(Click on the images to see full size.)
Monday, June 29, 2020
A Suburban Welcome
Yesterday was one year since my wife, my mom, my stepdaughter, and I all moved into a home together. It was a return to my roots and one that was welcome in ways I hadn't foreseen. As part of processing how unexpectedly fortunate I felt, I put together my first ever album, a collection of field recordings that captured some of the pleasure and aural peace I rediscovered here. That album was originally conceived as a sonic and visual unit, but, for reasons I won't go into, I never posted the photographs that were supposed to accompany the sounds. In celebration of our first year in our little slice of heaven, I share them here.
(Click on the images to see full size.)
(Click on the images to see full size.)
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Days of the Virus: 100 Days
As of 4pm yesterday afternoon (June 22, 2020), my wife, mom and I have lived one hundred days in semi-quarantine, leaving the house rarely, seeing almost no one else in person, and then only at a distance. Like other billions of humans across the planet, we have been privileged to make a nest of fear and to hide in it.
Millions -- in the United States at least -- have made a different response. Many of us have adopted the argument that if one's own chance of surviving COVID-19 are high, that one can do as one pleases because one is only risking harm to oneself. Of course, this assumption has been demonstrated to be patently false, but the abstractions required to apply that fact to practice seem to be lost on those blindly congregating as if in the few months of collective hibernation the virus had disappeared.
Indeed, our collective cabin fever seems to be forcing us out of doors and back to each other. Not only do we see myopic expressions of entitled rage, but protests and uprisings by the legitimately aggrieved seem also to be accelerated by the energy held in check until recently by the pandemic. In this time of great press, caught between the threat of an invisible carnivore devouring us from the inside and using us as living incubators for its spawn on the one hand and the struggle to respond mindfully to the darkness of centuries-suppressed violence in our culture being brought bold-face into the light on the other, it can be hard to know what to do.
My answers are not perfect, but this is what I'm doing:
First, I believe we all have a responsibility to be of service. My family is my first concern and my promise to my father to support and protect my mother in her age keeps us sequestered. I am only of use to her, my wife, my children, and my community if I am well enough to be so. This applies, too, to my patients who depend on me to be available and clearheaded to support them as they navigate their own crises. Therefore, I attend to my own mental and physical health as an expression of care and service.
Minimizing my exposure to the virus supports my ability to care for those whom I care about, but it also has the prosocial function of keeping one more human out of the loop of contagion. For every person who contracts the virus, between one and three others are likely to get it; even if the first person has no symptoms, the fact that they can pass it on is a critical issue. I work to keep from becoming that vector, not just for my mom, but for the community in which I live.
Too, it is important to be a voice for facts and for collective and long-view thinking: I strive to speak and act based on what science tells us -- stay home if you can, wear a mask if you go out, wash your hands, keep away from others. I stand for these actions and require those around me to do so as well.
In the face of the eruption of anger over and new awareness of our country's original sin of racism, I work to educate myself about my whiteness and others' blackness. What I learn, I share with others, especially those things that others don't yet see. I invite white family members and friends to explore what it means to be white; with white patients who are struggling to process the outcries and pain they see, I guide their questioning toward the perceptual lacunae that privilege creates; I listen to friends and people of color, to learn to hear and to understand their experience, working especially to remember that my own experience can lead me to misunderstand theirs. I set boundaries with and push back against those in my life who fight -- knowingly or not -- to keep hold of their ignorance and to contribute to our collective amnesia. These I believe are the most important things I can do.
There are other things, too. I make art; I try to process the pain I witness and my own in a public and, hopefully, respectful and empowering voice. I give money to organizations working toward the solutions that make sense to me and encourage others to do the same.
I also imagine a future. From here, it seems to me unlikely that we'll see the far side of our current crises in another hundred days or even two. Along with everyone else, I feel the weight of quarantine, the unique, unanswerable, dull throb of being a social animal in isolation. Yet, if we keep our heads and, ironically, stay connected across our bubbles, I can imagine a future in which we exceed our current selves, are more willing, and safer for our better trust.
Millions -- in the United States at least -- have made a different response. Many of us have adopted the argument that if one's own chance of surviving COVID-19 are high, that one can do as one pleases because one is only risking harm to oneself. Of course, this assumption has been demonstrated to be patently false, but the abstractions required to apply that fact to practice seem to be lost on those blindly congregating as if in the few months of collective hibernation the virus had disappeared.
Indeed, our collective cabin fever seems to be forcing us out of doors and back to each other. Not only do we see myopic expressions of entitled rage, but protests and uprisings by the legitimately aggrieved seem also to be accelerated by the energy held in check until recently by the pandemic. In this time of great press, caught between the threat of an invisible carnivore devouring us from the inside and using us as living incubators for its spawn on the one hand and the struggle to respond mindfully to the darkness of centuries-suppressed violence in our culture being brought bold-face into the light on the other, it can be hard to know what to do.
My answers are not perfect, but this is what I'm doing:
First, I believe we all have a responsibility to be of service. My family is my first concern and my promise to my father to support and protect my mother in her age keeps us sequestered. I am only of use to her, my wife, my children, and my community if I am well enough to be so. This applies, too, to my patients who depend on me to be available and clearheaded to support them as they navigate their own crises. Therefore, I attend to my own mental and physical health as an expression of care and service.
Minimizing my exposure to the virus supports my ability to care for those whom I care about, but it also has the prosocial function of keeping one more human out of the loop of contagion. For every person who contracts the virus, between one and three others are likely to get it; even if the first person has no symptoms, the fact that they can pass it on is a critical issue. I work to keep from becoming that vector, not just for my mom, but for the community in which I live.
Too, it is important to be a voice for facts and for collective and long-view thinking: I strive to speak and act based on what science tells us -- stay home if you can, wear a mask if you go out, wash your hands, keep away from others. I stand for these actions and require those around me to do so as well.
In the face of the eruption of anger over and new awareness of our country's original sin of racism, I work to educate myself about my whiteness and others' blackness. What I learn, I share with others, especially those things that others don't yet see. I invite white family members and friends to explore what it means to be white; with white patients who are struggling to process the outcries and pain they see, I guide their questioning toward the perceptual lacunae that privilege creates; I listen to friends and people of color, to learn to hear and to understand their experience, working especially to remember that my own experience can lead me to misunderstand theirs. I set boundaries with and push back against those in my life who fight -- knowingly or not -- to keep hold of their ignorance and to contribute to our collective amnesia. These I believe are the most important things I can do.
There are other things, too. I make art; I try to process the pain I witness and my own in a public and, hopefully, respectful and empowering voice. I give money to organizations working toward the solutions that make sense to me and encourage others to do the same.
I also imagine a future. From here, it seems to me unlikely that we'll see the far side of our current crises in another hundred days or even two. Along with everyone else, I feel the weight of quarantine, the unique, unanswerable, dull throb of being a social animal in isolation. Yet, if we keep our heads and, ironically, stay connected across our bubbles, I can imagine a future in which we exceed our current selves, are more willing, and safer for our better trust.
Friday, June 12, 2020
Getting Out a Bit
Like a lot of us, I've not been out of the house much (today is the 91st day of quarantine/social-distancing for my family and me). As I've written recently, summer is my time of year, so being stuck "on the compound" (as a friend of mine recently said) is especially depleting now. I've gone out for a few drives in the country, though, and today I had the idea to investigate a bridge I discovered on one of those sojourns. It's in a lovely little bit of verd that follows Little Gunpowder Falls in northern Baltimore County. It's a steel bridge, but it doesn't have the corrugated decking that makes tires hum in that marvelous way (which I love so much); instead has plates that rattle when driven over, so it makes rather a racket in the midst of the woods' symphony.
There's a small pull-off of the narrow road to the north of the river and I was delighted to see well-trafficked trails leading off along it when I arrived. Unpacking my field recorder, I trekked up and down the first hilly quarter mile or so and back before I decided that the most interesting sounds were to be found in the middle of the river in direct line of sight of the bridge. I may have ruined my sneakers.
What I like about this recording is the constancy of the water's play over its stones punctuated by the almost rhythmic rumble of the bridge. As the recording goes on, the ear begins increasingly to notice and appreciate the gaps between crossings. Different vehicles leave, of course, different sonic trails, some more and some less subtle (and occasionally disturbing). The birds sing nearly as steadily as the river and you can almost hear the soft greens and deep browns of the glen as shiny metal boxes hurtle across the gray structure and along its carbon ribbon feed.
This was recorded on a Zoom H4nPro (seen in the track art). It is unedited except for about five seconds I deleted from a long silence during which I banged my water bottle 🤦; it is otherwise unaltered. My aim here was to get as close to the sound I wanted in the original recording so as to require little or no tweaking in the studio (the equivalent of "in camera" effects in film). I would have liked a little more panning as vehicles crossed the soundscape, but getting that brought me closer to the rumbling steel plates and away from the river's plash, so this balance represents my best compromise. Initial review was done in Audacity and editing and export was done in Ableton Live 10.
There's a small pull-off of the narrow road to the north of the river and I was delighted to see well-trafficked trails leading off along it when I arrived. Unpacking my field recorder, I trekked up and down the first hilly quarter mile or so and back before I decided that the most interesting sounds were to be found in the middle of the river in direct line of sight of the bridge. I may have ruined my sneakers.
What I like about this recording is the constancy of the water's play over its stones punctuated by the almost rhythmic rumble of the bridge. As the recording goes on, the ear begins increasingly to notice and appreciate the gaps between crossings. Different vehicles leave, of course, different sonic trails, some more and some less subtle (and occasionally disturbing). The birds sing nearly as steadily as the river and you can almost hear the soft greens and deep browns of the glen as shiny metal boxes hurtle across the gray structure and along its carbon ribbon feed.
This was recorded on a Zoom H4nPro (seen in the track art). It is unedited except for about five seconds I deleted from a long silence during which I banged my water bottle 🤦; it is otherwise unaltered. My aim here was to get as close to the sound I wanted in the original recording so as to require little or no tweaking in the studio (the equivalent of "in camera" effects in film). I would have liked a little more panning as vehicles crossed the soundscape, but getting that brought me closer to the rumbling steel plates and away from the river's plash, so this balance represents my best compromise. Initial review was done in Audacity and editing and export was done in Ableton Live 10.
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