hoot
i fucked up this day, rambling out into the 94-degree monster thinking it was going to be mid-80s. i got some heat overload this week, and today did not help, nor did my enduring need to take a shit all the way over and all the way back from the big cemetery. i was out there looking for sounds, and i brought the famed and increasingly (to me) amazing sony field recorder for the task, as i have before, but this time armed with technique and strategies to get better quality sounds than i did before. i think there is one trace element of auditory sensation that will simply never work well without being there. one of the reasons i bought this gadget was for to capture the sound of the cars motoring over the kosciuszko bridge as they (the sounds) echoed off the tombstones and were absorbed into the hillside of that part of the cemetery. i feel like the continuity of time rises back from those stone platters, the voices of the dead themselves quietly roaring in tandem with the living rising up in their shiny vehicles over the east end of the cemetery. a loud horn honks and i expect thefragile stones to collapse from the pounding of the sound,but all they do is echo, bleat back in unheard chorus.
i caught plenty of that sound but i don‘t know how it might translate into impersonal audio.
i tried to capture the hustle of a flock of 100+ crows lifting off from under a large tree. i waited for 20 minutes for them to leave en masse, but when no loud booms and horns from the kosciuszko ran them off i took action, placing the field recorder atop a gravestone and silently circling (silent because the recorder picks up coughs and sneezes from miles away) around to the other side of the flock of crows, those flying beasts picking at the ground and idling away with me in the steady silence of things i scared them off by stomping onto their turf and i heard that magnificent sound of the birds hurtling away, a thunderous mix of flap and thump of 100 birds blasting off to another part of the yard.
satisfied with my acquisition of this amazing sound i returned to that field recorder and found that i forgot to turn it on!
F0CK!
earlier, while recording the sounds of the kosciuszko echoing off the tombstones,i spotted the old guy who hangs out at the cemetery (that will be me in a few years). he rides his bike in and fills a bucket with water from one of the abundant water spigots around the yard. that water is probably filthy but he uses it for bathing. he sits down on the frame of an old tomb behind the Johnston Mausoleum and cleans his pits and parts with the dirty water and maybe some soap.
