Work in progress.

Some things are broken round here.

  • Making the Yamaha P-125 digital piano sound better

    Published on July 29, 2023

    Early pandemic, I decided to reconnect with a part of my life that was very important to me: music. I played music, specifically piano, clarinet, trumpet, and other orchestral instruments, for most of my life. Then I stopped. Startup brain worms got to me. I did nothing but work for many years.

    The best digital piano in my budget that available at the time was the Yamaha P-125. All I wanted was a piano that was white, had weighted keys, had 88 keys, and that I could use with headphones.

    I had a lot of fun with it, but the one problem I had was that I don't really like how it sounds.

    There's a particular range of keys (I think in E4 to G4) that sound, to my ears, a bit weird and digital. When I play them together they smoosh into each other and it is noticeable enough that I recoil, every single time.

    Instead of getting a new piano, I decided to try to tweak it somehow.

    Here's what I did.

    1. Get a printer cable and connect the P-125 from the back (near the power cord) to your computer's USB / USB adapter
    2. Install the USB-Midi Driver so that I can use the P-125 as a Midi keyboard on my Mac
    3. Install Pianoteq
    4. Get decent headphones, I have the Audio-Technica ATH-M50x (you can get them used, for a third of list price, on audiophile forums or subreddits)

    The only thing slightly confusing about all this was how to activate the keyboard as a digital piano. Turns out, you need to press the metronome and rhythm key AS WELL AS the C5 key at the same time, in order to switch the audio output to the computer. You know that you've succeed at this when the piano says 'Off' in a slightly robotic voice. This means that the piano will now not output sound on the piano. You can now decide how to hear the music. On Pianoteq on my Mac, I either define the output as 'my nice speakers' if I want to hear the piano through my nice speakers; or 'digital piano' (then I plug in my headphones to the piano directly) if I want to listen through there. I use the headphones when I don't want to disturb my neighbors, like when I'm playing late at night.

    You'll know this is working (both on speakers and headphones) when you change the instrument on Pianoteq to something like 'vibraphone' and you can hear that the output.. sounds like a vibraphone. Personally, I really like the Steinway jazz and Grotian instruments. For those who have piano tuning interests, the pro version lets you tune each note. For someone like me who just wants to play a digital piano and have it sound better, the stage version is sufficient.

    Pianoteq is not cheap, but it is one of the best ones and it's what I like most.

    Next up, I'd like to learn Logic Pro and learn to arrange and record.

  • What Pride Means to Me

    Published on June 9, 2023

    Screenshot of a photo of Adrianna and Sabrena a queer couple With my wife Sabrena in the Paris metro in 2022

    1993: I am 8 years old. I am a scared little autistic girl who felt in my bones that there was something strange about me. Was it my obsessive, hyper-fixation on the things that interested me? My intense feelings? Or that I felt I had to lie every time the other girls shared the lists of 'boys they liked'? I often felt like a child who had so much to say, but no words at all. The words that people used with very young female children did not feel right. 'What boy do you like?' 'What kind of man do you think you'll marry?' 'When you grow up and have a family...'

    None of that ever felt right. I didn't have the words. Instead, I said things like 'I will never marry!' Which made people laugh. Of course you will, they said, you will meet a nice boy and you will marry him. 'I don't like boys!' That made people laugh even more. No one believes what children have to say unless they fit a script. I didn't have any of the right scripts.

    I did not know any queer people; the only time I ever heard about gay folks or trans folks was on the media, in a derogatory manner. I was about to use the Internet for the first time, and that would change my (whole) life. The first thing I do when I go on the Internet is to look up whether or not women lived together abroad. I find a lot of information about not telling anyone in the military that you are queer. I go on IRC and message a stranger and ask, 'how does it work?'

    I don't feel guilty in church the next day. I just feel like I know the biggest secret of the universe, like there's a name for people like me, other than pervert. But I worry about the logistics. How will I find a wife? I imagined I would have to fall off the face of the universe and disappear forever to even do that.

    I spend the next six years at school writing stories about stowing away, disappearing off the face of the universe, sneaking off to start a new life as someone else.

    2003: I am 18 years old. I have dated both boys and girls. Sometimes, at the same time. I give myself an arbitrary deadline. I want to decide at the end of high school which I prefer. I know that 'bi' exists and that's what I thought I was, but it didn't feel like me. I decide I want to start university with.. certainty. All I know is that boys are straightforward and easy, and girls are not. I know deep down I never choose the easy, because that rarely interests me, and I know I am at the fork in the road where nothing is going to be easy from now on.

    2013: I am 28 years old. I have a 4 year old dog, Cookie. We live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My first long term girlfriend got her for me, or with me, I'm not sure. 'If we ever break up you're going to have to take her,' she says. I have just been diagnosed with a terrible autoimmune disease, and she has to drive me and Cookie 350 kilometers to take me home. I've had to move home after years of 'gallivanting' all around the world, as my family would say, and I am learning to be at home and be at peace for the first time. I am out. I am going to live in Singapore for the first time as an out queer adult and single person. I am alternately sick and alternately learning how to be single again. I am sicker than I think. I go out with a different woman every week and I feel like I can be more openly queer at home than I ever imagined, but I also feel an impending doom: I was tired.

    Tired of running the race with a potato sack tied to my foot. Tired, generally. I do the unthinkable: I move out of my parents' home within months of getting back. You're not supposed to do that until you marry (a man). "You don't want to be here when I am dating all these women, do you?" I imagine myself saying. I think I say something to that effect, but dialed back. I am always dialed back at home. I can be 'a gay', but I should be proper. I can be 'a lesbian', but I should be successful. As long as I am successful, people are fine with me being queer and autistic. But it should always be in that order. I am reckless with the hearts of the women who apparently love me in this time, because I don't feel like I deserve to be loved.

    2023: I am 38 years old. I now live in San Francisco with my wife, Sabrena. Our dog Cookie is 14 years old. Mila, the large tortoiseshell cat we adopted when we got here, is 17. I have the queerest, most autistic life I can imagine, here. Three days into Pride month, I've already met and spent time with mostly queer people. They have lives, careers, families. Like me, they also came here from somewhere else to live their queerest, and sometimes most autistic, lives. From Montana. From Sarawak. From Singapore. From Taiwan. From China. For many people like us, California is a refuge. I have been here for five years now. It makes me sad that a country where neither of us have citizenship recognized our marriage, and gave us the ability to exist, survive and thrive, in spite of our sexuality, when our own countries tell us we are broken. And I am proud that our state gives us the opportunity to live our lives, as our most queer, most autistic selves.

    But when I brush up against elements of my old life, I am annoyed. I don't believe I should wait for gay men to have their rights first and then advocate for other's. I don't believe trans people should wait their turn in line to stop being discriminated against, especially in this time of trans genocide. I don't find it acceptable to have government officer shout that my marriage is not recognized in Singapore, when just last year I helped to review a form for another government that said Person A and Person B instead of "Husband" and "Wife". Friends from home say I am now too loud, too American, too... different. It's probably true. I no longer have it in me to allow another person, institution, organization or government to pretend that I should not exist. I don't have it in me to be okay with not having any rights anymore, either.

    We're here and we're queer, we're also very autistic (which is related) and we are very tired. I am very glad, however, that I did not have to disappear off the face of the universe to find a wife. Take that, 1993.

  • Savoring Hijabi Butch Blues

    Published on May 25, 2023

    Finished reading: Savor by Fatima Ali 📚 and Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H 📚

    Two queer Pakistani memoirs in a row:

    • Fatima Ali, a former Top Chef contestant who by had a promising career in food media before suddenly receiving a diagnosis for sarcoma. Co-written by Tarajia Morrell
    • Lamya H, a religious, Pakistani butch who grew up in Saudi Arabia, navigating faith and love in New York City

    Both books are very different. I liked the unapologetic, authentic insights into their lives. Both present aspects of faith and family with intimacy and tenderness.

    Fatima Ali's book in particular struck a cord with me: my wife and I have been deep into memoirs and articles that discuss death and grief (Sabrena is currently learning about grief in her college psychology program). What started as a an attempt to document her legacy and bucket list items before she passed turned into one where her condition worsened so much she couldn't travel. Instead, we got a beautiful book about her life told from her and her mother's perspective, that very much left you with a strong sense of who she was. She seemed to have been the sort of person I would have loved as a friend. I wish I followed her career more closely.

    Lamya H's book gives us a sense into how confusing and difficult it must have been to be a queer person in Saudi Arabia, especially so as a brown person there in their very classist society. She talks about friendships (or attempts at friendships) with Arab girls, growing up in a girls' school environment there and winning a scholarship to study in the US. Personally, I am usually skeptical / afraid of any ex-Muslim narratives that play to American bigotry; I was relieved to find that Lamya H deftly paints a portrait of who she is as a person and what she believes in, without needing to play off either side. Instead, she manages to weave her story about her life, country of birth, the place she grew up, where she lives now, her sexuality, her faith and family into an impressive, cohesive whole. I am thankful she published such an important book.

  • Wives and Lives

    Published on April 25, 2023

    Some thoughts on being a gaysian immigrant to California

    A scan of a black and white photograph of some Chinese calligraphy writing on a wall in a Chinese restaurant in Oakland, California

    Two weeks ago, I helped to plan and organize a Lunar New Year dinner for 120 queer and trans Asian people. It's a tradition that has been around for as long as I've been alive: the annual APIQWTC Banquet.

    Despite its mouthful of a name (much easier if you read it as API CUTESY Banquet), it was an event that left me feeling extremely raw and emotional at the end of it.

    I could not identify why exactly.

    Could it be that these events—large format Chinese dinners I've only experienced in the context of societal rejection—were usually events I hated, events that were milestones I can never have because I was gay in a country that had not fully accepted it? I was never going to have the large Chinese wedding dinner. Even if I think those are horrible, it would have been nice to have known that was open to me.

    Or they'd be a celebration of some kind of matriarch or patriarch, the sort of thing where your same sex or trans partner was often excluded from, unless things were Very Serious and they had already graduated into the Don't Ask, Don't Tell territory. At some point, people get old and it becomes possible to welcome same sex partners into these events: when you're old enough that you're thoroughly de-sexualized, is my guess.

    But there's more, beyond mere social acceptance and the idea that it's possible to have a good time, I keep coming around to the thought: if I had been to such an event, if I had known these people, when I was a teenager struggling with my feelings and my identity, my life would have been different. Visibility in the media is important, and I already didn't really have that back then; but visibility in the form of knowing that it's possible to grow old, screw up, fall in love, get divorced, have children, or not, organize community events and be an advocate, or not, all of that would have been powerful visual indicators to me that it's possible to have any kind of life. That you're going to have a life at all.

    Instead, growing up mainly among an older generation that was largely forced into the closet—and I do have strong memories of going to gay bars for the first time as a teenager that had just come of age, and seeing police raids rounding up gay men for 'vice', more than once—where the only people I knew to be gay or queer for sure were the advocates who were willing to put themselves out there to fight for our rights, document our stories, to tell our homophobic society that we exist. Those people served a purpose and they fought bravely. But I did not always want to be an activist. Even though eventually, I guess I sort of did.

    By simply refusing to pretend to be straight, at some point I found myself thrust into a position of hypervisiblity in the queer community in Singapore. I did not want to be that person. I simply wanted to write about the heartbreak I had endured as a teenager: I was just the queer equivalent of a teenager anywhere Live-Journaling her heartbreak. But by not changing the pronouns of the person who had apparently broken my heart, I became, I suppose, a queer activist.

    I did not know any queer couples or families until I was well into my early 20s. Other than the women I dated, and let's be frank, we were a mess, with no template or model or idea of what any of this was going to become. Information about queer people came into Singapore like a trickle: there were the gender studies books at Borders bookstore, the 'are they or aren't they' gay-guessing games of trying to figure out which celebrities were queer women (hint: it was mostly Angelina Jolie, at that time), I didn't really know what it meant to be queer. And I think I was already an extremely well-connected teenager for my time. (For a time, I ran a queer DVD lending library; I'd distribute movies and documentaries to other queer teens in my high school and elsewhere.)

    I did not know what it meant to be a queer adult.

    I had no idea what it meant to be in a committed relationship. Or what it meant to not be in one. I didn't know what my life was going to be. It was all a big blank, other than 'I guess I will have to go live overseas some day'. Even though Singapore has, anecdotally, a fairly large queer population, information about queerness is still suppressed by the state. We are still not allowed to see, for example, a reality TV show of a gay couple having their house revamped. It would be against the rules: you simply can't portray queer people in a non-negative manner.

    So when I found myself surrounded by a hundred dancing Asian queer aunties, and a few other peers and younger people, I was mad.

    I was mad to not have been exposed to the idea that I too, can some day be a dancing Chinese auntie in my 60s, prancing about on stage singing Teresa Teng songs at a karaoke in Oakland. I was mad that I never got to see people like M and her partner, an older interracial East- and South Asian couple, like Sabrena and I: with their children babbling about in several languages, the way it might look for us if we decided to have children some day.

    Most of all, I was mad to know that this life wasn't possible for me back home. Not by a long stretch. I hardly knew many queer people in my mid 20s, and I definitely did not know that hundreds of queer people above the age of 60 existed. Nor did I have the chance to meet them in a multi-generational setting, the way I did here.

    At the event, I met many people who were also immigrants from Southeast Asia like me. The first decade was hard, they said. They had to figure out how to exist in the US, and it was also at a time when the US didn't even have the laws it now does for same sex marriage. Many of them wouldn't have been able to move here or stay on here even if they had American spouses: not until Edith Windsor did us all a favor and defeated the Defense of Marriage Act, and enabled same sex marriage and other rights at the federal level.

    In that regard, I have it a touch easier. I came here for a high paid tech job, I came here when California is already one of the easiest places to live in the world for a queer person, and I was able to bring my spouse with me. But some days are harder than others. Like many of these aunties, I am dealing with my first decade blues: does it ever get better? Why did I give up my life of privileges and comforts in Singapore for.. America? Unlike many other immigrants, I did not come here for economic or material improvements. I came here for far more abstract things, like 'my rights', but also for very concrete things like, 'my wife and I need a third country that recognizes our marriage so that we can actually live together somewhere, anywhere.'

    A scan of a photo that says SAMBAL: Singapore and Malaysian Bisexuals and Lesbians

    A few months ago, I saw this image again: it was an image of Singaporean and Malaysian queer elders in what is clearly San Francisco, in 1993. I reached out to a few of them in the photo to ask: what was your life like? What did you struggle with? What's your life like now? Many of them said the same thing: the first couple of years are very, very hard. Some days you wonder if you will ever truly feel at home here. But, they said, we now have wives and lives, and that's more than we could have expected of our lives in Singapore and Malaysia.

    Wives and lives. I have that too, but I also have had far less time than them in California. I still have one foot in the door; I am still not totally removed from existing in a space where I've had to hide myself, and my life. Even the most hyper-visible ways of being queer back home are just standard, everyday ways here.

    One of them said, my wife is organizing this banquet, why don't you get involved? And so I did. I still don't have the answers, but I think I am starting to have the inkling of an idea.

    I think it looks like dancing on stage at a Chinese restaurant singing a Teresa Teng song. I think it could be carrying an infant babbling in three languages. I think it might be nice to have the ability to work with younger Asian queer immigrants 25 years from now, who will hopefully have an easier time than all of us did. I think it could be fun. I think I have a life ahead of me of queer joy that I can celebrate.

    I can be anyone I want to be. I did not always know that.

    (Photo taken on a Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II, shot on Kodak 5222 film, self-developed in Rodinal 1+50 at ISO 800, and scanned on Plustek 8200i. For more film photography shenanigans, check out my film photo blog)

  • Review: How Daido Moriyama Takes Photographs

    Published on March 12, 2023

    Finished reading: Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs by Takeshi Nakamoto 📚

    Daido Moriyama is one of the photographers I admire the most. His work (black and white street photography) is an influence on the kind of work I am trying to do in my photography; and his shooting style most resonates with me. He is known to mostly shoot with compact cameras, especially the Ricoh GR series.

    This photography book is unique in that it isn’t just a book of his published photos centered around a theme. Sometimes, I get quite bored of those types of books: Western photographers who go to India, for example, and shoot hundred page photo books that feel vaguely exploitative and white-gazey, are an example of the types of photography I very much dislike.

    Since I know Asia, and Asian cities quite well, I have a finely tuned nose for that sort of thing. I don’t find Asia exotic because, well, I am from there. So I tend to look to the Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Bangladeshi photographers I admire whose body of work situates them within places they work in, where, they have frankly far more interesting things to say. (Dayanita Singh’s photography, for example, does not need to rely on that pop and shock of India’s color or festivals or ‘weirdness’ to make a point: her long term work embedded in local communities tell me so much more about the place than, “India is so strange and exotic!”)

    So it is with Daido Moriyama. There’s no mistaking a Daido Moriyama photograph for someone else’s. No matter where he’s shooting, whether it’s Japan or Argentina. If there is a photographer whose ‘personal vision and style’ I want to learn most, it is his.

    This book is written by his collaborator, a Japanese author and photographer who shadowed Moriyama on several trips, all the while asking: what advice do you have? What are you thinking? What message are you trying to make?

    And all Moriyama says is:

    • Just go out and shoot
    • Shoot as much as you can (he believes in having quantity as a way to get quality photos)
    • He walks up and down a street both ways and he takes about a roll of film per direction
    • He thinks there is value in observing the mundane
    • Some basic tips, like ‘if you shoot a body of water against the light, the contrast is quite nice especially in black and white’ but he refuses to believe there are any specific tips that are applicable to all
    • He cares about doing the work more than talking about the technique or gear

    The book also says that he teaches sometimes, and many of his students are trying to break into fashion or avant garde photography. For those students, he advises that the work is the same as that of someone trying to do photojournalism or documentary photography. Go out and shoot mundane things. Find a building, take a hundred photos of it. Learning to see beauty in the mundane is the most important skill one can develop.

    Each part of the book is based in a certain location. So when he goes to Ginza, for example, there is a photo of the contact sheet that he shot. It was actually nice to see that a master has a ton of duds, too. Not that he ever pretended otherwise: but it was still assuring to know that Daido Moriyama isn’t getting 36 book or exhibition worthy photos out of every roll of 36.

    Lastly, he advises that the most important thing to do when you take a photograph is that you must have a desire to make that photograph. Not necessarily to tell a story or make a point (in fact, he says that arriving somewhere and having a pre-conceived idea of the location or community’s politics or social message is not a good way to take photos, that he prefers to just witness). But that you must feel that you have to take that photo.

    Moriyama also has a lot of things to say about film vs digital. He’s gone digital now, and there’s no going back! Having used both the Ricoh GR film and digital cameras, and also being agnostic to the film vs digital debates (currently, I am shooting more film to learn the darkroom arts specifically, but if I were to go back to working again as a photographer, it would probably make more sense to be digital-first, especially given film costs these days), I think he’s right. The Ricoh GR digital cameras are extremely capable, and they are my favorite film cameras. I do miss the contrasty T-Max grain and quality of his earlier work, but artists are allowed to evolve their vision and tools, and experiment. I appreciate this non-dogmatic quality about Moriyama.

    I would highly recommend this book even if you don’t love this type of street photography. It’s a good way to get an insight into how a great photographer works and thinks, beyond gear talk and such. The world has too much of the latter; but books like these are what I appreciate much, much more.

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