celesteh – Page 29 – Les said, the better II

Back Online

I’ve been mostly offline recently. My laptop had some issues when I tried to upgrade to OS X 10.5. The install DVD couldn’t mount my hard drive. After some kung-fu, I got it to notice that my drive existed. It said things were bad. Bad indeed. (The more technical version (non-tech continues in the next paragraph): I booted single user mode off the DVD and ran fsck and the third try, it finally found my disk. It said I have a bad Master Boot Record. However, the installed operating system (10.4) still booted fine and it’s version of fsck reported no problems. So I went on my merry way until my concert, when the damn thing really didn’t want to boot. I briefly got a question mark on my splash screen. Gah)

But things still seemed fine with the previous system, so I resolved to ignore the issue until after my concert, which could have been a disastrous move, but wasn’t. Anyway, it’s almost certainly a software problem, fixable with disk warrior. So, a few days after the concert, when some audio software I was trying to use wouldn’t go, I finally tried Disk Warrior. It gave me some cryptic error messages, which it’s website revealed to mean that I should buy a new disk because the problems were physical. Ack!
Physical disk problems ALWAYS get worse! Or at least, you should assume that they will. Because one little free particle of disk that got rattled loose and is lurking there – that particle will eventually get hit by the read arm. Hard disks are a lot like records. The read/write arm is like the needle. And the bit of junk is like dust on the surface of the record. But instead of just making a popping noise, it’s much worse, because the disk is spinning much faster. The read/write head doesn’t just bounce over the debris in a friendly manner. When it bounces back down, that impact is at high speed, so it breaks lose another little bit of junk, which is then waiting to get in the way. So you start getting all these little bald spots around your disk where pieces have been knocked out and all of those pieces are waiting to get in the way and cause further damage. This process starts slowly, but once it gets going – yikes!
That was the second disk in that laptop! Grr. I speculate that it probably had it’s initial damage when I ran it into a pole on my bike over the summer. It’s generally bad for laptops to crash them into fixed objects.
Anyway, the laptop is 4 years old. I just replaced the power adaptor all of a month ago, but in addition to a new disk, it could really use a new battery and soon it will not want to run the latest and greatest software and it seemed like the most reasonable course of action was to replace it. So I waited until after the start of Macworld in case Apple wanted to announce price reductions. They didn’t. In the mean time, I read the His Dark Materials trilogy, of which The Golden Compass is the first book. The last two books are even more heavy-handed than C.S. Lewis. And the charges of it’s being anti-Catholic are true, alas. The first book is completely charming. But the other books seem more rushed and can’t stand alone as the first one can. They rely much more on cliche. I just don’t understand British atheists. They have a state religion, which they could be completely justified in railing against. But they never seem to pick the state religion. Instead they choose religions which their state is persecuting. They pick on Catholics, I guess because they support oppression in Northern Ireland. They pick Muslims, I guess because they support racism. Aside from them being colonialist asses, I can’t imagine what their reasoning could be. It really doesn’t seem like they take on very much risk by attacking the official church of their country. Is it misplaced patriotism? I don’t get it.
Finally, I want to declare a moratorium on non-programmers trying to write fantasy that involves computers. “She typed and words appeared on the screen. How could this be! She had no text editor open and was bypassing most of the operating system. The keyboard wasn’t even plugged in! the computer wasn’t even turned on! It was a cardboard display computer from a furniture store! It must be the aliens feeding it data directly from the USB cable that they helpfully brought with them from the Jupiter branch of CompUSA. What a lucky coincidence that they use exactly the same completely arbitrary sequence of voltage pulses to indicate different letters of the alphabet!” It’s also a lucky break that our alien heros brought with them a cardboard install disk with device drivers for their alien USB hardware – while bypassing most of the operating system. Maybe I’m too intolerant of extremely sloppy, ignorant writing, but really, if I’m going to read something, I don’t want to feel like I’m wasting my time – time that the author didn’t bother to spend doing an iota of research.
Um, anyway. I got a new mac. I’m kind of concerned about how much 3 months of dog kenneling is going to cost, and plane tickets and at least I didn’t have to pay British prices for a new computer. I just sent email to the passport service again to ask what’s up with the consulate and my visa. I have a theory that they’ve written to ask my university for more information and the British postal service has inexplicably routed the mail through Poland via Nepal.
Um, anyway, reports of what software doesn’t want to work with 10.5 (Ardour, Gimp, etc) will be forthcoming.

Obama

I just watched the Obama victory speech. Commentary below the embedded content.

transcript here

Damn, that man can talk! When he started with, “You know, they said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high.” my gods, he brought tears to my eyes. I’m not registered Democrat, but if I were, I’d vote for him.
A few days before Christmas, I went to Cody’s Books in Berkeley and there were some older white women selling hats and scarves that they’d knit. They were raising money for Obama. Even in Berkeley, this is unusual. I stopped to talk to them and asked them why they were voting for him. They couldn’t really say. One of them talked about how she felt after his speech at the Democratic Convention 4 years ago. She said she thought, “why aren’t we running him?!” Which is exactly what I thought at the time.
It’s hard to immediately pin down what’s so completely compelling about Obama. My girlfriend says he has Jedi mind powers. He has an emotional appeal more than a logical one. But I think the logical one is there. Even though he’s not the most left candidate. That title belongs to the (now Nader-esque) Kucinich or maybe Edwards, who lost last time and who looked silly debating Cheney.
Obama is compelling because he is the 21st century. We’re supposed to have flying cars and wear silver clothes and all be fabulously wealthy. This is what we were promised in the Jettsons. But instead we got terrorist attacks and fear and war and poverty and politicians apparently nostalgic for the 19th century. We got leaders who seemed to think the centuries tick backwards instead of forwards.
Obama instead invokes the struggles of the past, especially the civil rights struggles and paints himself as the next logical step in that progression. He is forwards where Bush was backwards. There were those who -trapped in the past – said this day would never come. But it has come. The future is now.
And as he talks about hope and universal healthcare and employing scientists to solve problems, he’s talking about the shiny future that we wanted. The one where we can watch videos on our laptops and not have to worry about facing foreclosure because our kid got sick.

[Y]ears from now, when we’ve made the changes we believe in, when more families can afford to see a doctor, when our children — when Malia and Sasha and your children inherit a planet that’s a little cleaner and safer, when the world sees America differently, and America sees itself as a nation less divided and more united, you’ll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began.

I want a flying (carbon neutral) car. I want scientists making the world a better place. I want the mythology of America, the one where anybody of nay race can be president, to be true. I want the mythology of America, the one where we do good things in the world, to be true. I want the mythology of America, the one where we work hard and it pays off and things get better, to be true. Not only is Obama promising all that, he is all that. The first black man to win a primary caucus. He embodies all of our positive mythology and our hopes for the future. He is reaching out and grabbing a mantle that we all want somebody to seize, like Arthur drawing Excalibur from a rock.
That’s his emotional appeal. That’s more than a Jedi mind trick, that’s a combination of everything that can be good that politicians say.
I don’t know how he is from a policy wonk perspective. In some sense, it doesn’t matter as much. Nobody implements that platform that they campaign on this early. If all he has now are broad, general ideas, that’s all he needs now. What he can actually implement and what he will do come from a few factors including how willing congress is to work with him and how willing he is to respond to constituents. His record is good on both counts.
He’ll be Clinton-esque, like Bill was. He’ll say that he feels our pain and we’ll believe him. He’ll triangulate and take credit for popular but bad conservative ideas. He’ll bomb Kosovo, but we’ll think he meant well. I never thought I’d miss Bill Clinton, but I do. And this guy is the closest thing to that that we’ve got. And when he says that if he wins, it will be profoundly huge and wonderful for America, he’s right. It will be profoundly huge. It will make some of our most noble mythology become prophesy. We’ll be as good as we said we were.
This is a guy who can win and should win. Somebody trying to bring us forwards. I want my flying cars. I want Obama in 2008.

Last Night’s Gig

I showed up really late to the sound check because I under-estimated how long it would take to get there on Bart. It took twice as long as I expected. I was in an unhappy mood with being late and not really knowing what I was going to play. The show was booked as a duo with Polly but, obviously, she couldn’t make it. I realized that I had been looking forward to seeing Paul at the show and felt more sad.
There was a recording crew there who had set up a bunch of stuff for me. My computer wouldn’t boot when I got everything all plugged in. It does this every single time I go on stage. My computer has terrible stage fright. I couldn’t figure out if it was me being weird about how I was pushing the start button before shows or if something else was up, so I set Nicole to work on it while I ate something. I learned that my mac won’t start if there’s stuff plugged into the audio jacks on the side. This explains why the only time I have this problem is shows and rehearsals, and why I don’t have it at every rehearsal, only the ones that I’m stressed enough about to reboot before starting.
Sound check was a bit wonky, but I had faith the levels would be ok, given as I was sitting in front of a mixing board. I was kind of testy with the recording crew. I was excited about recording when I thought it would be a duo, but a solo is much less exciting and I hadn’t really worked out the best audio routing and it wasn’t coming to me then. I just sent them my stereo signal that went to the speakers, but now I wish I’d sent a separate feed of my synth. I also left the didj at home because there was a major storm and I didn’t want to take it on my bike in the rain. Also, it takes a lot of concentration to both play the didj and sample and process it at the same time and I don’t have a HID set up for that yet. I didn’t think I was mentally up to doing it without a flute to hide behind and while I was feeling so scattered.
Damon and Jen were up first. They played a really energetic set. It’s funny watching Jen on the trombone, because it’s not all that different from tuba, so I knew exactly how she was getting most every sond she got. There are some important differences though, what with the slide and the significantly higher pitch. She didn’t do silly slide glisses at all, but she used her voice in an interesting way. When you do voice multiphonics on tuba, you get an interesting sort of FM. The trombone appears to be different, or else she wasn’t doing multiphonics but interspersing voice with lip buzzing. Also different is that her voice was much closer to the trombone range than most people’s voices are to tuba.
I spent most of their set looking at Damon, because I don’t need to look at a brass instrument to know how it’s being played and I like to understand how sound is being made when I listen to it (ironic given that I’m a laptop guy). He had a whole bunch of bows and more or less attacked his instrument with them and also with a chopstick, his fingers and a large screw. The bass has a really fast response time in that when you hit a string it goes right away – unlike other low instruments where you have to wait for a sound to wend it’s way through a series of tubes. (A bass is more like a truck.) You can hit one string and it starts going right away and you can move very quickly to another string or even play multiple strings at the same time.
Damon and Jen sustained a frenetic pace through almost all of their set. they started fast and stayed fast. After the whole evening, Jen was jumping up and down. Matt D joked that she must be taking multivitamins. Their last piece, though was more subdued. Damon announced that they’d be playing Drescher’s Requiem in honor of Paul and Polly. That piece is largely made up of longer sounds which gradually rise in pitch. It’s subtle, but anguished. It was one of the better requiems that I’ve ever heard. Possibly the best.
Then it was my turn. I felt a lot better after eating a burrito and hearing Jen and Damon’s set. I played my minimodular synth and routed it though my simple looping program that I wrote for processing flutes. I had figured out how to gracefully add some extra features but hadn’t had an opportunity to code them in, so I was really playing with the flute version. Playing with my own synth is different than playing with another person in that I know ahead of time when the sound is going to change because I’m causing the changes. But, like with another person, I don’t know what the changes will be, really. There was some time where I had silence not because I thought it would be a graceful moment to add some, but because I had no idea where the sound went. The Evenfall minimodular is a tricky and subtle beast.
I did a lot of work to really get aligned timing when I wrote my sampling program, but I realized that it would be useful to allow for staggering the loop point. Or to divide by 3 or 5 sometimes instead of always by powers of 2. A (more or less) dead-on beat is perhaps most useful for flute, but with something I’m playing myself, allowing a syncopation could be valuable. I never got my p5 glove to work, alas. It seemed to be generating OSC. At the very least, the driver for it clearly was able to get data from the glove, but I couldn’t retrieve said data in SuperCollider. A glove interface would be really great for didj processing or tuba (if it were lefty).
So after the second time the sound died for reasons that were unknown to me, I thought maybe I should stop, but it turned out that people were actually digging my noodling. So I played a couple more. I’m looking forward to getting the recording.
I still have Polly’s mixing board because it didn’t occur to me to return it to Clyde. She’s probably not missing it yet. I’m going to take some advantage of it. Before, Christmas, I wandered into a gallery near my house, looking for art to give away. The most affordable thing in the gallery was $200. I explained that I liked it, but that was 10 commissions for me: 20 – 40 hours of work. (I work too hard on them.) The gallery owner asked me a bunch more questions about my project and then wrote me a check asking for one! I was quite surprised. I’m going to write it today. Tomorrow is Paul’s memorial service. I sent all my visa paperwork via express mail yesterday. It’s pretty much impossible that it will come back in time for me to get my flight tomorrow, so I’ll be going to the memorial. Actually, I’d probably go anyway. Maybe I should call the airline. It’s a non-refundable internet fare, but I know there are special cases sometimes.
I don’t think I’ll be playing again in CA before I head back to England, but if you want to get on my announcement list just in case – or for next time – I will be playing here again over the summer – you can get on the list very easily! Just send an email to celesteh-CA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (yes, that’s celesteh-CA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com ). Or check this blog. Or the mailing list also has an rss feed: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/celesteh-CA/rss . It’s an announcement-only list which is really low traffic. I only post to it when I have a show coming up on the West Coast of North America.

Do unto yourself as you would unto others

One time, I was tooling around Oakland and these two guys jumped on this other guy and started beating on him. They took off and left the other guy lying bloody in the street. This was before everybody had cell phones, but somebody passing by had one and so the cops were soon there. Nobody jumped in the middle heroically or anything, but they did call 911. And if I saw something like that again, I’d be on the phone right away, talking to the cops. For the most part, I’m not fan of the police, but they do have their uses.

And you, if you were someplace and you saw somebody about to kill another person or hurt them, you’d call 911 (or your country’s equivalent) too. I mean, even if it was somebody you didn’t really like, you might not want to jump in the middle, but you’d make the phone call. It’s the right thing to do. And, I mean, it’s not so hard to pick up a hone. You don’t have to give your name. You just have to say where you’re at and that somebody there is in trouble. You would do that, right? It’s a moral imperative.
I don’t know what it feels like to be in an agitated state. I’ve been depressed, anxious, closeted, etc, but I’ve never been bipolar and I hope it stays that way. Agitated states suck. People who are in them feel as crappy and awful and unbelievable deadenedly sad as somebody with bad depression, but with energy. Like how somebody might feel on a day they couldn’t get out of bed, but they can get out of bed and move around, because they’ve got the stamina to do it. Feeling that low and having energy to take action is a dangerous situation. A friend of mine (who I neglected to ask if I could plagiarize) describes it as feeling like you leg was caught in a bear trap. You’d do anything to escape, even gnawing off your own leg.
But if you had a cell phone, you wouldn’t gnaw off your own leg, you would call 911. And if you saw somebody so trapped, you’d call for help. And if you saw somebody about to kill somebody else, you’d call for help. And if the guy whose about to get killed is you and the guy whose about to do the killing is you, it’s still the same situation. One where you have to call for help.
So I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never been there. But I’m in the arts and so I know a lot of bipolar people. The suicide rates for bipolar folks is alarmingly high. I’m ignorant, but as your friend, I want to remind you to call 911 in an emergency. Even if you’re going to do it anyway. Even if you don’t like the guy getting killed. Even if you don’t want to be saved.

the most futile blog post ever

Ok, so I used to have anxiety and that’s mostly vanished, thank gods, (although my first self-inflicted T shot this morning did leave me feeling kind of freaked). It made me really suck at risk assessment. I never knew if I was actually in peril or not. Danger could be lurking around every turn. I might be unprepared!
I got very concerned about being prepared. Not just having an earthquake kit, but also being mentally prepared. In a crisis, you can’t sit down and think out carefully what’s coming. You have to just react. You need to already know how to respond when something gets thrown at you. So I used to sit and think about things that might happen and how I would deal with them. I would visualize myself taking steps to respond. I practiced it in my head in case I was called to do it in real life.
I don’t even remember now what I was worrying about, but if it happened, I bet I would (still?) be on top of it. This isn’t a completely crazy idea. It’s the whole basis for fire drills. Certain dangers are so unlikely that they’re not worth worrying about. But if you live in a tsunami zone, you know the evacuation route. Because when you get the 2 minute’s notice that a tsunami has just passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, you don’t want to be looking at an elevation map trying to figure out where to go.
I don’t want to be presumptuous or anything, but some of you live in tsunami zones or earthquake zones or flood zones. And having a mental drill once in a while might be a reasonable thing to consider doing. Which is to say that if you feel like you’re in a bear trap, I don’t think you’ll be recalling and following along with my moral reasoning about calling for help. But maybe for some of you, occasional mental fire drills make sense?
You folks all have shrinks and meds and people who know way more about stuff than me. I’ve got virtually nothing to contribute to this conversation. I really hate losing people and I want to feel like there’s something that can be done. That I can do. Something to keep the folks that I care about around longer. And it’s as futile as demanding that you stop smoking and start eating oat bran. Because that’s not up to me and I don’t know what I’m talking about.
fucking hell

OLPC: Teach a man to fish

There exists, now, finally, shipping a little computer called the OLPC. It stands for One Laptop Per Child. And it’s cheap. Very very cheap. A small sum of money will get you two of them. One for you (or a nearby kid) and one for a kid in the third world. They say “one laptop per child,” they mean that they want to see that happen.

The idea being, of course, that tech will set you free. I’m all for the utopian ideals of sharing information (Mi parolas Esperanton) and this idea seems entirely noble. But OLPC is currently being sued by a Nigerian keyboard maker. They’ve got an injunction against distributing the OLPC in Nigeria.
I’m thinking aloud here and I haven’t done research, so if I’m wrong correct me.
There’s a saying that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats everyday ~~until he gets mercury poisoning and his fishery dies from being overfished~~. There’s no doubt in my mind that the OLPC folks think they’re teaching fishing. But fishers need bait, they need rods, they need boats. If you teach somebody to fish, but make them dependent on importing all of their tools, have you really set them free or have you just you just recruited a client?
Where is the OLPC being manufactured? I know one of the goals is to keep costs down, but if you can do green(ish – or not-more-brown) manufacturing in a country that needs infrastructure investment, aren’t you doing even more good? Why aren’t the keyboards being manufactured in Nigeria? Wouldn’t it help third world kids more to have slightly higher prices, but help create and grow infrastructure and industry in their countries? Does giving stuff away undercut and harm what tech businesses already exist?
Kids with laptops is great and I’m all for it. And I might buy an OLPC to check it out and to get that smug glow of having done something to help. But giving kids laptops doesn’t give them clean drinking water. It doesn’t give their parents jobs. It doesn’t solve any of the immediate problems of neo and post colonialization in the third world. But, man it makes us feel good. Plus, it’s cheap!
Widespread corruption in Nigeria aside, are we teaching fishing or giving out fishes?

Memorize This If You Need It

It’s easy to remember 1.800.SUICIDE (1.800.784.2433). You folks that need to know it, you know who you are. Program it into your cell phone. Just fucking remember it. And then when you need it, fucking call it.
Sometimes when you look backwards, it looks barren and bleak. And sometimes when you look forwards, the emptiness seems to stretch out forever. It’s an illusion. Your life can’t seriously be like that, or you wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. Children actually raised that way die Of natural causes. By themselves. So if you’re old enough to be reading this, you life hasn’t actually been like that. Probably, the worst is behind you. If your situation was really so low, you wouldn’t have the activity level or agency to do something so drastic. People don’t get drastic like that unless they’re on the upswing. You’ve just waited until things have gotten better and now you’re thinking of it. Call the fucking hotline number.
You don’t get to adulthood without hope. You don’t get to adulthood without love. Maybe they didn’t love you enough. Maybe they’re gone now. But that love was there or you wouldn’t be. More people care about you than you think. People love you. People have loved you.

Afterlife

Rapture Ready folks care more about afterlife than life. Other folks are like that too. Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? Do you keep getting reborn until you reach enlightenment? Do you live this life over and over and over again infinitely? Can you come back and chat with the psychic living? Is this all there is?
I don’t fucking care about the answers to these questions. There’s no verifiable evidence for any of them aside form the “this is it” one. Maybe you’ve had a person experience with talking to the dead. I’ve known people who have. But it’s not mutually verifiable. The evidence can’t be used in a scientific sense. But, seriously, I don’t care. I’m just as happy with oblivion as I am with doing this same thing over and over again in the exact way. There are bad times. There are good times. You owe it to yourself and to folks who love you to chase the good. Go out and fucking grab it and hold on. It’s an obligation. Hope is a moral obligation.

What brought this on

Polly’s boyfriend Paul died. He was a good guy. I knew him, liked him. He read this blog. I hadn’t talked to him in a long time, but I cared about him. I don’t actually know who all reads this or what they’re thinking and maybe I’ve never met them offline or even online. But some of y’all are happy and some are sad. And if you need to memorize that number, you know it in your heart. So fucking memorize it. And call it when you need it.

Fine, I’ll Stop Listening, You Win

The RIAA is now suing some guy for ripping CDs that he purchased. He’s not sharing them on the internet, he just loaded them onto his own computer to listen to them. The major labels have apparently decided that it’s a crime to put music that you paid for onto your ipod.

It wasn’t enough that they’re trying to take financial aid away from college kids. I mean, those kids were violating intellectual property rights. Taking away their financial aid is seriously an over-reaction to that and despicable, but at least the kids did something iffy. But this latest guy didn’t do anything wrong at all.
The RIAA is a member organization controlled by the major record labels. Apparently, their policy is now that they don’t want us to listen to music that we buy from them.
Fair enough. If they don’t want us to listen to their music, we can stop.
I’m toying with the idea of throwing away everything I have from a major label, but I probably won’t. I mean, I like my CDs, that’s why I bought them. And, unfortunately, some of them are probably out on majors.
But I’m completely serious about the not buying anything new on majors. This is the first xmas since I was 13 that I didn’t get any music. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t receive it. If the major labels don’t want me to listen, I won’t. There’s plenty of great stuff out there on indie labels. I’m not hurting for CDs. Other Minds has two new releases and several of my buddies have given me their latest albums. And, of course, there are podcasts full of great music.
All of this is what’s so confusing about the major labels being such assholes. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives. They seem to think they’re Ma Bell, when that kind of monopoly hasn’t existed for years and years. Do they want to destroy themselves? Have they given up on life? Should all the record execs get on prozac right away?
There are some serious issues of power and control at play. What’s at stake is our share in our culture. Between DRM and IP and other legal wranglings, corporations want to own every aspect of our culture. They want to control information. Remember that thing where Sony installed spyware on people’s computers through music CDs. These guys think they own our computers. If we don’t secure net neutrality, they’ll try to choke off the internet as well. (Note that libertarian hero and scary, racist mofo Ron Paul is against net neutrality.)
Briefly, right now all data traversing the internet is treated equally. ISPs, who are often owned by RIAA member companies, want to make some packets privileged over others. If you go to their website, it loads fast. If you go to a competitor, it loads slowly or not at all. If they want to control all music, then it’s likely that net-surfing customers would have to pay extra to be allowed the privilege of getting to podcasts.
Which is to say that boycott is not enough, because in some sense they are Ma Bell. Does your elected representative support net neutrality?

Edit

Well, not quite. Oops. They still suck though and do make the claim that you shouldn’t rip CDs for ipod use.

Les Hutchins & Polly Moller @ the Luggage Store

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Les Hutchins & Polly Moller @ the Luggage Store, originally uploaded by celesteh.

Hey Bay Area people, I’ve got a show coming up on 3 January in San Francisco. Start out the new year with live music!
I’ll be playing laptop, didjeridu and some synthesizer. Specifically, I’ll be using my live sampling application, as heard in Paris, Berlin, the Hague and now San Francisco! It will be a duo with monster-flutist Polly Moller. (Note that she is not literally a monster but her flute playing is what you would get if King Kong or Godzilla played flute – and were really good at it.)
If Polly’s name sounds familiar with you, it’s because she was the lead of the flute-fronted rock band that I played in some years ago. Her flute playing then, as now, was full of agro tones and weird-awesome sounds that you don’t expect from a flute. She’s also really fun to improv with and her sounds work really well with electronic processing. I can do stuff with her that I haven’t been able to do with other flutists.
(Also, just to add, I’m awesome too.)
The show is at 1007 Market St in SF at the Luggage Store Gallery. It’s easily accessible via BART or muni (take the N line from the Caltrain station). Admission is $6 – $10 sliding scale. But if all you’ve got is $3 or $0 or something, they’ll still let you in.
The show starts at 8 with Jen Baker (Trombone) and Damon Smith (Double Bass). Those two formed half of the Just in Time Quartet, of which I was a member. Damon was also my bass teacher. He’s really cool and knows how to throat sing. Jen is also cool, but I don’t know her work as well.
Then at 9, Polly and I are on for 45 minutes or so.
I know some people have been curious about my Evenfall Minimodular synth. Polly describes it as “vintage” but it’s less than 10 years old. They are, however, rare. A guy in the south bay made them. At the time they were new, they were absolutely your best bet for starting into analog synths. It’s small, portable, yet a fully featured modular. Like an Arp, it has a bunch of normalized connections (it doesn’t need to be patched, but can be). And it’s got a MIDI in. The Evenfall guy thought it would be a raver’s dream. I don’t know if the trance/house folks ever got into this, but, it really should have been their dream. It’s flexible enough to be anybody’s dream, since it’s modular. I’ll be patching it and otherwise being arty. So here’s a chance to see / hear it in action.
The poster image is kind of random. I was hoping to find a picture of Polly and I together, but then gave up and used this snapshot I took of a peace sign at the Cesar Chavez park

Coming Out for Christmas

On Christmas Eve, I had my handbell playing debut. It was only my 4th time holding them. They’re heavy percussion instruments, like a disassembled marimba or something. They’re exactly what the name implies: bells you ring by hand. I had some big ones, F4 and D#4. I feel like I’m ahead of the curve for only my 4th attempt. So far ahead, I finished the piece several bars ahead of everybody else. (It’s hard to come up with page turns that work when everybody reads the same score.)
My third time playing them was the day before, the 23rd. Since the bells were in Palo Alto, I stayed over the whole holiday in the South Bay. I came down for rehearsal and then had lunch with my dad. The rehearsal foreshadowed the performance for me. My mind wasn’t on the bells, but on coming out to dad.
I met my dad at a chinese restaurant. Sarah gave me a lift and my dad invited her to lunch also, much to my relief. After we started eating, I said that I had been thinking about things a long time and I was very happy to say that I was taking T.
My dad chewed on his noodles.
Finally he said something about how it might change my attitudes.
I said I didn’t think I would become a conservative, and then immediately regretted the way I’d said it.
No, my dad explained, I might start eating like my brother and want to consume vast amounts of meat!
I have been kind of craving protein lately . . .. (This kind of seals it for me in my research of the cultural equation where meat is masculinity. I need no more evidence.)
So he more or less didn’t really react. Sarah said it’s what she had expected. I hadn’t known what to expect. I felt weird about it and stressed for the next few hours.
After lunch, Sarah and I went up to the San Francisco zoo for Daniella’s birthday party. There’s an ice rink there and it was open into the night, even though the rest fo the zoo was closed. Sarah and I were super late, so Daniella’s friends passed the time looking for the lions, until they finally started skating and we joined them. Sarah wanted to look at sleeping animals in violation of zoo rules, but all we saw were gigantic sleeping reindeer and some chilly looking flamingoes.
(About 48 hours later, some zoo visitors got a very close look at one of the lions. Some poor kid was mauled last night by an escaped lion, right next to where we were hanging out two days previous. Sarah was perturbed to learn this on the news, but I don’t feel like we just had a brush with danger.)
The next day, Christmas eve, I was sitting in Sarah’s living room, trying to get a p5 glove to work with SuperCollider when my dad called with a question. He said I sounded terribly depressed. I said I wasn’t. He said he had a question for me. I said ok. He decided he shouldn’t ask me over the phone. I said ok. He hung up.
I spent the rest of the day worrying about what he might have wanted to ask. So when I played handbells, my mind wasn’t totally on it.
After services, Sarah, Daniella and I went to the house of Sarah’s mother and grandmother. They made Swedish pancakes for dinner. It was fantastically tasty, but extremely sugary. I got into a punchy, post-sugar mood and then we went to another xmas party and then another with a glass of wine or so for me at each.
I woke up on Christmas at the crack of noon. Oh crap, I was supposed to go to Brother Bob’s early to help with cooking. Instead my holiday threesome (Sarah, Daniella and I) rolled into Bob’s house at the same time as my dad. My brother and his wife showed up shortly thereafter. We all chatted and then Bob put me to work cooking. My dad came into the kitchen and asked to talk to me. We went out into Bob’s garage.
My dad looked me seriously in the eyes. I have a question, he said. “Are you suicidal?”
“What?” This was not what I was expecting.
“I spent some time on the internet reading about what you’re doing. I want to make sure you’re not suicidal.”
Oh!! He read statistics about unhappy closetted, non-transitioning people. My dad was worried about me. My heart felt slightly warmed and relieved. No, no, no, don’t worry about that, I said.
Ok, he said, In that case . . . “have you ever contemplated a cue ball?”
“What?” I asked. He repeated himself. I had no idea where he was going with this. “No, I can’t say I have.”
“You should ask your uncle about his grandfather.”
“He was a pool shark?!” One of them was a dentist in San Francisco about a hundred years ago. Maybe he played pool on the side? Here was some new family history.
“No” my dad said and paused in the way he does when he’s about to make a clever point. All this setup is the clearest part of the day in my mind. But the punchline? I can’t remember how he delivered it. My great grandfather was apparently very bald. That could happen to me. I can’t say I haven’t worried about going bald, but um. at least we were in familiar territory. My dad was trying to talk me out of something. He does that a lot. This had become just another mundane scheme to be discouraged. I felt great relief and my heart warmed even further. I might have smiled.
He turned serious again, bringing up health risks. He repeated a few times that he didn’t want to bury me. I assured him that we were in agreement there as I don’t especially want to be buried. He told me that no surgery was without risks, which is true. Then he told me that he thought my mom got her brain tumor from her last surgery, which was for a stomach problem. I expressed doubt on this, but he started talking about how her brain tumor was so agressive it could have dated from a time so recent to it’s discovery. He said that 90 percent of all brain tumors come from the lung getting punctured.
I was losing the thread again. Mom’s stomach thing didn’t go near her lungs . . .. Maybe he’s confused about top surgery? I told him that I didn’t think my lungs were going to get punctured. He just wanted me to be careful, he didn’t want me to die before him.
I told him that I was moving into male risk categories and that I would possibly live shorter, but not that much. I looked at the corner of the garage. “I’d rather live shorter and be happier.” I said. Then I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder. “Dad, you told me something really smart a few years ago. You said that if I put off dealing with my troubles now, they would just be worse later. And I didn’t want to hear it because of this. But now I’m doing it and I feel really good about it.”
He awkwardly turned to leave the garage. I felt profound relief at the termination of the conversation. And then I drank moderate amounts of alcohol for the rest of the evening.
While waiting for the train back to Berkeley this afternoon, I noticed that I was feeling kind of anxious and wondered if maybe I should have not decreased my zoloft. But man, if all I have from that is mild anxiousness the next day, well, I think I can manage.
I am so tired right now. Daniella asked me today how my mom would have reacted to my transitioning. She would have been extremely upset. But the brain tumor changed everything, didn’t it? I want to think that if she could possibly think anything now, that she would think that I did the best I could when she was sick. I think that makes up for a lot of things that happened before. And precludes any afterwards. So what’s there to think about what my mom might think other than that I did my best and if it wasn’t good enough, well, it was my best. She sent me an email months and months before she got really sick, before the surgery my dad blames, about how she was having memory problems. And I didn’t write back for some reason, I don’t know. (It wasn’t good enough, but it was my best.) And my dad struggles with that too. How could a quarter of somebody’s brain go bad without me noticing? It must have been sudden. It must not have been noticeable. It’s not my fault. Of course it’s not. She followed a very typical trajectory for people with brain cancer. Nobody notices until it’s really bad and then she lives for maybe six more months. What causes it? Well, what causes a tiger to escape from the zoo one day but another? Our very existence is so improbable, what’s a few near misses along the way? What’s a fluke when our whole existence is a fluke? I might have been anyone, prior to the moment of conception.
I imagine my parents, my dad in grad school, my mom no longer working, holding their baby. This impossible thing they just made, in their arms. And them, with money tight, dreaming dreams. Of what I would be. Their little girl. Only god could know what lay ahead. No mortal would ever do anything if they knew. And so I didn’t go according to plan, but what did?
Happy Holidays.

Pronouns: A Fast Introduction

The problem: English lacks a commonly used gender-neutral personal pronoun. Also, sometimes people switch pronouns.

There used to be a singular “they” for unknown individuals. Shakespeare used it. It’s making a comeback, but it’s imperfect as it’s never used to refer to a person that you know. There are a punch of proposed gender neutral pronouns (GNP), including Spivak and my favorites: ze and hir: “Ze laughed. I called hir. Hir head hurts. I am hirs. Ze feeds hirself.” Of course, the way to get things into common usage is to use them.
Ok, so what about people who change pronouns? Obviously, the solution is to refer to them the way they wish. If you don’t know what you’re supposed to use, go with a GNP.
Then, there are temporal issues. I know some folks who have transitioned. Some I only knew afterwards, but know stories about them that are from before. I usually tell those stories with the pronoun that I’ve always used. “When she was a boy, she went to math camp.” Then, there are folks I knew before they came out. I use the pronouns that matched them at the time of the story. “She was a Mills student then, but now he’s at UCLA.” If I’m talking about a public figure or writing academically, I’ll use the current pronoun. “Wendy Carlos was still known as ‘Walter’ when she released Switched on Bach.” I can’t imagine a situation where using the most recent pronoun would be in error.
For myself, I prefer male or gender-neutral pronouns. Since I haven’t really changed appearance much, I think it would be unfair for me to get annoyed when old friends refer to me as ‘she.’ Mostly, it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes it’s like fingernails on chalkboard. I feel so much more comfortable with being ‘he’ or ‘ze’ that my tolerance of ‘she’ is declining. I mean, imagine if everyone referred to you for a day by the wrong pronoun. That would be really weird and uncomfortable, right?