Northwest Associated Arts

Yamaraashi-chan's chorus is one of four groups governed by the organization Northwest Associated Arts, which held their annual meeting last night. Kid Sounds is accompanied by Youth Sounds and Choral Sounds (all plays on our being in the Puget Sound region), and the all-adult high-end group Cantare. This is one of those local groups that annually dreams big and hopes to garner some attention from the local media in the hopes of getting sponsors and grants, and maybe someday more than just friends and family will come to listen. There were only two representatives for Kid Sounds, although three parents from Youth Sounds showed up.

There used to be just Choral Sounds and Cantare, and then they merged and spun off Youth Sounds and Kid Sounds, and needed an umbrella organization.

The president started off speaking about their mission: "Enrich, Enliven, Entertain, Educate." It seemed odd to me that the last two were in that order; shouldn't they be reversed? They discussed that this year the mision was sustainability: they've lost 13 members in the past two years. I have to say that I was impressed by one confession: they failed to retain or replace those members because the group, at 65 members now, is just big enough to be cliquey, and a lot of personal acrimony and unprofessionalism has made it hard to make the group seem welcoming. They know there's a strong dysfunctional strain on the group, they're willing to acknowledge that, but whether they do anything about it is the real test of the year.

There seems to be some tension between the Sounds groups and Cantare'. The impression I got was that Cantare' feels they might be getting a raw deal out of being in the group, but they're willing to use the groups' unified advertising, fundraising, and governing structure, and they need the Sounds groups for fresh blood. They could probably survive on their own, but the size of the NWAA is too attractive and they're willing to live with the dysfunction for the moment.

NWAA hired a marketing director and a grants consultant, and the strain of that is telling, since they haven't seen any returns, but it's only been a year and building a grants network can take two or three years of steady attention.

There's a lot of overlap between church choirs and musical directorship; every musical director the group has is also a church choirleader. It's sad that the only place people sing anymore in large groups is in church.

I get the sense that NWAA is at one of those tipping points Malcom Gladwell talks about: either the personal stress is going to tear the group apart, or they're going to get their act together (quite literally in this case) and become a much more professional organization. Whether they do or not seems to depend entirely on whether or not the next president is an organizer or a feeler; if an organizer, things will happen. If he wants to "feel your pain," NWAA's not going anywhere.

But they do seem viable for one more year. The four groups together are collaborating on a presentation of Carmina Burana next year, which means that if Yamaraashi-chan sticks with the group through the three seasons next year she'll be in Beneroya Hall presentation in 2007. That will be zero-degree Kelvin cool.

Geeking like it's 1995!

Omaha and I switched to VoIP about a month ago, and one of the critical failures of installing VoIP was the TiVo. The onboard modems inside the TiVo are cheap and cannot handle communicating over the VoIP lines. Omaha and I are in an even worse bind; our TiVo is an ancient Dish TiVo with one 30 GB hard drive, a very sad machine indeed. Ever since we've switched over, the TiVo has been complaining about its inability to call the mothership and confirm that Omaha and I are subscribers in good standing. We'd damn well better be after five years.

The problem can be fixed. It took one custom DB9M-to-1/4stereo cable. The stereo jack goes into a plug on the TiVo labeled "command". The DB9M end goes into a DB9F-to-DB25M convertor, which in turn goes into a US Robotics 38k modem. It was a little strange stopping by RePC to buy a modem after I'd actually given them all my modems a few years ago, thinking I would never need one again. The total cost for this repair job was about $35 bucks.

I twiddled with the dip switches on the back of the modem, and it didn't work. After realizing I had twiddled the switches backwards, I reversed them all and, miracle of miracles, after 32 days, the TiVo was finally happy. And the screeching, whining sound of a modem connecting at 38K resounding through the house again after years of DSL did not make me feel nostalgic. Fortunately, there's a volume control on the modem, and we'll be setting it to low.

After that, we put the kids to bed and then Omaha and I went downstairs to frag each other on Quake 4 in our own little LAN party. It was fun. I kicked Omaha's ass on the first round, so for the second I took on a few handicaps: I used only the shotgun, I downed a full glass of wine, and I walked everywhere. Walking's not entirely a handicap; you don't make footsteps. A few times I snuck up behind her and gibbed her with the shotgun, but since she had the rocket launcher she managed to win that round. She hasn't quite got down the coordination of looking sideways while running, and she's not paranoid enough to continually look behind herself. She also stops running to shoot. But the biggest thing is simple: Omaha doesn't play FPS's, whereas I've played every version of Doom, Quake and Half-Life there is, as well as Tron, Bloodrayne, Unreal, Halo, Hexen/Heretic and the Jedi Knight series.