Libre Music Challenge entry: Imprecession #1 (birds v. snake) 2022-04-01
This recording is my entry for a current round of the a very serious, silly competition: the Libre Music Challenge.
The prompt for this episode of the challenge was to make a piece of music using only free (as in libre) software but using no instruments, no synthesizers, and (“so it won’t be a who’s got the best microphone contest”) nothing but recordings made with lousy cell phone or laptop microphones.
Sequencers are explicitly allowed under the rules but for personal reasons I decided to put those on the ban list as well. See, when I was a teenage nerd I had an interest in early 20th century “Music Concrete” – some of the earliest electronica there was. It was very “tape centric” in that the main moves for a composer where to cut-up, splice, reverse, and vary speed on fragments of physical audio tape recordings. I wanted to explore that idea in the digital domain where you can zoom right in on the actual wave forms of a recording and cut and splice with exceeding good precision.
See here now for my formal written entry to the contest, and link to the recording.:
Social Housing in Berkeley (a draft proposal from 2019)
Here is a whitepaper I wrote as a City of Berkeley Housing Commissioner about how to do social housing in Berkeley, given the unique goals of social housing programs vs. the constraints of federal, state, and local law.
Democrat-party politics - heavily influenced by corporate interests, especially in real estate and finance - abhors this proposal and fought it madly in its City Commission cradle. I knew before I put it forward that it would have competed for public money and public attention against traditional so-called “non-profit” developers (who merely use legal shields to hide where the profits go). I knew it would suggests a future where well funded “charitable” so-called “tenants advocates” organizations aren’t needed. What I didn’t know is how viciously my fellow commissioners who were from those sectors would fight against social housing. It was heartbreaking and disgusting to watch.
Side note for interested readers: when you see technical terms in the PDF that are highlighted in red, those are links that can take you to a corresponding glossary entry in the same pdf. The table of contents is also clickable.
Please consider voting for these candidates as your top two choices in this ranked-choice system:
Dominique Walker, Mari Mendonca
From my perspective, those two women are unmatched as community activists with a sophisticated understanding of present reality. Ms. Walker you may have heard of because of her co-leadership of the Moms For Housing group that made international news by militantly winning housing for unhoused moms and their children in Oakland and Berkeley. Ms. Mendonca is my treasured colleague on the Berkeley Housing Advisory Commission and is well known and appreciated for her work with Friends of Adeline.
Perhaps what I like about both candidates the most is that while they each have a very clear, sophisticated concept of the issues and urgency of our time, neither of them are caught up in the echo chamber of party politics that seems to dominate Berkeley. We need more candidates like this for every legislative seat in Berkeley.
Candidate’s statement for the Berkeley Tenants Convention, 2020
I am masochistic enough to try to budge the fake progressivism of the Berkeley Tenants Convention slate election. I think there is no real hope of changing the cynical, self-serving, dishonest bullshit of some of the Convention’s powers that be but there is a wider audience here and sometimes I do shift hearts and minds.
Abstract
On the assumption that the production of natural gas for electricity generation and direct household use must end, we perform simple calculations to discover the rate at which natural gas dependent residences must be converted away from natural gas dependence. We consider several schedules for phasing out natural gas, ranging from 10 to 30 years. Under none of these schedules is successful conversion plausible, and we conclude that many homes will lose significant elements of basic habitability. We then note how uncertainties in the economics of natural gas are likely to break unfavorably, worsening the problem. We conclude by suggesting ways our society might adapt to this foreseeable and unavoidable catastrophe.
(Note from February, 2021. I’m leaving this here but the draft linked here has some embarassingly bad passages in it. The larger work it is meant to be a part of has evolved a lots since this. Sharing this early draft got me some very helpful feedback that gave me confidence to keep going and fix problems I did indeed see myself. So… wait till you see where this wound up. :-)
excerpt
Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot
Once, when he was 13, Kimmy woke up on Baker Beach, shivering, half naked under a dirty flimsy blanket in the San Francisco fog, his jeans rolled up under his head, his eyes stinging of salt, the first pale hints of sunrise warming the sky somewhere beyond the Marin headlands.
He’d ditched the north country after his father tried to kill his dog. As he fled, he’d had the sense to avoid the roads, hiked through patches of woods to the train tracks. Some older boys who’d passed through town, panhandling in beaten up leather jackets and torn jeans, full of flop-down grinning grace, possessed of a quiet animal quickness – they’d told him about the tracks. They’d told him which direction to hike to the siding and how to hop a boxcar to Oakland. He hoped they were telling the truth and they were.