Les said, the better II

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

I must return my internet box to the phone company. They also require that I write them a letter that says a whole bunch of things and contains a receipt for the box. To return it, I need to find one of their offices and go. Everything is overly complicated in France, except when it’s not.

My breaker box intermittently makes sparky noises the last couple of days (ack!), so I think I will unplug everything in the house.
I’m offline until Tuesday or Wednesday. See y’all in California!
Tags: Paris, Celesteh

Futurists and Science Fiction types talk a lot about the Singlularity which is a future event where there is sudden and complete change. Optimists see this as a positive thing: we’ll have a super-smart AI fix everything for us, or we’ll be able to upload our brains into super-fast computers and grow new bodies so we can keep reloading and thus never die or something really techy and cool will happen.

I think the tech problems we’ll supposedly suddenly solve are NP-complete. The first 90% is the first 90% of the work and the last 10% is the next 900%, if it’s even solvable. Frankly, I don’t see much cause for optimism about technology because the economy is doomed. The US dollar is being kept afloat by foreign investors. More than 60% of the US is in drought. There’s dust bowl conditions in the Dakotas. When the dollar finally collapses, the US is not (yet) so irrelevant that it won’t ripple out and possible cause a world-wide economic recession or depression. (The difference between the US and the third world right now is infrastructure and infrastructure only. How’s your power grid doing?)
Ack, dust bowl and recession (and hotter weather)! What can get us out of this disaster? What worked last time? War. Fortunately, we’ve got plenty of war.
I’ve been told several times that this conflict in Lebanon is very nuanced. It’s important to understand the subtlety of flattening the infrastructure of a sovereign country that’s been free of foreign occupation for all of what- 6 months now? It’s certainly difficult to grasp a morality where a rich country has caused 20-25% of it’s poor neighbor country to become refugees (not hiding in bomb shelters for a little while, more like homeless). I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions when I read that Israel is targeting civilian radio antennas in residential areas for bombing. Nor would I want to have un-nuanced ideas about bombing shelters used by families and killing 20 kids with one bomb. Maybe the way to figure out the morality in this nuanced conflict could be, say, to look at how many people have been killed and displaced on each side and the level of economic devastation (say as percentage of GDP) and the likely-hood of whether either side will turn into a failed state afterwards due to infrastructure damage. I bet number like that could provide a clearer moral picture of this very nuanced situation. Because blowing kids to bits with bombs from overhead isn’t barbaric, only beheading people in front of a video camera is barbaric, so it would be wrong to judge based on a purely visceral reaction to horrible suffering inflicted by a US proxy state.
Of course, the US is urging a diplomatic solution and is completely neutral as it rushes order of bombs to Israel, you know, to go with all those bombs, jets, guns, tanks, and military equipment that we already gave them.
Many folks in the US don’t want peace, alas. Something like 40% of Americans believe that the End Times are upon us. The world is about to end, they think. They look to the Book of Revelations in the Bible and try to work out the utterly bizarre symbolism. Part of this strange symbolism and confusing book includes a warning of a “peacemaker” who is actually the anti-Christ. So somebody who brings about peace in the middle east is actually completely evil and to be opposed at all costs. Jesus says, very clearly, in the Beatitudes “Blessed are the peacemakers” but a confusing, later book which is not a record of Jesus’ speech and life says peacemakers are bad, so I guess the bible’s position on peace is very clear. It’s bad. This is why Jesus cheered Peter on when he cut off the ear of the roman soldier in the garden on Holy Thursday.
There’s good news, though! The Rapture is coming! All the saved Evangelicals will be sucked directly to heaven in one moment. They get to skip the war, the drought, the plague and all the other bad things and death itself. One moment, they’ll be sitting at their desks, driving their cars, piloting airplanes, cooking dinner when suddenly! Fwoosh! They go straight to heaven! After that, a secular world government forms and there’s no more war, plus all the Evangelicals are gone. (The Virgin Mary prophisized 1000 years of peace, I don’t know how this fits into the Evangelical world view.) After they’ve been sucked out, their cars and planes will all be unpilotted and crash and the cooking ones’ kitchens will catch fire, but I see this as a net win. Peace. Secular government. Gay rights. George Bush divinely removed from office. It can’t come soon enough.
So we’re either headed for a Singularity, a world wide depression or the Rapture. Something big – either with a Deus-ex-machina or without. Maybe we’ll have all three and the Singularity will just be for the rich and unpious. The Rapture contingent even have a date: August 3rd, 40 days after the Israeli soldiers were captured. Do pets get raptured? They say all dogs go to heaven. It would suck if all the dogs disappeared. Cats won’t though, so it’s up to the Evangelic pet owner to be prepared. Invite your unsaved friends over for lunch at your house on August 4th. Sometime before August 3rd begins in Jerusalem’s time zone, tape a note to your door explaining to your friends that you’ve been raptured and they should try to find homes for your pets. That way your pets won’t be left for more than a day. If it turns out that you’re also unsaved, just take down the note the morning of the 4th.
I really like life. I don’t want to get raptured, because that’s the end of life. (I also don’t want to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. Why would people want to escape life?) You have to pretty upset with your life to be actively wishing for it to be over. I feel bad for people who are happily marking their calendars and writing notes about cat-care. Please, get therapy. Learn to see how conflict and death are bad things. Also, ride your bike to your therapists office and don’t take your hummer. It’s hot enough.
Tags: Celesteh

First California gigs in a year. Maybe the only for another year. Catch me while you can!

Laptop: August 3rd, 9:00 PM, San Francisco

Thursday August 3rd at 9:00 PM
at the Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market Street, San Francisco, CA

$6-10 sliding scale (nobody turned away for lack of funds)

I’ll be playing new laptop music. There’s a group on before me at
8:00, so you might want to come early to catch them too.

Tuba: August 6th at 5:00 PM in Oakland

I will be playing improvised tuba in a quartet along with Damon
Smith, Jen Baker and Aram Shelton at the 6th Annual Skronkathon at 21
Grand [416 25th St @Broadway Near 19th Street BART Oakland]

This FREE event starts at noon and goes to 10:00 PM, but I’ll be on
around 5:00. This event is rumored to be a blast, so I hope some of
you come. Bring your own item to BBQ. More information can also be
found at: http://bayimproviser.com/transbay_calendar.asp?summary=false&event_id=5467

Synthesizer: Details TBA

David Jensenius and I will be playing a laptop/synthesizer duo at the Maybeck Recital Hall in the Berkeley hill during the second week of August. I will post more about date and time when I know more.

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Man, I can’t wait to get home!
Tags: Gigs, SFBay, Celesteh

Today, I went back to the hospital near my house to get a blood test, as scheduled. Then I met Michelle and she gave me a ride out to the Hôpital Américain. It’s a small, private hospital in a far-flung rich suburb (we have those too, it’s not all poor kids burning cars) where, rumor has it, Sarkozy lives. The hospital has valet parking, lovely grounds and reminds me visually of a Nordstroms from the outside.

I was directed to the emergency room because I did not have an appointment. I felt somewhat sheepish sitting in an emergency room for indigestion, but given it was terrible enough that it felt life-threatening and they told me to go there, etc etc, anyway. There were far far fewer people waiting there than there were this morning for the walk-in dermatology clinic at St. Louis. Since it’s a private hospital, it’s not on the French system and it charges about 3 times as much (which is still much less than American hospitals in America), the waiting room was full of rich foreigners or others desperate to speak to anglophone medical types.
I saw the doctor relatively shortly after I arrived. He told me that if I’ve been taking antibiotics for three weeks, I can just stop and it will be ok. If later I have lyme symptoms again (like late-stage lyme) I can always just take more antibiotics then. I pointed out that the ghostly remains of my lyme rash are still visible and I still have symptoms and Yahoo medical says 4 – 6 weeks for people with my symptom set. Not that he wasn’t more knowledgeable than yahoo medical, but I don’t want to have lyme forever. So he told me I could do whatever I wanted and gave me a prescription for strong antacids. This is an improvement over my experiences at the pharmacy, where they kept giving me stuff for problems I wasn’t having. Last time, the pharmacist gave me brewer’s yeast. It’s good for you, sure, but isn’t it crazy to take yeast while on antibiotics?
So I feel much less godauful having only tried one of the two prescribed medicines. Or, I could just stop taking everything and hope for the best. The blood test I had early this morning was for lyme, but I don’t get the results back for 2 weeks, which which time, I will have stopped taking antibiotics anyway. Tomorrow was the day my original course of antibiotics would have finished, if I had not become allergic. Stopping = tempting.
Tags: Paris, Lyme, Lyme Disease, Celesteh

Some people treated for early Lyme disease have brief episodes of headache, muscle and joint pain, and fatigue that may continue for an extended period of time after treatment. These symptoms usually go away on their own within six months and do not require further treatment.
During the first 24 hours of antibiotic therapy, you may have a higher fever, redder rash, or greater pain. This is not an allergic reaction to the drug. It may mean that the bacteria are rapidly dying.

(ibid) Ok, so I had that, but longer than 24 hours afterwards. My joint paint did not start until after I had started taking antibiotics. I really wish I could talk to an expert or somebody.
Tags: Lyme Disease, Celesteh