previous months: 8/8/2009 -- 12/31/2009 

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2/17/2010   2/19/2010   3/4/2010   3/10/2010   3/22/2010   4/10/2010   4/16/2010  
4/18/2010   5/11/2010   5/18/2010   5/24/2010   6/3/2010   6/8/2010   6/18/2010  
6/25/2010   7/1/2010   7/10/2010   7/14/2010   7/15/2010   7/31/2010  
8/9/2010 -- next page  

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1/1/2010

A whole new decade. The way we measure time. How long is ten years? From right now? It seems almost an eternity to me, or at least a worthwhile goal. Not so long ago ten years would have been almost inconsequential. The unit of measurement I use, the one more-or-less always present in the back of my mind, is the monthly visit to Weill-Cornell. What will Dr. Pearse tell me this time?

There is a camaraderie that happens in places like the 'blood work' room at the hospital. During my last visit, just before the holidays, I was swapping stories with an older man who had one of the leukemias. He said: "When I first learned I had it, I figured I had about six months left. That was three years ago!" I told him my story was similar, and here I am -- three years ago, yeah. When I saw Dr. Pearse afterwards, he noted that there continues to be some low-level (very low-level, yay) myeloma activity, but that the Revlimid has been working to keep it in check. I couldn't stop myself, and I asked one of those unanswerable questions: "How long do you think the Revlimid will continue to work?" Roger smiled, he and I both knew he couldn't give a definite answer. But he did say "I have an induction patient on Revlimid who has been in remission for six years now."

"Wow"! I thought, "Six years!" And then on the way home: "wow..." I thought, "six years..." My oh my, how the scale has changed.

I'm not being morose about this, though. Being here -- now -- with Lian, Jill, Daniel; seeing my mom/dad/sis-and-her-family has been wonderful. Last night with friends and neighbors here in Roosevelt, and I just finished a smallish piece of music using some new software I'm testing, and, and, and, (and I've written this here before): this is a good life. Another three years would be great, six years would be fabulous, and ringing in 2020 would be amazing. Who knows... beyond? The platitudes fill my mind: make the most of every moment! every second is precious! life is a gift! Maybe so, maybe so. In the meantime I'm happy. I like this new decade so far.


1/7/2010

Although we don't go back into classes at Columbia for about another week, it sure seems the holiday break is over. Lian left for Seattle a few days ago (slightly delayed because Newark airport was a total zoo because of an annoying security breach), Daniel's back in school, Jill is dealing with fun state DEP stuff, and I'm hacking merrily away at some more code and music. It was a such a terrific time, though! I want it to live on and on, but that's not the way it works, I guess...

... but I did run across a set of glorious astronomical pictures accompanying an article in the New York Times discussing a new book titled Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle by photographer/filmmaker Michael Benson. I was particularly intrigued by this photo:

not so much for the image as for the accompanying text that said that the "snake nebula" pictured was located about 650 light-years away. We're being showered by all the information that was formed by the snakey inhabitants of this nebula 650 years ago. If I had some kind of snazzy, sci-fi 'experience translator' that could capture and reconstitute all this speed-of-light data, I could re-experience what happened there way-back-when.

Once sci-fi speculating starts, it's hard to stop. Building an 'experience translator' is one thing, and then the next is to find a way to project my consciousness out beyond the wavefront of information emanating from our planet Earth for the last week of December, 2009. Then I could re-experience the joy of this past holiday season! Project out farther beyond the spreading info, and I could do it again and again!

I thought this, and then I thought: "Jeez, who would want to do that?" First of all, the operation is a complete exercise of egotistical narcissism. How fun is that? What a waste of time. Secondly, a total re-experiencing through some strange reconstitutive immersion would be blindly redundant. I think when we say we want to 'relive' something, it has more to do with an interpenetrative nostalgia, a remembering that re-lives through a filter of experience, a way of heightening what the original episode meant.

Music obviously does this for me, and books too. I read this from Wisconsin writer Michael Perry's book Coop the other day:

Reading that, I recalled the hay-mow barns of my own youth. I knew and could inhabit the experience that Perry was describing; the smells, the feel of cold and the look of the lights. My consciousness didn't simply 're-experience' something, instead it produced a time-spanning integration of life. The result was both remembrance and renewal.

Maybe that's what my hopes are for this blog, a way of tracing out things-that-happened that will allow a future-informed reading. Maybe for me, maybe for the kids (although they're building their own experiences, and I doubt they can have the vivid recollection of "a thick sachet of alfalfa and manure" like I do). Whatever. I know I probably tend to make this all a little too "rosy colored" (a habit I get from my mom), but maybe not really. I do find that I can go back and read parts of the past three years here and remember: "oh yeah, that was what it was like to sit on the couch and think that my body was falling apart." It makes me different now.

I'm quoting a lot from books lately. I've had some free time to read. Here's another -- it may or may not be apropos, but at the end of the Times article I mentioned above about the Benson space-photo book, there was this quote:

I don't even know what that means, but it sure sounds cool.



1/18/2010

Classes for the spring term start tomorrow. I fall into the habit of measuring my life by "stuff I got done". This was a good break-time in those terms -- finished (more or less) the port of RTcmix to the iPhone, did a presentation with Dave Sulzer at the Guggenheim museum, our fun brainwave-audio show, spent great time with Jill/Lian/Daniel, got semi-caught up with e-mails(!), finished a set of patches and pieces using Jeff Snyder's manta interface, finished some reviews, got classes arranged, blah blah blah... but it never seems enough. Maybe it's the rush to continue filling in my train of memories. I was sent a really terrific article from good friend Katharine Norman earlier in the month. She manages to articulate a lot of what seems important to me, even more so now, about the re-experience of memory and the way music operates.

Not only music, not just text, but life itself. Shortly after I had written the previous blog entry talking about the Michael Perry book, I came out from swimming some laps at a local indoor pool, and the clouds, the sky, they had a character that immediately transported me back to a generically-crisp midwestern March day in High School. Driving home, I snapped some photos of the sky:

   


Whatever it was about the deeply clear blue, the gradations in white and grey or the pacing of the clouds, I was suddenly zipped back through my life. I was again facing an inchoate future with all the attendant feelings that used to wash through me. Early spring in High School. Have things changed that much? What's still left to do?

Here's something: Douglas Repetto and his wife Amy Benson became new parents two days ago! Now that's a memory.


1/23/2010

What a week this has been. Not a good one, either. The news coming from Haiti, post-earthquake, has been terrible. I knew of the poor conditions in Haiti after reading Tracy Kidder's excellent profile of Dr. Paul Farmer (the founder of Partners in Health): Mountains Beyond Mountains. Shamefully, I really didn't do much at the time, and unfortunately it takes an awful disaster to make the world aware of how desperate the people in that country have been. Brother-in-law John is doing some wonderful work to help, and Daniel has decided to coordinate a "Haiti Relief Walk-a-thon" through our UU church in Princeton. I'm happy to be a part of this family.

Speaking of family, I haven't had a chance to talk with my Dad about the latest Supreme Court nonsense. Corporations now can give unrestricted donations to political campaigns. Seems that these downtrodden corporations are just like us normal people, too, and they are entitled to First Amendment protection of their right to speak. And speak they will, I am sure. I recall when Dad ran for Governor of Indiana, one of the big factors that caused him to halt his campaign was the scale of fundraising that was required to become a 'representative of the people'. And that was over two decades ago! This latest malformed decision is from the George W. Bush-laden Court; the worst president ever just seems to keep on giving and giving...

Speaking of governors, the valiant (yes I am being sarcastic) new chief executive of New Jersey, Chris Christie, has posted his 'transition documents' on the New Jersey Governor web site. The one focused on the Department of Environmental Protection is just fascinating. My poor wife, the awards she has won for her work protecting the health and environment of New Jersey citizens, the time she has spent on the Science Advisory Board for the US EPA, her involvement in anti-terror/homeland security radiological activities, it's all wrong. See, she was basing her work on faulty science, because "real" science dovetails nicely with the core mission (little did we know!) of the Department of Environmental Protection, which is to help developers and business interests do what they want in New Jersey. Yeah.

Finally, my selfish, personal favorite badness of the week: the death of health-care reform in the US. In an almost classically cruel/ironic twist of fate, the late Senator Ted Kennedy's senate seat was filled via a special election in Massachusetts by a Republican candidate who has vowed to halt health-care reform in Congress. With 41 votes now in the Senate, a filibuster -- something that used to be called the 'nuclear option' when the Democrats were in the minority because it essentially shuts down government, but in Republican hands it's simply another procedural tool to be used as a matter of course -- can be used to stop any further action on health care.

I think back to the two-month argument we had with our insurance company over a $10,000+ bill. While in Switzerland, I was hospitalized with a life-threatening dental abscess (in retrospect I can see it was probably due to my increasingly myeloma-compromised immune system). The company claimed we were liable for the full amount because the doctors used were "out of network". Well duh... I was in Switzerland. They eventually relented and reimbursed us for the bill (Spital Interlaken required us to pay up-front: "Vee are so sorry, Herr Garton, vee haff had much trouble getting monies from US insurance companies, so vee do not deal mit them"). I think back to the nearly $5,000 we were billed for the implantation of a central-line catheter for my stem-cell harvest. The procedure itself was pre-authorized (I made sure of that), but -- silly me! -- I forgot to get the anesthesiologist and anesthetic pre-authorized. Next time I'll be sure to get the hospital gown 'pre-authed' also. I think back on just two weeks ago, when we had a change-over in our prescription drug benefits plan due to a renegotiation by the State of NJ (oh that wonderful "choice" we all get with our current health insurance system!). After about two weeks of phone-calls from both me AND Dr. Pearse's office, they finally got set to deliver my Revlimid. The two-week delay the company insisted was necessary meant that I would have missed an entire cycle. They suggested I go to a nearby specialty pharmacy to get a one-week supply to 'tide me over'. Would they reimburse, as they are providing the drug benefit now? Oh no, the drug has to come from their approved pharmacy. How much would a one-week supply cost? Only about $4,000. Dr. Pearse's office called again (isn't there a better use of their time?) and they did indeed get me the drug with only a few days' delay.

The reason I'm dumping all this out is to explain my depression and occasional ranting about the health-care legislation. I don't rant as much as I used to; life is too short(!). I've also tried, probably less successfully than I think, not to inject too much politics into this blog. This week has piled it on, however. and I need to say this: The health-care reform bill that would have passed is indeed flawed, but it had at least two components that were near and dear to my selfish heart: no cap on lifetime benefits allowed, and no denial for the infamous pre-existing conditions allowed. It was at least a start.

Now that the health insurance industry realizes it can shut down any attempt at reform, what's to prevent the corporations from acting with impunity? Heck, they can already speak out loud with billions of dollars (see above). Look at the history I've already had dealing with relatively 'good' health insurance plans, what do you think I can expect in the future? As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it:

Bear in mind that the horrors of health insurance -- outrageous premiums, coverage denied to those who need it most and dropped when you actually get sick -- will get only worse if reform fails, and insurance companies know that they're off the hook.

I expect at some point, if I'm lucky and I live for awhile longer, I'll get the "sorry, you're just not worth it any longer" letter. What will I do then?



Yikes, such bile! Such egocentric blathering, especially in the face of all the larger distress this past week! I guess the thing to do is to try to concentrate on the good that is happening, like John's initiative (can't say too much about it right now) and Daniel's compassion, and Jill's struggle to keep doing effective enviromental work, and also think about nice events, even if they are simply local. Classes started at Columbia, they seem like they'll be totally enjoyable this term. Friday I got to see dear friend Pauline Oliveros at a meeting at Columbia; the occasion a particularly pleasant one: we're planning the concert for her receiving the William Schuman Award. A very nice thing indeed! We had a wonderful dinner with our friends the Ellentuck's last night at an Italian place in Freehold, oh New Jersey! I saw Douglas at the CMC earlier in the week, he's a frantic new Dad.

One of the ineffectual and probably inappropriate responses I often have to bad news is to write some music. Coupled with a desire to just drift away, I wind up with a piece like this new one:

Good-bye, health care. Good-bye, earthquakes. So long, Supreme Corporation. Hasta la vista, Governor Christie.



2/5/2010

I've been thinking a lot about memory lately. Re-living memories.

We're supposed to get a fair amount of snow later today through tomorrow. Snow!


2/6/2010

I woke up this morning and this was the view out our bedroom window:
Snow! We finally got got a decent snowstorm while I was here to see it! I was half-convinced (well, not really...) last night that we wouldn't get any from the storm coming up the coast. We did.
Something about how a snowfall can transform everything, make all strange and new, it still amazes me. It gives me hope. This can happen here! If a predicted snow event doesn't occur, if we have a 'mild' winter with mainly cold, lousy rain, I want to shout out: look how vile our inattention to global warming has made the world! I'm selfish and obnoxious, and I want snow! When I was young, I loved to play in the snow. I want to be young again.
Today was so nice, I even wrote a quick piece inspired by the snow:
There are some small glitches, tiny clicks, towards the end of the piece. I left them in -- they remind me of the records I would play, inside after the snow. And for now, right here, we're home, we're safe, the world seems ok for awhile. I am so lucky! As I write this I can hear an owl hooting outside. Snow.



2/14/2010

Another Happy Valentines Day! What a week leading up to this one, too. Lots to commit to text here (somehow "write down here" doesn't seem to fit as I tap-tap on my laptop keyboard). It's interesting how this blog has shifted. When I started, I truly did think of this as being a hybrid of a last-will/testament kind of thing with a desperate notion of a written thoughts-and-feelings legacy for my family. I also did not imagine that I would be writing "Happy Valentines Day" in 2010. I was literally counting the months.

Now this blog-space has become more a way to record how life is unfolding, I suspect primarily for myself. I can go back and revisit events, re-align my memories, and affix in words the way things were for me at a particular point in time. I report mundane life-occurrences here, with much more an emphasis on the the simple 'log' part of 'blogging' (I still dislike that gross-sounding word). When I set the site up, I did it -- contra- most contemporary blogging software -- so that it would read first-to-last in time-ordered sequence. I figured it would be a grand linear narrative, building with each entry towards, well, something.

The good news is that something hasn't arrived. The arrow of time I had anticipated has flown nicely off-course. As a result, my blog has degenerated into semi-chaotic ramblings about daily life. Like most Real Blogs, I guess. Now, I worry, is when things will dramatically change: when I least expect it! But hey, that's the way life is, eh?

In the meantime, it's still fun to post random thoughts and (b)log events and happenings here, for friends and family. When I started this blog I wrote:

The nice thing about getting a diagnosis of a dread disease is that you don't really care about pseudo-problems of personal presentation like that any more.


So here are a few things that happened this week:

1. The Snowstorm(s)! -- yikes, we know have about as much snow on the ground as I've seen since I moved to New Jersey in the early 1980's. We were hit with one storm last weekend that left about 8-10" for us, and then through Tuesday and Wednesday another storm came up the coast with an additional 15-18" of frozen water. Pictures here:

We lost power for about 5-6 hours on Wednesday, enough for a nice candlelight dinner, but not so bad that we got terribly cold. I'm one of those idiots who actually enjoys the snow. I may write more on this oddness later.

2. Olympics! -- The 2010 Winter Olympics started on Friday night in Vancouver! Oh we are such Olympic junkies in our family. The really amazing part is that Lian was able to attend one of the events, and a really exciting one, too. She got tickets to see the 1500 meter short-track speed skating trials and finals. US skaters Apolo Anton Ohno and J.R. Celski won silver and bronze in an amazing race.

Jill and I remember watching the Olympics with Lian when she was young. Every two years we would avidly follow all the latest summer or winter Olympic news, recording programs when we couldn't watch so we could scan the highlights later (we're doing the same with Daniel even as I type this). And now, here she is, surpassing (yeah!) her parents and being able to attend the Actual Thing. This is as it should be.

3. music... -- This has been a surprisingly productive period for me, musically, and I haven't done a very good job of coherently posting recent work. Although I have linked most the pieces I've done in the past month here, the links have been relatively imbedded within the text. Here they are again:

In addition to these, I've also been doing some good recording with Terry and Pradeep Ratnayake a Sri Lankan sitarist working at the Computer Music Center as a Fulbright Scholar. Pradeep has been involved in a lot of our classes at the CMC, and he was the star of the Carnegie Hall concert with Terry I mentioned in this blog a few months ago. Terry has continued to work with Pradeep, and just for fun we started to get together for occasional sessions at the CMC (me on laptop, Pradeep and Terry playing sitar and mandolin). I've really been enjoying the musical exchange, both Pradeep and Terry are wonderful players/people. We recorded a few of them so far: The first set of recordings ("PGP-liveprentis") were made using only a simple stereo recorder 'live' in the room, the quality isn't as nice as I would prefer. I really like the second set ("PGP-liveprentis2"), especially the last two of the four. I don't think I'll ever get tired of doing music.



2/17/2010

Last week while it was snowing, I stood outside on our back porch for awhile, listening to the snow fall in the night. As I've said, I like the way snow alters the world, transmuting a familiar landscape into an alien world of fluid white forms. Standing there, I felt like I was watching the world slow and stop, the snowflakes encasing all in a crystal container. The processes of existence were becoming frozen.

Is this possible? Can we secure particular moments, hold them fast against the entropy of time? I'd like to think so, my life has been happy. There are parts I would like to keep, even though their distinctive character probably only exists in the instant of living them. It's pleasant to pretend that we can halt life at the high points, but the halting would certainly negate what makes them high. Oh well, at least I was there once. Maybe I can draw on a stockpile of happiness to help through any rough times ahead.

I like the sound of the snow, but the "sound" is actually an absence. As part of the transformational magic the snowfall brings, it dampens the standard sounds of the outdoors environment. I wanted to record this, to do my own audio version of 'freezing the moment'. How do you record silence, though?


2/19/2010

ouch!

This past Wednesday I went in for my monthly check-up with Dr. Pearse. All the stats were approximately where I've been for awhile -- my "M-spike" is very low but detectable (different than complete remission). This measures the amount of monoclonal antibodies that my bone marrow is producing. Monoclonal means they are bogus, they are being produced by myeloma cells. So the myeloma is active, but is being kept in close check by the Revlimid. This is not an unexpected state-of-affairs, and hopefully it will continue for a long time. The other statistics that they watch, my white blood cell count, my red count, were slightly on the low side. But this is also 'as expected', typical of people on long-term Revlimid.

Essentially I'm doing well. No other big problems detected, and the drugs are doing what they should. The "ouch" above is because I had my Zometa (bisphosphonate) infusion therapy the day before yesterday. Zometa halts bone degradation and repairs bone lesions caused by the cancer. Initially I had this done every visit, but now I do it every six months. I forget how much it knocks me down. I also forget that it takes several days after the infusion for me to feel the effects. Last night I met a small group of my current and former grad students for dinner over at Princeton (Jason Freeman, now teaching at Georgia Tech, is doing a piece with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. Current CMC grad students Dan Iglesia and Jeff Snyder both have jobs at Princeton now. Go Lions! Jason's student Akito Van Troyer was also along). I started feeling pretty lousy through the dinner, and when I woke this morning my body pretty much ached all over. Not fun. Now that I recall how it goes, I know I'll be feeling like I've got a nasty body-flu for the next few days.

Fortunately what I have to do in the near-term involves a lot of sitting around. This is the season of our graduate admissions review, and we have about 125-130 applicants in music composition for our grad program. We'll probably be able to accept 3 or 4. Lots of listening and reading on tap. Ouch indeed. The drugs continue to work.



Last week I did record the sound of snow falling, Wednesday afternoon when it was somewhat granulated. An excerpt: It's not silence, but it is snow.



3/4/2010

Yesterday I drove from my childhood home in Columbus (IN) to Cincinnati (OH). Mara Helmuth had invited me to give a talk in her Cincinnati Conservatory graduate seminar about my music and software. I welcomed the chance to combine a nice visit with Mara and her students and a short stay with my Mom and Dad. Mom's birthday was March 1, so it all worked well. Happy Birthday, Mom!

The drive over, especially along the southern part of I-74, was strangely interesting. I had made this trek a number of times in my past, but not so many times that it had become blandly familiar. I would travel this way in college to attend concerts, we would sometimes book air travel through the Cincinnati Airport (back when it was a less-expensive option), and one of the most memorable trips was for my job interview at the Conservatory. I recall driving to the interview, passing different neighborhoods, scanning houses on hillsides and thinking: "I wonder what it would be like to live here?"

There is also something about the scale of the land, the gently rolling Ohio valley hills and the particular slant of light that immediately propels my consciousness into my past memories. I wouldn't call my drive yesterday especially intense; it wasn't that kind of remembrance. But it produced a certain pronounced resonance with the life that I have lived.

I managed to turn the resonance into a veritable echo chamber by deciding to listen to some earlier music I had composed. I put on a set of pieces I had written that more-or-less initiated my musical collaboration with Gregory Taylor, my "gresponses" (pieces are linked here or on my music page).. This piece:

was made by recording a large segment of the sounds infiltering our Roosevelt living room one summer afternoon (they start several minutes into the piece). I had a friend, Eliot Handelman, in graduate school who had an intriguing idea of how listening to music overlays a kind of 'consciousness' on top of your own thinking. Listening to gresponse3 operated like a limbic system version of this concept. The music grafted one set of memories directly onto another, I could hear the summer sounds of my Roosevelt house as I was reliving my travels to and from live-events in Cincinnati. The juxtaposition brought into sharp relief the trajectory of my life, the chaotic path connecting Columbus, Cincinnati, Roosevelt, Jill, my family. Jill's reaction when I played gresponse3 for her after finishing it years ago was that it sounded a bit 'self indulgent'. I was certainly indulging my self with this experience, revisiting the random events that have led to my being on Interstate 74 at that moment.

One of the strong memories I had while driving was thinking -- in the past -- about where life would lead. Like I said, "I wonder what it would be like to live here?" I often tried (and I still do) to project myself into the future, to imagine what it would be like to be different people, to construct different lives.

Indeed, "what would it be like?" Listening, remembering, now knowing, I can answer that question: it is utterly unimaginable.


3/10/2010

My trip to Cincinnati also connected with two other memorable trips along that road. (I wrote that first sentence last week, just now getting around to finishing this entry! But I wanted to write these things.) Both trips had a substantial impact on my life.

The first trip was when I went to pick up Jill from visiting one of her friends who was studying briefly at the University of Cincinnati. It was Jill's first time out to the Midwest specifically to see me. When I travel back to visit CCM, there is one street corner in particular that I can recall from that visit to get Jill. I round the corner and I still feel a flash back to that thrill of life-adventure.

On the way back from visiting with Mara, I took a small detour. I stopped the car and took this picture:

It's on the way back to Indiana from the Cincinnati airport, and it was at this exact location where I had stopped the car years ago and proposed marriage to Jill. Memories? Oh my. What a time! I like this spot because just beyond here the view opens out onto an enormous vista of the Ohio River valley. The future seemed so vast, so limitless. And in retrospect, like I wrote above, utterly unimaginable. I hope Daniel and Lian are lucky enough to find the passion and excitement that Jill and I had.



3/22/2010

I just finished reading (slowly!) a thought-provoking book of poetry that Gregory Taylor had sent me awhile ago. The title is Against the Forgetting by a Dutch poet, Hans Faverey. It's a selection of poems from his life-work, he died in 1990. Each poem is a concise and mind-bending gem of language; all very short but with a large penumbra of hinted context. I encountered delicious lines like: "It is becoming now again. It is now almost no longer early evening. It will shortly be dark:"

Then I ran across this poem:

Sheesh! That surely captures something, doesn't it? And then there was this line from another poem: I still feel and think this on occasion. A feeling sneaks up on me, usually when I'm feeling low, like this whole myeloma thing is fake. I want it to just go away, I want to awaken from all this ... and when will it stop being so?

But this past weekend was not one of those occasions. The weather was glorious, the minor flood (heavy rain last week!) washed away, and springtime landed firmly in our yard. Daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses, even some forsythia all burst through the ground. Daniel did an excellent job in a school play Friday night, health-care reform just passed Congress, I've gotten a lot of work accomplished during Columbia's spring break... Yeah, my feet and hands (and brain...) are kind of 'tingly' from the Revlimid, but dang it is good to be alive!

Here's one more line from Faverey:




4/10/2010

Sometimes the Revlimid hits me a little harder than I expect, and today I've been feeling a bit tired and draggy. Of course, I could just be getting old... and in fact I will be "officially" older soon! Or it could be the amazing spring weather we've been having the past week, but I just awoke from an afternoon dream in which I was debating what I would write in this blog. This dream happened probably because I haven't posted anything for a few weeks, although -- as I've mentioned before -- I do think about writing here. If only thinking were action, I'd be One Accomplished Guy!

The dream-debate was about whether or not to put in a cryptic entry, something like I look through the square of our upper window, the trees against the stark blue of the sky, or come up with some tortured faux-profound observation: Life changes, our surroundings shift; a flood in our home warps the floorboards. I shave them and place them back. We always have to work to make 'experience' fit into our existence. The third option was a simple reporting of a few things that have happened recently, and that's probably the best re-entry into the blog I can imagine. So:


So that's the rundown. Jill's job is difficult with the transition to the new administration, still unclear how bad it will get. My computer music seminar his year has been one of the best I've given. Things are progressing at the CMC, all that. There, for now.



4/16/2010

I turned 53 years old two days ago (April 14), so Happy Birthday to me! I'm running several days late in this, which is par-for-the-course as our academic term winds down. Also, Happy Birthday to my good friend Judy Klein, she shares a 4/14 birthdate. While we're at it, Happy Birthday to my old friend Dave Fulton and my sister-in-law-in-law Elsa Murphy, both just before mine. And of course son Daniel coming up on 4/18, I won't be late for that one!

I dreamed I wrote in this blog last night. I dreamed that I wrote of the dogwood blossoms, appearing early this spring because of the uncanny warm weather we've been having. Last night before I went to sleep, I was sitting on our upper back porch among our dogwoods. As the twilight deepened the white blossoms took on an almost luminescent glow, a delicate white light against the pervasive, darkening blue. I dreamed this as a metaphor, of course. Now I've written the truth of that dream.


4/18/2010

Today is Daniel's birthday -- sixteen years old! My goodness!


5/11/2010

Here it is, almost a month after my last posting. I guess this is good, life is stretching out again. How soon I forget the intensity of it all! But not always...

Our term is ending, the rhythms of academia reassert themselves. We've had quite a group of students this year, both graduate and undergraduate. I was particularly impressed by a concert several Fridays ago (April 30). Three of our graduate composition students presented their dissertation works, Michel Galante, Victor Adan and Daniel Iglesia. I arrived in a terrible mood, the normal 1-hour commute stretched to almost 2 and a half (Yankees Game traffic, arg!) and I didn't get a chance to eat any dinner. But the concert was stunning. I was really impressed by the work being done by the 'gang' we have at the Computer Music Center these days. Taken with others on-the-scene at the CMC (Jeff Snyder [tomorrow to be defending his own doctoral work], Sam Pluta, Damon Holzborn and others), I think we're doing something right. What's interesting to me is that much of what is being done through the CMC is very different from anything I do myself. I find this strangely gratifying. I find myself justifying my existence as being an "enabler" of activities at the CMC, semi-tangential but still connected. Not a bad way to be as the years build up. Things continue to move forward, the young are young again, graduation approaches, and ... jeez this is getting pretty darned cliched! That time of year.

Another big chance to wallow in mawkishness is also coming up. My 35th High School reunion is scheduled for June 19. Several very close friends have gotten in touch with me saying they plan to attend, so I booked my flight last week. I wonder what the texture of those memories will be?

I'm already pretending to be young again. I bought a guitar!




5/18/2010

There are days when just walking outside seems to be enough to fill life. The sun, the warmth, the spring-time smells. It is simply marvelous to be alive. Both Saturday and Sunday this past weekend were like this. Also, our good friend Evy Chan was visiting from Paris, Jill and I have known her since graduate-school days. Here she is with Daniel at the Johnson Atelier Grounds for Sculpture in Trenton: What a time! I love this period of the year. Graduation at Columbia today, unfortunately the weather from the weekend didn't hold. But the time-rhythms of academia persist, the term ends, summertime starts. It continues. How many more, I wonder? It continues.


5/24/2010

I heard some reasonably good news today. Last week at my checkup at Weill-Cornell, Faiza noted that my "M-spike" had been trending higher. This is the measure of a certain protein that signals the myeloma is active. This isn't news, I've been on a higher-than-maintenance dose of Revlimid since the bogus protein levels increased again almost a year ago. However, it seems that my "M-spike" was continuing to rise slightly, which meant that possibly the Revlimid wasn't working as well as it was. The real impact would be a change in my drug regimen, probably the addition of Decadron (the steroid) again. At a much lower dosage than my initial fun with the chemicals, but still not something to make me glad.

The reasonably good news is that the lab results from my blood-work came back today and the "M-spike" was holding steady. It hadn't decreased, BUT it hadn't increased either. This means that the Revlimid is still apparently working. Yay! I won't have to increase drugs, etc., plus another month to add to my total. Boy oh boy, nothing like a slightly-updward-trending chart to remind me that these days won't last forever.

I sure wish some of them could last forever, though. Actually, not the days per se, but moments and feelings that make life a truly wonderful thing. Here's one:

Lian sent the link to me this past weekend. I am still overwhelmed. What an amazing, amazing adventure it is to live this life, to be here, have these things happen. Yeah, forever!



6/3/2010

My goodness -- my wonderful sweetheart daughter's fundraising for multiple myeloma is just amazing! (see link above) I read through the list of names who have contributed, and I am overcome by the kindness of family, friends, neighbors; even those I've never met. How did they learn of this? What moved them to contribute? This is almost a cliche (and a stupid one at that), but there is occasionally -- very occasionally -- a good thing that happens as a result of cancer. Discovering anew that my colleagues at Columbia are all really good and decent people, becoming aware of the joy in living, gaining that "perspective" nonsense, these kinds of things are all unanticipated 'benefits'. Learning how kind and thoughtful my neighbors are, friends far and near that I didn't realize were even aware of my cancer, this is something few of us (thank goodness!) can directly experience. Or if we do, it isn't as graphically obvious as seeing a pledge-list of names of those who care about you.

And my family. We had a terrific Memorial-Day weekend with Lian visiting. I watched Jim Nabors sing Back Home Again in Indiana at the beginning of the Indianapolis 500, great Roosevelt yard parties going on, Jill cooking fabulous dinners, the laughing and sharing, this is the stuff to hold in our souls forever. Yes I have a bad cancer, but I sure do feel like One Lucky Guy.

Then when we took Lian back to the Philadelphia airport, Roosevelt received a freak thunderstorm (something like 2" of rain in about an hour), and our house flooded again. Time to find a drainage contractor!



I wrote the above earlier today, and I just came upstairs to post it on-line. Tonight, though, I was sitting at the dinner table after Jill and Daniel had finished (I've always been a very slow eater). Jill had made again an absolutely delicious meal, with an apricot-and-fennel salad to top it all off. I was finishing some rolls (with frosting, yeah!) along with a truly tasty chocolate stout :-), reading a draft of a great book that a friend had written, candles were burning low from the meal; it was such a sublime moment... I thought to myself: "If I were to wake up dead tomorrow, [note: my friend and colleague Terry Pender said this phrase in our CMC staff meeting yesterday, it is truly a solid Midwestern utterance], I genuinely would have no regrets about the life I've been able to live." The only thing that would make me sad is the things I would miss, things yet to come. I hope I don't miss too many.



6/8/2010

I'm on our upper back porch again to write this. It is one of those sparkling days, the kind we call "mountain weather". I've been swimming in the mornings over at our local swim club. Today was a bit brisk, and memories of summertime in Canada with Dad were really strong. I could see the sharp green outline of the trees against the deep blue of the sky as I swam. As I dove into the pool, the coolness of the water put me back into a lake along the Winnipeg River, immersing myself in the cold, clear water before heading out to enjoy the sun and the solitude with my father. I was young again!

Funny how the weather, the slant of the sunlight, the green of the plants, triggers such tangible memories for me. This spring has been strange in that way. The weather has been really "blocky" -- one week it will be stormy and cold (floods!), the next it will be an uncanny 90-degree F (in the middle of April!), feeling like deep summer but with the foliage registering only early spring. And then days like this, when it feels like October but it's mid-June. It all seems ... strange. Maybe that's how life will be now. Memories collide and intersect, they stack up.


6/18/2010

I had my checkup with Dr. Pearse earlier this week, and all is still relatively OK. One of the big stat-numbers they are monitoring is that "M-spike" (mentioned earlier in this blog), or the amount of 'bad' protein being produced by my immune system. It's an obvious indication of how much myeloma activity is taking place. The "M-spike" is no longer in the 'not detectable' range, but it's still very low (for those interested it's 0.3, not sure the units). Even better, it seems to be holding at this level, a sign that the Revlimid continues to work. I think my "M-spike" has been about 0.2-0.3 for close to a year now. Dr. Pearse has also been monitoring my white blood-cell count levels and my hemoglobin, both of which are on the low side. This apparently is typical of long-term Revlimid use, and he's not too concerned. If the white-cell count gets too low, it does open me up to potential infections, but the fact that I've been relatively healthy -- besides having a bone-marrow cancer of course -- suggests that my body is still more-or-less under control. The low hemoglobin might account for some of the tiredness that I feel. Or I'm just getting old. Oh well, nice to have an excuse!

I finally got some recent musical activities up on-line. Here they are:

It sure is splendid to be able to work with musicians like Maja Cerar and Pradeep Ratnayake (and Terry, of course). Pradeep has had to return to Sri Lanka after his Fulbright stay at the Computer Music Center. We miss him.

We've also had changes happening around the house. We had a large pine tree removed, the one that lost many branches this past winter (photos of that damage on-line here, scroll down a bit). We're also getting bids on possible drainage solutions so we don't have to deal with our house flooding with every "100-year" flood that now seems to occur every few months. I'll get pictures linked up here soon.

Yes, now I link in pictures of our house, I report on recent activities, Weill-Cornell visits, this blog has shifted towards a somewhat mundane repository of ordinary memories. Here is my recent life, in all it's conventional glory. I don't mind this so much, though, especially if the alternative is the 'excitement' I felt when I first started writing this; a text-generating compulsion fueled by a feeling of looming death (my own!). No, I don't miss those days. But that feeling does still inform haphazard thoughts that drift through my brain. I figure that this silly blog can also continue to function as a dumping-ground for a few of these random reflections. It was originally intended as that kind of record, after all.

For example, not too long ago I was talking with my good friend Judith Shatin on the phone. She's been dealing with health issues of her own, and she commented "I feel a victim, not of the mind/body problem, but more like a mind/mind/body problem -- I have my 'real' mind that is disconnected from the mind that inhabits my body." I knew exactly what she was talking about -- I think it more accurately described as the mind/mind-body/body problem (if "problem" is even a correct label here). Mentally, the 'mind' that I feel is me, Brad Garton, feels just fine. I'm really enjoying what I do, what I read, my family, friends and neighbors, life-in-general. I mean, heck, I gotta guitar! Then people ask me: "hey Brad, how do you feel?" and the mind that is more directly connected to my body reports that sometimes I don't feel all that great. And then the body, well, it's getting old and falling apart.

The random meta-reflection that results from this is a recognition of how skewed my self-image can be, specifically related to my sense of age. For some reason, I always feel like I'm about 27 years old. Why 27? That was an age of transformation for me. I was entering grad-school, I was marrying Jill, I felt like I could Change the World. Jill and I both did. Who knows? Maybe we have. But we honestly can't approach life in the same way, with the semi-real fiction from those days that we have many decades ahead of us. When I imagine what to do now, though, I adopt that mid-20s stance: I can change the world, and I got plenty of time to do it. I guess perhaps it's best to maintain this fiction. The psychological alternative isn't very appealing.

It is appropriate to be speculating about mental age-image right now. I'm out in Indiana having a nice visit with Mom and Dad, but the excuse to be here is my 35th High School reunion tomorrow evening. 27, no I'll be 17 tomorrow! I'll get some pictures for sure. Plus my parents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary yesterday, another fairly important(!) event in my life. Happy 55th Mom and Dad!


6/25/2010

Last night I had a dream (yes I'm still having strange dreams) that somehow the "profile information" for my life had gotten erased. This is surely motivated by my becoming active on Facebook. Last night I spent time filling out the silly Facebook "profile" for my page: Tell us all about you in short, pithy phrases! I had set up my Facebook account years ago when Lian was interviewing for a job with them, but I had never really become too involved.

In the dream, however, it wasn't a Facebook "profile" that had been deleted, it was actually the memory of my entire past. The bulk of the dream I recall was attempts to find a back-up copy of these memories, or considering strategies to reconstruct them. It wasn't really disturbing or nightmarish, no frantic searching through old hard drives -- or hard lives -- or anything. It was more just a matter-of-fact contemplation of what my past, my history, might mean. Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? Yikes, I sound like Ross Perot's running mate.

I am sure this dream was also fueled by my recent 35th High School reunion attendance. Certainly my becoming active on Facebook was bootstrapped by the event. Lots of good friends with whom I had lost touch said "hey, we're all hanging out at Mark Zuckerberg's place!" (well, maybe not in those exact words...). Catching a glimpse of your life as it is reflected in the best friends of your youth, it is a perspective informed by memories of delightfully naive dreams. The things we were going to do! The plans we had! However, it all turned out... different. Not bad, just different. In my case, I rather like the memories I've stockpiled. I think that's probably true of most everyone who was at the reunion. Several of my friends had gone through what had to be difficult changes, some quite recently. But I also suspect they have a fair share of things they would want to keep in a "profile". We are our past, and we will be our future. Woooooooooooooooo!

Two of my closest friends from High School/College were in the process of reinventing their lives in various ways. I wonder what it would be like to start again, not so much with a 'clean slate' but maybe with an altered slate. It made me feel relatively immobile in comparison, more anchored to a particular life. I don't mind that anchoring, though, and to be honest it doesn't really describe my present reality. Yes I still work at the same job and yes I still inhabit the same home/family/social-group/etc., but much has changed. Heck, the genesis of this blog grew from a pretty radical rearrangement of the conditions of existence.

For me, the issue is what to do now. When I ask those who-am-I/why-am-I/how-did-I questions above, the missing and vital query is: Where do I go from here? I really don't know. Too often I tend to retreat into sound-worlds and let externalities push me around. That will get me somewhere. I'm lucky to have a position that allows that, but is that what I want to do with my remaining time here?

At least I still enjoy making up silly answers to silly "profile" categories. I'm not sure what my contribution will be to the vast Facebook data mine, but I bet they probably have a category for those of us who don't take it very seriously. Hmmmmmmmm, what do I want to do?


7/1/2010

June has accelerated by, and here it is July already! How does our time flow? In my preceding post here, I got all "cutesy" and ended with a moderately vapid question: "what do I want to do? Lately circumstances have dictated what I do. Jill, Daniel and I have decamped from Roosevelt to move to New York for a few weeks. Daniel is attending a Columbia summer program for High School students until July 16. Rather than pay the $3000 fee for him to stay in one of the Columbia dorms, we opted for him to be a "commuting student" and walk the 1/2-block from my Columbia apartment to the program. I was worried he would miss out on the dormish camaraderie, but it turns out that a large portion of the kids in the program are also commuting into campus. He's also managed to make a number of good friends already. How could he not? The class he's taking focuses on sociolinguistics; I suspect that any high-schooler opting for that particular subject will have just a teeny bit in common with Daniel's interests. Turns out he's having the time of his life, really enjoying both new friends and the class projects. Tonight he went out (alone!) for dinner with a bunch from the program. A New York kid, yikes.

Jill and I are taking this time to do some serious real-estate shopping. My lease on the Columbia apartment is up in September. Instead of continuing to pay rent, we decided that the NYC market conditions might be good to invest in a place of our own. We've been pleasantly surprised by what's on the market, a number of nice places not too far away. My sense is that we'll make the jump -- not a bad investment, I think. It's kind of fun to go around to see these different condos and coops. Our real-estate broker seems excellent, and the whole thing feels like one of those snazzy HGTV "House Hunter" episodes. But it's reality TV! It's interesting to project yourself into potential spaces, potential futures, possible lives.

Next week I start a big CMC cleanup and revamping. It desperately needs it, and we need to start getting set for the new "Sound Arts" program we're launching. Not real intellectually- or creatively-engaging work, but it should be satisfying in a wow-looky-what-we-accomplished way.

These things propel me along. Soon I have to think about what do do in Portugal, then a few trips in August, and then the summer is over. What will I feel then? Did you do much, Brad? How many more summers will there be? More and more of these moderately vapid questions begin to pile up, but they take on a quality of authenticity when you believe that your life is at stake. What if I just sit on our back porch and listen to the cicadas and tree frogs, watch the fireflies, gauge the dimensions of dimming twilight? I don't know, but somehow that all seems really important, too. I think of it a lot. I doubt it will make me rich and famous, though.


7/10/2010

Jeez, sometimes I'm such a monkey doing stupid monkey-tribe things. It seems many of my recent conversations (on- and off-line) have been more 'gossipy' than anything, generally with the aim of belittling someone who has enjoyed more monkey-tribe success, or grousing about my own tribal entitlements (or lack thereof). I want to be the top monkey! The others are stupid! Like I said: jeez.

Then there are times that sneak up on me, like driving over to pick up our pizzas last night. It was approaching dusk, and I was listening to some new music in the car. The road was unusually free of traffic, and the slant of the sunlight, the sound of the music, the wind through the car, it all melded. My identity seemed to disintegrate, my awareness dislocated until "I" didn't seem to be a perceiving entity any longer. "I" was a part of all that surrounded me, like water, like air.

This happens sometimes, especially with music, and through these feelings I think I find peace. How can I experience more of these moments of fluidity, and less of the stupid ego-wallowing? The trick is probably not to play the monkey-games. But there they are.



So much has been happening! Daniel is really enjoying the summer linguistics course he is taking at Columbia. Because of the class, I've been staying up in our Columbia apartment with him for the past several weeks. A real Nyew Yahkuh! Jill has also been up; we're seriously looking at buying a 1-bedroom coop or condo north of Columbia. The market is such that our mortgage payments won't be all that much more than what we pay in rent. Plus Columbia would like to see me leave the apartment (it's not my "primary residence") as there is a crush for faculty housing. We've already seen a couple of places we like.

I also missed a few birthdays here in the ole blog. My nephew Stefan turned 17 (yikes!) the last day of June. My sis Brenda just had her birthday yesterday. Happy Birthdays! My other nephew Bo has a birthday coming up. It's quite a birthday time-of-year for John and Brenda.

We've been completely stripping and cleaning the studios at the Computer Music Center. It's not that much fun, but at least the timing is good while Daniel is at Columbia. We found more asbestos contamination, oh joy. At least we had some good A/C installed last month, and with a few record (100-degree-F +) temperatures last week it was not that bad to work indoors.

My iPhone app was accepted for sale through the Apple App store! The pennies are rolling in! Check it out here:

I don't think we're going to purchase our new apartment with the proceeds. I'm hoping to make back the $100 I had to pay for the Apple Developer Program. iLooch was released by Apple on July 3; so far I'm still a bit shy of the $100 I need to break-even. Why isn't it famous? Why don't people realize it's just the greatest music app ever? Oh no -- monkey games!

At least there have been a handful of nice reviews of the app. I'm also happy witg the work that went into producing iLooch. The audio foundation for the app is the RTcmix music language, ported to the iPhoneOS. This should allow easy development of more audio apps in the future. The iRTcmix link is here:

I made a snazzy and suitably boring development video showing how to use iRTcmix -- the link is on the page. Staring into the camera and saying "Hi, my name is Brad Garton and I'm going to show..." gave me a renewed appreciation for what sis Brenda used to do (she was an NBC news anchor in western Massachusetts). I think it took me about an hours-worth of 'takes' to get the simple few sentences correct. Apparently making coherent noises with our mouths is harder than it looks.



7/14/2010

As your kids near the age when they will be leaving, the choices they make take on an added dimension, a reverberance that you imagine may echo through the rest of their lives. At the same time, you find you have less and less influence upon their decisions.

You hope that the values and the morals you have tried to teach through the course of a young life provide the fabled strong foundation. You hope, and you hope. You don't know what else you may have taught inadvertently, or what unknowns they may have learned. How else can it be? It certainly isn't easy.


7/15/2010

Last week I had one of the strangest dreams I can remember. It was so strange I can't even describe it -- a totally ineffable dream! I vaguely recall somehow existence could get twisted around in a way that was actually kind of pleasant.

What's odd is that the dream has really stayed with me through the past week. I have this experience in my mind, and I can't tell anyone what it is. I can't even tell myself what it is.


7/31/2010

I was in Portugal this past week, again at the Escrita na Paisagem festival with Gregory and Terry (PGT). Much more on this later. Now I am home. Jill and I lay in bed this morning, taking in the early sunshine, a soft breeze was blowing through our open window. Home.

We heard an odd sound outside, a rustling in the leaves and a soft bird-call. We raised our heads, and four wild turkeys were strolling across the lawn.



On the flight over to Lisbon (Thursday night, July 22), I took a musical memory-lane trip and listened to the mp3-Genesis-Boxed-Set that Gregory had given to me for Christmas a year ago. Genesis was one of my all-time favorite bands back in high school and early college. I was completely enthralled by what was called "progressive rock", and early Genesis was considered one of the standard-bearers of this musical genre. As I listened, I was struck by how... progressive the music was. The band was experimenting with all kinds of musical arrangements, trying out new synthesizer technologies, layering everything with thick and mystical lyrics, the whole 'progressive' nine-yards worth.

As I listened, I realized that what attracted me so powerfully to this music was that it was such a departure from my childhood expectations of music. Each record was a new surprise. They were always trying new stuff! The music metaphorically showed me that life could be constructed differently. Through music, I learned that things didn't have to be the way they were. It was possible to do something new. The world could be changed. Heady stuff for a Hoosier teenager.

I took the metaphor seriously. And there I was, sitting on a flight to Portugal, to play music I truly enjoyed playing,wa with friends, among friends. This was what I did. How did I get here? I was extremely lucky. Maybe the world did change, too.

Progressive rock also endowed the world -- or at least the semi-rural Indiana world I knew -- with a compelling (even if imagined) magic. Music magnified things, made them signifiers of some deeper meaning. Listening on the plane, drifting in and out of night-flight consciousness, I recalled the sight and smell of fresh pools of water back in the woods near our house after a rain. They were so clear, they sparkled, they were magic. These sensory impressions meant something to my teenage mind, and that over-the-top progressive music sounded that meaning.

One other aspect of my early infatuation with progressive rock was the world of possible sounds unleashed on many of my favorite records. My friend Pat Kennedy and I went to see Genesis perform live in Indianapolis on one of the band's first US tours. Only 3-400 people turned out for the show, so we were able to get excellent seats. I remember the absolute, soul-grabbing thrill when I heard the choir sounds being played live on a keyboard! as they started a song from their (then) new album:

Oh my, oh my. Just listen to that! Tony Banks, the keyboard player for the band, had an instrument called a Mellotron, one of the first "sampling" keyboards that operated by playing back pre-recorded sounds for each note. One person, and that choir. Oh my! To be able to do that...

I think again about my life: how did I get here? I was dazzled, I was enraptured. I could change the world. I hope I can revisit that feeling of infinite possibility again.



One more addition to this post, and after this I'll start a Whole New Page (another six months traversed!). In pursuit of my "I want to play a choir" dream, I managed to purchase (for $300) a prototype of an Orchestron, a competing instrument for the Mellotron. After fixing it up a bit, I was able to coax a choir from it. Here's an example from my days as a punk-rocker in Dow Jones and the Industrials: I love sound.





8/9/2010 -- next page