I’ve been dealing with wall repair estimates…
The first one: the guy didn’t respond at all to his own web form. He did answer his phone right away and set up an appointment to look at it and make an estimate the next morning. But then he didn’t show, didn’t call and didn’t answer the voice mail I left.
The second one: responded to a Yelp estimate request in less than an hour, set up an appointment for the next afternoon. He said that the middle and top walls weren’t long for this world either and it made the most sense to replace it all in one fell swoop. Within a couple of days he had sent me the estimates for replacing the three walls, as well as a single tall wall (but we don’t like that idea as much as the tiers). And… ooof, pricey.
Then the first contractor sent me a text — he apologized but he’d gotten a really bad stomach bug that put him in the hospital, and he could come out today (Sunday!) to take a look. And I was impressed — not with technical stuff like the first guy explained, but with design ideas for improving things while also reducing the cost. And he was super enthusiastic about trees too, so I know he’ll take good care of the cherry tree that’s on the top tier. I look forward to seeing his estimate because I think it’s going to come in well below the other one.
About those albums I picked up on Bandcamp Friday:
Albums centered around the Buchla Music Easel tend to share certain things in common. This one is a bit unusual in its lushness; while there are absolutely some moments and some aspects that are very “Easel-ish” — the pings and beeps and bloops are not missing — there are also lush layers, and meta approaches to composition. It’s an Easel album that doesn’t come off as minimalist. Nice.
While writing this post I accidentally had started playing a track on the Bandcamp website as well the one I already had going in MusicBee, and… it worked 😉
This is ambient and experimental music written for the dance piece “Last Work” as well as some other recordings that the composer had made at that same time. Some of it involves cello and choral sounds, plucks and sampled instruments and noises, and some of it is more purely synthetic. Overall I feel like it’s deep. As if the composer had really studied the dance piece, absorbed it, and then reinterpreted it both musically and in visual art (the physical release comes with silkscreen prints), with some prototyping and experiments along the way. It’s the best kind of ambient music, where one can just put it on in the background and let it tease the subconscious, but can also listen more intently and find that it’s definitely not just mindless filler.
I find this release a bit odd, and not in the usual way that most of the music I like is odd. 🙂 At the start it’s really beautiful and immersive but not afraid to growl and howl. But by the time we’ve reached the end of the shortish album it’s moved through so many moods and aesthetics it makes one feel lost (as the title might suggest). There are moments of genuine funk, in what is otherwise an ambient work. It’s actually disorienting.
POB is the “Ambassador to the Stars” for Noise Engineering, and here he is with a live set at Buchla & Friends (a synth convention) with a mostly-NE Eurorack setup, doing live improvised techno with the sort of industrial flair you’d expect. Even if I didn’t know who POB was, I would hear this and think “wow, this person really likes Noise Engineering oscillators.” Lots of FM percussive voices sometimes pushed into noise, grindy wavefolding and distortion, big solid underlying bass drones, hard kicks, and delay/reverb gone a little bit mad. Yes.
Following that up with more badass industrial-flavored techno. A nonbinary DJ/producer and game developer from Chicago. I definitely need to pick up more of their stuff (listening to other albums, it goes well beyond techno).
Trovarsi is fairly well known in the modular synth world, for having founded (with Space Racer and Earth-626) the SoCal Synth Society and Frequency Shift (a streaming festival featuring female and nonbinary musicians), and working with Corry Banks’ ModBap Modular. She makes great techno and seems to be a neat person, though I only saw her in passing at Knobcon.
I don’t know if both literal and figurative meanings of “at sea” were intended in Moonminpapa At Sea (since the author was Finnish), but that feels right. Anyway, yes, he did continue to be kind of obnoxious, faking competence and confidence when both were increasingly shaky. His wife kind of just went along with things for the most part, but then also kind of disassociated, while also discovering her artistic talents. Their son fell madly in love with a seahorse (who in this world apparently is a magical horse (with four hooves, horseshoes etc.) that lives in the sea) who did not love him back or respect him at all, a very Faerie sort of vibe. There was quite a bit of supernatural oddity going on. I was really expecting the story to come to a point where everyone finally admits they really want to go back to Moominvalley and that none of them actually like the sea or wanted to move in the first place.
Eh.
I started reading Sacred Gender and it’s better than I had feared. The book is sort of dual purpose: affirming one’s gender through pagan practice, and making pagan groups/spaces more welcoming and inclusive for trans and nonbinary folks. So there’s a bit of a Trans/Nonbinary 101 guide at the start and it’s really well done.
A lot of binary trans people don’t quite seem to get nonbinary folks, but it’s very clear that the author does. One metaphor the author likes, which struck me: “a platypus is not a beaver-duck.” Nonbinary people are not (necessarily) an awkward masculine/feminine blend. It’s just that our culture is so fixated on its model of gender that, when trying to describe someone for whom that model fails, it’s still done in terms of the failing model. (I’ve seen people say the word “nonbinary” is a bit unfortunate because it tries to define us by what we are not, but it’s difficult to come up with another way of thinking about it.)
Another fun one: in a hypothetical society with 12 genders, if there are more than 12 people then someone probably doesn’t fit neatly within the gender 12-arity.
The next part talked about the flaws in Paganism (e.g. Wicca and Wicca-adjacent, 20th century white people Paganism — something I was never a part of but had read about and knew a few folks in it). A lot of its feminist emphasis grew from 60s-80s second wave feminism, aka TERFs. Gender esentialism was baked right in, with strict gendered roles based on reproductive biological functions. This of course is not very welcoming to trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming or even “regular” queer people, and honestly is more limiting to cis people than it should be. Aside from that, there was a lot of ahistorical gunk adopted as almost dogma, and precious little attention paid to non-white, indigenous and folk spiritual practices. The book points out it really does not have to be this way.
The next part is about ancestor veneration — something largely neglected in the aforementioned style of paganism, but almost universal in most indigenous practices and folk religion. Honestly, the chapter could almost have come right out of Kemetic Orthodoxy, so it was all very familiar. This is an area where I also have been a little too white, so to speak, but I’ve been getting nudges about getting better with it and this chapter was timely for me.
I look forward to the rest of the book, it’s been pleasantly good so far.