sorabji.com: March 31 - April 8, 2000

Wander around sorabji.com:

March 31, 2000
mark thomas
Los Angeles, California
Now I am 37,000 feet in the air and listening to Gregory Ginzburg play Liszt's "Norma" Fantasy. I really can barely type in this crouched position, the laptop monitor is somewhat shut and I keep hitting random groups of keys, causing unexpected nonsense to appear on the screen.

The cloud formations are pretty interesting, and unlike most times when many miles above the earth I have recently begun to like this sensation, at least for parts of the flights. A few weeks ago, during a really rough landing into Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., the turbulence was so bad that a few people up at the front of the plane were screaming. In my experience it really was a dramatic landing, but to me it was like a thrill-ride and each time one side of the plane jerked up or down I kind of laughed and hoped it would happen again.

Basically, though, this business of typing while flying is a way to stay awake and to expel those paroxysms of distemper and panic which still erupt at unexpected in-flight moments.

This is American Flight 199 from New York to Los Angeles. It is March 31, 2000.

Last weekend, while deciding what to do with my living room, I hit on the idea of making it a technology-free zone. No computer, no phone, no radio. Just a big dinner table, a bookshelf, pens and pencils stolen from various jobs, and blank books to write in.

When I first came to New York the only pieces of technology I owned were a radio and a typewriter.

That very radio is on my bookshelf today, but it no longer works. It is the radio through which I heard the news that Mikhael Gorbachev had "resigned," and it is the radio through which I used to listen to the Danny Stiles Radio Show late at night.

I recently got a Shower Radio, a radio for the kitchen, and a portable CD player/radio. I may go ahead with a radio for the technology-free room after all, since the most important thing about that room is that it have no computer or internet connection.

The living room has become a large closet in the past few weeks, filled with boxes of papers and crap from October, 1990, to today. Last week I picked up one box from 1991 and the bottom fell out, dumping the contents into a box from about 6 months ago. Mixing these objects from across what feels like a century was strange, but I am starting to see it all come together, and starting to see that nothing in me has really changed, and nothing ever really will.

I virtually never re-read anything I write, but have reluctantly begun reading some of the things I wrote before and after moving to New York in 1990.

Back then I could not afford paper, so I took rolls of paper towels from bathrooms and typed onto them. It was typing without end, as far as I could tell, and as I learned to ignore when the typewriter performed auto-return at the end of every line I got to a point where I could ignore a lot of what I thought of as the constraints of writing. Having written with pen and paper for most of my life, I had come to the conclusion that paragraphs and sentences were subconsciously being curtailed or expanded just so that they would fit snugly onto the piece of paper.

I started thinking about this when a musicologist told me that Beethoven, whose music is more tightly motivic than expansively melodic, sketched many of his works on small sheets of staff paper, while Chopin and Liszt wrote their piano music on enormous sheets of paper normally used for orchestral scores.

Trying to apply this idea of physical space guiding the work that you put into it, I saw a roll of non-perforated paper towels in a bathroom at Lincoln Center and imagined it feeding straight into my typewriter. I further imagined that this would allow to flourish all the expansiveness of thought so clumsily stifled all those years by common notebooks.

Reading it now, the only word that characterizes it is "turgid." But that has less to do with the uninterruptable paper supply and more to do with the heaviness of that time.

When a friend gave me a computer in 1993 I further imagined that even those physical constraints of typing onto paper would evaporate and the invisible space inside the computer could fill with my automatic writings.

It amazes me to have lived this long without ever making use of any kind of Walkman or portable music device. It just never really occurred to me, but now I can't imagine leaving the apartment without this contraption filling in all the blanks of time spent walking from home to the subway or sitting in planes like this.
Most of the CDs I listen to are old recordings, though, of pianists and orchestras from the 1920s and 1930s; even with good headphones they can be very difficult to hear on the subway or in noisy airplanes.
I used a cassette Walkman in 1992 at the Jamaica train station of the Long Island Railroad. I could only listen to it for about 15 minutes. I found that listening to any kind of music while walking made me lose balance and become oblivious to everything outside the headphones. I nearly fell down some stairs, and I walked right into a wall while listening to Glassworks.
Obliviousness was a problem of mine before headphones, though.
On back of the seat in front of me is an AT&T airphone, crushed closer yet to my face since the woman sitting in front of me reclined her seat as far back as possible. On a flight a few weeks ago a 3-year-old in the seat behind me kicked all hell out of the back of my seat and screamed and cried continuously for about 3 hours. The child's mother appeared indifferent to the situation, and fortunately I was not hung over or I would probably have lost my mind the way I almost did at a McDonald's one morning after a 9-Guinness night. A child was screaming and whining in Spanish and it felt like my head was being flossed through the ears with a sword.
The child on the plane just seemed so relentlessly angry.
To my left is a window, and the requisite view-obstructing airplane wing. I once told a travel agent that I felt cursed to sit by the wing any time I fly, and for some reason she got very upset by my comment and told me never to say that again, as if I had said that I was cursed to a fiery death at 37,000 feet the next time I fly to LA.
The wing thing has always annoyed me. I've even gone so far as to request a seat near the back of the plane so as to avoid the curse of sitting by the wing, but whenever I've asked they say that there are no seats available anywhere else. I remember wing seats as far back as I can remember flying, including a flight from Ghana to Germany over the Sahara. Some people marveled at the sun rising over the sands, but at 1 or 2 years old I seem to remember nothing but airplane wing.
What am I talking about... The cloud formations outside are starting to disappear and the sunlight fades to nothing.
Most of the flights I've been on the last few months have been pretty short -- less than an hour in the air. This is 5 hours, and it feels different. This feels like I am just "In the Air" the way teenagers are just "On the Phone."

I just shrank the font size on my screen to so small that I can not see what I am typing. It's just a little white blip against a big blue background. Maybe this will free my mind once and for all.
I remember doing this in 1992, when I worked as a temporary word processor for a company on West 57th Street. There were hours straight in which there was nothing to do, but my busy typing of pointless reflections like these made whoever would have cared about it think that I was intensely busy at all times, even if nothing appeared to be happening on the screen. I filled 3 or 4 floppy disks with ramblings like these, and still feel burned by the fact that I accidentally erased them all one day. In those pages was everything, or so I have convinced myself, about the years of transition from college to the rest of my life.
The problem with typing this way is that if I get distracted for a second and look back I have no idea what I was just saying or where the sentence left off. Such hardships I endure.
Too much turbulence to type.

4-1-00 11:25 am PST
I am at the Downtown Marriott, 333 S. Figueroa, Room 536, in Los Angeles. This hotel room with its windows open reminds me so much of my apartment in Atlanta that I have decided to shut the curtains for the duration of my stay. Lots of tall office buildings and an ugly, gravel-covered rooftop. KPMG and Arco are the only buildings I recognize by name.

West Hollywood

Museum of Death

4-1-00 4:25pm PST
Feeling really spaced out. Guess it's the time-zone thing, or the way I forgot to eat breakfast and lunch. Or both. Driving around West Hollywood I was finding it hard to avoid seeing the Hollywood sign every time I turned a corner.
I went to The Museum of Death, which is a place that has lots of pictures of dead people, particularly people who had been savagely murdered or otherwise mutilated beyond recognition. Aside from some original works of art by John Wayne Gacy, and A Heaven's Gate bunkbed (it was an actual bunkbed with dummies wearing the actual Nike shoes; the bed and shoes were purchased by the museum at an auction of actual objects from the scene of the mass suicide) -- aside from stuff like that it was a lot of the same gore pictures that abound on the internet. The point of this museum was to make you feel glad to be alive, but that is a bit too much of a challenge for me, so I just took the place to be a schlock-house.
If I were to make such a museum it would be more about what death means to different types of people, and to different cultures. I guess that sounds kind of brainy, but Diane Keaton made a movie once called Heaven which was more or less about death. It was a series of interviews with people asked to describe their vision of heaven, and the one I remember most clearly was an elderly southern woman talking about bright light, family members from all generations, "and everybody's white." For some reason it just burned a hole in my mind.
I should find a copy of that movie, to see if I remember it correctly.

I wandered around the Los Angeles Public Library this afternoon. For all the waxings about what a majestic house of thought the New York Public Library is, I can not stand the place. It is not what I consider an inviting or comfortable public library, but being in such a library today reminded me of how many hours I used to spend at the Oberlin Library and, during the late summer of 1990, the Tampa Public Library, where I first heard piano music of Charles Alkan on LP (John Ogdon's breakthrough recording of the "Concerto for Solo Piano").

4-8-00 12:54 PM PST
In the air again. This is flight 40 from LAX to JFK. 2 hours late on departure. I am listening to Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated and typing these words.
LA seems pretty sane. A lot cheaper than New York. Not necessarily any place I would want to live but a nice enough place.
I hooked up with a few friends while there. One person is someone I know from a BBS that we used in 1993 and 1994. For reasons moribund and uninteresting I never talk about it with anyone except people I still know from that BBS. Our conversation about "What ever happened to..." made it sound like we were at an alumni reunion.
There were so many people to talk about, it seemed. Some of them went crazy, others grew up, a few of us got real jobs. I'm not sure if I've gone only one of those directions since 1994, but I know I nearly lost my mind in that BBS. There was something infinite about it, and night after night all the damage from inside of me just poured like mud through the phone lines, frantically filling message boards, IRC channels, phone chat lines, and e-mail boxes around the world. I know that it will be easy to return to that way of life, but for now I like to think that I have focus, even if it goes to many different places.
When the BBS closed down I kept in touch with and remained friends with several people from there, but in the back of my mind I'm always hoping that my secrets are safe with them.