looking for people to go along with me, if I go. Joan of Arc, of course, got burned at the stake rather than dress like a girl, so she’s close to my heart.
May 25 – 31 is /ETC in Amsterdam, a feminist con that I played at last year. They’re women-only, which, obviously, makes me nervous, since I’d rather be burned at the stake than dress like a girl. I had a lot of angst about this last year also and contacted them about whether or not they discriminated against trans people. They do not. This year, the group hosting it is called “gender changers” and they’ve had FTM participation in the past. They seem supportive, and last year was super-awesome, so I hope this works out. I’m thinking of doing a duet with somebody, if they’ll take me, to sort of up the female quotient of my act. ha. I’m going to the con whether I play or not, I think, since last year was so great and I really miss Holland. I want to take Xena, but I think I can still find lodging with a buddy in Den Haag and commute in to Amsterdam on the train. I can imagine that I can find lodging for Xena easier than for myself. She’s popular.
I have a friend in Bremmen, Germany, so I’ll email him a CD shortly. There’s a strong noise scene there. And, if I’m going to be in France, I’d like to play in Paris again. Of course, that’s much, much, much easier said than done. I’m going to see what contacts I can get there through school here and California, since my contacts form living there aren’t great for gig-getting. And, obviously, I’ll see if I can play more than once in the Netherlands. Berlin to Paris to Bremen to Amsterdam is perhaps overly circuitious. I will be travelling by ferry, bike and train, to keep my carbon footprint down as that’s easier for Xena, so the best timing for Bremmen might be late April.
I’m working on a piece about gender issues and sexuality that I’d like to premier in Berlin, if they take me. It’s the drag king piece, which features a crotch-mounted joy stick and moaning sounds. I’m going to add in some videogame samples (specifically, I want World of Warcraft). I also want to use samples of people talking, of course. Because all my political pieces use speaking. Because I’m unsubtle, alas. I think I want to interview people and ask them the questions that I got asked on transgender clinic intake. “What’s your first memory of having a gender?” “How long have you known that you are a man/woman?” “What makes somebody a man?” “What makes somebody a woman?” I think these questions are actually quite stupid. Especially the last two. But the answers are potentially very interesting. I kind of think of it as performative queer theory as much as music.
So if you want to record yourself talking about how you became aware of your own gender and what that means to you, email it to me! Otherwise, I’ll be pushing microphones into other students’ faces. I just came out to them last week, so it should be delightfully awkward and stressful to do this.
Also, if you can get me a gig in France, Germany, BeNeLux or nearby, please drop me a line! I’ll have everything I need to to do electronic noise, live processing, and/or laptop pieces. And a dog! And my bike touring gear. Heh. This is managable, but insane, so perfect. If I can’t get any other gigs, maybe I’ll bike from Berlin to Amsterdam. I wonder if there’s some way to organize a bike/music tour, like, to promote environmental causes . . .

In other news

For those of you in the San Francisco area, Other Minds 13 is very nearly upon you! I am jealous of you, because I wish I could go. The sampler CD for the shows is awesome. There’s a lot of great music. It’s March 6 – 8 in SF. There’s a sudent discounts avilable. I think it’s possible to get in free by volunteering. This year is especially great for fans of the cello. Fracnis-Marie Uitti will be plaing. She’s a friend of Ellen. Her music is incredible. She’s playing on the 6th. If you can only go to one night, go to that one. And then leave me taunting messages about how it was sper awesome and I’ll be sad. I was going to come home for the festival, but the way my student visa ended up working out, I just couldn’t. Alas.

Fine, I’ll Stop Listening, You Win

The RIAA is now suing some guy for ripping CDs that he purchased. He’s not sharing them on the internet, he just loaded them onto his own computer to listen to them. The major labels have apparently decided that it’s a crime to put music that you paid for onto your ipod.

It wasn’t enough that they’re trying to take financial aid away from college kids. I mean, those kids were violating intellectual property rights. Taking away their financial aid is seriously an over-reaction to that and despicable, but at least the kids did something iffy. But this latest guy didn’t do anything wrong at all.
The RIAA is a member organization controlled by the major record labels. Apparently, their policy is now that they don’t want us to listen to music that we buy from them.
Fair enough. If they don’t want us to listen to their music, we can stop.
I’m toying with the idea of throwing away everything I have from a major label, but I probably won’t. I mean, I like my CDs, that’s why I bought them. And, unfortunately, some of them are probably out on majors.
But I’m completely serious about the not buying anything new on majors. This is the first xmas since I was 13 that I didn’t get any music. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t receive it. If the major labels don’t want me to listen, I won’t. There’s plenty of great stuff out there on indie labels. I’m not hurting for CDs. Other Minds has two new releases and several of my buddies have given me their latest albums. And, of course, there are podcasts full of great music.
All of this is what’s so confusing about the major labels being such assholes. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives. They seem to think they’re Ma Bell, when that kind of monopoly hasn’t existed for years and years. Do they want to destroy themselves? Have they given up on life? Should all the record execs get on prozac right away?
There are some serious issues of power and control at play. What’s at stake is our share in our culture. Between DRM and IP and other legal wranglings, corporations want to own every aspect of our culture. They want to control information. Remember that thing where Sony installed spyware on people’s computers through music CDs. These guys think they own our computers. If we don’t secure net neutrality, they’ll try to choke off the internet as well. (Note that libertarian hero and scary, racist mofo Ron Paul is against net neutrality.)
Briefly, right now all data traversing the internet is treated equally. ISPs, who are often owned by RIAA member companies, want to make some packets privileged over others. If you go to their website, it loads fast. If you go to a competitor, it loads slowly or not at all. If they want to control all music, then it’s likely that net-surfing customers would have to pay extra to be allowed the privilege of getting to podcasts.
Which is to say that boycott is not enough, because in some sense they are Ma Bell. Does your elected representative support net neutrality?

Edit

Well, not quite. Oops. They still suck though and do make the claim that you shouldn’t rip CDs for ipod use.

Not Buying It

There are no CDs on my xmas list this year. I love music, but I’m done with major record labels. I just read that the RIAA is trying to remove financial aid from college students who file share. Enough is enough. If they want to prevent fans from going to school, I’m going to prevent my money from going to their companies.
There are enough (real) indies and podcasts and the like to keep me in great music for years. Indeed, there is also Pandora, which requires no capital investment at all and keeps me in good music by analyzing what I say I like. It actually works and they have classical music now too.
Alas, Pandora is not a real break from the RIAA because they track music based on CD barcodes. Everything they play is therefore at least somewhat corporate. So I guess I’m giving their money to the RIAA (and indies) instead of mine. (And, alas, as I have no barcodes, I’ll never turn up in a playlist.)
Frankly, I’m highly displeased with the state of media distribution in America. I purchased Battlestar Galactica from the iTunes store – because I liked the show. It has great writing and acting, etc. And then I learned from the writer’s strike that none of the creative people are seeing any money form my purchases. I have not yet decided how to proceed. If I buy DVDs, the creative people get some revenue, but too little and I’m stuck with a bunch of media when I probably only want to watch an episode once. And I’m left without instant gratification. In fact, if nobody who does anything productive is getting money from my buying it online, why shouldn’t I just pirate it? The writers are getting the same amount whether I get it from bittorrent or iTunes.
So yeah, in solidarity with the writer’s strike, I’m doing a consumer strike. Screw the media companies.

Talking about music

Aileen asks, “Is it just my limited experience, or is there really a paucity of sound-related terms in English?”
I’m intrigued by her question! Do she mean for describing a single sound event? I don’t speak any of my second languages well enough to give a comparison answer, but here are some technical terms in English:

timbre, tuning, tone, rhythm, tempo, loud, soft, dry, resonant, rich, rough, pure, metallic, high, low, nasal, tremolo, trill, vibrato, dissonant, consonant, atonal

If you are talking about a single sound event, most words would talk about the sound quality, so some of the above wouldn’t apply, as they refer to to multiple sound events. So you would likely want to talk about duration, amplitude, timbre and pitch. Amplitude is straight forward enough. And pitch is usually described in terms of high and low. timbre, the quality of the sound, is where you get the most words

Scientifically, any sound can be described by a finite number of sine waves. Specify their amplitude, pitch and phase and how they change over time. Timbre is strongly linked to how these sine waves are related to each other. A pure sound is one with few, harmonically related sine tones.
Harmonically related means that the frequencies of the sines are related by whole number ratios that are relatively simple. If you add the numerator and the denominator together, the smaller the sum is, the more pure the timbre. When talking about sounds this way, the lowest sine wave is often called the fundamental, and the higher ones are called overtones. (Many musical sounds have overtones that are just simple multiples of the fundamental.)
When the component sine waves of a sound are close to each other – specifically, so close that they fall within the critical band, you get roughness. (think of an instrument tuning, the sound is first rough, and then there’s a beating sound which gradually slows until they’re in tune.)
A rich sound is one with a more harmonically related overtones. If you get a whole lot of overtones (I think specifically odd ones), the sound is nasal.

Overtones that don’t have simple relationships with each other are called enharmonic. Enharmonic sounds are often described as metallic, especially if they have a lot of low or mid range frequency content and few highs and a bit of duration to them.
Noises, like twigs break, things clicking, etc, have more high frequency content, and are strong enharmonic and also very short. Sustained sounds with lots and lots of enharmonic content are called noise. Mathematically, noise can be described as the sum of an infinite number of sine waves – over an infinite amount of time, of course. Very short noise, as mentioned, is usually called “clicking.”
Vibrato is where the pitch moved up and down around a central pitch, where the deviation is too small to be perceived as moving to another note. A glissando is when it goes from one pitch to another, where the source and destination are perceived as separate notes. A trill is a sound that moved quickly between two pitches which are perceived as separate notes. A tremolo is a fast variation in amplitude, again with a specific amplitude center. Becoming louder is crescendoing or fading in. Becoming softer is decrescendoing or fading out.
Some timbrel terms describe the environment (whether “real” or “electronic”) in which a sound event occurred. A cathedral has a really long decay. If you clap your hands, the echo can go on for several seconds. a sound recorded in that environment would be described as resonant. Similarly, a sound recorded in a room with no echo would be described as dry.
There are a lot of other ways in which people describe sounds, but these are often metaphorical, describing the means of production, or comparing it to another sound. for instance a “booming” sound, is a low sound like, well, a boom. Vocal sounds are made with the voice. Screeching sounds. String sounds. Etc. some words are onomatopoetic. Crackle. Crunch. Crack. Clunk. Thunk. Boom. Whoosh. Sploosh. Splat. Vroom.
We have the most terms to talk about musical sounds, but the sounds most essential to survival are the non musical ones. A breaking twig does not have harmonically related overtones or sustained duration, but it might mean a predator is about to get you. It might not be a coincidence that so many of our onomatopoetic sounds describe these kinds of noises. Important sounds that communicate practical information.
Ok, a lot of the technical terms that I’ve named are actually italian, but are also part of the musical esperanto in that they’ve been adopted almost everywhere. (Crescendo in actual esperanto would be malsilentigxo.) I haven’t done much in other languages but dabble and listen to news podcasts, but if there’s one language that seems to never suffer from a paucity of terminology, it’s English.
I will concede, though, that English is not the best language for expression emotions, except for anger, which it, alas, excels at.
In unrelated news, tomorrow my dog goes to a kennel and in the afternoon/evening, I go to London. the day after, I fly to New York, where I still don’t know where I’ll be staying. Which I’m trying not to think too much about.

Weekend Report

The lounge with the electrical plugs and the wifi is shut and locked on weekends! I sat outside of it on a bench and checked a few email messages, but my laptop battery is not young, so I had to quit before I could post anything to my blog. I went inside the computer music labs and they don’t have internet access. You can get to a server, but not outside. Ok, I see why you wouldn’t want people using music lab computers to read comics, but they also can’t get to online help files either.

So I sat in the lab, waiting for my battery to recharge and staring squarely at my navel, when another postgrad came by. His name is Zack (I think) and he’s also after a PhD. He’s also a SuperCollider guy and also left behind from the Copenhagen trip. He asked me what I was up to and I whined that I was all alone in the world (woe is me), so we went out for a beer that evening.

I told him that I’d see him at school again today, but I didn’t go in. While I was navel gazing, I got an idea for a multi channel piece and I thought I’d get a stereo version working and then go add channels. But I haven’t been able to get a stereo version going.

So while I’ve been debugging my code, I’ve been trying to make a playlist of makeout music that I think Cola would like. Shockingly, this side project is not making me feel less lonely. Maybe I should write a makeout music generator to rival Nick Collins’ JPop generator. I need samples of women singing “uhgh” and “ooh” and all those sorta sexy R&B vocals. Anyway. What’s your favorite makeout music and why? Leave a comment. (Anybody that says Stimmung has to sit facing the corner for an hour.)

The piece that I’m actually working on uses feedback. It’s got a comb filter and it also feeds back into the whole synthdef. I use a InFeedback.ar and I track the amplitude with an RMS. There’s a tiny amount of noise going into the circuit and it builds up very slowly through feedback. When it gets above a threshold a bunch of envelopes start going and everything gets zeroed out. I multiply the output of the comb by zero and the input of the comb by zero and the noise by zero and set the comb’s feedback to zero. Heck, I zero the buffer that the comb filter uses. There are zeros everywhere. So when I lift the zeros, it should sound like I’m restarting it from the beginning, right? No! It very quickly builds up past the threshold and zeros again and builds quickly and zeros and builds quickly. I don’t get it.

Yesterblog

Yesterday, the first business day of my Birmingham residency, I got my student ID card and worked out how to get on the campus wifi network with my laptop, but, alas, not my n800. Given the way the network manager (doesn’t) work, I dispair of ever getting my n800 onto the network.

Then I went to the sole rehearsal for the John Cage piece Lecture on the Weather which I will be performing in on October 12. For those of you unfamiliar with this piece, it was commissioned by the CBC (Canadian National Radio) in honor of the American Bicentenial and premiered in New York in 1975. Scott, my supervisor, explained that the CBC New Music folks were a bunch of Vietnam War draft dodgers, which explains why Canada was celebrating the spirit of ’76. (America declared independence from England in 1776. “Spirit of ’76” refers to this declaration.)

The piece is made up of text and squiggly lines. The squiggly lines are treated much like Scratch Music. The text comes from Henry David Thoreau and includes random selections from Walden, Journal and Essay on Civil Disobedience. Cage points out in his preface that the last of those inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The first of those names, especially, might explain why NONE of the Brits in the piece had ever heard of Thoreau.

One of the greatest philosophers in the United States completely unknown here. Good gods.

I don’t know how I feel about the piece. The text is ok. Actually, it’s alarming how much it continues to resonate. I just read the novel Affinity by Waters (author of Fingersmith) and it’s largely about mistreatment of women in prison in the UK, 30 years later than Thoreau. I can read that and think “thank gods they fixed those problems! It’s a great relief that it’s not like that anymore.” But when I read Thoreau, I think, “Arg, nothing has changed.” Constitutional originalists continue to plague the land. The US continues to wage aggressive wars. Our taxes are still used for evil.

But it’s just weird hearing it read in British accents. by people who have no idea what they’re reading. Who hear the phrase “Walden” and think nothing. Who say “Concord” and have no association with it.

Anyway, after rehearsal, I got access to the school studios and a bank account. Yes, a bank account on my first day here. I’d feel very proud of myself, except that they really bent the rules for me, but were unreasonably strict when it came to the many Chinese students waiting in line. Racist bastards. After I get my student visa, I’m switching banks. In the meantime, though, I need a bank.

I feel disappointed with myself. I should have probably told them to fuck off. But, complicating my perceptions, the gate keeper who was giving a hard time to the Chinese students was white, but the guy who actually opened my bank account was black and had Jamaican parents. He was wearing a wrist band praising Marcus Garvey, one of the 117 national heroes of Jamaica.

Today: cell phone unlock, household crap, make posters advertising music commissions.

I’m raising my prices to £10 ($20.25-ish). Order before the prices go up! celesteh.etsy.com