Is this thing on?

I haven’t been posting here for a while because it was dropping older posts. I sent tech support email to blogger, but they have yet to respond. I just made backup with wget and so I’ll try posting again, but I’ve become tempted to move this blog to celesteh.com and host it with WordPress or DotClear. I suspect the second option has strong bilingual support, which may be handy, as I’d like to do my composer site in 2 or more languages.

So what have I been up to? I’ve decided to make a list of interesting schools worldwide. Right now, I am especially interested in the SF Bay Area, Canada, France, Berlin, London (and the UK) and the Netherlands. I’m taking suggestions for anywhere. (No small towns though. Middletown was too much for me.) Then, come September, I’ll start putting applications together. Then I’ll have lots of lead in, no rush and I’ll make all the deadlines. Then, hopefully a year from now, I’ll have a list of schools that have accepted me and pick the best one.
I should be out right now bar hopping, but I don’t wanna. I have to do publicity for my concert in a week and go put up some flyers. I think I will go around early in the day tomorrow and do it. It’s too crowded right now and I don’t want to try shouting in French at a bartender asking if I can put up a poster. Cola is in London. I’m too wimpy to brave such crowds alone.
I had a REALLY frustrating day on Wednesday and so didn’t do much yesterday because I can get away with being so lazy. Actually, I can’t. There are two people I really actually have to call tomorrow. Really.
I have a job interview on monday. It’s very exciting. I’m pretty happy about it. It requires geeky web experience, fluency in English and some French and the person I’ve met from the company seems to be really cool. It’s an oil company. Well, a company that does research for an oil company. You can have the perfect location, the best coworkers, the best environment and the perfect social consciousness. But you can only have three of those things. (Unless you work for a gay porn site and then you get everything.) Maybe research will reveal that it’s time for biofuel.
Oh and I’ve got an RSS thingee from filckr now, which holds my 200 most recent photos and will send them out via RSS to your aggregator or friends list.
Y’all should come to my concert on March 11 if you are female and in Paris.
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York?

Anybody got anything good or bad to say about the PhD program at York? They’ve got a new music research centre. Application deadline is 31 March. Trevor Wishart said it looked interesting. He stopped short of recommending it because it’s new and he therefore couldn’t say anything definitive.

It might be rather late for me to apply, since I’m coming from overseas.
What’s the town of York like? It’s got the second most important cathedral in Britain, but I’m guessing it’s not much like New York.
This is my first possible “bright idea” for next year…
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Recently

So I know you’re all wondering how I’ve been spending the 4th decade of my life, since it began a little over a week ago. Mostly, I’ve been behaving in accordance with the maturity becoming somebody of my age and feeling sorry for myself because I didn’t get into grad school. But that got boring, so I spent a lot of time working on a sound collage thing Les Radios Francophones which is a burning, wrecked hulk of a piece. I have no idea how to fix it.

My dad blew through town yesterday morning. He’s on an airplane for California by now, after spending last night in London. And last night, I talked with my conversation partner for the first time in a long time. I’ve been working actively on trying to understand more french, so I was a little disappointed when I was as confused as ever during our chat. Alas.
There are some french podcasts which I listen to which I find to be somewhat helpful: Les Journaux français facile, France Blue L’horoscope, Arte Radio and Les bulletins Nouvelles de Radio Canada, which covers some US news. There are others. In fact, there are too many. But those are the best, I think. The Easy French one is great because I can understand almost all of it and I can figure out the rest from context. I think it’s much more helpful than the jumble of words I get when listening to normal news on RFI.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

what to do next year?

I’m 30 years old, I should have a bit more of an idea of what I’m doing. On the other hand, I was in the midst of posting “tried the american dream – house, wife, car, two cats and a dog – and it sucked (well, except for the dog)” when I found my rejection note in my inbox, so I can’t say I haven’t welcomed some sort of instability. Or perhaps realized that stability is all pretend anyway.

Many or most universities in the US want their new professors to have PhDs. 10 or 15 years ago, this was not the case. Statistically speaking, since women need more education to be considered equal to their male peers, women especially must need PhDs.
So there is a new demand for PhDs. Universities are responding by adding PhD programs. Since these are new, their reputation has not been established. Berkeley, however, has a fairly solid reputation AND it is a funded program. Meaning that unlike most other schools, instead of paying them, they pay you. Of course, no true artist would let such petty concerns dictate their choice of studies, but, uh, Berkeley gets a lot of applicants, I’m sure. They take one electronic music person every year. therefore, out of hundreds of applicants, there only needs to be one person better than me, which apparently, was the case.
Eh, so applying to schools on another continent is really even more annoying than doing it in your home country. Like 2 or 3 times more annoying. So I only applied to Berkeley, even though it would have been wise to also apply to Stanford. I don’t want to move outside of the Bay Area in the US, not that it matters because all the deadlines for American schools have passed. There’s always next year.
There’s also Europe. Sophie tells me that the schools are easier to get in to. However, I’m not so hot on IRCAM, so I’d be looking at some schools in England or maybe the new center in Marseilles or McGill (Canada is practically Europe) or I could, you know (gasp) get a job and join the legions of MA-degreed musicians toiling away in the Leap Frog audio department. bah.
I’m too old to get another student visa. Nicole needs to be doing something wherever I go. Moving any place outside of Paris or Berkeley means doing the whole making new friends, figuring out the city, learning the local dialect thing AGAIN, which, yikes, but on the other hand, who wants to live in America? Do I need a PhD to get a job at GRM?
I’m taking suggestions.
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Using the Scientific Method to Improve Your Life

Problem: I don’t understand very much French

Hypothesis: If I read a lot of French blogs and news and also listen to varions French-language news podcasts, I will learn a lot of French.

Method: Read News in English to figure out what’s going on. Then Read news in French to figure out french vocabulary and grammer for terms like “hunger strike.”

Observations

Day 2

Augh!! Everything in the world is fucked up!!!!! Bird Flu! Hunting accidents! Toxic ships! Sarko! Prison Torture! Hunting accidents! Anti-democratic sabotage! Racism! Censorship! Evil evil evil!!!!!

Conclusions

Il y a un grave danger pour la sante d’esprit si on lit trop de nouvelles

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cross-posted do to blogger problems

Uncoming Concert in SF

Daniel Bernard Roumain joins Del Sol String Quartet and special guest DJ Scientific for A Civil Rights Reader for Strings, Laptop & DJ

Other Minds, although not having a festival this year, is producing a bunch of smaller individual concerts. This is the next one on March 6 at 7:30 PM at Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center, 3200 California Street, San Francisco. Sure wish I could go.
If the name Daniel Bernard Roumain is ringing a bell, but your memory is fuzzy, he’s a New York violinist/composer. The New York Times and NPR and other places have profiled him. Infuriatingly, the coverage tends to be, “oh my god, a black violinist! with dreds!” Quoting NPR, now, “Daniel Bernard Roumain doesn’t fit the image of a classical musician. The Haitian-American violinist and composer sports a silver nose ring and dreadlocks that reach to his waist.” Roumain, however, embraces this, “Roumain has coined a name for his style: ‘dred violin.'” After hearing a bit of Anthony Braxton’s difficulties being taken seriously as a black man who composes opera, it’s very clear why Roumain allows and encourages this kind of coverage. Being black and a classical musician is more than the liberal media can usually manage to wrap its’ tiny brains around.
The NPR article is a lot better than the NYT one I saw several months ago. Maybe the novelty of a black classical violinist is wearing off enough that Roumain is being taken seriously for his art, rather than his improbability. His art, by all accounts, certainly merits interest. It’s exciting that Other Minds was able to book him for this event. Lots of tickets are still available, get them while they’re hot.
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Blog Against Gitmo

Guantanamo Bay has been in the news again recently. Some of you may recall that a large percentage of inmates were participating in a hunger strike. That number has dropped to four. Why? The New York times reports it’s because US Soldiers have been strapping inmates into chairs, shoving feeding tubes down prisoner’s noses so forcefully that they faint and then pumping the prisoners so full of food that it causes them pain and to soil themselves and then harshly yanking the tube back out of the noses, so hard it comes up bloody.

Fellow, Americans, these are our tax dollars at work. This is our government. This is our country. The Pentagon’s own estimates say that only 45% of prisoners at Gitmo were involved in opposing the US. We have become the sort of regime in which people just disappear and then are tortured outside of judicial oversight. This violates every law and principle that the US is supposed to stand for or at least follow.

What to do?

  1. Blog about or talk about Gitmo.

    2. We must call attention to this situation.

  2. Protest – take it to the streets.

    3. Your city may have a group that protests once a week or once a month. Join them and carry a sign. Protesting is not grim or doomed. It’s actually a kind of fun way to meet some people and those in power do headcounts and notice if numbers of protesters are growing or shrinking.

  3. Write letters

I wrote my two senators and one representative:

Dear Honorable Barbara Lee,

I am writing to ask that you take action to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Yesterday, I read in the New York Times about cruel methods used to force feed prisoners held in there. These people are being held without trial and many of them are innocent of any crime. The system of extra-judicial prisons and secret gulags being run in the war on terror is contrary to the values that America is supposed to stand for. The risk to our nation now is surely not greater than during the cold war or the world wars and we were able to obey international law and maintain our decency during those times. I am proud to be an American but I am ashamed that my government engages in torture. This must be stopped for the sake of our reputation abroad and for the sake of our humanity. If we cannot wage the “war on terror” in a moral way, then we cannot call ourselves defenders of freedom nor can we call it a “war on terror” as we perpetuate terror on innocent people being held without trial in our prisons.

Thank you for your time,

C. Hutchins

Write your rep: http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Write your senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
And, of course, Letters to the Editor of your local newspaper are also noted.
For more information on Gitmo, see this recent Gaurdian article and Amnesty International, who also has a What can you do? page.
Spread the word.
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Statuettes and Replication Devices

A few days ago, I blogged about wanting a machine which would create statuettes of me on demand. Such machines exist! They are called Moldaramas. Alas, they are vintage and while it’s possible to purchase them, the listed price is about $10k. Not including custom molds. So without factoring the costs of molds, materials, electricity, etc, I would have to sell 2k statuettes at $5 each, before I would break even. While I would say that $10 or even $20 was a fair price for a made-on-demand piece of art, I’m not sure the public at large would agree.

What I need a is a 3d printer in a large glass case. Apparently, it’s possible to build a 3d printer out of legos. I think that such a machine would require a lot of maintenance. A real 3d printer is probably even more expensive than a plastic molding machine. So, so far, legos are looking like the best bet. Or, perhaps, I just want to do a run of a lot of statues and put them in a more normal vending machine. The “risk” is that at the end of vending machine deployment, I have a lot of extra statues of myself. Fortunately, this isn’t much of a risk. Because, who could resist a statue of me? Not me.
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