A Postcard View
Today I hopped around Manhattan to record three interviews for three different clients. The final recording was with Leonard Lauder, former CEO of Estée Lauder; Estée was his mother. He’s also chairman of the Whitney Museum of Art and a major art collector with a particular fondness for postcards, the subject of our recording.
Here’s the view from Estée Lauder’s waiting room (please forgive the camera-phone):
Then we were escorted to a quiet corner conference room to record the interview and enjoy this view of Central Park:
Joad Returns
Here’s the second episode of “The Joad Show.” Though I did the sound design for all the wipes and transitions, my favorite part is actually the second or so of silence during “Poor Margaret’s” close-up around 2:30. A little room-tone goes a long way.
Joad Cressbeckler: NASA Honeyfuggling America With Nonsense Space Dreams
One memory in particular I have about Rev 105 is being in 6th or 7th grade and listening to special feature about Soul Coughing. They devoted a whole hour of air-time to the group, featuring live and unreleased tracks interspersed with interviews and pre-produced segments about the band’s history and development (narrated, I think, by Mary Lucia). It was cassette-tape “gold,” and tape it I did. (Where is that tape today? Did I record over it?)
Remember how we used to collect our music?
You’d hear a catchy song on the radio but miss the ID, so you’d call the station. “That song. What was that song?” and you’d hum a few bars for the DJ, approximate a few misheard lyrics. “I think there was a trumpet?” And then she’d tell you what it was.
The next day you’d call the station to make a request, and they’d promise play it sometime within the hour. You’d wait at your parent’s stereo, your finger hovering in anticipation over the red circle on the tape deck. 90 minutes passed, and then:
“By request, here’s…,” the first few bars already creeping up beneath her voice. You’d fumble for the “rec” button.
And so you collected whole shoe-boxes of mixtapes with no particular unifying theme, each song missing the first few seconds because, of course, you needed to hit “rec” and “play” at the same time.
Busy Day
I can’t remember the last time I biked to the park specifically to find a good place to read. I stayed there for hours, until the sun fell behind the trees.
Gmemory
Most of my friends use Gmail and Google’s built-in instant messenger system, Gchat. By default, Google logs not just every email you’ve ever sent, but every instant message, too. To wit, only one of my friends has actually gone out of his way to disable this feature (called “going off the record”).
For me, this becomes a question of balancing the potentially frightening implications of recording everything I’ve ever written vs. the fear of losing a chunks of my virtual memory, parts of my real past. After all, thanks to Google, I have a huge keyword-searchable memory backstop. I’m able to recall nearly any bit of critical information or minutia from the depths of my Gmail archive in a matter of seconds, so long as I can remember just enough peripheral information about an online conversation. For what it’s worth, I haven’t been willing to turn off this auto-logging feature on my own account. Besides, even if I were to delete these records, presumably they’d still exist on the other person’s account.
I’m curious if and how other people deal with this. Do you regularly purge your digital memories, or do you (like me) continue archiving everything in your digital life as a matter of practice? Do you ever revisit old conversations? And is that healthy? What do you do with memories or old conversations that you’d rather not remember? My sense is that the medium makes a big difference; sure, we’re comfortable with managing email, but what about all those instant messages? What about colorful internet chats with an old lover?
Knowing you can dig back into the past, do you ever fight the urge to look for hints of something you maybe should have noticed, or to say “I told ya so?” How does it make you feel to know that those records still exist, perhaps on someone else’s hard drive and outside of your control, perhaps filed away in perpetuity on a Google server?
I was a big James Joyce fan in college (indeed, there was at least one miserable semester where I thought I was Stephen Dedalus incarnate). Any undergrad Joyce seminar eventually includes some scholarship about the love letters (ahem, very NSFW!) he wrote to his girlfriend (and future wife) Nora Barnacle. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Joyce never expected these private expressions of affection (etc.) wouldn’t stay private. Now these letters are nearly as central to our understanding of Joyce as the spectre of Catholicism that permeates his writing.
Just think: everything you’ve ever written to anyone else is still out there, and it’s keyword-searchable.
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