For a Long Time Festival

I spent the weekend working at this aptly named festival. Musical events for 14 hours yesterday, counting the parking garage excursion. I see a lot of concerts at Wesleyan and they affect my thinking and that’s a good thing, but I don’t write about them much as I don’t have time to ponder them. I’m on musical overload and it’s a wonderful thing.

So on Friday night, Phil Niblock played and showed moves for two hours. His movies seemed to have an aquatic theme at first. boats. fishing. shipping things on boats. then it switched to agriculture. first wheat sort of stuff and then meat. Animals being killed. cut up. cooked and eaten. The animal part had a triumphal feel in the music. some folks in the audience said that the pictures of animals being killed and processed (by hand, as these were images shot in the third world), made them want to go vegetarian. But i dunno, with the triumphal loud drone music going on, it made me feel some sence of victory over banyard animals. there was a long section of chasing, catching, killing, plucking, cooking and eating some chicken, all with this almost victorius feel. The last two nights I’ve been dreaming of eating chicken. So the meat eaters want to stop and the meat avoider wants to start.
And then saturday, I saw a bunch of installations, then Jascha played a very nifty droney-piece. And I had a sudden insight. I know what I am going to do for my thesis! More later. Jascha’s piece was very nifty. then I wandered around more. Talked to a reporter. The second repoerter from the Hartford Courant to interview me about the festival. Apparently, I have not been mentioned in the paper. I should have done more than just parking garage pieces. I was just so tickled by the idea. Anyway. aaron had a nifty staticky installation derived from field recordings of sounds in the area.
Too much happened to post about it. Also, no sleep.
I am working on stuff for my May 6th concert. 8:00 pm. my house. 177 Liberty Street. Analog modular synthesizer. There is a reason you never see these beasts in concert, cuz they’re monophonic, they take a long time to patch and you can’t “save” patches like on a computer. you have to do it manulaly every time. However, the concert is free. Bring your own beer. I took some pictures of the synth for the flyer: http://www.xkey.com/~celesteh/pics/gear.html I also have a nice patch going right now, which maybe i’ll record, but prolly not.
ok, i did record it

adventures in civil liberties

so i was just walking back from the parking garage, where i went at 1:00 am to hear my pice played. (after some beer. pardon typos.) i didn’t hear my piece played, but i heard three or four pieces.
i dunno when mine is on. anyway, i was walkiong back, and me and two guys: a phd student and a grad alum, guys in their 30’s at least were walking back towards campus down the street of the city when a public saftety guy started yelling at some kid from his car. he jumped out and demanded id from the kid and started shouting into his radio about spray paint. the kid was just walking down the street, i guess carrying a can of sprsay paint. the public safety guy was giving him a really hard time and me and the two guys were watching, unhappy about how the student was getting hassled. then the guy yelled at us about how we were with the student, so we started to walk away. he starts yelling into his radio for backup. i kid you not. for a can of spray paint. two seperate public safety officers appear and stop us. want to know who we are. want to see our ids. want to know if we’re involved in some very seious incidints of vandlaism!! so they question us and demand to know ids. the alum guy gives his phone number and keeps saying he’s staying in the guest house, as that must give him some non-miscreant creds. the phd guy gives out his name and id. i shake my head and walk off. /another/ public safety guy appears as we get back to campus where i’m trying to retrieve my bike. he takes my picture with a digital camera so they can id me later. for a kid with a fxcking can of spray paint. so i start yelling at him, saying, “you guys think you’re the fbi!” and he comes back with, “i know who you are! i’ve seen you walking around campus here last year before you graduated!” this guy works night shift. there is no way he’s seen before, especuially last year. so i laugh at him and he’s all “i know who you are! i’ve seen you! i know who you are!” i think the civics department must be in trouble.

In other news, the festival is groovy. and i have an alibi for whenever this spray painting thing occured!

Offline

My laptop has just been volunteered to do duty as a part of the huge music festival happening this weekend. It will spend time locked in Ron‘s office and then it will deployed to run a multi-channel audio piece.

I’m doing backups now. I’m assured that it won’t walk off, which is good because I would actually sob if it did. Anyway, so I’ll be offline for the next couple of days, which I prolly would anyway cuz of the festival and it’s prolly for the best because I have so much reading to get done. so much reading. Anyway, I don’t need to be online all the time. I can go away from my computer for a couple of days. No problem. I could quit anytime. This won’t affect me at all. Smooth sailing. *shakes* and theere’s email in the laaab. ii’ll bee ffinee.. nnoo prroblllem..

lalala

Yes, I worry too much. sometimes, I worry about how much I worry. But now I’ve posted my worries a few days ago and they worry me less. Do people know I have a lot of baggage and will it change their opinion of me? Well, they know now, I guess.

I was talking to somebody the other day and she told me I was telling her something I had already told her. So I switched to being entertaining instead. But really, most of the time I talk to get things outside myself. So I say the same things over and over again. This is why it’s good to have many friends, so you can tell them your latest tale of triumph or woe or whatever and you end up telling 10 people and by the end, you’ve expelled it from yourself.
The last day of class is May 4th. One week from today, May 6th, I am giving a concert. God willing I will be done with my paper very soon. I must do some reading for it. Foucault. Something about cross dressing in the middle ages. Too many books. And I must document the lab more fully. I think I’ll be home in two weeks. Hopefully less. Not that I’ve bought tickets yet or anything.
When I get home, I will need a bike and an internship. Somebody who reads this has an extra working bike lying around that they want to give up for the summer. Or maybe it’s only a little broken? Flat tires or something? Busted breaks? Some small but annoying thing that is preventing you from riding it and if you lent it to me you would get it back fixed in August. Let’s be honest. You’ll never get around to fixing it yourself. It’s just making you feel guilty, sitting there broken. You keep meaning to bike places, but you’re always running late and that little piece of plastic over the spring thingee on the breaks is cracked and you really ought to get it fixed, but the guy at the shop will realize that yer a poser and it’s too much work to get it over there and you don’t have time, you’d rather watch tv or something and damn now you feel guilty again. see, you can get this out of your life by lending me your bike. then, you’ll feel a little glow when I talk about how nice you are. And that will last for a few weeks after you get your bike back, before you feel guilty again for not riding it. Byt then it will be october and so hot the tired would melt off of it as it sits locked in front of a Bart station, so you wouldn’t need to feel guilty then either. And then you’d kind of forget about it for a while. So you can get months of guilt out of your system…
Maybe it’s just me that thinks this way? the same thing would also work for getting me an internship, by the way. I will work for very little money (alas) and you would impress your boss by reccomending me and feel like a good person all around and it would totally make up for all those secret solitare games.
I feel kind of spacey today, obviously. I have a bunch of errands to run, but I have to sit here and wait for a plumber before I can do them. I should read some of my books. Which first? Queer theory? Medival cross dressing? Or the rehabilitation trial fo joan of arc? I think critical theory goes well with scatteredness. I notice that I understand it better if I read it while tipsy or on the verge of sleep.
For non-required reading, I got a book out of the library called Bisexual Women in the 12st Century. It’s also full of theory stuff. But I figured that everybody seems to be bisexual these days. Makes me wonder what’s going on in the world. Am I missing out on something or what? So I read the introduction and it’s main point was, “seems like everybody is bisexual these days.” Ok, well, I knew that. So I wonder if I might be missing out on something, but then I remember that what I’m missing out on is boys, and well, I’m ok with that. Anyway, apparently there was a huge bi movement in the early 90’s that made bisexuality more and more acceptable in the GLB community, in that, that’s when they started adding the ‘B’ to their acronyms. And this movement was centered in the Bay Area, a lot. So when I was a youth, I really wanted to be bi and I guess that made me a product of that time. But I tried it out and boys were just… boring. I have nothing against them, but they’re not girls, you know. So I dunno why I’m wondering about this again aside from having so many bi peers. I guess there are very few lesbians in the world (and really, a lot of women who said they were lesbians before had secret boyfriends and stuff, so this isn’t new, it’s just more out and out is good). One of the few. One of the proud. One of the lesbians. My very deep thought on all of this is: “the more queer women, the better.”
indeed

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.