Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

George Bush

 

Scitolopolotics

 

During
my first semester I read about an acoustical phenomenon where when researchers
divided up recorded speech so that each consonant and vowel sound was
separated, and then played back the recorded speech with all of the parts in
correct order, but with each sound reversed, listeners were unable to detect
the reversal.  I decided that it
might be interesting to write a piece that would make people aware of this phenomenon
by crossing the threshold of inaudible reversal and audible reversal. For my
recorded speech, I decided to use the words of George W. Bush, because
everything he says is so very backwards. 
I searched CNN.com for aiff files of Bush speaking and only found two
good ones.  One was him speaking about
the ABM treaty, but my ex-wife was coincidentally working on a piece using the
same piece of audio and didn’t want me to use it.    Instead, I used a short speech that George Bush
gave on terrorism and destroying American culture.  That semester, one of the students in MUSC 220 had used the
same audio clip for a different sort of tape project.  I had been thinking about the subtext of the speech since
hearing that project and about how to make Bush’s real message – his desire to
destroy pop culture – clear.  I
started by playing the audio file with no change, and then divided it into
grains 0.025 seconds long.  I
played those grains in order, but each grain was played backwards.  I then doubled the grain size and
repeated the process for several minutes until Bush’s speech became
indecipherable.  At the same time,
I took much shorter Bush phrases, first form the text and then from other texts
with similar themes and ran them through the same process.  Because those clips were much shorter,
they became indecipherable in much less time.  These co-processes made the main process clearer and
highlighted the sub-text of Bush’s speech.  The speech was nominally about terrorism, but on repeated
listening, it became clear that it was more about causing American culture to
shift rightward, to criticize Hollywood and to push the idea of individual
responsibility instead of socialized responsibility.  Because of the repeating of the speech, which was gradually
breaking down, the friendly experiencer was listening carefully, grasping at
meaning.  The subtext was brought
to the surface in that way.

            The
second part of the piece uses this process but in reverse.  I bought a book about lesbian
separatist philosophy, Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations by Jeffner Allen, at a bookstore in New
Haven.  I then picked out four
phrases related to violence and terror and specifically picked to annoy my
ideologically post-feminist vocal talent. The ideas expressed were as radical
as Bush’s but from the opposite ideological spectrum. I run the algorithm in
the opposite direction, because I take the opposite view of the words.  Allen also talks about violence,
terrorism and victim hood, but unlike Bush, everything she says is true and
real.  Her words are ultimately
empowering to her reader, giving her readers freedom instead of taking it
away.  Her viewpoint is equally
extremist, but exists in reaction to the sort of evil that Bush proposes. Each
phrase went to it’s own channel, one of four used in the piece.  The sound started completely backwards
and so was impossible to pick out meaning, but after a short while, the
shortest phrase began to be understandable.  I was surprised the way it was easy to focus on one sound
among many as soon as words started to be decipherable.

            I
found that the second movement made the piece much more bearable.  Listening to George Bush talk about
destroying culture for five minutes made me very tense, but the soothing voice
of Jessica Feldman reading about women uprising acted as an anecdote to Bush’s
rhetoric.  Also, it’s very easy for
oppositional political pieces to fall into negativity.  Allen’s words made the piece end on
hopeful note.  “Terror is negated
through the freedom of my body” is the voice of sanity in opposition to
Bush.  We still know that destroying
our liberties is not the answer to fear.

            This
piece was first performed at the end of the Fall 2003 semester, but I was
running it on a different SuperCollider version than it was written for and so
it crashed between the two sections, due to a now fixed SuperCollider crash-bug
with Buffers.  I performed the
piece in its entirety for the first time at a house concert in the fall of
2004.

            This
piece was written with four-channel surround sound.  In the first part, the main speech is sent out panned to the
middle, but the short, highlighted phrases are sent only to their own
speaker.  In the second part, every
phrase gets it’s own speaker. 
Highlighted sounds and the final phrases get their own space this
way.  Two channel mixes only using
panning were not successful.

            In
the spring of 2005, I began experimenting with spatialization algorithms.  I found that it was acceptable to mix
the piece down to two channels using virtual locations for each of the four
original channels.  I wrote a Class
Library to compute phase changes, delay and amplitude differences between the
virtual locations and the actual, physical speakers.  Using this created enough perception of space to compensate
for not actually having all four speakers.  I did this because I want to be able to play my pieces
easily and without extra hardware. 
If I can run all of my pieces using only a stereo speaker arrangement, I
can use just the line out of my laptop and a very basic mixing board.  This greatly simplifies setup and
increases the number of venues with suitable equipment.  It also makes it possible to create a
CD recording.

 

State
of Disunion

 

I
made another piece with George Bush’s voice in the spring of 2004.  I took his weekly radio address from
right before the State of the Union address.  Approximately half the speech was made of up lies about
Iraq.  The second half was lies
about domestic issues.  (Our economy
has been turning around for so long now, it must be dizzy.)  I started by playing the file straight
and then slowly added a sine-tone that was phase modulated with the same
file.  The sine was 480 Hz, a
multiple of 60 Hz, the rate at which AC power oscillates in the United
States.  The second sound creeps up
slowly and being an octave of AC power makes it hard to hear at first.  The friendly experiencer often confuses
the sound for buzz from electric lights or other appliances nearby.  Then, near the end of Bush’s war lies,
I fade out the straight sound file, leaving just the modulated version.  At that point, explosive noises come
in.  I use them mostly because I
thought that he kept talking about bombs, so I should include some bomb
sounds.  Then I play phase
modulated just ratios over him. 
The ratios are 17/19, 19/19, 21/19, 23/19, which is an otonal series
high up in a tuning lattice.

            The
results I got out were loud and of a different character than I expected.  There was massive peaking, but
SuperCollider uses floating point numbers for audio, not integers, so it didn’t
clip like digital distortion normally clips, say on DATs or CDs.  I tried in vain to find the error, but
decided I liked the sounds and left them as they were.  A side effect of this is that it was
tricky to record the output straight to disk, since 16 bit linear aiff files
use integers.  Eventually, I
discovered a typo in the SynthDef and fixed it, but it didn’t sound as good
anymore, so I undid the repair. 
The peaking and distortion gives it it’s character and seems ironically
appropriate given the subject matter.

            I’m
not sure what the piece is about really. 
The explosives are kind of heavy-handed and I’m not sure about
them.  But I don’t know what, if
anything, the other non-Bush sounds might mean.  When I played this during my fall 2004 composition seminar, Alvin
Lucier commented that political pieces run the risk of being heavy-handed.
People like this piece, though, so I’m keeping it.

            I
first played it at Open Mic Night at It’s Only Natural Restaurant, where it was
enthusiastically received.  Since
then I’ve played it at 21 Grand in Oakland California.  It works well as a piece to bridge
tonal content to word content.

 

Further
Bush Ideas

 

As
I wrote my first Bush piece, the timbres of his voice began to fascinate me. His
inflections are almost musical. 
While I disagree with nearly everything he says, he says it in a
beautiful manner.  Obviously, as he
was born and raised in Connecticut everything about his speech patterns and
elocution has been learned in adulthood. 
He is very talented and must have a fantastic elocution coach.  His voice has the musical timbres of
the south and the drawl of Texas. 
His speechwriter’s careful word choices coupled with his pan-heartland
accent make him seem immediately trustworthy.

            I
kept on with Bush’s voice projects, including working on a tape piece with him
saying "terrorist" over and over again, from different speaking
engagements.  The inflections are
amazing and I’d like to do something with them, and especially with the
phrase" in fact what the terrorists have done is caused to take an
assessment of what’s important" from my first Bush piece.  Steve Reich’s piece Different Trains has violins playing the inflections of
the vocal field recordings.  Robert
Ashley’s operas also make extensive use of inflection, replying on inflection
rather than using pitch much of the time. 
I was thinking about how to do this, but there was another problem
causing me to slow my efforts.  I
was hoping that Bush would be voted out of office in November, alas.  This would have instantly made any Bush
vocal projects obsolete.  Clinton
also had a beautiful voice, but few people would currently care if I started
manipulating him saying "I did not have an affair with that woman."
or anything else he said.  Shortly
thereafter, I discovered Ann Coulter.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All Right Reserved.
Tag: Celesteh

Text
Sound Poetry

           

            I
created several pieces using manipulated speech recordings, starting in the
fall of 2003.  After creating
several of these pieces, I became aware of a genre called Text Sound Poetry.  Charles Amirkhanian gave me a copy of
Other Mind’s re-release of 10 + 2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces and coincidentally, I finally bought the
copy of the re-released OU
archives that had been temping me for months.  Phillip Schulze, an exchange student, gave me a copy of Terre Thaemlitz’s album Interstices.

            Text Sound seems to be especially well suited to political
expression.  Often, a political
work suffers a tension between the political/text content and the musical
content.  Either the political
message or the music often must be sacrificed.  However, in the Text Sound genre, the text content is the
musical content.  Composers like
Sten Hanson, Steve Reich and Terre Thaemlitz are able to create pieces where
complaints about the Vietnam War, gender discrimination and police brutality
form the substance of the piece. 
To engage the piece is to engage the political content.

            Reich’s
pieces are less obvious than Hanson and Thaemlitz.  The loop process he uses it Its Gonna Rain is auditorially interesting, but the
meaning of the piece is not immediately clear to a modern listener.  Many discussions of his pieces
eliminate the political content and focus on the process.  Before I did research on this piece I
was disturbed by the implications of a white composer taking the words of an
African American and obscuring them until the content was lost to the
process.  It seemed as if he was
exploiting the preacher somehow. 
However, according to Four Musical Minimalists, Reich was deeply involved in anti-racist
organizing and was collaborating on anti-racist street theatre with the San
Francisco Mime Troop.   The
book also stated that Reich was fascinated with deep timbres of African
American voices.

            Right
now, speaking for black people and saying that you’re fascinated by the timbres
of their voices would be extremely problematic. (I was surprised to see that
the book had a very recent publication date.) But this all took place in the
60’s and it’s appropriate to judge his intentions only according to what was
considered progressive at the time. He was on the right side of things.
However, when one is trying to learn from this to figure out what to do now, one has to take into account current
notions of progressivism.

            Come
Out is an extremely
effective piece of political music. One of my questions was whether or not
"come out" had a possible double meaning at the time the piece was
written. It did not. That phrase as a signifier for visible queer identity
originated in the 1970’s or 80’s. Instead Reich’s sample is made into a very
effective loop where the words "come out to show them" and then just
"come out" are plucked from their original context and by repetition
gain their own meaning of protest. Reich transforms the words from a statement
of victim hood to a statement of protest. (According to Four Musical Minimalists) The words originate from a group of
young African American men who were beat by the police in Harlem. One of them
is describing how he was injured and wanted medical attention but wasn’t
visibly bleeding, so had to open is wound to allow some of "the bruise
blood to come out to show them." 
Aworks blog points out that the piece was written as a fundraiser for
the victims of the police brutality. (Gable)

            Investigating
Reich’s work was influential to me. 
I want to be aware of the issues I encountered in his work and keep on
the current left side of progressivism. When someone who has privilege is using
the words of someone who does not have privilege, it seems that extra care
should be taken to avoid distortion. 
I have done this thus far by mostly only using the voice of my political
enemies rather than my friends. 
However, the transformative nature of Come Out is entirely inspiring.  It is one of my favorite pieces of
political music. In his seminar in the fall of 2004, Alvin Lucier warned that
the danger of using text that you admire is the urge to elevate it
somehow.  Reich does elevate the
text, but not like a gilded manuscript. 
His elevation is sensitive and entirely appropriate to the material.

 

            I
first became aware of Sten Hanson’s piece The Glorious Desertion while listening to the OU archives.  It is an excellent piece about American involvement in the
Vietnam War.  Hanson is European, yet
the piece eloquently captures a picture of American politics of draft
resistance during the war.  It is
made up of interviews of draft resistors. 
Although the war is long since ended, the piece is still engaging and
interesting and avoids being dated.  What makes it work is that the issues it raises are large and
iconic of an era.  There is a clip
within it of men chanting “Hell no, we won’t go.”  This chant is still within the national consciousness as an
emblem of a large, long-lasting, successful movement. 

            I
fear that my own text pieces will not wear so well over time.  I believe the key to the longevity of
Hanson’s pieces is his choice of source material. He uses the voices of people
who actually believe in something larger than themselves.  If I am going to keep making political
text-based pieces, I need to find voices that stand for something.  I need to pick prominent issues.  Alas, this is hard to predict.  I though prison torture mattered, but
it does not, because it is only a part of a bigger picture.  If I want to do anti-war pieces, I
should follow Hanson’s lead and use the words of soldiers or activists.

 

            Instead,
I began my foray into Test Sound pieces by using the voice of President George
W. Bush.  I created two pieces
using his voice that are described in the next chapter.  Ron Kuivila warned about using the
voices of politicians because of the danger of a short shelf life.  As the election approached, I began to
see the wisdom in this caution. 
Clearly, I thought, Bush would be removed from office (alas!).  I began to look for a source of sound
material that was going to stay current longer, and preferably also from the
right wing.

 

            Fortunately
for me, David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right decided to start monitoring right wing
media for distortions.  His book
details how there exists a right wing echo chamber, which he participated in
during the Clinton administration. 
Anti-Clinton people would invent scandals, where someone would imagine a
story about Clinton, and the right wing media would repeat the lie.  There was virtually no fact checking to
verify the imagined Clinton misdeeds. 
One media outlet would report it. 
Another would report that the first outlet had reported it.  Another would notice that
reporting.  Finally, the buzz
created by the right wing would be picked up by the mainstream and by the
endless partisan special prosecutor investigations.  The result of this, as we all know, is that Clinton, who was
investigated initially for a land deal that went bad, ended up being impeached
for having a consensual affair.  If
Larry Flint hadn’t stepped in and exposed the then speaker of the House’s
recent affair, Clinton would likely have been removed from office.  Larry Flint saved our democracy (at
least until 2000).

            Obviously,
something had to be done about this situation.  David Brock wrote a confessional memoir and then
enthusiastically switched sides. 
Americans love their converts and so the left has enthusiastically
supported Brock, despite his confession of lying in virtually every article he
had written until then.

            Fortunately,
his recent efforts are all well documented and verified.  In an effort to expose right wing spin
and echo as lies before it becomes part of mainstream political culture, he
began to post outrageous comments by pundits on his website
mediaMatters.org.  In addition to
posting the text of offensive comments, he also provides documentary audio and
video clips.

            This
documentary evidence seemed to be a goldmine.  It was a treasure trove of right wing voices.  And what’s more, the offensive content
was already cherry picked.  No
longer would I have to do text searches of Bush’s speech transcripts and then
look for a recording of it.  I
could find all the pundits I wanted and only have their worst comments to
listen to.  I reasoned that pundits
may rise and fall in popularity, but they often last for years.  Rush Limbaugh has had a radio show for
more than ten years and has thousands of rabid followers.  His voice is iconic.  He was the first pundit I downloaded
samples of.  However, I found his
voice initially difficult to work with. Limbaugh is hard to pull apart.  He is not sound bitey.  He says nothing immediately
reprehensible.  It takes a few
moments to realize that he’s reprehensible. After experimenting with Limbaugh’s
voice, I turned to Ann Coulter.  Her
outrageous, short sound bites were much easier to manipulate.  Limbaugh requires several minutes to
grok.  Coulter requires mere
seconds.  My success with Coulter
lead me back to Limbaugh and on to other pundits.

            However,
I fear that my pundit music has an even more limited lifespan than my Bush
music.  Rabid, right wing pundits
do not focus on broad issues.  The
focus on the GOP talking point of the day and on attacking their opponents with
whatever the echo chamber kicks up. 
It may turn out to be something that changes the course of history, like
Monica Lewinsky, or it might be later easily forgettable like “Travelgate,”
Howard Dean screaming, or Kerry throwing away combat ribbons during a protest.  In a short time, people will have
trouble remembering the name of the losing challenger, let alone the guy who
lost the primary in New Hampshire. 
Pundits themselves may outlast these candidates, but if the content of
their speech is made up of dated issues, then the speech also becomes
dated.  Pundits only touch on broad
social issues as asides in their focused attacks, except for only
occasionally. 

Coulter did say that we should “Invade
their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”, where
“they” are the people of the Middle East. 
She touches on the national mood but – one hopes – she does not
represent a mass movement. She represents a political elite, and not even an
elected elite.  Her words will not
lastingly resonate unless, God forbid, she wins a prominent public office.  These pundits do not stand for anything
larger than themselves.  Their
words reflect self-glorification first and everything else second.  Michael Savage’s pro-torture remarks
were filled with interjections complaining that other media outlets (aside from
him, of course) were “communists.” 
He paused for self-aggrandizing comments.  “You like that?! 
Go complain to somebody! 
See if I care.”  Rush
Limbaugh uses silly voices more often than not.  He is in love with the sound of his voice.  He stands only for himself.  Ann Coulter is dazzled by her own
cleverness and never bothers to construct a coherent argument.  These pundits are cynical.  They only believe in their own
greatness.  They do not exist to
convert, but rather to preach to their own choirs.

            While
I enjoy Text Sound Poetry, especially what I found in the OU archives, I think that my time working
with pundits is past.  In the end,
I’m frustrated.  I thought that
people would be appalled at Limbaugh defending prison torture. However, it’s
not an effective political piece because people are not appalled.  They don’t care.  Someone finally managed to neutralize
empathy.  Prison torture was not
enough to cost Bush an election. 
It’s only Arabs and terrorists and bad guys that get tortured.  When Michael Savage calls Iraqis “sub
humans,” he speaks for America.

            Making
leftist experimental music is inherently futile.  The politically dominant far right doesn’t like experimental
music and will not listen to it. 
If they did listen to it, they wouldn’t be persuaded by my content.  They don’t see anything wrong with
defending prison torture.   I,
like the pundits themselves, end up preaching to the choir.

 

On the other hand, as Brock notes, most
centrists and leftist are blissfully unaware of how the far right is changing
discourse.  Bringing this to the
attention of the left may hopefully inspire them to fight it.  At the least, one hopes that all of the
Alien Others constantly attacked by the right wing would begin to feel
solidarity.  Arabs and queers are
often used almost interchangeably. Imus in the Morning described an Iraqi resistance fighter as
“an enemy combatant who had sworn fidelity to some bearded fatwa fairy.” (http://mediamatters.org/items/200411190009)
Queers stand-in for almost any social “problem.” Bill Cunningham said while
discussing classroom discipline on Hannity & Colmes, “In the good old days, back when AIDS
was an appetite suppressant and when gay meant you were happy, back in those
days there was discipline in public schools. But not today.”  (http://mediamatters.org/items/200503040003)
Ah yes, back when people knew their place and social norms could be enforced
with lynching, in that mythical golden age, children were well-behaved. 

Antebellum logics are a threat to queers,
to people of color, to women, to atheists and to anyone who wants to avoid a
police state. When Bush complains about pop culture and Limbaugh defends prison
torture and Michael Savage calls queer members of the “turd world,” this is a
treat to my future ability to survive in this country.  I keep saying that I’m done with
pundits, and then I keep working on just one more piece.  I feel compelled to engage these
threats.
This post is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved. It is not Creative Commons Licensed.
Tag: Celesteh

You think I have time to argue with you? I am writing my masters thesis. comment anything you want, i don’t have time to read it. i am writing about how pundits shape national debate. Eager to avoid debating racism, they created the meme that engaging any discussion about race is racist. Stating that different groups of people have different experiences because of systematic discrimination and talking about how that shapes outlook then becomes racist. Therefore, any attempt to fight racism becomes racist. Yay!

Relatedly, David Duke recently gave high praise to Shipshape Widgets for not having a racial discrimination policy. I would boycott them, but I think having a policy against racial discrimination is totally optional. I’m happy to frequent a business that is willing to tolerate racism, because it’s not like they’re promoting racism. And David Duke’s praise and the endorsement of Angry Aryans for the Return of Lynching (AARL) is not my problem. The White Power movement’s feelings on things and endorsements of ideas and businesses should not be taken as a point in favor or a point against, cuz who cares what they think? The Conservative Christian Council (CCC) has thousands of members and the support of some elected high-ranking officials, but that’s not my problem.
that’s why I’ve just joined the Alien Others for the Advancement of Polyannaism (AOAP), because recognizing a systematic pattern only causes people to acknowledge it, which makes it worse. Because the first step to solving a problem is ignoring it and hoping it goes away, especially if there exists a vast well-funded movement to promote the worsening of the problem.
Tag: Celesteh

All of you people poking me about RadioShack, knock it off. You live in the bay area. It doesn’t matter if a few folks here or there aren’t as enlightened as you, especially if you know, you happen to be straight. If you did not have any legal protections against discrimination and lived in a place where it was the norm rather than the exception and it happened to apply to you, I can assure you that you would feel differently.

Also, I had zero pages of thesis starting this break. It’s due in five weeks. My concert is April 5th. All the music is not yet written. I am sitting indoors on beautiful spring days listening to Michael Savage call arabs “subhumans” over and over and over again and am not out in the sun and not at the beach and not seeing my friends and have not even been berkeley yet because I need a draft in a week and a half of my thesis and the next person who pokes me will not be a happy camper.
And diamonds are neither feminist or non-feminist as much as they are overvalued, much more common than they’re marketed to be and yet simultaneously soaked in the blood of workers.
what’s with you guys all coming out of the woodwork this week? sheesh.
Tag: Celesteh

Jesse is reporting that radioshack is anti-queer. No more radioshack for me. Boycott ’em.

Update

Some homophobic magazine likes radioshack. You can argue with me about whether or not this is the “fault” of radioshack, but you know, “diversity training” just means putting something about respecting your customers in those boring training videos and telling managers they can’t fire employees for being queer.
Al Lashers on University in Berkeley has more stuff and is usually cheaper and the folks working there are definitely more knowledgeable. Radioshack should also add some electronics training.
Tag: RadioShack

Much like the US celebrates Labor Day in September instead of May Day on May 1st to celebrate the labor struggle (and the Haymarket Massacre), the US ignores International Women’s Day in favor of Mother’s Day. You think of Mother’s Day now as a fake, Hallmark holiday, but in actuality, it has radical routes, founded by women who saw great tragedy in being asked to raise and nurture generations of cannon-fodder.

My friend Jenya, who unfortunately I haven’t seen in ages, told me that as a child in Russia, Women’s Day was a national holiday and that people would bring gifts to female family members, maybe only their mothers. I cannot recall.
Women’s Day is an international holiday, recognized by the UN, which commemorates women’s struggles for suffrage and equality. Remember that women have had the right to vote in the Unites States for less than a hundred years. The sacrifices and struggle made by our foremothers to win this right deserves celebration. We must honor those who in the past struggled for freedom and we must never forget that our freedom is hard-won. The UN has a webpage explaining the history of this holiday. Like so many struggles for equality, it has strong socialist roots. Probably why we ignore it here, alas.
Tag: International Women’s Day

I downloaded an Epson printer driver the other day. It was a HQX file. HQX is an old mac format used for file transfers. It’s called “hex” for some reason. I don’t remember of it is compressed or just provides some sort of protection against corruption on mixed networks. It’s antique.

I opened the HQX file and found a SEA file. SEA stands for Self-Extracting Archive. It’s a file format that provides both compression and an application to decompress. Wow, you don’t see many of those anymore. Also antique, but apparently still kicking as it was an OS X application.
Inside the SEA, there was a folder and inside the folder was a DMG. A DMG is a disk image. These are very popular now and are the usual way that something like a printer driver would be distributed. DMG is a compressed format. I wonder why they felt like they had to compress a compressed format. Normally a DMG is the final layer, but no . . .
I mounted the DMG and within there was an install program, a Vise installer. As far as I know, the Vise installer also provides compression. This vintage of installing software is somewhat older than the DMG and somewhat newer than HQX. So they compressed a compresssed, compressed file, put two applications in there and added a funny format as the very top layer.
Fortunately, when I double-clicked the installer, my drivers actually installed. I can only imagine that they were much smaller than the file I downloaded from Epson, who has a rather slow server. The drivers are fine, but the release engineer is an idiot. This process took more than half an hour.
Tag: Epson

I just got a call for submissions to something called Women Take Back the Noise. They want to raise the prominence of women in noise music, so they’re looking for laptop, noise, experimental, glitch etc tracks of less than 8 minutes. They want tracks not published elsewhere. They give you a CD and it’s a nonprofit project. It doesn’t say WHO is profiting. It doesn’t say how they plan to distribute. It doesn’t say how many CDs they plan to press. Ok, so they don’t want to pay royalties. Fine. What do I get back for this?

I think that projects designed to promote women’s stuff are great, but my stuff has value and I need to know what you’re planning with it. I’m not going to just be overjoyed that you care about noise by women and send you something. Like, we’re all sitting here wetting our pants at the slightest possibility of notice. Maybe it’s a sugar crash here, but pleas for free stuff from women for free just makes me feel disrespected. I’ll prolly drop them an email, but in the meantime, if you’re planning a project for women or queers or some minority group because you want to show how valuable their contributions are, you have to act like their stuff has value.
I’ve been on stuff for free before. Heck, I paid admission to hear my tape played at Woodstockhausen. But geez, I knew what I was getting in return.
Tag: Feminism

The sky is clear and blue. Birds are chirping. Flowers are blooming. At night, the breeze carries the smell of them around to where I walk. The windows are open. It is warm enough for short sleeves. People in shorts and t-shirts play sports in the park. The farmer’s market has two stands selling fresh strawberries. I bought a fennel bulb, dug up that morning not many miles away. The people smile warmly like the weather. I go back indoors, in the shadows of walls and ceiling, open the windows and type on my thesis concert pieces. The sound of George Bush’s voice drowns out the birds.

Tag: Spring

all my dreams last night were of Pbinds. I went looking for a good online definition/ description of a Pbins and could find none. I think this must be significant.

My four channel dubya piece is now semi-successfully spatialized. in 2 channels.
I just have to finish spatializing my bell piece (and find new bell sounds and re-implement the wind chimes as being based in a pattern instead of random) and then write detailed program notes for everything and then i can write some new music.
Oh, and figure out what to put on ym application cd and drop it in the mail on monday. i’m thinking rush limbaugh, high squeally tunings, ann coulter, airwaves #3. i like my bell piece, but it’s in progress and all those other pieces are done, except coulter is a bit tweakable.
my concert is one month from today. i have 2 weeks to generate a thesis draft, basically from scratch since my supercollider documentation project is kaput.
Tag: Celesteh