Les said, the better II

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: The Hague, Celesteh

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: The Hague, Celesteh

I’ll be offline until further notice. My flight leaves today at 4:20 and arrives in Paris tomorrow. From there, I will go to The Hague via train with an as yet unpurchased ticket. w00t. Where will I stay in Holland? I don’t know. My French cell phone should work should you need to call me.

Tag: Celesteh

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.
Tag: Celesteh

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.
Tags: SF Bay, Celesteh

Maybeck

I played my gig at Maybeck on Wednesday with David. We had a good handfull of people, about 20, which isn’t bad considering the extremely short notice and which is half the capacity of the space. Reactions were mixed. My brother said, “that was . . . [long pause] . . . interesting.” Somebody else characterized it as “f***ing awesome.” we’ve been invited back, which is generally a good thing.
It’s interesting to play an instrument where you can’t really predict what it’s going to do. I use a lot of chaos patching. (That is a situation with 3 oscillators, such that OscA frequency modulates OscB, which FMs OscC, which FMs OscA.) Chaos sometimes repeats along certain patterns, like a 7 note pattern, or more notes, or sometimes maps to no shape at all. A tiny knob twist changes everything. Add in an LFO and it goes from state to state and then back again (well, only back if your Oscs don’t drift, and since mine are MOTM, they don’t).
In David’s case, unpredictability came from complicated SuperCollider patches, which at one point spun out of control in a really interesting way.

SFEMF

On Thursday, I went to the opening night of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. (I think I’ve gone to every single one – tonight might be the only concert of it that I’ve ever skipped. huh.) The second piece was by Manuel Rocha, called Frost clear energy saver and involved, I swear to god, a refrigerator, miced and on stage. (Follow the link for a recording.) He wrote in the program notes that he become fascinated with the sound of his refrigerator. Interestingly, he also spent time in Paris, earning his PhD from Paris VIII. Cross-continent refrigerator love? It is a phenomenon? My jaw = dropped. Since he mixed it at Mills in 1991, while I was a student there [Edit: before I was a student there], there’s a chance that my refrigerator feelings were unconsciously influenced by a mostly-forgetton memory of that same piece.
The festival is super. All the pieces last night were cool. I’m only skipping tonight it because I haven’t eaten dinner in the last several days. Tomorrow night, Matt Davignon is playing. He has an excellent new album out right now. Polly Moller has posted a review to her blog. It’s a calm and gentle treatment of the drum machine, pulling out an unexpected energy which is soothing and unexpected. It’s good music to listen to if you have (say) anxiety cuz it’s interesting and cool, but won’t freak me you out.

Monday, August 21st

Is the afternoon that I fly back from Apple Valley (well, from Ontario, CA). I’ll be playing tuba that evening with the Just in Time Quartet at the Temescal Café in Oakland, CA, provided, you know, no plane delays or terrorists. I’m brining no toothpaste, so as to avoid having to check a bag. (Who knew toothpaste was a security threat? Maybe somebody at the TSA just saw the first Austin Powers movie.) I’ll be playing 7-9, which will be a loooong time for my chops, but hopefully some practicing + mouthpiece buzzing while in the south will get me in shape.
Tags: SF Bay, Celesteh, Music

Luggage Store Gallery

First up was a very nifty band called Bolivar Zoar with Ava Mendoza, MaryClare Brzytwa, and Theresa Wong. They are like experimental + country with a punk rock aesthetic. So much fun! High points involved MayClare screaming like a musical horror movie actress and Theresa standing up and growling at her like the horror movie monster, putting the screaming in perspective and adding a comic element. It’s very rare and wonderful when a group can so successfully meld the performance aspect and the musical aspect. All the humor, screaming, outlandishness and punk rockiness is completely musical. I hope they put out a CD.

All of them are recent Mills alums (indeed, the band was founded as a project for Maggi Payne’s advanced recording techniques class). In fact, a very large percentage of the audience was Mills alums and women vastly outnumbered men. Alas, the audience was very small and a couple of people left during the longish intermission + burrito break. When I went on, there was a certain air of show and tell. I played:

1. UPIC Impressions of Paris
2. Bourdon Bleu
3. Music for Panic Attacks
4. Requiem for my Paris Refrigerator
5. Organic Forms
6. Meditations pour les Femmes
7. A short improvisation with Ellen Fullman on autoharp

Reaction was generally positive. I am never playing Music for Panic Attacks again, zoloft or no zoloft. I may never even record it. People like it, but it makes me incredibly tense. Requiem is possibly not finished. I wrote it the morning of the show and I think I need to spend more time with it before I can call it done. I did not play any recordings of my refrigerator. Truth be told, they didn’t come out at all. It’s weird melodies will live on in my memory.

Skronkathon

I was in an quartet dubbed the Just in Time Quartet by the announcer. (Not all of us arrived early.) It’s always funny doing these improvs where you introduce yourself to a couple of people you’ve never met or seen before and then start improvising. I don’t know what we’d talk about at a party, but now we’re on a stage just playing stuff.
It had a good energy. We only played for like 20 minutes. Mitch missed us entirely.
I stayed around for a few other acts, but then ducked out to get a sandwich down the street (yeah, the skronkathon was a BBQ, but my friends ate all my tofu dogs). The sandwich launched an assault on my still troubled stomach, so I ended up seeing very little skronking. Alas.
It’s funny how I have anxiety about so many things and sometimes barely get through my day, but getting up and playing tuba in front of a room full of people is no problem. I think I should play more tuba every day. Honestly, I don’t know how people live without tubas and dogs. How do they ameliorate the crushing pain of existence?

Still space for the last gig

There is still space available for my Wednesday gig. It’s the last one that I’ll probably play this August. (if you’re looking for a tuba player around the SF bay this August to improv – I’m your man!) I just found all the pieces of my synthesizer yesterday and set it up at Maybeck. It sounds nice there. There’s a good PA and the room sounds good. Doing noisy, loud sounds that cut out suddenly is very dramatic there. The sound hangs for a moment, reverberating and then disappears.
I bolted everything together sort of haphazardly, such that modules I would normally patch together are far apart. So when I was testing it yesterday, I got some very different sounds. The best patch ever! Too bad I couldn’t record it. I think I will keep it in this configuration for a while.
Tags: SF Bay, Celesteh

I will be playing an
improvised synthesizer/laptop duo of electronic soundscapes, textures
and noise with David Jensenius on August 9th at 8:00 PM at the Maybeck
Recital Hall in Berkeley. Reception to follow.

I will be playing an analog modular synthesizer, one of those monster
synthesizers that requires cables to patch it together. David will be
doing live processing in SuperCollider. He is an excellent composer
and an MA student at Wesleyan University and is in California for only
a short time.

Donations at the door would be appreciated, $10 more or less.
Seating is limited, so email reservations are necessary.
Please respond to: celesteh@gmail.com
Directions to Maybeck will be sent in response.

The Maybeck venue is really lovely. For more information about it,
see their website: http://www.handprintseries.com/

This is my last scheduled concert in California for this summer.

Tags: SF Bay, Celesteh

The evening of my first day back, there was a small earthquake. Welcome home! I didn’t believe it was a quake at first because it was so small and quiet, but indeed, it was a 4.5 near Santa Rosa. The local news featured an interview with a Santa Rosa woman who had a box of Q-tips fall on her head in a local WalMart, but was fortunately unharmed.

I went out with Mitch but felt crappy, alas. The next day, I went to see a doctor and whined and whined and perhaps whined too much because now I have a prescription for Zoloft. Hmm. I have not yet taken the first pill because it causes (yay) stomach upset and I still feel ill from breakfast. (Lois the Pie Queen tastes great but is ill-suited for delicate stomachs.) The doc told me to eat yogurt to fix my constant indigestion/naseau. I’ll let y’all know if it helps. Anyway, apparently feeling sick and hurt is not from having a bacterial infection recently that I still don’t feel better from, but rather is curable with Zoloft. Whatever works. Maybe it will help. I’m seeing a chiropractor tomorrow, who can maybe unknot my back and arm. If it is just stress causing me ill, then she will be great help.
Also, I learned that I weigh 119 lbs (54 kg). I’m 5’11” (180 cm). What’s perhaps more alarming than me dropping like 20 lbs (9 kg), is that my weight is up from it’s low point, which must have been around 110-115 lbs (50 -52 kg). Maybe that’s why I feel kinda listless. Sorry for whining so much. Apparently, I’ll be cured of whininess soon.
Tags: SF Bay, Celesteh

Hello, I am back in Berkeley, preparing for my gig tomorrow night at the Luggage Store. (9:00 PM, come at 8:00 to hear the other band too.) I only have 20 minutes of new music written because I got ill right as it was time to start writing stuff. So I’ll be presenting some works-in-progress and maybe some older never-before-played-in-public stuff. There is at least one piece that even subscribers to my podcast have not heard before.

I am sooo jetlaged and alas still have not returned to feeling 100%.
In my Paris apartment, I had a really awesome-sounding refrigerator. I recorded it that day before I left. I have 43 minutes of it making it’s strange song-like sounds. I feel tempted to subject people to the entire recording, but I think I would not be invited back. It really is lovely, though.
Also, I’ll do a 10 minute or so improvisation with Ellen Fullman. So that plus new computer music (and one tape) is half an hour. Plus several minutes of fridge. Plus, um, gosh, I’m listening to my fridge right now and it’s so great.
zzzzzzzzz
Tag: Celesteh