Listening to tapes I made in Atlanta in 1997. These might have been my first ever “walking around” recordings, and from the sound of the first few minutes they are not very good. It’s the same problems I try to deal with today, in isolating or preventing altogether the sounds of my physical movement from getting into the recording. Maybe I should not be so demanding of perfection but it seems to me that if one is going to bother doing something like this you should make an effort to do it right.
The sound has me leaving the Club Tower and walking to a diner where, in my surprisingly-to-me tinny voice, I ordered a Reuben sandwich. I used to eat those but don’t think my innards could handle Reubens now. WFOX 97 FM radio is heard in the background. I have no particular memories of radio stations in Atlanta, not even the classical ones. I also do not think I ever had a television there. It was an ignominious and almost regrettable experience I had living in Atlanta. I could not stand the apartment building, which was considered a luxury property. It had three Yamaha Disklavier grand pianos, a concert hall, a bunch of water fountains, a swimming pool… Looking at the building and its surroundings on Streetview reminds me just how much I disliked that place. It’s an ugly building on the outside, and I was put in an apartment that had a loud exhaust fan blowing about 20 feet from the porch. On account of that fan I never used the porch. The roads outside were paved but they didn’t feel like it. The sun was so hot it ate my skin. The job at CNN was something between a contributing factor and an escape from my dislike of the entire situation. At the time I told myself I was hired and relocated at company expense because I brought such value to the enterprise. I don’t think that was ever true but these are the lies we tell ourselves at corporate.
Said it before, will say it again: I cannot believe how different my voice has sounded over time. The voice that ordered that Reuben sandwich sounds like nobody I have ever known.
For this recording I used what I was led to believe at the time was a pretty high-end cassette recorder. I still have it but I don’t think it will ever work again. It might not have been the top-tier gadget I thought it was but whatever the case it certainly had nothing on the field recorder I use these days, but then why would it.
(It’s a style, I think, to ask questions without using a question mark.)
I titled this audio “Sundays in Atlanta”, which I assumed meant it would be me playing piano. So far it is not. It is actually making me feel a little faint, listening to me walking through my days in Atlanta.
I had relatives there. I stayed with Aunt Lou and Uncle George for maybe two weeks before landing at a transient residence for a few weeks, then finding the Club Tower. I don’t remember why this happened as it did but I rented the Club Tower place without seeing it in person. That was probably a mistake, and contributed some to me ending up in a place with an obnoxiously loud exhaust fan right outside. On account of staying at George and Lou’s place for those couple of weeks, and more specifically because I received mail there, my credit history will forever show that I lived at their house on Johnson Road.
I might be confused about this but I swear there was a Streetview shot of the building that showed the place had been acquired or was in the process of being acquired by the Trump organization. Aha, here it is. It does not look like this sign was out front for very long, and now that I look at it again it might actually be outside the lot next door:
Today the Club Tower is called the Arts Center Tower, a reference to the Woodruff Arts Center located across the street. I don’t remember seeing concerts there or doing anything related to classical music in Atlanta, aside from having a piano at home. I also took blessedly few pictures in Atlanta. I had a webcam at home but whatever film photos I might have captured are lost to me now. I never had a car in Atlanta, which I readily concede may have contributed to the discomfort of my stay there and my negative attitudes about the city. But those negative attitudes are not worth anything. I can’t say I disliked Atlanta because I barely knew it.
Side 2 of this cassette has what I was expecting, with me improvising at the piano. It feels like I never listened to either side of this tape until now, even while digitizing it, but I must have played it back at some point. I had a fine, fine piano in Atlanta, a Petrof upright that was rented to me even though piano rental places don’t usually rent out such quality instruments. That was the best piano I ever had at home. Like the piano I think all my furniture was rented, too, something my Aunt Lou described as “shitty.” It was, no doubt, a crutch. But it was a crutch that worked almost precisely as planned. I skedaddled out of there with very little responsibility for possessions and such.
These improvs aren’t bad, either, assuming I am allowed to say that. These I will share, not the other side of this tape. I did some new-to-me stuff in Adobe Audition, with exporting a bunch of ranges to separate mp3 and wav files. Pretty cool, for me at least. Audition seems to be the least sexy of the Creative Suite programs, at least by my estimate.
