September 28, 2005 By Kyle Gann
The papers blown off of the Adirondack chair were the
first sign that something was amiss. A new nip was in the air, almost chilly. The mountains etched the horizon with
a crisp, purple line that he hadn't noticed in months. A sense of time passing settled slowly on him like dust stirred
up from a long-neglected cabinet. Old enmities had passed; recent inequities were etched in stone with a certitude
that no hand could revoke. He struggled to rid his mind of the remnants of insistent issues that now needed no longer
ever be thought of again. But as more troubling thoughts cleared, it occurred to him that internet radio was still
alive. How could it be possible? The pronouncements had been so dire. Yet that woman from Washington had hinted
that there was never really any danger. Was it all a game, a distraction concocted by CEOs and political lobbyists
to divert onlookers from the real crimes being committed, the money being siphoned from foreign governments, the
restrictions being tightened on some form of expression no one was watching at the moment? Again, as so many times
before, he chafed at his inability to see behind the curtain, his ignorance of the machinations of those expert
outside his field, those who affected his future but were forever exempt from responsibility for it, hidden behind
a veil of corporate secrecy.
No point in thinking about that now. The altered circumstances, however outside his control, dictated a certain
responsibility. He made an effort to notice the stack of compact discs on his desk which, despite its steadily
increasing height, had come to blend in with the rest of the furniture. Names that had flown by so fast as not to
register now stood out with accusatory frankness. Slow Six? An ensemble of some kind, with compositions credited
to one Christopher Tignor. Songs by pretty Molly Thompson, whom he hadn't seen in years. An enormous piano work
from 1977-78 by Lubomyr Melnick, titled simply KMH, was listed as a rerelease. Why had he not owned the vinyl
original? No way to puzzle that out at the moment. A new Noah Creshevsky CD awaited. Emily Bezar's "Angel's Abacus,"
with its Feldman-like minor sevenths, had been haunting his memory, from which he hoped to excise it by adding it
to the mix. Kerry had recommended This Window Makes Me Feel by one John Supko, and he uploaded it almost
absent-mindedly. And of course there was Gloria Coates's Fifteenth Symphony, which had made such a riveting
impression on him only days before. Art Jarvinen had sent him a CDR of Breaking the Chink, and there was a new
Mary Ellen Childs album out too enticing to ignore. More difficult to fathom was the recording of intermission
noises by Christopher DeLaurenti, the tall, shaved-headed Seattleite whom he had just run into at school. Names,
names, each attached to a trail of memories, except for a few curious in their absence of evocations. There
would doubtless be other names, many, many others, and beneath the shadow of the political charade, the work
would continue.
But now the harsher noon-day light edging around the deck and through the sliding glass door prompted
reflections that there remained alternate histories to write, additional ephemera to be entered into the
record of events. He allowed his eyes to close for a moment, and, shaking off melancholy, returned to books
still laying open from yesterday....
COMMENTS:
Wow, this is great, Kyle. Who wrote it? William Faulkner? Raymond Carver?
Just yesterday a friend wrote to me saying "Kyle Gann hasn't updated his radio station for months!" So it's
a good thing you're starting to look at those piles of CDs. Looking forward to the results...
KG replies: It's Hemingway: The Old Man and the CD.
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