Berkeley composer (now living in Holland) and Other Minds board member, Celeste Hutchins is now offering to compose a 1 minute piece for anyone who bids on her item on EBay

So, for a couple of bucks you're a patron of the arts.

Novel idea. Something we would expect from Celeste!

She explains the project on her website.

Celeste is trying to get 30 1-minute commissions, to be released on a CD. So far she's up to number 3 or 4.

Music composition has never had a good business model. But this just might be it.

Notice the new look? The old look was getting boring. Too much beige. New font too: Lucidia Grande. We'll try it for awhile.

Tonight's MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS (11pm on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco) features just one work: Alvin Curran's solo piano Number 10 from INNER CITIES.

Alvin calls Number 10 (there are 12 parts to INNER CITIES, and the whole collection runs nearly four hours) " a vast postmodernist sonata, where the music no longer understands where it is coming from or where it's going."

I think INNER CITIES is one of the great piano cycles of the late 20th C. The performance is by Daan Vandewalle from a 4 CD set on Long Distance.

The program will be repeated Monday at 11pm. You can hear it in real time from the KALW website.

And you can hear it all week streaming from our MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS website after broadcast.

You can now hear a lecture that John Cage gave at the Cabrillo Festival, August 1977. It's on the internet archive and is part of the Other Minds RadiOM project. Here's the description:

The lecture begins with reading of Mureau, the first part of “Empty Words”, which is based on a Thoreau text. The program concludes with a lengthy question and answer session that followed Cage’s appearance at the Cabrillo Music Festival in August 1977. It is often in addressing the public’s questions that Cage’s brilliance is most memorable, and this example is no exception. Of particular interest is his description of how he uses chance operations in his creative processes.

The program is here.

The entire Other Minds RadiOM collection is here.

This weekend's project was to convert the website I've been maintaining for my MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS radio program from a static set of pages managed by Dreamweaver to a dynamic blog under Movable Type 3.2. After some deep thought about how to embed the existing static pages into the page, I was able to repurpose the style sheets and marginal content from the existing site into Movable Type templates. Eventually I'll move the past static entries for programs prior to April into its own archive. But for now they'll live along with the blog-like entries. Main reason why I've done this is because I could never get the RSS feed to come out right. I had to edit the xml file manually each time I updated the site, but no RSS reader would recognize it. Never could figure out what I was doing wrong. Now the site generates a new RSS feed item every time I add an entry. And, we now have moderated comments on all the new entries! Not sure that everything is working right, and the real test will be later in the week when I add an entry for next weekend's program. Also, now all three of my websites, this one, my photo blog All I've Seen, and Music From Other Minds, are all managed by one Movable Type engine. (I only wish MT had a better WYSIWYG HTML editor for creating entries). Take a look, leave a comment. MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS

We must really be at the bottom of the 11-year sunspot cycle now. We've had a run of days with no or very few sunspots.  

Long distance radio reception and propagation is terrible, because sunspots direct a flow of ions toward the Earth (solar wind) that feeds the ionosphere that makes skip wave transmissions possible.

Check spaceweather.com for more information and great images.

You can view a video of poet Joanne Kyger reading at UC Berkeley on April 5, part of their Lunchtime Poets series. Joanne is introduced by Robert Haas. The video requires Real Player. Click on the photo to view.

UC Berkeley now has a number of really interesting webcasts online. Worth a visit. 

We're off to a rented cottage at Sea Ranch for an extended weekend. Weather report says rain and cloudy. No matter. Six months backlog of New Yorkers, Atlantic Monthly's, a couple of books, my portable ham radio and a long wire antenna. And some bottles of wine we've been holding onto, waiting for just the right moment. It's our anniversary, too.

Time to do nothing but stare at each other, watch the ocean, and the birds, and think shallow thoughts.

Back in a few days with some pictures, maybe. 

On the next MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS this Friday 4/13 on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco, at 11pm (Pacific Time) and repeated the following Monday at 11pm:

Excerpts from Michael Gordon's LIGHT IS CALLING.

Also, Philip Glass's Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra, and

Ian Wilson's Atlantica for Saxophone Quartet 

Details on the website, otherminds.org/mfom 

And, because we're going to be away this weekend, the program won't be available for streaming from our website until Monday night. 

Some 80 people had a great treat tonight in Berkeley. Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera performed 5 piano four hands pieces by Terry Riley inside an old Mission-style bank on Shattuck Avenue that is undergoing deconstruction. It was one of those really great experiences.

Part of the ongoing Berkeley Arts Festival series run by Bonnie Hughes, Sarah and Joseph gave this performance in preparation for the  Triptych Festival in Scotland.

Ms Hughes has been finding odd spaces in downtown Berkeley to hold these small, intimate events for years. Every old decommissioned bank provides an opportunity for a music event. And some of these spaces are quite impressive. Tonight's was no exception. The former Fidelity Loan Assoc building was built in 1925 in California Mission style, with carved wooden rafters and ceiling. Enough room was cleared for folding chairs and a space made for the borrowed grand piano. Some retro Japanese globe lamps provided all the lighting, and there was no heat or bathroom. The floor had a carpet remnant and a makeshift curtain was tacked up to block off the back of the room, which we were led to understand was not inhabitable. All this made for a wonderfully informal atmosphere.

Still, about 80 of us arrived and took our seats. Sounds of the street were not far from us, but the performance, with Terry present, was, at least for me, quite a surprise. These pieces were remarkably gnarly, not something I would have expected. Rhythmically and harmonically they seemed quite complex, something between Conlon Nancarrow, Franz Liszt, and Lennie Tristano. And, they also seemed quite difficult. 

They played "Cinco de Mayo", "Jaztine", "Tango Doble Ladeado", "Waltz for Charismas", and "Etude from the Old Country".  

Playing piano four hands (as opposed to two pianos) introduces some interesting choreography, both with the pedaling and the occasional crossing arms. Add to it the complications for the page turner (Jerry Kuderna), and you have really three performers at the piano. The concentration on all three faces during these pieces was priceless.

The program was followed by an impromptu improvisation by Terry that ranged from Indian ragas to stride piano (did I hear "Mama's in the kitchen bake'n shortbread, shortbread.."?) to cascades of Lisztian proportions ... all done with half a tongue in cheek. 

And then afterward everyone assembled at the Venus Cafe next door for coffee and cookies.

It was a wonderfully civilized event, and everyone left smiling.

I sure hope Sarah and Joe will be recording these pieces soon. They were quite remarkable. 

Music from Germany on the next MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS.

Thomas Larcher: Cold Farmer, Mumien

Walter Zimmermann: Festina Lente 

This Friday 4/20 on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco, at 11pm (Pacific Time) and repeated the following Monday at 11pm

Italian pianist/dancer/singer Debora Petrina has performed one of Morton Feldman's very early pieces for solo piano and dancer, and it's been a YouTube hit for months.

Ms Petrina will be performing the music of Nino Rota at Mills College (Oakland, CA) tonight:

The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presents

Primavera Italiana:
The Spring Festival of Italian New Music

DEBORA PETRINA, pianist

Pianist Debora Petrina will perform a program including pieces by young Italian composers along with two important US premieres by Nino Rota: "12 Songs" from Giovanni Testori?s play "Arialda," and a suite from Federico Fellini?s "Casanova." The program is completed by the "Adagietto" from Mahler?s "Symphony No. 5" in an inventive piano transcription by Camillo Togni.

http://www.iicsanfrancisco.esteri.it/IIC_SanFrancisco/Menu/Gli_Eventi/Calendario/

Thursday, April 19, 2007  8:00pm  Free Admission

Mills College Concert Hall  5000 MacArthur Blvd  Oakland, CA

At Mills College tonight, (see program announcement below) the young Italian pianist/singer/dancer Debora Petrina performed Nino Rota's rarely heard Suite from Fellini's Casanova (1976). What a wacky piece! And so typically Rota-esque. Oddball rhythms and off-note melodies, something between cartoon music and something for the big screen. It was quite fascinating and I'd love to hear it again!

Ms Petrina is an excellent pianist and she also sings. She accompanied herself with songs by Rota and Mauro Montalbetti, and her own arrangement of Fred Rzewski's To The Earth.

But the Rota Casanova Suite was really the best. It made me want to see the movie...

But too bad there were only 30 people in the audience, all of whom seemed to have enjoyed the event. 

By the way, Debora has a CD out on OgreOgress performing some very early piano pieces by Morton Feldman. I featured this CD on a Music from Other Minds program back in 2005. Its a very surprising CD. 

Interesting coincidence: The architect of many of the buildings at Mills College, including the Concert Hall where tonight's performance was held, Walter Ratcliff, Jr., was also the architect of the Fidelity Bank building in downtown Berkeley, the site of last night's Terry Riley concert (see below). 

Counting tonight's program, number 104, we've presented works by 153 composers on our MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS weekly radio program on KALW-FM (San Francisco).

A complete list of all the works broadcast so far is on the website. 

Here they all are:

JohnLuther Adams, Charles Amirkhanian, Beth Anderson, George Antheil, Mark Applebaum, Richard Ayres, Milton Babbitt, Alexander Balanescu, Billy Bang, Jean Barraqué, David Beardsley, Dan Becker, David Behrman, Barbara Benary, Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, Johanna Beyer, Mark Blitzstein, Pierre Boulez, Tim Brady, Henry Brant, Martin Bresnick, Chris Brown, Earle Brown, Galen Brown, Gavin Bryars, Michael Byron, John Cage, Mildred Couper, Rick Cox, Ruth Crawford, Alvin Curran, Maria deAlvear, Francis Dhomont, William Duckworth, John Duncan, Henri Dutilleux, Julius Eastman, DanielDavid Feinsmith, Morton Feldman, Luc Ferrari, MichaelJon Fink, Jim Fox, Dominic Frasca, Fred Frith, Ellen Fullman, Kyle Gann, Peter Garland, Philip Glass, Manuel Goettsching, Michael Gordon, Sofia Gubaidulina, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Barry Guy, Lars-Petter Hagen, Cristobal Halffter, Lou Harrison, Michael Harrison, Hirokazu Hiraishi, Bryan Hollon(Boom-Bip), Eleanor Hovda, Melissa Hui, Charles Ives, Richard James(AphexTwin), Leos Janacek, Joan Jeanrenaud, Ben Johnston, Klaus Jorgensen, Dan Joseph, Guy Klucevsek, Charles Koechlin, Jo Kondo, Drew Krause, Hanna Kulenty, György Kurtag, David Lang, Thomas Larcher, Daniel Lentz, Jorge Liderman, György Ligeti, Pierre-Yves Mace, Bruno Maderna, David Mahler, Philippe Manoury, Tigran Mansurian, Igor Markevitch, Ingram Marshall, Steve Martland, Janis Mattox, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Marc Mellits, Olivier Messiaen, Chris Miller, Stephen Mosko, Conlon Nancarrow, The Necks, Olga Neuwrith, Phill Niblock, Per Nørgård, Michael Nyman, Pauline Oliveros, Erik Ona, Leo Ornstein, Hans Otte, Gerard Pape, Harry Partch, Steve Peters, Larry Polansky, Jonathan Pontier, Serge Prokofiev, John Prokop, Maja Ratkje, Belinda Reynolds, Terry Riley, Jean-Claude Risset, Curtis Roads, Neil Rolnick, Ned Rorem, DanielBernard Roumain, Loren Rush, Frederic Rzewski, Franco SaintdeBakker, Somei Satoh, Giacinto Scelsi, R.Murray Schafer, Arnold Schoenberg, Phillip Schroeder, Stephen Scott, Peter Sculthorpe, Charles Smith, LindaCatlin Smith, RonaldBruce Smith, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Markus Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, Toru Takemitsu, Karen Tanaka, James Tenney, Michael Tenzer, David Toub, Jason Treuting, Sachito Tsurumi, Edgard Varese, Kevin Volans, Ian Wilson, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe, Iannis Xenakis, Carolyn Yarnell, Frank Zappa, Walter Zimmermann, Evan Ziporyn

Last night we had another treat as part of the on-going Berkeley Arts Festival at the abandoned Fidelity Bank building in downtown Berkeley. Local piano virtuoso and teacher Jerry Kuderna organized an evening's presentation of the early piano music of Arnold Schoenberg and some of his students, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hans Eisler and Victor Ullmann.

But the evening began with Brahms, the Intermezzo #1 from 1894, to set the stage. In chronological order, we also heard Berg's Sonata Op. 1 (1907), 5 lieder from Schoenberg's Das Buch der Hangenenden Gaerten (1908), Schoenberg's 6 Kleine Klavierstuecke (1912) and his 5 Pieces for Piano (1924), Eisler's 5 Songs on texts by Bertold Brecht, and the Andante for Victor Ullmann's Piano Sonata #5 (1943). A 50-year spread, and what a calamitous 50 years it was.

Mr Kuderna was joined by the amazing young soprano Nora Lennox Martin for the Schoenberg and Eisler songs. (We need to hear a lot more of Eisler.)

Speaking from the piano bench, Jerry Kuderna tried to set the stage for this fin de siecle tour, emphasizing Schoenberg's influence on his students, including Eisler who supposidly rejected Schoenberg later on. 

But as the 50 or so of us sat in the abandoned Fidelity Bank Walter Ratcliff Jr. designed in the 1920's,  I couldn't help thinking about how different a world Schoenberg's Vienna of 100 years ago must have been. And how difficult it is for us today to even imagine what cultural turmoil this music came out of. And where it all led.

The years from about 1890 to 1933 in Europe have always fascinated me, going back even to high school. (I wrote my senior English term paper on Webern's music -- my English teacher had to pass it on to the school librarian "who knew a little about music".)

It's hard even to embrace all the historical and cultural dynamics, and to follow the interactions between the arts, science, politics, psychology, etc that led the west out of the 19th century and into the so-called modern age of the 20th. 

In a sense, Europe went thru a  major psychotic break that erupted into the First World War. By it's end in 1918 the world was quite a different place and the 19th Century was finally over. But the chaos that followed in the 20's relapsed into total nightmare by the end of the 30's and total war into the 40's. 

This is the landscape that scored last night's concert, beginning in time with the Brahms Intermezzo, that old man's nostalgic reverie of a world about to end (altho he couldn't have known that),  reaching across to Victor Ullman's tragic Andante, composed in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

The raw hysteria in the Berg Sonata seems so over-the-top today, where "cool" is more than just being, and where being cool is everything. Those Viennese were far from cool.  Listening to Schoenberg and Berg from the period up to World War I, reading Karl Kraus, and Arthur Schnitzler, one is reminded of Freud and how he made the Viennese acknowledge their nightmares.

Which is why, except for a few pieces, (the piano and violin concertos are the exceptions) the music of Schoenberg in Los Angeles in the late 30's into the 50's seemes so out of place and lost; perhaps a dead-end for the serialism experiment. L.A. was no Vienna. Too cool, much too cool.

What then are we supposed to do with this music? Without the historical context, it makes little sense. But framed by the cultural dynamics of that time, it starts making more sense -- we are hearing the final screams of a century being put to rest. 

Which doesn't at all detract from the simple fact that this tragic music is (still) extraordinary.

Needless to say, Mr Kuderna and Ms Martin performed ecstatically, and the evening, despite the lack of heating in the hall, was far from cool.

Bravos all around! 

On the next Music From Other Minds, Friday 11pm repeated Monday 11pm (PT), R. Murray Schafer's Sixth String Quartet from 1993 and Wolfgang Rihm's Violin Concerto DRITTE MUSIK, also from 1993.

And we'll also try something completely different to end the program from a new CD by the Eighth Blackbird ensemble.

Music From Other Minds airs on KALW-FM San Francisco 91.7 FM, and is available, on line, for the week following, via our website: otherminds.org/mfom

Earlier this week PBS broadcast Bill Moyer's story about how the Bush administration hoodwinked the press into selling war in Iraq to the American people.

It's a frightening story and had me yelling at the TV. There is sufficient evidence for impeachment of Bush, Chaney and the rest. And I think Colin Powell comes out as the most tragic figure of all. The whole thing is worthy of a Shakespearean drama.

The program is worth watching (again).

Here is what FAIR says about the program:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3093 

Media Advisory
"Buying the War"
Moyers documentary exposes media culpability in Iraq War

This afternoon I went over to the UC Berkeley campus for a talk by Marcus du Sautoy, author of the absolutely fascinating book, The Music of the Primes. Du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. The event was organized by the Math Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.

Mathematics fascinates me. And while my B.S. is in Applied Math (1964), I never became a mathematician. I probably would not have been a very good one. (Most math majors are good bridge players, and I never liked playing cards, so my fate was sealed early on.) But I can see maybe having become a math teacher.

Fortunately (or not) I discovered computers early on, and altho computers and math are related, they're not really the same. Still, I've tried to keep up my math chops, and I still enjoy reading calculus books. (My fave is Ralph Agnew's textbook from 1962, and, of course, Richard Courant's classic.) This is great literature. I'm always looking for ways to explain things. And, after all, I am a technical writer.

There's been an explosion in popular books on topics in math recently, and Marcus du Sautoy's book is a prime example. (sorry). There are a couple of books about the number (and concept of) zero, many about pi, and even e (Euler's constant), and imaginary numbers.

Surprisingly, the S.F. Chronicle carried an article about today's lecture, so maybe that's why the Chan Shun auditorium, one of the biggest on campus, was completely full. Many students, but also many older folks from the community, like me, and even some pre-teens with their parents. 

It helps to know that du Sautoy is quite a performer. His appearances on BBC TV and radio are legend, like his talk on "Why Beckham Chose the 23 Shirt". And today's talk met all expectations, and then some.

For example, in explaining how Reimann's Zeta function improved on Gauss's approximation  for finding the number of primes below a certain number, du Sautoy had to explain how the buildup of the harmonics of a sine wave can create more complex waves. To illustrate this he played a violin, then a clarinet, and finally riffed on his trumpet with a canned jazz combo streaming off his laptop! It did stretch the point a bit, but it was entertaining.

You can find much of his talk on the internet here, and here.. And of course his book covers much much more. He actually gets into why the persuit of prime numbers is of such great interest to mathematicians for centuries. He interviews some of the major players and exposes some academic rivalries. (Those rivalries still go on, apparently; see this negative review of du Sautoy's book on the MMA website.)

It was exciting to think about math for an hour or so today. I'll probably pick up a few more books on the subject just to keep the juices flowing.

And it was a beautiful day to be back on campus again. It's getting close to finals week, and there was lots of activity. Almost made me want to register for next semester.

This afternoon I attended a tribute event for Max Mathews on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

This was organized by CCRMA, the computer music research lab at Stanford. 

Max is one of the great pioneers in using computers to synthesize speech and music. He started working on it in 1957 when he was at Bell Labs. Speech and sound synthesis in general was a topic of great interest to the researchers at the phone company. And altho the computers that were around 50 years ago were many thousands of times less powerful than the cell phones and laptops of today, he did set the theoretical vision for everything we take for granted today, like the iPod and mp3 music players, iTunes, and GarageBand. 

But Max's first real contribution was a program called MUSIC IV, written in FORTRAN, that allowed the programmer to set parameters that would define synthetic musical "instruments", and have the computer generate the sound samples characteristic of those parameter settings. What the computer was doing was solving the equations of sound that simulate the vibrations in air that we associate with music and musical instruments.

Back in 1966, when I was working as a systems programmer at the Courant Institute computer center at NYU,  I had heard about work that was being done to synthesize sound on a computer. And thru some contacts I had with the NYU music department, I eventually got involved with porting Max Mathews MUSIC IV program to the CDC 6600 at NYU. One day I received the source code from Bell Labs via Princeton, with some sketchy documentation on how it was supposed to work. 

I did get it to work, somewhat, but I never went beyond that for a couple of reasons. The biggest problem was the the computer center was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission (eventually the Department of Energy), and the Music department was not quite able to justify this use of their supercomputer. Then also, the output of the program was a digital tape that had to be sent to Bell Labs in New Jersey to be converted to analog sound. If I recall, a full digital tape, which held about 600 MB of data and took a few hours to generate, represented only about ten minutes of sound.  So this was pretty impractical. So eventually the project was dropped. But in the process of researching all this, I did get to meet Vladimir Ussachevsky and Milton Babbitt, and then Morton Subotnick, who was using a large Buchla analog synthesizer at the time. Once I was introduced to Don Buchla's analog voltage-controlled synthesizers I gave up on computer synthesis. (As it turned out, we needed to wait another 20 years before it became practical.)

But at some point I did get to meet the famous Max Mathews. I believe it was at a talk he gave at NYU. I cannot remember. But I did have some correspondence with his assistants at Bell Labs or Princeton regarding some problems I was having porting Music IV. 

Skip ahead to the 1970's and now I'm doing radio programs on KPFA in Berkeley and involved with electronic music activities at Mills College and other things. During that time I meet Jean-Claude Risset and John Chowning, two composers who pushed Mathews technology even further. Risset came from France to teach a seminar in computer music one summer at Stanford, where John Chowning was teaching and setting up a computer music research lab that eventually became CCRMA. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the seminar, but friends of mine did and I got some of their notes, and featured some of the new computer music on the radio.

From that point, the technology of computer generated music advanced extremely rapidly as smaller and faster computers became available. And jump forward to today, where the computer plays an integral part of all music (and film) production, much of these advances are due to the seminal work done 50 years ago by Max Mathews and his team at Bell Labs.

So it was fitting for both CCRMA and the Computer History Museum to honor Max for those 50 years and on his 80th birthday.

Hahn Auditorium was filled to capacity today to hear CCRMA's director Chris Chafe, Evelyne Gayou from the French Groupe de Rechereches Musicales (GRM) in Paris, John Chowning  of Stanford, Gerald Bennett from Zurich, Jon Appleton from Dartmouth, and Jean-Claude Risset from Marseille, each give a brief talk about their work with Max over the years, and his importance to them as mentor and guide. These reminiscences were heartfelt and gave some insight into how visionary Max's work really was. And then Max gave an all-too-brief summing up of the early years working with the IBM 7094 and DEC PDP 10 (versions of which were downstairs on the museum exhibit floor.)

The talks were followed by an hour-and-a-half concert that I only wish was better. Of the six works presented, most were dreadful, or worse. It left me pondering about how music depends on so much more than just enabling technologies.

But there were two that stood out because they demonstrated a true musical consciousness that was above the rest.

One was Gerald Bennett's Un Madrigal gentile,  for tape alone. (We say "for tape alone" to indicate that the sound was mixed and generated probably on a computer and written probably to an audio CD or AIFF format data file. I doubt if any "tape" was really involved, but the language from the pre-digital days remains... we don't say "for CD alone").  This was a wonderful, minimalist piece that mixed brief choral sounds with voices, natural sounds, and lots of silence. Unlike so many pieces of this genre that throw everything at you all at once, Bennett's "tape" piece allowed itself to take all the time it needed. I found the subtleties of the sound and the pacing very engaging, and I wanted to hear more.

The other stand-out piece on the program was Jean-Claude Risset's Strange Attractors (parts 2-4) from 1988 for clarinet and prerecorded sounds. Combining live traditional instruments with computer accompaniment is difficult to do well. But here Risset concentrates on the most interesting sounds that the B flat and bass clarinets produce, those low sensuous tones. The musical style was firmly placed in the late '80's, with the prerecorded sounds of the clarinets playing against the live solist. The intertwining of the live and recorded sounds provided an interesting backdrop. But I was expecting more. So it was a bit disappointing. I've heard a number of Risset's works that are far better than this one. But still, it was miles ahead of the other works on the program.  The live clarinet parts sounded quite difficult to master, and they were performed dilligently by Gareth Davis, dressed in old jeans and a faded t-shirt. Maybe I'm turning into an old fart about this, but it might have been better had he dressed a bit snappier for the occasion, rather than like he just came from the gym. (I found out later that, in fact, Gareth, who is from the UK, had no time to change clothes between rehearsal and performance. In an email he said that otherwise he would have been "black on black", which is more like his performing attire.)

Anyway, I was glad to see such a turnout in tribute to Max, who remains, even at 80, a vital part of this community. Happy birthday, Max!