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Bay Area friends! We've got another concert coming up with Oakland Symphony Chorus a week from Friday (February 16, 8 pm at the Paramount; The Artist As Activist), and we'd love to see you there. The Symphony will be performing Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No 6 and Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 5, and we'll be joining them for the world premiere of Carlos Simon's Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.

And then in April, OSC will be collaborating with Pacific Edge Voices for their The Sound Garden of Love concert at St. Mark's in SF. On the program: Elgar's Lux Aeterna, luminous and crystalline; it's new to me, but I'm looking forward to floating up there, supported by close harmonies. And to my utterly ecstatic joy, a piece with which I am quite familiar: Vienna Teng's The Hymn of Acxiom. Yes, when I found this out, my squeals could be heard clear across the bay. :D (I know! I still need to write about her Freight concerts in December, but suffice it to say for now that I am glad those shows have become part of my end of year rituals, grateful for every year she's managed to find a way to come back since my first time in 2019, or done an online concert the years she couldn't.)

There is something very now-ish about taking a song created with electronic voices based on one person's voice, and extracting it back out to a group of human voices to perform with all of our quirks and foibles, and the power of community enabling a group performance where we as individuals will need to take breaths unplanned, will make mistakes, but will make art, beauty, together. It feels zeitgeist-ish, similar to how I've written 100,000 words' worth of stories in the last six months, as if I'm rebelling against the mainstream embrace of large language models as authors, algorithms as intellects, corporations as people. Now-ish, even on the accelerated schedule of technology changes, because the forces Teng described in the early 2010s have had more than a decade to entrench themselves into our lives.

*

Sometimes, the advertising algorithms get stuck in a rut. Like Lily Diamond, I, too, have been inundated with lingerie ads in my social media in the runup to Valentine's Day, now barely a week hence, and I'm mildly curious if it's the usual spray and pray targeting feel of most ad campaigns, or if any signals I threw out being a person online have contributed to so intensely refocusing the ads that I'm being shown.

( (someone is gathering every crumb you drop )

But what's being advertised even more avidly to me at the moment than even the seasonally predictable lacy red and pink and black trousseaux? These Friends of the Boundary Waters x Hippy Feet Merino Wool Hiking Socks.

( they are cute ... )

( look, I know I tend to evangelize about wool socks, but also 'now we possess you, you'll own that in time'? )

(o how glorious, glorious, a new need is born)

*

Later in that piece, Diamond confesses:

Aside from feeling bullied by an ostensibly omniscient algorithm that's supposed to know me and anticipate my needs better than I do myself, I feel a bit let down. It feels good to be known. I've made many a joke about my phone being a pseudo-surrogate boyfriend, but it's the algorithm we rely on to feel understood psychologically, spiritually, capitalistically.

( (someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (say just the right thing and) show that you're understood) )

(leave your life open, you don't have to hide)

And yet I'm posting this publicly, anyway - rolling the dice, seeing who will read, engage. (Hoping for who, rather than what. Betting that silence means what.) Going on four years of having our social life circumscribed by circumstance, our social media interactions bound by ever tighter limits.

Posting this here, while knowing that everyone is tired of creating Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of, and burned by the corporate mainstream options that are tolerated enough, if limited in other ways. And, too often, too worn down by the demands of twenty-first century life to conjure up the activation energy to engage, either. (Who has time for 2000 words of my rambling observations?) Yet I'll still link to this on the mainstream social networks where I know people, because. (I guess with Bluesky opening up this week, I ought to look again and see who's made digital homes there, on Threads, on Mastodon. I gave up last year because, again, Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of.)

*

I've also been reading Rebecca Solnit this weekend. Her latest for the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, weaves together a lot of loose threads. It's long, but worth the read. What caught my attention most was how she talked about the social pandemic both predating and coexisting with the current medical pandemic, a crisis of extractive technology impeding human connection, exacerbated since the first stay home orders. The loneliness Diamond expressed above, too.

( (let our formulas find your soul) )

The piece ends with even Solnit sounding weary, she of changing the story from despair to possibility.

"I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.

I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area."

Valentine's Day will mark 4.5 years since hyounpark and I arrived (back) in the Bay Area. It is a markedly different Bay from the one I left for college; I am a markedly different person in my 40s now from who I was in my teens. But even with the 13-month interruption of staying home curtailing our plans to establish our Bay-based social life, see old friends more regularly, make new friends? The best parts of being here have been the relationships we're forging and reviving, the community we're finding our way into. And among our community, among the people we know, we're all trying to make things better for all of us.

We're all a chorus here, doing the work, needing to breathe at points when the sound must go on. Staggering our breathing as individual singers so we can sustain the sound as a whole. If you're feeling like Solnit here? Breathe. To end by quoting Vienna Teng again: "We've got you."

Gonna be a busy weekend, so happy birthdays in advance, andrewshead and jaina!

Oh, Boston, you don't know how to cope with earthquakes, do you.

Last night: Torrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrri. Yay. :) Hey Jupiter and Crucify and Precious Things and Concertina and Take to the Sky and Hotel and Etienne and Cruel. Very weirdly hard rock and kinda '80s throughout; I was happiest when it was just her and her piano. Except when I had to turn around and tell the guy behind me to get off his goddamn cell phone, this was a *quiet* song, and I didn't need to hear him dissecting the Sox game during it.

Before that, no melissaagray's, and I saw some guy knocking on his door, so I sped up a bit to catch up. As I got closer, I saw the body shape wasn't right to be any of the usual guys ... and then I realized it was Max! Yay for surprise midweek special guests :)

Today: it is 72F and rainy outside. I am confused. It is supposed to be 66 and rainy tomorrow. I also have my first winter cold. No, I don't get it either. To smack down this cold: matzoh ball soup, tom kha gai, and kimchi rice.

Tomorrow: holy shit, little nolrak is getting married. WTF, dude, I've known you since you were *14*.

Oh gawd, Head of the Charles is tomorrow? Which means the best way to get onto the Pike is probably going to be either 93S or 2W-128S, rather than the usual JFK Bridge-Soldiers Field Road-Exit 17 ...

it's a month until my birthday and it's warm out, sunny and slightly breezy and i walked to work this morning in mere shirtsleeves. haven't seen weather the likes of this in november since ... wait for it ... i lived in california. heh.

and i followed my nose for breakfast and renee was making mango blueberry scones today, so that's what i've got for breakfast. :)

i am sooooooo taking a long lunch today.

missing the ocean tonight. the cool, fierce breeze of the pacific; the moist, clay-ey sand between my toes; the soft hiss-crash of the waves a few hundred yards away; the seals barking because dammit, it's after midnight, it's time to play! what are you silly high schoolers doing, up past midnight with hours to go of homework? come have fun instead!

and california is my future. and optimistic, ever-hopeful that it will be andrew's too.

1/3/24: Oh, younger, dreamy-eyed self. You will make it back to California, though it'll take awhile longer than you'd imagine. And Andrew, too, will make it to California eventually; "we spent Christmas in California with my in-laws." Mild regrets for the worst parts of our younger selves' behavior and wishing we could have been better to each other, more prepared to love each other the way we deserved and needed, but that's the nature of growth. (I know, a lot easier to say as a 40-something than to hear as a 20-something.) And you will both be happy at your core, despite the circumstances of the future world.