As a trans woman; semi-professional musician, producer; audio engineer, and for whom Stanley Kubrick is my favourite artist of any medium, Wendy Carlos is one of the single greatest inspirations of my life. I can’t personally imagine the struggle she went through all that time ago; having the courage to be herself when even today it’s been a personal struggle. Gems like her really only come around every once in a whi…
Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
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Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#72Owed to my father's long interest in electronic music, I'm the thankful owner of several of the 1960s/1970s original print Walter Carlos-attributed vinyl records and a few of the 1980s Wendy Carlos-attributed ones. Switched-On Bach/Brandenburgs, Sonic Seasonings, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer etc. all played a large part in my discovery of electronic music as a child.
Wendy's works are tough to find on streaming services these days. I'd love to listen to Timesteps again, from A Clockwork Orange.
Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#73I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film p…
Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm specifically talking about people like Andrea Dworkin, who said: "Prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman's body. [...] In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again la…
Dworkin had to prostitute herself in order to survive in the 1970s. I think you're barking up the wrong tree. If anyone was sympathetic to the struggle, it was Dworkin. She just acknowledged that it was also harmful and contributing to oppression.
Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#75Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#76I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film p…
Create art about whatever you want but if you bind it with your identity and sexuality you're more an idealogue than a craftsman.
Or when it's straight and cis you don't feel the same way?
Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#77I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film p…
Thanks for sharing. I think for some, that could have been a very uncomfortable story to share, but it's just so important that stories like this are spoken out loud. We all have capacity for such growth. Regarding the BTTF 2 is a work of Satan anecdote: it's so convenient that any time the actions of any authority are at odds with how a group expects/wants things to work, instead of challenging their own priors ("wh…
Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm trans myself, and my general belief is that Steinem's position is far more defensible if we didn't have our personal lived experiences with gender dysphoria, or the evidence for things like regret rates for gender-affirming surgeries being very low. Second-wave feminism on trans issues was largely incorrect and harmful, but that is mostly a contingent fact rather than a necessary one. This is as opposed to second…
> This is as opposed to second-wave feminism on, for example, sex work issues, which is necessarily bad because it is more interested in moralizing than in caring about freedom or materiality. The radical feminist position on prostitution is about reducing harm to women as a class. That a minority choose to willingly engage in sex work doesn't negate the structural issues at play here. Most women in prostitution are…
The exact same problem applies to migrant farm workers, but nobody is proposing to solve it by making farming illegal.
Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#79Re: Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second-wave feminism on trans issues was largely incorrect and harmful, but that is mostly a contingent fact rather than a necessary one. Not sure I understand what that means. Just to clarify: I don't have the research in front of me, but I'd be willing to bet that by 1977 there were at least two or three decades of research on trans issues relevant to Steinem's words about trans people. E.g., more than enough to…
Well, the issue is that a lot of the trans research that had been conducted by then got burned by the Nazis. The modern idea of gender identity which is now widely recognized as the best possible explanation for the empirical outcomes we see was just being formed, and the dominant players in the field were still "sexologists" who decided whether someone was trans based on how attracted they personally were to their p…
I know Robert Sapolsky did a talk on essentially this subject, but it looks like he's on sabbatical writing a book atm.