dang, I’m just not very good at blogging regularly.

Whatevs…

Today I sat in my Uncle Peter’s apartment in Boston and managed data. I uploaded to flickr. I tagged and dated and geo-tagged pix. I meant to upload video and sound recordings, but ran out of time.

I emailed the friends I think i’ll have time to visit in NYC next week.

I ate two bags of maruchan ramen and a 32 oz bag of frozen mixed veges.

I talked to Amy. I paid my monthly tax bill.

It’s 4:30pm and in two hours I head to South Station to catch a greyhound to Holyoke, where I’ll be crashed at the Holyoke Research Institute for a day and a half. They accepted a proposal I made, so hopefully tomorrow we’ll work the details for a residency there.

Yesterday was my only full day in Boston. It’s cold here. Today it’s 13 degrees F. Yesterday it was 6 degrees F. And windy. And I had the brilliant idea to go for a ten mile walk making field recordings along the water line. My uncle lives on the water. So, I wanted to walk the coast from UMass to downtown.
This was a terrible idea.
First of all, when field recording I take forever to get anywhere. I’m constantly stopping and standing stock still to get a good sound. I stand for at least five minutes in place not moving, wearing binaural mics. This is just a bad idea in six degree weather on the Chesapeake bay.
Plus, I always think the best sound will inevitably be someplace inaccessible, so I inevitably get wet and sandy or dirty or…
So, after two hours I had some great sounds, which I will upload later, but I had hardly made it more than a few blocks along my ten mile route. And my feet were wet. And my nose and hands hurt so much I was hyperventilating.
So, I totally gave up and went back to my Uncle’s to drink tea and warm up.
I shot some video, and took a few pics, but, it was just too darn cold to have my hands outside my pockets operating gear for any substantial time, so not nearly as many pics as I would have liked.

In the evening I took the T (commuter rail) to MIT and met my friend Craig. He and Will Pappenheimer created a beautiful work of art at Fringe last September, Virta-flaneurazine SL. Craig and I chatted and enjoyed Melanie Smith’s art. He introduced me to his friends Sasha and John, as well. I look forward to checking out there work in the coming days.
here are a couple links he suggested to me:

Shift Space

The Networked Performance blog

Internet is intermittent where I stay in Rosemead, that’s all I’m saying.

(this is some spa treatment powder you reconstitute or something. It was on display at cvs this evening.)

So, the point is (was when I wrote this some odd days ago), I have either been on the road for 14 days or 24 days.
Except I sort of decided it is 14 days, because some opportunities have come up on the East coast that could use an extra 10 days of traveling.
Nothing like pragmatism, eh?

So, day one,
Wait, today, day 14 (except I’m writing these offline now, and posting them when I spot a burst of wi-fibility, so now maybe today the 4th of January, it is maybe 16 days? 17days?), I woke the way I always do at Nobu and Ri-chan’s, with Nobu storming around the house getting ready for work. He leans towards the thinking that if he is awake, so should I and Ri-chan be. He doesn’t actually rouse me from bed, but as I sleep on a futon on the floor in the living room, which is in between the kitchen and the bedroom, he makes a great fuss of walking through the room continually, and yelling at Ri-Chan and banging pots and pans and such.
(Now Franco Battiato just came up on random on my mp3 player. He is fucking brilliant. If we discount classical composers, far and away my most obsessive collections [and maybe he qualifies in there, too…], he competes with Gary Numan for the artist I have most obsessively collected.) I, in response, awake, and then lay in bed refusing to acknowledge that I am awake, even ignoring his questions when he asks, “Lee, are you awake?”
I love my relationship with Nobu. To a certain degree I guess it mirrors my relationships in general, to know me is to marry me, basically.
Umm, which is kind of weird.
Or maybe totally inaccurate.
To know me is to be caught up in my passive-aggressive, antisocial, borderline psychotic, nihilist-leaning (because the hegemonic can), self-absorbed delusion?
Well, we’ll have to revisit that, but, Nobu and I, we have an excellent relationship, built on a mutual pig-headedness, contrariness, and absolute certainty that we are right and the other is deliriously confused.
Regardless, my morning here begins with the racket of Nobu trying to wake me so that he can start the day arguing with someone other than Ri-Chan, who he argues with every morning. Because Nobu just loves to argue; about anything with anyone taking any position, just as long as it involves argumentation.
But I steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that I am awake and in this way stymie his desire, and I end up the victorious one in our morning combative meditation ritual. HA! Take that, Nobu!

(Nothing captures the memory of sunset like a phonecam.)

After he leaves the apartment I get up, and then Ri-chan and I have breakfast. She drinks some coffee. I drink coffee with soy milk (I normally drink coffee black, but she puts soy milk in my coffee, and now I have that as one of my rituals here) and eat grape nuts with soy milk.
And we chat. Which is a pleasure, because Ri-chan is smart and charming and delightful. This morning we talked about my misuse of the term Pochi, which I thought was Japanese for “dog.” But which is actually a common name for dogs in Japan. Inu is the word for dog. We talked about nursing. Ri-chan just finished nursing school here, and she used to work as a nurse in Japan. She adores the elderly, and would like to specialize in geriatrics. Today, however, I heard tales of the morbidly obese in the cardiac unit. And specifically the weight of their bed commodes.
HORROR!
I am so scarred now.

(It’s too bad I didn’t have my good camera out, or a better cellphone, but whatevs, those are real estate signs, because this church in the ghetto of Baltimore is for sale, no reasonable offers refused.)

Since then I’ve been listening to field recordings from the trip, editing them into loops of sound I like, and longer pieces from in between conversations and distortions. Inevitably when I wear a microphone and go out to record for multiple hours I end up with moments best left out of my music and uploads.
Today I’ve been working with recordings from the DC area metro’s blue line. I have some distortion I needed to cut out, from when we were on particularly loud sections of track. I don’t care for limiters. I prefer to set a volume and get the range of sounds that volume permits. So on the day I rode the metro for five hours recording stations and trains, I used different volumes to capture different aspects of the experience.
As I write I’m listening to Christmas mass at Christ Church in Alexandria. I went with my step-family, and I recorded it. It’s probably not useful for any of my music, but it will be a nice upload and document of the trip. The recording is pretty okay, if I say so myself. One thing I learned from Carl Orff is an appreciation of dynamics. I love how his work requires a quiet environment or a constant riding of the volume knob. Or parts of it just disappear and you end up with an arrhythmic beach, a surf of voices crashing aperiodically in your ears.
Anyway, this is a nice recording. I’ll upload it along with everything else when I can.
But that may be awhile, as I’m here ten more days (not now, now I’m here 4 more days, maybe 5, I travel on the fifth day. Travel presents a difficulty in day counting for me) and Nobu and Ri-chan don’t have wireless. I may try using their modem if I get desperate, but for now, it’s kind of fun just writing in word and rambling and not checking email or fb or blogs or etc.
I get a lot of tweets. And tweet a decent amount myself, so, that gives me my socio-digital fix.

(Nobu is buying food for Pochi, his cat. His cat who has been dead for a few months. Nobu has a somewhat extended mourning ritual for dealing with Pochi’s death. It is beyond irrational, but don’t try telling him that, because he prides himself on his rationality and internal consistency. And is always searching out the inconsistencies of others to attack. This tactic, fwiw, is not so effective with me, perhaps one reason we’re friends, because I believe that all humans are always inconsistent, and that the conscious mind is deluded about pretty much everything, but especially consistency, rationality and other ludicrous belief structures. He tells me I’m behaving without consistency in my beliefs and I ask him, “what beliefs? When have I ever demonstrated anything remotely akin to consistency or rational behavior or self-awareness? Or even a basic desire to do anything but what pleased my momentary fantasy?” And that’s the end of that verbal duel.)

Listening to one’s life from a few days before is always odd. In UMF (an art work/composition series from 2000-2001) I likened it to time travel. And I still feel that way a little.
So, during the louder sections, there is some digital artifacting on this recording. During the louder hymns. I was using the mp3 record feature on my iriver IHP-400 instead of the wav feature which is my norm. I forget why. But I screwed around with the settings for some reason that day.
Anyway, this recording, unlike the wav recordings, has some flanging in the high end. Not too bad, but noticeable. I’ll still post it, but be warned.

Nobu got home

And then that entry simply ends, because Nobu is the end of productivity. Once he’s in the house, there will be nothing but discussion and argument and theorizing. Which is super awesome, of course. I love arguing with Nobu (not first thing in the morning, so much).

I woke up, laying on the futon on the floor in Nobu and Ri-chan’s apartment. Looking at me through the kitchen doorway was Ri-chan. Except, oddly, she was horizontal not vertical.
I parsed this with my mind, and realized she was laying in a bed, a fold-away old fashioned metal type, with the covers pulled up around her throat. Her nose was red.
“Are you sick?” I aksed.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Oh.”
I got up and we talked, I forget the details now.
At a certain point she mentioned that I should stop being silly - maybe I mentioned my plan to rehearse all day – that today I was going to meet the American husband she and Nobu found for me.
I thought this was a little odd. But, ultimately, perhaps for the best. I’ve demonstrated a profound inability to look after myself, and maybe it is time I found a sugar daddy to look after me. Being straight might be an initial inconvenience, but if Nobu and Ri-chan felt I could overcome that difficulty, well, I would try not to disappoint them.
Then my father arrived.
Fortunately, not as my new husband, that would have been a little grotesque. And given that I’ve been living at home for a year, perhaps a little to close for comfort.
He was in the kitchen to give me away.
Ri-chan was still in bed in the kitchen. She was demonstrating a staunch dedication to remaining horizontal.
Then a little man arrived. Think Gimli from The Lord of The Rings. Except dressed in modern safari-like clothing. He was to be my American husband.
So, there’s this gnome fellow. That’s strange to begin with. Maybe at this point I’m starting to think this is a dream.
I often dream waking up. That is, I often wake up and start going through my day and discover I’m in a dream not real life only at some point when things get really weird, then I’ll realize I’m dreaming and wake up and go about my day until something really strange happens and then I’ll realize I’m dreaming and wake up. And so on. Some nights I wake up all night long without ever actually waking up. I can wake a hundred times I na night like that. At it’s worst, when I’ve been having these cyclical dreams for weeks on end every night, I become very suspicious of reality and go through my day fully expecting strange things to happen and the realization of dreaming to strike. Perhaps this in part explains my ambivalent relationship to truth and faith and certainty and the other bedrocks of reality.
Anyway, my new husband is not unattractive at all. He’s short, a gnome I think, though now I think maybe he was more a dwarf. But he is quite handsome if you like bears. He’s a white bear, a polar bear. And he is dressed very nicely, suggesting he can take care of me in the way I am accustomed to, that is letting me sleep in the laundry room, or the closet, or the death room, or some such, and feeding me grape nuts and rice milk and chips and salsa and giving me some room to work.
What is strange about my new husband is that on his hat he wears the head of one of his victims. And on a rope around his neck he wears another.
At first I think he’s rocking some new hipster jewelry, because it looks almost like he is just wearing the faces of these men. But the faces are shimmery, almost like bad holograms. I don’t say anything because I am uncertain what this jewelry is, and if it’s new techwear, I don’t want to offend him. Maybe holographic adornments are his silicon valley gimmick and he’s got a VC fortune backing him in this stuff. It’s not unlikely, I’ve been in SF a long time now, and gnomes wearing the holographic visages of their beheaded enemies as an avant garde introduction to their new high tech jewelry and cosmetics line is not as uncommon as you might think living elsewhere in the world.
So, he’s a handsome fellow and he’s wearing these fellows’ faces. Strange, but I can deal.
So, we leave for a stroll, a few minutes outside the fam for he and I to get to know each other.
We’re walking around the streets of Rosemead, a suburb of Baltimore, holding hands and chatting. And I am now close enough to see that these are not holographic jewelry, but rather, the actual heads of his victims, shrunken and bewitched so that they can never firmly regain their appearance. They are ever-shifting, so that the power their likenesses hold are kept within, at my fiancées beck and call. None but he can ever again look upon the faces of his enemies. This strikes me as incredibly clever, he has not only stolen their lives and their heads, but he has also stolen their very images, the memory of what they looked like is his alone.
My fiancée fucks with very powerful magic. I am deeply impressed. But a little concerned now, because I’m wondering what happens if I piss beau off, right?
And then I notice that my fiancée has a roving eye, not for other men, fortunately, but for his enemies. Everywhere we walk he is watching all around us for his enemies. He is hunting. I realize my husband will never be still, never relaxed. He will always be on his guard, on the watch for those who have wronged him, or whom he has wronged. His life is a war with other men such as himself, hunters.
And then I heard the shower and I woke up and I had to pee and I thought,
“fuck, Nobu is going to be in there forever, what with his long, thick, black hair!”
And I began pacing and drinking coffee because I thought,
“fuck it. If I have to pee I might as well really HAVE to pee!”

Leaving LA to go to SF really didn’t have any, going-on-a-journey feel to it. It felt like, “ho hum, another frakking bus trip to the tenderloin.”
Of course I love a good bus trip anywhere. And SF is so full of amazing people I adore beyond words, including a totally awesome gf, that I always enjoy going there.
But enjoying going to SF is different from the feeling you have when embarking on a big, crazy journey.
Or more accurately, the feeling I imagine I would have when embarking on a big, crazy journey if I wasn’t so emotionally repressed that the very concept of feeling is essentially just that, a concept, like infinity or Africa.
So, this feeling I’m always hearing about, “I’m so excited about going on this trip,” “aren’t you excited to be going on a trip?”
If I had the capacity for experiencing any form of emotion, that’s the feeling I expect I would have had. But, instead I was waiting for the bus thinking about how much shit I left unfinished in LA, how much shit I had to do to prepare for the trip, how much work was left before I can frakking graduate, and how much work I had to do for my primary client before leaving the bay area. And how much I needed the money from that work if I was actually going to be on the road longer than a fortnight.
Which is my normal thinking state, because I extract a fair amount of the joy in my life from thinking about how much work I have to do, because I really love having a lot of work. Especially, since, as you no doubt noticed, the “work” I have to do in my life is stuff like

Get ready to go on a four month trip
Finish writing a kick ass thesis about intellectual property that everyone loves
Prepare for a bunch of recording sessions with amazing musicians across America
Write a bunch of stories about myself
Take a lot of photos with nice equipment
Make field recordings of all the things I love
Make mix cds of love songs
Work on a database of holistic medicine, and feminist and ecological activists
Edit videos of awesome lectures on eco-feminism
Finish a huge installation art work
Prepare a bunch of proposals for upcoming installations

I mean, really, the shit I think about is almost exclusively self-indulgent and self-absorbed and totally awesome.
So you can see why thinking about all my shit is a lot of fun.
But, it was distracting me from thinking about, “oh, how exciting, I’m going on a trip.”
But, mostly,
See, I can’t believe we’re still basically in LA here. Lame.

So, the trip either began on December 10th or the 17th. The 10th through the 17th I was in SF. And the original plan was to visit something like fifty people in eight days. And do some school meetings and work on thesis and spend quality time with my gf for her birthday.
Clearly I’m not so good at realistic planning. I get that.
But, then everything went in the toilet because this job for my client, it totally saved my butt, because I am a disaster with money and had totally missed a check that was cashed months after it was sent, and suddenly I had half as much money as I had budgeted for my trip. And at 122 days at $5 a day, you can’t have half your money disappear. Because that half is more than the $5 a day. It’s part of your actual transit money and your paying cell phone bill money and IRS back taxes money and that-last-frakking-installation-cost-me-a-lot-of-future-moneys money, so you simply can’t suddenly be missing half your money.
So, this job was, well, for me it was business as usual, because I have only a few skills - I am very good at making friends, I am able to learn anything in no time at all (but will apparently never be able to master anything), and money just always appears when I need it (being a member of the dominant class, gender and race means never having to say you’re hungry) - but despite being business as usual in that I needed money and money appeared, it was sorely needed, because without it I would have embarked on the trip and miraculously have had to receive money some other way.
But, this job totally aborted my plans for SF to see a bazillion friends I really wanted to see. So, I started to think,
“Maybe the trip didn’t start on the 10th. Maybe it starts on the 17th, because really, the time in SF I’m mostly working, so that’s hardly like going on a trip.”
Plus I wasn’t doing any of the things I had laid out as the daily activities I was obligated to engage in while traveling:
Blogging
Photography
Field recording
Composing
Burying time capsules
The only thing I managed to do, was start dropping off the love mix CDs I had made.
Maybe I’ll try to write a post on each of these activities, because this hardly seems like the place to start explaining them.