Cold Comfort

I'm having sex in Ron Kuivila's bed, guest bed that is, with one of the other guests here in the house he shares with Bobbi and their young 'un in Middle Haddam, just north of Lower Haddam in the 'fucking Xmas card' that is Connecticut of the Holiday Season.  Ron and I have some connections going way back, having both appeared on Tellus cassettes back in the day (I particularly liked Canon X), and Ron and David Anderson collaborating on the design of FORMULA, a FORth-based Music LAnguage which I've very surprised didn't have broader uptake. It was amazingly well-designed, with a highly-threaded process-based model that seemed remarkably suited for music.  My late and amazingly talented composer buddy Jim Horton used it exclusively near the end, when his arthritis got so bad and his hands so crabbed and swollen that he could only peck at the keyboard, but through the tidy naming of a few very simple processes, could generate huge masses of sound. Dave was a professor at UC Berkeley when I was a grad student there and later was the ex-boyfriend of my now girlfriend: a plaything of We who struggle in the Incestuous Appalachia that is the Life in New Music.

It's so wonderful to be here, to talk about Music and Art with someone who knows more about it than me.  I don't get that much in SF these days.  I need to come back soon to the Methodist-sanctified ground here in the shadow of Wesleyan University.