Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

it is not an article of faith for catholics that life begins at conception. abortion is just as controversial in the catholic church as it is in all of american society. not every catholic agrees on the pope with this point any more than every american loved reagan. FURTHERMORE, when the pope says “culture of life” he’s also talking about war, poverty and the death penalty. it doesn’t take much research into the lives of prominent conservative catholics to see how that’s not in 100% agreement either.

also, a lot of catholics use birth control
ahem, when the pope said, not says. When do they start picking a replacement? Who is in the lead? I want to see a controversy leading to a papal schism with a pope and an anti-pope busily excommunicating each other. That would be exciting.
Tag: Pope

Ann Coulter does. She think it’s a war against Islam, which I guess is super clear from her September 12th 2001 (or thereabouts) comments that we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity. She meant the entire middle east. Her book Treason, of which I’ve read about half, takes periodic breaks from talking about the heroism, patriotism of Joe McCarthy (the anti-communist guy. no, i am not kidding) to talk smack about Allah and the entire Middle East. Hussein was bad because he was from the same region as Usama bin Ladin. she said something about a swamp there. The middle east is a swamp, you see, which needs to be drained and “third world savages” need to be civilized. The whole third world are savages, though. I don’t want to do a Coulter trick and take a quote of context

This insanity is apparently the basis for a lot of foreign policy, which apparently resembles a torture-filled six degrees of separation game, according to a recent article in the Gaurdian. You might know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who might want to hide a ticking time bomb, but anyway, this other guy that that guy knows is a terrorist, so we’ll torture all of you, cuz there might be a bomb there someplace. Afghanistan is apparently a prison state and soon we’ll be a prison planet. Some folks think the comparisons to Nazis are overblown. Maybe they are. Maybe when German read about prison camps in Poland, they thought that comparisons to Napoleon were overblown.
And if Joe McCarthy could have used torture and his way had become the law of the land . . .. Well, no wonder Coulter likes him.
In the mean time, let’s talk about the pope dying, the plight of the brain dead being disconnected from feeding tubes, the latest from the Michael Jackson trial and the horrible indecency on our airwaves.
Tag: Terror

• time pieces – figure out when intermission should go and if anything ought to be cut
• Clean house and room
• write concert program (as in, a printed program)
• buy food to feed self, cola and dad
• buy booze
• buy ingredients for post concert snacks (i’m thinking cookies)
• figure out webcast url and post it
• buy hair dye
• dye hair blue
• email grad student list with concert info
• get car jump started and let it run for a while to recharge battery (shouldn’t the charge have lasted from last time?)
• let people who can’t make 8:00 show know about 4:00 run through (also april 5th)

done

• made pieces MOTU-compatible
• emailed music department about concert
• posted like 50 flyers
• scheduled thesis defense

possible thesis title: Political Voices: Political Engagement Through Text Sound Poetry
thesis paper theoretically due april 15th. i’ve got some books to read for that. yarg
Tag: Celesteh

I just saw on TV an hour ago that the pope was dead. now, according to the internets, the pope is alive again. Apparently, they have done controversial surgery on him, replacing several of his missing and broken parts with machines. he is now robopope!

If this doesn’t work, he’s left a will saying he should be cryogenically frozen. This will make him the world’s first popesicle.
Um, ok, nevermind. I’m just annoyed that the story keeps changing. Let me have my moment of momentous occasion already and then let me start speculating on the new pope. I hope they pick an Italian.
Tag: Pope

Second cup of coffee yesterday morning was not a good idea. i have wiggle room on the written paper, which anyway, i am officially Not Worried About. Worst case: I have to rewrite it over the summer and don’t graduate on time. I understand that the amount of work required for the paper is inversely related to the amount of work done creating the musical opus. I’ve written a few personal library files which ought to count for something, including my fancy panning class, and my set of buffer tools for manipulating recorded speech. It took me many weeks to do my first text piece with bush’s voice. a few weeks to do my ann coulter piece, only days to do rush limbaugh and i banged out medidations for women in a single evening. this plus the hundred or so pages of my previous (gah) thesis project, and i am not worried.

a motu is a device which allows a computer to be able to receive 8 separate lines of audio simultaneously or output 8 separate lines simultaneously. with a motu attached to my computer, i can send out 2 lines to the stero speaks built in to the chapel and 2 smaller speakers that i’m going to use for folks like fred phelps, because running him through the built in chapel speakers puts him just too much on his home turf. my dislike of motu products dates back to driver problems i had in os9. ever single mac midi application except for motu ones used the official oms midi drivers. except for motu. they had their own set. which meant rebooting to run my one piece of motu software and big headaches sorting out my extensions. motu hardware is somewhat more compatible with supercollider. their program performer does a few more things and does not require installed hardware to run it. however, performer is overly complicated and i don’t use the extra features. and motu hardware won’t work with protools. blah blah blah. i got sick of worrying about this and so all of my pieces were designed to be only two channels
what really really annoys me about my advisor is that upon listening to a piece of music, he immediately grasps the point and makes several suggestions to make the concept clearer or to make it work better in the space. infuriatingly, these suggestions are almost always a good idea. ok, it’s not infuriating. it’s just a lot of work. and, of course, this is why i went to music school. i’ve been mostly sitting at home working on stuff and not sharing them, which is illogical and foolish. i HATE asking for help because i have the idea that it makes me look weak. ahem. anyway, last semester, advisor was on sabatical. this semester, we mostly talked about d00med first thesis project. so that’s why i’m getting musical feedback right now.
in case you missed it below my poster, i’m going to paris next year. if you have an idea of a grant that i should apply for, let me know.
for you californians, i will be playing the contents of my thesis concert again in california, in san francisco at the hemlock tavern on the last wednesday in june. it will cost $10 (or less, i’m going to try to bargain the price down) to get in. more details as they become available.

Tag: Celesteh

where the target will never see them

1. MOTUs are a piece of crap. MOTU drivers crash my computer. you can’t even run iChat while running MOTU. I did NOT want to do four channel set up because it is a pain the ass. i will have to haul a bunch of equipment around. i will have to install fucking stupid drivers which fuck everything up. I will have to have redundant laptops because MOTU will cause a laptop crash at least once during concert and i’ll look stupid if i make people wait for a reboot.
2. no, it will not “make my life easier” to add a fucking gui to all my programs. doing a bunch of extra coding really never makes my life easier.
3. gender shifting ann coulter’s voice is a terrible idea. it does not deconstruct her status as a right wing woman pundit, it just reinforces stereotypes and gives weight to ad hominem attacks against her appearance.
4. now is REALLY not a good time to want to change everything around.
5. myabe, you know, my advisor should hear ALL of my pieces before my concert. maybe not. it’s not like i want to change every single one of them.
6. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
7. also, unrelatedly, appletalk has suddenly stopped functioning, which means i need to do an os reinstall or some shit. etf? at least i know it’s not cuz of motu, cuz it happened last night.

also, i hate everyone on earth. except for you. oh and the written portion of my thesis is due in a week and a half, i’ve just learned. today.
Tag: Celesteh

Ignorance is strength

“We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture,” said “pastor and parent Ray Mummert, 54” explaining his opposition to Darwin. Uh. Yeah. That sucks when the smart, educated people attack you. Let’s all feel superior for a moment before the full implication of that quote dawns on us and we descend into panic. Of course, all that really matters is unquestioning belief and that’s how these folks vote and the age of reason is over. ok, now panic.

Esperanto Ed in the News

Esperanto Ed is/was my Esperanto teacher. It’s so funny to see that name in print, cuz that’s also how I refer to him. ahahhaa. (Maybe if we learn Esperanto, we can talk to educated, intelligent people in other countries who will help us escape.

Damn good cookies

Try the cookies. Really easy, really tasty recipie.

Culture of Life

The federal government continues to look out for people without brains. Not, not the guy in the first item, I’m talking fetuses who have never had a brain. The US army wants to force women relying on them for healthcare to cary brainless fetuses to term.

Important points in that article

What many people don’t realize, she said, “is that an anencephalic pregnancy could be over a year in gestation. One of the nasty things not many know is that because the brain is not developed, the fetus doesn’t send a signal that it is ready to come out.”

that speaks for itself. And:

In 2003, the government lawyers also cited moral arguments for denying military medical coverage. Prohibiting federal funding of abortions “reflects and effectuates a moral judgment to value all human life, including the life of an anencephalic infant.”

The government’s refusal to fund abortion “furthers the government’s interest in protecting human life in general and promoting respect for life,” the lawyers said in their appeal.

If they care os much about one non-brain-having fetus, imagine how much they care about everyone in Iraq. If they’re so morally clear that they will defend even the most horrible, terminal, fatal, suffering-inducing, unsurvivable congenital birth defects, then the must be 100% absolutely, positively clear in Iraq. It would certainly be a cynical ploy to draw a bright line in a murky area to pretend that everything behind that line is 100% ok, you know, to imply a moral purity where none whatsoever exists.
For those keeping score at home: Lack of brain = good. Poor = bad. third world = really bad.

My concert

8:00 PM tuesday, April 5th in the Chapel on the Wesleyan Campus.
Tag: Celesteh

If I am ever in a coma or a persistent vegetative state and I’m not coming back: take as much time as you need to come to terms with it and then stop keeping me alive. It’s not going to bother me either way if my brain is gone, so this is for you. Don’t prolong having to deal with stuff. It’s a waste of resources. Just OD me on morphine or whatever. Seriously. Faster is better here, too. Better living (and dying) through chemistry.

my dad had better have a living will or something before he goes on his open-ended motorcycle trip. when my mom was dying, i really wanted to help stop her suffering, but my dad was against it and he got final say. i’d fight my brother, though.
Tag: Celesteh

There is a substantial [textbook] buying bloc–namely, school boards in southern states–that follows suit with whatever the state school board of Texas does. These states buy textbooks uniformly, statewide. Most “blue states” buy district to district, so there is no unified bloc per se to counterbalance the southern states where points of politics are concerned. So this bloc of southern school boards has an unrivaled power to influence the choices of the major textbook publishers in the country–of which there are only like four, anyhow. Basically, they don’t publish anything the school board of Texas doesn’t buy.

You can see where this headed, but it’s already shockingly total. Right now, a sex ed textbook that isn’t “abstinence only” cannot be bought in the United States. Not a current one, not from any major publisher. There are inroads against evolution as well, but sex ed has basically been exterminated.

Link (via Boing Boing)

98% of parents in Texas want their kids to get sex ed in school, according to something I read a few months ago, God knows where.
Authors like Joe Conason argue that Republicans have stolen from us the good old days of the Clinton administration. He applauds Clinton’s every move, including the punitive as heck Welfare “Reform.” Conason claims to speak for the left. This is how we got into this mess. Screwing the poor is not leftist. And this textbook mess didn’t start four years ago. It’s been growing under Clinton’s watch. The appeasement pro-business politics of Democrats have failed. They’ve failed a generation of children who will now have to deal with higher rates of disease and unwanted pregnancy. They’ve failed parents. They’re failing the very notion of a secular society.
We have no elected leadership on the left in the Senate. In the house, we’ve got the progressive caucus. Everywhere, we’ve got a bunch of spineless democrats, terrified of republican attack ads and too cowed to actually do something their district would vote them back in over. Instead of standing out, they try not to offend. So our single-party system steamrolls everyone in favor of a few small constituencies: the opium of the masses and business.
If leftist politics of the last 20 years have failed, then we need to find a new way. What happened in 1999 in Seattle was awesome, but it seems to have run out. Only the Daily Show covered the shadow convention in Boston. Everybody covered the anti-RNC protesters, but I understand that what was on TV played out a bit differently than what I saw on the street. In the 1960’s it was street actions that defined the peace movement and were immensely successful, but this doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. Or maybe they were never enough. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the second major boycott against a segregated transit line in the south. you don’t hear about the first one. Protesters drove the bus line out of business. But they didn’t end segregation. Because the Montgomery boycott was couples with legal action. All these attacks need to be multi-pronged. Street action, then, was necessary, but not enough by itself. Legal action with out street action was also insufficient. What does this mean for now?
The other side has learned lessons on how to neutralize our actions. Both sides need to constantly invent. Both sides need to constantly re-analyze the past looking for winning strategies and jettisoning losing strategies. This does not, as perhaps Conason would advocate, mean jettisoning core values.
There’s been some talk lately about going door to door. That works. (These guys think they’ve invented the wheel though. The Lesbian Avengers put this in the organizing guidebook in like 1996 or before, anyway.) But what about artists? Has the leftist art of the last 20 years also failed, because it is part of a failed milieu? Of course, this depends on the role of political art, which is certainly not a settled question. Does it exist to serve art or to serve politics? I feel like anything that gets people to pay attention to non-corporate art (which does not glorify the dominant paradigm – i.e., not blond jesus paintings) is helping resist fascism. But it’s not enough.
Tags: Leftism, Art