Les said, the better II

Link to me, add me as a friend, mock me in chat rooms: http://www.myspace.com/celestehutchins

Incidentally, while trying to sign up to post content on mp3.com (woo, they’re back), I found out that I’m in the All Music Guide. At least, I think that’s me.

Tags: myspace, AMG, Celesteh

In the grand spirit of internationalism that so pervades American society, mother’s day is celebrated on a different Sunday in May than every other country on earth. Which means I have yet another set of Mother’s day crap to endure, although since I mostly still consume American media, there will be less of it.

I feel a little nostalgic and not violent this year. Well, a little violent. Anyway, if you have a mom, go make nice with her even if you have some long-standing disagreement, cuz she could fall sick and die faster than you can say “hey, what just happened?” and you might never have a mothers day again. Well aside from the one a week or two from now in every other country in the world.
Tags: Mothers Day, Celesteh

This post is designed to enlighten those who would like to come visit me. One such person will be coming soon. I always love it when people visit because it’s fun to show people around and I actually get to those museum exhibits on my list. Plus, they tend to buy me food sometimes. Staying at my place and buying me a nice dinner is cheaper than a hotel!

If you come by plane to one of the major airports, you’re going to want to hop on the RER train and take it to the Gare du Nord. You will buy a ticket at the airport RER station. That same ticket will take you (almost) to my door. You do not need to buy a new ticket to transfer to the metro, but you must keep your RER ticket with you and be prepared to run it though the ticket machines a second time.
If you take the Chunnel, it will drop you right at the Gare du Nord. Therefore, these instructions start at the Gare du Nord.
Go to the metro. Buy something called a
carnet. (Tell the station agent “zh-uh voo-dray uh kar-nay, see voo play” and hand over 10.70€.) It’s 10 tickets all together for about 4€ cheaper than buying
them separately. Then, using one of those new tickets (unless you already have an RER ticket), get on the 5
line towards Place d’Italie. Get off at Jacques Bonsergent. When you
come out of the metro, you will be either in a little square with a
press or across the street from it. That street is called Magenta.
Go to the Presse and buy a map of paris. He sells a nice one with a
light blue cover and a pull-out map. It’s got many colors of
printing. It’s a good map.
Anyway, then turn around so you have your back to the presse. Look
down Magenta. On the left hand side of it, there is a street. Walk
up to that street. It is Pierre Chausson. I’m on the right hand of
the street. You will see just a large door and a keycode thingee. My
door code is [ask for it via email]. Go through that big door. I am the stairway on
the left. There is a list of names next to the door. My buzzer is
labelled Hutchins/Wilkins or vice versa. I am on the second floor (if
you start counting at zero). My door is on the right.
I’ve got the place until August 1st. So you could some stroll by the lovely canal, eat some crepes and some chevre, drink some wine, look at a museum or listen to a concert or just bike around.

I’m back in Paris after going to the Joan of Arc Festival in Orléans. There was a medieval faire and lots of spiced meade and wandering bagpipers and silly costumes and cannon demonstrations and battle re-enactments and religious processions and horses and drums and armor and more Scots than one might expect. It turns out that something like a third of the soldiers defending Orléans during the siege were Scottish. They were making a huge deal about the Scot thing.

Unfortunately, Le Pen and other right wing types have though Joan of Arc would make a good symbol for them. She drove France’s enemies out of France. Similarly, they argue, we should get rid of all the immigrants. However, Joan showed up with a bunch of Scots. She fought with them. Some of them died beside her. It’s extremely likely that some of these Scots really liked France. Maybe they liked the wine. Maybe they liked the cheese. Maybe they met a local girl (or boy). Maybe they were injured and had a long convalescence and stayed after their comrades had gone on and became part of the local community and thus never went back to Scotland. My point being, Joan wasn’t opposed to people coming to France. She was opposed to an armed foreign invasion. It’s more than a little bit of a stretch to say that economic migrants are more like the English invaders than they are like the Scots who came to help out and may have stayed because of opportunities.
Parisians I talked to seemed concerned that the festival would have a strong reactionary contingent. There were a few people there who I suspect may have been such. But most seemed not to be. This morning, the mayor of Orléans made a long speech about Joan of Arc and her message today. Clearly, a modern Joan would be against the Precarity (read: CPE) and in favor of equitable development and protecting the environment. He said it a lot better than I just summarized, but the point is that there was an effort being made to claim Joan on the left and to remind people of her international friends and comrades at arms. Huzzah.
Anyway, I spent the whole weekend eating. Bread made of nothing but honey, flour and spices. Medieval “faggot” bread (cooked over wood!). Sheep’s cheese. Fermented honey beverage. French food galore. I must now go offline and eat more faggot bread and sheep’s cheese.
Tags: Orléans , Joan of Arc

I have a concert June 9 in Paris near Belleville. Woot, I will actually play within the city. It will be an hour long and contain music which has not yet been written for recorder (non-transverse flute) and cornetto (but not at the same time) and computer. I must now tear out my hair trying to figure out what to write. Send your ideas to ______________

Tags: Paris, Celesteh

Dear Honorable Senator Feinstein,

I am writing to oppose the PERFORM Act. As you know, this act would outlaw MP3 streaming, as the MP3 file format contains no DRM. I am a musician and composer. I prefer mp3s for many reasons, including the universal level of access. MP3 players are available for every operating system, free of charge. When I stream an mp3, I know that I’m reaching the largest possible audience. DRM-laden streams can never possibly achieve the same level of market penetration. By their very nature, DRMs must be secret and proprietary. That means that a private company has to write them, which they do for windows and then possibly Macintosh as an afterthought. Linux is supported even less often. Should I choose to stream via a DRM-burdened format, I have to pay a third party company and in the end, I reach fewer people. This doesn’t help me as an artist. It doesn’t help me as a fan.

We already have copyright laws. Webcasters already pay royalties. From a practical standpoint, I know how to capture and record DRM stream as easily as a non-DRM stream. This law is unneeded and unnecessary and doesn’t solve any problems. It does, however, create problems for webcasters and listeners, especially ones on older systems or using linux.

Please withdraw the PERFORM Act.

Sincerely,
Celeste Hutchins

Tags: DRM, PERFORM, Celesteh

What lies ahead for summer? I’ve mentioned a whole bunch of plan possibilities. For instance, getting a job (how pedestrian, yet useful for being able to afford nice restaurants (I joke at pedestrianness, I would very much like to work next school year especially.)) I think my offer evaporated. Alas.

I have my apartment until August 1st, so if you want to come visit, you can come between now and then. I’ve mentioned both wanting to bike in the footsteps of Joan of Arc and also wanting to a little tour in Germany. These things can both happen, although the bike trip would have to be on a smaller scale. And it will be regardless. Joan walked over a mountain range to get to see the Dauphin! Not just a mountain range, but one without any tourist attractions. I like to combine my pilgrimages with sight-seeing and starting out with an incredibly difficult ride and not much else would present a problem in that I think I would quickly give up the whole idea or injure myself or both. Anyway, Joan did this in like March. That’s really nuts. Also, in March, there are really no tourist attractions.
So I’m thinking of biking along the Loire, where she was liberating towns. Also, there’s a peace ride in Germany that looks like fun. In between, I’ll be, you know, writing music and stuff like that.
Monday is what they call a “bank holiday” here. Why do they call it that? Anyway, 3 day weekend. Think I might go for a bike ride. The following weekend is also a bank holiday, so I’m going to Orléans (by train) because it’s the anniversary of Joan raising the siege. There’ll be a parade and god knows what, oodles of Jeanne d’Arciness in a big Joan-themed festival. yay.
In France, her image has been hijacked by right wingers. Joan drove France’s enemies out of the country. And you know, economic immigrants are exactly like an invading army trying to seize the throne! I think this festival is largely aimed at foreign immigrants who read Joan as a feminist icon (not well supported by evidence, alas) or a queer icon (ask to see my term paper) or um. I hope I’m surrounded by other foreign lesbians and not the followers of Le Pen. Or hell, maybe all those people come together for an odd combination of revelry and religious processions!

In language news

I recently realized that the reason the baker looks at me funny when I ask for pain au raisin (“raisin bread”) is because I’m inadvertently calling it pain au reason. Reason bread, raisin bread, what’s the difference? Anyway, it’s not actually rasin bread by actually a round thing that I think is called a “snail” sometimes in the US. It’s a sweet round flat pastry with some sort of creamy stuff on it and raisins. There is a very similar pastry called an escargot (“snail”) but instead of raisins, it has pistachio and bits of dried apricot. The creamy stuff for it is pistachio paste. I prefer it, but it’s not as widely available.
So I was feeling really good about my French, reason bread excepted. This happens when I listen to the Easy French Poetry podcast because it’s all in French, but I can understand it. And I had a bunch of successful interactions yesterday. But today, I tried to ask the baker if she had a nice vacation while the bakery was closed and it just did not get across at all, even when an anglophone interviened to help. Then, while I was returning home with my new baguette, one of my neighbors started talking to me. This never happens. Parisians don’t frequently speak to their neighbors. But the thing that causes French folks to become friendly are the cops! There was a swarm of police officers ticketing every car on my street. If you tended to divide the world into us against them, the cops are definitely “them,” which makes everybody else “us.” Therefore, in this brief oppositional moment, I became part of us. Except that I did not understand what she was talking about until she switched to English. bah. I’ll never speak this language.
Tags: Summer, French, Celesteh

Momus wrote an article in Wired recently about how the hip new geeky thing is to be offline and unfindable via google. I’m so unhip! I guess this new (heh) ideal is easier if you’re already a famous artist. It is alarming, though, how much one can discover about people via search engines. If you mention a brand name in your blog, it’s possible and even somewhat likely that a marketing type will find your blog and add it to a synopsis of what the internets are saying about Brand X. “I like to use Brand X shortly before I do something with my boyfriend that I would be embarrassed if I knew was being passed around a conference table and read about by people wearing business attire.”

However, this is not why I have not updated recently. I was in the midst of a mad post of d00m in which I talked about how I finished my Sonology app and then had a swell day wandering Paris with a Brit composer named David and the bread shortage the next day (half the local bakeries are on vacation. Lines and shortages! It’s like Soviet Russia!) and even some about how Munich is a really great place to spend a few days drinking when a sudden browser crash felled my prose! alas and woe!
So I will just now talk about Sonology. Regular readers will recall that I was gob-smacked when they sent email with an earlier deadline which conflicted with some (but not all) data from their website. Also, they wanted way more docs. Augh! Ann and Ellen helpfully and wonderfully located my missing paperwork, and emailed me images of it, which I could then print and include. In the mean time, I sent email explaining that their web page was somewhat confusing and they should consider rectifying that.
I got back email on Monday explaining that the the email they sent me had been in error. I don’t need the extra docs and and the deadline really was in June. Bah, ok these things happen and at least I got it out of the way. Alas, though, I won’t find out if I’m in or not until sometimes in June, which makes planning my life slightly . . . distant. If I get in to Sonology, I’ll be around for a visit sometime in August. If not, I’ll be around when my visa expires in September.
Today I got email promising to send me more information about the entrance exam. Ye gods! I haven’t done anything like counterpoint or other things which interest conservatories in years! I’m guessing the email is in error. Some might be annoyed by this, but I am not. It gives me a good feeling. All of my previous academic institutions have been somewhat disorganized on occasion. So it gives me a good feeling about getting admitted (perhaps even to the MA program, although I didn’t apply for it). and if I don’t get admitted, I can just say it was an accident.
If the school’s director of media relations googles and finds this, well, I didn’t say anything embarrassing about what my boyfriend and I like to do while visitting the school’s website.
Tag: Celesteh

Yeah, so my Sonology application is due May 1st. But their website, after you submit the written stuff, says June 1st. So I wasn’t worrying about it because it’s June 1st. But, no, alas, I got email today saying it is May 1st AND I need to have documentation proving I graduated from all the schools that I graduated from, which their website did not mention.

So today has been a fun day of panic and trying to get people to fax or email me stuff from the US. I know such great people who will do this for me. I had to go to my school and get the lab guy to write me a short attestation that I’m a student there. My school has no electricity. Apparently, there was a misunderstanding about the electrical contract and the power got turned off. I didn’t ask if they could make outgoing phone calls yet or that shut-off was also resolved. Nor did I inspect whether they have any toilet paper whatsoever, but last time I went to class there was none. I wonder if Sonology’s services are sometimes turned off or otherwise unavailable?
So tomorrow morning, I get to go find a place that will let me print my scans of Mills transcripts and my Wesleyan diploma and then take those printouts to the post office and then mail them to den Haag where the MUST arrive by May 1st. I feel panic when I think of this. Ack. Panic. The lab guy at school said that it’s actually slower to send stuff express. I don’t know if he’s bullshitting or not, but it sounds somewhat likely. Sending stuff via international express mail fromt the US to France is completely screwed up. Fedex is way better.
Nicole is suggesting that I send it twice, once express mail and once normal mail. This seems weird to me. What will they do with two copies? I’m going to call random french folks in the morning and ask them what I should do. Maybe I’ll call Sonology on Monday.
If I fuck this up, no Netherlands for me. I feel like such a dipshit. I should have know it was wrong when it said June 1st and I should have expected to have to send documentation about previous schools and I shouldn’t be all surprised and panicked now. I’m too old for school. Or I never learn. I HATE panicing. I thought I had plenty of time. grrrrrrrr!
Den Haag is only like 4 hours from here by train. A piece of mail should be able to get there within a week, right?
Tag: Celesteh