Analogue/digitaldigital

... Now my mind is drifting into the angry land of copyright cops and criminalization of social arts-sharing and collaboration. And now drifting to thinking of the time it takes to copycorrectly and what it implies and to how the forces that want copyright recordings to be used only in very narrow contexts, are the same forces that are squeezing musical and artistic laborers’ work so they only make a tenth of a fraction of a cent for their works, once the lawyers and the businessmen that own their intellectual property are through with them. Anyways. If I focus on the formal aspects of songs that seem to work well in live aerial dance improv; spinning and not spinning; with floor work and without; with mounting and dismounting; with stillness and dynamism... then I can get better at being able to apply those principles to my friends’ music to make that music look even better than it already is, and to picking the music that will also help make me look better. But it’s hard when there are these scary giants that I happen to know about who might want to kill my dancing being seen if it is accompanied by the songs I’m studying; the works I’m learning from, because dancers don’t have time or money to reinvent the wheel and that’s bad practice when it comes to ideas and invention anyways... And, I mean, yeah what I’m actually about to work on, for the next show that isn’t a last minute improv bit, I hope, is DOIN IT LIVE. The music. Doing an act with some live musician buddies. Probably including myself because our performance space is actually too small for more than two people to be performing in the light at any given point (Do you see what we’re dealing with here?). And of course I also need to test that in the practice studio first, because I need to be able to show up and set up the sound and just give one (TRS probably) feed to whoever’s running sound, because we’re not dealing with a sound board here, either. The producers don’t have time to mentally process alternative tech setups, so I have to just have it ready to go and not even hint to them that I’m doing something different until it’s 100% ready. Anyways when last minute choices come up though. What do I look for in ANY music that comes my way? What makes a good improv bit? Am I allowed to THINK about heavily policed music? Because if I listen to it too much, then it will be what I think of to use in a last minute emergency setting. Or just in general because the medium is dance. It’s like if you threatened someone for not paying a subscription fee for the design of their lighting instruments. That designer/ engineer is not the person doing the work *in the moment the audience is watching them*. That designer/engineer doesn’t have to show up or spend any more time. They get money from the sales of their product, once. The live performer is the lighting tech and the DJ and the dancer and the announcer and everyone else who is in the room.  Anyways anyways anyways. What is good movement music? Do voices get in the way or do they add to it? Should the voices speak to the costume? Should I speak? Should I yell over the music? Should I try to hit moves with the beat or avoid hiting moves with the beat; avoid getting caught up in the beats and instead get caught in the interesting in betweens? If I keep working at framing and reframing this question in subsequent iterations of blogging, will better answers emerge? “A question well put is a problem half solved” -- John Dewey. It’s my favorite quote. John Dewey would have detested people who discourage people riffing off of each others’ literature. Riffing and improvising are the musical and dance equivalents of hypothesizing, formulating, and responding. I’ve spent more time writing this than I had tonight. I still need to pack up my makeup, pack up my three costume options, go to my partner’s house to see if he has shiny leggings I can use, practice trumpet (update: I ran out of time), and hope that I can nail down a few solid solo loop pedal songs in the near future so I can just run away from the world of recorded music problems and be some raw force of lonely sound and movement instead.

Also this blog is the one where I gave myself a lot of permission to just talk about talking before talking and being meta, which I’m doing now. These days when I try to write in one of my blogs, I end up doing entries like this one where I take so long to describe what I want to write before writing it that I delete everything and stop writing because I’m actually just trying to DO STUFF. Anyways the next post will be one in which I muse about the paradoxes inherent in the process of picking music for an improv aerial act. (I’m performing tomorrow night at the show in town. I don’t think ANYONE who lives in my hometown reads this blog, nor do I think more than two people in the world read this blog, but just in case you know the city I’m talking about and the bar that we perform at, here you go here’s your big chance to watch me DO STUFF tomorrow 3pm and 5pm shows bring ur vaccine card and a mask but also don’t come because the hospitals are filling to max capacity again and doctors are delaying other people getting surgeries and other important stuff because of the COVID cases filling up hospital beds still (and the cases are almost 100% unvaccinated people).

I get nervous that I’ll mess up somewhere. I missed a deadline already but it might have been pushed back anyways. Even if it didn’t, I’m moving forward. I’m nervous I need to throw together an aerial act to perform just one week from today. Even if I don’t remember my sequence (I already have a couple somewhat prepped in theory), it’s okay because I am pretty cool when it comes to improv, I do believe. I’m nervous for my conference presentation. That’s the one. I have to finish submitting the grad app so I can finish making the conference presentation read okay for an audience. As long as it’s an audience it seems like a pretty manageable thing to do though. I’m excited to say what I want to say. I socialized the process. Writing is so much more beautiful when it’s socialized. Without, it’s broken. Same with any technology.

Stay safe n' healthy y'all. <3 (;

Some friend of mine at some point in time said they like it when people refer to people they know by name without feeling the need to contextualize them; as if you’re already part of their family or you’ll get to know those people soon or it doesn’t matter how they’re connected; you’ll pick up on who they are by the way they are talked about instead of societally-constructed details. I kind of liked that they liked this because my natural inclination is to get angry and frustrated when people do that. I still think that talking like this or writing like this is pretentious, presumptive, and implicitly exclusionary, but I also still like imagining a world where not-teaching is never used to exclude or oppress. 

The very nature of the physical present is of spontaneity. The present is a constantly moving force of action that is pulled every which way by past origins and future possibilities, whether they happened or will happen ten years or ten milliseconds away. As these present actions are played out, they add on to history. The mini chronology in my diary represented a pattern of thought against the “icky boy”, which I, luckily, evolved out of. Other histories show patterns, too.  For instance, the actions of geese have established migration patterns, which are frameworks for them to live within. America has established a pattern of presidential elections, which we base off of an unwavering, physical document called the constitution. If patterns do badly though, it is the present’s job to plan for the future and break those patterns, as well as to reflect on the past to keep the thoughts up to date. I did this with my diary. Movements for equality or other facets of a better life have broken patterns of unfair treatment by reformulating old ways of looking at the constitution, and acting in accordance to the updated point of view. Knowledge and action are always evolving. We can’t control the past, but we can build off of and away from it to make a better future for our present selves to move into.” - Teen self, 2010

- I have no reason to publish any of the writings I was proud of, or anything I write today, except on Facebook or for my personal archives. I remember making a purposeful social change in my writing style at some point. I decided the highest form of writing would be to write useful letters to specific people. Grants count. The more people the letters are useful to, the better. I feel confused about publishing in paper publications; I am only interested in publishing according to context; to answer a question. I definitely used to run into problems because I would try to do more than just answer prompts. I would try to answer them and then add my own creations and syntheses. But there wasn’t time or space within the document constraint criteria, so I would try to shove everything in in a really messy way. Since my teen and younger adult years, I’ve gotten better at compartmentalizing where I put my processing-and-integration writing and where I communicate and try out ideas socially so that they don’t make outrageous or unacceptably extraneous appearances in formal documents.  - There are things I was writing in 2010 that are more coherent and wise than things I was writing between 2012-2014. This correlates with my levels of insanity between 2012-2014 and how much I did not want to be in college at the time. I am trying to banish the “what ifs” that this inspires. Useless: “what if I had taken a break when I wanted to?” “what if I had transferred to a better school for me when I tried to?” “what if I had taken the honors program more seriously?” “what if I had transferred out of the arts college and into arts & sciences college like I wanted to instead of listening to the people who exclaimed ‘but people transfer TO the visual and performing arts college, not OUT of it!” I have tried to make this past useful. I have tried to learn something from it. Learn how to somehow avoid getting trapped in a situation like that ever again. Two interpretations I have been operating with for the past four years, knowing they work but are not sufficient: 1) I should have somehow known what I was doing and what I wanted my work to look like after college. 2) I should have not been in college. Possible conclusions that render paradoxical, stagnant, and possibly impossible working models: 1) I should only do things if I know every single aspect of what I am getting into and what will arise. 2) Despite loving writing, reading, editing, and learning voraciously, despite secretly wanting to be media studies and/ or writing teacher since 2013, and despite desperately desiring to be surrounded by other people who love these things, the academy is not the place to be. Conclusions that are possible and if true render desirable, progressive working models: 1) I can never know enough about what any given moments or series of tasks and environments will give rise to, so I should just move forward imperfectly and take the risk of living “wrong” again incase it turns out to be better than the present. 2) Despite not having taken various possibly better paths in the past and therefore never proving for sure whether they would have worked or not, I can trust that, after four years outside of the academy, four or more years to assess and integrate the past, I am now far more capable of being responsible and purposeful with my life choices. I know what I want and I want it because I have a better idea of all of the elements that need to go in to the formulation of life pursuit goals for myself, personally. 3) I am currently in the process of making the types of choices I wish I had made in 2011.  

The Theory of Living Human Systems can be a metaphor for both earth and machine. Our environment, the tools we use, and our knowledge are all part of how we interact with each other. In the light of intersubjective understanding, who we interact with is our environment. An understanding of how this living human environment affects us and how we can direct the flows of information and energy in a positive direction helps us find our place in the world. Making “music” with each other (see Levitin, p. 253) is how we, as human groups, emote towards a cooperative living environment.”  - Another acceptable salvage from my mostly embarrassing google docs archive. Author: YA Self, circa 2012.

“When we ripped up the land, replaced the soil with iron railroads, and flew across Earth and sea to far off destinations, we defied space and time. Faster and faster, the world grew smaller and the sky’s endless promises expanded over our heads. We lurched towards them, connecting our minds with the stars through TV, radio, and satellite stations. The modern period saw our lives gain speed right along with the tools we built to communicate; allowing us to exchange more ideas, more images of what we thought we saw, more money...” - Acceptable excerpt from one of many (mostly embarrassing) attempts to write articles summarizing the history of everything. Author: Self, circa 2012.

Marshall law enforced on ICE protests and noncompliant cities; electronic shackles used for overflow... solutions: counties must ban e-shackles ASAP and get involved in abolishing prison industrial complex in general bc EVERYONE is next...  possible our solution = explain such a trajectory to city councils or whever there is power to speak to, followed by the following printed and delivered in leaflet form: “Hi! This isn’t a threat; just a friendly reminder: ‘First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me’ -- Martin Niemöller Please take whatever steps you can to insure this doesn’t happen again, thx! <3 ”   In addition, demand utopia as an alternative to dystopia!  ok there I’ve expressed some anxieties. I’m really happy the blockades are happening. I’m kind of going crazy because I am finally so sick of not having a regular schedule I can work with/ around for the past 4 years and I feel the effects of how that precarity blocks me... I have always (reported/ confirmed by mom) struggled a lot with transitioning from activity to activity especially when the activities are new and/ or unexpected types of things. My imagined utopia might be obtainable within the next year or so: be able to do aerial dance like I do but regularly, around 7pm each evening, alternating light/ cardio days with more technical repetition days. Have some time for breakfast and stretching in the mornings. Hopefully cut the sugar, alcohol, and smokeables. Have about the same 6-8 hours of work time through out the day. The tricky bit: do work that allows me to dilligently dig in and do the best I can with my given skill set to help make the world a better place. As I transition from the precarious gigs I do now into whatever’s next, that is my main guiding goal. The capitalist society I live in is generally averse to providing material support to someone who wants to work to de-alienate, de-fragment, and de-pollute society in any meaningful or sustainable ways. So... it’s going to be a challenge. Some might say it’s impossible. But I’ve been reading. The utopias are possible. There are ways. When will I settle? When I’m in that schedule and it’s working and my work is in a stream prefiguring a society of constant praxis prefiguring the world we can have if we redistribute the trillions of dollars of assets that is currently being witheld from folks doing the actual work. 

I swear I can feel excess energy build up in my system when I eat sugar or heavily carb-y things! This is a note to self. You don’t have to believe me if yr reading this; I’m just tunin’ in and if I’m wrong it certainly still helps to believe I can feel this but I’m pretty sure I’m right. 

damn i kinda miss the very elaborate procrastination tools I used to have on lockdown before my last computer died and I ended up with this other situation. By “tools” I mean I had certain creation flows that involved mashing up lots of screenshots, glitching shit, collaging, and using weird old ancient computer visual emulators... certain quick ways of processing trash... I used to think it was a bad habit left over from artsy days but I’m starting to think that processing trash using trash apps is actually fine

can someone find me a photo of an astroturf floor surrounded by tall b&w checkered walls all very brightly lit in a room where you can’t see the ceiling? Large checkers; no smaller than 2x2′ each. For some reason I think there is a scene in the 1992 aesthetically fucking-awesome film Toys w/ Robin Williams that might fulfill this wish but I can’t find any via a cursory google search.