Moses slaughtered it and took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron’s right ear, and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot.
Because Jim is on a nostalgia kick, it is perhaps almost unbearably fortuitous that my mother would be erasing all my files from her old PC, e-mailing them to me in compressed file form. A lot of it doesn’t send, I suppose because it is a lot of old No Sunlite for the Media files that are not meant to be heard ever again. Part of me hopes I still have copies of this stuff on CD, & part of me understands that ninety-eight percent of it is complete crap anyway. Still! Nostalgic crap is not entirely crap, is it? Anyway, the files I have been e-mailed successfully are old pieces of writing & old lists I have compiled & copied & pasted from the internet for reasons of research & obsessive interest. One of these things is a paper I wrote for Sociology, for an assignment that had us quietly & secretly watching someone at school for a week. It was an assignment on voyeurism! The paper I wrote I remember had been read aloud to the class. It went something like this:
And The Stranger continues through her days, a creature of chance and general being. Transparent and supernatural in one fleeting moment, wanting and wholly eager the next, she is as enigmatic and confusingly formed as the Sphinx. But The Stranger does not live to be this curious individual, as it seems she lives only by her own, very human rules. She moves wherever she is taken by luck or fortune, and in this sense she exists as the ultimate stranger to society. Unnoticeable, yet unforgettable in the sub-conscious, The Stranger leaves a path of psycho-social uncertainty from no matter where she comes and no matter where she goes.
The Stranger had been a girl named Lauren, who I had a crush on. Every boy in my school had a crush on her. She was a high school superstar. I wouldn’t doubt some girls had a crush on her too. I don’t know where she is now. I don’t care. (Okay yes I do know. She is at the University of New York. Whatever, it’s more poetic this way).
Anyway. So. Amongst the files that are e-mailed to me is a folder entitled Noise Utopia. It contains three files, the only three, I’m guessing, that survived out of the 20 or so that were in the folder originally. The story of this folder is this-
In 10th grade, I had an English teacher who wore his hair down to his shoulders & swept back off his face. He had very red eyes; people used to joke that he smoked pot after school. I used to seriously comment that he probably smoked pot during school. Speculations of a high school mind. Before I joined the newspaper staff the next year, he was the one teacher who both inspired me to write & loved what I wrote (for better [which was very rare] or for worse [which was always very worse]). His name was Mr. Shapiro. He had a beard & wore socks with his birkenstocks & shopped at Trader Joe’s a lot. He taught Creative Writing, which I had taken the year previous.
Anyway. The final project for my 10th grade English class was simple in theory & design & yet proved to be very long-winded in execution. The assignment was thus: create your own version of either a utopia or a dystopia. You could use anything you wanted, do anything you wanted, as long you kept a frequent log of progress & presented the final product to the class. To illustrate: when presentations came around, projects included posters with images & descriptions of the “Utopian Car” (the lacrosse players did this one), professionally printed & bound faux-magazines depicting the “Utopian Wedding” (the smart, driven girls; more specifically: the debate team captain), & a somewhat unprofessionally printed & bound (but hand-illustrated!) “Utopian Children’s Book” (my brother). After much deliberation, I went the psycho-social route I knew Mr. Shapiro would like.
The Utopian Noise track.
My point at the time, I suppose, was to say to the class: what you may find dystopian in nature, others may find utopian. Take, for example, music. You may find static, harsh noise, & completely indecipherable rhythm to be dystopian; this should be turned off!, you may say. I, on the other hand, may find this kind of music utopian. Perhaps I find bliss in the mess, or nirvana in the junk pile. I was going to show my class what was what, & I was going to do it with style. I had decided this.
This anecdote is turning into something of a too-long story, one which I have become tired of telling over the years. Here is the somewhat basic low-down, then. Over the course of maybe 8 or 9 weeks, I would tinker with different sounds & frequencies & harsh tones in my mother’s basement, using only Microsoft Sound Recorder to amplify, distort, & echo any sounds I recorded. There were maybe 15 or 16 different tracks layered over one another, & I don’t remember everything I used, but I know that I did use a guitar, a Slinky, a Yamaha keyboard, & I believe an old & out of tune dulcimer that my mother still keeps hanging above the doorway to our downstairs hallway.
There was also the night I invited Math & Neal over to my house to record a live, impromptu jam of sorts. I played the guitar (poorly – maybe 3 chords), Neal played bass (he was an amazing bassist, but during this recording he resorted to simple plonks & doinks, typing out some weird cryptic music-theory form of “666” every now & then. In early versions of the noise track, you can hear it in the background), & Math played a homemade instrument of ours that involved two amplifiers essentially playing themselves. To explain further: the concept behind this instrument was to connect a practice amp into the input of a much bigger amp, or vice versa, basically tinkering around with plugs & holes & cords until we managed to create a machine that had high-pitched, completely erratic feedback playing out of the amps. This noise was manipulatable, however, by twiddling the knobs for things like “bass,” “middle,” & “high” on the smaller amp. This may all be technically wrong, but what’s really important is that this thing was an experiment in noise innovation that we were very proud of. Also, it’s important to note that it kicked major ass.
So, after the jam session, which lasted over 16 minutes, I added some more layers of various noises & static & then called the thing done. I compiled every single track onto 2 discs, called it “Neon” (I donno, don’t ask)
, & brought it into class. The noise itself was something I was incredibly proud of, & also terrified to share to the class. This thing was almost seven minutes long. & it was loud. & it was hard on the untrained ear (think Metal Machine Music for a Streisand fan).
My classmates presented their various utopian fantasies (okay, so one of these was a powerpoint that had a picture on each slide of a Lego man & woman in various positions & in front of various backgrounds, with typed dialog underneath. It was supposed to depict the “Utopian date.” I was chosen by the girl presenting it to read all the Lego boy’s parts. It was like odd impromptu high school theater without having read the script first. It was wonderful). Anyway, they presented all their projects. Then it was my turn.
The first thing I remember I did was I drew a sloppy sketch on the blackboard of what our homemade noise machine looked like, with a brief description of how it worked & its role in the final product. Then, I put the CD into the boombox at the front of the room & hit Play.
While the track played, I stood gripping the podium just in front of the boombox, & made funny faces. Really, that’s all I did. I made funny faces; I scrunched up my nose & raised my eyebrows & bared my teeth & acted like I smelled something funny. It was an excruciating seven minutes. But people were laughing! They hated it, but they loved it! It ended, I went back to my seat, & blushed my way through the rest of class. I got an A, & damnit I have never deserved an A more.