Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Things Celeste Worries About

  • Do people around me realize how much baggage I have? If they do, will they still want to talk to me?
  • Is my music boring?
  • Am I boring?
  • Am I working hard enough?
  • Is my dog getting enough food, attention exercise?
  • Do I have any clue how to communicate?
  • what if I keep making the same mistakes over and over and can’t ever escape them?
  • What if everything that goes wrong is my fault? Like, to the point where my actions actually ellicit, somehow, other people to be mean?
  • What if I’m mean?
  • what if I’m blind to all my own faults that re important?
  • what if I can see them, but can’t manage to change them?
  • what if all the bad things I’ve heard about myself are true?
  • Do I stand for anything?
  • Do I know what my values are?
  • If I had tried harder, would it have made a difference?
  • Did I do everything I could for my mom?
  • Do I know who I am?
  • Is identity important?
  • If I’m grumpy, will nobody want to talk to me?
  • Should I hide being grumpy?
  • what if I’m grumpy all the time?
  • maybe just nobody has realized my propensity for grumpiness, crotechetyness, and angstyness?
  • am i more fxcked up than other people?
  • is music important?
  • has anybody realized how little i actually know about harmony, history and literacy?
  • am i being stupid?
  • If I worry too much, will my hair fall out?

Parking Garage Music

I’m writing some tunes to be played out of the Muzak system of the big parking garage in town. Currently, it plays obnoxious baroque music, designed to annoy skateboarders. There is a pretty good coffee shop underneath it, with nice outdoor seating, but which is totally ruined by the classical music warfare, otherwise known as a nonviolent deterrent. Yeah, there’s a reason the Pentagon studies how people react to music. I think it might count as some form of psychic violence. So I never sit outside the parking garage and i get coffee there less often than i would otherwise.

So next weekend, we’re having a music festival which is taking over the muzak system. And I have tunes for it that will not annoy me, but may annoy everyone else.

I dunno if I can include all of these. I think that garage-4.mp3 is my favorite and I’m not sure if garage-3-mono.mp3 really belongs in there at all.

Song for Medieval Religous Practices Intersecting with Modern Critcal Theory, Thus Creating a New Symbolic Grid of Heteroglossic Discourse

what do you know, shiny little foucault
i took a relic from your grave, a little piece just to save
i keep up upon my mantle, serende you with some handle
the workers strike, it changed your mind
now a little pice of that is mine
i dug you up with a spade
in a secret midnight raid
no where to go with my bit of foucault
on a rainy day i’ll put you on ebay
enjoy the present relaity
with the history of sexulaity
we’ll have some dinner discourse
afetr the main course
tell me what you know, my bit of foucault
whoah whoah whoah

I was offline and not blogging

but now i am back online. well, i was metaphorically offline. busy, unhappy, etc.

I have just returned from La Domo Ĝensenius, where I playes sapce invaders and other video games on a linux arcade machine and watched maybe 1.5 hours of Tivo and consumed copious amounts of sugar!!!!!!!!!!! bounce! bounce! bounce! crash….
(picture me typing this really fast. read it alloud as fast as you can to simulate the effect. try not to breathe) ok! tv! is really weird! it has really short scenes that cut togther really fast in aseries of nonsequiters only joined together by pictographic or colorthemes or sometimes by sound or animation style or just the knowledge that yer still watching the same program. what happens from moment to moment has nothing to do with what just happened. or maybe this was because i was watching cartoons. seaforce 2021 or something. what was going on? i have no idea. and Dexters lab. every scene is like 20 seconds long. the plot is barely constructed at all. and it’s a tiny bit gender normative. although there was a very brilliant james bond parody. i don’t understand, tho, why they can’t deconstruct the gender dyniamics they seem to purport to parody rather than reinforce them. c’mon. put dexter in a dress! i’ve only seen this cartoon once, but i’m an expert on it, really. and the simpsons we watched one or two episodes. i can’t remeber now. i remeber there being sex on the simpsons, like that one episode where Homer and Marge discovered exhibitionist tendencies and end up hiding in mnigolf windmills and whatnot. i won’t say the sex was just hinted ta, because it was really a major plot point of the episode i’m recalling, which was on when i was an undergrad. i mean, it was the plot. but it i don’t think it was so explicitly discussed. also, they seem more disfunctional and adverserial than i recall. and i know that they weren’t making bondage jokes when i wa sin highschool and college, cuz i would have caught those. and the plots are much fatser paced. and then this happened! and then this! and then this! and this! and this! no, we won’t return to what happened to grandpa as that guy was seducing him in florida! and this! and this! no point other than the ride! flash! flash! flash! flashing lights! sugar! sugar! lights! sugar! lights! sugar! sugar! lifghts! Sugar! Sugar! Lights! Sugar! Lights! Lights! S! L! S! L! L! L! S! S! S! L! L! S! S! S! S! L! S! L! L! L! S! L! S! L! S! L!

Queer

Apparently, in the brave new world of critical theory, you don’t need to be um, queer to be queer. Stright people can also be queer. As long as you’re somehow oppositional to the mainstream. Also, somehow by this definition, the A-Gays or other privledged folks are not queer, even if they are LGBTTFAGIetc.

what a queer idea.
I don’t want to be heteronormative for saying het people can’t be “politically queer” nor do I otherwise want to be any sort of wet blanket but: do not appropriate my identity! If you have always been the gender you are now and have no problems with it and it matche yer body and the people you like are always of the opposite sex, then yer not queer. Sorry. You can be really special and interesting and nifty, but you can’t be queer.
A brief history lesson: as few as five years ago and maybe still for all i know, the word “queer” was controversial when used by LGBT folks, because it was/is still used as an insult. People get/got beat up by angry folks calling them “queer.” So when a group formed called Queer Nation, they were really radical for using that in their name. They were a direct action group that would do things like have sit ins where they would chant “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” Such was the era that a bunch of people sitting around, chanting, calling themselves queer was very newsworthy. the group was controversial. why did they have to be so in-your-face and unclosetted?
So when you use the word queer now, to self identify as LBGTTFAGIetc, you are doing so as a person reclaiming language. You are taking an insult upon yourself and saying, “yes i am queer. i am a sodomite. I am just as you say and I am proud of it. Now what are you going to do about it?” this is a powerful and important thing to do. It is claiming identity and seizing the terms of debate. It is liminal, it is transitionary, it is taking a leap. It is part of a tradition of queer activism that started before stonewall.
If you are striaght and you beleive in queer rights, then I saulte you. But you are not queer. when you say that you are, you take a powerful symbol and dilute it. you take a word that people took serious risks to reclaim and you are removing it’s meaning. this is a meaning that people were arrested to claim. they were beatten up to claim it. they lost their jobs. It’s not something to be taken lightly. words are powerful. If you’re het, the word queer does not belong to you anymore. It was wrested from your control and seized by the people to whom it refers. Now put it down. It does not refer to you.

Gender

Can I just say that gender is kind of confusing. Like, yeah it’s cultural, but it must be more than that, cuz of trans people and stuff. I mean, people actually change their bodies to match their gender. And Savage Love last week had a letter from a guy who was born intersexed, but the operated on to be feamle, but felt like he was really male. I mean, that’s complicated.

When I was a youth, I was thinking about gender a lot. I remeber being in 7th grade and Louis demanding whether or not I wanted to be a boy and whether or not I would get sex resassignment surgery if I could and me not answering cuz I didn’t know. I hated girl drag. I hated having to wear a skirt every day to school. I felt like it limited my motion and my freedom, but obviously I felt more than that, cuz I won’t wear women’s clothes now unless I have to. I try to avoid activities where I have to wear costumes that are gendered female. Joan of Arc got burned at the stake rather than wear a dress everyday. I can kind of see where she’s coming from.
So when I was an undergrad and some folks started coming out as trans, it was something I wanted to think about, but Christi was having none of it. she did not want to date aboy and if I became one, she would leave me. So I liked her and I wasn’t sure and anyway, I was at a women’s college and I liked beign surrounded by women and feeling like I was among my people, so I didn’t go there. If I had gone there, maybe I’d be a boy now? Who knows. My first girlfriend is a boy now and a bunch of women that I admired or was attracted to or both have switched.
Lois, in Dykes to Watch Out For questions her gender for a while and then lies about being trans becauase she’s annoyed at one fo her friend’s transphobia. Then she comes out as untrans and explains that she enjoys being a girl “in a perverse sort of way.” which is kind of how I feel. I’m finally comfortable with my body, at least for the last few years and I really wasn’t for a long time. So when I write about Joan of Arc being on both sides of some sort of gender binary/hiearchy, that’s kind of me projecting myself onto my research, which everybody does and in this pomo period we can all be somehwat honest about it. so before I didn’t know whether I was a girl or a boy and now I say that I’m defintely a girl, but maybe I’d rather be a heretic than wear a dress. Does this make me genderqueer? I dunno. I’m about to go put on a tux for queer prom. Seriously, wearing dresses makes me as uncofmortable as hell. It’s not right. It’s not me. It’s like hammering a peg into the wrong shaped hole or something. I used to feel happy when people called me “sir,” but then other times I would be annoyed by it. It’s annoying now.
I wanted male privledge, but obviously something more was going on…
This is me sharing too much. goodnight.

too drunk for homweork

ok, i’m not really drunk. i had less than one pint. but ifeel like i shoudl not drive, for example and i’m eschewing going to the library due to the late hour and the rain and my level of confusion. So not TV. People I would instant message are offline. I’ll post to my blog.

I just got back from a bar-hangout after a concert. One of the concert pieces was 4 blogs set to music. These two guys culled funny blog posts and harmonized them. It really shows how stupid blogs are. Yes indeed. Glad they didn’t pick this one. The concert was very long seeming, but it closed with some excellent steve reich. I want to sound like that guy. I played in Aaron’s piece, which was very nice.
On tuesday, my composition seminar went to Mass MoCA to see the sound installations. Mass MoCA is a museum of modern art in the Berkshires, which is a mountainious region where new yorkers go on cultureally themed vacations. stream
There are four sound installations in the museum, of which we only managed to hear two. One is a free way piece. There is a long pipe, open at one end and with a mic at the other end on an overpass. The sound from the ic is amplified and played back on two speakers under the overpass. The mic and the speakers are far apart. It’s nice cuz it sounds like pipes and pipes are cool.
The other piece was by Ron. [ron's installation]Mass MoCA used to be a power plant before it was a museum. So there’s a bunch of power plant and power plant -closure related stuff. Ron has a permanent sound installation about the plant and it’s closure that’s set up in a narrow walkway between two buildings. There’s speakers set up overhead. And if you look through the windows, there’s electric generation equipment laid out all installation-y and a long table with capacitors on it. The big coke-can size capacitors – one for every worker employed before the plant shut down. The apeakers had sounds from the plant’s history and workers talking about the plant shutting down and the museum moving in.
[other installation] This next one was temporary. It was the best installation ever. It’s not really pink. It’s a big white room with papers all over the floor. The room is as big as a foot ball field. And those things hanging down that look like lamps are loudspeakers like for making announcements. And attached to the roof are penumatic devices dropping down signle sheets of paper. So periodically one or more of them would go off and then a piece of paper would flutter to the ground. The whole thing was monochromatic except that the windows had pink film on them. nd the loudspeakers were making announcements, but sort of like poetry inspired by reading too much critical theory.
In the very back was a door to another smaller, dark room with concert-type speakers whirling around overhead, playing choral parts by meredith monk.
In the big room, you can hear the chorus, the announcements and the paper dropping.
I think it’s the most beautiful piece of art i’ve ever encountered. Awe inspiring. When I’m sober, I’ll look up the name of the artist.
[Chris watchign apice of paper drop]Chris sits, watching a piece of paper drop to the floor. It was so beautiful how they twisted and fell. It was onion skin paper, it said, thin and light. There were big, slow spinnign fans on the ceiling, changing the pattern of falling. they driften bauetifully to the ground, twisting in the air. The annoucements were about text and bodies and representation. It was really very wonderful.

how much sleep do i really need?

Less than 8 hours, moe than 4-5 of been getting. too bad. i liked having all those extra hours.

How much time do I have left at school?

And today, I suddenly realized how alarmingly close to May 4th it is. good lord. I must write a 5 minute piece or two sutibale for playing out of mono parking lot speakers by monday. and then i got ta stuff and my 20 page paper that i should start researching. yes, i should. none of those are due till the 14, but the faster i get done, the faster i can go home.
and now, i think i’m going to take some action regarding my sleep defecit, despite that i have no job lined up yet. alas. hire me. Resume.