Let's Go for a Walk :-)

Meant to upload this a couple of days ago for my girlfriend for Valentine's Day. She booked us a creekside home on AirBnB for my birthday a few weeks back. We could hear it just outside our window by the bed and she would go out each morning and evening and just sit there, looking off, listening. I snuck out while she packed and set up my binaural mics on a little head shaped wire sticking out of the ground, letting it run until the battery died.

Enjoy whatever you're doing and listen to the river sing sweet songs.

I went outside in the rain and sat under a giant umbrella while I drank coffee and read Severance (no relation to the show, despite the article I learned about it from indicating otherwise). You can hear the rain, police sirens, an airplane, some wind noise distortion, wind chimes, and a church bell. My girlfriend says the church bell is off-key, but it sounds fine to me. Maybe I'm tone deaf.

I missed my turn and ended up back at an entrance to the Wissahickon Trails I've previously used. Or I did at least once, to check out the Hermit's Cave.

The local clinic's pharmacy phone line hasn't been working for over a week, so I haven't been able to refill my prescription for my SSRI and now I can feel my brain again. These occasional brain quakes, like a skipping CD but of my consciousness, keep getting to me. It's like an internal tourette's. I don't know how many days it's been, but I've been getting nauseous, agitated, and just feeling generally uncomfortable for the past week. I don't know if I'm going to go back on, as this isn't the first time I've had trouble with the pharmacy. Guess we'll have to see how I act around people over the next week or so.

I got lost. Between my brain not functioning and an apparent emergency at my work I had to respond to, I had trouble keeping track of where I was going. When the nausea hit I realized I forgot my Pax 3 and just cut off the recording. Eating the months old peanut butter filled pretzels I found in my cabinet seemed to help. Upon arrival to the trail I realized I forgot my hiking shoes too. Enjoy the squishing of the mud for me, because it was hell to stay up in.

There's a giant pimple blooming on my cheek in the same area from my teens. I turn 34 in three weeks.

I'm breathing pretty heavy in this one.

Last night I went to see Eraserhead for the umpteenth time. It was being projected inside a tunnel under the disused train track (I believe the idea is to extend the brief rail park through here at some point) a block from where David Lynch used to live in Philly. The area is now lovingly referred to as "The Eraserhood," in reference to the influence the neighborhood had on the film and I believe some of the footage in the film being shot there. I thought the entire thing was shot in Philly, using his enormous home (which I believe he said was robbed 20-some times), but I've since seen footage of him and Jack Nance recollecting shooting the opening scene at a tunnel in LA. I'm also fairly certain he was enrolled at AFI in LA when shooting, so, I'm not sure. I believe all of his earlier shorts were at least shot at his Philly home.

This is a shorter walk than most, mostly because I got bored of just eves dropping on peoples' conversations as I walked to the next bar. After the film I waited in line at the Trestle Inn for the Eraserhood Forever afterparty. I spoke to ambitious 24-year-old who had driven out from Downintown. He had also attended alone. He had only first seen the film a year or two prior, seemed to have an excited and limited knowledge of Godard and Verhoeven (though my knowledge on the latter is even more limited). He had grand plans of quitting his software engineer job in DC, which he remotes into from his parents' place, living in an artists' loft and making movies. He has the money, so he keeps buying all the equipment to get it done. I hope he doesn't watch too much before making his second feature--it'd be more interesting to see a young, hungry, and pure perspective than another idiot like me trying to ape the new wave masters again.

I found a couple of interesting sounds on this walk. I was specifically looking for organic, industrial noises to compliment the film. I stood next to an air vent for a few seconds before you hear a couple open the door to the fancy condominium lobby and stare at me. Then I started hearing this eerie high pitched hum emanating from one of the few remaining factories. I couldn't decipher whether it was abandoned, there was all sorts of strange vegetation breaking the concrete around it. Either way, I walked the circumference of the block trying to pinpoint where the sound was emanating from but had no luck. You hear bits of it here. The most fun was the sewer grates hissing steam, a homeless person's closed carefully laid over them. I never noticed that these grates actually have the word "STEAM" engraved in the middle.

I haven't gotten around to recording any of my walks for a while, but I might this weekend if I can get my car back and go look for the ruins in the park so I can finally upload this damn album to bandcamp.

So, whilst driving home from my girlfriend's place in NJ, I realized I had my recording equipment on me. I put it on and started recording my drive. Then my car started sputtering and I had to pull over to see if I could figure out what was wrong. 

Surprise! I couldn't. 

Now it's been at Pep Boys for 2 days.

It sputtered the whole way home, roughly an additional 45 minutes (what you hear here). I left the windows down the whole way and just grinned my molars, hoping my windshield didn't fog up too much to see and that my motor wouldn't just crap out and fall through the bottom of my car.

The wind noise here might make it a little less relaxing than my walks, but I still think it sounds interesting. If anyone needs this for a project, like creating a mixtape made to sound like it's being heard from your car stereo while you drive around in early autumn with the windows down, here you go.

Hope to be back next week with my little walk through the woods in search of dead peoples' houses.

I think this may be my favorite recording thus far. I was fairly annoyed while walking because despite driving down this road each time I go to the office, it hadn't occurred to me that the walking path is primarily right against the road. My motivation for taking this walk was in part because I wanted to hear more of nature, of the water and trees on the other side of the trail.

Last Sunday I ended up in the hospital after passing out during an x-ray at an Urgent Care. Over the last week I had developed an increasingly inconvenient cough and occasional headaches. I'm vaccinated and most doctors have indicated I probably had COVID last January, before there were tests or we were even aware it had arrived here. Since then it's been discovered it may have been in the US as early as October or November 2019.

So, I doubted I had it again, but seemed better safe than sorry since most of my co-workers are not vaccinated for reasons I don't care to get into. All of the pharmacies on my way home from my mom's were booked until the following afternoon. Only a local Urgent Care still had time for tests, albeit with an appointment. After a rather generous raise in June, I finally signed up for healthcare through the exchange, so it was only $35. Fine. Whatever.

They had me wait there for the results, though I'm still not clear why. As I sat and laid down I became sicker and sicker. They had me take an x-ray to be safe (a bill for which I'm still awaiting...) Now, I don't know what's up with my body. There's so many things wrong with it and doctors have generally just waived them all away as not serious enough or labeled my various GI issues as IBS, which another doctor told me means "we know there's something wrong, we just don't know what." One of my issues is that when I raise my hands above my head, I get dizzy. Apparently I was dehydrated this day, so when they asked me to hold my hands above my head for the x-ray instead of simply getting dizzy, I collapsed on the floor.

Passing out is always a strange experience. At least my experiences have been. Each time it's happened to me I have dreamt, usually of my paternal grandparents, and for what felt like an entire evening but was only for a matter of seconds. Each time I wake up it's just like in the movies--first the faint sound of voices, then a bunch of unfamiliar faces, and then a moment of confusion as I realize I am not in fact in my bed, then a sudden and total awareness of where I am and what happened.

Anyway, that's why you'll hear me cough a few times. Also, I guess the initial point was I couldn't hear through my left ear while recording this, so I just assumed the traffic was more overwhelming and annoying than it is here.

Ironically, the constant whooshing of cars flying by (and they do tend to fly by on this terrifying, windy road) ends up sounding kind of like the ocean to me. As aggressive and terrifying as cars seem in real life, hearing the disembodied sounds of them pushing air past them is quite nice. I think this is the most relaxing and consistently enjoyable recording I have made to date.

Sorry about the coughing, though. I didn't wear a mask, so at least you can't hear me breathing this time.

I recorded this yesterday during a new weed holiday, seemingly created by the legal weed industry, called OIL Day. You see, if you look at the number 710 upside down it kinda looks like it says OIL.

I'm fairly certain this did not exist before this year and I have no intention of working it into my life in any meaningful way, but it meant I got 25% off another PAX pod at my normal dispensary.

The dispensary I go to is roughly a 20 minutes walk from my house. There's another place closer, but I'm a sucker for discounts. I have a Costco membership, I have Honey installed on all my browsers (for what it's worth), and I still get newsletters from monoprice, groupon, slickdeals, sidedeals, etc.

Far as I can tell, there's nothing special about this dispensary, but almost every time I go I get $5. Including yesterday. My $60 pod only came out to $40 after the discounts. What does that same pod cost at the place 10 minutes walk away? I don't know. Hopefully more than that.

So, I walk down to Frankford. There's no great way to do it, either. Winding through the weird Northern Liberties neighborhoods--post modern mcmansions tucked between the traditional nu-architecture of this city and 100-year-old rowhomes--and down across whatever section of 2nd St. is easiest today, then through the tighter rowhomes east of there and across the disparate area around Front St. leading to the Fillmore.

Listening now, I think yesterday's walk was one of my more aurally interesting. There's my house and me dropping my key (more just tossing it straight into the street), weird construction, echoey music from all angles, followed by the El and 95 overpasses.

The recording just ended for me and was immediately followed by "Balloon Balloon Air Squeak" from the royalty free Hannah Barbera sound effects collection I downloaded for another project. Suppose I'll move onto that project now.

I texted my mom. I took her last week to get the J&J vaccine (she's deathly afraid of needles, though she doesn't know or understand why), so I've done my part. Also I'll probably see her next weekend when she goes to see her granddaughter (my niece) for the first time. She was born in January, so... COVID. What else can be said that hasn't been talked about everywhere all the time for over a year now. I could talk about how yesterday was my dad's birthday and I haven't talked to him in 4 years, but I'm not really interested in discussing that right now.

Today I walked down to South St to meet a friend at Tattooed Mom's. She's flying back to Mexico later this week and is hoping to pick up some cheap insulin for my diabetic cat--assuming we can figure out how to get it back to the states. When her husband tried a couple weeks ago he was told that it wouldn't last the plane ride, but, I mean, diabetic people exist. They live normal lives during which they travel, sometimes great distances, and presumably still take insulin during those times. She tells me he was much more concerned when he thought it was for me than when she informed it was for my cat. So it goes.

Something I think about a lot while I'm walking is fences. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this one passage from Numlock really stuck with me. It reads:

In the American West, you’re never too far from a fence. A new study estimated that at any given point, the nearest distance to any fence is usually less than 31 miles, and on average is roughly 2 miles. It’s estimated that the global length of fencing on Earth is 10 times the length of roads. Fences have unexpected impacts on ecology. For example, migrating pronghorn antelope have difficulty navigating the fences crisscrossing once traversable expanses, and fences that have long since outlived their usefulness have similar effects despite their vestigial use for landowners. Indeed, there is a serious issue for some species with “ghost fences,” which are when you remove a fence that has existed in a place for a long time but species continue on for generations avoiding a place because there used to be a fence there, because animals are weird and we kind of broke them with fences.

I don't think I had ever thought about it before reading this, but there are literally fences everywhere. Part of our capitalist obsession with property, of course, but I do wonder how much is actually necessary? When I think about prisons, the first thing I think about is all the fencing. There's fences all over the place, both indoors and out. There's fences between fences to segment people into even smaller gaps. How much of that is actually necessary? Years and years ago there was a report on the Daily Show, of all places, about a women's prison that ditched all of its fencing. A quick google search indicates it was probably about a prison in Shakopee, Minnesota, that later may have actually implemented some fencing. They never had any issues that would seem to implicate the need for fencing, so why bother? Evidently they reason they were considering it was an increase in drug-related crimes, which... is a whole other thing.

We're such a lazy society. Everything revolves around what you're being sold, not what you need. The whole point of an invention isn't that the world needs it, it's that you can convince the world that it needs it. The world has existed up until every invention perfectly fine. I won't prop up overpopulation myths, I think a lot of our issues lie more with limited perspectives and initiative. Because everything we do is based on cost, we cut corners and end up with endless landfills of plastic bullshit, daylight balanced street lights, and fences in the middle of nowhere protecting nothing because any more effort or redoing anything would cost too much up front.

In movies when you hear the sound of footsteps, cars driving by, the wind, etc., those are usually not exactly what you're seeing. Sometimes, particularly in lower budget movies, the sound will be recorded live, but for the most part what you're hearing is a recreation of those sounds either in a studio or recorded at another time, likely at a different location, by different people. If you've ever seen behind the scenes of a cartoon when they watch the clip and use whatever tools around them to try and create the sound you would hear in that situation, it's usually the same for live action sequences. This means what you are hearing is by design, it is chosen either by the director or the sound person/folly artist, or whoever. This includes wildlife documentaries, too. 

If you pay close enough attention you can sometimes notice that you'll hear one thing in a shot but another, despite them being of equal distance and volume in real life. They are choosing what is important for you to hear in order to give you the impression of being there, what they think you would normally notice, or what they want you to notice in order to set the atmosphere they are looking to create in that scene.

I think about this a lot while on these walks. I consider myself a fairly observant person, but when I have these mics in my ears and I'm trying to not cough, burp, or even breathe too heavily, I start noticing even more little sounds around me.

One time I took a girl on a first date to a midnight showing of Eraseherhead, which she had never even heard of (yes, I'm that kind of white guy). Afterward she texted me that she couldn't help but hear everything around her. The sounds in her uber, the sound of her toothpaste tube, and so on. It's interesting how much we naturally filter out, either for our survival, sanity, or just out of boredom. It's even more interesting when people make those decisions for us.

In these recordings you will of course hear everything. These are largely unedited, starting when I hit record and ending when I hit stop, and mostly untouched (I will generally apply a slight limiter and then boost the volume a little or remove random clicks from the glitching microphone). You are limited only by the range of my not terribly cheap but absolutely not expensive microphones. You can imagine what it is I'm doing, you can try to paint an image of my surroundings in your mind, or you can just tune it all out and let it seep into the background as if you were on the walk yourself. At most I'd be curious if you hear anything I don't, since you don't have the same distractions I do from my other five senses on these walks, not to mention my general anxiety.

Today I went for a walk with my lady friend in the town she resides, New Brunswick. I visit her most weekends and occasionally she comes back to Philly with me for the weekdays--she's a TA, so she can currently work remotely due to the pandemic. We actually tried to record our walk yesterday, but I forgot to set my H5 to hold and then apparently hit the stop button after 18 seconds.

We walked from around her place to a little manmade pond called Passion Puddle. Yes, Passion Puddle. Toward the end you can hear me briefly talk to a woman walking her dogs about the little turtles sunbathing on rocks. You can see the one in this episode's photo, the other got cropped out. There were a whole family of them, maybe 10 in all. As soon as I got close they jumped into the water, one by one.

At the end of our walk we sat on a bench and just listened to the one horny bird above, watching another couple feed rice cake to the turtles by throwing it directly at their heads. It was nice.

I don't record all of my walks, but I like to take a picture or two each time. Follow me on instagram @thecobblestonehighway if you'd like to see more and/or say hi. I have no idea if anyone listens to this.

Went for a walk from Northern Liberties into Old City. Only recorded one way, spent the walk back listening to Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Soundproof, a radio program that was unceremoniously cancelled in 2015 or 2016 only after a couple years on the air. It had actually followed the Night Air, a sound collage program that was unceremoniously cancelled just before it. Soundproof was somewhat similar, but it focused on all sorts of sound art, rather than just original collage work. It also featured interviews, experiments, field recordings, obscure music, and radio plays (including a broadcast of the classic 70s rock 'n roll radio play What's Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me).

A major theme throughout the program was always recordings of nature, usually incorporated into a larger narrative, but there were plenty of recordings of people boating, riding trains, or just walking around. I always found it strangely enjoyable listening to someone else walking somewhere else, at a different pace than me. I never found it as competitive as when I tried to walk listening to Alan Vega's final album, paced to match his stride as he skulked around NYC late at night in the midst of his own apparent twilight.

During this walk I was able to close a ring on my Apple Watch--the first in a while. I know we're both always being watched and monitored while also not at all. The watch uses whatever algorithms to determine when I'm doing something out of the ordinary and then times it, but I also like to believe there's someone in a large, mostly empty office space with a cup of coffee that's mildly excited to see I finally closed another ring.

No interruptions on this walk. Just me on my own. Lots of wind noise, though.

The image for this episode comes from one of the underpasses for 676. I always go out of my way to walk under them when I'm heading downtown. It's nice that the lights remain so warm and calm. So often we're assaulted by new, impossibly bright LED bulbs inexplicably daylight balanced, making everything look cold and uninviting. They not only upset our circadian rhythms, but upset the brains and routines of nocturnal animals. They're a blight on modern society. By all means, replace the inefficient bulbs, but LED bulbs can be any fucking color, so why not make them something pleasant?