in the thick of it / longest post ever

I'm flying through The Waves by Virginia Woolf in the library. I don't usually study here, but it's going well.

--------------------------- ---------------------------

Now I'm finished. This book, like many, benefits from a single extended reading. On the other hand, taking a long time to read it--that is, in a stop-start fashion--can contribute to the sense that you have read through an entire life. The impressions we have of our own lives begin to mix with those of Woolf's characters, and our capacity to identify with them grows. For once I think that the technique of this novel, rather than my personal tendency to project myself wholeheartedly into the emotions and characters of movies and works of literature, is what makes such identification so viable. I can't explain what that technique is here, because the product of that endeavor would look like a final paper for this class...

--------------------------- --------------------------- --------------------------- ---------------------------

I am looking forward to living in a mode where I can express myself directly, face fears head on, and live in the present. I may be making progress.

--------------------------- --------------------------- --------------------------- ---------------------------

In the new corner of the internet I've built I will turn myself into a subject of observation. With time I may learn to defamiliarize my writing, my music, my interactions with people and the environment. That is, to see it as new and strange. More specifically I will see through an imagined set of foreign eyes unburdened by my own habits of perception and thought. The idea is to see those very habits as an outsider. This is a war on Narcissism.

--------------------------- --------------------------- --------------------------- ---------------------------

Please please please check out a musical act called "The Books." They specialize in aleatoric music: "Aleatoric, indeterminate, or chance art is that which exploits the principle of randomness" (wikipedia). If I had read this before hearing The Books I would have approached their music with expectations and skepticism. Fortunately I only read about it afterward, and thanks to this I am free to express my feeling that The Books, using found audio, cello, acoustic bass and acoustic guitar, inhabit a very important niche in what we consider music today without gratuitously offending the conventions of western music. What I mean is that while there are still time signatures, rhythmic patterns, melodies and harmonies, the use of found audio samples for percussion, melody, and thematic inspiration makes for a revolutionary musical experience.

Music is everywhere. Step outside and listen: animals, people, machines, plants, weather. The Books are keenly aware of the vast soundscape that confronts us every day, so listening to their music is like walking through an alternate universe of sound peppered uncannily with the aura of nostalgia and mystery. As you might suspect, walking outside while listening to this music on some good headphones is exhilarating--most of the time there persists a jarring but fascinating contrast between what you should be hearing and what you are hearing, and for preciously short segments the two worlds actually correspond.

The Books remind me how much our perception depends on the detection and interpretation of sound. I had an idea recently for an art project. Here are the steps:

1. Prepare to spend about twenty minutes recording the sounds of an environment that maintains a relatively consistent level of ambient noise, such as Times Square.
2. Within those twenty minutes arrange for actors to approach the recording device and deliver a casual monologue as if they knew the listener.
3. Find someone who is willing to spend a while in the same crowded place (at approxiately the same time of day) with headphones on and instruct them to go to the spot where the ambient audio was recorded.
4. Once at the location they will put on the headphones and listen to the recording with the actors' monologues.

The result: As the listener accustoms himself to the incongruities and correspondences between what he hears and what he sees, the appearance of voices close to the designated spot will produce an eerie sense of a person's physical presence. It amounts to a kind of "ghost audio tour."

Why I think it will work: In short, sound data is also spatial data about the environment. For example, when someone stands a foot from you and begins to speak, your brain will detect a physical presence that corresponds to the way that the sound data is being perceived; even if your eyes are closed you will probably be able to tell how far away the person is, their stature, and a sense of how they are moving.

I'm not that interested in the paranormal, but I am interested in how our senses interact and confuse each other.

--------------------------- --------------------------- --------------------------- ---------------------------

I don't know what you were referring to exactly, but I want to fast forward, too. I have movies in my head of different parts of this planned vacation. Don't take this for obsession--I play all kinds of movies in my head when I'm in between busythings. But some of the details I've thought about verge on silly. For example, I thought about what we will buy to feed ourselves (besides booze) when we stop at a supermarket on the way there. I have a strange desire to mix hedonism with spiritual balance. We will sip wine from the bottle (to each his or her own bottle), lose articles of clothing because it's already hot in the summer and hotter when you drink (though I'm not excluding the possibility of other motivations), and all the while we will eat luscious vegetarian food. Can you cook that up? I can wash, chop, stir, and lay things out on a plate in a way that pleases refined aesthetic sensibilities.

And I'll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. And as I rise above the tree lines and the clouds, I look down, hear the sound of the things you said today.