Melissa Dunphy

After a frustrating series of setbacks, I finally have my course schedule for this semester settled, and I am rather excited. I managed to get out of the music department for the first time in three years, and I'm taking:

Copyright, Creativity, and New Media
Peter Decherney
T 5:30-8:10
This course examines the impact of copyright law on artists and creative industries. Looking at publishing, music, film, and software, we will ask how the law drove the adoption of new media, and we will consider how regulation influences artistic decisions. The course will cover both the history of copyright law and current debates, legislation, and cases. We will also follow major copyright stories in the news. Readings cover such diverse topics as the player piano, Disney films, YouTube, video game consuls, hip hop, the Grateful Dead, file sharing, The Catcher in the Rye, and many more. In addition to active participation, students will write papers on fair use, do in-class presentations, and write a research paper.

Digital Battlegrounds
Joseph Turow
R 3:00-5:00pm
Students will read books and articles that address several key areas of social concern and confrontation around the web and mobile devices as well as the “over-the-horizon” topic of augmented reality. We will consider each topic for about two class sessions, reading extended works on the subjects and as well as related articles. Topics and authors we will cover include: The collaborative “nature” of the web (Clay Shirkey, Yochai Benkler); Social profiling, reputation and the media (Dan Solove, Joseph Turow); Privacy (Helen Nissenbaum); The right to forget (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger); The meaning and implications of “free” the in digital world (Chris Anderson); Threats to traditional journalism (McChesney and Nichols); Social implications of augmented-reality technologies (various academic and trade writings). Students will write a semester paper as well as weekly critical analyses of the reading.

Do these sound fabulous or what!? Copyright and new media geek out!

First class for the former was today. I spent two hours grinning from ear to ear. I felt maybe a little embarrassed that I was wearing my Pirate Bay t-shirt under my sweater, but the temperature in the classroom was low enough that I could leave my outer layer on and trick everyone into thinking I don't try too hard.

I am equally psyched about the second class, whose professor comes highly recommended by pretty much everyone.

*happy grad student dance* I'm going to dance that dance now, because I'm sure I will be doing the sad grad student wallow in just a few weeks when the workload hits.

Anyway, this is all very timely, because SOPA. I have a script up that will (hopefully) put this website and mormolyke.com on strike for 12 hours starting at 8AM EST, coinciding with the Reddit strike. You know, so all 4 people who accidentally click on the site during that time will get a message about SOPA. But hey, it's the little things that make me feel like I'm at least doing something. I moved all of my GoDaddy domains (there were more than I realized, damn) to NameCheap last month and felt very pleased with myself. If only my EFF stickers were vinyl, I would put one on my car RIGHT NOW.

Labels: college, politics, website

Looking backward first: behold a long overdue recording of a live performance: from March 2011, here's Anti-Social Music and Handshake (my lovesong to the dial-up modem) in Brooklyn:



This made me so warm and fuzzy. I'm not sure that anyone likes Handshake quite as much as I do, but I don't even care. From my program notes on Mormolyke Press:

A raucous homage to the sounds of the Information Age in a setting of the Lorem Ipsum (dummy text used for centuries in print publishing, now most famously used in website design). Features representations of a modem handshake, DTMF tones, the sequence of powers of two, and nod to the famous "Captain Crunch" whistle of the 1960's, an icon of the phreaking and hacking community.

(BTW, yes, I am so freaking lame and slow. I should have posted about this stuff months and months ago. But hey! Help me atone by paying what you will for the recording -- what you will hopefully being more than $0, if you're not too poor.)

It's pretty awesome being a composer sometimes. Like when people play your music. That's cool.

Also pretty cool: when people let you play stuff while they dance. Looking forward to this Saturday, for which I'm cooking up an off-the-cuff performance with Niki Cousineau as part of Third Bird's Blind Date:



You can get tickets in advance. You should probably do that. I'm busting out my viola and likely a delay pedal.

Labels: music, Philadelphia

I just finished designing a new blog dedicated to the roadtrop Matt and I are taking this May-June:

www.roadtrop.com



Heh, the photo of the car in the design is one I took last night ... of the toy Magnum in our tchotcke cabinet.

There are a few blog entries up already, and more to come. Since fantasizing about the roadtrip is basically what I do for fun at the moment, I'll probably be blogging there more often for the next few months, though non-travel posts will stay over here.

In my early teens, I had an obsession with detective novels. I still love them, but back then, with puberty raging in my heart and loins, I wanted to be all the female sleuths and/or sleep with all the male sleuths when I grew up. It might have started with Sherlock Holmes - I know I had a dumbed-down kids' version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and soon moved to the real thing, and I also devoured all the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books early on. At some point, I found a copy of Murder Ink in the school library and pored over its pages, systematically attempting to acquire and read every book it mentioned; I know that's why I discovered and branched out into John le Carré and Dashiell Hammett. (I even dropped into the Murder Ink store in Manhattan for old times' sake on my solo US vacation in 2002.)

By 1993, my obsession had mostly focused upon Inspector Morse. I first encountered Morse through the television series, which in Australia ran on Channel Seven and was enjoyed by my dad. As much as I loved the show, the books were, of course, better, and I read and reread them many times, chasing down all the references to opera and literature and poetry and classics. I also collected them avidly; I think I had at least four different editions of The Way Through the Woods.

I'm not a fan-lettery person, but in 1994, I took stock of how my little fourteen-year-old life had been shaped by my devotion to Morse books, and started drafting a letter to author Colin Dexter, after rather creepily stalking him as best I could by hunting down on VHS all his guest appearances in the series and looking up his address in an authors' directory I found in the State Library of Queensland. (Just think what I would have done with the internet and Google Earth.) I wish I'd kept a copy of my letter to laugh at in posterity; there were at least four pages of gushing, along with detailed descriptions of how the novels had inspired me to join the chess club, take up Latin (through a correspondence course, since my school didn't offer it), research the baffling mysteries of Freemasonry (this interest vanished after I finally learned the handshake when I was 16), and become a fledgling opera buff (I bought an expensive subscription with my allowance and attended all the shows by myself, since nobody else I knew could stand the stuff); in particular, I described my resultant affliction with a profound admiration for the music of Wagner. I blathered on with oblivious teenaged narcissism* about playing the viola in the youth orchestra**. After four or five painstakingly handwritten drafts, the letter was dropped in the mail and forgotten. I honestly never expected a reply; I just wanted to thank the guy and talk about myself.

My mother didn't understand why I wouldn't stop screaming hysterically when this came in the mail. She looked genuinely worried, as though she feared the familial insanity had taken me early.




Text:

22.9.94
My dear Melissa,
That's just about the sweetest letter I've ever received. Bless you! If you were here, I'd give you a hug and a kiss (if that were allowed!).
My greetings to you from Oxford and from Chief Inspector Morse. And every best wish to you yourself always!
You write awfully well, you know. And perhaps you're going to be a writer yourself?
Sincerely
Colin Dexter

I'm not going to say that this letter made me who I am. But it certainly kicked all of my Morse-inspired interests into high gear. I took more music courses in grades 11 and 12. When I agreed to go to med school after graduation, it was only because I thought I wanted to be a forensic pathologist. The first drink I ever had was Bell's Scotch. The first $1,000 I ever saved, I spent on buying tickets to the first Australian production of the entire Ring Cycle in Adelaide in 1998. And now, of course, I am a composer, and currently, one of my graduate courses is a seminar led by Carolyn Abbate (squee) focused on Tristan und Isolde.

This blog post brought to you by nostalgia provoked by watching Inspector Lewis on Netflix Instant, followed by Humoresque, which was our Tristan "reading" this week.

*as opposed to self-aware 31-year-old narcissism.

**When his next book came out in 1996, one of the young characters "had a great love of music, and played the viola in the National Youth Orchestra." Naturally, my blood ran cold upon reading that sentence, and I felt certain I was responsible - me, personally, responsible for a small trait of a small character in a Morse book. However, that character had committed suicide, so I couldn't bring myself to think on it too deeply.

Tangent: is it now an accepted thing that all forensic pathologists on TV are women?

Labels: From the Vault

In June of 2006, Matt and I bought a house.

We wanted something low-cost, since it was our first. I was gung ho about fixing it up myself, since I pretty much grew up renovating and I'm handy like that. So we ended up buying the cheapest house in the area. $82,000 for a two-bedroom semi-detached. And ohhh boy was it a fixer upper. When we walked in, the walls were yellow from decades of indoor tobacco use; they were literally coated in nicotine. I knew everything needed to be gutted and redone. But I was keen. And somehow, I managed to convince Matt to go along with it.

Our real estate agent and our housing inspector thought we were completely insane and advised us not to buy every step of the way.

Five years later, after the expected helpings of blood, sweat and tears, the interior is finished, and we're (more than) ready to rent the place out - after we show it off a little online, because GODDAMN we are proud. I've blogged our progress occasionally along the way, but here are some specific before/after shots to give you a small idea of our work.



The basement stairs were rickety and a little worm eaten, so we replaced them with treated wood. The foundation wall itself, being made of mortared field stones and more than 100 years old, was in terrible need of tuck pointing - I'm glad I finally plucked up the courage to tackle that this summer and probably saved us about $8,000. We still have to install a handrail, but it's pretty much complete.



For a period of about ten days, we didn't even have a working toilet. The local McDonald's saw us regularly at all hours. Matt embraced his inner redneck and shaved with a hose in the backyard. Understandably, we tackled this room first. The brand new bathroom cost us a total of about $500 in materials, mostly spent on the glass blocks, as we got some killer deals on the toilet and bathtub. Perhaps the only thing more baffling than the sash windows in the original bathroom is the chair-rail strip of wallpaper depicting the heads of big cats (there is a better shot of this monstrosity in one of the slideshow photos below).



Next we finished the kitchen, which was quite a job. Above you see it as we bought it. All the electrical appliances were connected to a power strip from the 1960's that you can see fastened to the wall below a window that was missing a pane of glass. The sink was from 1947 and leaked. We know the year of manufacture because there were a bunch of 1947 newspapers beneath the "rug" in the main bedroom, and we found an advertisement for the exact sink within.



First we took down the kitchen wall. At the time, I was napping upstairs when I was awoken by the most horrendous noise; it sounded like a war had broken out. I ran into the kitchen to find Matt, Jordan (pictured above) and four or five neighborhood boys I didn't know blithely laying into the wall with hammers. As I recall, I was extremely freaked out. Especially when I saw that there was about three cubic feet of wasp nest insulating the outer wall (we had not yet discovered this in the above photo). Luckily the wasps were not resident.



Not satisfied with the walls, we also set to demolishing the floor, which had been rotted out by the leaking 1947 sink. The rot had spread to the joists, so we sistered those to treated wood beams and replaced the subfloor completely before tiling.

I should also mention here that I learned during the process of building the kitchen that staining cabinets is my absolute least favorite job of all time. I think I hate it even more than sanding ceiling drywall. I built the plate rack you can see above the sink with some dowel and scrap wood after I saw one in a cabinetry display with a repulsively high price tag - it seriously looks exactly the same as the one in that showroom.



The main living area (look at that beautiful wallpaper) was almost a breeze compared to the cramped rooms with all the complicated plumbing and rot problems. I impulsively decided to take down the stupid arch wall, and I'm so glad we did. Combined dining/living rooms are where it's at, especially in a house this small.

Progress on the exposed brick wall was documented here.



Here's the view from the arch (or where it used to be) to the front door. New door, new window, new walls, new ceiling, new lighting fixture, new molding, new floor ... it's all new.
Except that HVAC grate. It was a non-standard size, so we had to keep the old one and refinish it.



This is probably my favorite feature of the living room. The original rooms had these exposed pipes and ductwork running floor to ceiling. When I say "exposed," what I mean is that they were actually covered in wallpaper and then painted. Yeah. We decided to box them in, and because I hate wasted space, I recessed some built-in shelving into the covering wall. The column you see was necessary because the ceiling beam above the arch was poorly supported at that end.



Stairs: original, in progress, and complete. The door you see in the first photo was dismantled and the wall to its right taken down so the basement entrance is now right at the top of the basement stairs.



This is the view from the top of the stairs, in progress and complete.





And finally, the bedrooms. The master bedroom was the only room in the house where the plaster was in decent enough shape to patch and keep. I'm very happy with the closets we built in both rooms. They're better than the closets in two of the bedrooms of our Philly house.

Here are some occasionally hilariously horrifying shots of the renovation in progress. Looking back at them, I can't believe we lived like that for so long. But I'm laughing, so I guess it was worth it.



And here is a pretty slideshow of higher-res photos Matt took today. I present our masterpiece of home improvement:

A few moments ago, I was mining a 1977 interview with Stockhausen for quotes and insights to include in a horrible paper I'm writing on Mantra that is already late because I am allergic to writing it. Anyway, I tweeted:

Now & then, Stockhausen's writings remind me of David Icke. Especially when he starts talking about his past lives in Japan/India/Egypt.
"You see, now we work with energies: more or less energy at a given time, energy in registers, a coming or going energy..." Sure, Karlheinz.

Hahaha, right? then, OH HOLY SHIT, this on the last page of the interview:

The spirit of [my latest work Sirius] is that it is music from Sirius, which is transposed on this planet and [reveals] the possibilities of this planet, because I think that the culture of this planet has been mainly formed by visitors from Sirius, especially in the time between 9000 and 6000 B.C., [as have] most of our modern concepts of cultural achievements, as far as these are still available, because, as you know, an enormous amount has been burned in the library of Alexandria, where all the secret knowledge of architecture, of mathematics, of astronomy and of the arts, and of the magnetism of the earth, of ecology, etc., has been destroyed voluntarily by the Christian orthodox administration. But I think that our main sources of present-day culture, as decadent as it may be in most parts of the planet, stem from visitors from Sirius whose main representatives (leaders) were Isis and Osiris. Through a series of revelations which were at first quite nebulous, but have become more clear during the past few years, I know (as little as I know about details) that I have come from Sirius, myself. And I know that the highest kind of language that can exist for this highly developed culture is music. As long as we're inclinated toward the bodies and possibilities of the body of this planet Earth, then everything from Sirius appears as music. It is structured in a direct harmony with the forming principles of the universe, of the rotations, of the seasons, of different aspects of youth, man, woman, the friend, of the elements earth, fire, water, air, of states of growth, etc. All of these characteristics stem basically, and have been made conscious, from this culture, and there are many other planets which have been influenced by these universal principles, which are communicated best through sound in music that is the best and most universal way.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN IS AN ALIEN, YOU GUYS.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS PAPER.

A few days ago, cellist and Twitter superstar Zoe Keating spoke out against Spotify. She has some good points. I do think that Spotify should pay equally to each record label and/or artist. But who's fault is it that they don't? The record labels have always flipped out over subscription services. They've systematically killed every one in the past: Rhapsody, Napster, Zune, etc. I'm sure Spotify didn't deliberately draw up different contracts with labels because they felt like it. The labels demanded it, and labels are still far bigger and more powerful than a young company that has yet to actually turn a profit (though it's on the brink), even if the industry is burning to the ground.

Spotify has the potential to save the ailing music industry. People stop pirating when they use it. Perhaps some artists are railing against Spotify because the music industry is (was) a vampiric business model that has demanded blood from artists for decades, and it doesn't deserve to survive. Eh. No, most artists have misdirected their rage at Spotify because they don't feel they're being paid enough yet. Railing against Spotify, however, isn't going to help us. Telling people to stop using Spotify in 2011 is like telling consumers to stop collecting mp3s in 1999. We have to find a way to work within the new system. (Which! I would like to say I predicted years ago, and I wish I had blogged about it then because I would be hailed as a prophetess! Or something. Never mind, being a prophet-with-a-blog probably pays about as much as being a fledgling composer.)

One advantage of the Spotify model is fairness - a different kind of fairness to the one discussed by Zoe Keating. This is old hat, but I'm going to say it anyway. Once upon a time, we bought a CD without knowing whether or not it was worth listening to, played it once, and if it was terrible, we were stuck with a useless object that took up a little over a quarter of an inch in our CD racks. I still have CD's kicking around that I know I will never play again; I can't sell them, and I can't bring myself to throw them away, because I paid $10+ each for them. My mp3 collection is the same way, though at least it takes up less space and doesn't smell like my basement. In the subscription system, the artists that I love and play over and over and over again can potentially get more money than the artists I play once. Good god, if the music industry had been savvy enough to implement some kind of music subscription service in 1999, Trent Reznor, Robert Smith and Kraftwerk could probably buy themselves a new yacht and call it Melissa.

But, of course, the recording industry hasn't been savvy. Everyone saw this coming but them - even I, a tiny little cog that isn't even properly connected to the machine. If they had bothered to think about the future rather than masturbating over the piles of cash they were raking in, they might have invested that money in development, launched a subscription service similar to Spotify shortly after the mp3 was invented, and maintained their own value in consumer culture. Instead, they fought tooth and nail against digital distribution, wasted money on DRM, and tried as hard as they could to turn people away from digital media altogether. Analogy: the tide is slowly coming in. You live close to the water's edge. Do you (a) dig a canal that directs the water around your home and perhaps find a way to make the ocean work for you, or (b) stand on the beach with a bucket, pumping your fists and yelling, "Go away!"?

Alternatively, they were the moronic and shortsighted grasshopper in the fable by Aesop, and now they want us to feel sorry for them. I find record labels only slightly less stupid than book publishers who are now teetering on the brink of failure (HOW CAN YOU BE THAT DUMB. The internet began as a TEXT-BASED MEDIUM. Delivery of electronic text files has been available since the beginning. Why did you not think about creating subscription services for books earlier? You sat watching the cracks in the music and film industries grow, and you did nothing. Nothing. And now you're crying over Google Books, and hoping that charging fifteen fucking dollars for an e-book will save the market for physical books? Burn, baby, burn.)

If the industry had thought about this earlier, Spotify or something like it would be ubiquitous today, and the revenue raised from advertising (for the company) and streaming (for the artists/labels) would sustain the industry and hopefully artists. Now we are stuck with a service in its embryonic stages and millions of people with vast mp3 collections that they probably got for free. Perhaps Spotify will grow into something that can support artists. Apparently it's already starting to do that in Sweden, where the service first began and has existed for much longer (translated article). But I have no pity for you, music industry. I have pity for the artists who will suffer in the meantime because of your shortsightedness and incompetence.

Oh, and I have pity for all all the artists you have ripped off over the years. Pass the marshmallows.

*sigh* This was a really impulsive blog entry, and I'll probably get flamed, but I'm just going to hit PUBLISH POST because I need to run to Sam Ash. Up Your Cherry is playing tomorrow night and I need a power supply.

If you weren't able to attend the Voice of this Generation concerts the other weekend ... I'm very sorry. Because they were awesome.

But you don't have to spend all day every day crying about it any more, because the recording with Jessica Lennick and Tim Ribchester from just a few weeks earlier is now for sale!



You can buy it electronically (in your choice of MP3 320, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire) for $7 from Bandcamp.

Or you can pick up one of the gorgeous digipak CD's at the Tesla's Pigeon minisite.

AND AND AND I still have a few of those handmade silkscreen prints left, so you should definitely consider picking up one of those. They're even better in person than they are in the photographs below -- a lot of people fell in love with them at the concert merch table and couldn't leave without one.

Another year of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival is over. Thank god. I mean, I love doing Fringe things, but HOLY CRAP do I have a lot of catching up to do in every other aspect of my life.

With that in mind, I must keep this short. First: eternal gratitude once again to Kendall Whitehouse (Can you give eternal gratitude twice? Isn't that like adding infinity to infinity?) for coming to the Voice of this Generation concert this Sunday and taking these marvelous pictures.



He also made it to our tech rehearsal Saturday morning with camera in tow. Rad.

Matt uploaded some grainy video of Up Your Cherry at The Undead to YouTube.



Speaking of, Up Your Cherry got a nice mention in City Paper! Our first press!

Also, the Philly Weekly blog Make Major Moves interviewed me over the phone, in the course of which call I managed to talk about Voice of this Generation and Up Your Cherry, and then spiral into one of my usual caffeine-fueled rants about new music:

I think that’s very reflective, because when I do go see orchestra concerts, and no disrespect to old people, it's just a sea of white and grey heads. It's a very conservative audience and performance style that hasn't changed in 100 or so years, and when even the smallest change happens, there's an uproar. There are all these people who've been around it for so long and they don’t want it to change, and they’re the ones with money, so the orchestra wants to cater to their demands. Sure enough, there’s stagnation. And this is one of the causes of the symptoms of the Philly Orchestra filing for bankruptcy, and a problem with other orchestras around the country... [More]