I’ve been at the piano lately, recording myself playing and commenting into a microphone about the music at hand. It’s been a mixed bag, and I don’t know if I should continue with the pursuit. I’m trying to find my radio voice, and am considering pursuing a career path in that realm. I don’t know what I would be good at except for speaking, but I don’t think I’d be satisfied just announcing names of composers and performers.
I thought that explicating the myriad of thoughts that pass through my mind when discovering or rediscovering a piece of piano music will be edifying to someone. Or maybe I just think people will like the sound of my voice. I’m not quite ready to share the stuff with the voiceovers yet.
The best I’ve set down in the last few days is this part of a “Berceuse” by the Norwegian composer Halfdan Kjerulf (1818-1868). Louis Oesterle wrote of Kjerulf: “He renounced the study of theology for music, and settled in Christiania as a music-teacher. His songs obtained great vogue through Jenny Lind, Nilsson, and Sontag; he also published much beautiful piano-music of a strongly Scandinavian cast. His compatriots honored his memory by the erection of a monument at Christiania in 1874.”
I guess if I want to do this right I’d have to incorporate a screen recorder, which would show the music as I played it, turning what was supposed to be an audio-only affair into video. I had a similar thought earlier, when enduring the misery of listening to the sound of my own voice as mentioned in a previous posting here. Most of that audio is a result of me calling from payphones and leaving voicemail messages ranging in quality from pithy to somewhat interesting. Some of that audio quality is so bad as to be almost unintelligible but I could make up for that by putting on the screen text which approximates my words at those times when they are most difficult to understand. This of course makes for a lot more work but also creates interesting possibilities for visualizing things when text is not needed.
I can’t express enough how tedious, depressing, and monotonous it is listening to all these hundreds of little sound bites. I’ve never had any problem with hearing my own voice but now I’m starting to hate it. I am editing the sounds as I go through them, so I can’t just line them up like a playlist and tag the interesting ones. I’m amazed by how often I sniff in these calls. Since noticing this (and editing out every occurrence of what has become a somewhat disgusting sound to me) I’ve tried to be aware of whether I do that more often than I think. I do not seem to. It just seems to be a tic associated with talking on the phone. Or is it something more? Is it an assertion of some emotional relish or subconscious rebuke? Is it something I do to wake myself up when I am boring myself to tears? Is it some kind of arbitrary subconscious punctuation? I’m not going to worry about it.
An interview yesterday with a young reporter was interesting. I was feeling groggy and think I might not have been particularly articulate. I got to tell a favorite story, though. Once I was at a bar talking to a gentleman for the first time. In the conversation I said “By the way, my name’s Mark.” He replied: “Thomas”. For a ½ second I looked at him, puzzled, asking how he guessed my last name. In the next second I realized, of course, that his first name was Thomas, which happens to be my last name.
We got a laugh out of that but what happened next was random. He asked “Wait, you’re Mark Thomas? Are you the receipts guy?” Indeed I was, and still am a digital hoarder of scanned images of most of my receipts. He had followed my receipts for years and said that he simply found the web site interesting. It was a nice conversation.
What made this connection so unlikely was that if his first name did not happen to be the same as my last then chances are good I would never have mentioned my last name to him. And I certainly never would have mentioned my receipts website. If his first name was Bob he would probably have never known he was talking to a receipts celebrity. Hah.
I still see that guy around once in a while. Next time I’ll remind him of when we met, and how I’ve told that story many times.
At another bar I met someone who had just moved to New York from a tiny town in North Texas. In Texas he had worked at a truck supply store. I mentioned that I had built a website for a company well-known in the trucking business. Not surprisingly he was familiar with the company, which is based in a small Indiana town.
But further to that minor bit of kismet he went on to sing the praises of a particular interactive calculator that existed on that company’s website. He said he used it often as a tool to answer customers’ questions at his store. I could not believe he was saying this. “You’re the one who was using that calculator? I wrote the code for that thing and I also could see how much usage it got. Usage of that calculator was extremely minimal.” How likely is it that someone would move to NYC from a tiny Texas town and sit next to the person who programmed a piece of web software that he used almost every day, and that virtually no one else knew existed?
…
I mentioned to the interviewer that I intend, some day, to move on from sorabji.com as a primary web address and use flaneur.nyc instead. This site, such as I tend to it anymore, has for a long time now not made sense being named for the obscure British composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, though I intend to keep the domain and e-mail here active for the duration.
The word flâneur, however, is just about the perfect word to describe my life these last several years. I attempted to move content from here and other places to flaneur.nyc several months ago, but that pursuit got bogged down by too much content, a particularly uncoöperative WordPress, and my own damn laziness. (It’s too bad you can’t put the circumflexed â in the actual website address.)
Based on a couple of e-mail inquiries it appears flaneur.nyc is considered a “premium” domain for some reason. I have no interest in selling but it reminds me that years ago I sold a domain name for $5000 to some people in Tampa. I never actively tried to sell a domain, they came after me. I still get inquiries and offers for WSBJ.com, UPPITY.com, and a smattering of others, but I’m surprised no one has ever offered to buy torturechamber.com.
The interview yesterday got me talking out loud about my concerns that my various mountains of digital hoards don’t really represent much more than raw material. Thanks to the reporter’s encouraging words I think now that this concern is maybe not as legitimate as I might have thought yesterday, though it is something to think about.
Speaking of digital hoarding I finally did something I’d meant to do for a long time. I moved the giant mass of photo dumps and my cemetery photography sets from Menalto Gallery2 to Piwigo. I also moved the thousands of Found Photos and Slides which I use to populate sorabji.tumblr.com. I have not updated anything in the Picture Essays or Cemetery Photography sections for a long time. This was because Gallery2 just did not work as expected on this web server I leased back in December. I can’t remember why now but for some reason I had zero confidence in Piwigo when I first discovered it considered a leading alternative to Gallery2. I’m OK with it now.
I often feel a silence when I look through my own pictures. Other times I feel sadness at the obvious truth that the past is gone and never coming back. I think there is a dimension available to us which allows everything that occupied the spot on which you stand to return, no matter how many millennia had passed.
