Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

This was the first election in 20 years that I did not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, because of its radical social policy and its complete failure to have a plan to fight islamic terrorism.

found this quote lurking on somebody’s blog comments. It does not appear to be a troll. “Radical social policy” seems to be some sort of anti-gay thing, given the context, which, ok, you’re a bigot and you want to vote bigot. But “complete failure to have a plan to fight islamic terrorism”??
Clinton had made Al Qeada a huge prioroity. When Bush got in office, he thought everything Clinton was doing was obviously stupid and completely dropped the ball on Al Qeada. This guy clearly doesn’t know that. I used to read long articles in the left-wing press about how the FBI was stupidly wasting tax dollars preparing for terrorist attacks that had never (yet) come. Bush stopped all that.

How Do You Know What You Know?

Maybe you read it in a book. Maybe you saw it on TV. If it’s a positive or negative idea about a brand, a person, or a poltical idea, then you heard it from marketting. When people don’t know that Democrats were the party of effective terrorism fighting until Bush screwed everything up, that’s a failure of Democrat marketting and a brilliant success of Republican marketting.
A lot of people have a lot of ideas about how to fix the Democratic party. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Democrats were actually doing all the right things. Like anticipating the threat of terrorism, preparing for it and foiling terrorist plots. The problem then, would not be that we were on the wrong political course, but were on the wrong marketting course. Our message is not getting out.
Our problems included lack of media access, a muddled message (“I actually voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it”), lack of an echo chamber, lack of a unified message. I was briefly a Product Manager. I’ve done a few Product Requirements Documents. Mostly for web applications. That’s my marketting background.
We need a slogan, and a mission. We fit ideas within this framework, phrasing things in positive way, according to the slogan and mission. For example:

slogan: fighting for working people
mission: We give voice to the hardworking people of this country and fight for their interests
issue:environment
The children of today will inherit the world of tomorrow. You work hard to provide for your kids, to ensure their future. The world they will live in is part of that future. We must make sure that their air and water is clean. We must ensure that they have the technologies to maintain a standard of living above ours without sacrificing quality of life to pollution. Our children dserve to inherit a world as clean and bautiful as the one we inheritted, if not better. We knwo you work hard for your families. And we want to work hard to maintain your family’s health and quality of life for generations to come. Would you do any less for your kids?

Ok, we just framed the environmental issue in hetero-normative rhetoric. In positive terms. Talking about protecting our territory and maintainging our property rights. It’s a more powerful way tof rame the debate, since it takes the initiative instead of seeming like it’s coming from behind and losing. This is a better marketting strategy.

(I posted a comment to Matt Lagoy’s LJ (check out the mp3 posted there) about wine glasses and I thought maybe wine glass information might be useful to some of you.)

wine glasses sound great, but breaking them is always a risk. i used to have a whole set of glasses from cost plus, but they all broke. i was using light metal knitting needles as beaters. cost plus glasses are manufactured very inconsistently, so they all have different pitches, some of them at nice intervals to each other. my ex said that if you show up to cost plus with a mallet and a tuner and try out all the wine glasses, the plainclothes security guys all come stare at you. but they don’t kick you out.

the variation in tuning is nice, but the glasses are cheap and break too easy and plus they’re hard to get to sing by rubbing (ala the glass harmonium). Crystal glasses are best for that and more durable in general, but at over $100 a pop, they’re way out of budget and still fragile. Daniel Lentz uses all cyrstal glasses for his wine glass pieces, however, he’s sponsored by the glass company and gets them for free. So he breaks at least one ($150) glass per performance, but doesn’t have to bear the cost of replacement.

i’ve found that the glasses at ikea are much more consistently made than cost plus glasses. they’re tough, they speak when rubbed almost as well as crystal and they’re just as cheap as cost plus. the downside is that every glass of a particular style is going to have pretty much the same pitch. but you can get different glasses for different pitches or use water to change the tuning. Lentz says that water and different wines create different tones, which makes sense as they have different viscosity. When I played in his wine glass ensemble, we used donated bad wine mixed with quite a bit of water for the concert. We practiced with water only.

so, in conclusion, if you want to use glasses for music, i reccomend ikea as a good source. solidly made. resonant. cost efficient. oh, and not sweatshop. they’re all made in finland or something.

And as post script, wine glasses are extremely well suited to alternate tunings when you use them filled with water. Seiko, iirc, makes a tuner that prints out numerical cents values for tuning. It’s about $30. jjicalc is useful for converting from tuning ratios to cents.
Lou Harrison’s biography has a story in it about bubbles slowly forming on the inside of bowls tuned with water, dulling the sound. Apparently, adding a tiny bit of glycerine added to the water prevents this. However, as far as I know, Lentz left our practice glasses filled with water for days and no bubbles formed. It may be that there was glycerine in the water, though. I don’t know. Or maybe this doesn’t happen with glass. anyway, this is why Harrison built the american gamelan: because the bubble problem was annoying.

What have I been doing in California? Glad you asked.

The week before Christmas

I met Nicole’s family, for the second time actually. I met her parents and sister while she was in college, but only for about 5 seconds and I don’t think they remembered. We flew down to the Inland Empire (that’s the Desert east of LA, San Bernadino County and whatnot), to Ontario airport and then went to Apple Valley. There don’t seem to be apples in Apple Valley, as it is the high desert. That means sage plants, sand, tumbleweeds, Joshua Trees, rocks, etc. In the winter, it rains and is green and rocky and desolate and lovely. I remember long ago hearing a story that God told some Mormons to grow apples there, but then the mormons realized that god was insane and moved on.
So I met all of Nicole’s immediate family. They’re shy. Her brother is a funny, cynical geek boy. Um, we ate a lot of donuts. I ate a lot of donuts. More than anyone should eat in a weekend. ugh. Her parents were shy, so I sat around eating oodles of donuts. Yes. And drinking coffee. Her father has stockpiled massive amounts of coffee. They have their own well, so if they had a camp stove, they would be set for all sorts of natual disasters. But not WWIII, as I imagine that somebody would use that as an excuse to nuke LA (oh, come on, you would) and I think they would get fallout there. anyway. I met the highschool best friend. She’s keen. The family is keen too.
Cola’s father turned 70, so the whole extended family went out to dinner. All of them. my goodness. I felt a bit on the spot. They’re good people. Cola’s dad writes poetry, which is quite good. I like her family. She says they like me. Which is all good.

*faint*

mac mini. works with mac or pc peripherals. those kids that used to carry around hard drives and memory sticks to work in the lab are now going to carry computers in their backpacks.
steve Jobs is sometimes completely birlliant. it looks like a toy, but it has a real processor and a real hard drive. the extra-nifty one is faster than my laptop and has a bigger hard drive. ram only goes up to one gig, but it’s certainly fast enough for all sorts of audio crunching. one of those plus an mbox would be very respectable. This will be great for multimedia labs that don’t want or need new keyboard, etc. they just want more power.
damn

my friend said
public performance gets chicks.
try poetry she said.
what a stupid idea.
but then
so stupid
why am i standing here?

she said
even poor public performance works
I guess that’s my
Saving grace
don’t need to look confident
ok to mumble

she made a resolution
she said
to look out for number one
i’m too nice
she said

if there’s one thing the world needs
it’s less kindess
i said
and more
poor public performance

Due to various drama in my life last year, I never saw the third LOTR movie. The first two, I saw midnight, the opening night on the gigantic IMAX screen at the very geeky Sony Metreon in San Francisco. One of the pre-movie commercials was for Microsoft. The audience booed. Somebody yelled “go Linux” Cheering ensued. There was cheering for the opnening credits. Oh, we were geeky fans. And somehow, I missed the entire phenomenon for the last movie.

I went and rented all three DVDs. The first two movies really lost something being shrunk down from gigantic iMAX projection to Cola’s teeny TV. Well, it’s not a teeny TV. It’s perfectly reasonbly sized for a television. It’s just dropping a lot of detail off the movies. Alas. I’m not sure that I want to see the third movie for the first time on such a tiny format. I’m hoping that somebody who reads this has a gigantic TV and loves LOTR or at least tolerates it and says “come watch it on my TV!” I know of a very large projection screen in Connecticut, but I dunno, want to watch the movie noowwwww.

Requisite pseudo-academic deconstruction

I made a pledge or something not to go watch any more violent movies. I don’t want to encourage that sort of movie making because I think it contributes to violence in society. I made an exception for LOTR because the movies are so beautiful and I loved the books so much as a child. But LOTR is violent and has some disturbing social messages. They are at war with evil itself. Sound familar? Actually, because of the various factions involved, it’s more of an axis of evil, rather than a single evil.
On the one side is Gondor and the white City with it’s white tower. In the white city, there live noble people, skilled guild-members, farmers (well, just outside the city) and buccolic, suburban red staters. Opposing Gondor, there is the black tower. It is industrialized, filled with sub-human workers with dreadlocks who want to do away with the white city’s way of life. They work in factories. Not that I’m detecting any sort of sub-text. Evil is at war with civilization itself. The axis of evil hates freedom and wants to stamp it out.
Some of this was in the book. The book has some disturbing bits about how folks from the south (or perhaps the global south) work for evil. They’re swarthy. The main point of the book was opposition to mechanized warfare and anti-fascism. It was a reaction to the horrors of WWII. Some of this is still in the movie. The good guys have the ultimate weapon, but it’s too horrible to use, even agianst evil. Because any ultimate weapon is, itself, evil. I wish that message would filter more into the public discourse. Also, the acceptance of fate and the strength of ordinary people to enact change are both nicely included.

Geek

I’ve noticed the movies have changes somewhat since I first saw them. I’m very glad the Ent Moot got added in. It was a shame it was ever missing. A voice-over of Gandalf saying to look for him in the East on the fifth day also seems to have been added to the second movie. When I first saw it, there was this long battle and they good guys were losing, but then they rode out into the battle to face certain death and suddenly a fourth army appears and I was thinking “who the heck is getting into this now?” And then I thought, “Oh yeah! Gandlaf! I forgot about him!” It made me feel engaged in the movie. So I think they should take the voice over out because it seems like the charecters in the movie had forgotten too.

Some of my readers are music people and some are non-music people. This post is for both groups. A few years ago, NPR did a series called American Mavericks. It’s about the sort of music that I do, explaining the history of this sort of stuff in the Unites States, starting from the Colonial era. The series is accessible, entertaining and very informative. It is possible to stream them from the American Mavericks website. all the programs are an hour long. I’ve been listening to one nearly every morning. I feel very informed. It’s cool. And it was made in San Francisco, so it’s got a nice west coast sort of perspective on music that I’ve been missing in school. So if you want to know about this kind of music or you want to know where I’m coming from, this is a good thing to listen to.

And, I was surprised to hear the names of one of my fellow Wesleyan grad students mentioned in the program I’m listening to!! They just talked about the Toby Twining ensemble! I think they gave him a bit more time than they even gave Anthony Braxton. Wow. Although this isn’t shocking when I think about it, cuz Toby is fairly brilliant and writes really cool stuff.

Dear Sentaor Boxer,

I am writing to encourage you to oppose the nomination of Judge Gonzales to Attorney General. Torture should not be the policy of the Unites States. This morning, I heard Gonzales refuse to condemn torture on moral or legal grounds. He should not hold any position of power anywhere and certainly should not be the next Attorney General. Please represent our Blue State by voting no on Gonzales.

Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,
Celeste Hutchins

In related news, Boxer is objecting the the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes. As you may recall from Farenheight 9/11, having a senator join an objection is key. go Boxer!
Not working on thesis . . .

• Amnesty International
• Move On
• People for the American Way (link contains background information and analysis)

Some organizations have decided to focus on lobbying Gonzales to renounce torture because they do not think that they have enough support to stop his nomination. Contact your senators and tell them to vote no on Gonzales.

This morning, during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Judge Gonzales steadfastly refused to legally or morally condemn torture. He refused to say that the US should not engage in torture. He refused to say that other countries should not torture American citizens. He would not say that torture was illegal or wrong. Gonzales was deeply involved with a Department of Justice memo that laid the legal groundwork for interrrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay’s US-run prison camp. The non-partisan Red Cross called those techniques “tantamount to torture.” Those memos are also implicated in the torture and abuses that occured in Abu Ghraib. The memos state that questioners may inflict pain on detainees as long as the pain is less than the pain of death or organ failure. Should a questioner kill somebody or exceed the alloable levels of pain, it would only be torture if the questioner meant to kill the person, cause organ failure, or exceed pain thresholds. If a representative of the US Government beat a prisoner until that prisoner’s kidney was destroyed, it would only be torture, then, if the assailant meant to cause organ failure.

These memos are no longer US policy. They were recently withdrawn, probably in preperation for Gonzales’ nomination. Recent news reports indicate that he was not the author of the memos, however, he admitted to Senator Kennedy that he was deeply involved int heir drafting, meeting with the authors several times to discuss the leagal opinions expressed in the memos.
Gonzales’ history shows he supports torture. His present answers indicate that he has not decided to condemn the practice. He cannot condemn the practice, because of his past involvement, he would be condemning himself. It used to be a no-brainer for anyone to stand in front of the Senate and condemn torture. It used to be especially a no-brainer for anyone to stand in front of the senate and condemn foreign governments torturing American citizens. Call or email your senators and tell them to vote no on Gonzales. (Your senator will have offices in your state with local phone numbers as well as an office in Washington DC.) We cannot allow a supporter of torture to become Attorney General. One of your senators may be on the Judiciary Committee. It is especially important to contact comittee members. (Comittee members representing where some of my blog readers live include Diane Feinstein D-CA, Ted Kennedy D-MA, Charles Schumer D-NY, and Arlen Specter R-PA)
Please pass this information on and encourage others who condemn torture to oppose Gonzales.