Sounds
I’ve taught radio and film classes for a number of years and every once in a while I’d demo some sound piece for students I myself made. Usually they cringe, even the good-hearted ones. It just doesn’t sound normal to their ears. “Normal,” I guess, is a podcast, like S-Town or Radiolab. My stuff seemed pretty weird in comparison, like maybe I should talk to a therapist. Perhaps then I’d sound more like Ira Glass and less like Antonin Artaud. My students are rarely wrong, so to prove their point I’ve embedded a few examples of iTunes-proof sound art. N.B. Cowboy and Aliens is a “normal” radio doc, but the others are far gone.
Street Art, Puerta Vallarta (2018)
She said, He Wrote
Released in 1983, Chris Marker's Sans Soleil consists largely of musings in the form of imaginary letters attributed to a fictional cameraman that are voiced by a nameless woman. In catalogs, Sans Soleil is described as a meditation on time and memory—the kind of film that waits in movie queues forever. The English voice of this film, recorded by the Montreal-born, Paris-based actress Alexandra Stewart, haunts my brain like a ghost writer. When I hear her voice, I write brooding sentences that look down on the sadness of this world with untiring melancholy. Antonin Artaud said that the mind believes what it hears and hears what it believes. That is the secret of fascination.
The voice for this piece was provided by the talented actress Kate Udall. Special thanks to my colleague Meredith Alexander who pointed me in the right direction. This is the first essay in a trilogy of sound-alikes and derives from a six-month stay in Montpellier, France.
Vendor at Les Arceaux, Montpellier (2011)
Cowboys and Aliens
The myth of the Wild West has long cast a spell not only on Americans but on Europeans as well, from Denmark to Kyrgyzstan. So popular is the idea of the cowboy that, in Germany, where the Wild West adventure writer Karl May was the best-selling author of his generation, it spawned the Kraut-Western. Today, rodeo is a big-time spectacle watched by millions live and on ESPN and TNN, with canonized rodeo activities like bull riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, barrel racing, and bronc riding. These activities hardly reflect the kind of work done on today’s ranches, but rather point to a nostalgia for the romance of the west and the reenactment of the taming of an unconquered nature. John Wayne may have disappeared, but cowboyism lives on.
On a cool October night not long ago, two dozen international writers were shuttled to Fort Madison, Iowa on the Mississippi River, home of the Tri-State Rodeo and theMidwest's oldest American military garrison. They had come in search of a myth. And what they saw was something else. I myself had never attended a rodeo, and the idea of doing so amused and frightened me. All that dust flying about, animals squealing, large vats of ketchup, square-jawed men and women. As someone who grew up in the industrial Northeast, I couldn’t have felt more like an outsider. If I was perplexed, what would it be like for real outsiders—visitors from China, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, New Zealand, Jordan and Mexico—surrounded by 10,000 flag-waving fans?
International Writers at Fort Madison, IA (2007)
We Interrupt this Program
A 16-minute experimental sound collage that ironically arranges (and deranges) found sounds from the cold war (a speech by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the survival narrative of Hiroshima’s Takuo Matsumoto, civil defense broadcasts, and Paul Frees’ “voice of god” narration from Joh Else’s documentary The Day After Trinity). An experiment in acoustic archaeology, We Interrupt This Program excavates disembodied voices from the past and puts them back into play, allowing then to collide like neutrons in a chain reaction.
Enola Gay (B-29) in Action (1945)
A Cup of Tea
One day, I walked around my house with a shotgun mic. I’m a little nutty and prone to doing things like this. In this case, I wanted to listen to what my house had to say, so I leveled the mic at doors and windows and stairs. Speak I said. As I was preparing a cup of tea, I even pointed the mic at a teapot and ceramic water dispenser. It was an old house, built over 100 years ago. I figured it had a lot of stories. I suppose this comes under the rubric of “found sound.” I don’t think my house was haunted, but when its sounds were taken out of context, as in Pierre Schaeffer’s sense of musiqe concrète, a cup of tea suddenly resembled the creepiest thing in the universe.
