Tuesday 30 January 2018

Memory Mix 2 (Quadraphonic)

1

Sitting in a train carriage aware of a woman to my right having a tearful conversation on her mobile phone. She gives clipped agitated answers to unknown questions while coughing, crying, and pleading with the caller. She sobs throughout the call, tears streaming down her face, evidently very distressed. The caller evidently ends the dialogue angrily and swiftly leaving the woman shaking, sobbing uncontrollably. After a few minutes I lean across the aisle offering her a pack of tissues enquiring if she is okay. Turning slowly, seemingly only now aware of her very public position, she smiles slightly and takes the tissues. She opens them furtively, and with the aid of a pocket mirror from her bag, dabs one tissue to her eyes and cheeks and mouth where her make-up has run. She discards this and then takes another. She then blows her nose in a series of revolting gurgling snorts, opening up the tissue between expulsions to inspect the contents. Both the sound of her blows and the visual result she displays turns my stomach so that I look away in disgust my seat creaking as I move, her actions still visible to me in the reflection of the carriage window. Thankfully moments later the train arrives at my destination but as I get up to leave she turns to me and hands me a folded tissue with her number written on it. I smile awkwardly disembarking, still disgusted, unable to meet her gaze at the window. As soon as the train is out of sight I discard the tissue.

2

As a child attending another boy's birthday party. Sat around a table with other children from my class at school, we are all eating snacks and party food, swilling fizzy drinks; loud voices, music: noise. The kid who's birthday it is (we are all no more than nine or ten years old), is greatly excited, laughing, joking, shouting at us all across the table and above our din. It is his day after all. At some point he gets to his feet and laughing with his mouth open I become transfixed on watching the crushed food inside his mouth become a lurid coloured paste which he continually adds to as he laughs. Slowly my attention shifts away from his guffaws, and I realise that I have long-since stopped eating, the noise of the room some how diminished outside of myself now just as my thoughts inside have been silenced. All I can do is watch and listen to him closely and he alone, and as he repeatedly tilts his head back as he chews, chomps and fills his face; things going into and sounds coming out of his mouth. Then I watch in horror as a thin trickle of green snot dribbles from one nostril into his gaping mirthful maw, mixing with his food. At that moment I vomit violently which is met with a universal and mocking laughter from all present which resounds and reverberates in my memory long after it has actually occurred. To this day the memory of this haunts me still.

3

On a metro train headed for Queens, New York, stationary, waiting beside the platform. The train is quite crowded with lots of disgruntled passengers due to the unexplained lack of movement from the train. Sat beside me, Jennie is checking her phone for alternative routes, irritated by yet another delay and our lack of remaining time in the city. A garbled message interrupts the general hubbub on the train briefly, something to do with the delay no doubt, but I can't understand what was said. I turn my attention instead to two New Yorkers sat opposite, women seemingly friends who appear to be discussing someone. I can't determine who from what they say and their thick accents but from their dismissive demeanor and their casual and repeated swearing I assume it's a man they know. Momentarily disinterested in this, I listen to several screeching trains pass us on other tracks in the station, the faint clatter patter and murmur of people on the platforms, snippets of conversations within the carriage, before once again finding my attention drawn to one of the women opposite, the one furthest from me. Between trading insults with her friend, she regularly turns her body to face front, staring blankly beneath her baseball cap, and then proceed to sniff deeply, noisily, followed by a chewing of her gum with an open mouth and a smack of the lips. This action she repeats in sequence often, like it's a tic or a learned response to her friend's reactions to her comments, and it's in this repetition that I find my attention drawn and also it's abhorrence.

4

At a Francisco Lopez gig at Cafe Oto. Jennie and I sit opposite where Lopez will perform facing us. The audience is circled around Lopez in the centre with their backs to him in two rows, and in several rows facing the opposite direction on several sides of this. Waiting patiently the gig to begin Jennie and I both note that a man behind us evidently has an awful cold causing him to frequently sniff and blow his nose. We consider moving seats but as the venue has greatly filled our options are now limited so we decide to stay put and ignore it the best we can. Having listened to Lopez extol on how our lack of sight will be more conducive to listening, we don our blindfolds and the venue is plunged into darkness. Lopez plays a complex surround sound mix of crisp electronics, angular rhythmic industrial noise, and amplified natural sounds which shoot, swirl and sweep about us building and demolishing an architecture of fragmented narratives. Initially I'm irked by the intrusion of the man's sniffing behind us, noticeable only really in the silences and quieter sections, or the pauses between pieces. Gradually however, I come to listen attentively to his input, almost anticipating it, and as I do so, I also become more aware of other sounds; the tinkle of glasses at the bar, passing cars and people in the street outside, Jennie breathing, our weight shifting in our creaking chairs, other people with coughs and colds near and far. And it's not without some irony that I also consider Lopez' statement again in the terms that without the visual spectacle of his performance with which to also focus one's listening, my attention may be inclined instead not to recordings but to listening to my physical now, my immediate environment.     


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