Who more worthress...Arec Bardwin or Richard Gere? And my acoustical attic...

OK. I shouldn't take nearly as much amusement from this story as I do. It is just that I have never liked Richard Gere as an actor, and his obnoxious politics leave me even colder.

Still, I must have sympathy for his supporters. You know how it is for us these days when we hear of a sexual scandal involving a priest and we get more details and breathe a sigh of relief and say, "at least it was with a woman?" Well, for Gere's supporters, they can at least say...never mind. Even I will not go there.

There are cheap shots and there are free shots.

Does anyone still remember that stuff? Sort of like Kemp's Lake Tahoe. You can find out little bits about the scandal with Google, but, my oh my, has it evaporated, compared to other scandals.

Anyway, since my new studio is smaller than the old studio (yet better in many ways...I keep telling myself), I have to make sure that everything has a place, and a use. Anything that doesn't, gets tossed or sold. Period. I cannot save anything that I cannot find a use for in the next year or two. And that includes the box of cassettes that has been following me around for years.

I have been wary of simply throwing away the box, since there are tons of unmarked cassettes with gems on them. I have been going through those cassettes, listening, labeling, shelving, etc.

I was mightily pleased to discover cassettes of some of my electronic compositions from many years ago, one in particular that came out of my work with Stockhausen's "Four Criteria of Electronic Music." What makes me most interested in this piece is that I am using the system I developed for the compositional structure for a series of paintings right now, yet I have not been able to find anything but the reel-to-reel master tape of the piece (and I don't have a reel-to-reel player/recorder any more). So I was overjoyed to put on this unmarked cassette to hear this piece.

Now, I was curious about two things about this piece (which I composed in 1993 or 1994):

1. Since I used just about the whole spectrum of human audible sound, would I be able to hear some of the high frequency patterns that I put in there?

2. This was a piece I wrote when I was thoroughly immersed in mid-century avant-garde music (Xennakis, Stockhausen, Boulez, Yuasa, Subotnick, Cage, etc.). While I still listen to and enjoy that music, I am not nearly as involved in it as I was then, and I wondered if I would enjoy hearing, even to be able to endure this long composition of pure electronic music.

Well, I am pleased that, yes, I can still hear even the very highest parts of the music, and that I enjoyed listening to this piece even more now than I did the last time I heard it (when it was used at a dance performance many years ago).

I also found lots and lots of concert tapes of various ensembles I have been in, and have really been enjoying listening to the Balinese gamelan that I played in (although there the ragged edges on some of the pieces annoy me now even more than they did then - although I no longer have the same pique at the musicians who were responsible for those ragged edges - I remember days when a couple of us wanted to strangle a tempo-challenged musician or two).

The worst was a live tape from a band I was in back in 1991/1992. The performance was pretty good, but I had one solo where my intonation was out to lunch. Egads.