Saturday, December 5, 2015
Rearranged the bed in my room. Resolved a very strange problem on Patrick's iMac computer running Yosemite in which typing certain special characters like backslash or tilde would result in a different character with an umlaut like o with umlaut or u with umlaut. In Terminal, ls listings would appear with @ characters replaced by capital E with accent acute. And man ls would also show the incorrect characters. It was really freaky. All OS X updates had been installed. I restarted the computer, and that did not resolve the problem. I opened Disk Utility and repaired the startup volume once then repaired permissions several times. One more restart and it seemed the problem was gone. No breakfast. John S picked me up at home in his car and we drove to Fort Mason Center. We visited a printmakers exhibition and sale, and a ceramics sale. We stumbled upon Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (#40partmotet) and subsequently secured walk-up tickets to attend. The performance reminded me a little of Audium in the sense that it is an exploration of audio performance and space, but it's very different in a lot of ways. She recorded the Salisbury Cathedral Choir performing the choral work "Spem in alium nunquam habui" (Thomas Tallis) and each of the 40 singers were recorded individually. During the performance, 40 speakers are arranged in an oval, and the audience is permitted to walk throughout the space or sit—only two small benches are provided at the center. The large, waterfront warehouse room is entirely unheated; I found it uncomfortably cold. The performance lasts about 11 minutes. The view of sailboats passing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge provided an exquisite, unexpected beauty to the experience. During the performance, like everyone else in the room I remained still. However, near the end I realized that it was probably more valuable to walk around during it since you normally don't have that opportunity in traditional settings. Afterwards we stopped briefly at The Interval then drove to Japantown for a late lunch at Ramen Yamadaya. I had tonkatsu ramen with yamadaya topping ($12.45) with hot green tea and John had a kara-age chicken bento ($7.95) with Sprite. One of the thick chunks of meat in my ramen was noticeably and disappointingly dry in the middle, but another chunk of meat was perfectly tender. Not worth complaining about, and I did enjoy the dish otherwise. Among other things we talked about Japan, D.C., London, France, Oracle, startups, BMWs, and DoorDash. He dropped me off at home. Nap. Late dinner at home: small pastrami and cheddar sandwich with butter leaf lettuce, mayo, mustard; carrot juice; orange juice mixed with mineral water.