Les said, the better II

celesteh@gmail.com 1-860-301-2508. we can hang out, but (maybe) not this weekend.

I just saw The Third Man on campus. They show free movies in the science center. It was an entertaining movie, from 1949. Right when one of the characters, the Baron, first shows up, it’s easy to tell he’s a bad guy. Because he’s gay. How can you tell he’s gay? He’s wearing eyeliner, he has on a fur stole, he’s carrying a tiny dog and he smiles like Peter Lorre does in the Maltese Falcon. Also, adding to his alien otherness, he has a more pronounced accent than other Germans in the movie and, as Zoe noted, he has “Nazi teeth.” Another person in the film, Dr. Winkel, collects antiques. Gay. He’s the Baron’s boyfriend. Obviously they’re up to no good. Obviously the dead man in the film was up to no good because he was friends with these guys.

It is a bit disconcerting to realize that a large part of my identity was Hollywood code for evil. But it does provide context for claims of the religious right. They tap into a deep symbolism, older than Hollywood. We use queerness as a symbol for otherness, apparently, because we’re apes. I think some monosexuals find themselves confused and made uncomfortable by other sexual orientations. I thought, after reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality, that this had something to do with western culture. He has an argument, which I cannot hope to summarize, where through repression sex became a form of knowledge. Not just knowledge, but the ultimate self-knowledge. Secret, inherently experiential. Sexual identity is primary identity. So being confronted with different sexualities is being confronted with alien knowledge which could unhinge the sense of self, I guessed. Apparently, homophobia and biphobia comes from something deeper.
This does explain why some women will cheeerfully participate in their own repression. Fundamentalist language will always be more powerful than logical or rational language. Some suggest strategies for co-opting fundamentalist language for leftist purposes. We have to, I guess. Parts of this argument make me deeply uncomfortable.

We start by having the womens’ groups decrying the Islamic FUNDAMENTALIST view of womens rights. These FUNDAMENTALISTS want to roll back the clock and make women answer to men. In AMERICA we don’t believe in that.

Well, the women have their marching orders, I suppose. So much for letting women lead themselves. The first I heard of the Taliban was from feminist groups. I, like many feminists, wanted something to stop that situation. It made my views on the war in Afghanistan complicated. Stopping Taliban is good. bombing the hell of out of an already bombed to hell country is bad. I felt conflicted. I don’t like the entire us-vs-them mentality this argument depends on. Attacking Islamic fundamentalism has become terribly confused with attacking Islam. Demonizing a foreign alien other just heightens awareness of alien others among us. If Islam is bad, then women and queers might be bad too. We’re all the other.
I understand that this us-vs-them language has a draw. What I don’t understand is why it doesn’t seem to work on me. Do I fall for it in other places and not notice? Has my status as an other somehow made me shy away from it? Why would other others not similarly shy away? Why don’t other people like logic and reason? How does logic get so easily twisted? For example: Bush is the first president in many many years to get more than 50% of the vote. But he beat Kerry by very few points, a narrower margin than any in at least as long a time period. The over 50% reflects that third party votes are much lower than years past. That’s it. The victory is small. But people sieze upon the over 50% like it means something besides the Greens and Libretarians doing poorly.
I don’t think people are powered by logic at all, myself included. Which is troubling. Why do we have the power of logic but not use it? My leftism is mostly emotional. I’m one of those moral values people. I think it’s immoral that sick people can’t get healthcare and that some people go to bed hungry. I can make arguments about why these things are bad, and the arguments are reasonable and logical, but mostly it’s about the morality of it. The emotionalness. How can we make people suffer? Don’t people suffer enough already from life without having indignities and pain heaped upon them from unfair social systems?

So I thought I’d re-organize my photo library. I’m still ironing out bugs. But now I’ve got things organized by month which will hopefully greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to publish, since I don’t need to re-publish the past. I also added comments to each and every photo, but I’m using document root comments, whichw ere easy to setup, but don’t alert me when folks comment, so I guess I’ll only see coments on those bored momemnts when I’m clicking theu my entire library, re-living my past. Whci I probably do more often than I should. But I’m proud of myself, regardless, since this is all manged by a perl script that I wrote. My photo library is managed entriely by iphoto + some shell scripts and a perl script. That includes my XML feed. programming is a lot more fun when either there is not right answer (for art) or nobody is making me do it. cuz theni only work on things that i’m interested in when i’m interested in them. I love grad school.

I was raised in the same town my mother was born and raised in: Cupertino, CA. Cupertino has gonethrough many changes from it’s incoropartion (I think in 1952) until it’s present day. When it became a town, it was mostly agricultural. Now it’s more famous as the headquarters of Apple Computers. Then, as now, it is primarily a town of immigrants. when my mother was small, Yugoslavians, Italians and others were coming to Cupertino to farm the rich farm land. Silicon Valley is built upon some of the best farm land in the world. Now, maybe people come from Asia and elsewhere around the US and the world to work in the electronic industry (which has polluted the hell out of the best farm land. what was orchards are not superfund sites.). For as long as I can remember, Cupertino has been a destination not only for engineers relocated from asia, but also extremely wealthy asains looking to move someplace new. Somehow, real estate agents in Hong Kong started spreading the word that the Cupertino School District is the best in the world. If you want your kids to be well educated, you’ve got to send them to Cupertino. The resultant influx of serious students caused the school system to become very very good. My parents sent me to Catholic schools, wich were, unfortunately, not nearly as good as the local public schools, because they wanted to me to hear about god. Apparently, if they wanted me to hear about God, they could have just sent me to Stevens Creek Elementary.

One of the results of the influx of immigrants from India and China is that Cupertino is most likely less than 50% Christian. Which is probably why this teacher felt like he had to evangelize, to reach out to these heathens. So while Fox is saying Jesus belongs in the classroom and the left is saying that this guy stepped over some line between teaching context and promoting the bible, nobody is talking about how Jesus is probably not the religion of the majority or a significant minority of the class. Not only does Jesus not belong in the classroom, most of the parents probably don’t want him there. Fox and others on the right have the idea that our country was founded on Jesus and almost all of us beleive in Jesus, so why not make that clear? Except that in Cuperinto, it’s not the case that almost everyone belives in Jesus. The teacher is not reinforcing a pre-existing set of beliefs. He’s trying to convert. Now that I write this, I relaize it doesn’t matter, really, to anyone involved. Those on the left don’t want Jesus teachers evangelizing for any reason. Those on the right think converting the heathens is just another part of our reach christian heritage. bah. Won’t someone think of the children?
I’m mostly upset that my favorite Fox show went to Flint Center while I was away for school. At least I didn’t miss Anee Coulter.

I just got back from Seymore’s and injested my full beer limit, which includes one pint of Hoegarten, one taster thingee of cask ale and a bottle of Liberty Ale for those of you who may wonder. There was a group outing after Anthony Braxton’s concert. The concert started under a bit of uncertainty. A meeting between the school president and the student body had been set up and the last moment during the time we were supposed to have the hall. I showed up early for the new event, hoping to record it. I purchased DAT tapes at inflated prices and went over to find somebody else already setting up in my usual spot. I was trying to find out what he was planning on doping with the tapes afterwards or find out if I could set up next to him, when the head of the CFA staff for the event tols me I could not record anything anywhere under any circum stance.s I got frustrated and went home. Well, it turns out that veryone there had a recorder and the school radio station broadcast the event. She was just telling me I couldn’t do it becuase she could. I work at CFA events. I frequently interact with this woman, asking questions about where I can set up to record. I want revenge. I think that I wil never ask permission for anything again and just set up to record wherever I want when I’m supposed to do it and if she doesn’t like it, she can talk to my boss or suck my dick, whcih ever would make her happier.

I’m off topic. . . So we set up late for Braxton’s concert. He said we all had to play standing up. I was joking about playing my lap tuba standing up and said I should have brought my sousaphone. His eyes lit up. I protested that my sousaphone is not a good horn and I don’t play it well, etc. He persisted, so I went home and got it. In the middle part of the first half, I played a trio with Carl Testa on doublebass, me on sousaphone and Anthony Braxton on bass and contra bass saxaphone. Maybe you’ve never heard of the contrabass saxaphone? There’s only nine of them in the world. Anthony says not all of those are operational. They were hult by patriotic frenchmen at the turn of the last century. The Nuclear Whales have one. Anthony’s got another one. So we played. Carl is virtuosic. Anthony is virtuosic. I am not. But there was something just extremely awesome about playing between the contrabass sax and the tuba. They’re both made of brass. They;re both ponderous. All the time, I trying to play along with instruments that are not like mine. I try to mimic what angela is playing on clarinet and I can’t because they’re entirely different instruments. I can only parody her lines. but when anthony started playing the contra, it wa sin my range. I could play his lines back at him. It was awesome. There was a real musical connection. Carl is also a fantastic player. I can’t do on the tuba what he does on the bass though. He’s a very fast player. I just can’t play tuba that fast. There’s a noticable gap between when I start playing a note and when the note sounds. I always have to be playing ahead of the beat or i sound behind it. It makes it hard to follow the person next to me, because i need to be in the lead or else i’m beihind. tuba + sax = awesome. I used to play a million duets with a guy in highschool named jeremy stafford on bariton sax and me on tuba. that was nice. brass instruments belong together, even if one of them is a reed.
In the second half of the concert, we played Ghost Trance musics for about 20 minutes and then anthony ended it. he thought we’d been going for an hour. We start playing a really virtuosic composition, but then play “outisde”, forming sub groups within the ensemble and either play the aucillary pices includded with Ghost Trance or Language Musics or other Braxton compositions. Tailor Ho Bynum came back and was a very excellent section leader and he had us playing little groups of language music and some ghost trance and the music ends up being ever-shifting alliances of small ensembles forming and reforming and regrouping and moving and changing membership all playing at the same time on the same stage and sort of toegther but sort of apart. it’s how anarchy would work as a political system. It;’s awesome
at the bar afterwards, anthony introduced his youngest son, who he hadn’t seen in years. He was just so happy his son was around. it was so cool. i got in aq long politcal argument with a guy who was wearing an anti-
un shirt. anthony kept telling me not to take the guy seriously. finally, i realized that anthony wasn;t joking. the guy just wore the UN shirt because he knew he was going to be aorund leftists. afterwards, the guy was trying to buy me burbon. i dunno if he just wanted to be freinds after arguing or what.
enjoy this post until i take down the scandolouos parts wheni sober up. if there are any scandolous parts aside from my drunked typos.

So apparently, a group of unhappy undergrad trapped the college pres in his office today and demanded he meet with them tomorrow. this got media coverage good for them. I don’t think they will get listened to any other way. Folks in power need to remember that people will find a way to be heard. If you brush them off, they will amp up their tactics.

anyway, so the “emergency meeting” tomorrow is going to be held in Crowell Hall. At the same time that mic checks are supposed to be happening for Braxton’s small ensemble concert, which I’m playing in. the meeting is supposed to end at 6:00. There is no way that it will actually end at 6:00. why didn’t they scedule it for the chapel? It holds more than 200 more people and Braxton doesn’t need it.
why are they angry? glad you asked:

• WESU/NPR deal: negotiations made behind closed doors

• The RIDE
• FUNDING for the QRC and the UOC (SBC)
• Chalking
• Gender neutral housing
• Hostile Financial Aid Office
• Where is my money going?/Transparency in spending/Trustees/Tution
  increase

• Senior housing/off campus housing
• Student voice outside of the WSA
• X-house
• Hate Crimes
• Community Relations
• Worker’s Rights, Janitor’s abusive & racist supervisor, upcoming strike
• Veto power of administrative decisions
• Voice in creation of classes and our majors
• Ethnic Studies
• Tenure (who gets it?)
• SOC quotas, decrease in recruiting
• harrassment from Public Safety/ usage of facilities
• lack of transparency
• General respect from the administration
• Long Lane Prison and Wesleyan $ supports it
• Spanish dept funding
• Disassociation of Wes from Middletown and the harrassment of Middletown
  community members by Public safety

I dunno what all of this is about. SOC stands for students of color. They’re pissed. I heard some of them at a speak out and they’ve got reason to be pissed. Chalking is some fake issue where students aren’t allowed to chalk the sidewalks. they do anyway. Gender Neutral Housing refers to something where a bunch of people sat down and hammered out some compromise to allow co-ed dorm rooms for students who selected it or students who didn’t want gender to be taken into account for dorm assignments. The folks on the comittee went to 21963918234674 meetings and made a million compromises and came out with a carefully worded policy, etc. the administration first accepted it and then tossed it with no comment, reassigning a bunch of dorm rooms just days before school started.
WSA is student government. X-House is a “program house” for african american students. I understand that a few white students live there too. I dunno anymore about that. It’s constantly in peril, apparently. It used to be the only program house that first year students could occupy, but the rules were abruptly changed without student input. The WESU radio station becoming an NPR affiliate was also without student input. If you’re starting to see a pattern here, you might be on to something.
Hate crimes: a few students get fag bashed every semester. It’s scary. I don’t know what they want the school to do about it. One time, they figured out who did it and the penalty was being banned from campus, according to public safety. Terrorize a community and you never get to hear Braxton play again! I think jail might have been more appropriate.
I dunno about community relations other than local residents kind of hate us. the school decided to fix that by building some sort of art center for children in the north end. They didn’t ask anyone what they wanted first. So they have this center with a bunch of school people and volunteers and no kids. (patterns . . .)
Worker’s rights. heard a rumor that monolingual spanish speaking employees are being called epithets by their bosses, who also serve as their translators when they talk to the school about stuff, so they can’t complain. Don’t know anything more about it. I am not a relaible source here.
Respect from the university, well, if I were smart, I would not make a comment. But I can’t resist noting that it’s very easy to dismiss the concerns of anyone you’re actively calling “kids.” That has got to stop.
This seems like a radnom laundry list of comaplaints, but they’re unfied by a thread of feeling voiceless. They do all fit together.
This blog post will come back to haunt me when I try to apply for teaching positions. Look, students are what defines a university. No students. No university. Therefore, it’s logical to assume that they must be an important part of the university and that their concerns matter. some students of color feel like they’re being used as a prop to promote the diversity of wesleyan to it’s “real” traget students (white) and are getting no instituional support. the stories they told back up that claim. that has to change. some of the changes the students are demaning are impossible. You can’t compell a tenured professor to attend diversity training. Nobody has told them that. The administration just brush them off and say it’s unnecessary.
I hope the students and the president can come to an agreement where the school agrees to not just roll over the students and make imperial descisions. I hope they come to that agreement quickly. By 5:00 pm would be nice.

Somebody wrote a short history of the piece Come Out by Reich and they link to an old post of mine here. I’m kind of chagrined, actually, as the post they link to is the thinking-out-loud variety (as so many are) and it’s clear that I have no idea about anything I’m talking about. I got Come Out confused with Its Gonna Rain, for example. However, since that time, I did do some research.
One of my questions was wether or not “come out” had a possible double meaning at the time the piece was written. It did not. That phrase as a signifier for visible queer identity originated in the 1970’s or 80’s. Instead Reich’s text a very effective loop where the words “come out to show them” and then just “come out” are plucked from their original context and by repetition gain their own meaning of protest. Reich transforms the words from a statement of victimhood to a statement of protest. (according to Four Musical Minimalists) The words originate from a group of young african american men who were beat by the police in Harlem. One of them is describing how he was injured and wanted medical attnetion but wasn’t visibly bleeding, so had to open is wound to allow some of “the bruise blood to come out to show them.” The blog cited above points out that the piece was written as a fundraiser for the victims of the police brutality.

Come Out is clearly beyond reproach. It is a lasting piece of political music (although it does require one to read the program notes to understand it) and it comes out of fund-raising collaboration, making it just the sort of piece of music that Jesse woud be interested in for his Kent State paper. What’s kind of interesting is how the words “come out” gained additional meaning in the interviening years and how the piece might change or gain meanings because of that. However, the opening context of the piece, I think, prevents that.
I really like Steve Reich. His work influences mine. I think there are some issues surrounding his work that have to do with changing ideas about liberalism. His piece It’s Gonna Rain is a tape loop piece. It’s before Come Out, from when he was at Mills and I don’t think it’s as good as his later tape piece. He went to Golden Gate Park and recorded a famous preacher who liked to give sermons tere. The preacher was talking about Noah’s Ark. Reich felt that the message of impending apocalypse resonated with the angsty zeitgeist he felt around him. Four Musical Minimalists also explains that he was really into the rich timbres of African American voices.
Reich was actively working in anti-racist projects, some with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for example. I want to do more research on this and who their target audience was and whose minds they might have changed. Were the urban audiences of San francisco racist, or were they energizing their base? Also, very importantly, how many black people were involved in this effort?
there is an unfortunate tendency for peple to fall into the social roles that they are comfortable with. Feminist groups sometimes spend a lot of time listening to men in their midst. Sometimes men even become the spokespeople. Equality groups must also gaurd against the social tendency to give away their voice to white men. I don’t know when this became an issue that people were aware of. Certainly by the 60’s, there were black-led civil rights groups and black people began assuming leadership role in pre-existing organizations.
Right now, speaking for black people and saying that you’re fascinated by the timbres of their voices would be extremely problematic. (I was surprised to see that the book had a very recent publication date.) But this all took place in the 60’s and it’s appropriate to judge his intentions only according to what was considered progressive at the time. He was on the right sinde of things. However, when one is trying to learn from this to figure out what to do now, one has to take into account current notions of progressivism. I would not make those statements. I would not have written the piece It’s Gonna Rain. I’m a timid sort and I’m afraid to speak for other people. (In modern political discourse it’s perfect acceptable to declare yourself a spokesperson for whatever group you claim to represent. I think that’s fine. But I don’t want to speak for a group that I feel myself a member of or that nobody else would recognize me a member of.) In fact, when I do tape loop pices on text, I seem to always end up using people who I strongly disagree with. I have no timidity distorting their voices and re-ordering their words. Also, the temptation to illuminate their voices like gilding on a medival manuscript is not present as it would be with words I agreed with.
So, I still have not done enough research on Riech’s tape pieces to write that chapter of my thesis. I have a few lingering reservations about It’s gonna Rain. But I can say, unequivocably, that Reich was a progressive, on the correct side of social isues and he did good work. It’s inspiring that it makes lasting music that’s still worth listening to. I would characterize Come Out as a sucessful piece of protest music, one that is not easily co-opted, and continues to have political and musical significance.

Sunday Comic. (If you see this monday, hit the “previous comic” arrow) The Salvation Army is a religious Organization. they used to have a contract with the city of San Francisco to deliver meals to AIDS patients. But they lost that contract when the city passed a rule saying all contractors must provide domestic pertnership benefits. Because the Salvation Army thinks being gay is a big sin. So for years, I guess they dilvered those meals with a friendly, “here’s dinner, you sinning fag.” or what? So when the salvation army santa in the comic says, “I want to see an end to intolerance, injustice and prejudice.” He means, against some people, but not all people. Some predjudice is a-ok. Boycott the salvation army. Give your money to a group that’s really against prejudice instead. (Like the National Coalition for the Homeless or Food Not Bombs. Or a church that doesn’t discriminate.)

SuperCollider does not reliably convert floats to integers even when you ask nicely. sure, it rounds for you. but does the type change? nooooo. can you use it as an array index? noooo. does this cause my code to fail in impossible to fix ways? yes. does it cause unreasonable levels of frustration? you bet. Has this been fixed in between the version where i noticed the bug (from september) and yesterday’s version? nooooo.

grrrrrrrrr
update work around: when you do float.floor or float.ceil, put an asInt at the end: float.floor.asInt float.ceil.asInt .

I have just finished reading Lynne Chenney’s terrifically auful pulp novel Sisters. Yes this is the “lesbian” romance that you’ve read about. I don’t want to blow the whole thing for you, but there are no lesbians. Only sexless female victims. And one very male-dentified female lead. I could identify with her, maybe, [spolier!! skip to next paragraph if you don’t want to know the ending] except for her over willingness to marry a xenophobic, poor-person-hating, vigilante-justice-(against poor folks for being poor)-supporting profiteer (who is male). But if her agreed with her on everything, that would be so boring. ahem. yes.

I did not find my copy of sisters on amazon.com. Nor on ebay. Not even at the Middletown library used book sale. I downloaded it from the internets and you can too: word document or PDF. Be forewarned that there’s no hot juicy sex and it has all the pulp novel crap you would expect from V. C. Andrews. On the one hand. On the other hand, the heroine is 100% blue state, which is kind of interesting. She’s even multi-racial, although how that ends up being treated by the end is . . . um . . . proplematic. The alien other is just not bound by conventional sexual mores, is she? too bad jazz music hadn’t been invented in the time period of the book, or she could have listened to it.
bah
well-written review from the democratic underground