I’ve been writing for weeks, but not typing it.
I wanted to write about the wandering ears. What happens when I’m tired or if I decide to let my ears wander around. It’s not like Gogol’s Nose. It’s more like this feeling like my ears are far from me, gathering sounds that are so distant it seems impossible that anyone else would hear them, and folding these sounds back into my senses.
This isn’t all pathological. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with, I feel like my ears are ping-ponging around, unable to shut anything out. But other times it means I can continue my hobby of casual eavesdropping and pretend I’m a spy.
When I’m editing, the wandering ears enable me to experience not only words and sounds in the track, but to feel the in-breaths or the moment a violinist lifts her bow to play. To a degree, this translates to images too. And to spatial orientation, the feeling of being compassed in the city, the body turning automatically towards the direction it needs to go. That doesn’t mean I don’t get lost.
I used to show my students a scene from the film Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould as a way of helping them understand creative ways of activating sound in their films. While I’m no Gould, this scene is related to the ways I listen. All music. The short film of the 32 that I refer to is called Truck Stop. You can watch it here.
Wrote an earlier post about how I experience language. The senses. Giving attention.
On the subway platform the other day I saw a woman putting a baby on her back and tying a blanket around the baby and the baby’s little foot sticking out crooked and the woman taking the blanket off and the baby stayed on her back as if by velcro and the blanket got tied around again and the little foot was tucked in. I smiled at the woman but I was wearing a mask and headphones and she did not smile back at me.
I remembered the woman who worked at the daycare in Berlin when the kids were little. Emma was just over one year old and couldn’t walk yet. The daycare found this to be a problem; they had a set of standards or skills the children needed to acquire along a certain developmental timeline. So Emma was sitting around sometimes, perfectly content in the backyard or on the carpet looking around at what was going on. The childcare workers had to get her from here to there in various ways. They were frustrated with my parenting. But Betty, a woman from Ghana who worked at the daycare, carried a beautiful cloth wrap with her. And she would carry Emma on her back, tying it just like the woman I saw on the train platform this week.
The head of the toddler section of the daycare reprimanded Betty more than once for the breach of protocol. But Betty kept doing it because it was practical and Emma seemed content and was still learning to walk. Eventually the head of the little kid group taught Emma how to walk by giving her two pails of sand to hold for balance and she toddled through the play area like that, carrying buckets of sand.
The following week I went to pick up Emma and learned that Betty was gone. They told me that her apprenticeship had ended but I didn’t believe them.
Another flash of memory from long-ago Chicago: seeing the light falling on the nape of a stranger’s neck on the elevated train, and me thinking: I could make a whole film about this, just the way the light is moving and lighting up different parts of the back of this stranger’s neck. At that time I thought everything had to have a story the way “official” movies did, stories that came from the outside, backstories, dramas and acts. I could not make stories like that. They did not even enter my mind. I was more interested in the light, the sound, the gesture. I decided to keep that image and save it for later. Now that many years have passed I am convinced, or reconciled to myself, that this image is the story, nothing more. And I still carry it as a living, vibrant thing.
The pinball machine of mind, thoughts ideas and feelings like when the ball is bouncing between the pads up in the middle of the machine, you keep them going with the little upper flap levers, reveling in the balance, timing, explosions of movement, and the score cranking its way up at a lightning pace. It is not random, it is intentional. I insist that creative work is valid in this way. I demand it can be like this.
Been revisiting in my memory a seminar I attended few weeks ago when, after my presentation, the leader asked me what word, if you could choose just one, would you use to describe your project. Without a moment’s hesitation, I said correspondence, then asked him what he would have said.
He answered, smiling: meandering.
And at the time, to be pleasing, I agreed.
There is nothing about what I am doing that is “meandering.” To sow the seeds I want to requires rows that are not rigid; they respond to the soil, the roots from previous seasons, the rocks & clods of earth, understanding the direction the sun might shine on sprouting things in the coming year.
The logic of connection, of correspondence, it’s all right there.
I’ve been spending a lot of time watching a number of my older films for my upcoming exhibition. There are seven short films I created while making BUNKER. Usually I cringe when I have to watch past work, but these days I find myself more dispassionate, nonjudgmental, curious about who it was who had the energy to make these things and trying to follow the path of the why. It is fascinating to see what parts of different projects come from one another or how one film tries to untangle a knotty problem generated by something just hinted at in a previous film.
For once, just for a few minutes, instead of comparing myself or thinking why bother, I thought to myself: I’m the only person who could have made these things. It doesn’t matter if they are all great. They are things I made. And nobody else thinks and makes the way I do.
That was a good moment. And maybe that’s enough.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER will have its Norwegian Premiere at Vega Scene on Friday, March 15 at 17:30 as part of the Oslo Architecture Film Festival. The screening will be followed by the opening of my solo exhibition Near Space at Galeri ROM. BUNKER will have additional screenings at Vega every sunday for the duration of the exhibition. The exhibition runs from March 15-April 15.
I had to stop reading this one at the second paragraph to let you know that I used to play in a punk band that did a song about that Gogol story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3Rbv7MTDfI
I'm on the left, playing bass. Enjoy.