Luggage Store Gallery

The Luggage Store Gallery is across the street from the Golden Gate Theater, where Hairspray is currently being performed. It's on Market Street at 6th Street, which is a rather, uh, intense neighborhood. Despite this, the gallery has been doing really well.

The gallery itself is up at the top of a steep double flight of stairs and musicians perform at the street end of the space in front of a row of tall windows. Organizers Rent Romus and Matt Davignon told me that normally, there's a big velvet curtain hanging in front of the windows, but that it was taken down recently and they don't know why. They hope it's coming back, since it helps make the space less live, and Rent has a noise show booked for the very near future.

Anyway, Zeke Talbot played first on detuned and prepared guitar, with some looping going on and singing along. He had something very haunting and disturbing going on, like a serial killer in a scary indie film, that I really appreciated. I went next along with Will and Jim, and Peter Nyboer was last with his laptop music. He also did a turntable improvisation that I really liked. We all had the street light and the Golden Gate Theater marquis in the background. Rent told me that he was grateful one of the two street lights was burnt out, because last time they had both been shining in behind the performers and that it was pretty blinding.

Celeste was there with a DAT recorder with which she recorded our set. She'll be transferring it to CD and I really hope it comes out well, because the music felt and sounded really good while we were doing it. You never know though if it will come across in a recording.

In other news Ben McAllister has posted sound files, photos, and commentary from Big Sur on his web site. You can see it at http://www.listenfaster.com/bigsur.shtml.

In other and even better news, I've been awarded a grant from the American Composers Forum's Subito fund. It will help me make my upcoming fourth CD, Not Made of Stone.

Me and the Punk Rock Orchestra

Yesterday I attended a Punk Rock Orchestra rehearsal to deliver the parts for my arrangement of my song "Road Spiders". That's all I was planning to do, but when I got there the director, John Gluck, asked me if I'd brought my flute. Apparently their first flute player, Suzanne, wasn't going to be in for a couple of rehearsals and he asked me to sit in.

It was a blast. The pieces we rehearsed were "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" by the Dead Kennedys, disturbingly morphed with Leo Delibes' Flower Duet; "Mosh of the Toreadors" arranged by John based on Carmen; and an arrangement of "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones" by Fear. It was a lot of fun.

We ran through "Road Spiders" too. I got to demonstrate the flute part. I took comments from the players who needed changes made to their parts (mostly to make them less long, not so many page turns, easier to read, etc.). Nobody was amplified so we couldn't hear the mezzo-soprano's rendering of the words, but I could read her lips, and I'm sure later on I'll hear them amplified. I know I did the right thing leaving the brasses out of the arrangement because the bass line was quite loud enough with just the low woodwinds and the strings. One brass player who was there said the piece sounded like Vulcan music. A violist gave me a big thumbs-up and Michael Mendelssohn, one of their singers, gave me a high five. John really seemed to like it. So it's a good start!

Will Grant, Jim Carr, and I are getting ready for our gig at the Luggage Store Gallery on July 1. We have sketched out a basic outline for our 30 minutes. I have written all-new words, and the music will be improvised. You should come hear it!

No rest for the wicked

That's what my mom used to say when I whined about my chores as a kid. I was a very literal-minded child and I was always concerned that the remark meant that I was wicked (in the traditional bad way) and that therefore I had to do lots of chores.

Nowadays I know better -- wicked is actually a good thing. :) The part about no rest has not changed. Yesterday's experience at the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival was really, really good. I had a great time improvising with my assigned cohorts. I think it went extremely well. The event is wonderfully peaceful, happy and convivial. It's great to be with so many of one's own kind, and make and renew contacts. The redwoods are beautiful, and the Henry Miller Library helps to create an atmosphere of freedom that feels so good held up against the usual city and suburban grind. This gig is a lot more like vacation than a gig, although I would hardly characterize gigs as "work", exactly; more like a soul's compulsion. It was pretty hot though.

Today I can't give myself a day off. There is a lot to do. There is a press package to send out, articles to write, practicing to do, contact info to be logged in and dealt with, and CDs to listen to. Ben McAllister from Seattle gave me a CD of his music, and Will Grant, who attended the festival and played too, gave me a CD of what he's done with the recordings we made earlier this month. It's all preparatory to our Luggage Store Gallery gig on July 1. Paul, in his role as official photographer, took about 150 pictures yesterday which will need to be developed and gone over. Soon there will be all new photos on this web site.

Celeste and her new girlfriend Nicole were there too. They are a cute couple! I got to say hi to Ken Lee (close friend of Michael Haumesser who engineered Taste the Wall -- who has a baby now, astonishingly) and Jonathon Grasse (my grad schoolmate, now teaching at UCLA). It was nice to see Ernesto Diaz-Infante again and to finally meet Matt Davignon after only emails up till now. I got to meet flutists Marjorie Sturm and Emily Hay. Ben McAllister seems pretty cool. I wonder if he's overflowing with positive energy all the time, or just at festivals. :) Max Valentino played a sensuous and warm bass guitar.

Album name change, again...

Wanted to let you all know that I've changed the name of my upcoming fourth album, AGAIN. It was going to be Exit Stage Wrong. Now, I've found one that is a better fit for the overall concept: Not Made of Stone.

In other news, Will Grant and I got together to do some recording last night at Celeste's Berkeley abode. I got my first look at the Long String Instrument, which is living there with its creator, Ellen Fullman, while Celeste is away at grad school. :) Will and I had to be very careful not to disturb it as we set up recording equipment nearby.

We took stabs at recording the flute part I've written for his piece, Dreams. We also recorded me doing a range of different flute sounds -- multiphonics,key percussion, different percussive tongued and air sounds, etc. -- and some spoken words, for him to process and use as laptop music in the gig we are going to do together on July 1st at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.

I'm almost done with the orchestral score for Road Spiders. I have until Thursday to get it finished and printed so I can deliver it to John Gluck after the Punk Rock Orchestra show.

We interrupt our regular innocuous journal postings...

Ahem.

Can I just step up here for a minute and say I'm ashamed to be an American? Being an American means that atrocities are being committed in my name right this minute. Not only that -- my parents had atrocities committed in their name also. The Phoenix Project, the heinous thing upon which the current program of abuse in Iraq is based, was implemented during the Viet Nam war.

Here's a link where you can read all about it, and hopefully weep: http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/

Here is a link to the official Army investigative documents about the prison abuses in Iraq: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894001/

So if anybody tries to wring their hands and tell you that what's going on in Iraq is "unprecedented", that's just not true. It is what happens under any colonial regime when the invader sets about oppressing the native inhabitants of its new colony.

A Trekker's lament

I've been a fan of Star Trek since I saw my first episode of classic Trek, which was "Plato's Stepchildren". (I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, at a young age. Star Trek was not on the TV menu at home when I was a child.) There has been so much Trek since then. I've watched and been a fan of NextGen, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager...to varying degrees. But it was all Trek. I'm not having such a good time with Enterprise.

Recently it's seemed as though they are belaboring the point that in the pre-classic Trek historical period, humans were not (or won't be) nearly as highly evolved. This point is coming across very well, but I'm not sure how intentional it is. I just saw the rerun the other night where Lt. Reed and the Marine commando major had to batter each other like crazed 11-year-olds up and down the halls of the Enterprise. It was awful.

Paul made an interesting point recently which was that in Stargate SG-1, you can believe Col. O'Neill being a ruthless SOB on occasion because his background is in special ops. Capt. Archer being as cold-blooded as that, which he has been a LOT lately, is hardly believeable because he was a test pilot before becoming a starship captain. The Xindi-inflicted Sept. 11th notwithstanding.

The Enterprise episode featuring Sim, the copy of Trip that was made so that Dr. Phlox could harvest his cloned neural tissue to save the real Trip, was really disappointing in the cold-bloodedness of Capt. Archer and the Tale of Two Cities ending. It would have been so much more interesting if Trip had died and Sim went on to assume his role on the ship.

Besides which...and this seems to be the "early Trek humans are more primitive" thing again...Captain Picard would never have sacrificed Sim for his neural tissue once it became clear that Sim was distinct from Trip, especially after he saved the Enterprise. Both Picard and Capt. Janeway would have said something like, "This man is a member of my crew. Phlox, you're just going to have to keep Trip on ice and find some other way to save him." That could have taken half a dozen episodes and been hella interesting.

Sometimes I wonder if the current writers of Enterprise have ever actually watched any other Trek series, or if they were just hired with resumes full of The Commish and Lifetime movies. Or, perhaps there are just way too many executives from Paramount lurking around the set. I have no idea. I am just a disgruntled fan.