GOLDMINING #5 - Sliced Pink Peaches

A Creative Diary

Hello and welcome to GOLDMINING, a creative diary.

This one’s a bit of a travelogue, tracing a festival run with Mother Mother and the muse.

When we landed in Calgary, I saw I had missed a call from an unknown Newfoundland number. “Goodbye” was all the voicemail said, in an automated female voice. Goodbye, I said out loud. Goodbye, my love. I wondered if I could fall in love with a robot, once they really nail down the technology. I would never admit it, but I think I could.

It was well into the evening by the time we got downtown, but the city was still bright and hot, teeming with Stetson hats. I avoided the fester of idle hotel time and went for a photo walk right away. I met a veteran named Brian. “How are you?” I asked. “Oh you know, just getting older and uglier, but never been happier,” he said, followed by a toothless laugh, slow and wide, like a cat’s yawn. I took his portrait and e-transferred him twenty bucks.

Because it was Stampede, the police were on full display, mounted on horseback, clopping around the city, in what looked like a preening ritual. I thought about the word clopping, and about onomatopoeia, which might be a farce. Before there were words, there were sounds; we just invented the words and assigned them meaning. But in a parallel universe, they might have called a horse a bee, and instead of clopping, the hooves go “bzzzzzzz.”

The clopping:

From which I made a loop:

Every city is different in how it handles crosswalks. In Calgary, a robot man counts us down. He seems nice enough, but I couldn’t fall in love with him. Too controlling.

Carrying on, a street quartet comprising two adults and two children performs wholesomely.

In an effort to obscure the source, I stretched the audio until it was thoroughly mangled. The result was satisfying: a sound that began sweet and innocent, turned into something demented and unsettling.

I wondered whether speed protects us. If everything were slowed right down, could we better see the cracks in character and the nuance of poor intentions? How much are we getting away with simply because we’re moving so fast?

The following day at the festival, I delighted in the backstage restrooms, partly because the stalls were private and sparkly clean, but mostly because the tap was both a kick drum and a hi-hat, throbbing away at the brisk tempo of 172 beats per minute.

Our travels also moved at a fast tempo, landing us in Spokane, Washington the next day. There were storms, however, so we ended up with a 7-hour layover in Denver. I resisted the urge to stagnate in the lounge and instead drifted around with the camera, something I never do in airports. I mostly shot out the window to avoid being intrusive, and played around with in-camera multiple exposure.

We got to Spokane around 2am, so I saved my custom arrival walk for the morning, when Google Maps erroneously led me to a parkade with no way out. Better than a way out, though, it had birdsong and a decent reverb from the empty lot. I wondered if the GPS was flirting with me, knowing the way to my heart: avian music.

Back in another airport utopia, a week after Spokane, we were waiting out more delays, this time in Quebec City. A public piano was set up there, and two children duetted gleefully.

I was collecting steps, walking back and forth from one end of the terminal to the other, passing the young musicians each time. On my last lap, they were suddenly gone, the piano silent and the space de-animated, like an abandoned house where a family once stirred. Were they ever there? I drew on what courage the ghost children left behind and sat down to play a little myself. A young man named Hugo appeared, standing beside me, listening. We had a brief chat. He plays piano but rejects the title of musician. I told him you don’t have to be good to be great, which I believe to be true and meant as encouragement, but I don’t think it landed.

Something I find peculiar is when hotels decide to have the TV on and blaring when you first enter your room. But when we got to Edmonton, the set in my room was on, yes, but its picture was silent and beautifully distorted and pixelated, like a hanging piece of abstract art.

I filmed it for a while and used the footage as the visualizer for the song I made from the sounds above — a song that definitely wouldn’t exist if not for catching the creative winks given by the world and responding in kind.

It’s fun to wink back. It’s fun to flirt. Even with robots.

Thanks for stopping by.

Onto the next and into the mine.

XORG

“GOODBYE”: