Week 4: Sound and Silence

In which the podcaster falls into a memory hole and establishes palaver with a throng of angry instruments in order to find a way to improve his current situation.

The episode logo this week features an actual photo of the podcaster in 1980 stepping into the world via the meadow in what is now known as Olympic Valley, CA.

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 5 – WEEK 4:  Sound and Silence

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 5, taking you through Week 4 of my 12-Month Video Fast.

In the corner of my front room, across from where there used to be a TV and a heap of video equipment but which is now graced with a makeshift writing desk and extra room to dance, sits an array of angry instruments. They’re a pretty nice bunch to be honest, but they’ve fallen into neglect and are fairly resentful, some more than others. There’s the electric bass that I bought a couple of years ago and have barely picked up; that one mostly just sits there glaring. Then there’s the lap dulcimer that my cousin gave me which is honestly so mellow that it rarely has much to say, but generally leans in the corner looking wistful. There’s a handmade balafon – a small xylophone with resonating gourds – with pretty great tones that’s fun to attack with the mallets for a minute or two occasionally [balaphon (2.5 sec)... Hey!]; that one’s the most content of the bunch, but is also the envy of the others, who can be a little harsh with it. You can still tap a beat out of the two djembes, though their heads dried and cracked some time ago. But it’s the electric guitar that’s easily the most dissolute; I’ve had that since 1974 and we know each other pretty well, though it’s definitely been an on and off relationship over the years. I do sit down with it occasionally, but most of the time it just sits there dejected and muttering, with a mournful background chorus from the various hand instruments scattered around. A sad scene to be sure. So what exactly brought about this indecent state of affairs?

It's…complicated.

See, near as I can tell I have an unusual relationship with music in general, compared to most people anyway. Now how in the hell can someone have a complicated and unusual relationship to music, you ask? Since you’re asking, it’s like my brain doesn’t quite get music – it’s maybe the one creative medium that it finds oddly confusing. It’s resistant to music – it always thinks music is trying to control it. How uptight is that? I’ve got one of those annoying brains that doesn’t shut up (hard to imagine, isn’t it?), and I can find it hard to think when tunes are on. It’s not like I don’t enjoy music – I really do, many kinds, and I can let it sweep me away – but I can also go for months at a time without it even occurring to me to put some on in my apartment. Tell me that’s not unusual.

See, I love silence. I love to let my thoughts run undirected, maybe to see where they lead or maybe just to give them some exercise so they’ll get to sleep at night. I’m totally serious, and I know there are others like this, but I don’t come across them too often. In my forties I started having a hard time living with roommates, partly because almost everyone likes listening to music more than I, and I can’t be around it playing frequently, let alone constantly. Give me a trickling stream any day – now there’s some music. (Of course now we have earbuds, which should be called you’re-not-there buds.) Funny thing is, alone in my apartment I often sing to myself, when I’m doing chores or in-between focused tasks or just wandering around aimlessly – about anything, you know, like 

[IMPROV APARTMENT SINGING]

Irony is most of my life I didn’t like musicals, and now I practically am one. I swear sometimes I sing in rounds and harmonies. And then I go back to silence.

I always loved silence. Spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid, though I suspect that was less about consciously loving silence than it was about catching frogs and crayfish. Biking through the woods as a teen, I think a little more so. In undergrad in Ann Arbor I’d occasionally slip out of the dorm well past midnight to go walking in the nearby Arboretum for hours, sometimes until dawn. I had amazing night vision and never took a flashlight. Sometimes I’d just stand there in the woods, in the dark, for a while, just breathing and listening. After my second year I took a year off to decide what to do with my life (whatever that is) and lived for six months, summer and fall of 1980, in Olympic Valley, CA – that’s where Palisades Tahoe Ski Area is now. I called it my Summer of Sitting on Rocks, and I sure did a lot of that. Got a job painting ski lifts (I painted the chairs and ran a spray system for the tower painters), and when I wasn’t hanging above the glory of the Sierras, I was tramping through them. At that time Olympic Valley sported, gosh, dozens of homes, maybe a hundred (if memory serves), all tucked along the ridge north of the main road. Now of course there are a few more. But the vast meadow on the south was still open and pristine all the way to the ski area. I could just step out of my tiny shared in-law apartment on Tiger Tail Road and enter what seemed to me, and still does, the world. I read and wrote a lot in that quiet place, and by the time I returned to Michigan in late November, I knew what I wanted to do. I would study English Literature in order to hone and energize my own writing. I would be a writer.

The course of my studies there took me one step further, not toward being a lit-wit but toward becoming a courtesan of quietude. In my junior year I spent six weeks in New Hampshire taking part in what was easily the best educational experience of my life. That was the New England Literature Program or, affectionately, NELP, which was started at U. Michigan in the mid-seventies – and it’s still going. (Look it up – it’s really cool!) At that time about twenty students and eight staff and faculty spent May and half of June at what was normally a summer camp on Lake Winnipesaukee. We’re talking cabins with minimal electric and a lodge in the woods with nothing around for miles. The idea was to read New England Lit in an environment much like the one in which it had been written in the 19th Century. To heighten that effect, we were not allowed to bring watches or clocks of any sort, and most definitely not radios. It was 1982 and that was more than enough to make us feel removed from the hubbub and clamor of “civilization” (whatever that is). It wasn’t absolute, nor was meant to be – there was a phone for emergencies and two vans to take us into Wolfeboro (which you could canoe to in an hour if you liked) and farther-out excursions to camp and climb ridges and mountains. But mostly we sat in the woods or on docks or outcroppings or around fires, reading and writing and talking about everything, getting to know each other and taking in the natural world (which I think includes everything, but you know what I mean). And let me tell you, that shit was formative, at least for me, and by the time it was over my senses felt alive and my heart open, and I was ready to be a writer who lives in the world acutely.

And quietude has been my ally ever since.

[TRANSITION: balafon (4.5 sec)]

Oh yeah, the instruments. Told you they were outspoken.

Okay, so here’s their story. When I was 8, I became obsessed with piano music. I’d get excited whenever it was on, and would run to the kitchen and I’d play along with it, banging my fingers on the table like a keyboard. Come Christmas, of course, I asked for a piano, and my parents gave me a guitar – because, you know, it’s basically the same thing. Okay, that joke is at their expense, but the truth is that in 1968 there were no inexpensive or moderately affordable pianos. Electronic keyboards for the masses were still a few years off, and my folks were maintaining a hard-won and tenuous grip on the middle-middle class with a house in the suburbs and four kids, so this was an inevitable compromise. And it came with lessons, so I learned – “Greensleeves” and “Shoo, Fly” and “Swanee River” and all that. Exciting times.

Thing is, as some of you know, a guitar really isn’t a piano. They don’t sound alike at all, and though both have strings, a piano is more of a percussion instrument. More fundamental though is the difference in how they’re played. A piano is very visually oriented, as am I, with all the notes laid out in front of you, whereas a guitar in primarily tactile (you feel your way around the fretboard) and aural (of the ear, and mine are not the most skilled of ears – ask any of my once and future bandmates). But I kept at it (as I just foreshadowed), and took more lessons, gave some lessons, got an electric (whom you’ve met) and took rock and roll lessons, played acoustic for “folk masses” at our church (don’t ask). In the dorms at Michigan (yep we’re back there again) I played bass in a cover band just for fun – pretty much my first experience with that. A bunch of us from the sixth floor would get together in the cafeteria a few nights a week and learn songs – very eclectic – Hall & Oates, Jethro Tull, I insisted on the Ramones (“I don’t wanna be a pinhead no more, I just found a nurse that I could go for” – it was a med student dorm after all) and kids would hang out and listen. At the end of the semester we “headlined” at the Couzen’s Hall Talent Show, along with the Metal band from the fourth floor. I was shaking like a leaf, but we were a big hit. During the climax of our final song and the last song of the evening, which was (I shit you not) “Freebird,” the metal guy’s amp that I was using caught on fire right behind me, and I was too nervous to notice that I no longer had any sound – until a bunch of people came running at me. Half the crowd thought it was a special effect, and I was a sort of rock star after that for a while. Didn’t feel like one though.

So the guitar became part of me, if not exactly I of it. I dragged my Yamaha acoustic with me as I ping-ponged across the country through the 80s – Ann Arbor, Tahoe, Ann Arbor, Oakland, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Chicago, San Francisco, playing now and then but mostly for myself. I never felt like a guitarist, more like a poet who played the guitar (sometimes). As long as I kept in practice, I was proficient, but I was never really an inspired musician. Until I was.

Summer 1987 I end up back in San Francisco after months of journeys and waylayings. I’m disillusioned with the poetry scene at that point (a tale for another day, or not), so I start going to an anything-goes open mic called Circle Arts, where I meet these two really goofy guys, Ted Thacker and Phil Wronski. They call themselves Baldo Rex and bounce around doing all kinds of crazy, silly songs with Ted on guitar and Phil approximating crooning – very silly and very likable and everybody cheers. They were great songs actually. Fast forward a couple of months and I run into Ted and Phil drunk in a crowd in front of the Paradise Lounge, and Ted says, “Hey, do you know anybody who plays the bass? This guy John booked us a bunch of gigs but we don’t have a band. We’re trying out Junglebook tomorrow on drums but we still need a bass player.”

“I know how to play [the] bass,” I say, “I’m out of practice but I could come and sit in.” And I do, and they are so fun to play with and I end up being the bass and rhythm guitarist for Baldo Rex for a year and a half in San Francisco. We play twenty-some gigs and always draw a crowd and it is a total blast and I am so inspired writing parts and harmonizing and syncopating and simpaticoing, and that was it, I guess, the missing link – the fourth element of big-hearted humans. At the end Ted and Phil decide to (goofily) move back to Boulder (where apparently they’d both been birthed by giant caterpillars), and everything is congenial and everyone misses the band but all good, it was what it was and it was the best. After that I decide for some reason, well, that was fun and I’m done playing music now, and who knows why we do anything. A year or two later I sell and give away all of my instruments and am happy as a Rocky Mountain oyster.

So fast forward again, this time 25 years (and try not to get dizzy or break time, please) to Oakland in 2017. Who cares what happened in between. I’m sitting here in this apartment (yes, the one with the TV) feeling kind of desolate after a rough couple of years. The only instruments here are a djembe I picked up in Brooklyn and a small thumb-piano called a kalimba (more on that in a minute). Then out of the blue I get a Facebook message from my college friend Keith in Grand Rapids. It includes a pic of my old Gibson electric, looking ever so vibrant in its red-velvet lined case, and says, “Hey, do you remember this guitar you sold me 25 years ago? Well I’ve got a bunch now and don’t really play this one anymore. Do you want it back?” Whereupon every cell in my body promptly screams, “Yes!”

I got my hands on that baby and played and played. Played it constantly for months, wrote a few songs that I played out a few times in my rough-hewn way. Played a few Baldo Rex songs I remembered. Spent months learning “The Rains of Castamere” from Game of Thrones because it had the hardest fingering I could find (like mega-Twister hard). I played and played, with dopamine leaking out of my eyes, ears, and fingertips. My cousin gave me the dulcimer (I’d always wanted one), and I played that. I got a second djembe and played both of them. Someone gave me a Chinese banjo and I played that even though its strings are like razors, an out-of-tune autoharp (which needs all new strings and tuning, but it’s fun to make discordant noises with), and a bag or two of hand instruments. I swear I was like some kind of instrument magnet. Who knows why anything happens. After about a year and a half of that I got depressive and stopped playing everything, because brain.

So in what way, you might be asking, and I assume you’re asking, does all this have anything to do with keeping my video fast?

In a word, intentionality.

Because I’m doing a lot more with my time now, but most every evening, even after more than three weeks off the juice, I find myself staring into space and wondering, now what should I do instead of watching TV? – which is so dumb and at this point feels like some sort of loop that’s been triggered in some part of my brain. So to address the question and the loop, it seems like a good idea to intentionally activate other parts of my brain, especially ones that might result in productive, energizing, and pleasurable activities. I’ve done a million different things that have lit up my brain (I’m not talking about the acid). Plus I’m always feeling weighed down by creative and creative-adjacent projects that I start but don’t find time or focus to finish, or can’t get enough momentum on, can’t keep my brain lit up about. Sound familiar? And why is that? For one thing for years when time actually does open up I’ve been saying, “My brain is tired” (I know that sounds familiar), like some commercial taught me at some point, some commercial for watching TV.

So to test this out, this week I approach that corner of my room with the muttering throng, across from the corner that is now so quiet, and try to start a conversation. There’s the intentionality – because in the past I’ve only played when I felt the (infrequent) urge. But this time is different. The question is, who’s going to stimulate my brain in such a way that it shifts and stays activated? I look at the balafon [balafon (2.5 sec)] – nope, too bouncy for a steady spark. I pick up the dulcimer [dulcimer (9 sec)] which I love for its soothing sounds, but I don’t need soothing right now. I pick up the guitar, old friend who knows my ways [guitar riff (10 sec)], and there’s always potential there and often momentum, but it’s been a while and I’m playing predictably, at least for me [guitar riff (1 sec)],  and I need something more unexpected.

So I pick up the kalimba. I bought this simple little thumb-piano almost ten years ago after the death of an ex, a wrenching, unexpected death with great grieving – first time I heard the word “fentanyl” – and way too young to go and so much energy, and I used the kalimba to flow with the grief. I played it most days for months. I played it at readings between grief poems, and cried. I played it during a solo full moon ritual on the beach. And I play it sometimes, and it almost always sounds like grief to me. So I pick it up to see what it has to say to me now.

[kalimba grieving]

And I can still hear the grief. So I ask it, can we go somewhere else? And it walks with me.

[kalimba walking]

And I say to it, Life is long and complicated, isn’t it. And:

[kalimba dancing]

So we sit down for a while and talk some more, and decide to make a springboard to see if it will take us somewhere else. Not a song, a springboard. A springboard of sound.

[full kalimba piece (1:40)]

Thank you, kalimba. Thanks for your help with that. 

This podcast is not going to be about music now, by the way, nor is it going to become a demo tape. I promise. But it is, I think, going to have a lot more to do with intentionality.

I so appreciate you folks for listening, and there seems to be a buncha ya who have caught every episode, which totally makes this feel worth doing. So just this week I found the FAN MAIL button on Buzzsprout, which I’d overlooked, and clicked it, so now, if you like, you can leave messages (I think just text messages though) on any given episode. I can’t reply back so if you want to hear from me, include your contact if I don’t have it. Please reach out. You might save me from some of that TV jones. Also I’d love to know what you’re thinking, what’s working and what isn’t, what you want more of or never want to hear again. And like I say, please share with anyone who might dig this.  

And the fast will go on regardless.

My gracious and grateful thanks this week to three new subscribers to the podcast: Hilary Goldstein, long-time pillar of mental health advocacy in Berkeley, CA; Deborah Perry, ASL interpreter and core of the earth leaking out of West Roxbury, MA; and my mom in Cape May County, NJ, who’s kind of responsible for this whole thing you’re listening to – thanks, Mom!

Next week we’ll explore this intentionality thing a little further, and maybe give birth to the United States of America.

This has been Episode 5, reviewing Week 4 of my 12-Month Video Fast.

Thank you for listening.

 [guitar finish (5 sec)]