Getting on the Band(camp)wagon

My first album!  It's field recordings; I'm fairly pleased with it.  I learned a lot and look forward to sharing more of my output on Bandcamp.



Below are the notes I originally had on the Bandcamp site, but decided they were more personal than I wanted there. 

In the summer of 2019, I moved into a house in suburban Baltimore County and rediscovered some forgotten parts of myself.  As a child, I had lived on a series of Air Force bases, which mostly were pretenders to suburbia, but military culture prevented their full absolution.  We finally moved “off base” when I was 12, settling into an archetypally suburban development on what was then the outskirts of Albuquerque; I lived in that house for nine years and it became my template for home.  The first house I bought, after living in a series of increasingly urban environments, was technically in the suburbs of New York City, but the fact was that our little oasis in the metropole was exactly that:  the exception to the norm.  My second house was in a much more typically suburban neighborhood, a lovely Levittown clone northwest of DC.  I lived there for a brief and tumultuous five years before abandoning it in a divorce; it would be another seven before, rather unexpectedly, I found myself reconnecting in a healthy and welcome way with my suburban roots in the north of Baltimore.  In these field recordings, I hope to convey the nostalgia, the relief, and the reconnection that I have discovered here.

Night Out

Lavender twilight eyeshadow

Strings of headlight pearls

Pinstriped macadam dress

Saturday night date with I-95

As Darkness Comes Once Again

The sun setting
on the autumnal equinox
is the eye of a wild mare
buoyantly galloping over horizonless verdant plains
under endless lapis skies
as she steps in a gopher hole
and feels the snap of her metacarpal
and goes down
chin first
onto the earth
into which her soon to be
scavenger cleansed and broken frame
will lingeringly
disintegrate
to dust.

All Sounds Come from Heaven

Lately I've been noticing that I have a strong judgmental response to sounds in my environment:  while some sounds are genuinely neutral to me, for many, I tend quickly to decide I enjoy or abhor them.  For example, on my commute to my office this morning, I decided to seek the solace of a quiet country road that was out of the way, but very pleasant and rejuvenating.  Just as I turned off the noisy urban street and onto a tranquil residential path, a huge diesel tow truck pulled in behind me:  I was immediately angry and put upon.  The engine was loud enough and the driver stayed close enough (this took some doing on his part, as I drive a zippy, nimble sports car) that it actually hurt my ears.  I felt violated, entitled to my peace, and angry that I had to tolerate this horror behind me.  We played cat-and-mouse for a while, me trying to get away from him and him catching me up; it turned out we had the same destination.  Once I realized that, I dejectedly gave up on my rural-soundscape-seeking and just drove to work.

This episode really brought forward awareness of my automatic judgment of what I hear.  Apart from the appropriate rejection of physically harmful sound, it seems important to explore the fullness of our aural experience.  As I get older and make more music of my own, I’m increasingly aware of my taste in what I want to hear.  This seems appropriate, in the sense that any artist identifies a comparatively narrow band of all possible expression within which to work.  That said, as I often guide my patients to do on the path to self-understanding, it seems a worthy effort to expose oneself to as wide a variety of experiences as possible in order to determine which of them one wishes to have more of and which one does not.  The more I experience the universe of sound, the more I may understand of the music I wish to make.

There are many sound artists and musicians who incorporate into their art sounds I dislike.  Cage famously built his career in part on the assertion that there is no sound which cannot be music.  I get this premise and do not refute it; it does not contradict that I can still explore and choose which sounds are meaningful and expressive to me and which are not, independent of their meaning and expressivity for others.  However, I am discovering in new ways my biases against what I think of as "noise":  I feel entitled to live only with sounds I enjoy and not with sounds I don't.

That's a problem.  (I am confident, dear reader, that you grasped that already.)  I am, of course, aware that I do not have any say in other people's or in the world's sounding, let alone control over it.  So, how did this entitlement come about?  Marc Weidenbaum* recently suggested that it comes from the auditory control our technology affords us:  pop in our earbuds and our aural universe is (nearly) at our command.  I think this is true in part for me -- or at least generalizable:  in my home growing up (long before earbuds), my parents played music almost constantly and I enjoyed most all of what they selected, even during my teen years.  I think my first experience of feeling affronted at being forced to listen to something other than what I wanted came when my younger brother hit adolescence and began developing his own, different, taste (which, to be honest, I have come in recent decades to appreciate as brilliant).  "Somebody else's favorite songs" has been a bane for me since about that time.

But there are other sonic affronts I suffer:  sirens and jackhammers while walking, television in the next room, the hiss of nearby traffic, the distant hum of the city -- none of these are especially unusual to be annoyed by.  What I'm appreciating, however, is that the word doing the most work at the beginning of this paragraph is "suffer."  It's my own subjectivity, not anything inherent in the sound, that makes a thing an affront.  Indeed, it's not even necessarily anything innate to me that causes that; yes, there are evolutionary predispositions, like toward hissing or growling or loudness, but my responses even to those can be malleable.  (This, in turn, arises from the fact that sound cannot exist without a listener -- vibrations, yes, but sound is by definition a perceptual phenomenon.)

Which raises the question, how might my experience of the world, of others' art, of my own music, change by practicing greater acceptance of all parts of my soundscape?  An interesting inquiry; I'll let you know.



*I couldn't find the link to the blog post in which he touched on this, but here's a short post in keeping with the spirit of it, so you can see his work.

Nailing It

"Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose..."  -- James Taylor

British Racing Green was actually the thing I most had in mind when it sunk in that I was serious about painting my nails.  A paean to the dreams of my late childhood and early adolescence, it is the color of the cars that my father -- and therefore, I -- loved the most:  those legendary (and legendarily finicky, pain-in-the-ass, labour-of-love) tiny British two seater convertible coupes, MGs, Austin-Healeys, and, of course, Triumphs.  At this point in my life, I'll never own one (at least short of becoming Jay Leno-rich), but to this day these cars and their streaks of countryside copse verde growl dustily through the backroads of my dreams.  Five little crescents of BRG on my left hand seem to honor some small but critical voice in myself in ways I never expected when my daughter asked me if she could do my nails.

It was her idea, but something in me perked up when she asked, the Saturday night of the local Pride Weekend last June.  "Why not?" I said and suggested an abbreviated rainbow on my left hand (five fingers couldn't hold the whole of ROY G BIV).  When she asked, looking quizzical, why just my left, I wasn't yet sure, but it felt important.  In any case, I figured, come Monday night, I'd acetone it all off in anticipation of returning to work.

But I quickly realized that I liked it.  And others seemed to share that opinion, which felt good.  I ended up wearing the rainbow for nearly two weeks, during which time I had begun to collect a baseline of nailcare paraphernalia such that I could do my own.  And BRG was the first thing I wanted -- but I couldn't find it, so my first on-my-own manicure was bright red with sparkles.  I felt like I was channeling my inner grade school girl.  Eventually, an old friend sent me a green that I found nearly impossible to distinguish from BRG and, even though it was not named that, that is what I called it when anyone commented on my nails.  Other colors -- mostly, like JT says, greens and blues -- attract me, too, and I'm excited to explore.



My last manicure looked better than my previous ones and I've learned a lot about nailcare in the last two months -- enough to know that I and nearly every other identifying male doesn't know shit.  My wife pointed out that I'm about the equivalent of a six or seven year old girl, since that's when a lot of folks start; that seems fair.  Hopefully, my adult motor coordination will save me from several years of preadolescent brushwork, but I'm fine even if it does.  Somehow, this just seems right.

In the last month or so, I have gotten a sense of why just my left hand:  it's the hand I attend to most when I play viola.  It seems meaningful to give it a little pride.  I'm right handed, so I engage with it all the time; my left, though, has a role that my right could never take -- making music in that one special way since I was 12.

And I like that it leaves people wondering; it's a little queer flag, it marks me as a violist (in my mind, anyway), and, even when I'm not actually wearing BRG, it keeps a little MG Midget alive in my heart.

Update

And on Labor Day, autumn falls like a wet blanket over the joyous bonfire of summer.

It is delightful to have the windows open to cool breezes and to listen to the outside noises, ironically evocative of summer:  busy birds, neighbors' A/C units, windchimes, cicadas, and distant traffic.  But it's difficult for me to get enough of summer.  A country drive south of the Mason Dixon Line, I'm safely in the blue territory of the BoNYWash megalopolis, but I think I'll always miss the token winters of Florida.

Marc Weidenbaum, whose creative output I follow at disquiet.com and through his newsletters, has recently been advocating for blogging (indeed, he claims to have been doing so uninterruptedly since before the word was born) and posted a link to a fellow blogger's shared argument that I found especially compelling:  that blogging did and does a better job of what social media has usurped, namely, sharing your life with friends and family.  That point clicked into my thoughts about social media like a critical missing tetromino.  Too, while I've understood for a long time the value of writing as a means for organizing one's thoughts, both Weidenbaum and Donaldson praise regular blogging as an ideal arena for that process.  These ideas and others have led me recently to determine that I need to spend more time writing here (and for my professional blog).

I briefly had a few blogs back in the late 90s and early 00's, including the original version of circlingcrows, but my motivation for posting was unsorted, so my use of it (and, consequently, my output, to the degree that that was a goal) was even more inconsistent than that of my current sites.  Of course, in the context suggested by Weidenbaum and Donaldson, consistency isn't a goal in and of itself, but an ancillary outcome, one way of scoring the time and effort I put into thinking.  And consistency arises out of my willingness to say yes, in any given moment, to sitting and writing when I have a thought that seems worth investigating.  One of the things I appreciate about Weidenbaum particularly is that he seems not to have a minimum length for his posts; sometimes they are a few sentences, but sentences worth engaging in (at least for him, but more often than not for the reader, too).  Take this in the context of social media's practical microblogging format and, to my mind, you've got no reason not to blog.

So, my plans are to take the occasional thoughts that I have specifically not posted on Facebook and explore them here.  In its most recent iteration (since 2011), my intention was that this blog be primarily about music, but, while I intend that it continues to be a place for my musical efforts, I'll be expanding the rubric to include pretty much anything that isn't better placed at DNLPS.

And now, time for breakfast.