At a Panera for a field day, of sorts. not sure where I will go but unlimited Metrocard and not a care in the world could take me anywhere. Calling it Field Day because I am venturing out with the new binaural headphone mics for the first substantive time. I was at the Greek pool hall last night and the sound was amazing. You could hear pool cues striking other balls and ricocheting off other balls the way billiard balls do. Other sound I haven’t processed yet, spent the rest of the night scanning receipts and organizing the new receipts site. It’s going to be all my receipts, or rather all the receipts I possess, including the ones purchased and even found. I have a bunch of receipts from old Astoria, receipts related to estates of the Blackwells and others of note from that era. They are actually of legitimate historical relevance. I paid hundreds for them. Speaking of spending money I looked up the cost of this field recorder I use and which is my favorite gadget ever. Today that thing sells for $600. I can’t believe I spent that much on such a thing but I guess I’ve forgotten that I used to have buying power, and that I used to make good money doing what I do, or used to do. I would have expected it to have come down in price since I bought it. I did not look up the price, it just happened to be mentioned in a review I was reading. But it made me realize that the cost of replacing it means that losing it would mean I can’t do this any more, this field recording. I do have a shit ton of money coming back from taxes, though, but that’s for rent and food, not gadgets.
Going to shoot David an e-mail to see if he can make coffee some afternoon this week.
Interesting correspondence from someone who has followed my web stuff since the ice age. Dude lives way upstate, in Queensbury 50 miles north of Albany. He’s an hour from the Amtrak station but said he’d be happy to come pick me up and let me stay at his place as long as I wanted, just to get away from it all, or see a lifestyle different from what I am used to. At first I thought he said he had a spare room, which might have made the offer a little more interesting. But he has only a couch — hah, almost wrote “ouch”. I am too old and set in my ways — not to mention a sleep sprawler of amoebic randomness — to bunk on a couch without it being a matter of eminent necessity. It’s a nice offer, I guess. I don’t know if he lives alone but it sounds like it. Funny thing is when I started reading the email I thought it was from the dude who lives in North Dakota and has also followed my web stuff since forever.
Just put the headphones on to hear myself typing. The sound is kind of infernal. i think there is a setting on the recorder I could change to make it seem less like a flood of sound. It’s a little bass heavy. Hmm, DMS set to OFF seems to have had the desired effect.
There is a book I need to find that I got years ago, about the history of sound and its meaning to certain historical epochs. Listening to this Panera through 3D headphones is impossible to describe. it is awesome.
