music – Page 8 – Les said, the better II

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

Horrifying Moments

Redaction

One of the most horrifying moments in film is the crucifix scene in The Exorcist. That scene stands out of one of extreme drama, and, indeed, horror. I’m talking about it non-specifically because I haven’t actually seen the movie. But I want to, because it’s reputed to be an excellent film and a classic in it’s genre. And there’s a famous scene involving a crucifix which invokes horror in the audience.

The reason that I bring this up is because I fell victim to knee jerking even as I tried to resist it. Horrifying is not the same as horrible. Saying that Beethoven’s 9th is a horrifying depiction of violence does not mean that it’s horrible. Nor does it mean that the horror lies in people’s enjoyment of the piece. Instead it means that McCleary would like to put an additional genre description on the 9th. In addition to it’s musical form and it’s time period, she would like to add the label “horror.” A label worn by excellent works in other genres.
This sort of generic description is not often applied to musical works and so McCleary is often misconstrued. Including by me. Which is why I should not blog about books that I haven’t actually read.

But what about porn?

(Musicology is so much more exciting than one might think!)
The director of The Exorcist created a film about demonic possession. However, I wouldn’t say that he was advocating for the same or trying to encourage it in any way. I’m guessing most Beethoven scholars would assert that Beethoven wasn’t advocating for rape. However, pron occupies a somewhat different realm in society. For starters, unlike demons, we all agree that it exists. Secondly, unlike rape, it’s legal.
So I think most of my questions from my previous post still stand: Does a pron sample carry the male gaze with it (“the male audition”)? Does intent matter? Does usage matter? What are the implications of whether or not they matter? Does the amount to which they matter vary over time?

Questions in Feminist Musicology

Instrumental Music

To call Susan McClary‘s book Feminine Endings “controversial,” is an understatement. It inspires not just controversy, but also outrage. One guy I knew said of it and her, “she should stop writing.”

Those of you who are not in the music world may be unfamiliar with this book. What it could it say that would cause folks to want to mute the author? “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the [Beethoven’s] Ninth [Symphony] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.” (found here) (Let’s leave aside that this sentence doesn’t actually appear in the book, she did write it and the book has a rephrased version of the same sentiment.) Note that she is speaking metaphorically about the piece of music, not literally about Beethoven. She speaks of his creation, not of he, himself. Still, that’s provocative as hell. Is there anything to it?
I kind of like the 9th and the drama of it, so rather than knee jerking about how I don’t consume that kind of pron, I want to instead address the idea underlying this oft quoted sentence: Are ideas of sexuality and violence expressed through instrumental music? One place to search for the answer to this query is to look at how instrumental music is paired with words and actions in cultural product that seeks to express those same ideas. That is, does Hollywood assign certain sexualities or actions to certain musical idioms? If, for example, woodwinds and especially saxophones were often used as musical cues attached to the sexual other, such that they came to stand as a character note, that would suggest that instrumental music could carry those sort of cues. And indeed, the saxophone’s association with jazz and thus black people (an alien other) lead it to be associated with other alien others like queers (as Norman Mailer wrote, “the white negro”) and fallen women. It is the case that certain instruments and tonalities tend to have cultural baggage rooted in their history. A sax playing a ‘blue’ note invokes all the baggage of jazz music. A drum and bugle corps playing in major invokes the baggage of military pride. Indeed, it would be more surprising if these associations did not exist as it would mean that people had no connection to their cultural history.
Lest anyone argue that the newness of ‘talkies’ means that poor Beethoven was writing before associations came to be attached to musical cues, I have two answers to that. 1. The term “feminine ending” is an archaic musical term, referring to cadential weakness. (wikipedia) This shows that ideas of assigning sexuality to musical structures pre-date hollywood. And 2. She’s using present tense not past tense. “The point of recapitualtion” means not the intention, but the moment: the place where the theme returns and is restated. She asserts that it “is one of the most horrifying moments in music” now. I have to disagree, purely on aesthetic grounds. However, she’s talking about what it means to a listener now, not what it meant to the composer or people in his time period.

Tape Music

I meant to just have an intro paragraph on McClary, but I got carried away, as one so often does. (I have to confess that I haven’t actually finished reading the book. I can’t even swear that I finished the first chapter, but I can’t say for certain as it’s in California and I am not.) Anyway, my point of bringing it up was to make the assertion that if the use of certain instrumental sounds can reference particular ideas, this must also be the case for musique concrete. That is, if a certain schmaltzy sax line implies a sexual encounter, a musician playing a sample of a moan from a porn movie must also have certain baggage. It unarguably conveys sexuality. To say otherwise would be silly. And with it, I think, it brings all the baggage associated with pron.
The first piece that I know of which uses the sounds of a woman experiencing orgasm is Tiger Balm by Annea Lockwood. This piece is feminist in intent. And the sample reflects that. It sounds like a home recording and while the fact of it’s inclusion is a bit shocking, the sonic effect does not carry the titilation that one would expect. I communicated as much to Lockwood over email, after she sent me the record (I met her by volunteering for the Other Minds festival, but that’s a longer story). Her reply acknowledged this.
Since then, I’ve heard orgasm samples used in (at least) three pieces by two male composers. Both used what sounded like recordings of commercial pornography. The first one was by Jascha Narveson, who was a colleague at Wesleyan. He played it in class and I remember it using mostly porn-y sounds. I was dismayed, but then he explained that the piece was feminist in intent. The other two pieces were both by Alvin Curran. One he performed this last spring at the Royal Conservatory. He has a large keyboard loaded up with samples and he improvises playing them, building up dense and often unexpected textures. The first inclusion of the woman moaning was a surprising juxtaposition and a funny moment, but when it returned, the humor was lessened until it was gone. The other piece was on a podcast which I just listened to and which inspired this post. It sounded like he was using the sample sample in the same keyboard. I suspect that it’s a sound that he uses often, as are, probably, all the sounds in his keyboard. Therefore, it’s affect cannot be merely novelty or it wouldn’t bear repeating in multiple pieces and would instead wear thin as a joke that gets old.
So does a pron sample carry the male gaze with it? The production values and sound quality are as instantly recognizable as pictures of Barbie-smooth skin and shaved pubic hair. Can one speak of a male audition to compliment his gaze? And does intent matter?
If intent does matter, then McCleary seems to have slandered Beethoven. (*) I can imagine that his primary conscious desire was to create a compelling piece of music. Certainly, he had unconscious goals, firmly tied to his time and place. But even then, when women’s roles in public life were less than they are now, rape was still far out of bounds. (I presume. Scholars are free to correct me.) If intent doesn’t matter, then Narveson’s piece would be perpetuating our hypothetical male audition. Or does it matter how the music is used? I recall that the music was composed for a feminist benefit of some kind. Does the importance of intent change over time? Beethoven’s intent doesn’t matter because he’s long dead and we’re modern listeners, so therefore, over time, the importance of the intent and original use of Narveson’s piece will gradually fade and it will slowly fall into the male audition. If the intent and usage is a deciding factor in how one regards a piece, do the program notes then become an integral part of the composition? What you hear is always colored by what you know (or think you know), so, to avoid the male audition, would it be necessary to insist that everyone acquaint themselves with the program notes?
How much importance to composers should this be anyway? There is (or was) a group in the San Francisco area called the Porn Orchestra. They played live music to accompany muted porn films. Sometimes with the fast forward button firmly pressed. Amusing, certainly. When I first learned of them, it was via the internet and their information spoke of the “universal” experience of hitting the mute button while viewing porn, because the sound so often sucked. I polled my female friends and almost none had participated in this “universal” experience. So it’s universal for who? (We all know the answer to this question.)
So what about using pron samples? I hope for discussion in the comments, as I don’t have answers to these questions.

Edit

Something just occurred to me. There will be a followup post shortly.

Edit 2

Ok, I knee jerked a bit. Sorry. followup is here

Organ Concert Review

The Grote Kerk in The Hague is having an organ festival right now, which explains why I keep hearing organ music while walking the dog. Last night, I saw a very small flyer for it posted to the church door and decided to check it out. I really like organ concerts and I can name one organ composer off the top of my head (Henry Brant), but I’ve never written for the organ and don’t know too much about the instrument. As a former resident of the Bay Area, though, I was pretty lucky as there are two Mighty Wurlitzer organs installed in local movie theatres. One is in the Grand Lake in Oakland and the other is in the Castro. Also, Wesleyan University, where I was in 2003-5, has a pretty nifty organ which was brand new when I was a student, so I got to hear a lot of organ music, including a new piece by Christian Wolff. This whole paragraph is a long way of saying: I don’t know much about the organ (factoid: invented by ancient Romans), but I dig it.

The performer last night was Leo Van Doeselaar of Amsterdam / Leiden. There was a pre-concert talk of which I understood nothing and then he went up to the organ loft to play. Church organs are often located in the back of churches, which is the case in Den Haag’s Grote Kerk or sometimes on the side. Almost never does a listener actually face the organ (Wesleyan is an exception to this). However, the chairs were arranged, so the audience sat facing the back of the church and hence the organ. Also, it’s often the case that the organist can’t be seen. They had set up a screen and a projector so that there was a camera pointing at the organist and the image was projected where we could see it. Kind of strange, but also interesting.
This particular organ has two panels of stops on either side of three manuals (keyboards). the stops control which pipes are getting air in them and they’re a bunch of knobs which can be pulled out or in (hence the expression, “pulling out all the stops.”). The organist had an assistant who was a page turner, but also did a lot of stop manipulation. The music would switch manuals without a break and while one manual was being played, the busy assistant would re-set the stops for the return to the original manual. Interesting to watch.
The first two pieces were from the 17th century. Which, alas, is not my favorite century. Also, note in the first paragraph that most of my organ listening has been with theatre organs, which often play a more popular repertoire. So the music just seemed kind of . . . sedate. The organ was not punching through and not filling the space. I could see the performer and I could tell he was playing is heart out, but it just wasn’t translating for me. So I wondered if it was the music or the organ. “Well, they can’t all be Bach’s Toccata in d.” (You know the piece. It’s a very dramatic and cliche organ piece. Nicole associates it with horror movies.)
Even as my mind wandered, certain sonic effects were occasionally interesting and I wondered if I might want to exploit them by writing an organ piece. (Well, why not?) Then, the organist started on the third piece, Gioco by Peter-Jan Wagemans (wikipedia). I do not need to write an organ piece, as Wagemans used all the cool bits that I had noticed and several I hadn’t. The piece was astoundingly amazing. The composer is an organist himself, so he is able to write as somebody who really, really knows the instrument. And as he’s a local guy, it’s very well-suited to the sort of organ they tend to have in Holland. It played off the reverb in the cathedral very well, using short notes played quickly to create textures. There was a section where a certain flourish was repeated a few times and each time there was a note repeated afterwards like an echo. The stops for that note were really mushy sounding, not cutting through at all, so it was hard to tell when it started and stopped. It was more of a presence. And I swear, it sounded like a real echo. One that boldly defied physics: believable and slightly disorienting!
There was no clapping between pieces, but the audience was all abuzz after that one. Organists, take note: you can make people very happy if you depart from the 17th century. There are composers alive today and some of their work is amazing.
Then, alas, we returned to the dusty past. But, much to my delight, the last piece actually was Bach’s Toccata in d. Man, I love that piece. It’s great. So unapologetically dramatic! And it’s got these huge parts that should just, imo, shake the fillings out of your teeth. There’s a piece for an organ, something that fills a space! A gigantic installed behemoth, an ancient roman excess! Crashing and pounding like the ocean! Huge! but. It just wasn’t. Ok sure, it was dramatic. And it had a couple of moments that were kind of big. but. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by Mighty Wurlitzers to expect something too big, too much. Maybe what I expect is gauche and ostentatious and not what Bach had in mind at all. Maybe I’m crass. But crass is great fun but this was restrained and smallish.
I think the organ is just too small. It’s also kind of recessed, which can’t help.
I also think that I just must be crass, because the audience gave the organist a standing ovation and then rushed to the CD table. I do think he was a really good performer (especially the new piece was fantastic), so maybe they’re used to the organ and I’m not? I’m probably going to skip the rest of the series, however it also includes carillon recitals (no wonder the bells have been so interesting lately), so I will definitely listen for those.

Are You a feminist? Why or why not?

Video from the 4th of July shot with my camera. The audio from this will shortly be munched into a piece of music. You too can participate. Make your voice heard! I am not looking for any particular answer. However, I am looking for language diversity. So send me your answer in your favorite language: English, Esperanto, Spanish, Japanese, Klingon, etc. I’m especially looking for German, since the piece is going to premier in Austria.
Email me your answer in audio or video (with sound). Any format is ok. I will thank you in the program notes and give you a copy of the piece. Cell phone movies/recordings are ok, the internal mic on your computer, whatever. Send files to celesteh AT gmail DOT com.
This movie little clip is under a Creative Commons Attribution-only Liscence, btw. Video wants to be free.

Howto: Podcasting

What is it?

‘Podcasting’ refers to a sort of audio blogging. The podcaster posts a piece of audio to the internet and subscribers automagically download it via itunes or another client program. It’s a good way for people to keep up with your audio output.

How do I subscribe in iTunes?

For Safari/iTunes users, this is really easy. Click on the RSS icon in the podcast you want (this is on the right hand side of the URL address field). Safari goes into feed reading mode. On the right hand side, there’s a link that says “subscribe in iTunes.” Click that and you’re good.

If you use another browser, find the URL of the feed and copy it. Open iTunes. Go to the advanced menu. Select subscribe to podcast. Paste in the URL. Hit ok. You’re done.

How do I prepare the audio for my own podcast?

Usually, people post MP3s. You can record audio with software called Audacity. This is very handy software, which can also be used for normalization. (This means making the recording as loud as possible – a good thing or it will sounds really quiet in a playlist.) It is also possible to use Audacity as an MP3 converter. iTuens and other software can also be used for that. I convert audio to be 160 kbps stereo. If you are just recording your voice talking, it possible to a much lower quality conversion and still be totally understandable.

How can I host my own podcast?

If you have your own server, you can ask your sysadmin for WordPress. This is blogging software, which is easy to install. It requires SQL. Your sysadmin or hosting company can help you with that. There are many templates that you can use to change the way it looks. I host my entire professional website with wordpress.

Upload your MP3 to your website. It doesn’t matter where exactly you put it. It can be on a free site like Geocities or on your own server, or wherever. Let’s say you put it in a directory called ‘mp3s’, under your web directory ‘public_html.’
Using your webbrowser, log into the wordpress dashboard and click to write a new post.
In the body of the post, include a link to your mp3: <a href=”mp3s/new_mp3″>My new MP3</a>
say whatever else you want to say
click to publish

That’s it.

How can I have somebody else host my podcast?

You can sign up for a free blog at http://wordpress.com. Do everything just as above, but your dashboard is at their site instead of yours. Or, you can pay to have them host your mp3s for you.

How do I get my podcast listed in the Apple Store so it shows up when people click on “podcast directory” in itunes?

You need to have a store account, which usually requires you to submit a credit card. There are ways around this, for example, by joining the developer network. Launch iTunes. Click on the podcast section. Click on the podcast directory. Scroll down. There’s a link that says “submit a podcast.”

Find out more

I swear, this is all really, really easy. Leave questions in the comments.

Gigs!

I’ve mentioned that I’m playing soon in Austria (12 July in Lintz). The information is here. Note that the concert is open to anybody at all who wants to attend, whether they are participating in the rest of the conference or not.

I think playing at hacker / open source meetings is a good idea. I’m looking into using Perl to talk to the SC server, just so I can submit a proposal to a Perl conference. Of course, I spent some time as a professional perl scripter and I once wrote a web server in it for fun. My first-ever SuperCollider project had quite a bit of perl in it, as SC3 was really very alpha at the time. so it’s not just a cynical ploy to get to play at a geeky gathering.
Also, leftist political conferences are a good fit. I’ve got American political music, for sure. I keep thinking about doing more of it, but my ability to manipulate non-English text is lower. I think I will do such a piece for the /etc conference, as I recorded a friend of mine speaking in French about feminism. (Do you want to be in the piece? Send me a recording, in any format, of yourself, speaking in any language, answering the question: “Are you a feminist? Why or why not?”) Anyway, there’s certainly plenty of American material to work with, alas.
So if you, dear reader, are doing some sort of conference about open source or hacking or programming languages or leftist organizing or any related field, you should drop me a line. Depending on the location, I may be able to cover my own travel expenses. I have no technical needs, aside from electricity and a sound system. If the venue is café-sized and/or in Holland, I can even provide my own sound system.
Hm, if only I had a few pieces in Esperanto . . ..

FAQ part 2

Ah, I am getting a clearer signal from you now, and thus I have more answers.

What’s going on with Birmingham?
I’m still not officially admitted. They never received my Wesleyan transcript, despite my having sent two separate requests to the Wesleyan registrar. I don’t know if it’s the mail or the registrar or the admissions office, but something is going wrong someplace and it’s kind of frustrating. I think I can come in on a tourist visa and spend a few days in the US if I have to, to change my status. But I’d rather get it right the first time. Also, lack of official admission has lead me to not try applying for aid and it’s already summer, so I think it might be too late now anyway. Which is suboptimal, but survivable.
What’s going on with your commissioning project?
Still working on it. It’s been really low traffic lately, which is ok, because I’ve been kind of busy doing other things.
No, I mean, what’s going on with MY commission that I requested?
If your request came with a paypal or via etsy, I’m working on it. Otherwise, please resend. Or, if it’s been longer than a week or so, er, please resend the info.
No, I mean, what with that other project you promised to do? Or email you promised to send? Or name for contact you promised to give me? Or dog food you promised to buy?
Arg! I’m sorry! I’m Sorry! um, soon. specifically: I’ll have the 65€ on monday. I’ll check out the equipment to do the CD transfer on Monday and get unedited CDs in the mail shortly thereafter with edited ones to follow. I need to email somebody to ask the guy’s name. I meant Birmingham ENGLAND, not Alabama. They didn’t have the right kind of dog food when I went by, but we still have a few days of the vegetarian kind left, so she’s ok for now.
Er, yeah.
What’s the blue box I now see in the sidebar of your blog?
It’s Twitter, which is a(n ou-like) service that I can SMS or IM with my current status. I realized that while I was off biking around, nobody knew where I was, so I sent daily SMSes to a friend of mine with my location. Which is only useful to that one friend. So now I can SMS twitter instead.
There’s some sort of RSS or something you could use to get updated on my status, but you’ll have to go there to find out about it, you feel all stalker-y. Otherwise, check the blog or twitter. My username is ‘celesteh’
When will you next be stateside?
Thanksgiving is the next date to count on. Might come sooner, depending on factors.
Are you playing anything in the SuperCollider gathering next September in Amsterdam / Den Haag?
Yes, I will absolutely be there. And play music. I need to let them know that, though.
Do you have any technical requirements?
I will need a place to plug in for electricity and I will be providing a line-level stereo out. I need a table big enough for a laptop and a small mixing board, and a chair to sit behind said table. I may require a mic stand, but I don’t know yet. Set up should take me about 15 minutes and sound check only about 5 or 10 after that. Also, I’ll be bringing my dog with me, so I’ll need to be able to get her into the venue when I’m playing and also on the other nights. (She’s very quiet, housebroken and free of fleas and, indeed, has experience performing and thus will cause no problems.)
Ok, you’re kind of losing me.
Hey, I’m reading a lot of people’s minds right now, through the internets. Some of you want to know about the suspicious package at the conservatory. Some want to invite me to play a gig (or have already) and want to know what I need. Not everybody needs every answer.
Shouldn’t you just send those people email?
Well, in an IDEAL world, where I wasn’t a total flake . . .

12 June 2007 23:21

I want to start this entry by stating that I am no more injured then the last time I posted. Nicole is similarly unscathed. Xena is fine and in my possession. I still have (afaik) all my stuff (except for a handkerchief which I was fond of, alas). Almost all of it is in working order.

I am on a train. When I post this to my blog, I will be in Den Haag. I will now pause for a moment to go find some wood and knock on it.

When I last typed, I believe that I was sitting in a laundromat in Antwerp. I think I wrote about the cathedral. Did I mention that I left Xena tied up outside directly outside the main entrance? Whenever she is alone in a strange place, she fears being left there forever and so urgently tries to attract my attention so that I can come rescue her. She barked loudly the whole time that I was in the church. I could hear her barks echoing. I’ve come to like the acoustic of external dog barks resonating in large stone vaults. However, I can see how others might not feel the same way. But it really gives a feel for the resonances of a space.

Anyway, when I came out to get her, the ticket seller yelled at me for a bit, saying that everybody was scared to come in because there was an alarming, barking dog next to the door. I apologized profusely and felt really guilty. What if somebody’s vacation was ruined because they were too frightened to see the cathedral and they only had half an hour of opportunity to do so (because they went to the museum first or something)?

We biked to Mechellen. The trip was uneventful. Painfully uneventful. Some folks yelled at me for letting Xena run along side the bike in the woods. The LF 2 is really poorly laid out for a long section of in Belgium. It has no signs and it’s really boring. Also, people who live close to Antwerp are often unfriendly and hostile and scowl at you in a threatening manner when you say hello as you bike past. And some of them seem to like to deface signs for bike routes. By spray painting over them so you can’t read them, or drawing in new arrows pointing in wrong directions or taping over parts or removing signs entirely.

When I got to Mechellen, though, I pulled out my Routard and started calling the three listed hotels. None of them took dogs. In the Netherlands, every hotel takes dogs. In France, people adore dogs. Even in Germany, people are quite warm feeling towards dogs. I think Belgians are desperate to differentiate themselves from their language-sharing neighbors. As such, they’re not too fond of dogs.

A friendly older woman approached me and started telling me about her bike tours. She gave the excellent advice of calling small towns’ tourist offices before 4:00 so they could book you a hotel. Great advice. She also said I probably wouldn’t find a hotel at all for the evening. Yikes.

There may or may not be a lot of hotels in Mechellen, but they’re not well marked. In Antwerp, I sort of walked around, looking for hotel signs and knocking on doors. Apparently, I was very, very lucky. Anyway, I biked past and so went into a very swanky looking hotel. There’s no camping around there, so I was kind of stuck. But they didn’t take dogs either! The woman at the desk, though, was awesome and called a much more moderately priced hotel and booked me a room.

So we ended up at the Hobbit Hotel. I mention it by name because the owners are REALLY REALLY nice and are just starting out and want some publicity. So it’s a typical utilitarian two star, but with really good service and good breakfasts. The owners eat the same breakfast as the guests, so it’s tasty even if there wasn’t an excess of choices. Also, as much espresso as you want. Also, there’s wifi in the bar area. It’s free, but you have to ask about it before you can get the password. They also offer secure bike parking and I think also bike rentals. It’s about 2 km from the center.

I booked two nights because of the cathedral. It’s carillon has the most bells in the world. UNESCO lists it as a world heritage site. They have regular concerts, three times a week when the carillon school is in session and one time a week in the summer. The concert was the next day at 3:00. So we walked around, got some food, went into a bar with a gay flag, got some more food and generally slacked until the concert, which lasted a little more than an hour. It was widely ignored by one and all.

Sometimes, laptop artists worry about something often called “performance aspect.” What this tends to refer to is the visual component of performing an instrument. For instance, if you go to a piano concert, usually it’s possible to see the pianist. You can see her gestures and get a sense of her musical interpretation by how she moves her body. This extra-musical information is widely believed to be the main reason that people pay to go to concerts. If you want to listen to the Goldberg Variations, for example, a CD of Glen Gould may be the best possible musical way to hear it. But if you go to a concert, it won’t be as polished, but you can see the pianist moving around. So goes the common wisdom, usually offered as reasoning for why laptop music is lacking.

I bring up performance aspect because carillon concerts have none. Was I listening to a live performance? Was I listening to a MIDI file? I don’t really have any way of knowing how “live” is really was, except that bells were actually ringing. The process that activated those bells, however, was invisible. Does the lack of performance aspect make a difference to carillon concerts? Is this why virtually nobody else was paying attention (or are they not as tickled pink as I am by hearing Strangers in the Night dinging out of a church steeple?) I once heard Carmen performed at the Grote Kerk in Amsterdam and others were listening. I think I have too little data to draw conclusions, but it’s something to think about. Nobody whines that they can’t see the bell-ringer.

After that, I wanted to go into the cathedral, but I really did want to upset anyone like I had in Antwerp. The cathedral had a very large square in front of it, filled with hedges. I tied Xena up, to a tree in the hedge, far enough from the door that nobody would be alarmed to enter, but close enough that it would be clear where her owners were. There didn’t seem to be any residential houses nearby. The French and the Dutch don’t seem to mind barking dogs too terribly much, so I figured it was ok.

The church had an amazing number of relics. They had St Celestine, who is rumored to have some sort of prophesy (and who is my patron saint, according to me), and a bunch of other saints. So many relics! It was awesome! No cathedral is complete without having several display cases full of human bones. Also, they had the most amazing pulpit ever. I can’t even describe how florid it was, covered with animals and plants and saints and crucifixion, frogs, snaked squirrels, apples, all so very ornate and overdone and carved in wood. Pictures will be forthcoming via flickr.

After a while, Nicole got worried about the dog and went outside to check on her. The police were holding her leash. Some woman with two dogs had come by and become very worried about our obviously abandoned dog. (You can tell she’s abandoned because she’s ~~wearing a collar~~ has no water bowl near her). The woman offered her water but she wouldn’t take it! Clearly, this calls for police intervention. Nicole false claimed to have been unable to hear the dog barking. The police gave her a talking to, but let her keep Xena. You can’t take the dog in the church, you can’t let her bark outside. The hotel folks would have been happy to look after her (almost too happy, though), so I guess that was a solution. Also, it’s a solution to take turns, which is what we did with the city museum and the other church that we visited. I told the hotel owner about this when we came back for the evening and she was shocked. Belgium has too many laws, she explained.

The next day, as we were checking out, she asked if we’d forgotten anything. The dog, maybe? It would be ok if we forgot the dog. Xena is charming to everyone, except to cops and concerned ladies who offer her water.

We started down the path to Leuven, the home town of Stella Artois. The bike route took us down a canal. For the whole day. On the same canal. Although we were instructed to cross from one side of it to another at the halfway point, so I guess that broke up some of the monotony. At least it was easy going. And people started to become more friendly again, which was a relief. Also, the last bit smelled like beer. mmmmm

We got to Leuven and Nicole asked me why it was famous. I suggested we stop for a beer (maybe a Stella) and look at the guidebook. As we got to the Grote Markt, I said, I’m going to guess it’s known for it’s beer, it’s cathedral and it’s stadthuis (aka, city hall). That thing was ornate when it was built. But then, on the advice of Victor Hugo, they decided to cover every possible nitch with statues of notable personages from the region. The effect is astounding. It puts Brussels’ flamboyant Hôtel de Ville to shame. I’ve never seen so many statues at such high density. And at the base of every statue were a bunch of tiny bass reliefs showing even smaller people. It’s amazing.

We sat down in a café facing the stadthuis and asked for a beer recommendation. The waiter brought us really strong beers. Biking in the hot sun + really strong beer = unable to walk afterwards. Nicole was more steady than I, so she went first into the cathedral and then I went. The inside is charming, plus the altar of the previous church still exists under the newer church. And they have lots of relics. And a life-size carving of a falling horse as at the base of their pulpit, so complete that it actually has a carved asshole.

The town is a college town, and thus has lots of vegetarian food at reasonable prices. I found it to be entirely charming and worthy of a longer visit than I allocated for it, but when I went to find a hotel in town, they were full because of some university event, so we went on to go camp as we had originally planned.

My fietsroutsen maps of the Netherlands have campgrounds marked on them, which is a very useful feature. My Belgian maps not only cover far less ground, but don’t mark campsites, only mention their general vicinity. Some of them have had signs from the bike routes, so I just hoped the one right outside of town would be similarly marked.

I thought we might have gone too far when we passed the gypsy camp. (like, with real Romas), but when we got to the top of a hill and could see nothing but rolling fields in every direction, I knew we had gone too far. A family biked up behind us, so I asked if they knew where a campground was. They lived next to one, but it “wasn’t wonderful” and the owner was “kind of crazy.” How bad could it be? I just want a flat spot and a shower. We biked with them the way there. They explained that the path we were on was only for bikes and agriculture. Also, it was the hilliest part of Flanders. I think I broke a speed record for the dog trailer. They also talked a tiny bit about Waterloo. Napoleon was defeated because he failed to account for the little hollows that run through the hills.

The route was beautiful. Rolling fields (of barley!) on either side. Farm houses in the distance. Moody, grey skies. It was the prettiest part of the trip.

We got the campsite and the owner was, as advertised, kind of crazy. The campsite had a large grey, greasy lake in the middle in which steely grey fish would slither around, just beneath the surface before returning to the murky depths. The fish were huge. The lake was a breeding site for mosquitoes. He insisted the water was lovely. Spring water! Drinking water before it got in the lake. You can’t drink the lake water, but right before it goes in, you can. We asked where the showers were. “The toilet is over there, go to the end and then up, you understand?” Showers? “The toilet is over there, at the end.” I started to become suspicious, but he started asking questions about our dog. Was she friendly? Had she ever bitten anybody? He proclaimed his love for animals and said that if we ever came back riding a live elephant, we could camp for free! He kept talking about this for a while and the light was fading, so we rushed to set up the tent as fast as we could when he finally wandered off.

Nicole went to powder her nose (for European readers: she went to use the toilet). She came back. “It’s uhhh rustic. You’ll need to jump over a trench to get there.” Good gods, open sewers! ewwww! I went, past the moldy, mossy, abandoned caravans, marked with yellowing “for sale signs” and there were slugs in the toilet. (Not, like, in the building. I mean, in the bowl. I peed on a slug.) I told Nicole that I didn’t think it had been cleaned since the Carter administration. She pointed out that there was no Carter administration in Belgium. We started joking about what political event had lead to his abandoning toilet cleaning. Maybe it was personal. Maybe his wife left him and he didn’t realize they needed cleaning. Or maybe she had died. Maybe she had forgotten to clean them one day and he had killed her and left them unkempt in warning and protest. As it got darker and the skeeters swarmed, this theory became more ominous. The frogs screeched their mating class in the background. The birds screamed like banshees. It was the loudest campground ever and it was all animal sounds. The less than quarter moon was hidden behind a cloud and I could hear the large fish darkly rising to the surface to snatch bugs from the air and splashing back down to the opaque bottom. Why had he asked so many questions about how mean the dog was? Why was there nobody else in the campground? Who owned all the greenish empty caravans? What happened to them?

We finally went to sleep, although I woke up about a million times. why had the frogs fallen so quiet all of the sudden?

When we got up in the morning, he was no where to be seen. The showers . . . yikes, I wouldn’t have mentioned them either. And did I mention how weird the water tasted. Drinkable lake water, eh? We packed up as fast as we could as the greenish clouds swirled menacingly overhead. Xena, usually eager to frolic in campgrounds sat nervously near the gate, anxious to leave. the bottom of our tent was covers with odd roundish, slimy, oozing creatures.

We peddled up to the top of the hill, where we had last seen the bike route and spent a while riding through the town, until we came back to the inexplicably grey camp ground. The route went right past it. And then around the back. And then meandered and then came back to the other side. We didn’t see a single person. I started looking for signs from the Blair Witch movie. That’s how today started. It got better. And then it got worse.