My role is to be here in the side yard when the moon is swimming in the deep end of the sky with the treeshapes near it. It’s a full twelve feet deep under the nightpool and there’s a moon ring down there, and I’m swimming down toward it and I hear the high vacuumacious sound in my eardrums and I feel the tautness pulling between my toes and I’m thankful that all my thoughts are nonsexual, and that I can sit here with my mouth open and my eyes slitted.
There are only so many nights like this. The middle of summertime, and even though it’s late, a cricket like a bartender with a rag in his hand is mopping the surfaces of sound. Just one. The rest of the crickets are silent. Their abdomens are sore and chafed and they don’t want to chirp anymore, they want to rest. As do I. Even this one that I’m listening to is getting drowsy. He goes: chert chert chert. And then there’s a long pause while he sits and lets things droop, wondering if anyone’s listening. And then chert chert chert chert chert. And then another long pause. Birds by day, crickets by night, singing away.
I’m staring right at the fucking moon and I don’t care who knows it. I’ve heard so many different Logic sounds come from my computer and through my headphones I almost can’t stand it. I’m drunk with sound, like the thirteen-year-old Brazilian girl. If I want to write something with marimba I can have marimba. If I want Balinese gamelan there’s gamelan. Chinese guzheng zither? It’s there. Japanese shakuhachi flute? Sure. There are innumerable kick drums, some real and some synthesized, and as for electric guitar — I’ve got Twangy Guitar, and New Surf Lead Guitar, and Nice Crunch Guitar, and Dirty Rotor Guitar, and dozens of others. Too much, almost. Everything’s beautifully sampled. Debussy would have gone batshit if he’d had Logic on his computer. The history of music would have been completely different.
Fourteen
I NEED A MICROPHONE, THOUGH. I need a really good stereo microphone. I spent an hour this morning reading about microphones and hunting around on the B&H website. B&H is an electronics store in New York where expensive purchases scoot around in plastic bins on rollers over your head. I bought a camcorder there once. It’s run by Hasidic Jews with hats who know everything. The prices are cheaper on Amazon than at B&H, but that’s because Amazon is using its stock price to take over all of retailing and bankrupt the world.
I’m not sure whether I want to get two monophonic hundred-dollar Studio Projects B1 microphones, one for the right track and one for the left, each of which would float in a rubber spiderweb shockmount on a tandem microphone rack, powered by phantom power from a Saffire 6 USB interface, or whether I want a single shotgun stereo microphone by Audio-Technica that was developed for broadcasters to cover the Olympics. The Audio-Technica shotgun costs about seven hundred dollars, which is obscene, but once you enter the B&H world of microphones, it seems like a reasonable price.
“You float like a feather,” sings Radiohead, “In a beautiful world.” I’ve listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I’m not sure I hear it myself, but I was pleased and touched. Sometimes that’s what you need, just a quick, casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in the Garden State soundtrack. Now, that’s a soundtrack. They were all just songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And there’s that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile.
If you’re a woman and you want to make it in movies, that’s what you need: an enormous mouth. Because you’re talking. Somewhere above you is a big, sensitive microphone on a boom pole that is listening to what you say. You have to have a really big stretchy Carly Simon mouth with big lips that want to be open all the time. And you want to have teeth that go on forever. You don’t just have bicuspids, you have tricuspids and quadricuspids. Look at Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow. The men, too. Tom Cruise, huge mouth. Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Sinatra — all bigmouthed men. Brad Pitt, fairly big mouth. You don’t need to be tall. Natalie Portman is tiny. When she became the black swan she was so terribly thin I worried about her. Her mouth was bigger than ever. And lately, in No Strings Attached, she’s still beautiful but her hair looks tired and she’s perhaps wearing too much eye makeup. Her great moment was when she handed over the headphones and smiled in Garden State.
The bad guys in movies have small mouths. Good poets often have small mouths, too, whereas good singers have big mouths. Think of Whitney Houston: small face, big mouth. Good poets often have beards, which make their mouths exceedingly small, sometimes invisible. Robert Browning had a very tiny mouth, I think. Stanley Kunitz, medium-size mouth. It’s a completely different approach to utterance. Maybe that’s the fundamental difference. I have a small mouth, and it’s slightly asymmetrical. Even before I smoked a cigar I talked like a cigar smoker.
What a disgusting habit. I love it.
• • •
I’VE BEEN READING UP on anemia. I was surprised to learn that blackstrap molasses has more iron than anything except meat — much more iron than collards. Spinach is nothing, forget spinach. Roz doesn’t eat meat.
I watched some Logic tutorials by Matt Shadetek, who teaches at a music school in Manhattan called Dubspot, and I learned how to use the chord memorizer. The chord memorizer allows you to play any sort of chord you want by playing a single key, even chords that are so widely spaced that a single pianist couldn’t play them. I layered some impressionistic sounds and loaded them in the chord memorizer and recorded a little piece. When I listened to it I realized that the harmony sounded alarmingly like Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” I guess that’s not too surprising, since it’s my favorite piece of music. On top of it, into the computer’s tinny microphone, I sang, “Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Drown it with good.”
My voice was small and scratchy. I like the idea of having a scratchy voice.
Time to take the dog for a walk.
• • •
AT FRESH MARKET I bought a jar of pesto, a shrink-wrapped hunk of Parmesan cheese, and a blue box of cellentani pasta — the spiral kind that holds the pesto best. I thought of writing a dance song in which there would be a sudden silence and then a low voice, like the voice in “Low Rider,” would intone the names of kinds of pasta. “Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum — rigatoni. Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum — rigatoni.” Then: “Cellentani! Cellentani! Cellentani!” I paused in the bulk-food aisle, looking at the plastic canisters of sesame seeds and poppy seeds, and I thought of Roz wanting to eat the sidewalk. I bought a big jug of Brer Rabbit blackstrap molasses, which is in the baking aisle. On the way home I listened to part of a Sodajerker podcast interview with Jimmy Webb, who wrote “Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain,” and then I sent Roz a text: “The internet says that blackstrap molasses contains more iron than the Lusitania. I bought a jug of it for you in case you need it. I can drop it by anytime if you’re feeling anemic. Love P”