Category: Uncategorised

Disk drive woes

Drinking will not solve your problems, no no no, but it certainly helps you forget what you’re thinking about. also, me= lightweight. yes, so whilst i was sitting in the electronic music studio, preparing to create an RSS feed for podcasting (w00t) containing the reading or my firt symphonic piece, when suddenly, there was a loud clicking and grinding sound emerging from my laptop and i started getting IO errors. rebooting did not help. i booted it as a firewire disk and over the course of a much too long a time, i backed up my school data to Phillip’s computer. all throughout there was grinding and clicking and a painfully, mournfully slow data transfer. then i took it home and backed up my supercollider data. now i have it mounted as a frewire disk for my desktop and am creating a disk image. my hope is that i can take it to the compter store and that apple care will give me a new disk and then i can just re-image it and have the exact same computer as before. cuz disks do start to get full of crud and wiping them periodically is not a bad idea. but this is only a year old. and i like my disk. it has cool stuff like authorizations to run software that has obnoxious liscening control eneter code special key one computer at a time blah blah blah.

The image is going rather slowly, but not worrisomely slowly. maybe walking home shook everything back into place. if i take it to the computer store and it doesn’t show symptoms for them, i am still going to demand a new disk. my thesis. no backups. moment of panic. i had a moment of panic this morning when i communicated my thesis concert date to my advisor (April 5th) and he said, “oh, that’s just two weeks after spring break. pretty soon.” I looked stricken.
Readig drunk blogs is so great isn’t it. maybe i should halt drinking cognac before i float away from reality. i had a beer before office hours and then some jim beam from aaron’s hip flask when my computer started the click of deatjh. and now i just forgot that iw as not going to sip any more and then took another slip. it’s a slipper slope from here. i just did it again. goddamit. i have enough problems with relaity when i’m sober. do you ever have a feeling like you’ve sort of been out of the office for a while. what’s going on? so many of my reactions to people are not conscious. i’m much more alert when i’m typing. where alert = not dissasociated. i’m going to use that word even though i don’t know what it means. sometimes i giglle at things. if i’m giggling, i’m not home. it’s weird when i’m not home. ofdd times. times when i ought to be paying attention. and my computer is like, i dunno an umbilicall cord. it cannot die. my lif e is on there. i read a science fiction when i was a kid about an apple newton that attached directly to your brain so you ended up outsourcing your thoguhts to it until it became an extension of yourself. the author thought this was cool idea. but what about when the disk died:? what then? woudl you lose the memory of your 4th birthday party? would your thesis vanish into thin air? would you lose all the pices you had written in the last year? i’m thinking deep thoughts now. sense of self. what it means to interact with external stimuli.
My tuba broke durng class today too. i was having problems with my 4th valve sticking and was oiling it and pushing the rotar thingee up and down when sddenly the button disattached from the rotar. fortunately, my pocket knife is advanced enough to both take aparta computer and repair a tuba. you buy a tuba and it costs 2 – 4 imes as much as a computer, but it will last for a hundred years. you buy an analog modular type snth from MOTM for around the same price and it will last for about 30 years (maybe longer). you buy a laptop and it will last 5 yeard if you’re insanely lucky. otherwise. 2. maybe 4 years. what a tremendous waste of money. and here i am typing on my 5 year odl desktop (it’s still a fast computer, dsmmnit) about how computers suck and i need to experience life without mediation or more directly and while present and what not. i’m going to stop programming entirely and learn to meditate and go sit in trees o n the outskirts of yellostone saving buffaloes from wymoing ranchers who are legally empowered to kill them and be a diryt ippie activist luddite and pay folk musc on ym tuba. strating tomorrow. goodnight
Tag:

My Weekend: Best Birthday Ever

Friday, I started catching a cold and by Friday night I felt kind of ill. I set up webcasting for the Bill Dixon concert. It was the first official webcast from school. My computer was crashing with Quicktime Broadcaster, so I had to work out those issues, get a line out of the DAT machine, set everything up, all while feeling sick and the run and do a soundcheck and play in the concert. I felt dizzy after playing some notes. Cold medicine to the rescue. It is ungood to tech for a concert and then go play tuba in the same concert. However, I can now do webcasting and could teach it to others.
Despite a very harried set up, the concert went extremely well. It was a joy to play Dixon’s music. I felt like I played well. and the webcast was successful. So all was well. Somebody who heard the concert said they dug the tuba. Cool. I didn’t even know anybody could hear me.
Saturday morning, I woke up early, consumed caffeine and then set up a webcast for the Bill Dixon symposium. then I drove to the airport and picked up Cola! Yay! I dropped her off at my house so she could nap after taking the red eye and then I went to the rehearsal to my 5 minute symphonic piece. Aaron conducted it. the orchestra was sight reading. Aaron really pulled the piece together in 45 minutes of rehearsal. They played it very well at the end of practice. I wish I had a recording of that run through. I wrote the kind of tuba part that I thought I would like to play. The tuba often had the theme. The player was kind of timid. It seemed like he was thinking, “I could possibly be meant to stick out that much.”
for those of you just joining this feature, Cola = Nicole. She is but one person with a nickname and is my girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since winter break. I was extremely happy to see her.
I went to part of the afternoon session of the symposium. They were talking about identity and music and opportunities for musicians and racism and nationalism and many fascinating issues. I cut out early, though and went to wake up Nicole and consume more caffeine (it works as well or better than cold medicine sometimes). Then we went to the orchestra performance of three student works, including mine. Angel, the director, asked me to come up and say a few words. I had no idea that was coming. The piece was about my marriage breaking up (as much as pieces can be about anything), but the title was from a 15th century mystery play about Joan of Arc, so I talked about that. Then they played through it. It didn’t go as well as during the practice, but that’s to be expected. It was pretty good. There was a fair sized crowd there, including my advisor. I await his feedback.
Then I had some time off to spend with my sweetie. Then I webcasted a concert by Bill Dixon and Ran Blake. It was fantastic. I had my first symphony performance. I got to see my girlfriend and then I went to a great concert. All in one day.
Sunday was actually my birthday. I’m 29. I have mixed feelings about that. But my Saturn return is now over. Theoretically. I’m not into the self-examination thing anymore right now. Maybe I should re-do it periodically,
the grad women in the music department arranged a potluck brunch and “surprise party.” It was sooooo heterocentric. Little (like model train scale) plastic penises were handed out. Riiiight. This idiom is clearly aimed at Midwestern married housewives. One nifty thing offered for sale, however was a semi-programmable silver bullet. It was clearly AM modulated, by a sine wave, a ramp wave or a pulse wave. I want to write my synthesizer manufacturer to ask how many amps I can run through my VCA. I seems like I could have batteries on one side and bullets on the other and use a LFO or a laptop outputting a subsonic audio signal to control the speed and then put them on drumheads or something. I had a piece for vibrators and electric guitars at my undergrad thesis concert. I don’t want my dad to think my academic experience is all about vibrators or something. although, at 29, should I still care about that or am I old enough to stop worrying about it?
I remember going to a 29th birthday party as an undergrad and thinking of the birthday girl as an unqualified grown up. Totally a responsible adult who didn’t have much in common with us students, but who was fun. la la la
Everyone since Charles Ives likes to talk about grey haired women as the ultimately unhip concert attender. If your music appeals to gray haired women, then you suck and you’re not avant guard enough. However, time marches ever onwards and some proponents of this meme will find themselves a victim of it.
Today I took Nicole to class with me. It was Anthony Braxton’s seminar. I had been talking about him. Nicole didn’t believe me. Today, she learned that I am a more reliable witness than I seem. We watched Alien. Mostly, I think, because anthony loves the movie. But we talked about motivic material and sound design. there’s a cheesy symphony at the very end which really doesn’t belong. However, the main theme of the symphony is an inversion of one of the major themes of the movie. I hadn’t seen the movie before, so I was more aware of plot than of sound. Also, it was clear from the start that you had to kill the cat. As soon as they found the cat while searching for the alien, they had to have realized that they had no way of knowing if the cat was infected or all the paths to infection. Also, how did the alien get so big after popping out of the ill-fated crew member? Was it eating the food stores or what?
In the afternoon, Nicole sat in on Braxton’s ensemble. We played one of each type of piece that we play, so it was a good introduction to what we do in the ensemble. Then, alas, she went back to the airport and by now she in Dulles waiting for a flight to Oakland. I was so glad she came to see me. I miss her when we’re so far apart. And it was just perfect timing, with all this stuff going on at the same time. I think she got to see what my academic experience is like. She said this afternoon, “your life is weird.” It is indeed.
Tag:

Art Music as Weapon

The L.A. Times has an article today about using classical music as a crime deterrent. First, some background:
Wesleyan had a symposium last spring about environmental sounds. Someone presented a paper using music to chase away teenagers. The researcher found that classical music doesn’t repel anyone and the evidence is all anecdotal. Nobody has actually done studies. The L.A. Times claims otherwise, but who knows if the reporter actually did research or just reported what everybody “knows.”

The L.A. Times article talks about what it means, socially, to use Art Music as a weapon. They have an elitist take on it, however, and speak only from the point of view of high art types and the police/state. No actual thugs or teenagers were interviewed. Middletown, CT has a parking garage which blares baroque music all day every day. There s a coffee shop on the first floor of the garage. Teens congregate outside the coffee shop. The inside of the shop blasts industrial music to attract the teens. The outside of the coffee shop blasts classical to drive them away. The teens I’ve talked to say they don’t notice and they don’t care. (It drives me crazy though.)
What environmental sound programming actually does is define space. Let’s say you’re in a mall. the whole thing is indoors. There are many hallways, rooms, etc. You have some rooms that are shops that must be differentiated from the common area of the mall and from the store next door. the entire environment is totally homogenous, so they need to use several cues to define themselves as a separate space. These involve things like color scheme, decorations and sound. the large mall has one sound track. Each store has it’s own soundtrack. They contract with companies like music to provide them with a soundtrack which reflects whatever image the store is trying to sell. Sound design in this context is about creating feelings of group membership. This store plays your music and sells your clothes. It welcomes in the demographic that the store hopes to attract.
Using art music on Middletown’s parking garage is basically the same strategy. The music says, “this is not your music, this is not your place to hang out.” Rather than be “uncool,” or somehow cause people to switch to concert behavior, what the music actually telegraphs that public spaces are reserved for the upper classes. and how can you possibly object to classical music? It’s the highest form of art! Anyone who objects to this plan is either a thug or a philistine.
Obviously, public spaces belong equally to everyone regardless of class or any other factor. Things that try to define it as reserved for the rich are objectionable. The weaponification of sound is also extremely probelmatic. This trend is related to the army blasting rock music at detainees. Remember when we invaded Panama and played loud death metal at the Papal Nuncio until Noriega surrendered? Also related to the sound cannons owned by the New York police department. Public sounds used to mean carillons playing noon concerts. Now it’s something to divide and destroy.
and what does it mean for Art Music when the state insists that it’s objectionable and does not belong to youth or the poor? I believe there is a plot afoot to destroy art. We all have to listen to commercial pop and hate and fear all serious art and serious music or else we’re uncool? The future of music is doomed.
Tags: ,

upcoming concerts

Tomorrow, February 11th 8:00 PM Crowell concert Hall, I will play tuba with the Wesleyan Creative Music Orchestra, lead by Bill Dixon. This concert will be webcast, starting from 6:00 PM EST (3:00 PST) , obviously including our rehearsal. The stream can be found at rtsp://snuffy88.its.wesleyan.edu/wesmus.sdp . You must use Quicktime to view the stream.

Saturday, february 12th, at 4:00 pm in Crowell Concert Hall, the Wesleyan Orchestra will play my five minute symphony. This concert will not be webcast, but I will post an mp3.
I have reserved the Wesleyan Chapel for my thesis concert, but I’m going to have to call and ask which date I reserved it. I think April 5th. They want all this information about what I’m going to do. Damned if I know.
Tags: , ,

Million Dollar Baby bruhaha

I read some article in the NY Times about the new Clint Eastwood flick. There’s a controversy. The right wing hates the movie. They say it’s in favor of assisted suicide and plays racial politics. I haven’t seen this movie. the times only revealed that the plot twist involved one of the characters becoming seriously injured and wanting to die. Is it clint eastwood? Is it Morgan Freedman? Or is it Hillary Swank, the plucky young woman who wants to become a professional boxer? Take a guess.
Yeah, you’re right. Hollywood wouldn’t seriously allow a woman to break gender roles and succeed without having to suffer suffer suffer. And she dies at the end, which is even better. So the anti-assisted suicide people are in an uproar. As are the disability rights advocates. Becoming disabled doesn’t have to be a death sentence and really, it’s not fair to disabled people to treat disability as if disabled people were better off dead. But where are the angry feminists? Have we gotten so used to women in movies being punished for everything but being a Stepford Wife (the original, dammit) that we’ve given up saying anything? Seriously, the right wing should love this movie and every other one of the 23719547291541253 movies where a woman who tries to succeed gets hurt. They should love the Austin Powers movie where the woman spy decides that she really just wants to marry a spy instead of being one. They should love Clint’s movie Mystic River where the wife of the suspected killer gets to suffer suffer suffer at the end for not keeping her mouth shut.

The best part of the Times story is where Clint tries to defend the movie by saying the bad guys in it are welfare cheats. See, I hate the poor! I’m on the right side!
I haven’t seen the movie. I don’t feel like I have to. I went to the mall today and spent some time standing with Aaron inside a Lane Bryant. Afterwards we talked about enforced femininity and how it is codified, promulgated and largely adhered to. The plucky-hero-succeeding movies are trite and tiresome too. What I like is more like Star Trek. All the positions are inhabited by all sorts of folks. Aliens. Women. Minorities. Anybody can be anything in Star Trek (as long as they’re straight, *sigh*). And then there are just images of different people who have already succeeded and what happens to them afterwards.
Tag:

controversy – Hacking Humans

Person who I forgot to ask if I could quote her said

i don’t understand your reply to my comment in your journal
where you said “creepy? you think the idea of me wanting to use possibly dangerous methods to put people in suggestible states and program them is creepy?”

like, i don’t think that most people would get quite how creepy that is, but if you’re flat-out saying that you’re using possibly dangerous methods to put people in suggestible states and program them and that (if i read you correctly) that *is* creepy, then… why would you do it? i mean how would that be okay?

This in reference to my idea to use 10Hz waves to put people in alpha states and then expose them to ideas of peace, love, joy, togetherness, etc. Morality in art is a good discussion to have. I saw an installation L.A. that used real bits of endangered animals. I heard the artist say the point was about vegetarians who wear leather shoes. I felt like killing endangered animals for so little reason was profoundly immoral. so is it wrong for an artist to experiment on people using methods she’s used on herself? I want to make clear that the “danger” here is the possibility of seizures from strobe lights. Every dance club I’ve frequented on the east coast has had a strobe.
I asked my questioner: if I gave participants copies of my research, explained my methods, provided them with printed copies of all text first and experimented on myself before allowing others in, would it be ok?
She said no, you can’t give informed consent to something you haven’t experienced and furthermore, some things, like recreational murder, cannot have the concept of informed consent.
I don’t think I agree. First of all, I can’t try murdering myself and then go murder you after seeing how it went for me. The non-consentability of murder has to do with the finality of it and that it is universally recognized as harmful. People consent to potentially harmful things all the time, like bungee jumping, or even things that are supposed to cause them pain, like kinky sex (everyone who has done it has consented without personal fore knowledge once). Furthermore, it’s not my intent to harm anyone. So, like bungee jumping, maybe there’s risk (but not risk of getting flattened under a bridge), but the goal is a positive experience. There’s some things floating around online that claim that “there is ample evidence that some [altered states] bring about extremely pleasant feelings and can profoundly affect personality.” (http://skepdic.com/altstates.html)
Well, is it immoral? I don’t think I’m going to have time to do this by April anyway and certainly not in any sort of super-master-hypnotist level. I like generating controversy, though. I wonder who would participate if they thought it might hurt them? Why would they? What role would peer-pressure play? Why do people go to Survival Research Labs events? Are they immoral? This is profoundly useful for distracting me from writing chapter 2 of my thesis.
Tag:

The End of Criticism

The era of criticism is over. It is the end of the critic, the end of destructive comments, the long-delayed end of an era.

Critics have power as long as we’re willing to listen to them. We don’t have to engage them. We don’t have to listen and we don’t have to participate. Too often, when critics are decried, the decrier means on that s/he should become the critic. “Only I get to criticize music, because of my unique and legitimate position as the arbiter of taste.” That is not my intent.
Obviously, music and art must be engaged and even discussed, or it is the end of music education. Otherwise, no one will ever know of any artist because no one will have spoken of them. It is appropriate to engage music in several ways.
If you are a teacher and the creator is your student, the constructive criticism is completely appropriate. Constructive criticism implies a power relationship. It should exist within that relationship or when requested, other wise, it is exerting authority where none ought to exist. Also, please note, constructive criticism. Saying “this sucks” is in no way constructive.
The way to engage art is to make art. It is very easy to say “this sucks” and to destroy and to complain about other people’s endeavors, but it’s more difficult to create something yourself, now isn’t it? Engaging music with words, then, means talking about what is worth emulating in a piece. If we look at pieces as jumping off points, then learning from them to instruct our own music is beneficial.
And for those whose role it is to talk about music: If somebody invented something, say that. If somebody had made something great, say that. If something sucks, then don’t waste our time by telling us about it. Talk about something that is worth talking about. Perhaps you’re worried that there’s a danger that some terrible trend will go unchecked unless it is criticized. However, it will not be emulated unless it’s worth emulating. It will not be praised if it is not worth praising. Creators of suck will be met with a resounding silence. Their is no danger of something with no redeeming value taking over, unless, perhaps, you are thinking of Thomas Kinkade. Your position as newspaper art critic, angry letter writer, peeved grad student, gallery curator, arts administrator, university professor, or cultural-capital endowedness is not going to stop a consumer-driven trend. You can’t make the unwashed masses like something or dislike something. Instead, they rather object to being thought of that way. Make something better, or you have nothing to say.
Tag: