July 2, 2003 (Vol. 37, Iss. 40)

noise.
Editors: Kimberly Chun & J.H. Tompkins
Art director: Lori Spears
Noise logo designer: J. Fish
Music accounts executive: Chris Owen

PUNCTUM

By George Chen

Death rattle

MY CAR IS dead. I'm taking her to the junkyard. I had her less than a year, and it's like putting a pet to sleep. To ease the pain, I'm signing up for City CarShare. It's a program that fits my needs, namely, failure to pay monthly insurance fees, while promoting environmentally friendly car usage, or so I'm told. I went to an orientation with a yuppie couple and a few East Bay bike people who were a bit older. They might have been in it for the aforementioned socially responsible reasons, but I was trying to be more pragmatic. My only question was whether the cars came with a CD player or cassette deck.

My old car, Nova, has a tape deck. She was pretty immaculate on the outside when I got her, with a butterscotch paint job since chipped by some unprovoked hit-and-runs. Maybe naming her was a mistake. I knew I wasn't ready for the commitment, but she threw herself at me. She would sometimes emit a burnt toast smell, her brakes squeaked, and her engine was loud. I thought that naming her would make me invested, that the act would automatically change me into someone who knew about cars, someone who could maintain this "classic" with rusted guts. Instead, it makes me someone who is too sentimental about a car to let it go to its proper resting place.

I found out things about her old owner, who'd moved away for grad school and left a glove compartment full of evidence. He smoked Camels and had a bunch of R.E.M. tapes and a pair of BluBlocker sunglasses. I pretended I was this guy sometimes, wearing his BluBlockers and listening to Murmur. We never got to have our summer driving experience, Nova and I, windows rolled down, cruising Lake Merritt, blasting Moss Icon, or Panama, or something equally inappropriate for a granny-muscle car.

The freedom of the road and the individualized experience of driving is intrinsic to the stereotypical imagery of California. Now my California dream is bound to public transit, which alleviates oil-crisis guilt but is totally unsexy. Communal cars? Who are we, the Amish? I've reentered into the world of sharing, of the public good. Now that I don't have a car, will I become one of those people who automatically care about pollution, Critical Mass, and reusing grocery bags? It doesn't seem to be taking. Could turn out to be the same problem with naming the car, with bothering to care about anything that will eventually break down on me.

I got the same sort of feeling when I heard about the Nature Sounds Society's field recording workshop. Part of the Oakland Museum's California Library of Natural Sounds, the Nature Sounds Society is similar in mandate to the Vancouver, British Columbia-based World Soundscape Project. Phil England's December 2002 article in The Wire summed up the work of the Canadian soundscape advocates as a confluence of acoustic design, nature preservation, and noise-pollution combat. The CLNS has a narrower scope, which can be seen on its excellent Web site (www.museumca.org/naturalsounds), a sonic tour of California animals from the tapping of the red-breasted sapsucker to the coyote's howl. The workshop is one activity offered to members and nonmembers alike, but members have access to the library's sound bank. It's a resource that musique concrète manipulators and scientists can share.

I recently had a soundscape record bequeathed to me. It's one of the Syntonic Research Environments albums Atlantic released in the early '70s; this one has ambient sounds from a 1969 Central Park be-in on one side and "Dusk at New Hope, Penn" on the other side. The be-in recording is amusing for its hippie naïveté, like one could actually change the world with tambourine banging, barking dogs, anarchic woodwinds, and the odd drug-induced muttering. Its innocence is undercut by liner notes describing the aftermath of the event: "Later in the day, there would be rock-throwing and confrontations with the small contingent of policemen nearby, and a terrible moment when a nude dancer leaped into a roaring bonfire, but for this moment in time, frozen on a reel of magnetic tape, everyone seems together and happy." The "Dusk" recording captures a legion of chirping crickets, and I sometimes play it in an attempt to soothe my cluttered mind. Its calming effect is broken by the natural ambience around my house – emergency helicopters buzzing overhead, freeway off-ramp traffic, the occasional gunshot. The Environments producers were hard at work answering the question, Can an aural environment be recreated in the home with sufficient realism that the person listening actually gets involved in the event itself?

Three decades later, it seems like the purpose of our listening habits is to keep us as uninvolved in our environments as possible. Be-ins have long been replaced by a new mode of experience, what Joan Didion might call the freeway communion. Bumper-rattling bass and child-pacifying DVD-playing headrests are equally symptomatic of California's biggest musical export: its car-centric soundscape.

I envisioned the three-day field recording workshop as an opportunity to merge my interests in sound with a budding ecological perspective, a gas-guzzler's redemption. I figured that lectures from ornithologists and woodland preservationists in an outdoor setting for a weekend would make me someone who could automatically recognize and care about bird migrations, civilization's encroachment on wilderness, and the impacts of tourism. Instead of embracing the transformation, I asked what the food was like and whether there were cabins with electricity.

Unfortunately, I view nature the way a child views vegetables: as something that is supposed to improve you but isn't nearly as fun as candy or ice cream. I mean, come on – vegetables come from dirt. I recently tried to meditate, but I felt blocked by my internal static, my psychic noise pollution. I like the idea of sitting quietly for days recording birds and crickets, but I fear that in a battle between my ideals and my boredom threshold, I'd start tapping the microphones or unconsciously humming that ubiquitous Busta Rhymes-Mariah Carey song, ruining the purity of the endeavor.

Still more of a consumer than an ecologist, I opted to abstain from the workshop when I found out how much the fees were. Maybe next year, I thought to myself, I will be worthy of this Society. Hopefully by then I will have finally become the sort of person who doesn't need to be reminded to take care of my resources before they crap out on me.