triple beam coelostat

good morning ~

(click the link / pendulum mural to listen)

My Big Breaktriple beam coelostat

today’s track started with randomized slices of an amen break and wound up sounding “kinda like Dire Straits”

I’ve got some bonus sounds for you this morning - - I recently composed and recorded the soundtrack for an exhibition by an extremely talented sculptor / ceramicist by the name of Bianca MacPherson. She requested something that incorporated rain, nostalgia, and the sudden temporal shifts of dreams and I gave her something that simulated falling asleep in front of the TV plus recordings of a white noise machine. Her work’s on view at the Zoller Gallery at Penn State - if you happen to be near State College, PA you could catch it today or tomorrow, otherwise please follow her and enjoy the soundtrack:

Seventy five years ago the cars got bigger and bigger and in the scorching, bleaching blast of the sun they put up buildings that modeled the atomic, quarks in orbit. We had touched the hem of the garment of space and they were scrambling to rip off the robe entirely, the cosmos stripped bare by her bachelors, even - the galaxy nude descending a staircase. Fins and parabolas, names in lights, roofs that took off from Earth in vectorized rocket trajectories, casting their angular shade onto Sunset Boulevard as the sun dipped down below the sky. Everyone was driving and every coffee shop along the highway wanted to be seen at a distance, moths to a bare porch bulb.

Above us in the dusk a shuttered restaurant like a UFO with spider legs strutted above the seven terminals of Los Angeles International Airport. We were hustling to get to our ride before he canceled - the walk was much further than anticipated. In the back of the car I tried to recall the details of what I remembered on Googie architecture but I refused viewing the Wikipedia page, didn't want to get motion sickness. Just cruising along the coastal freeways was like throwing a trawler net out the back of my life's boat, it dug everything up. But soon enough we were eating Thai food takeout at my friends' house in Echo Park surrounded by backyard citrus.

For a period of about 8 months I was lightly obsessed with this neighborhood. In 2010 when Jesse got enough money to fly out the entire 7 piece Wailing Wall band for a gig at the Troubadour, we spent that week crashing all over the floor of an apartment right on the park - woken by blindless windows and a stiff back I'd walk around the lake each morning. We walked to Dodger Stadium to catch an afternoon game on a $5 ticket, heavenly. And then I kept finding reasons to go there, took trains and busses from Orange County on a few occasions. This could be it, I thought, before a million other things went down. So I told my friend - earnestly - that he was living the dream.

Later the next day my dad and my sister asked me what I wanted to do and the answer surprised me: I wanted to go to the Griffith Park observatory. It had been, I don't know, maybe 15 years since I last made the trip up there, but something about the vista called to me. They were game, too, we pleasantly bopped along, up through the hills and past the Greek Theater. People and their cars everywhere - perhaps a little foolish to attempt this so close to sundown, but no, it was fate - we arrived just as the planetarium show was about to begin. We leaned back in the plush, almost reclining chairs and watched a simulacrum of the sky serenely glide along the dome of the ceiling.

The show began with a man carrying a glowing orb. At another time in my life I may have cracked a joke: came to Hollywood to act and now he's the afternoon orb man. But at this time in my life I saw him for what he truly was: a guy with a job, maybe a guy with a union, delivering the shit out of this monologue about how truly insignificant our blink of existence is in the light of the cosmos. We were in Los Angeles, after all - the music and the narration tugged at you, almost aggressively so, impossible for people on this coast to deliver scientific information without a little bit of the ol' razzle dazzle. Here were the takeaways: we don't know shit, we hardly understand anything, we lack the language, we don't yet have the tools, if the universe were a wet paper bag we'd be stuck in it without a sandwich sword to stab through. Gee, the planetarium show sure has changed since I was a wee one - according to what I learned when I was eight we should be vacationing on the moon by now.

Out on the roof we greeted a preposterous view of an enormous city sprawling before a sparkling sea. Vast, very big, made you feel as insignificant as anything in the dome show. My own personal history kept unfurling out behind me like a bridal train (I kept tripping on it) and as I saw building after building catch the last hour of daylight I finally saw it for the little thing it is. Bolted to one wall, a plaque of poetry:

THIS DOME CONTAINS THE TRIPLE BEAM COELOSTAT WHICH REFLECTS SUNLIGHT TO THE SOLAR TELESCOPES

Then we drove to Burbank. I wanted to see the original Bob's Big Boy and, if the piles of cigarettes were still there, leave a cup of black coffee for David Lynch at the foot of the eponymous Boy. This restaurant is indeed one of the googie persuasion, angular and squared at strange angles, jutting to and fro off the road like the thumb of a robot hitchhiker. But the cheetos and the coca colas had all been cleared away and, unbeknownst to us, we rolled up to the weekly classic car meetup. Hot rods gleaming in the gloaming, engines uncovered for all to see, not a place to park a reasonable Audi anywhere in the lot. The exhaust pipes rattled with an antiquated thunder and there would be no dinner seating. Was this the future the architects imagined when they built the diner in 1949? Guys with goatees and leather jackets live-streaming from the parking lot? And what of our future? I fear that we may have to collectively earn back the optimism of the space race era. Our contemporary era buildings now are grim and utilitarian, built cheaply and without feeling. Our buildings do not fuck - this does not bode well with me. And as for dinner? We went to the Haus of Pizza in Costa Mesa, untouched and unchanged entirely since I last dined there, indeed the same as I remember it from 30 years ago.

But what about you? What are you looking out over? What kind of buildings are you putting up? Is your neighborhood pizza place still exactly the same, too?