Thu, 19 May 2005

the stage is everywhere
My dad was always buying electronics we didn’t really need, and so we were the first family on the block with a satellite dish, with quaddrophonic sound, with a vcr. I never understood why he bought these things, as he was home a few weekends a year and never really had a chance to use this stuff, but I later learned that all this stuff was pre-release and experimental models that hadn’t hit the street, stuff he wheeled and dealed out of low-level research and design people he met on the job. My mom basically ignored all this electronic junk, except for a small voice-activated tape recorder which she claimed for purposes we didn’t know about, or think to question, until much later. It turned out that my mother, to avoid phone charges and possibly direct conversation, was making tapes for my father after the kids were asleep, concerns and dreams and little bits of quiet singing, which she mailed to whatever hotel he would be staying at the next week. My father got these tapes, and must have enjoyed them, as he played them for his business friends, who liked them enough to ask for copies, and so my dad made a lucrative side-business of copying and selling the tapes his wife mailed to him with the raunchy parts cut to the beginning of the tape. Years of this went by before my mom found out, and was understandably furious, and that was just one more thing which led to them breaking up. My dad must have made a bunch of these tapes as every once in a while I’ll hear a sample of my mother’s voice in a song, tucked in some spliced-up plunderphonic barrage of samples or fading along the edges of some drone number, and if there’s anyone else around and the voice isn’t moaning and panting into the little solid-state microphone I’ll listen and try to understand who she was in that other world, the world that wasn’t her children.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #