I saw Retribution Gospel Choir (a side project of Alan Sparhawk from Low) at the Varsity Friday night, opening for Mark Kozelek. Best I could tell, Alan walked on stage already fully possessed and speaking in tongues. Imagine grabbing Raggedy Andy by the sacroiliac and shaking him as hard as you can while he sings about salvation and damnation and nothing in between. It was a little like staring at a flashbulb: a long after-image.
Mark Kozelek and Phil Carney (whom Mark never acknowledged on stage) played two hours of mid-tempo sixteenth-note patterns under Mark’s four-note recitative. Mark has a lovely voice, but all the songs were squeezed into the emotional range between amusement and ennui. As an artifact of marriage and fatherhood, I spend a surprising amount of time in the range between delight and jubilation, with occasional forays into fury and terror. I’m sure I’m still capable of amusement and ennui, but they are low-amplitude signals that get lost way down in the mix. This is the reason I spend so much of my time listening to second line: You and your children and your ninety-year-old aunt all march down the street and raise a finger to death.
His parents are nice people. He can see how hard they work. He can see how lucky he is. He can see how unusual this is. He can read the papers. He can appreciate how blessed he is, with food and clothes and a roof and hardworking people who love him, sitting here, being together, sharing a meal. He can see how this summer is an island, with plenty of time and plenty of freedom and plenty of food and nice people to watch over him. Still, as he eats, he’s biding his time, waiting for dark and the ominous hum and the sure sense that something is out there, far away but growing near.
It’s odd to be a sundial. He’s up with a camera on a roof in the railyard, inching around vents, additions, storerooms, gables—warts grown and not removed—trying to keep out of the sun, trying to set up for the shot, wondering whether the light is already too bright, too hot, too direct, wondering why the train is late. It’s never late, or it’s always late. Maybe it’s only late when he’s up here waiting. If he brought a toolbox up here and set it out on the tar, he could probably use it to bake a cake. And it’s not even noon.
I half-remembered this sound as I was driving home from the grocery yesterday, and it took a little digging to find it again. I heard about Pekko Käppi via Warren Ellis’ blog back in March. Käppi has my number. If I had even more ears, they’d be listening to him too.
He wakes where he always wakes. He has slept in his clothes, and he smells like a fermented towel.
His mother looks in and shakes her head. He blinks at her and pushes off the sheet as she turns away. These gray socks are what’s wrong. Maybe if he could just…
Sleepy. Crazy. Not yet with the world.
The water from the tap is cold. Colder than makes sense, from up there in the tower, exposed to this same summer air, pipes under the lawns warming in the sun, up through the walls…
He leans forward and places a palm on the plaster. The plaster is cool. He wonders why it doesn’t sweat. He wonders whether there’s any coffee, whether his mother will complain as he drinks it, as if it would stunt his growth, as if he were a child.
The headphones are getting uncomfortable, but something is going on.
He nudges the tuning knob and the hiss intensifies, pulsing, like the breath of a predator. Deep in the background there are tiny irregular clicks—faint, frightened: the prey? And the hum? The hum is constant over this whole portion of the spectrum, no matter which way he tunes: the night? The sea?
He pulls off the headphones and pushes back the chair. His ears feel like boxers’ ears: hot, flat and raw.
There is motion outside the window. Something in the sky.
He eases the door open, applying a lot of muscle for extra control. The hallway boards want to creak as he bobs silently along with deep knee bends. He’s all joints tonight. He’s all joints every night.
The stairs flex. The front entry holds its breath. The door lets it out. The porch paint peels.
Up above the northern lights are swarming and searing, although this is not the North and it’s the humid heart of summer. Up there must be far from here. Cool, dry and highly-charged. Ionized. Electrified.
The sidewalks lead to the streets. The streets lead to the roads. The roads lead out of town.
We ended up getting 140 groups to do readings of Boggle and Sneak, for a total of close to 300 people. I’ve been saying that the story of this Maker Faire for me will be that 300 people walked up and knowingly did me a personal favor (and this was on top of the giant-sized favor that my crew of Ed, Andrew, Will and Susan all pulled out.) My main reaction is basically stunned and bewildered gratitude. People can be pretty great!
Ed, Will, Andrew and I spent the day at Maker Faire asking fairegoers to read pages out of Boggle and Sneak in our time machine. Each person or group read a single page, and we’ll be editing all the the pages into chapter-length videos. The readers were great! We had individuals, couples, parents and kids, moms and babies, groups of friends, and a man with the devil on his back. We’re still hoping to get R2D2, but we haven’t been able to get his attention yet.
