the hartses

another former Method member, Joel and his wife Sarah have jumped american ship to join the ranks of those teaching English in China. for quite awhile too. i am jealous and also proud. i will be thinking and praying for them especially in upcoming months. for those of you who don't know Joel, he is quite an accomplished music writer, as well as author of this blog.i am still searching around to see if they've got a blog having to do with their current travels... here is their website.more amazing friends doing amazing things. all very motivating. i thank God for my friends in this world. it's funny to say, but they are making it a better place. how novel. and possible...

a night with matt and jim

it's been too long since i've seen my friend Matt. we studied music together in college, as well as played in a band. he's one of the most generous and kind souls i've ever known. his dad and him are on a journey from new york out to idaho, via mississippi, and stopped in for one night. our short time together was refreshing. matt has doing some great work in africa while studying at columbia university. check out his and his wife Jacinda's blog here.. i miss the days of the method.

diane arbus

first trip to the dentist in, say...7 years?

so i was plodding away at something on my computer a couple weeks back and unconsciously fingering some of my teeth when a good chunk of one came tumbling out of my mouth.
hmn.
first thoughts: my teeth are rotting. this is what i get for not having been to the dentist since before college.
and more importantly: i have no dental benefits or insurance.
and possibly more importantly than that: what have i been doing since college to have no dental benefits or insurance?

i made an appointment. cavities. but not too horrible, considering.

i had my tooth pulled out yesterday without the "gas".
when i entered the office, though, i stumbled onto an employee prayer meeting. they asked me if i needed prayer, so i made a request. i prayed with them before i signed in. that's kentucky for ya.
the tooth came out as a miracle- apparently i had such bent roots in it that the dentist would have never considered pulling it, and would have sent me to an oral $urgeon, had she known. i was still bracing for the pull after she had it in her hand. didn't know it had even happened. and it ended up being pretty cheap. hallelujah.

the 360 works

i wrote a post a little while back about how my relatively new xbox 360 died on me. i despaired and then thought maybe i'd just live with it and regain some valuable real life hours.
well, where microsoft's products fall short, t's made up for it with customer service.
i called them, they sent me a prepaid box, i shipped my xbox out for repair, and a new one came back free. pretty nice.

and this means... see you later.

maybe they call it the xbox 360 because of the circle it makes when you buy it, have to send it back to microsoft when it breaks, and then returns to you again.

do re mi fa so la ti

when i was in college and people (usually of the older generation) would ask me my major, and i'd say "ohhh, well... music!". so many times i got the usual response, which was "well that must be fun for you!", or "oh what a great outlet."
if i wasn't lucky enough to see the conversation end there, "what sort of job are you going to have with that?" would inevitably follow.
though these certain types may have been right to doubt the security in careerpath, the part that i felt they often misunderstood is that music is not just a visceral hobby or "outlet"- of course it should be these things sometimes- but it can also be incredibly ACADEMIC.
the picture above is a screenshot of an max/msp patch written and used by the electronic artists Autechre.
here's some audio programming shots from other various programs. many of them aren't even exclusively for music- they are more like programming languages, used to research or shape audio information, which, in our glorious day and age- can be conveyed digitally.





an example of code from Super Collider:

"// play a mixture of pink noise and an 800 Hz sine tone
{ SinOsc.ar(800, 0, 0.1) + PinkNoise.ar(0.01) }.play;

// modulate the sine frequency and the noise amplitude with another sine
// whose frequency depends on the horizontal cursor position
{
var x = SinOsc.ar(MouseX.kr(1, 100));
SinOsc.ar(300 * x + 800, 0, 0.1)
+
PinkNoise.ar(0.1 * x + 0.1)
}.play;

// list iteration: create a collection of indices multiplied by their values
[1, 2, 5, 10, -3].collect { |item, i| item * i }

// factorial function
f = { |x| if(x == 0) { 1 } { f.(x-1) * x } }"

Years ago, people of culture studied music in school, took lessons requisitely, considering music to be integral to an education. They played cellos like they wore dresses. (Often.) Today, take a high school like mine, which had NO music program whatsoever, aside from an elective option choir, which was the worst in the western states, statistically and seriously.

The point is, music is intrinsically simple. Western music (as we know it) is based around only 7 tones of a major scale. But music also has a depth to it that so many people will never know, never understand- maybe because it's represented most often now by MTV and not by actual real and thinking musicians. There's a planets worth of organic tones we can spend lifetimes trying to emulate. Much like painting in visual art. And technology is only accelerating that capacity. I find this absolutely thrilling, humbling, and challenging.