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.
