Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Well, I dug the two feet of snow off my car and it won’t start. um, actually, i only dig out the door when i tried starting it. so mayeb it’s bad to try ruinning it encased in ice, but this does not change the fact of a dead battery. Also, something was making an odd noise. I last bought fuel in November. The thing about diesel is that it freezes. I’m hoping the my november fuel is winterized, but if it’s not, then um, i need to go buy fuel additive? I need to buy a thingee full of fuel and top of with it? My fuel system hoses would be full of gelled diesel if it’s frozen. Maybe my car isn’t moving until spring.

In case you’re wondering, yes, this is a please for you to come over with jumper cables. I swept all the snow of the hood, just to get possible access.
In other news, the snow seems perfect for making snow people (some un-politicall correct types insist on calling them snowMEN, thus ignoring all the experiences of snowWOMYN.)

update: I know how to hook up the cables, i just need to borrow them + another car
Tags: Celesteh, Winter, Diesel

If you ask for a loaf of bread, you get half a loaf. If you play is safe and ask for a slice of bread, you get crumbs. The way to get the whole loaf of bread is to demand the bakery. There’s word that describes the outcome of going in to a debate pre-compromised and willing to give and take: that word is losing.

The Democratic Losing Leadership Council opposes Dean for DNC chair. Dean keeps asking for the whole loaf of bread! We’ve focussed-grouped that! Asking for the whole loaf of bread is risky. Wouldn’t it be better to just ask for a slice or two? The DLC, who endorsed the last two highly successful presidential candidates, thinks that copying the RNC platform is the way to win. The obfuscation, lying, distortions and scapegoating required to make the voting public buy that platform are apparently lost on the DLC. Maybe one of their focus groups could tell them that the majority of people think that health care is a right and support the idea of nationalized healthcare. But the DLC gets its money from corporations and corporate interests. So why does anybody listen to them? Corporations love fascism. The DLC is owned by those who may not even want Democrats to win.
The DLC has way too much influence and they’re proven losers. Screw them. Dean for DNC chair. A guy that asks for a full loaf rather than a slice is the best guy out there right now. Next time, we’ll get somebody who will seize for the damn bakery, already.
Tags: Politics, Democrats

My cousin was a professor and I got to wondering if she had ever published anything pedagological. So I did a WorldCat search and then just Googled her. No textbooks I can find, but research citations galore. Alas, no text of her papers, but if you want to read an abstract on Implications of tick size on the quantifications of engorgement in female Dermacentor variabilis (and I know that you do) . . .. She’s Leahy MG there. Otherwise known as Sister Mary Gerald Leahy.

I would talk some about death, but it’s a cold winter night and I think instead I will turn my attention back to my own pedagological problem of my SuperCollider Tutorial Thesis Project of doom. My advisor wants it to be more hardcore and frighten away those who are not technically saavy. Only he didn’t say it like that. I think I have an idea on how to make it fit within both of our requirements. Although maybe not. I’m kind of stuck.
What the hell would I tag this with? Celesteh, maybe. (What’s a tag?)

What would happen if you aimed a 10Hz FM transmitter right at somebody’s head? What about an AM transmitter? Aren’t the radios in cell phones supposed to be what causes brain tumors? Has that ever been proven? (My mom never used a cell phone, but I think the cordless phone was glues to her head often.) What if you took normal audio, but delayed the right channel by 1/6th of a second and had people listen via headphones? (166.7 ms would be very audible, huh?) What if you send an audio channel to the video in of a TV (AM modulated by a square wave LFO, of course)? What if I never write the stupid outline I ought to write for my thesis?

who owns ideas?
Tag: 10Hz

One of my favorite blogs is the one beloning to Tiffany. She’s understated and wry and she’s living in China. so she posts things that she thinks are mundane, but to those of us who have not ventured far beyond the borders of the US, it’s all fascinating.

Tag: Tifanjo

Apparently, Wesleyan has some sort of quota on their email system, so you can’t have more than 30 megabytes of undeleted email. Sheesh. So I’ve been going through, re-reading old messages and deleting ones that no longer matter, such as notices of overdue library books, schedule changes from concerts a year ago as well as personal exchanges. I had a lot more correspondence a year ago than I do now. Tons. I keep reading email people sent me a year ago. My god, was my life bleak. I went on d00med dates with people from personal ads who like Yanni and disliked academics. Worse, I had angst about it. The ex wanted to reconcile, then she didn’t, then she did, then she didn’t . . .. Repeat until Spring Break when I finally realized she had just been viscious on purpose and quit talking to her.

I feel all despondent just reading it. However, many things are abudantly clear from this perspective. 1. My life is way better now than it was a year ago. 2. Breaking up was right choice. 3. My friends are all very swell.

Yes, I have a rule about no smack-talking the ex. Yes, I just broke it. I’m sorry. I’m not sure how to think/talk/write about her. Nine years is a long time. There were good times. There were bad times. Sometimes I miss her. Those times are less and less. I’ve been leaving her out of stories and saying “I did x” when it was her and I. I did everything with her. Virtually nothing “I did x” was by myself. But I don’t want to talk about her every time I talk about a life experience. I’m a lot more individuated now than I’ve ever been. After being alone for the first time, I didn’t know who I was. But it turns out, I’m who I’ve always been. Just that person was sometimes just below the surface and not so visible. This gets all slippery when I try to blog it and I’m not sure. It’s hard to see personal change, cuz there’s no distance and no perspective.
Theoretically, the Saturn Return lasts from 27 – 29. I think I kicked it off early with my mother dying. This coming birthday will be my third without her, and hopefully, the end of my Saturn Return. In Indertiminancy, John Cage says, “Before enlightenment, men are men and mountains are mountains. After enlightenment it is the same. In between, things get confused for a while.” Moutains are now very certainly coalescing into rock and dirt and whatnot. Too bad I’m not enlightened, although I bet this would be a step on that path.
Tags: Celesteh, My Life

I’ve played extensively in the Middletown, CT new music scene. Ok, so I nearly fell over laughing at that phrase, but no disrepect to anyone. We do have a lot of new music around here, I just would never have thought to call it a scene. Only because I’m a big-city centric elitist. I would have called it the Wesleyan new music scene, personally, but not everything that happens is part of the university.

Speaking of education, when I last spoke with my advisor, he was pessimistic about getting my book published. However, O’Reilley published a book on Hacking Legos, so I have a bit more hope. He also pointed out that my thesis comittee wouldn’t actually understand my project and told me I would need to create some pedagological pieces in the style of David Tudor’s electronic works, like Run Through. So I popped in my CD of such musics and it was just evily irritating. I don’t want to write ensemble pieces for computer and certainly not like Tudor’s “i’m too good for analog synthesis” stuff.
I could also abandon my plans and just write program notes for all the pieces I’ve already written and that would count as a thesis. I’m just a composer, after all. It may be that everyone would rather I would just do that. It may not be. I’m clueless.

Tags: Middletown, Wesleyan, My Life, Celesteh

If anybody wants information about tickets for a “gala pre-[Other Minds] festival opening party including performances by Michael Nyman and Daniel Roumain and Asian Fusion cuisine by celebrity chef Rob Lam” on Feb 23rd, you should leave a comment, drop a line or call 415-934-8134. Tickets are $125/ person.

I’m supposed to find people who want to go and encourage them to come, but mostly I only talk to graduate students on the east coast, or professors on the east coast. So far, no takers. but it should be really cool. And you would really impress a date. For serious. Dinner, art bigwigs, composers, celebrity chefs! What’s not to enjoy?
If the name Michael Nyman is ringing a bell and you can’t remember why, It’s because he wrote the sound track to the Movie The Piano. You’ve heard this sound track. You’ve enjoyed it. It’s super keen. He also wrote a book called Experimental Music which is used as a textbook at Wesleyan. And it’s just worth reading.
So, yeah, you should go.
Tags: Other Minds, Music, Fundraising

So, 10Hz is the approximate frequency of alpha waves, which is why your brain responds and why it makes people feel sleepy. So 10Hz is a resonant frequency in your brain. And Your brain also reacts to electromagnetic fields oscillating at 10Hz. The chronicle recently reported, however, that Some people are senesitive (aka alergic) to electromagnetic fields. Hmm, you know that scene in the Matrix where they’re hacking Morpheus by doing all this stuff to him and making him sick? That’s not what I want to do. Although it would be interesting to see who would walk into an installation that might hurt them. So SRL.

Most electromagnetic fields are produced by electrical wiring in your home, computer monitors, electic motors, etc. The voltage frequency we surround ourselves with is 60Hz. That’s much faster than 10Hz, obviously, and it may be the speed that harms some people, I have no idea. I’m just guessing. But that low hum you hear right now? That’s 60Hz. When Americans are asked to hum the frequency of the earth, the sound of the planet, alas, they hum 60Hz. This is a totally new articifical envirnoment we’re inhabitting without any idea of what it might be doing to us. But I digress.
I went to an installation at the San Francisco MOMA a few years ago about Melatonin. I learned that looking at a lot of dark purple is supposed to stimulate melatonin. So I’m imagining putting people either into a windowless room or by themselves in a tube . . ..

Tube

The user lies down in the tube. The part she’s lying on is squishy and dark purple. The top of the tube is white, like a projection screen. Purple lights provide a small amount of lumination. The user puts on headphones, but there is also a speaker cone right behind her head. The speaker is emitting a 10 Hz subsonic sine wave, thus generating a physical sensation and an electric field. The headphones are playing calming music. Every frequency in the left ear is offset by 10 Hz from the frequency in the right ear. The tube illumination slowly dims as images beging to strobe at 10Hz over the user’s head. These could be flashes of light, but they could also be images. I think images might be interesting. Hopefully, the user feels calm and gets into an alpha state. The headphones begin to play words, for the hacking content. I’d probably do a slowly read meditation thing, “you are relaxing. you feel love towards the world” blah blah blah. Then, as it’s time to end the project, the speaker cone and the headphones begin to slowly speed up to 12Hz, the normal, waking state and the projections dim and the tube lights slowly come back up, but instead of being purple, they’re a yellowish green. I’m picturing it being 20 minutes in the tube, although half an hour might work better.

Room

The room is dimly lit with purple light. They’re a projection screen in front. People have beanbag cairs or something to sit on. A large speaker cone creates a 10Hz standing wave (no, I don’t know hot to do that yet) that users can actually feel. There is one speaker on the elft side of the room and one on the right. They are playing the same relaxing music as for the tube, however, I might drop the relaxation text. The projector is flashing images at 10Hz. My temptation (evil is always easier than good) is to flash images that ought to be immensely disturbing, but might not be in this relaxing setting. However, as tempting as it is, that would be evil. As the event comes to an end, after half an hour or longer (“concerts” are a longer format), things slowly speed up to 12 Hz and the room starts to fade up in green lights. People should feel energized afterwards, apparently. Rehersal Hall 003, on the Wesleyan Campus, is the perfect location for this.

Text

I have no knowledge of this, but my dad claims to. He says that if you’ve got people in suggestable states, the ideas you can communicate are very basic, like hunger. I suspect you may be able to get farther and incorporate in Fundamentalist ideas. Framing leftism in terms of fundamentlaism is probably too nuanced for a suggestable state. But I think people also have an impulse towards the sublime. We want to see god. We want to be spiritual. So I think maybe sublime, love everybody type stuff could work. We are all one. PLUR!
Tags: Music, Computer Music, Installation, 10Hz

Ok, the Times had an article (found via Boing Boing) on something called the Dream Machine. It’s basically a slow strobe. “[S]cientists . . . noted in experiments that light flickering at 8 to 12 flashes a second against a subject’s closed eyelids seemed to slow the electrical pulse rate of the subject’s brain to a state of semiconsciousness known as the alpha state and produce rich dreamlike imagery.” Furthermore, I have it on good authority that playing pieces with a 10Hz difference between the right and left ear has similar FX. 10Hz is the sleepy Hz.

There is some issue with using this phenomenon, at least with light. “Dr. Robert Fisher, the director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Stanford, said that 1 in 10,000 people is likely to have a seizure in reaction to the its stroboscopic light, and that children are about twice as susceptible.” Ok, so it’s somewhat dangerous. This is why you can’t buy a dream machine (except hand-made), even though it’s supposed to be dern cool.
Ok, so what do you do artistically with a phenomenon which will harm 0.01% of the population? You can’t just put it up in a gallery, that’s for sure. So, you could do a small installation wiht lots of warning and posted no access for children, maybe. Or a web application. Or what? hmmmm.
I do want to try to slip ideas at people while they’re suseptible. Hacking Humans. I promise it will be good stuff, “Love they Neighbor,” etc. Although I’m sure Focus on the Family would object. “Pledging to love your neighbor is a way of accepting alternative lifestyles and homosexuality! What if your neighbor were gay, for example!” Said Lou Dobbs.
Tags: Installation, Dreams, 10Hz