Weekend Trips not to Take

Leave The Hague at 12:30 PM, Drive to Paris. Eat. Sleep. Carry all belongings down 3 flights of stairs. Drive back to The Hague. Leave girlfriend and all belongings at a gas station. Carry all belongings the few blocks from the gas station, through the pedestrian area, to apartment. Move all belongings up steepest flights of stairs ever. Wonder why knee hurts.

#2

Cut Friday classes. Go to train station. Take train to airport. Get on plane. Fly to San Francisco. Borrow Car. Drive to Santa Cruz. Eat. Get drunk. Go dancing. (awake for 26 hours!) Collapse. Awake. Eat. Get lost trying to find beach. Drive to Berkeley. Eat. Sleep. Drive to Santa Cruz. Watch brother get married. Eat. Drive to San Jose. Eat. Drive to Berkeley. Sleep. Try to buy tuba shipping case. Give up. Buy bubble wrap. Wrap sousaphone in bubble wrap. Get ride to airport. Fly to Amsterdam. Get on wrong train. Wander around train station of small town in Holland while carrying bubble wrapped sousaphone. Take train to The Hague. Carry bubble wrapped tuba to apartment. Fall asleep. Miss classes. Forget lab time.
This weekend, I’m thinking of going to Amsterdam to get my hair cut.
Um, anyway, my brother got married and I came back for it and went to the Bachelorette party (my first and last, I think). And I now have the worst tuba in Holland, I think. I didn’t worry about breaking it because who could tell. It sounds like a wounded cow. I want to use it to work out how to do some stuff which I will later do with a real tuba.
My stomach still hurts from the antibiotics that I took in July. This is ridiculous. I go offline to find a medical person to whine to.
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From Talk Like a Pirate Day

The Queen

Yesterday, there was some big queen-related festival. I speak not of the makes of Bohemian Rhapsody, but rather the head of state of The Netherlands. It’s a constitutional monarchy, so she actually wields power.
The capital of the country is Amsterdam. It says so in the constitution. But The Hague is the seat of government. That means that all the government buildings and meetings are in The Hague. It’s where the queen lives and where parliament meets. It’s as if the constitution of the United States listed New York City as the country’s capital, but all the government stuff was still in DC. Except for the museums. Anyway.
So yesterday was a sort of State of the Union kind of thing, where there is a procession from the queen’s residence (a palace?) to the parliament and then she addresses them and lays out her legislative agenda. She rides in a royal carriage. There were bands (and sousaphones) galore, people in uniforms on horseback. A gold-festooned carriage. A festival-like atmosphere filled the city center. I did not have a school holiday, but many elementary schools clearly did.
I thought it would be remis of me (thinking only of you, dear readers) if I didn’t at least try to get a glimpse of the queen. Alas, I was standing in the crowd on the wrong side of the palace-y thing. I saw her carriage, but only from a rather far distance. I was on my way to see her get into the parliament, but it was jammed with people. I did, however, see an image of her doing a very queenly wave on a TV screen. Which is almost like being right there.

Royal Spatialization

There was a lot of music associated with the festivities. Including the aforementioned marching bands (and sousaphones!) but also calliopes. These were quite involved, featuring female figures on the front who actually beat bells. Inside, were pipes and percussion. Several years ago, I saw a MIDI controlled calliope for sale on EBay. Next time I see one, I will not hesitate. Anyway.
I was walking home from school in the evening and heard more band music. I love a march, so I walked over to the source to see what was going on. In the square in the center of town, there were a bunch of bleachers set up. All full of people. The described a large square area where the marching bands were performing field shows.
A field show is that thing that marching bands do where they go out on a field of some kind and march in patterns. In the US, this is most often done at (American) football games during the halftime break. It is also sometimes sighted at competitions. The competitive aspect is strong. I’ve never heard of people just doing it for fun without competition somehow involved. And yet, here in The Hague, bands are marching around, playing marches and settings of pop songs and making formations. There were a couple of high school bands, but the others were all adults. Gray haired trumpet players.
Perhaps in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, one of the bands had pirate flags on it’s drums and did a show called legend of the seas. All in all, everybody looked like they were having more fun than I recall from my field show days. I got information about The Hague’s marching band Victory. They all had matching sousaphones, all in much better shape than mine. I’ve failed to locate a tuba shipping case and I could really do with a playable instrument.
A year or so ago, I did some marching with the Wesleyan Pep Band for a half time show put together by Neely Bruce. He, like Charles Ives, saw marching bands as a great way to do spatialization. I was reminded of this as the different instruments moved around and faced different parts of the Plein. People doing wavefront synthesis (a spatilization technique) talk about how everybody sitting in a different place will hear a different concert. This is true, but it’s also true for field shows. If the trombones are marching closer and closer to you and the saxophones are further away, you’re going to hear something different (obviously) then the people who have advancing saxes and retreating bones. The wave patterns you get from moving band instruments is way more complicated. Is anybody besides Neely working now to exploit this?
19th century technology still has something to say. yarr avast.Tags: ,

Yesterday

Back from France. I miss it and I miss living in the 10th arrondissement and walking to get cheese from the fromagerie and baguettes from the boulanger and produce from the little vegetable market around the corner. It had it’s stresses, certainly, but man, the food was better.
Nicole has learned how to roll a joint! huzzah!
Today, in class, we listed to All the Rage by Bob Ostertag (he has some free downloads on his website, you should look for this piece, in case it’s available). The recording we listened to was the Kronos Quartet playing with a tape that consisted of a guy talking about being called “queer,” getting gay bashed, his friends dying of AIDS and internalized homophobia. Intermingled with that were sounds from a riot. I asked the teacher if he knew if it was the White Night riot (I know KPFA recorded it) or Stonewall or something else, but he didn’t know. The piece is extremely powerful. It’s the sort of thing that you have to give your full attention to and then you spend the rest of the day and some of the next day thinking about it.
So after the student concert this afternoon, I was thinking about it and walking by the train station on the way home. A guy paused from rolling his joint to spare change me in Dutch. I said “sorry” (conveniently, a word in both languages) and a short guy next to him took it up again in English. I said sorry again, but he persisted and merged into sexual harassment. “Have you ever been with a man?” he asked. “You should try it at least once.” Gee, thanks for your offer, but no. Yeah, not exactly friendly when somebody is shouting it across the (bike) parking lot at you.
The Ostertag piece starts with (quoted from memory) “I remember the first time I heard somebody say ‘queer’ and knew they meant me.”
Yeah, French folks thought I was kind of weird and they got that across subtly, but I was in a little bubble of foreignness. I was the eccentric anglophone. Clearly not French. Old ladies gave me mildly disapproving looks on the metro once in a while. Men did not give me the eye. At all. Ever. I was more or less outside of the male gaze for a year. Nobody called me queer. Nobody laughed at me (except for my terrible language skills). Nobody refused to sell me clothes. The bathrooms were more or less gender neutral and the dressing rooms at clothing stores were explicitly gender neutral.
The Hague is a lot like home in some ways. I feel unfriendly male laughter following me around here. FWIW, this not coming from people who ‘look’ Dutch, but from people who might be other immigrants. I would type more about this, but Nicole’s joint rolling skills are starting to effect my typing.
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The Latest

Theoretically, I should have full functionality on my school’s wifi network on Monday. Tomorrow, I am driving to Paris. Gasp, yes, driving a car across three countries. Yikes. I will fill it up with boxes of stuff and drive back to put all the stuff in my new apartment. Huzzah, it is two rooms right in the middle of town. It is awesomeness. The air mattress at the anti-squat sprung a leak, so this is just in time.

I ordered a bicycle. I kept waffling back and forth between getting the cheapest bike possible because it will get stolen anyway and I’m only here for a year or get the bike I want but couldn’t get at home and be worried about parking it all the time and ship it home. I went with option B and in 4 weeks, I’ll have my very own 60 lbs bike (yikes). In the meantime, I am trying to assemble a bike from pieces of incomplete bikes. I feel I am close to this goal, but I left the major piece someplace on a rack with no lock (I don’t have one yet) and I’m worried somebody will think it abandoned and throw it in a dumpster. After careful consideration, I’ve decided I should probably give it some brakes. So it needs a tension arm for the chain, some derailer type thing (it doesn’t need to move, but it does need to keep the chain from falling off) and some sort of braking device and it’s all good. w00t.
School is cool. Housing crisis is solved Bike solution in progress. all is well.
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Online Again!

Welcome back to me. Here’s a week old post that I couldn’t put up earlier:

Reminiscing

When I was a student at Wesleyan, I left town for Spring break one year without cleaning the refrigerator at all. Milk and soymilk sat open. Other food items lay inside while I was gone for three weeks. Some time during that three weeks, a fuse blew in my home and the fridge was left to get warm. This was either during or before the heatwave.
When I opened the door to my Wesleyan fridge, a cloud of green spores filled my kitchen. Literally, a cloud of particulate matter. Aaron cleaned it all, god bless him. (I wonder if he wants to move here to be my housemate again?) The situation was something of a disaster. However, it did not smell as badly as the refrigerator in the anti-squat where I stay. I’ve been eating out a lot.
If Aaron did want to come out here for a while, he might find it familiar. In many ways, this is a lot like when I started at Wesleyan. Holland’s food culture is on a par with Connecticut as is, I’ve been told, the weather. The course load is also similar. In my first semester at Wesleyan, I took way too many classes. Here, I’ve found my course schedule to be even more packed. I have classes five days a week. I’ve gone to four so far. I have three more tomorrow, two or three on friday, two on monday and tuesday. I don’t have to actually take all of these and indeed I have some that I am considering dropping.

School

So far, I’ve learned that Sonology’s origins are from the Acoustical Research department at Phillips. So Sonology has the tapes for Poème Electronique , which they commissioned.
I’ve also learned that women are good at communication, which is why Pauline Oliveros writes the kinds of audience pieces that she does and that a lot of music is male exhibition just like peacocks, so biologically speaking one could conclude that women were unsuited to music and thus probably don’t have a cross-cultural tradition of same and wait, how does Pauline Oliveros fit in this? and yeah I found one possible class to drop. yay gender essentialism.
Also I had a long and math filled lecture on convolution and I’m ashamed to admit that I dozed off. When I awoke, there was a formula on the backboard. I think I get DSP except for the formulas are confusing. What does h refer to again? There needs to be some sort of key provided next to every equation to remind you what the hell the letters are referring to. I took trig a long time ago, so I think I can hack it, even if I could not remember the frequency relationship between a sine wave and that same wave squared. (Octave higher + offset. It’s how frequency dividers work.) Finally, I learned that convolution is a linear process and therefore is reversable, although Curtis Roads claims otherwise. hmmm.

Housing

Cola has been off looking at apartments. Today we looked at two. One was at the very high end of the price range, but comes furnished and with a possible 6 month contract. The other was way too expensive and won’t be ready until next week. But the landlord called up tonight and offered us the bigger, more expensive one for the lower price. Also, no agency fee. Hope on the housing front.
Also went today to Stroom and signed up to try to get housing through them. They’re an arts group which offers help to artists locating housing or studios. To qualify, you need to be part of the group or a student at the art school or the conservatory. There is a waiting list. I wish I had looked into this when I was here over the summer.

The Next Day

Last night, somebody dumped a pile of stuff in the street in front of where I anti-squat. And it’s not even Sunday. I kept hearing scavengers coming by to look at the stuff, so this morning, I took a gander and grabbed a mirror. Huzzah, there is now a mirror here. There was also most of a bike, but the front end looked kind of messed up. If only I could weld!

First Period

So there are ballet students at my school, because I go to the Royal Conservatory (oh my god, how did this happen exactly?). The ballet students have changing rooms near the music practice rooms. The changing rooms have mirrors ringed with lightbulbs, just like backstage-y stuff. The changing rooms also have showers. Showers with hot water. At 9:50 this morning, I handed the front desk my student card and in return got a key to a room with a hot shower in it. Then Cola and I ran down there, became clean (yay!) and I ran up just in time for my 10:00 class which doesn’t start until September 14th, something I would have known had I gone to the meeting or if I spoke any Dutch. I am seriously going to take some evening classes or something.

Second Period

Afternoon class number one was on the roots of computer music. We talked about the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot, the RCA Mark I synthesizer and Music I – Music V among other aspects like timbral limitations fo repeating wave forms. It was mostly review for me, but I hadn’t heard sound samples of the Mark I before. The teacher, Paul Berg, also asserted that new instruments and technology tend to be first used for old applications. Clara Rockmore played Rachmoninov with the Theremin. The first Mark I stuff was old warhorses arranged for synthesizer (this thing, btw, took up an entire room and was not voltage controlled. It had 12 discrete oscillators – one for every equally tempered step, an octave switching device and some wave shaping. crazy). Berg sees this tendency as regrettable, but I think it’s just part of human nature. People relate new tools to old frameworks. Many people now carry around in their pockets little computers with fast disk access and D->A converters. The use them for playing recordings, because that’s how they think about pocket-sized musical devices. It’s using a new technology for an old idea. If you want a CD player or a casette player, by all means get one. And it’s not bad to use your Ipod as a glorified one of those. But really, it could/should be more.
Also, I counter that not every application of new technology to old aesthetics is bad. Ipods are a case in point. Also Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach is really wonderful. It’s fun, it has interesting sounds and it was a good idea. She got great timbres and it deserved the popularity that it achieved. Old music with a new instrument is only a problem if it’s not done well.
Also, Ondes Martenots are cool and I want one. They’re expressive as heck and very well suited to some solo performance. Also Messiaen wrote great stuff for them. They also have interesting timbres, partly because the speakers are sometimes behind sympathetic strongs or gongs or otherwise modified. Pure awesomeness.

Third Period

My last class today was one of those first meetings where the teacher talks about what he’s going to talk about. It’s a class largely about spatialization, but also sounds in space: how they work physically. The teacher is involved with wavefront synthesis. From what I gleamed from just the introduction to these subjects in general, my SuperCollider spatialization classes work the right way. I am going to add support for reflections very soon as my suspicions on how to do it are apparently correct. Anyway, if you get a really fast processor and a whole bunch of D->A converters, you could generalize my code to do wavefront stuff for you. Maybe I’ll make it automatically for n channels, just in case.
Also, the speed of sound varies according to atmospheric pressure and air temperature and humidity and whatnot. Perhaps I should get a little USB meteorological station. People are sensitive to very tiny differences in timing, so it may actually be perceptible.

The evening

I hate Dutch food. Why must everything have so much sugar in it? I am listening to Not Made of Stone by Polly Moller. It seems to be partly about our road trip to Vegas in 2003. I hope I am not Deep Eddie.
I really like my school. I have wanted to live in The Netherlands for a long time. I’m so happy I came.

And More Recently

Well, I haven’t posted for a while, but I haven’t written anything for a while either. Who wants to read through a glut of week old news? I’ve now been to every class at least once. I felt kind of negative about today’s classes, but maybe just because it’s Monday. Maybe if I didn’t take any Monday classes, I’d start to feel negative about Tuesdays. Class is in MIDI. For real. Not “‘MIDI’ but really OSC” or really hardware devices or really anything else, but MIDI. Today we talked about the MIDI spec.

MIDI

MIDI should be dead technology and CV should be alive and kicking (maybe if they were, my opinions would be reversed… (probably would, alas)). The teacher gave a lengthy explanation, but didn’t talk about binary or hex representations, and the sick logic is not apparent without such knowledge. Let’s look at the anatomy of a midi message in binary. First, the first 4 bits: 1wxy. the 1 indicates a a new event of some kind. wxy indicates which event it is. Astute observers will note this leaves 8 possible events. This is kind of true. The next 4 bits (almost always – unless the first 4 bits are 1111) indicate the channel number. Obviously, there are 16 channels. Then you get two more possible bytes (some events only use one more byte. Some use no more.). Those bytes must start with 0 to indicate that they’re not new events. So you get seven bits to work with, which is to say, 0-127. Possible values thus range from 80-FF for byte 1, and 00-7F for bytes 2 and 3. A note on on channel one in binary is: 1001 0000 0 followed by a seven bit number indicating which key, followed by 0, followed by a 7 but number indicated amplitude. Half amplitude (“velocity”) on note 60 would be 1001 0000 0001 1110 0011 1111 (or 90 1E 3F)
Let me note that 7 bit amplitude really sucks.

Life

I want a PolyMoog. And a pony. And a bicycle. I’ve talked myself into getting one worth bringing home at the end. I also want an apartment. I have a landlord, I think. Having a landlord and not an apartment is definitely the worst of both worlds. Anyway I should have lodging any day now. Which is good because the guy at the reception desk today told me I couldn’t shower.
The analog studio here was two walls of synth modules including 16 oscillators. OMFG.
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Yesterday’s Typing

School officially opened today, which apparently included some speeches or something. I’m vague because when I checked the time of the event this morning, I had the idea that 13:30 was 3:30PM and not 1:30 PM and so while more together students heard an inspiring lecture, I was taking a (desperately needed because I was too tired to tell time) nap. I arrived at school 5 minutes after everything concluded.
I got my student card but not my course schedule. When do classes start? Theoretically, tomorrow, but I don’t know. Hopefully, I’ll find out when I post this as somebody will have answered my email.
Cola and I went to a rental agency in our quest to find housing. The rental person explained that since we were looking for less than a year, we absolutely have to rent a furnished apartment. This adds 100+€ to the price. Agency fees are equal to one month’s rent (therefore, rent = ((stated rate) * (1 + 1/9)) + utilities,   Utilities = 120€ ish). Den Haag should be cheaper than Paris, damnit! I computed that it might be cheaper to take the year lease and just pay for the extra months that we won’t be here. Nicole is going to look at two expensive apartments tomorrow. Squatting looks better and better.
We just bought a requisite lamp from a Turkish shop. I am proud of myself that I bargained down from 15€ to 12.50€, but I made some errors. I said 10€ when I meant 10€. I should have offered 5€, which is what it’s probably worth. It has a little trophy figure of a footballer on it. We’ve got the requisite 4 books. If we steal the air mattress which I inflated this morning, all we need is a table and a chair and we’re set. Maybe also a residency card, since neither of us has registered yet. This is theoretically not a big deal but I think I might make an appointment tomorrow despite our lack of permanent address. I’ll be fine but I’m worried that staying at an anti-squat might look bad for Cola since she’s coming in as a person looking for work.
Anyway, now our current lodging will have two sources of light, although still no hot water, as my attempts again today to light the heater failed. Gas here has a scent added, but it’s different than in the US and I don’t know what it smells like. Nicole can apparently detect it, but so far, nothing. That’s good because there will be no explosions but bad because there will be not hot showers. I need a place to live. What am I doing here? I wake up with absolutely no idea where I am.
I’m going to have homework and tests and stuff. Tests! What’s up with that? I’m too old for tests. I’m too old for school. What the heck am I doing here? Bay Area prices for furnished apartments? Tests? Hideous, insufficiently bargained lamps?
If anybody calls me a “girl” again (or one of “the girls”) in the next day my head will explode. I. Am. Not. A. Girl. Thank you.Tags: ,

Notes from Yesterday

I’m here.

Got into France yesterday and right away got tickets on the Thalis train to the Low Countries. Started calling hotels listed in Fodors. This guide book had the most listings for The Hague, but is not a book for budget travelers. The youth hostel was booked (other students who planned ahead, curse them!) so booked a normal hotel. Maybe a 2 star or so. Arrived in The Hague around 19:30, figured out how to buy tram ticks, found hotel, found food, slept.

Housing

Today, I found the phone number of the guy I stayed with when I visited and then also called a bunch of apartments listed on Craig’s list. They were all very far from school and the nice one was more expensive than where I lived in Paris. Bah.
Sasha tried to figure out a temporary solution to my housing crisis. Hotels here are not cheap. Finally, he hit on an idea. His friend is out of town for two weeks, so we can stay there in his absence. The question was: do we break down the door to get in and just buy him new locks or do we try to track down the keys? It was decided that the second solution was best because of the number of locks on the door.
It’s an anti-squat. In The Netherlands, it’s legal to squat, but you have to do it a certain way. You need a lamp, a table, a chair and a bed and the best time to move them in is Sunday at noon. If you don’t have all these things, you can be evicted or arrested for burglary, which would probably be inconvenient for me right now. There’s a ten block area of town that’s all slated for demolition, which means it’s kind of easy to squat, at least until they knock the building down. anyway, once you have all your squatter stuff moved in, you let people know that you’re squatting there which hopefully will prevent people form knocking the building down with you inside.
Some owners who have empty apartments would like to avoid having squatters. Squatters have the rights of tenants and get free utilities, but pay no rent. To prevent squatters, you use anti-squatters. These guys pay the landlord like 50€/ month and live like squatters except they can be kicked out when the landlord wants. It’s almost as good as squatting.
So the anti-squat has electricity and water, but no gas, which means no heat and no hot water.

Furnishing

There’s some sort of large rubbish pick up on Sunday night where people with permits can dump large piles of junk on the street. People without permits drive around looking for pre-existing piles to augment. People who want, say, a living room set drive around looking for one. We saw a nice sofa and matching love seat and a bunch of nice dining room chairs. If we start collecting enough stuff and get a chair, table, bed and lamp, maybe we could just squat near the anti-squatter.

School

Starts tomorrow (Monday). Labor day is May 1st here, so no holiday. I know (I think) where I’m supposed to be, but not what time. I am so damn tired. 9:00 am here is midnight in California. zzzzzzTags: ,

Are you still here?

Trying to read Dutch apartment listings is making my head spin. Dutch is like a really drunk German guy trying to speak English. Ask me if I still think that after I’ve been there a while. I leave for France on Friday. Because I am a master of preparedness, I have no train ticket from there to the Netherlands and no place to stay in Paris nor in The Hague. I saw a promising apartment listing on Craigslist today, though, phone contact only. Yay for skype. Boo for time zones.

My gig at the Temescal Café was fun and went well. Each set successfully emptied out the restaurant. Nothing in the tip jar, but I forgot you need seed cash. If people don’t see some dollars already in the jar, nothing will go into the jar. Also, like, most everybody fled, so there might have been other factors. I have avant-gaurde creds!
Last weekend, I went on a river float trip in the Central Valley. T’was fun. Cola got caught in a tree, but I stayed disaster free. It was more fun than the last time I went as I knew a lot more people and they all chilled out a lot after the organizers had a kid.
Most of my paperwork is in order. Y’all should come visit me.
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Gig Monday

7-9 pm monday 8/21 @ temescal cafe 4920 telegraph, oakland.
Improvised music plus good food and beer.

7:00pm
Aram Shelton
alto saxophone, bass clarinet
Jen Baker
trombone
Celeste Hutchins
tuba
Damon Smith
double bass
The Just In Time Quartet, as seen at the Skronkathon. Again living up to it’s name, since my plane is supposed to come in at 4:35. whee.
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