Hari Kunzru

 

Twice Upon a Time: listening to New York

 

Machine were mice and men were lions

Once upon a time

But now that it’s the opposite

It’s twice upon a time

 

[Moondog]

 

Ear Cleaning: Any process that encourages a person to listen more discriminately, particularly to sounds of the environment.

 

[Barry Truax – Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, 1978]

 

1. I ♥NY

 

Lying in bed in my East Village apartment I can hear the ticking sound of a mechanical timer – perhaps the building’s gas or electricity meter - turning round on the other side of the wall.

 

Strangeness of a new place:

 

orange street light filtering through the thin blinds

unfamiliar smell

buzzing fridge, a few feet away from my head (studio)

street noise outside the open window

car goes past dopplering  r’n’b

laughter

 

A girl sits down on my stoop and makes a long phone call. Pleading, sobbing. Come on. I’ll have the money for you on Tuesday. I swear. On my daughter’s  eyes. What do you mean? You don’t know what I’m going through here.

 

and that metronomic clicking, relentless sound of time passing

 

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

 

That doesn’t sound like good news, Tom. I mean, in this economy? You want to keep your options open. You want to diversify. Try not to get tied into anything.

 

I have to go out.

 

I pull on some clothes. The heat is oppressive, even at 1 am. Tompkins Square is dark, filled with movement. A lot of people around tonight. Many reasons. Broken aircon. Nowhere to sleep. Too wired. Too high. 104 degrees this afternoon, add another twenty in the subway. The sound of skate wheels on the basketball court, junkies conferencing on the benches of Crusty Row. Whole place smells of skunk. By the Avenue A gate some jazz musicians are conducting a discreet free blowing session, begging the question - can a free-blowing session ever really be discreet?  This feels that way, despite being basically very loud. Feels clandestine. They’re watched by a small crowd, some of the street people who hang around outside Ray’s Candy Store, others like me, forced out of their stifling apartments. The musicians honk and squeak. Everyone follows their own path, the tenor player and the drummer driving things along, half a dozen others dropping in and out, attacking everything from an upright bass to a set of bongos, meandering around with various degrees of competence, assuredness, purpose, strength of will.

 

Out of the pitch blackness of the basketball court steps a tall man in a wizard’s cloak. He has a staff. Very metal. Seems to know the guy with the star tattooed on his cheek, the one leaning on his crutch, making his bottle of Olde English 800 perform a dance for the good people. For a moment I think it’s Moondog… except this guy can see, is aged about 25 and looks totally wasted. I think he might be about to cast a spell.

 

broken bottle smashes

argument by the benches

 

dog barking

 

honk rattle

 

2. Be a hobo and go with me

 

I only got here a couple of weeks ago. Nothing but a stranger in this world. Every time I exit the subway I have to make a 360 degree turn to work out which way is downtown.  I need a guide. Foodies have the Zagat, swingers have Adult Friend Finder. I choose…

 

Moondog.

 

AKA Louis Hardin, born 1916, son of an Episcopalian minister who is also at various times, “a merchant, rancher, real estate and insurance agent.”

Idyllic childhood in Wisconsin, then family moves to Wyoming, begins a slow process of disintegration that leaves the boy living alone with his father for long periods.

On a visit to the Wind River Reservation, Louis receives a drumming lesson from an Arapaho Chief called Yellow Calf. learning “the running beat, and alongside it the walking beat, which is also the universal heartbeat.”

He develops a lifelong taste for what he sees as a primal form of life, as opposed to the “coca cola culture” in which he has been brought up.

He will spend much of his life on 6th Avenue in New York City.

 

3. We are all just prisoners here

 

Another humid August night, I’m drinking with a friend in a Bushwick bar. Important to keep hydrated. Equally important to be somewhere with air conditioning. This place is not what you would call fancy. It has a pool table and serves Pabst Blue Ribbon to guys who station themselves on their stools around five and try to maintain verticality until closing. The selection on the jukebox is so generic it ought to be shot into space as a memorial of white working-class American music taste (thirty-plus male demographic) in the year 2008. Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Springsteen. Someone puts on Stairway to Heaven, and I know what’s coming next. It’s inevitable. All other options have fallen away.

 

On a dark desert highway …

 

Hotel California is one of the few definitively globalised musical experiences. It walks the earth. It is abroad. I’ve heard it in every beach resort I’ve ever visited, and most other places besides - a bus station in Bolivia, floating towards my houseboat across the darkened water of Dal lake in Kashmir. I’ve heard it in bars in Phnom Penh and Durban and Baku and Beijing. About the only place I don’t remember hearing it is LA, though there’s probably a California state law that says FM stations must clock up at least one play per day in order to qualify for a licence. It’s a song whose lyrics take on a particularly sinister tone in tourist spots, with all that business about checking out but not being able to leave. Played on a crappy cassette recorder at 3am in a junkie beach shack in Goa, it’s actively terrifying. In this bar its effect is comforting, a woozy affirmation that whatever we’re all doing here has been sanctified by custom and tradition. We are guys, getting drunk. It has always been thus.

 

Later, walking towards the subway, I pass an auto-repair place. A group of men are playing cards on the sidewalk, listening to Reggaeton pumped out of a system somewhere in the back. Squat Negro Modelo bottles are clustered on the crate they’re using as a table. Down the street is a tortilla factory where women in white smocks and plastic caps are working a late shift. The door is open and I can see them, packing tortillas into bags. Machinery whirs and thuds. A radio plays Spanish language love-songs.

 

 amor / dolor

suerte / muerte

 

There’s something devotional about the tableau, the repetitive gestures, the white uniforms, the plaintive declarations of love.

 

4. Blindness

 

Louis’s parents divorce.

After a scandalous liason with a parishioner, Hardin senior is defrocked.

Father and son move from place to place.

In 1932, aged sixteen, Louis finds a detonator cap while wandering around near some railroad tracks and brings it home to tinker with. It explodes in his face, instantly blinding him.

He describes his time in hospital as like being “smothered alive”.

He renounces his Christian faith. Later he will turn to the worship of Norse gods.

He attends the Iowa School for the Blind, where he startles people by his fierce independence. He studies music and begins to write poetry.

After a series of more or less platonic crushes on older women and a brief failed marriage, in 1943 he leaves for New York City to become a composer.

After this he never meets his father, mother, brother or sister again.

 

My brother is blind. This is one of the major dynamics in my life. His blindness, my sight. I can only imagine how it would feel to negotiate this city as a blind person. The open delivery hatches in the sidewalk, the fierce commuters. With so much uncertainty, so much to go wrong, there’s a need to make your own certainty, to find a system. The blind develop an appreciation for precision, repetition, knowability.

 

In New York Louis Hardin  gives himself the name Moondog.

He makes money by:

life-modelling

selling broadsides and poems

playing music on the street.

 

He composes canons, rounds and other highly formal pieces

He uses ‘snaketime’ rhythms, sevens, fives, nines

He invents a number of percussive instruments

the oo

the utsu

the uni

the trimbas

 

He gives up wearing factory-made clothes

He warns his readers of the evils of the Federal Reserve

He writes a hymn to the UN

He is taken up by the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who lets him listen to orchestra rehearsals and introduces him to various famous musicians. Other musicians find their way to him. Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Charlie Parker. Stravinsky.

 

He makes his own costumes from squares of cloth

He cobbles his own shoes

He becomes preoccupied by the culture of Nordic Europe

ancient

prelapsarian

in harmony with nature.

white race origin myth

 

In 1970, he compiles his “Universal Reckoning”, listing the key dates in five billion years of global history. Only five are in the last two millennia:

0AD Birth of Jesus

AD9 Battle of the Teuterberger Wald. Two Roman legions annihilated in Black Forest of Germania

570AD Birth of Mohammed

1000AD Discovery of America by Leif Eriksson

1945AD The coming of the atomic age

 

5. “54^th and 6^th, a few yards from the North East corner with the four foot polished patio stone walls of the MGM building at his back.”

 

A twelve block pilgrimage. I walk up from the New York Public Library, where I spend my days cocooned in an office overlooking 5^th avenue. At weekends a breakdance troupe sets up, busking for money by Patience and Fortitude, the stone lions guarding the entrance on 5th Avenue. For some reason, despite the huge variety of music recorded expressly for the execution of the boogaloo smurf,  these b-boys always dance to Billie Jean. Maybe they earn more money when they play a tune that doesn’t make white midtown office workers feel threatened. There’s only so much Michael Jackson you can listen to before you feel like throwing a baby off a balcony: sooner or later we usually get a guard to go down and move them on.

 

Midtown is a place of work. All other forms of human activity (most of which take place here, usually some distance above street level) are secondary. People walk fast. They hunt for gaps in the traffic, swerving past the charity muggers, the vendor pushing his pretzel cart across the intersection. The traffic on 6^th Avenue heads uptown, past the big hotels, the towers of media and money, status-conscious enough in this neighborhood to need fussy little plazas, fountains, public art. The sounds: sirens, HVAC systems, 18-wheelers, car alarms, Mr. Softee Ice Cream trucks, bass woofers, the subterranean rumble of the trains passing under the sidewalk, … and shouting – not exclusive to midtown but an important topic for anyone researching the acoustic ecology of Manhattan. A whole book could be devoted to the reasons New Yorkers shout in the street - to assert their control over their environment, to express joy or pain or rage or intoxication, to hail a cab, to abuse an acquaintance, to abuse a stranger, to abuse an authority figure, to abuse authority in the abstract, to apostrophise the buildings or the cars, to conduct one half of a conversation with an invisible intelocutor - or simply to express the intense feeling of vertigo generated by this particular world city:

 

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK 

 

A cultural rule of thumb: Londoners conduct an internal monologue, New Yorkers just go ahead and say it

 

internalise / vocalise

 

Hey! Ladies first! Goddamn jackass ….

 

Looks like it’s gonna rain. Radio said it’s gonna rain. I believe it, look at that sky …

 

You are so  beautiful, yes you are, don’t let nobody tell you otherwise, hello puppy, yes hello puppy …

 

Moondog had a favourite corner. During his time in New York, roughly from the mid forties to the mid seventies, he spent most of his days in one spot. Despite his adoption by the Beats of Greenwich Village he didn’t much like to improvise. All his music was carefully scored and copied.

 

Repetition, predictability, control.

 

Moondog’s corner is just behind the new MOMA . I can’t find the MGM building. Maybe it’s gone. The Warwick hotel seems to occupy the whole corner .

 

the hotel doorman’s whistle summoning cabs da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

child’s voice

screech of tires

thud of a cab door

conversation in several languages

rickshaw bell

 

The next day I take an mp3 player and I make the journey again, accompanied by Moondog’s early music, recordings from the forties and fifties. The percussion rattles in snaketime cycles (“seven-four, eight-four, nine-four, and who for and what for I don’t know…”), overlaid by delicate melodies. Sometimes you can hear trolley cars, traffic, a steam whistle, perhaps from a Hudson tug. Primitive tape overdubbing - the recordings were made in a studio. Sound leaks in and out of the ipod’s earbuds, layering modern 6^th Avenue onto city noise of sixty years ago. Archaeology.   

 

7. Ictus

 

The tone cuts silence (death) with its vibrant life.

 

No matter how softly or loudly, it is saying one thing: “I am alive”…

 

Let us call the instant of sound-impact the “ictus”. The accent of the ictus divides silence from articulation. It is like the dot in the painter’s vocabulary, or the period at the end of a sentence.

 

This dividing of silence from articulation should be one of the most exciting experiences possible. In medicine the “ictus” refers to a stroke or sudden attack.

 

[Ear Cleaning  R. Murray Schafer 1967]

 

I entertain the hope that if I look hard enough, I’ll find Moondog’s inheritor, standing on a street corner selling tracts. In this spirit, I give a few minutes to more or less everyone I come across on the subway, from the young woman dressed as a superhero doing unaccompanied Tina Turner numbers to the kora player whose new Air Jordans poke out imposingly from beneath traditional Senegalese robes. One night on the downtown six platform at Union Square I find an elderly black man in a velvet tuxedo. He sings “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and, just so we get the financial picture, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”. Another night a homeless-looking man bundled into a heavy down jacket improvises an incoherent and rather depressing song, with lyrics that seem to be a cut-up of “Say You Say Me” and “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman”. There are slick acts, usually to be found in prime spots at Grand Central or Penn: Gypsy Kings copyists twirling in time, an inexplicably popular East Asian outfit who do schmaltzy covers of Kenny G and Lionel Ritchie. There’s the same Andean pan-pipe ensemble I walked past in Paris, Milan, Sydney... I wonder if the Peruvian government regulates them, assigns them territories (felicitationes amigos, you now have the exclusive Warsaw rights to Flight of the Condor …) or whether something even weirder is going on. Are they the exact same musicians? Are they following me? One day I discover the Kids from Fame have wheeled a rickety-looking upright piano into one of the interchange tunnels at Penn station. They’re playing ragtime backing for a young woman who tapdances on a metal sheet laid out on the floor, like the chicken at the end of Stroszek. She’s gonna live forever.

 

I like best the Mariachi bands who work the subway carriages. They shuffle in, carrying their instruments, always including an accordion and a little high-pitched vihuela guitar. They invariably look crushingly bored. Then they propel into a song, perfunctorily crunching into the silence of the carriage like a child biting into an apple.

 

Ictus.

 

It amazes me they can make such a joyful noise when they seem so dejected.

 

8. Jobs all along

 

Curbing “ipod oblivion” on city streets?

NY bill would ban the use of electronic devices in city crosswalks

[CBS News website  Feb. 7, 2007]

 

So how many people on the platform have white wires snaking down into their collars? Rush hour solipsism. Perhaps one in four. Privacy is just as valuable here as in any large city and of course there’s a particular experience – of personal drama, control – that comes with navigating urban space to your own soundtrack. The ability to create an auditory environment and carry it around, to override the polluted city soundscape, is worth three hundred bucks of most New Yorkers’ money. In Village Bells, his study of church bells in rural France, the historian Alain Corbin explores the idea of an auditory territory. Until the nineteenth century, the range of the bells in the village clocktower defined the limit of a community, socially and administratively. The church bell tolled the end of the working day for those in the furthest fields, and the limit of hearing became the de facto basis for community boundaries. Now, auditory territory can extended infinitely, through amplification and broadcast technologies, while the ipod creates a community of precisely one. You could see it as a land grab, a radical privatisation of public space.

 

Certainly, between the cellphone and the ipod, it’s clear people are only partially present in the physical space they occupy. When I’m on my bike, pedestrians often wander out into the road without looking. It happens far more frequently than in London, where people seem more used to cyclists. I get used to swerving, shouting insults, dealing with the aggrieved self righteousness of iphone owners who don’t understand that natural selection pressures are weeding their genes out of the communal pool. The future is for multitaskers, morons! You, my preoccupied friends, are going under a bus. Frankly I don’t think a $100 fine would work on the Apple zombies. They’re remote-controlled from Cupertino. When Steve Jobs throws the switch and starts beaming modem-like tones into their heads instead of Britney Spears, they’ll stop what they’re doing and march on the armories and power stations, ready to fulfil their evil leader’s plans for world domination. Don’t you see? Bill Gates was just a diversion! It was Jobs all along! Jobs, I tell you! Jobs!   

 

9. New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

 

“People usually ask why I’m dressed this way,” Moondog said, “and I tell them it’s my way of saying ‘no’.”

 

[New York Times May 15^th 1965]

 

The first band I go to see in the city is a friend’s intellectual rock outfit, who are playing the back room of a popular Williamsburg hangout. They’re not a particularly serious act, knocking out songs for fun, though the singer seems to believe it; he clings to the mike-stand, lost in a skinny indie dream of hair and fuzzboxes. The bar is Ivy League Hipster central, a milieu of tattoos, irony, unacknowledged trust funds and sublet lofts. No figure (except perhaps the derivatives trader) is more reviled right now, particularly by other hipsters. Certainly no one will admit to actually being one. It’s always someone else - posers, wannabes.  Face-eating consumer of cool, ruiner of all that’s new, the hipster is a sort of doomed wanderer, trudging about the blogosphere in search of the latest, greatest, most radical and transgressive cultural hit. He’s hated (and hates himself) because he has no real allegiances, no real taste, no desires at all except to be safely at the centre of the edge, to be edgy just like all his friends, whereas in reality he’s just at the edge of the centre, no more transgressive than the lamest suburbanite downloading the Jonas Brothers on itunes. There’s no niggaz 4 life / skinhead forever / born to lose tribalism any more, at least not amongst the college-educated. You don’t carve “mods” into your arm with a box cutter (though on reflection perhaps that was an English thing)  because no one’s gauche enough to claim that what they like to wear or listen to will define them for longer than the next five minutes. The hipster is the cult of the absolutely new, the first true post-networked youth movement, its constant churn just a side-effect of the hard work of maintaining hip in a liquid world where information is easy to come by and everyone can acquire whatever cultural symbols they want with minimum effort. The tragedy of the hipster is his reverse Midas touch. He kills everything he loves. Once a thing is on his radar, blogged about, uploaded, it’s immediately commercialised, branded and sanitised, then sold back to him. The transgressive danger he seeks is forever unattainable.

 

Hipster music can thus be everything and anything, but its essence is pastiche. Choose a style – sixties folk, African highlife, C86 English indie – and rock out. Every so often I trawl myspace and the Pirate Bay, and listen to the new crop of bands. I try to be open-minded and occasionally find something that survives repeated listening, but for the most part I fall into the “x sounds like y” game. Oh, this bunch like the Stooges. This lot like ESG… 

 

Moondog makes music with Charlie Parker Steve Reich Tiny Tim Pete Seeger

He lives for six months in Philip Glass’s spare room

Marlon Brando comes over to play bongos.

He goes on the Today Show

He makes an album of children’s rhymes spoken by Julie Andrews

Despite attempts to forge him a mainstream entertainment career he does not ‘break out’

During the sixties he develops a more elaborate Viking costume

spear

horned helmet

Pursues larger scale musical projects

Tries to distance himself from image as ‘street musician’

 

One day I go to see LCD Soundsystem (favourites of mine), who are DJing with ex-DNA member Ikue Mori at an art gallery. They play Salsoul records to a packed crowd of bored and boring people, who spend most of their time looking around to see if anything cool is happening on the other side of the room. I’m desperate to dance, to lose it, but this party is inert, self-conscious. I’m getting texts from a girlfriend, who’s on an E in the middle of a ten thousand strong outdoor rave in Serbia, having one of the peak experiences of her life. I leave, feeling angry, old and bland.

 

Maybe this city is over.

 

Oh, take me off your mailing list
For kids who think it still exists
Yes, for those who think it still exists

 

because it’s all finished and they turned CBGB’s into a boutique and we know we should have been downtown in 1979 because these days Laurie Anderson’s at the Lincoln Center making booming noises by contact-miking her skull and Lou Reed looks like a grumpy wizened pixie and the Lower East Side is full of NYU students buying keffiyehs and in Tompkins Square there’s a sort of rearguard action, a commemoration of a riot twenty years ago, with punk bands and fierce moshing and lots of ink and studs and army boots and cops standing at the back with a decibel meter, making the engineer turn the PA down when it tops 80dB. Old guys with ponytails sell anarchist papers, one of the Rays Candy Store drunks fist-bumps the singer of the Bullys (you can fuck my sister / but you might get a blister) who make way for Leftover Crack (a joke name: the joke being there’s no such thing) and at some point we even get a Klezmer band.  In the crowd is David Peel, local musical hero of the dope-smoking sixties, and it’s all very defiant and withered and small and I understand why arty types say to one another at wistful parties that the one good thing about the coming recession is maybe it will go back to how it was the good old days xeroxed flyers cheap speed muggings and free performance space for all and then at least pretty please perhaps those French bankers being so loud at the bar will just fucking disappear

 

10. Not a game

 

According to Trainer Ron, they’ve had the same music at the gym since 2005.

 

Ron has arms like my legs. We talk about

 

the financial crisis

plasma tvs

the honeys

 

then suddenly he’s singing along

 

Made me learn a little bit faster

made my skin a little bit thicker

 Makes me that much smarter 

thanks for making me a fighter

 

I like that one, he says. Gimme twenty-five. Straight leg. Go.

 

 

11. Shout out to all my peoples

 

“WINS” UNFAIR

This radio station

Employs a Disc Jockey

Who Plays My Record

“Moondog Symphony”

and calls himself

‘Moondog’

I AM MOONDOG

 

In 1954 Moondog sues the popular DJ Alan Freed for copyright infringement.

At first Freed, who has a huge audience (and is credited with the invention of the term ‘rock’n’roll’) does not take the case seriously.

In court, Arturo Toscanini, Perez Prado, Benny Goodman depose for the plaintiff.

Moondog wins $5000. Freed has to stop using the name

With the damages Moondog buys land upstate, a refuge.

 

In almost six months of (intermittently) keeping this diary I’ve barely explored the radio spectrum. It seemed like it was the opposite of what I wanted to do - listening to sound in space, in the context of the city. Moondog not Freed. But radio is obviously a territory too, a  profligate open sound-space, the counterpart to the ipod’s solipsism. You phone in, request, talk to the presenter, make dedications. On a freezing Sunday night, just before Christmas, I sit down with a notebook and listen

 

epic r’n’b ballad about singer vandalising her boyfriend’s car:

you’ll  probably think it’s juvenile / but I think I deserve to smile

 

sarod and tabla players explaining sixteen beat structure of raag. Interviewer says to the two musicians: “you come off as dudes. There’s not like that whole back and forth”.

 

Brooklyn we go hard

We go hard

Shout out to my dude XL I see you too, my moms, pops, my whole family members

See the future my boy Future we about to go big 2009

Shout out to Mika

All my peoples in Brooklyn

 

DJ mash-up of spacy electro and I kissed a girl. Katie Perry’s perky lesbian titillation hollowed out, spooky, a suburban oxycontin high

 

commercial rock

in the first 30 seconds:

road

bones

taste it

tonight

the greatest

sets me on fire

 

Hark the herald angels sing glory to the newborn king our next selection is going to be found on page 43 for those of you following along angels from the realms of glory yes angels

 

The worst part is I

Million reasons

do whatever it takes

 

La reina y el rey us against the world

 

Do it for the thugs

I’ll do it for hip-hop

a truck

a Benz

 

deals on electronics mercedes slips and falls cases of cerebral palsy lead poisoning quadriplegic? We’ve recovered millions of dollars all expenses paid round trip by following the easy instructions on the website

 

Asesina, me domina

Cuando escucha el reggaeton en la bocina

 

dinner jazz walking winter wonderland simpering singer too bright piano

 

King Selassie I

 

Weird paedo christmas song little altar boy I wonder could you pray for me what must I do to be holy like you little altar boy oh let me hear you pray oh it’s the Carpenters

 

life is a highway knocked down back up again want to ride it all night long yeah

 

hard Latin bass DJ Cassanova takes calls ay baby gets the girls to simulate oral sex on the phone

 

All this in twenty minutes. Many simultaneous cities. NPR City, College Radio City, R’n’B City, above all the Latino City running in parallel to the Anglo one. Add to that the internet streams and you have a sort of infinite parallelism – Armenian City, Punjabi City, Ethiopian City, Mandarin City, New Age City, Ambient City, Faery City, Evangelical City, Adult Contemporary City, Singles City, Sports City, Pet City …

 

12. Two sounds, one high and one low

 

Each made it their work to return inwardly to the measure of grace in themselves, and not being only silent as to words but even abstaining from their own thoughts, imaginations and desires

 

[Robert Barclay, Quaker, Governor of the colony of East Jersey, 1678]

 

The jet engine thrum of the air conditioning, that idiot on WNYC who plays show-tunes all weekend, the traffic jams and pointless horn blaring whenever someone double parks on 10^th st.  Machine were mice once upon a time. Now they’re lions. Engines vibrate my windowpanes. Six months in and I still can’t sleep, let alone return to the measure of grace inside myself. As the breakdancers outside the library work through yet another cycle of Michael Jackson, I google ‘quiet places in New York’, which is how I end up in Tryon Park, crunching through the snow to the Cloisters, where the Metropolitan museum houses its medieval collection. It’s like that Brueghel picture Hunters in the Snow, except with kids sledding instead of peasants gathering wood. Sounds are muffled. The air is heavy, cold enough to sting. The Cloisters is a weird New World transplantation, bits of several French monasteries Rockefellered across the Atlantic and cobbled together to make a more or less Romanesque building, facing off against the housing projects on the neighboring hill. It’s a beautiful piece of fakery, but today it’s full of people stamping snow off their boots and pointing objects out to one another, bubbly with pre-Christmas cheer. No silence here.

 

I crave the absoluteness John Cage describes in Indeterminacy:

 

It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room I heard two sounds: one high and one low.  Afterward, I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds?'  He said, ‘Describe them’. I did. He said,  'The high one was your nervous system in operation.  The low one was your blood in circulation.’

 

When was New York last truly quiet? Some time before September 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed up the river to the isle of Manna-hatta. There’s a project to reconstruct the ecology of the island as it was then. A world without Billie Jean. Imagine - it’s easy if you try. Over the summer I spent a week alone in a house on Shelter Island. No distraction at all. The dark woods, the water lapping at the shore. The trouble, I think, was the early eighties décor of the place, which triggered memories of being terrified by slasher movies when I was young. In houses like that, teenagers drank and had sex and were punished by a chainsaw wielding maniac in the hockey mask. I had to wedge a chair under the door handle. Not that kind of silence. I didn’t like that kind at all.

 

Perhaps I’m better off in the city. Loneliness and silence are not the same. On Church Street in Tribeca, there’s a compromise solution, the Dream House, set up by minimalist composer La Monte Young and light artist Marian Zazeela. A large apartment, empty but for grubby white carpet and a massive PA system, a few hippyish decorative touches, a small shrine to Pandit Pran Nath, coloured lights playing on the wall. From the speakers emanates a vast cosmic noise. A drone whose overtones are subtly, continually changing. The sound is huge, geological, pressing down on the ears. Lie on the floor, close your eyes. In the life of the Tortoise the drone is the first sound. It lasts forever and cannot have begun but is taken up again from time to time until it lasts forever as continuous sound in Dream Houses where many musicians and students will live and execute a musical work. Dream Houses will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years or more of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition all its own but one with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum…

 

In 1974 Moondog leaves US for Germany

Spends old age fêted

tours interviews large perfomances

Dies in Germany aged 83, in 1999

 

There is, finally, only one true silence.

 

13. Wake Me

 

I’ve been keeping this diary for six months now, listening to New York.

 

One day I think I’ve found Moondog’s inheritor. A young, shirtless man, drumming on plastic tubs and bits of metal junk outside Penn station. Plastic tub-drumming seems to be a popular form of busking here, but this guy is extraordinary. His rhythm is locked down, metronomic and complex. Man lion sound for a machine city.

 

Descending into the subway at Astor Place. Beneath the street, ceramic tile, iron pillars. Industrial age archaeology. The downtown express shoots through without stopping, filling the space with metal on metal noise vast primitive ecstatic Gods of Manhattan howling

 

in the clatter of the carriage, the social world

 

close harmony singers

 

Why don’t you wake me, shake me?

Don’t let me sleep too late

Gotta get up in the morning

About a quarter to eight

 

boots on the stairs, mass migration, out into the street into yesterday’s snowfall sloosh of slush and up into the marble quiet of the library and to my office where I put on my headphones free safe isolated and out of the drone in the silence at the centre of the city

 

June  - December 2008

 

 

Notes:

 

Most biographical information from

Moondog: The Viking of 6^th Avenue   Robert Scotto  [Process 2007] and

Moondog’s Corner www.moondogscorner.de

 

Permissions / References / lyrics substantially quoted

 

TS Eliot  - Burnt Norton

Barry Truax – Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, 1978

Ear Cleaning  R. Murray Schafer 1967

The Eagles “Hotel California”

LCD Soundsystem “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down”

The Bullys “Bullys” (?)

Christina Aguillera “Fighter”

Jazmine Sullivan  “Bust Your Windows”

Daddy Yankee  “Gasolina”

The Carpenters “Little Altar Boy”

Robert Barclay Apol. Quakers   (The anarchy of the ranters, and other libertines; the hierarchy of the Romanists, and other pretended churches, equally refused and refuted, in a two-fold apology for the church and people of God, called in derision, Quakers. Wherein they are vindicated from those that accuse them of disorder and confusion on the one hand, and from such as calumniate them with tyranny and imposition on the other; shewing, that as the true and pure principles of the Gospel are restored by their testimony; so is also the antient apostolick order of the Church of Christ re-established among them, and settled upon its right basis and foundation.)  [1678]

John Cage, reading; David Tudor, music   Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music. Ninety Stories by John Cage, with Music. Folkways FT 3704, 1959. Reissued as Smithsonian/Folkways CD DF 40804/5, 1992

Dream Music/Keyboard Study #2 La Monte Young    [Aspen no. 9, item 10, 1967]

The Coasters “Wake me Shake me” 

 

This piece appeared in the first issue of Loops "an intriguing new joint venture between Domino Records and the Faber and Faber publishing company – both at the forefront of their field as proponents of risky and exciting new music and literature, respectively. Intended to be released twice a year, each “issue” of the journal is intended to showcase the best music writing by authors, journalists and musicians themselves. This first issue contains interviews, thinkpieces, tour diaries and fiction pieces – notably, a tantalising (and curiously Avril-Lavigne’s-vagina-centric) extract from Nick Cave’s twenty-years-coming second novel The Death of Bunny Munro, and Chris Killen’s darkly comic depiction of Paul Simon as a lonely Yo La Tengo fan, and – amongst other things, clearly attempting to demonstrate the full range of how music can be written about."

[thanks, The Line of Best Fit] 

Read an extract here. Below is a video of me reading another extract at Rough Trade on Brick Lane.