previous months: 1/1/2010 -- 7/31/2010 

8/9/2010   8/12/2010   8/22/2010   9/11/2010   9/30/2010   10/10/2010   10/11/2010  
10/14/2010   10/16/2010   10/17/2010   10/21/2010   10/22/2010   11/4/2010   11/10/2010  
11/15/2010   11/18/2010   11/22/2010   11/24/2010   11/25/2010   11/26/2010   11/29/2010  
12/2/2010   12/8/2010   12/9/2010   12/12/2010   12/13/2010   12/15/2010   12/20/2010  
12/21/2010   12/22/2010   12/23/2010   12/24/2010   12/27/2010  
1/1/2011 -- next page  

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8/9/2010

Our time gets measured by the way we live. I remember what a dislocation it was when I left school for a Real Job, and all of a sudden "summertime" didn't have the same spin it carried for nearly all of my life to that point. I ran quickly back to academia, where I could once again parcel up my existence into semesters, mid-terms, finals.

As a result of this blog, however, I also overlay 6-month blocks onto the scholastic rhythm. It's totally arbitrary, decided at one point by a feeling that I was cramming too much onto one web page. But here I am, counting another block of time. Of course it begs the "how many more?" question. The one with no answer, at least in our tunnel-vision view. Some day there will be an answer. Hmmmm.

A good start for this block is that I'm working on a new piece. This also begs the question (lots of begging here tonight): "why do I make these sounds?" I don't know, but I do. I'm too tired right now to even begin to speculate -- as I know I have elsewhere in this now-bloated blog -- why I do this music nonsense. It makes me feel like I matter, somehow, but the paradox is that it really doesn't. It's a selfish thing. So there.

The fact is that I can't help but think of sound. The starting point for this new piece was watching the waves from one of our boat trips up in Maine this past weekend. I imagined a guitar-sound (I gotta guitar!) fragmenting like the spray of water, and then coming together to form semi-coherent patterns. I could hear it, obliquely, and now I feel compelled to make a real version. Not sure why, but it's there.

Maine: a great trip with my sis and bro-in-law John, with the cousins-minus-grownup-Lian. Family, another compelling thing impossible to "explain". Photos:

Also (another good way to start this 6-months, and bridge to the recent past 6-months) -- music from our recent PGT/Portugal fun: and photos here: One more good-start: my check-up with Dr. Pearse last week was fine. The declining hemoglobin stats appear to have stabilized. Good-start. Good-continue!



8/12/2010

Pop-psychology labels it a state of "flow", it is a mental configuration I enter when programming or working on a new piece of music (the two are co-extensive for me). I find it very easy to do this; the hard part -- perhaps knowing for myself the ease of this mental-state entry -- is sitting down to do some programming/composing. Today I was working on a major modification to the iRTcmix package, and it did flow. I'm going to play my guitar later.

Flow is needed today, a temporary disconnect from the realities of life. Jill's mom, Ruth Lipoti, died this afternoon. Unlike Jill's father, Roy Lipoti, her death wasn't unexpected. Ruth had been struggling for several years, and at least she didn't have a lot of pain at the end.

She was an amazing woman, and not the least of her accomplishments is Jill, my absolute beloved. Plus the profound impact she has had on Lian and Daniel's lives.

Although her quality-of-life was deteriorating for the past several years, it was only in the last few weeks that Ruth began talking a lot about 'going to be with Roy', relating dreams she had of Roy to Jill. It sure seemed a sign of something approaching. I'm not a big believer in a God-fearing afterlife (nor would I want to be, to tell the truth), but I do think that the actuality of time/space is ineffable enough to us small-brained humans that all kinds of interesting possibilities remain. I like the idea of particular slices of existence remaining 'open' for some kind of eternity, and I certainly can imagine spending that eternity with those I love. We all die, but maybe that isn't such a bad thing.


8/22/2010

Funny how much useless knowledge we accumulate. But then again, how is it possible to define a 'usefulness' metric for what we know? I know how to code JCL, the command instruction language for IBM mainframes. Somewhere I suspect I still have stacks of old tractor-feed paper from the days when grad-student colleague Dave Madole and I did programming consulting work for ETS (the SAT-test people) thirty years ago. Utterly useless to know now, but it helped get me where I am.

Today we drove down to clear out the remaining items from Ruth's apartment. As we traveled, I thought about how Jill had come to learn all the shortcut/back roads to get to Medford Leas, the graduated-care facility where Ruth and Roy had retired. Useless? Yes, but how much has that knowledge formed who Jill now is, those weekly visits to her ailing mother?

We are the sum of our experiences, and our memories of those experiences. I don't know that we can realistically jettison any of these without fundamentally altering who we are. I suspect it may be impossible... brain surgery, anyone?



This was the obituary that ran for Ruth last week:
And another photo: I like this one a lot -- Jill's mom had such a radiant smile! The delay in posting this here is because we left for a trip to see Lian in Seattle, and have spent the past week hiking in the Olympic Mountains and sightseeing on Whidbey Island. It was a Really Good Thing to Do. Pictures coming on-line shortly!


9/11/2010

Today is the nine-year anniversary of the World Trade Center destruction. For some reason the memory seems even more intense this year than in previous. Perhaps it is part of the run-up to the decade observance (oh we like our base-10 markers!), or perhaps because of the insanity surrounding the planned/not-planned Manhattan Islamic Center near the memorial site, or maybe the overheated midterm election rhetoric is now bearing the damaged fruit. Whatever it is, the collective memories seem stronger this year. It all gets reinforced by the day itself -- an intensely beautiful fall day, very much like what I recall of the "original" 9/11.

I'm again thinking of memory, how it shapes existence. What were the memories being created by the 3000 dead of September 11? The thousands who die each day? What if they all had their own blogs, the attempt to shape memory (yeah...); what would they put forward? We've had another of our own personal time of powerful remembrance with Ruth's memorial last weekend. The times we create, the way we live, these all get dissolved into.. what? To only a few do they really matter, but that connection is of the greatest strength. Then it all evaporates, blown away by the passing of the arrow of time. Memory: "The lone and level sands stretch far away."


9/30/2010

So much I haven't written here lately! Instead of trying to tally all the recent events and happenings, I'll write of a feeling I had about a week and a half ago. It also shows I still think of writing here often, even if I am too lazy to sit and commit to the text.

I was drifting off to sleep, and something -- maybe the position of my body, the sound of the wind outside, the warmth under the bedcovers -- reminded me, viscerally, of the safety and contentment I felt when I was young. Or at least that's how I recalled it. I felt, for no really obvious reason, good. Life seemed unjustifiably happy, untroubled, carefree. I was there, in that nice bed, and it was enough. I thought: "This seems an excellent trick of mind, to be able to be this way." A trick that I could invoke automatically when young, but was now difficult and elusive.

I wondered: "How could I make this rare feeling more common? Could I install a mental filter that might make the world better?" But then I thought: "What would that do to me? What kind of person would I become?" I wasn't sure it was such a desirable thing, to be that wrapped in bliss. All the time. I'm still not sure. It was a wonderful feeling.

All this came to me almost fully-formed as something I would write here in this blog. Here it is, almost two weeks later and I'm finally taking a few minutes to type it in. I'm such a lazy bum!

And a lot has been happening lately.


10/10/2010

Today was 10/10/10. The fascination we have with the patterns we discern in our arbitrary numerical assignments! And they are fascinating, aren't they?


10/11/2010

Autumn is here in full force, and we had an extended weekend (happy Columbus Day today!) with weather that could be serve as the template for my great-fall-weather category. Perhaps it was just a touch on the warm side, but with the leaves beginning to turn and a crisp blue sky hinting at winter to come, the memories of past October days came flooding through.

On the way over to church yesterday, Daniel said that fall was his least favorite season. I remember when I was his age that I would probably have said the same thing. Older now, however, I like the resonance it evokes. I remember when I first started liking October -- I had just purchased (then) Walter Carlos' two-album set Sonic Seasonings. The side devoted to "Fall" really grabbed me.

Darn, I wanted to post a small excerpt here, but I can't find the digitized version. Maybe tomorrow. As always, I had more to say about all this, too, but I'm tired.


10/14/2010

I was going to write more about "fall" (I even found my recording of Carlos' Sonic Seasonings), but my MIDI Music Class was so terrific today! I wanted to write down a part of it. Why? I guess so I can remember -- but a longer discussion of that motivation is for a future posting.

This was one of my favorite lectures to do: it's about "production", or how to use the tools of the studio to build the sound of the music you record. We've spent several weeks describing the tools and techniques, and this is intended to showcase various ways that others (other 'producers') have used them. Essentially I get to play music I like and then talk about it. I love my job!

I have a set of standard works I usually draw upon to show different techniques, double-tracking, innovative reverb, pitch-shifting, etc., but I also bring in newer pieces that have been released more recently. This year I decided to change the opening of the class because of a CD that Peter Gabriel put out earlier this year.

Instead of jumping right into demos of various sounds, I said that production can really change the way music is received and understood. The example I used was the first cut on Paul Simon's Graceland album, The Boy in the Bubble. An aside: this was the first CD I ever owned, Jill bought it for me. Anyhow, I played this excerpt:

We talked about it, how it sounded ("bouncy", "energetic", "happy", "optimistic", etc.). Most of the class had heard the piece before. I asked if they knew what the lyrics were about. No takers.

Then I played a version that Peter Gabriel had recorded for his recent release Scratch My Back:

yikes. "These are the days of miracle and wonder..." My oh my. Music is pretty powerful stuff.



10/16/2010

Couple of real quick things to post here:
That's all for now. Time for sleep.



10/17/2010

wow. My daughter ran 50 km (26.2 miles!) today in the Nike Women's Marathon 2010, a fundraising event to benefit blood-cancer research. I've described her involvement here in this blog before. Today was the culmination of her hard work and determination. What an event it was! Lian was just amazing. I am astounded that she's my daughter. To all the wonderful friends and family who contributed to her fundraising, I am... well, "humbled" is too weak a word. More like utterly abashed. Grateful beyond words. What a world, what a world!

I think I know already that there will be an effect of this that Lian can't predict. The Revlimid is still working for me, but (as I've mentioned) the "M-spike" is gradually increasing, showing that my myeloma is beginning to change. Dr. Pearse says that the course of this idiosyncratic disease can shift, and it's impossible to discern the future, but he has been discussing future treatment options with me in recent visits. At some point I may have to face some difficult times; of course that possibility exists for all of us. It will be a remembrance of the feeling I have right now, the pride and admiration I have for my daughter, thinking of the resolve she mustered to literally "go the distance" that will help me get through a stem-cell transplant, a stepped-up infusion schedule or whatever gets thrown my way. The lessons we can learn from our kids. The inspiration we can draw. THANKS, Lian! Jill and I are so proud of you and Daniel, our love is strong!


10/21/2010

The memories of Lian's weekend, the memories of good things. I've been thinking more about why I like the fall season (see the earlier post here about my discussion with Daniel), and it occurs to me that fall is the time of year that can only be truly appreciated with age. Just like the layering of colors on leaves, autumn is the time when layered memories build the texture of the seasonal affect. You have to live to access these memories. I like the chill in the air, it reminds me that the joyful winter holidays are coming. I like the occasional bursts of "Indian Summer"; the unexpected warmth brings back recollections of June/July/August. Even the slant of light coupled with a rainfall can suggest springtime and the almost startling realization that the flaming colors of leaves dying will again cycle back to a time of growth. Fall is the season of memory. I love the above picture. I pass by it going up to Columbia or heading over to swim laps, and the scene keeps getting better. Behind the trees you can see a microwave repeater tower. At night it has several blinking red lights. That helps complete the scene for me. It's like a fabulous science-fiction world we inhabit, where trees are incredible colors and towers transmit communicative radiation. I'm here! I remember all this! And every year it gets painted with more and more memories. Make them good.

Above I also mentioned Walter Carlos' piece "Fall" from Sonic Seasonings. Here is an excerpt:

I said above that this summons for me a time when I began to know that I really liked October. Carlos uses 'natural sound' recordings throughout the piece. There is a section with the sound of a fire, probably a campfire, and the above segment has (obviously) a recording of ocean surf. It's such an enigmatic sound, both inviting and foreboding. Inviting because of the constance, the repetition; foreboding because, well, it's fall and that sea is cold! The sound of the synthesizer wandering through Copland-like harmonies, barely heard at times through the crashing waves, it was when I heard this that I began to realize that I had stockpiled memories of things like campfires at college, hayrides, in Canada. The surf -- I could imagine how it looked, white and dark at the same time. The feel of a chill wind and the evoked memories, but also my pretended knowledge of what I thought lay ahead. I think it was lying on the floor of my apartment in Indianapolis listening to this piece that I first knew, deeply, that this was my life. And that's autumn.



10/22/2010

Twenty-seven years. married to the woman I love! Do I know how lucky I am?


11/4/2010

Today was a cold and rainy day. I didn't mind it too much, however, even though I had to do a fair amount of walking around campus today. We've had a beautiful fall, all things considered. Much better than my poor mom and dad -- I think the last substantial rainfall they had in southern Indiana was in July!

Here are a few pictures of the new landscaping in our back yard:

   


and here's one I snapped of a spire of Riverside church while walking to my car one day last week: The sharp blue of the sky, that's the kind of crisp-cool fall weather we've had here for the most part. And here's one more of my favorite scene of Etra Lake (pictured above in this blog), most of the trees have 'turned' in this one:
So the cold and the rain seemed appropriate today, at the beginning of November. It made me think of the coming holidays, the inner warmth of the approaching season. I love this time of year.

I need to hold these good feelings close, because the other reason the grey dampness seemed suitable today was the result of the mid-term election two days ago. Capitalizing on a sharp impatience of an electorate expecting an 8-year Bush/Cheney ransacking of our country and economy to turn around in 18 months, the Republicans managed to capture control of the US House of Representatives. The Senate, and of course the Presidency, is still in Democratic hands. The contemporary Republican party, unlike the party of my father, seems to aim primarily at the most selfish, self-absorbed, self-centered and greedy characteristics of our country. The driving interest seems to be power, not governing, and it will be to the detriment of our national future if their unthinking and uncaring agenda becomes standard policy.

Laying it on a bit thick, aren't I? I've tried not to inject too much politics in my writings here. As this blog has sorted out as a place where I've mainly done my own self-absorbed/self-centered musings on life, the root motivation has been the mortal connection that cancer has revealed. Politics has seemed almost silly in that context. Here's the connection now, though: one of the primary vows of the incoming Republican maniacs has been to "repeal the health-care bill". I can't completely understand why, and I also can't understand how polls that show an evenly-divided electorate on the health-care bill can translate into a MANDATE to do THE PEOPLE'S WILL and return to (what was by all accounts) a totally broken health-care system.

Selfishness, and perhaps a misguided belief that 'this can't happen to me'. How else to explain these attitudes? And how can I make apparent to these misinformed zealots that, for people like me, words such as cap on lifetime benefits and pre-existing conditions have a real and terrifying meaning? You want to go back to that?!?

Oh yeah, the other big target is the elimination of discretionary spending. I guess it's important to do that in order to balance the budget, although handing the wealthiest of the wealthy in our country a fat tax cut has nothing to do with any financial balancing. Discretionary spending... hmmm... cancer research, anyone? See, I can be selfish too.


11/10/2010

I had a whole slew of bizarre dreams last night; conversations that became frozen into horizontal cylinders in time, odd re-workings of past events. At one point I recall going in 'by hand' and resetting neural pathways in my brain. I'm not sure why I had to do that.

All this subconscious activity is probably because today is one of those Really Big Days in an American life. More on this later...



This is now "later".

So here's the story: Way back in April, when long-time good friend and apartment-sharer Martha Colby decided she'd had enough of NYC and changed her life with a big move to the mountains of Utah, Jill and I thought of different things to do about our NY apartment situation. The easiest thing at first was to find another person to share the apartment with -- and we did. Unfortunately Columbia had changed various policies, and I was no longer 'officially' entitled to a faculty apartment nor was I supposed to share the apartment with a non-family member. It wasn't good, and I sadly let down a potential apartment-mate. I probably could have told lies lies lies through my teeth and worked things out, but it really didn't seem right. Well, it really wasn't right! Lies lies lies!

When we began investigating other possibilities, we came to the realization that, given the insanely bad real-estate market (for sellers) and insanely low interest rates (thanks for wrecking the economy, Mr. Bush!), we would be paying substantially less per month in mortgage payments and building fees than we were paying in rent to Columbia University. Yikes!

We started looking around at various places we saw listed on-line, and had the good fortune to connect with Kelly Cole, a real-estate agent for the giant NY firm Corcoran. Turns out that Kelly is pretty much the Upper-West-Side person to know, and we very quickly found several very nice condos and co-ops within our price range. It was just like being on HGTV!

Sorry I'm using so many italics and such in this posting, but it has been kind of a breathless day.

Long story short: we settled on a spectacular 1-BR in the Castle Village complex just north of the GW Bridge, put in an offer, and today we closed on the deal! Exclamation point! Italics!

I haven't written too much about the whole convoluted process here (and "convoluted" is a gentle adjective -- it amazes me that any real-estate gets sold at all in New York), because I started feeling like saying too much would somehow jinx the outcome. Yep, the process was that long and entangled. Supposedly we did it really fast, too.

We're really happy with it, and I need to start letting people know that things have shifted for us, much for the better as far as we can ascertain. My subway ride to Columbia from the place is about 20 minutes, not quite as convenient as the Columbia-housing place one block from main campus, but the area around the apartment is really nice. And it's ours. The American Dream! We're in debt again! How odd life can twist, sometimes.

I especially need to tell Martha, for I haven't said much of anything to her since she moved out West. Weird how our brains can turn a silly superstation (the don't-talk-about-it jinx) into something virtually real. Anyhow, thanks Martha Colby! The ripples from your move did good things for us!

How good? This is the view from our living room, I took the picture today after we were handed the keys:

Life changes. The ride sure can be fun sometimes. We got a place in New Yahk again!



11/15/2010

Sometime I disappoint myself. Well, to be honest, probably a bit more than "sometimes". Often it has to do with a confusion I have developed between Thought and Action.

What do I mean by this? Let me give a little self-constructed context: As I age, I am imagining more strongly various ancestral linkages. My paternal grandfather (Dr. J. Glenn Garton, I carry his middle name) was what we would now too modestly call a "quick study". Essentially Grandpa was intensely smart. I don't know exactly when he began college, but he was a licensed and practicing physician in his early twenties.

I don't believe I'm anywhere near Grandpa's level of intelligence, but I have noticed that I can quickly gain a superficial grasp of things. This is my fantasy linkage: I have some of Grandpa's genes! My problem is that this trick isn't properly paired with the strong work-ethic that Grandpa had. I don't recall a single night during my childhood visits to Iowa when "Doc Garton" wasn't called out at 2 or 3 AM (sometimes several times) to visit a sick patient. Back then doctors made house-calls, whenever needed. Grandpa always went. I sleep at night.

The way this plays out is that I can quickly see through a task in my mind and work out a pretty good solution. But then the Thought and Action confusion sets in, and I feel that I have already accomplished the task. Wrong! For example, I'm working with Damon Holzborn (one of our current graduate students) to implement a few interesting new features for our iPhoneOS project. This is the same software that I used for my iPhone/iPod app iLooch. The new features presented some interesting challenges, and I figured out how to make it all flow within our current framework. When I say "figured out", I mean I know exactly where in the existing code to make the changes, add a few data-structures, and cause it all to mesh together. I should hope I could -- I wrote the original code after all.

But after figuring all this out, have I actually sat down to make the modifications to the code? No! I'm a lazy idiot! I thought of it, so therefore it's done, right? Eventually I'll do it... maybe later tonight. Or tomorrow.

This pipe-dream procrastination normally doesn't cause any big troubles. Unlike Grandpa, people's lives aren't depending on the next sound I construct or the next line of code I type. However, I feel bad when my action-deferment may delay some niceness for people I respect and admire. This fall I got hit hard with a substantial pile of recommendations and evaluations. The good news is that I didn't defer them too badly and I made all the appropriate deadlines (I think!). In the process of doing them, I once again marveled at how strong the work is that people are doing -- thank goodness I no longer have to compete directly in "the game"! Some of the recent materials that people sent my way were just amazing.

One of my former students, Chris Bailey, is a case in point. He sent me a copy of his new CD Immolation Ritual a few weeks ago. His new work totally blew me away, especially the first two pieces on the CD. I've always been a fan of Chris' music, even doing a goofy re-mix of his work for my piece ssssand. I also know how nice it makes me feel when I get an uncommon and random piece of e-mail out of the blue from someone saying they enjoyed some of my music.

So have I written to Chris to tell him how much I liked his new work? No. I thought about it, though. What a dummy I am. To Chris and everyone else who has given me such good music to hear, I'm planning to drop you a note soon... maybe later tonight. Or tomorrow.


11/18/2010

I've been reading the book In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld. In their discussion of relativism and alternatives to radical subjectivity (like the 'privileged observer' they identify in Marxism), they defined their own sense of an objective reality: Unfortunately, I have some objective news to report here.

For the past few months, the 'stats' that Dr. Pearse has been watching have slowly inched upwards, showing that my myeloma is accommodating to the Revlimid I have been taking (check here and here and here for a few refs). As I described, the "M-spike" is a measure of monoclonal antibodies (i.e. antibodies that are all identical; i.e. bogus ones). This indicates the level of cancer activity. Over the past year -- after my initial remission ended -- it was .2, .3, .2, .3, .4, .4, .3, .4... etc. Roger said that when it hit .5 (I forget the units, I think grams/deciliter or something like that) we should discuss changing the drug regimen. At my appointment last month it was .5, and it probably will be .5 from the blood-work yesterday, too. This isn't really anything to get freaked out about, to put it in a bit of perspective I think my "M-spike" was over 3.0 when I was first diagnosed. Roger likes to be proactive about dealing with this stuff, though, and I tend to think that's a Good Thing.

So we discussed a number of options, the good news being that there are now a number of options, and settled on adding a new drug (Biaxin) to augment the Revlimid. It's a fairly benign drug, supposedly, but he also wants to start me back with some Decadron (the steroid from hell) to help with the efficacy of the Biaxin. I need to warn my colleagues and grad students, because happy things like chair-throwing and total freak-out may be possible again.

The good news is that the dosage of Decadron will be about 10% what I took in the wild-and-wooly days, but I'll probably still be randomly bizarre. At least now I have an excuse.

I wrote these down earlier today, sitting in our new apartment and watching the Hudson, thinking about what I would write here given the recent news:

Life is indeed one big adventure. Or maybe several adventures.



11/22/2010

I started again with the steroids today. I had forgotten how much "fun" they can be. Even though the dose is lower, they hit me kind of hard.

I got a lot of work done, definitely the manic part of the drug. Software updates, a new piece I'm happy about, general odds and ends. The crash will most likely be unpleasant.

Music. Sometimes I really don't feel like I fit anywhere. I listen to the music. I miss my daughter. I miss my son. I miss my wife. What are these differences in perception? Oh the drugs.


11/24/2010

I had also forgotten how much "fun" the withdrawal phase from the steroids can be. Oh joy, once a week for awhile now. Stupid cancer.

But Thanksgiving tomorrow, and wonderful family around. I love this time of year.


11/25/2010

Thanksgiving. What a nice word, and what a nice day. Good family, good food, good time. There is more I could say, but not now. Good night!


11/26/2010

I've been wondering about why my initial dose of steroids have had such a strong effect on me this week. I think I know why: I believe it is the same mechanism that makes former drug addicts so sensitive to any reintroduction of hard-core drugs. If I recall, Dr. Pearse told me that dexamethasone I take has certain 'addictive' qualities. My body accommodates to the presence of the drug. This is why (I think) that they use a "pulsed" therapy -- push the drugs for a few days, stop the drugs for a few days, cycle again. It gives my body a chance to recover itself a little. I had been dormant for a few years, but when I restarted the steroids on Monday, my body lit up with pharmacological recognition.

Whatever the reason, I felt hit really hard by the decadron this week. I wasn't expecting it, because the dosage is much lower than my induction therapy. All of the feelings came back with a vengeance, though; the initial mania, the heavy crash, the general-body-badness, the drifting "chemo-brain" perception of reality. Even the weird dreams have returned in full force (last night I dreamed all my teeth fell out on the floor, but I just looked at them and puzzled over why I still had perfectly fine teeth in my mouth...).

In any case, this is my life for the foreseeable future. Yes, another adventure. I have noticed how it has dramatically re-motivated my writing here in this blog. Nothing like a stark reminder of mortality to make me feel like leaving some textual remnants behind. I've thought yet again about the purpose behind this blog. As I've said several times before, I originally imagined it as a way of inscribing Big Heavy-Duty Deep Thoughts for my kids, for vaguely-fascinated descendants, hapless readers who happen across this, all that extreme egotistical silliness. Yeah, Deep thoughts.

Instead, this blog has -- probably inevitably from the start -- degenerated into random superficial observations, reporting of various bodily conditions (like above), a fair amount of whininess, oblique references to personal/family life-stuff, strange confessionals, all that self-indulgent bloginess I imagined would happen at the beginning. Where else, though, can I try to let those I love know what a miracle I think life can be? Where else can I attempt to write the feeling of the yellow-green rising sunlight outside as I lay in bed this morning (oh the drugs), my family here in the house? I can't put it into words, but perhaps I can at least hint it. And music, of course.


11/29/2010

We survived another Thanksgiving, but I'm not intending "survived" here as an ironic/sarcastic metaphor. My poor father seemed fine when he my mother arrived at Newark Airport on Thanksgiving Day. Later that night, he complained of a little back pain, which developed into a severe and debilitating pain the next day. Fortunately we were able to reach mom and dad's physician back in Indiana and got a prescription for some heavy-duty pain-relievers FAXed to our local pharmacy. This enabled my dad to get through the weekend.

We were also able to arrange an appointment right when they got to Indianapolis today for dad with the bone-specialist he has seen in the past, and the prognosis after the consultation seemed good. Mom and dad are safely back home now. Whew! What a time!

I, of course, drifted along most of the time in a haze of drugs. The combination of Revlimid and the Decadron really shifts your brain around. Total mania followed by pervasive 'wiftiness', with some general out-of-it alienation and weirdness thrown in for good measure.

The manic phase of the steroids is quite something. If employers found out how the side-effects of this drug can play out, I think they'd be dosing up the workforce in short order. I took my weekly tablets of Decadron this morning, and my productivity went berserk. Here are a few things done today:

and probably more. For lots of working people this probably isn't too impressive, but it is way beyond my normal pace. As to the quality of what I did, well, that's unclear. But I sure did it fast!

The mania also manifests as semi-crazed ebullience, especially at dinner. One of the things I truly love about our family is how much we like to laugh. Not from derisive or mocking humor, but from the joy found in everyday (and sometimes unique-day) life. The stories I told during our holiday meals! The fun in memories! I described our high-school sophomore homecoming float -- it was supposed to be a bulldog but looked like a weird blue frog --and the fire that resulted in front of the reviewing stand from the model rockets we intended to shoot "dramatically" from the shoulders of the creature; I related the story of Lian's first day at nursery school; I told our kids about the 'property lines' Brenda and I had in the back seat of our car during long trips, and the mystical "smooooooke from the smoookies" and the story of how Gatorade was made (yes alligators were involved) that my sister half-believed on these same trips. I'll have to post these stories here later. "For the children...", yeah.

Jill, my amazing and wonderful wife, got to deal with all this as best she could. She also laughed the hardest at some of the recollections. I'm hoping the family who shares humor is strong and healthy. It sure feels that way.


12/2/2010

We fool ourselves into a sense of certainty, a notion that we can predict how something will go. I had forgotten how random the effects of the drugs can be. With the new regimen, I figured "oh, I'll be manic on this day, I'll be crashed on that day..." But no, my consciousness is being haphazardly shoved around. Not just on a day-by-day basis, but almost hourly at times. This isn't a necessarily bad thing, although there are periods where I feel just plain lousy. Instead it's just kind of... strange. A lot. I'll feel really jangly and vibrating, and then a short time later I'll totally wash out, and then the world will shift and I'll feel oddly alienated from existence, and then things will seem hyper-real for awhile. It's quite something.

I was cycling through various "states of being" while walking from Columbia's main campus to the CMC studios at 125th Street today. It was a powerfully blue and sparkling early-December winter day, and everything was continuously transforming, and I was struck again by the blatantly obvious: how the very fabric of our existence, the fundamental things we can point to and know are real, are determined by our perceptual apparatus (and of course the neurochemical decoding of sensory input that happens in our mysterious "seat of consciousness"). As the world was metamorphosing around me, I had an overwhelming sense that I was making it all up. Me and my chemo-brain drugs were creating everything.

That wasn't really right, though, as I realized that something was out there, goosing my senses. The world altered again, and I felt a part of a seamless continuum between internal consciousness and external physics. Not too long ago one of the academic buzzwords-du-jour was "embodiment", and today there seemed a kernel of truth in some of the post-post-modern rhetoric. The negotiation, the mediation (another tired old academic-speak term) between our evolved neural survival mechanisms and "that stuff out there" made a lot of sense. I was 'making it all up', but the fantasy I was constructing kept getting kicked this way and that by real-live externalities. Go figure that one.

I have more to say about this, I think, but the world just shifted again and I'm really tired. Time for bed.


12/8/2010

Here's the 'more to say about this': I was thinking as I was walking along Broadway that this was one of the reasons I disliked much Really High Modernism music. It gets so abstracted from connection to real life, so rarefied that it loses the visceral interest that makes music live for me. Funny I should be thinking this, because most all of what I do musically is -- how would I put this? -- completely "virtual". I like listening best to music on speakers, at home, sitting on my couch. How more abstracted from the actual act of performance than that can you get these days? And the thing I believe I do best is to artificially construct music using symbolic tools and code. Truly embodied, huh.

But a lot of what I try to simulate in my music is some kind of life, or at least that's how I hear it. It also gives me an entry into understanding why I like music over speakers. What I do is enter into that virtual-reality scene, the musical signal allows me to feel through my body what the traces of the music carry. I remember talking with Jim Randall at Princeton about why much of Haydn's music bugged me. His reply: "Aha -- you can't get around the smell of the powdered wigs, eh?" Yep.

On the other hand, there is highly complex and seemingly abstract music that does seem to have that living 'kick'. In fact, after I walked to the CMC on the day described above, one of our graduate students (Bryan Jacobs, my TA for the MIDI course) presented his compositional work to the class. Even though it was extremely dense, non-metrical and complicated music, it had a drive to it. The class picked up on it. I was amazed at how well they enjoyed his music, radically different from what they normally hear. The whole time Bryan was playing his pieces, from his laptop, I was watching his fingers. Totally involuntarily, they were moving just above his laptop keyboard in sync with the gestures he had constructed in his piece. He couldn't help it -- he had that embodiment thing happening! Great fun.

I talked about this with Sam Pluta (TA with me for my graduate seminar) at dinner later that night. He's involved in a Columbia-rooted ensemble called Wet Ink that has been enjoying a fair amount of success here in NYC. I've been to a few of their concerts, and they are exciting. They play the kind of semi-modernist sounds that you think I might denigrate with the "oh how awful abstract music is!" aesthetic, but the music lives, it connects. I don't really like concerts, but the Wet Ink stuff does not translate well to recorded media, so my listen-and-pretend at home approach does not work for their music. They are a live ensemble.

Hmmmm, just wanted to say all this for some reason. Lots going on, last week of classes, Tristan Murail retired from Columbia tonight (more on that later, I've really grown to respect and admire him). Appointment with Dr. Pearse today, no big changes but the day's blood-work report hadn't appeared while I was there. Continue.


12/9/2010

Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I got with my job. Today was an excellent day: That's what I do. Never, when I was young, did I imagine life would be like this. I may be dying of cancer, but this is truly living.



About the cancer nonsense, I found out from Dr. Pearse at my appointment yesterday why the drugs have had such a powerful effect on me. The use of Biaxin with the steroids -- Roger was one of the authors on the paper describing the therapy -- has a strong potentiative effect. Even though the dosage of the dexamethasone is only about 10% what I took early on, the combination of drugs seems to give it more efficacy. Cool, better drug action without as many of the high-dose physiological side effects. Mentally bizarre, but I can live with that.



12/12/2010

Last week was quite a week. The "excellent day" on Thursday was on the heels of several others of near-equal excellence, including the fun jam-session with Miller Puckette and Todd Reynolds (above), a thought-provoking presentation by Miller in our graduate composers' seminar and all sorts of other good stuff.

The biggest event of the week, though, was Tristan Murail's retirement reception. Yeah, I know Pierre Boulez was in town on Monday, but this was an evening of personal importance and a demarcation that will define a new time at Columbia for us.

I have really appreciated the chance to work with Tristan. It took a little time for me to grow this appreciation, though, especially harkening back to my obnoxious change-the-world, aesthetic fire-breathing days. I tried to capture some of that in my remarks at his reception. This is what I recall saying:

This text is reconstructed from memory, so I have most certainly left a few things out, added a few things, and I've done the general embellish-and-revise operation that happens with any of our memories. These are the memories of my life, however. For the past few years at least, they have been wonderful, and they have been terrible. I'm not sure what more any of us could ask from the incredible gift of living we have received.



12/13/2010

Yes, those steroids. When they hit, I work like a maniac. I wander around the house doing stuff all day long. But here is a description of how I just passed the last 20 minutes:

I was upstairs sending e-mail to my friend Gregory Taylor, and I wanted to quote something from Daniel Lanois' new book I'm reading on my Kindle. I had to get my reading glasses to do this. I had my Kindle, and I had the case for the reading glasses, but no glasses. "Aha!" I thought, "I bet they are downstairs!" Downstairs I went, and in the kitchen I found the glasses. They were next to -- I'm not making this up -- a Christmas card letter that was opened exactly half-way. I recalled that while opening the letter, I decided it would be a good idea to replenish the water in our humidifier (it's really cold outside tonight). I went into the dining room to check the reservoir, and, yes, it was half-filled.

I knew that while I filled it I decided I needed to finish washing the dishes from dinner. Went back to the kitchen and THEN I finally finished washing the dishes. Half-done, yeah. Then I filled the humidifier, went back to finish going through the mail. I opened one card that had that sparkly-sequin touch on the cover photo, the little plastic bits that reflect blue/green/read/yellow as you move the card in the light.

Next thing I knew I had spent several minutes gazing at this card, thinking how much I liked that sparkly phenomenon when I was very young, thinking about when I was very young, and I snapped out of it, grabbed my reading glasses (so I thought) and went upstairs. Upon arriving upstairs, I discovered that I had left the glasses downstairs for some reason. I went back down, they were on the dining room table. Went back upstairs, remembered why I had set the glasses down: I had to go to the bathroom.

So I did. Then I came out, couldn't find the glasses. Went back downstairs (this was now the third trip), no glasses. I am now writing this, no clue where the mystery glasses might be. Oh humans. Oh me. Oh brains who react strangely to external chemical influence. How did we ever evolve 'purposeful behavior'?



I found my reading glasses. They were next to my Kindle, tucked slightly under so I couldn't see them.



12/15/2010

I'm such a fame-hound sometimes (fame as in enjoying connections to famous people). I've had a really talented undergraduate in one of my classes this term, and his final project was one of the best I've heard in awhile. His name is Simon, and he's from Austria. At the end of the last class, I asked him: "Simon, I know your last name is relatively common in Germanic-speaking countries, but you wouldn't by any chance be related to Werner Herzog, would you?" His answer: "Yeah, he's my dad."

Yikes!!!!!!! If I had to name only one film director I consider my favorite, it would be Herzog. I've read his Walking on Ice book. I think I've seen nearly all of his movies, except perhaps one or two of his most recent works.

There was a period in my life where his films really resonated, films like Stroszek, Woyzeck, Heart of Glass. In fact, there is a line at the end of Stroszek that sort of became my mantra for a few years in my early twenties. The story is about a Polish émigré (Stroszek) who has left Poland because his life is so dismal. He moves with his wife/girlfriend to Wisconsin, and of course nothing changes. The final scene takes place at one of those western-midwestern 'roadside attractions', complete with "authentic Indian" standing out in front to attract travelers.

Stroszek pulls up, it looks like it's late October or early March, virtually no one except the sad Indian is there. The sky is overcast, and Herzog's cinematographic ability to capture the feel of that kind of day is unparalleled. The place is a really run-down 'attraction', with a creaky chairlift going up a very minor hill. At the base of the hill are a number of oddball arcade things including a "dancing chicken" box. If a quarter is used to activate it, it sends a small electric current through a grid at the feet of a chicken and makes it hop around. I've actually seen one of these.

So Stroszek gets on the chairlift with a shotgun he's been carrying, and at the top we hear the inevitable retort. The next scene has several police cars with flashing lights around, the chairlift is still going. One of the officers gets on the radio to report the situation to HQ. He says: "Well, we got us a dead man on the chairlift, and... [this is the line that lodged itself in my brain]...

My oh my. Boy do I remember that.

Simon said his father was a good dad, he used to take Simon on many of his shoots. I'm inclined to believe this is true, because Simon seems a really together kid. Simon seemed genuinely pleased that I liked his father's work. He said he would tell his dad that his music prof really enjoyed his films. Whoo-hoo!



Lots of text in this blog lately, fueled of course by renewed cancer-awareness and the manically 'fun' effects of the steroids. I think it needs some more pictures at this point. Here are three of our Christmas Lights display this year:

   


I decided to use the new water-management swale that Roosevelt landscaper and neighbor/friend Lawrence Mendies put in for us at the end of the summer. Daniel helped with the concept: "damped harmonic motion". It could also be titled "Snakes in the Swale", but Jill isn't keen on that one.



12/20/2010

Lian's birthday today!


12/21/2010

Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. Darkness begins to lose after this. 24 years ago, this was one of the crazy happiest days of our lives. With Lian being born ten minutes before the solstice, we were ready to face the coming darkness. We were a family.

I told Lian that last night was a special celebration for her. Total lunar eclipse. The process began about 1:30 AM and achieved totality close to half-past two. I decided to delay my bedtime to see at least the start of it. The night sky was clear, and I wanted to check out the roof as a sky-viewing platform.

It was a beautiful, crisp, clear night. I was surprised that there seemed to be no one else up to see the show, but then I turned the corner around around the elevator building in the center of the roof. The wind blasted off the Hudson with an icy coldness that cut through all of my warmly-layered clothing. Yikes! Then I looked up, and the cold faded (well, slightly) away. The moon was about 1/4 eclipsed, looking very unnatural. The way the umbra was cutting across the disk was just... odd. Something was very strange in the natural order of things. Sheesh, if I was an ancient Mayan and this was happening on the eve of the shortest day of the year I would be running to the nearest stela to carve my world-end predictions straightaway.

Two more things then happened that switched the experience from being something kind of cool and interesting into an EXPERIENCE. First of all, I noticed that the eclipsing moon had a perfect ice-ring circle around it. The bright white of the ring made the cut-up moon and the slightly brownishing color all the more unusual. Then as I was gazing at this sight, one of the warning/searchlights on top of the George Washington Bridge swept across the sky, drawing my eyes to the riot of lights making up lower Manhattan.

At that point, the cold wind cutting through me did melt away. Man oh man, what a view! What a scene! Sometimes I wonder how I get to be at some place, at some time, to experience these things and lock them into my memory. I will be revisiting this one for sure.

As I've mentioned, I've been thinking a lot about this memory-business lately. What do memories do for us? Why do they exist? What role does music play? Will I need them in the future to get me through rough times? After death? Before? During? In any case, my neurochemical processes are socking a few away for imperfect but vivid recall. Last night is one of them.

Another one, coming on the heels of Lian's birthday here, was what happened the next day after her birth when I returned home very early in the morning. She was born ten minutes before the solstice (hey, that's today!), and I came home to get some supplies to take back to the Princeton hospital. It so happens that I was there in time to watch the solstice sun rise. Just for fun, we had built a "fake stonehenge" in our back yard after visiting the real thing in England. The rocks (they came from upstate New York, a mystery: how did they get here?) are indeed aligned with the summer and winter solstice sunrise and sunset. I figured having an ancient and mysterious site on our land would raise our property value.

For some reason that morning at sunrise I felt it would be fun to pretend to play some Druidish/Merlin role to celebrate the birth of our daughter, so I grabbed some random spices from our spice rack (don't those Druids always do stuff with spices?). I positioned myself on the central rock of our "Stonehenge" and tossed a few pinches here and there, thinking what were probably very silly Druid-like thoughts. But even doing this totally bogus activity released powerful feelings of unbridled joy and possibility... it was an intense and wonderful experience. My incredible wife had given birth to the most beautiful little person I had ever seen. My family, my life seemed complete in a way I could never have imagined. Perched on top of my Roosevelt-henge rock, I felt like I was simultaneously dissolving in ecstasy and exploding in goodness and light.

I carry that memory, now. Forever. Maybe this is what remembering is for, to keep us sane in important ways as implacable eclipses remind us of our ultimate insignificance. Through memory, I can even take those relentless but starkly beautiful eclipses and make them my own.


12/22/2010

Here it is Wednesday, and I haven't written about our wonderful visit to my sister's last weekend for our traditional early-Christmas celebration with 'the cousins' and Mom and Dad. We started doing this years ago when Brenda was working in television. She often had to work on Christmas day. We then discovered that traveling prior to the actual holiday weekend was much easier for us, especially for Mom and Dad flying from Indiana.

Here are some pictures from the past weekend:

John and Brenda had done an amazing job of decorating their house. Also note the Skype video-session with Lian. The future is now!

But of course one of the main events of the weekend was the traditional competition for the holiday pun-of-the-year. There never really is a winner of this competition, the puns are generally so awful that "win" would not be an appropriate descriptor.

In no particular order (except I'm going to put mine last!), here are the entries from this year. I'm missing one from nephew Bo, though:


So there you have them! Just in time for the actual Christmas day! Ho ho ho!



12/23/2010

The dreams are getting interesting again (plus see a few recounted above in this blog). This time with the drugs I knew a little bit what to expect. For some reason they tend to go "meta", which I find intriguing. For example, last week I dreamed that I had to meet Peter Susser a few blocks from our new apartment in New York. Peter is our new coordinator of undergraduate music theory at Columbia. His office is right next to mine in Dodge Hall. In the dream we had to take a packet of instructions on the subway to main campus. The problem was that the packet 'weighed' 57 megabytes, and I warned Peter that the New York Metro Subway Authority was now charging a fee per Mbyte. We would have had to pay a lot of money. Fortunately, right next to us was a data-compression store (yeah...) and we were able to go in and get the packet reduced to a mere 9 MB.

Now as odd as that part of the dream may be, this is where it gets interesting. I realized that we were in a dream, and I could "step outside/above" the dream and fold it in a certain way. Then I could compress this folded packet and carry it. Then I could do it again, recursing on up into infinity. A totality of experience neatly folded and concisely packaged. It went "meta".

I hadn't written about this dream, because I had other things to do, plus it was just another strangely entertaining dream. Then last night I had a dream of writing this earlier dream here. In order to capture it I had to paste it as dots on paper(?). All the while I was doing it I had the feeling of floating 'outside' everything, almost like before when I could step-above the dream-action.

Does this suggest some place where consciousness can go beyond our limited, linear reality? Can we shed the coil and float away? I hope so, because it's kind of fun.



I feel pretty floaty today. Shaky, slightly jittery, and mainly aaaaaaahhhhhhh....... the holiday season is here in full-force, and I'm enjoying the time to get good work done. Lian comes tomorrow night! Yay!



12/24/2010

Something about an anniversary date seems to have meaning. We divide the circuit of our planet around the sun, and when it returns to the same part of the orbit, there it is: the year. Four of these have now passed since I started this blog, and this one marks a change again. They all do, of course, but...

We went to pick up Lian at the airport, a contemporary version of the 'traditional' homecoming. All the Christmas-ey things are in place, in spite of the return of my cancer life is still pretty darned good. I'm doing my little Christmas Eve ritual, the big difference now being that Lian and Daniel are the ones who will be staying up late. I'm heading to bed shortly. The monks are chanting away on the stereo. There seems something more I should say to mark this year-measure, but I can't think of anything right now. Happy Christmas Eve!


12/27/2010

So far, this has been an excellent holiday. Lian home, Daniel and Jill relaxing, I'm reading and poking away at musical stuff. Plus some fun extra-added attractions, like the major snowstorm that just finished yesterday. I think New Jersey set an all-time record for the amount of snow in a circumscribed period. It's more than I think I've ever seen in one sitting.

This will be a multi-media blog posting, a few random items to get put here before the end of the year. First of all, here are the 'traditional' pictures of our Christmas trees, taken Christmas Eve:

   
downstairs tree                                                 upstairs tree



the Big Snowstorm!

       

Last but not least, I finished a new piece:
I have additional pix of random holiday-like activities. Maybe I'll put them up later, after the New Year's festivities.





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