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9/2/2018

There is now a hole in my blog. I've missed an entire month! I didn't mark Dad's 85th birthday (8/18/2018 -- HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!!!!!!), I haven't recorded the good times we've had on Whidbey, taking Shai to a "bluepub" (brewpub) for dinner, the piano arriving in good shape (didn't even lose too much tuning!), our return in mid-August to the East, new students coming in for classes, seeing our good friends Liz and Tom on Whidbey (oh the wineries!), Jill getting ready for classes, my ankle finally healing (just started walking everywhere with no brace a few days ago), the Canadian-fire-smoke haze we left behind, and the hot hot humidity in New York and Roosevelt. All the unpacking, everything coming together, meeting new friends in our Washington neighborhood, watching the Perseids from our upper deck, so much... fun!

Xenon has adapted well, we think. I'm heading back West in a few days to start my sabbatical in earnest. I've been building a bunch of ideas; I hope they work. I have a lot ahead.

Jeez, I was so 'disconnected' from things that I had even written a blog entry for July 31 and forgot to post it! At least I made sure to get Dad's birthday gift to him, yay!

9/6/2018

I'm on an Alaskan Airlines flight to Seattle. A new chapter in life beginning, this one with multiple parts. I said good-bye to Jill this morning -- the longest we will have been apart since we got married (a month shy of thirty-five years ago!). I've caught up with a lot of the e-mails and meetings I wanted to get finished before I dove into the projects I want to do, and in fact have started some serious work on a few of them. I hope everything happens! I won't be back East for three months, the beginning of December. This will be interesting.

Jill is going great guns at Rutgers, but I can tell she's really looking forward to the 'flip' next year when she will be the one to fly out to our Whidbey home. I'll be the bi-coastal guy at that point, for a few more years at least. That will also be interesting.

While getting things packed up for our moves (NY, Whidbey), I found a bunch of old tapes containing work I did years ago. Some had recordings of pieces I had forgotten about, and others had pieces I didn't even recall. I don't think they're mine. I also found a few that I had been missing, and I managed to digitize a handful of them before I left. I'm leaving the tapes plus the dubbing tape decks in New York for future work. But I'll be posting the ones I found here. Why? Some weird sense of 'completeness', I guess. Or it's my massive, bloated ego. We actually had a band back in my Indiana youth that we called "The Massive Bloated Ego Band". Yeah, rock stars! Much silliness.

9/9/2018

The first weekend here has almost passed. It's Sunday night, and Happy New Year if you're Jewish. It was supposed to be rainy today, but most of the day was quite nice, although a little on the coolish side. Tonight it's 'raining', and I use the scare-quotes because the rain we've had here is pretty much water that hangs around in the sky. It's also very windy, so the droplets hit you from various angles. There are not that many of them, though.

Our new Whidbey home came (unexpectedly) with an extensive sound system. Every room has at least two speakers and a volume-slider. This includes the bathrooms! I figured out how to connect my amplifiers to it, and now I can give full-house concerts whenever I'd like. I treated myself yesterday evening to a thorough listen-through of the work I, Terry and Gregory (with special guest appearances by Dan Trueman and Karl Fury) did about two years ago:

I'm now convinced it is the best work we have done. It's pretty amazing, if I do say so meself!

Tonight I was even more self-indulgent, and I played the set of summer2006 pieces during dinner. I think it was with these pieces, or maybe the earlier little set of Small Pieces that I decided to play at the first meeting of my graduate seminar in the Fall term following their creation. What a bad idea that was! I probably should have known better than to play my own stuff, but I wanted people to think it's 'ok' to play their music in class. I was met with nothing but blank stares. These sounds had no currency in the rarified air of academic/Columbia music.

I'll be honest: I have no idea how I wound up here, on the music composition faculty of Columnia, save for the fact that I have a technical adeptness that was useful at various critical times. I've never felt a part of the music that gets done, and I've generally felt really alienated from the concerns of most people in the 'new music community'. There are only a handful of students I've had over the past three decades who even identify me as a "composition teacher". yikes. I've really tried hard to impress upon all the people I've worked with an expansive definition of 'music composition', but I guess it hasn't taken root. Dots on paper, sounds in sequence -- oh joy. There is much, much more to it than that.

Well heck. I listen to my sounds, and I like them. I guess that's good. And they also don't seem like much else that others do. That's probably also good, if you buy into the whole creativity thing. But then again, maybe I'm just fooling myself.

One thing that this music does do for me: it really socks home the memories. While listening through my self-indulgent virtual house-of-sound concert, I noticed that those summer2006 pieces were produced literally a few months before my cancer diagnosis. So for fun, I then played my mm-pieces.

Those feelings! That sense of life! Back then, I really thought I hadn't much time left here. Now, here I am, on Whidbey Island, twelve years later. Making more music essentially just for me. I am fortunate in my irrelevance.


I had planned to write something else in this blog-post. While typing the previous post, there were a few things I wanted to write down, things that happened while I was back in NYC. They didn't really fit with the prior post, plus I ran out of time on the plane while writing it (and I was really tired later!). I wrote down a list of them to include later. Here it is, with my best guesses as to what I intended to write:

Paul -- I had a nice visit with Paul Lansky while back in Roosevelt. I realized that it wouldn't be easy for me to pop over to have lunch with him anymore, and that finally motivated me to pop over and have lunch with him. What I wanted to say is that Paul looked much better than the last time I saw him, about a year ago (I think). He says he's been exercising a lot. Whatever it is, keep doing it!

others (Jeff) -- Similarly, I had coffee with Jeff Snyder before going to see Paul. Dan Trueman was away on Long Island, but I'm really glad I got a chance to 'hang' a little with Jeff.

disconnect -- not sure what I meant by this. It seems to be a growing theme, though. I'm here on my island!

Seth/Miya -- again, not 100% sure what I intended to write. I suspect that it's how great it is to have them both at the CMC now. It is.

future CMC -- dang, I wish I knew what I meant by this one! Probably something really profound, charting a bold new course for the CMC with Seth and Miya, and all our terrific students and collaborators. This really is one of those exciting times at the CMC again. I think I should go on sabbatical more often.

9/23/2018

It is now officially Fall. I always want to count September 21 and March 21 as the Fall/Spring dividers, but I guess that often the equinox actually falls on the 22nd. I just like "21" as a number.

The temperature is getting cooler here on Whidbey, and the light hours are decidedly shorter. Although most of the trees and bushes are evergreen, a tinge of golden-yellow hits many of them, and the crispness in the air sure feels like 'back East' this time of year.

There are a few deciduous trees that struggle to show their autumnal colors:

but nothing like the displays we would get in Brown County or around our home in New Jersey. It's a more subtle change here, almost Japanese in the delicate coloration: One thing that was strange. Today was very windy at our home. I looked outside and the leaves were 'falling' up the bluff: Things are different. I am getting a lot of work done, though.

9/26/2018

One of the aspects of living alone is the ability to do things (like play music) that would be possibly annoying to others, but not at all when you're by yourself. Tonight I was reading more of Pete Townshend's autobiography Who I Am: A Memoir while eating dinner, and I thought: "Hey, I think I'll listen to the original recording of the Who's rock opera Tommy." Man oh man, what a trip down the ole Memory Lane that took me! I got the record shortly after it came out -- I think it was the summer before seventh grade for me. I had just begun to explore the expanding world of rock music, and this double-album was a revelation. I remember lying on the floor with my head between our family stereo-unit speakers, marveling at the depth created by the reverb and effects.

And the music itself! Oh my! I almost started tearing up tonight when the first refrain of "Listening to you..." came across the speakers (it occurred earlier than I thought it did, during the "Go to the mirror" song). Everything seemed possible to me back then. This music said so.

Now here I am, on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, things seemed possible to me back in 1969, but I had no idea what the range of those possibilities might encompass. I'm attempting to create virtual environments, sonic/graphic, that capture those immanent moments in life. Why? Because I was there, and those places mattered to me. This was my human life. See me, feel me...

9/29/2018

It's good out here, but there are things I miss. While eating dinner tonight, I thought about the times I would drive over to Dan Trueman's house in Princeton, and we'd spend the rest of the evening talking about the latest Academic Music Follies, or (prior to that) when we would gather with Ge Wang and Perry Cook, pretty much doing the same thing. Or driving Terry Pender home to Bloomfield, NJ, talking about current politics, the music scene, the CMC, the world. I realize I won't be doing them again.

Will those be replaced? No, and they wouldn't really exist even if I were back in NJ, living a straight course from where I was. Change is what happens. Here's the change that's good: last night I went in to 'baby-sit' Shai while Lian and Itay went to a Cirque du Soleil show. Shai and I had quite a night out, going to a 'blue pub' (brewpub) for dinner and having a grand old Grandpop-Grandson time.

This morning, though, I was paying with Shai while Mom and Abba caught up on a little sleep (Shai was uncharacteristically awake for much of the night). I had some Play-Doh out, and was using some cookie-cutter templates to make different shapes. I cut out an eight-sided figure thinking it would be fun to point out that it was a 'stop sign', but Shai quickly corrected me: "a OCTAGON, Grampop!" Jeez. The kid knows his geometry! (and I won't even mention the ovals, the rectangles vs. squares, different kinds of triangles...)

Here's a random comment at the end of a post: While eating dinner, I was listing to the Lateralus album by Tool. It seems many of the lyric/music combinations that grab me have to do with the experience of something vs. reality, i.e. this from Tool:

and of course this from Trent Reznor (NIN): So, did you vote for Donald Trump thinking he would represent you? Idiot. Now... you know...

10/15/2018

I'm sitting out on our lower back deck, next to our fire-table (thanks again Brenda and John!), looking at the quarter-moon shine across Puget Sound. Mars is bright, and I can see the great square of Pegasus directly overhead. I was listening to some old Talking Heads music while driving around doing errands yesterday, and this quote stands out: "Well, how did I get here?"

Yes. I think this is a common refrain in my recent posts, but being alone sets me thinking about the trajectory of life. To be sure, even the chance to be alone to do work is remarkable. At least I've actually been getting work done. Progress is slow, but it is progress. I have a lot to do...

Even last week I managed to keep up. Why is that an accomplishment? Last week was spent in Disney World wth Shai, Itay and Lian in Florida. My oh my! Obviously there is much I could say, but I don't want to retread Baudrillard (America) or Eco (Travels in Hyperreality). Instead I'll say that the TRUE experience of Walt's dream is through the eyes of a two-and-a-half-year-old. Monetized? You bet. Crassly commercial? Oh yeah. Platitudes galore. But the reality for Shai... it took my breath away. This is how we plant dreams and optimism in the next generation. I hope it can work.

Oh there is so much to say, and I'm not saying it. Time -- listening to old Genesis songs during dinner that transports me back to High School, thinking about the future here, where am I now?

10/16/2018

Donald Trump is a stupid, ignorant, despicable, terrible, horrible human being. God needs to damn him before it's too late. The world is all wrong.

10/22/2018

Thirty-five years ago Jill and I got married. Happy Anniversary! This is the first one we've spent apart in those three-point-five decades. We talked on the phone a lot today. It was like it was thirty-six years ago. At this point I might write: 'we were so young! we were so optimistic!' but that would make it seem that our optimism and youth has been replaced by cynicism and age. No, that's not it, it's more that our optimism was naive. We had no idea the dimensional depth that our life together would take. Here we are now, and you know what? It's good!

11/1/2018

I'm in Indiana! Mara Helmuth invited me to Cincinnati to show some of the recent RTcmix/Unity work. It's especially nice because I can stop by to see my mom and dad. Thanks Mara! I have much built-up to write here, but it will have to wait. Soon!

Yesterday evening going trick-or-treating with Shai (and Lian and Itay) was total fun. It was a nice and spooky night in Seattle.

11/5/2018

I've been having a nice visit with Mom and Dad in Indiana, the reason (as noted above) being the meeting with Mara Helmuth's students at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. All went really well, and I've been able to continue working out here. I brought the Oculus gear along: Good times!

Tomorrow is the election. I'm pretty discouraged. I really wish that it would be a total repudiation of Trump and his policies, but I'm worried that the Democrats won't even make any gains at all. After the horror of the presidential election two years ago, it's hard to muster any optimism. What will happen to the world?

At the very least, shouldn't our president work to unite the country? Idiot Trump knows only division, and the stoking of the myriad ways to separate us into mutually hating groups seems his only mode of operation. And yes, I hate him for that.

Here's some GOOD things to dwell upon, hoping against hope that the world may be a little better after tomorrow. The first is a boatload of pictures taken from our trip to Disney World with Shai several weeks ago:

This next link is really fun: When we were packing up our Roosevelt house to move to NY/Whidbey, we didn't know what to do with our closet-full of art projects and other assorted paraphernalia from Lian and Daniel's younger days. So we decided to use TECHNOLOGY to rescue us from our nostalgia dilemma, and I digitized most everything that was there. The memories! Our kids! What an archive! The future, I hope.

11/12/2018

Sometimes a hint of a smell, or a taste, or just a feeling will happen and I recall the past holidays, and now they are coming again. Pine. Nutmeg. Cinnamon. The reflected light from silver foil, like around the Hershey's kisses that would appear this time of year when I was young (and then one year there were gold ones, and then red). Such feelings. Such good feelings.

I'm about 75% through a book Gregory Taylor sent me months ago, These are the Names by Tommy Wieringa. Was it for my birthday? Just for the heck of it? Anyhow, I've passed the point where the book 'grabs' me. Is it a murder mystery? An action/ adventure, although waaaaay slow? Or a magic realism? I love the way the author is revealing things. The facts of the story sneak up on you, and suddenly there you are: in a new world. I still only read it in the interstices of work, while I'm eating, just before bed.

There was a third thing I wanted to write about here, but I don't know what it was.


Oh, I remembered what it was! It was about the disparity in time I feel. E-mails come in bursts, at odd hours, but I realize I'm the odd-hour guy. I wake early, out here, 6 AM, but back East where most everyone I with whom I am interacting resides, 6 AM means 9 AM means they're up and about. Here it is 8:30 PM for me, just finished dinner, listening to some music, and Jill is probably already asleep. Daniel, oh my. From here it's almost a complete day/night shift for him.

11/21/2018

One of the things I do while existing on my own here on Whidbey is listen to a lot of music. I wake in the morning, walk downstairs and ask Alexa to play various things. I mirror them on my laptop, connected to the house sound-system. Surround sound! I listen while I'm coding in the morning, then at lunch, then on through the afternoon. At dinnertime I even plan virtual 'concerts' of bands: Tool, Genesis, King Crimson, NIN. Tonight I played Yes, Close to the Edge and Relayer. The nostalgia! I was in high school again, experiencing the joy of discovering new music with Pat. I wonder if he and Geoff have such strong memories of that musical time in our lives?

Nostalgia, oh yeah. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the beginning (for me) of the holiday season. I will start playing medieval Christmas music. And synthesizer carols, and the Brandenburg Concertos. I love the memories I carry, the magic time of year. And I TRULY LOVE the fact that Jill is arriving here tomorrow! Happy Holidays!!!!

12/3/2018

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we're in the throat of the holiday season now! I love this time of year, and the good feelings are being reinforced by the presence of Lian/Itay/Shai and the soon-arrival of Daniel and Jill. The T-day dinner was terrific; Jill and I seamlessly resumed our life together. I was a little worried that we'd have to 'relearn' each other again, but I now know we're way beyond that.

My sabbatical project is going well, which partly explains my lack of writing (again!) here in the old blog. I've made it past nearly all the technical hurdles and uncertainties, and that leaves the way open for the fun part, making things up! I think it's pretty good, although I have no real basis for comparison. I showed it to Jill, Lian and Itay and they seemed to enjoy it. On from here, I guess.

My long-evolved plan of playing certain music only at this time of year (I'm listening to the Waverly Consort's A Renaissance Christmas and George Winston's ur-new-agey CD December) is working. I'm in a totally different location, different feel, different light, but it's the Christmas season! What a lifetime of good feelings, dating back to the happiness of being on school vacation, when Brenda and I could spend all day making adventures with our 'dollies' together. And ice-skating. And sledding. And playing games. And the anticipation...

12/13/2018

Some days seem inertially difficult, but things get done. I'm thinking "I need to brush my teeth" and then "maybe in a little bit" but then "oh heck, might as well get them done now" and then it gets done. Before I realize it, I've actually accomplished things. I'm reminded of a scene in the third (original, sixth of the extended trilogy/trilogy) Star Wars movie where Chewbacca is imprisoned, and the jailers toss in C-3PO, totally dismantled. Chewbacca picks up one of the android arms, gives a half-hearted wail, and then patiently starts assembling everything, one piece at a time. You just keep chipping away at something, and then somehow it gets done. Oh my, life-lessons from Star Wars. I'm a sci-fi nerd still!

That's today. I'm starting work on my next scene for the big VR project. I showed the first one to a few people at the Computer Music Center yesterday (I'm in New York for a few days getting, one piece at a time, a few things done). It worked well, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Onwards!

One of the things I had to get done here was my check-up with Dr. Pearse. All is good, and we're moving forward to get some more of my stem-cells harvested in February. This is good -- it's been over ten years since my last harvest, and they only remain viable for that length of time. Ten years! Oh I thought I'd be gone by now, but everything seems stable. Yay!

This isn't a difficult procedure, not at all like a stem cell transplant. These cells would be used in a transplant if I need one again. The harvesting is simple: I get drugs for five days to 'mobilize' the cells from my bone marrow, and then they get filtered out of my bloodstream for a day, using a dialysis-like procedure. I wrote a fair amount about this the last time I had this done, back in 2008. I still think the word "harvest" is a little goofy. A hoe-down! I'm jes' a stayem-cell farmer! The good news this time is that there are new drugs used to cause the stem-cell release into my blood, and they won't cause me to go bald again. That's always fun.

It's snowing outside our apartment now. We had a lovely dinner with Seth and his wife Jennifer last night. Things are going well at Columbia. I'm going to go work on building a sunset and some mountains.

12/20/2018

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIAN!

Yep, thirty-two years ago today, our lives dramatically changed. I had no idea what that event would mean, and absolutely no idea the depth of that meaning. And then Daniel, and then, and then, and tomorrow night I spend the evening with my grandson while Lian and Itay enjoy a birthday dinner.

It was a dramatic day for Lian's thirty-second, too. We had astoundingly high winds, and the power for nearly all of the island is out. Thank goodness we bought a house with a generator! I've been spending the last few days getting things in order for the family holidays next week. Getting the Christmas tree was an adventure. I believe I may have purchased the last tree available on South Whidbey Island. Every place I went: "We didn't think that we would sell out so soon!" Fortunately one of the plant nurseries had one left. They warned me it was a little tall, but it was perfect for our house.

Only two small strands of our tree lights made it intact. I don't know what happened to the others, but they surely did not light. I went to the local hardware store and got some new lights, and that's when I noticed that things were strangely dark. No power! The store was on a generator, so I was able to transact my multicolored-light business. Coming home I noticed debris blown all over the road. I wrote this to Jill shortly after getting back home:

Like I said, almost the whole island is now without power. On the website Puget Sound Energy said that many of their main transmission lines were damaged, so it may be awhile before we get electricity restored. I've got our gas fireplaces going, the generator is powering the tree lights (and they look pretty good!), and I'm listening to Baroque/Renaissance Christmas music. This is good. Happy birthday again, Lian!

12/21/2018

It's the winter solstice! The time to celebrate light -- so here are photos I took of the lights on our Whidbey home for the first time. No big theme this year, just getting them out there in the wind and rain we've been having. Light up the house! Light up the Sound! There's a part where "life imitates art" but that's in the sabbatical project.


       

       

       




The only way to really see them is on a boat off the south coast of the island. Plus they're a bit scattered about. Such is the nature of our life these days. Yeah, kind of a metaphor, that.

12/24/2018

Now on Whidbey Island, and it was a night that totally lived up to my imaginings! Christmas Eve, twelve years after I started this blog. How did I get here? I don't know, but I'm happy. Lian, Itay, Shai (oh yeah!), Jill, Daniel, Daniel's friend Jussi, we all came together for a wonderful meal and happy holiday memories being made. Our electricity came on right around noon, and the rest of the day was marvelous. The sun was out, the sound was gorgeous, Mt. Rainier was in view, what a time. What a time. I want more of these! I'm selfish!

12/28/2018

Goodness, I blew right through Christmas and the following two days! It's been quite a season this year, action-packed with the antics of Shai and loads of fun with Daniel, his friend Jussi, Lian/Itay and Jill. Really great dinners, including sushi at a restaurant run by one of Jiro-sushi's 'grand-apprentices' (the apprentice of a Jiro apprentice). It was incredible. It was Lian's treat, a Christmas gift to the family, too! And dinner at the Roaming Radish out here on Whidbey, and Jill's amazing cooking. Then sight-seeing in Seattle, the Space needle:

   



Chihuly's amazing glass sculptures:

   



and the new 'biospheres' built by Amazon:

   


the Nordic Museum, plus generally terrific family feelings. I had high hopes that our holiday time in our new home would be good, and all were exceeded. This is what makes life so precious. I'll carry these memories with me.

And here is an object for collecting those memories, our 2018 Christmas tree. I took many photos, because the position of the tree in our central stairwell allowed for many viewing angles. Or maybe I just went berserk and took a whole bunch of pictures...

   

   

 


12/31/2018

Jill and I are celebrating New Years alone, perhaps for the first time ever in our entire lives. But it's good! Jill made an amazing dinner, and at one point she went upstairs to investigate some 'fireworks' sounds, and I sat alone, downstairs, in our new home. The lights were pleasantly dimmed, Renaissance madrigals were playing softly in the background, lights from Seattle were beaming across Puget Sound, our Christmas Tree was sparkling/glowing in the hall, and all was... terrific. I wrote "all was... good" there initially, but I'm enough of a bourgeois kinda guy that this really seemed terrific to me. We spent the afternoon hiking through some Whidbey forests, and then getting the ingredients for our dinner tonight. I did a little work on my project, we texted and phoned our friends and family. This is not a bad way to spend time in life at all. In fact, I'll call it: terrific.

We're about to go watch the ball drop in NYC, three hours ahead of our New Years out here. 2018 was a pretty amazing year. Here we are. I truly wonder what 2019 will bring.



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