All I Know³
Information, transmission, modulation, and noise - 3rd Edition

Ok. It’s now official.

The entire rchrd.com domain has moved and is working off a new hosting service.

My domain, rchrd.com, started out at mindspring.com many years ago (remember mindspring.com ?). Then it got gobbled up by earthlink.com. Five years ago I moved it to iPowerWeb.com, which seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’ve seen a stead decay in performance and unexplained outages and other problems over the years. The last was a situation, just last week, where users on AT&T’s internet plumbing (that includes me) couldn’t access my sites. After getting conflicting reports from support, I decided that was the end.

After doing some research online, and then calling around to talk to some real people, I decided to move the whole show to In Motion Hosting (inmotionhosting.com). They were even good enough to initiate a server to server transfer of the bulk of my 3.5 GB site, saving me many hours of download/upload time.

And now it’s all there. Last night I repointed the DNS entries for the rchrd.com domain from iPower.com’s name servers to inmotionhosting.com’s  and here we are.

The transition was pretty seamless, so far, and I’m glad I took my time moving things over and getting it all working right. I’m hoping for the best. So far I’ve been impressed with the support I’ve received, and altho I’m not a newbie at all this, each environment and installation does provide its own challenges and a new learning experience.

So, onward!

I’m in the process of moving from one hosting service to another. The reasons for doing this are many.

So far it’s been a bit painful. But I’m proceeded bit by bit, literally.

So don’t worry if you see something strange happening. It will probably change later. But it’s been one big headache. I’ll explain when it’s all done.

I just updated the running playlist for my radio program on KALW.

150 programs to date, presenting over 430 individual works.

The complete playlist is here. The website has lots of details.

I read today that the Cafe Figaro in Greenwich Village is closing (again). It was my hangout from 1959-68. It closed the first time around 1969. Then re-opened again as The Figaro in the 70’s. I believe it’s gone thru a number of changes. But it never attained the popularity and significance that it had before 1969.

So many icons of the 60’s are gone. Well, it’s almost half a century now. So, it’s not surprising.

What we want is some way to go back to a day in, say 1966, a nice spring day, and sit outside the Figaro with friends, a cappuccino and a croissant, and you’re 22, and it’s Spring in New York. And everything just seems so, so, …mmmm…. so, significant.

That’s probably because, it was.

Smoke in the air from forest fires have turned the sunsets red. We smell the smoke in the air. This will be an interesting summer, for sure.

Does this look familiar? Actually, it’s an oil painting of my picture from 1970, done by Maurice Pierse in Dublin Ireland, who was so intrigued by the image that he painted it! (Click on the image to see it larger)

That’s a first! Some of my images have turned up in the strangest places. But never before as an oil painting on someone’s wall.

I am humbled, and impressed.

Forty years ago today I left New York City for good, flying to San Francisco to take a job at UC Berkeley.

It was also the day RFK was shot.

I woke that morning, in my empty apartment in the Village, surrounded by the luggage I packed the night before. I switched on a pocket radio, the only working appliance in my one room studio, and heard just confusion. I couldn’t tell what was going on.

Eventually it became clear. RFK had been shot in LA. And I was flying to SFO in a few hours. There is no record of what I thought at that moment. Today, my mind is a blank about much of the whole affair. The shooting. The flight.

I do remember that my parents drove in from Long Island to take me to the airport. Their second child was leaving. (My brother left years ago for Johns Hopkins, or was it MIT. Or Tel Aviv U. I forget which.)

I don’t remember any conversation. It must have been a difficult scene. RFK and goodbyes. My dad was an Eisenhower Republican anyway. And my mom was probably a Democrat, if she voted at all. Her parents were Eastern European immigrants and Socialists. She was quite happy just being a suburban housewife. I guess. I never really knew for sure.

Anyway, RFK and my leaving NYC for Berkeley are forever tied together.

Somehow I got on the plane with all my stuff. 51 boxes of books and more stuff, shipped earlier in the week, would be waiting for me. Somewhere. I have no memory of how I managed this move. It happened, somehow. I wasn’t even sure where I was going to live once I arrived. The University would pay relocation fees, including a hotel for a few days. But then what?

On the plane I was nervous. I do remember that.

Was I doing the right thing? Moving from New York. Four years earlier, when I graduated Brookly Poly, my friends were all being sucked up by the tech companies in the West who were supporting the military technology of the Vietnam war. Engineers were going off to Arizona and southern California to work for the now lucrative war effort. But leave New York? It was 1964, I was 20 and living in the Village. No way! You must be crazy to leave.

By ‘68 all that changed. Assassinations, riots, crime, grit and soot, bad drugs in the street. The hippies of ‘66-67 had morphed into homeless beggars and toothless street bums by ‘68.

Sometime in March, and this I do remember clearly, I left my apartment to go to work across the street at NYU. Blocking my way on the sidewalk was what looked like a pile of old clothes. Some busted boots, coats, hats, many pairs of pants. Unfortunately there was a man in them. Lying on the ground staring up at the ugly sky. I knew this man was dead just by looking at his skin. A few months before I had gone to a funeral home in Brooklyn for a view of my Uncle Benny. I’d never seen a dead man before. He was quite dead. So was the guy on the sidewalk . That same color.

And people were just walking around him, not even looking. Like it was just a pile of garbage left there last night for pickup.

This disturbed me. I do remember that.

So I went over to work, to my office, sat down and typed out my resume. I gotta get out of here.

I wrote and sent two letters that day, with my resume. One was to people I knew at the computer center at the UC Berkeley Lawrence Lab in California. The other to people I knew at the University of London Computer Center. I went to the mailroom and bought stamps, and mailed them. That was sometime in March, 1968. I knew it was a wild and impulsive thing to do. But it had been building up. I always wanted to go to Berkeley. And to London. We’d see who’d win the toss. Then I went about my business, wondering what would happen next.

A few weeks later, in early April, MLK was killed. We expected riots.

And then a letter arrived from Berkeley. An interview. I never did hear from London, until years later.

By late May I had a job offer. And On June 5, I had turned my life’s arrow around and was on the plane heading West.

It was on the plane that the pilot announced RFK’s death. There was a moment of silence. I didn’t know what to think. I had the feeling that everything I ever knew was about to change forever.

That’s what it took. A letter. An envelope. And a stamp.

Had London ever replied, I probably would have quit this country. Had I not followed the impulse to get out of the City and write those resumes and post those letters, I would still be in NYC, maybe. Had that old guy not died in front of my apartment, who knows.

I tell this story to my two Berkeley-born daughters occasionally. They wouldn’t be alive had it not been for the events that stemmed from a death in the street, a letter, an envelope, and a stamp. When you’re 24, the most mundane things can form the matrix out of which the next forty or more will grow. But you don’t know that then.

It’s all very very strange .. to wonder about it all.

And the rest of the story, the London part, is important.

I loved London when I visited it in 1966, and kept up a number of connections there by mail. Disappointed from not hearing from them, I still would occasionally meet people from the U of London at conferences. Around 1972 I arranged to take a year’s leave from Berkeley and take a job at the London computer center. I spent all of 1973 in London, enjoying most of it until the big oil crisis, the first oil crisis, in the winter. But sometime around September the director of the computer center moved his office from the second to the third floor. By this time I had forgotten about the 1968 letter. But into my office comes the director, a very very messy guy, excitedly holding in his hand guess what, that letter.

Unopened.

It had fallen behind his desk and sat there for 5 years until this moment.

I told him there was no need to open it, I knew what it was.

So he opened it, read it while laughing. (I wasn’t, but I was contemplating all the events that led up to this moment and what would have happened if he had been a bit neater.)

And standing there he offered me a full-time job. But it was too late. I wanted to go home.

A letter, an envelope, and a stamp.

And forty years later….

And right now, one daughter, at 24 the same age that I was when I left in ‘68, is now a tourist in New York City, visiting friends and hopefully tracing my footsteps in the Village. And the other, almost 30, is in Gaza City, looking out on the Sea and reporting back from Palestine.

It’s enough to take your breath away.

Our Oakland neighborhood’s monthly pot luck, “First Wednesday” is featured in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, on the food page, along with Victoria’s excellent grilled pork tenderloin recipe.

This is something that has been going on in our ‘hood even before we moved in, almost ten years ago. Some say it’s been a tradition for over 20 years, but no one is really sure when it actually started.

The great thing about it is that it is never planned. It just seems to happen the first wednesday of each month.

Which does result in some surprises occasionally, like the time everyone only brought dessert. The article is by one of the neighbors, Patti Brown, who lives across the street.

We are fortunate to live in a great neighborhood, where everyone knows each other and shares a meal at least once a month. It seems like such a rare treasure these days.

This week’s MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS transmission features selections from a new release on Bridge Records of music by Tania León.

Click on the “Listen Again” link on the MFOM website.

Friends of Luc Ferrari now have an official website: www.lucferrari.org.

“The Association PRESQUE RIEN assembles the friends of the late French composer, Luc Ferrari, to make his music better known and performed, and to diffuse his writings, his films, his music theater and radio art.

The general task of PRESQUE RIEN is to encourage music creation as well by coordinating individual actions by its members.”

You can join PRESQUE RIEN at the new LucFerrari.org website.

This week you can hear the music of Dutch composer Peter Adriaansz on the current Music from Other Minds program stream, at http://rchrd.com/mfom/mfom.m3u

Yikes! I’ve been busy.

Many projects running simultaneously.  So both this and the photo blog have suffered neglect.

Things should get better next week.

In the meantime, did you catch Oresteïa by Xenakis on the latest Music from Other Minds? You can still hear it for a week. Just click on the “Listen Again” link on the MFOM website.

I note that there will be a performance of Stockhausen’s STIMMUNG in Santa Monica on Saturday (April 12th).

Details here.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth, December 1908. So maybe it’s more like the anniversary of his conception as well.

Son of an English teacher father who translated Shakespeare, and a symbolist poet mother, Messiaen, who died in 1992, is still perhaps the most unique and exotic of 20th century composers.

There is an excellent one-page appreciation of Messiaen’s music and role in 20c music in today’s New York Times by Anthony Tommasini.

And, it looks like there will be many concerts honoring Messiaen in New York City and Europe this year. Here is a partial list of events.

So, I wonder what San Francisco events are being planned. I haven’t heard of any. Many years ago MTT and the SF Symphony did perform the massive Turangalila Symphony (it was spectacular!). And just as many years ago the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano did a preview of sections from his opera, St Francis, with the SF Opera staging a complete performance just a couple of years ago (it was also spectacular!).

We can only hope to hear more Messiaen locally.

One of Messiaen’s great interests was bird song. Many of his pieces feature his own transcriptions and interpretations of the songs of birds, from the ordinary to the exotic.

The next MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS broadcast on KALW will feature two bird-song based pieces that are very rarely performed: Réveil des Oiseaux (Bird’s Awakening) for piano and orchestra, and La Fauvette des Jardins (The Garden Warbler) for piano solo.

And, there will be more Messiaen on MFOM/KALW in the coming months. Stay tuned.

You can hear TUNNEL-FUNNEL by Daniel Goode and a new release of The Webster Cycles by Steve Peters on this week’s MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program, available for streaming all week.  rchrd.com/mfom for details and streaming link.

Cody’s Books in Berkeley has been reborn!!

Having gone thru some really rough times, this independent and venerable Berkeley landmark has relocated to downtown Berkeley. The official reopening, under new management, was this afternoon.

This new spot, on the corner of Allston Way and Shattuck Avenue, is equally historic. Once the site of Edy’s soda fountain, and then an Eddie Bauer store, the upstairs floors were the offices and studios of radio station KPFA for many decades. (A place where I spent some of my own decades.)

A bit smaller than their previous location on Fourth Street (which they had to give up when the landlord significantly raised the rent), this new space on the corner is full of light, clean, and congenial. And, there’s a great spot for author readings and other events in the rear of the store.

This is a difficult time for all independent bookstores, especially stores like Cody’s that feature new books. So we congratulate the staff and new management for the commitment, hard work, and determination to carry the flame forward.

Bookstores are the cultural and intellectual heart of a community. Cody’s has been in Berkeley for more than fifty years. We have a good feeling about the new store. May it live long and prosper.

Unfortunate Update: Cody’s didn’t make it. It closed for good on June 20th.  The dream couldn’t out run the phenomenal debt the new owners had to assume to keep the doors open. Eventually, strapped for cash and with all the publishers and distributors unwilling to extend any further credit, they were forced to shut down. This time it’s for good.

Recently I was asked to recommend a list of books on new music. So here it is. These are, of course, in addition to Alex Ross’s excellent “The Rest Is Noise“.

Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Paperback)
by Kyle Gann - University of California Press; 1 edition (February 13, 2006) ISBN-10: 0520229827

Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Paperback)
by Morton Feldman (Author), B. H. Friedman (Editor) - Exact Change (March 2, 2004) ISBN-10: 1878972316

Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Paperback)
by Robert Fink (Author) - University of California Press; 1 edition (September 13, 2005) ISBN-10: 0520245504

Modern Music and After - Directions Since 1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks) (Paperback)
by Paul Griffiths (Author) - Oxford University Press, USA; 2Rev Ed edition (December 3, 2007) ISBN-10: 0198165110

Winter Music: Composing the North (Hardcover)
by John Luther Adams (Author) - Wesleyan; Har/Com edition (January 1, 2004) ISBN-10: 0819567426

The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams (Eastman Studies in Music) (Author)by Steven Schick - University of Rochester Press; Har/Com edition (May 1, 2006) ISBN-10: 1580462146

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Paperback)
by Daniel J. Levitin - Plume; 1 Reprint edition (August 28, 2007) ISBN-10: 0452288525

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer (Hardcover)
by Thomas May (Author) Amadeus Press (June 19, 2006) ISBN-10: 1574671324

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Book & CD) (Hardcover)
by Alan Licht (Author) Rizzoli; Har/Com edition (November 6, 2007) ISBN-10: 0847829693

Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (Hardcover)
by Carolyn Brown Knopf (March 20, 2007) ISBN-10: 0394401913

Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987 (New Series) (Paperback) by Chris Villars (Editor) Hyphen Press (May 1, 2006) - ISBN-10: 0907259316

Silence: Lectures and Writings (Paperback)
by John Cage (Author) Wesleyan; 1st edition (June 15, 1961) ISBN-10: 0819560286

Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Paperback)
by Robin Maconie (Author) - The Scarecrow Press, Inc. (April 2005) ISBN-10: 0810853566

Messiaen (Hardcover)
by Peter Hill (Author), Nigel Simeone (Author) Yale University Press (October 11, 2005) ISBN-10: 0300109075

Certainly not a complete list, but you should be able to find most of these books still in print or reprint. I’m going to compile a secondary list soon.

Gerhard Samuel, conductor of the Oakland Symphony from 1959 to 1971, passed away in Seattle on March 25. He was 83.

He will be remembered as being the one of the most adventurous conductors the Bay Area has ever had. Those were the golden years of the Oakland Symphony.

There are memorials by Charles Shere, and Joshua Kosman.

Tonight’s broadcast on PBS FRONTLINE of part one of “Bush’s War” is an epic tragedy on the scale of a le Carré thriller, or maybe Shakespeare. Unfortunately it’s not fiction, and it’s about a sitting president.

The whole four hour program is viewable on line and it’s not a pretty picture.

Much of the material was gathered from previous FRONTLINE programs about the run up to the Iraq War. The broadcast is timely as we start the 6th year of this unneeded war with now 4000 soldiers and untold Iraqi citizens murdered.

Hopefully, all this will serve as evidence in the eventual war crimes trials that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld , and Wolfowitz should face.

 Morton Subotnick  -  Spring (from Until Spring, 1975; signed 2008).  Pencil and blue, red and green crayon on vellum, 17” x 14”.  -  $500

This score and others from composers featured at Other Minds 13 are now on sale on the Other Minds website. This web sale is a benefit for Other Minds.

Some new programs and many more at radiOM.org.

+ A Visit with John Zorn (1987)

John Zorn and Larry Ochs join Charles Amirkhanian to discuss and play a selection of Zorn’s compositions. Among the pieces heard is an excerpt from “Spillane” in which Zorn tries to capture some of the film noir sensibility that imbues the Mickey Spillane novels, based in Zorn’s hometown New York City. This is followed by excerpts from Zorn’s collaborative improvisational work “Cobra” for which he created a number of general rules which are then used by a group of talented musicians to create a kaleidoscope of sound events. Also included in this program is a portion of “Hu-Die,” a piece named for and inspired by the great Cantonese actress from the 1930s, and a recording of tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain.

+ Ode to Gravity Desert Equations: The Music of Richard Horowitz and Sussan Deyhim (1987)

Composer Richard Horowitz and Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim combined the sounds of new wave electronica, percussion, and Middle Eastern modal music in their 1987 album, “Desert Equation: Azax Attra.” Charles Amirkhanian plays selections from the album and interviews Horowitz about how he and Deyhim constructed these enchanting blends of modern technology and ancient sounds. The music is scored for voice, nay flute, percussion, and electronic keyboards and has been described by some as an “electronic oasis”; give it a listen to see why. (from the KPFA Folio)

+ A Concert by the New Music Ensemble (1972)

A concert mixing classical piano works and new music for instrumental ensemble, sponsored by the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble, and given on March 10, 1972, at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. The concert features works by Robert Erickson, Richard Felciano, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Loren Rush, all performed by the Ensemble. Also included are piano works by Robert Schumann, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Franz Liszt, and Frederic Chopin, performed by Robert Helps.

+ Interview with Terry Riley (1983)

Charles Amirkhanian interviews composer Terry Riley at his home in Northern California on June 11, 1983. Riley describes his early childhood experiences with music, his life as a student in San Francisco, and his first experimentation with serial and then minimal composition. He goes into great detail about the processes that led to his seminal work “In C.” Riley also describes his early collaborations with other composers, and his later tendency to work alone. Both Amirkhanian and Riley lament the fact that growing up in rural California there was little chance to be exposed to classical music. Riley also discusses his exploration of musical traditions from around the world including Asian and Indian music, his affinity for Eastern spiritual philosophies, and the influence of Pandit Pran Nath.

Listen free at radiom.org

Took two days of hacking with WordPress, but all three blogs are now running in their new editions:

Had to learn a bit about mySQL, PHP, CSS, and more. I also came across some limitations, but we can live with them for now. Still some tinkering needed. I’ll link the oldest entries “previous” link to the last entry of the previous edition. That should make the transition seamless.   Lets just see how it goes.

Friday night’s MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program will feature, among other things, the world radio premiere (as far as I’m aware) of John Cage’s 28-minute work for wind instruments, Twenty-Eight, from 1991.

I will admit, right here, I’m not a great fan of Cage’s late “numbered pieces”. I always have the feeling that they were intended to be played but not heard. (There - I said it.)

In these pieces, Cage gives sometimes vague instructions to the performers about what they can play between specific time markers (”time brackets”). A performance is directed by a video clock that is visible to all. The score indicates the times when to play and when to stop, and how to play. The performer chooses what to play in those time brackets depending on the instructions Cage gives in the score.

These pieces are all about process. What does it take to create a piece of music in real time? This can be really interesting for the performer. But from the point of view of the listener, I could be outside the concert hall listening to birds and find that more interesting. And yet, some of the pieces that I’ve heard are quite engaging, even tho that might not be due to the composer’s intentions.

Still, the fact that these pieces do get performed and even recorded is an achievement worth noting. And Glenn Freeman’s OgreOgress Productions has been championing Cage’s late work for years. So we’re really pleased to be able to be the first to broadcast this very new recording on the radio, anywhere.

The program Friday night will also sample another OgreOgress release of music by Alan Hovhaness (could anything be more different?!), with a performance of his Talin (1951) with Christina Fong, viola, and the strings of the Slovak Philharmonic.

And we’ll conclude the program with an improvisation on prepared piano by Kui Dong recorded on a recent Other Minds release.

Music from Other Minds, KALW 91.7 San Francisco Friday 11pm
Broadcast streaming in real time:

LIVE KALW STREAMING (RealAudio)
LIVE KALW STREAMING (Windows Media)

Programs are available for streaming on the Music From Other Minds website, http://rchrd.com/mfom for one week after broadcast

Just back from a brief vigil against the war in Iraq held in tony Piedmont’s city center organized by Move On. Some 50 or so people answered the email call to gather and remember those who have died and our dishonorable leaders who lied.

Piedmont, an East Bay surburb of San Francisco that borders on Berkeley and Oakland, is the Beverly Hills of the North. So it was reassuring to see that many people come together. However, too few young people came. It seemed we all were veterans of too many peace marches, peace vigils, teach-ins, sit-ins, and so on.

Was it four years ago we stood in a similar vigil holding our candles in Berkeley.

Cheney was interviewed on PBS earlier. He was asked to comment on the fact that 2/3 of Americans oppose the war. His response: “So?”. I’m afraid this democracy is lost. I’ve always felt that the governance model the Bush administration admired the most was the Chinese. See it now in action.

So what’s the difference between Movable Type and WordPress?

Well, after playing around with WordPress in an attempt to replace my no-longer-working Movable Type blogging installation, I’ve found out what the biggest design difference between them is.

MT generates static web pages while WP is totally dynamic, generating the pages in your browser as you call for them.

So?

Well, that means that should the database that runs a WP blog get corrupted you will never be able to view any of the pages on the site. But with MT, static web pages are regenerated only when you add a new entry to the blog. And these static pages can be saved even after the database goes south, as has happened with my MT blogs. The pages are all there for viewing. I just can’t add any new items.

Hmmm. What to do? Backing up a WP blog site means backing up the PHP software that generates the pages dynamically, as well as the mySQL database, and the templates and CSS files that define the look/feel of the site theme. But you can’t back up the web pages that WP generates on the fly. (Well, I guess you could do a Save As while viewing every page… not very efficient.) At least, I don’t think there’s a way to generate and save the pages WP generates statically. I need to investigate this further.

This may not be a problem for text blogs like this one. But it has stopped me trying to recreate my photo blog in WP.

So I may go back to MT for the photo blog by reinstalling the latest MT distro and creating a new mySQL database for it to use. I won’t be able to make the old photo blog come alive again because it’s database is hosed, apparently. But at least the static pages are all there still and the site is viewable. (All I’ve Seen). But I can start a “second edition” of the photo blog and link them together.

Stay tuned.