Melissa Dunphy

I just spent an hour or two playing the mandolin, playing scales and arpeggios and picking out the chords in songs like "I Still Call Australia Home" and "Home on the Range" and "Everybody Hurts." The thought crossed my mind: I wish my life were like this. Why can't being a musician mean I just sit around playing an instrument all day. Then I remembered that the reason I am a composer is that I suck at practicing and I hate it. Oh yeah. That's right.

I put my mandolin back on its wall hook and went thrift shopping.

From Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller:

One Saturday afternoon, Rand greeted the Hills by beckoning Ruth upstairs, unto the immense master bedroom, where tall glass windows lined a wall to the left of the bed. "Do you see those junipers?" she asked, pointing to a row of twelve-foot bushes about half an acre from the house. "A UFO came by there last night." Stunned, Hill asked for details. "It was hovering just above the junipers and then flying in slow motion," she said. It was round and its outer edges were lighted, she continued, and it made no sound. By the time she woke Frank and led him to the window, it had moved out of sight. "Did you really see this?" Hill asked. "I saw it," said Rand. The story seems to demonstrate her confidence in the ability of her mind to interpret the evidence of her senses. As the years went by, this particular confindence would not always serve her well.

Maybe ... maybe Ayn saw Stockhausen arriving from Sirius?

Oh, more stuff:

On the long drive in Frank's new Cadillac convertible, they stopped for a day or two in Ouray, Colorado, an old gold-mining town a few miles east of Telluride, whose surroundings contributed to the topography of Galt's Gulch. As they continued east, they may have passed the former site of Nikola Tesla's scientific laboratory, which had stood on a mountaintop near Colorado Springs in the early 1900's; the experiments the eccentric genius had made in harnessing electricity from the atmosphere and transmitting it wirelessly through earth and air may have provided a model for the revolutionary new motor invented by Galt. (Tesla also invented a fantastical but possibly workable "death ray" that Rand may have borrowed, in part, for Dr. Stadler's terrifying weapon, Project X.) Along with Edison, Tesla became one of Rand's models for her hero.

Update on my ongoing hippyfication (see also my continuing experiment with no poo):

Here's a life development I can't quite believe is happening to me because mentally I still think I'm 19: people get smellier as they get older. I've been noticing this trend for a few years now, and after my success with no poo last year, I decided to examine this body odor business. As a result, I have a bee in my bonnet (pun intended - see below) about chemicals in commercial deodorant that cause your body to produce increasingly viler smells, perpetuating the need for more and more deodorant in a lovely vicious spiral.

I don't believe in not using deodorant. I don't particularly like the bacteriashit that produces the natural smell of human (which is why I am not a fan of the uber-human smells that have ambushed me in my fourth decade). But maybe there was something I could do that would work more effectively than rubbing my armpits with aluminum chlorohydrate. I tried a "natural" deodorant by Arm and Hammer, and it did not work for me at all. I smelled like an ape by lunchtime. I tried cornstarch and baking soda, but they didn't seem very long lasting either, left powder all over my clothes, and required messy reapplication.

One day, I saw this product - Cureceuticals Fresh Me Up Deodorant Manuka Honey Daily Hygiene Spray - on Amazon, and bought it on a whim without much in the way of expectations. Mostly I think I got it because it was all about honey, and "Melissa" means honeybee in Greek. Yes, this is the strange superstitious way I shop. Imagine my surprise when the damn thing worked. Either that, or it made me completely unable to smell my own body odor. Then again, Matt hasn't complained, so I'll assume it's the former.

[Aside] I kind of love the directions on the bottle: "SHAKE WELL. Apply CureCeuticals Fresh Me Up over entire body (underarms, legs, feet, and between the toes) daily, as often as needed. Spread evenly with clean hands (safe for broken skin). Use a cotton ball, soft pad or fingers when applying to face." Is it just me, or does "entire body" and "between the toes" sound like a euphemism for crotch? Maybe they should have used ellipses, as in "between the ... toes." This is also suggested to me by the list of relevant body parts at the base of the label: "UNDERARMS • LEGS • FEET • TOES • BODY • WOMEN • MEN" Surely the last three words actually mean crotch.

So, great, it works. Ten bucks for a bottle seems a little steep, however, so I got even more hippy, and decided to make my own. Thus! a recipe!

Smelissa's Manuka Honey Deodorant Spray

1. 1 cup of water
2. A teaspoon of 16+ manuka honey
3. A teaspoon of Dead Sea salt
4. A teaspoon of baking soda
5. A teaspoon of Epsom salt
6. 1/2 oz of isopropyl alcohol

Mix dead sea salt, honey and baking soda well in a bottle. The mixture will fizz. Let stand for 24 hours with the cap on only loosely to allow air to escape. You should end up with a clear golden liquid and a bunch of sediment. Decant the liquid into a spray bottle and throw out the sediment (or add it to bathwater, or whatever you like). Add Epsom salt and shake until dissolved. Add alcohol.

This has been working for me for a couple of weeks now, and since I bought most of the ingredients in bulk, I pretty much have enough for the rest of my life, so let's hope it keeps working. I guess you could leave out the alcohol -- it's in there as a preservative which I added after my first batch started smelling verrrry faintly funky after a week -- but the concentration of it is so low that it doesn't bother me. You could potentially add fragrance to the mix as well, but I really like the smell of honey, bzzzzzzbzzbzz.

Hopefully this helps someone. I couldn't find any other manuka honey deodorant recipes on the web.

A couple of weeks ago while idly browsing the interwebs, I stumbled over this article about diamonds, written just in time for Valentine's Day. Being a huge fan of confirmation bias, I read it to once again gleefully affirm my distaste for the jewelry industry and my decade-old conviction that anyone who buys rare gems is a sucker and a half. To summarize: once upon a time, diamonds were very rare. Upon the discovery of huge mines in Africa and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century, diamonds were suddenly not so rare, but since mining companies (in particular, De Beers *shudder*) were able to control the supply (and, though brilliant marketing, the demand), they artificially inflated prices in an astoundingly evil way. (Seriously, I can't believe people fall for it.)

Last week I had to read Chris Anderson's Free for my "Digital Battlegrounds" class (see below). I waited a couple of days to start talking about it here because I admit I found myself getting noticeably happy-excited while turning the pages, and after putting it down, I wondered if I had just gulped down some Kool-Aid without looking.

But no, having allowed it to digest without incident, I really do think that anyone who is involved in the creative arts needs to read this book. It didn't tell me a whole lot that I didn't already know, at least instinctively, but I think it helped to strip away the clingy tattered remnants of sentimentality for the idea of selling digital works and to shed the last of my fears about giving stuff away (where stuff = mp3's, for example, which stream for free on my Bandcamp site).

As I see it, in many ways, the media commodities that were so heavily monetized in the twentieth century are going the way of diamonds, but instead of the supply flood originating in a few mines in remote locations, it's streaming out of every computer, everywhere. Entities like the RIAA and MPAA desperately want to be De Beers. But how can they be against such a tide? If they had been a little smarter, like De Beers, they would have jumped on the situation before it became a problem and won the culture war, but as I've ranted before, they were all too busy swimming in their Scrooge McDuck money pools and eating crayons.

There is no point in trying to monetize something that is no longer a commodity. It a futile exercise in idiocy to try to dig one's claws into a clearly outdated model of industry. What we need to realize (those of us who want to survive when the levees break) is that we need to figure out ways of monetizing properties that haven't been rendered worthless by digital technology - by using the amazing cheap/free resources of digital technology that are available to us as both consumers and artists.

It sounds terrifying, even to someone like me who is practically a copyright extremist next to colleagues in my field. Anyway, reading this book helped with that.

I am full of optimism! And hopefully not Kool-Aid.

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