Author: Charles CĂ©leste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Band Practice

Rehersal with the flute band went for four hours today. 4.25 hours, actually. That’s a long time to be pressing a scab to a string. And I had an important realization: I like Tammy’s bass a lot more than I like my bass. I thought it was 3/4 size, but it’s actually the same, but the neck is narrower, so it feels smaller and is easier to play. But maybe it is smaller than a fretless would normally be. Anyway, it has a great sound and is very comfortable. My bass is theoretically considered to be better than hers. Maybe she’ll trade. OTOH, my grandma gave me my bass as a graduation present, from highschool. Everything becomes sentimental when it’s a gift from a dead person. I have a copy of the book Lonesome Dove, which I have zero desire to read, but don’t want to get rid of because my mom lent it to me. Anyway, maybe I could trade something else to Tammy for her bass, like a semi-functional church organ. Or we could just trade while I’m at school with an option to trade back later? Perhaps I should discuss this with her instead of rambling on about it in my blog.
My other band, Tennis Roberts may or may not have a gig tomorrow night, but I have no idea because Mitch has not called or emailed. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow morning when we’re hanging installations in the castro for the IDEA Ensemble as a part of the thingamajigs festival. It’s a very musical weekend. Anyway, if it turns out that TR will be playing tomorrow night, I’ll be playing Tammy’s bass! Isn’t that exciting? It would be nice if I knew, cuz we could make an email list and tell folks, and maybe somebody could make little quarter-size flyers about the band with contact info, so that if anybody wanted to book us or something, they could do that. It’s the sort of thing you want to know ahead of time. *cough*cough*

Bass is the Place

I cut off the tip of one my fingers on my left hand while making dinner last night. It’s not that terrible, but it sure smarted. My theory is that as long as I don’t play a fretless bass, it won’t affect my sound one bit. Because only fretless basses have any sort of real tone anyway.

Getting Rid of Books

I have a lot of books. Christi’s dad built us a great bookshelf to hold all of our books, but we filled it up and had to get several Billy bookcases from Ikea. This is partly because we live down the street from an almost-free bookseller. Christi used to walk past the bookseller every day after work and come home with an armload of books. After she quit working for Nolo, the influx of books slowed, but did not stop. Christi’s parents live in Portland, and every time we isit, we go to Powells Books (http://www.powells.com), the world’s largest bookstore and buy even more books. We could open a library of books on orchestration and leftist political tracts. Whenever we go to Powells, Christi makes a bee-line for the music section and I head over to the Chomsky shelf. We rendezvous later in science fiction. But we don’t have as many sci-fi books as you might expect. Probably because our arms are already full of other books.
Anyway. I really like books, although I do not read nearly as often as I used to. I even went through a period of no reading at all. The boom years were really a culturally dark time. I read again now, but not nearly as quickly as I get new books. Fortunately, Chrsti reads extremely quickly and has read almost everything in the house, which now has more books than my grade school’s library, although less science fiction.
Since I will shortly be moving a long distance away, I’m making a stack of books to be sold. It is a very small stack so far. I look at a book and I either have read it through, have started it, was assigned it for school, but never read it, or just never read it. So either I started or finished it and I liked it, or I feel guilty for not finishing it or not reading it and want to keep it until I do finish it. There are very few books that I don’t like. Really. So the stack of books to sell includes science fictions that are too auful to even be campy (although I kind of liked hem anyway, in a campy sort of way) and right-wing political tracts. All of the rest of our books are either nice, have the potential of being nice, once I get around to reading them or must belong to Christi. I know I didn’t buy Monica’s Story, so it must be hers.

Band Practice

I practiced with the rock flautist today. I think at the end, I will be a better bass player. I feel like it is my responcibility, since we’re playing at the flute convention, to play up the unconventional nature of the project as much as possible, so as not to dissappoint the flautists. But i’m not sure I want to arrive at a new school with a blue mohawk. it would certainly be an echo of my undergraduate years. . .. when I left for Mills with purple hair, Mitch’s mom said, “Well, one thing’s for certain. Everyone will know who you are.” True prediction. But it’s not what I would like to be known for.
the flautist:http://www.silverwheel.com/

Better than self-published

Innova Recordings (http://www.innova.mu) will maunfacture your CD, do cover art designs, proofing, jewel cases, printing, PR, etc of 1000 CDs for about $5.24 per CD (please note that this estimate has significant digit errors. I ought to say about $5.00 a CD, but anyway…). At then end of the process, you get to have 950 CDs sitting in your basement or studio or whatever. I know a guy who self-produced 2000 CDs and he still has more than 1700 of them, despite giving copies to everyone remotely in the music buisiness. It’s a good CD, but he’s got no buzz. Neither do I.
So even if I create the most fxcking awesome faux audio language course ever thought up by a human being, who the hell is going to buy a copy? Which is why I should stick to “selling” my CD via Mp3.com. The quality sucks. No record stores carry it. It’s never had a review. I’ve sold exactly one copy. and it’s only cost me about 20 bucks (buying copies and giving them to family). which is a higher per-disk rate than a real record company, but I don’t have 950 disks in my basement.
I’m glad that music school is going to be free, cuz there’s just no way I would ever be able to make back my tuition otherwise. And there’s no way that I could make back $5k on a run of my CDs, whether I printed 1000 or 10000 or 100, cuz nobody would buy it. Of course, if it were all about the money, I’d be working for a startup in Palo Alto making software for corporations to spy on their employees’ email, IM conversations and websurfing habits (yes, I’ve had a job offer. I considered it for about one milisecond. Yes, I know I’m lucky to be able to say no). But I don’t really want to schlep 950 CDs to Middletown either.

Learn Language Audio Course

Man, those things are useless. what’s the gender of the noun? who knows? but my suitcase is on the train! (oh no!)
Piece idea: Audio course in esperanto. starts out straightforward with sections you would expect. “Section 1 – Greetings” “Aro Unu – Salutojn” But starts getting progressively stranger. and the “boing” between sections gets more elaborate, until it starts overlapping with the language section and turns into full pieces of music. “boooing zooom bewww bweeee excuse me, my hamster is rabid…” etc. all of this will be microtonal, of course…
I need a fluent esperanto collaborator. i wonder if ed would do it?
wait, maybe i should do it in german, since i’ll have to take a test in it. Verzeihung! Mein Hamster hat die Tollwut. (I wonder if “rabies” will be on the exam…)
Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, did a funny, short phrasebook for interstellar travellers. It has phrases like, “That is my travelling companion. It is not a tip. I will call the manager.” It would be perfect, especially with “hello”, “goodbye”, “nice to meet you” spliced in at the beginning. The language would have to be Esperanto or Klingon or something, since a national language might be offensive in that context. I wonder if she would go for it.

More tuning

Tiffany admitted to not fully reading my blog because of the technical nature of my subject matter!!! Anyway, it’s not like I know what I’m talking about. But to rectify this, I just joined The Just Intonation Netowrk and they’re going to send me a book and some magazines. I like getting magazines in the mail. I probably don’t need the magazines, but I think Christi might enjoy them. She loves tuning.