#69: Ana's Books
The recording is going well despite our not having set foot in a proper recording studio, yet. We’re working in my office, which was my daughter’s room from ages 6 to 18 or so. Aside from some moving around of furniture and filling the place with instruments and audio gear, it is as she left it. Any acoustic treatment I’ve done is limited to blankets on walls and the books on shelves above my workstation (her old desk).
Ana took most of her books when she got her own place. But she has a lot of books. There wasn’t room for everything. What got left behind is a heterogeneous collection, and a fairly accurate cross section of her progress as a reading person: Eric Carle, Curious George, Hats for Sale, A.A. Milne, Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl, Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, Watership Down, Little Women; Jules Verne, Marguerite Yourcenar, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Cortázar, Patricia Highsmith, Borges, Bossypants by Tina Fey, and A Theory of the Drone, by Grégoire Chamayou. Some I remember reading to her as a child. Others not so much!
As soundproofing or sound absorbtion, books can help. But they won’t eliminate the barking of the beagle across the canyon, the drivers shouting horrible things to each other, the 113 bus, the hoards of rambunctious high-schoolers out of school, the presidential helicopter (now on call for a budget-slashing, anti-government libertarian), or two-stroke mopeds. All of this is picked up by the microphones. But we manage. If the beagle barks in the middle of a take, we do another. If the local right-wing populist maniac flies over on his way to a light lunch at la residencia presidencial in Olivos, we do another take. In many cases some very fancy software will be applied after the fact, removing the offending noise. So there’s been no need to work anywhere else.
But there’s this really good-sounding vintage Wurlitzer piano in a house across town, in Chacarita. Its owner is an excellent tecladista. But it and he are not coming to us. So this week David and I will be going on a little field trip, far away from the beagle and the 113 (the presidential helicopter cuts a wider swath). It’ll be fun. Chacarita is a happening place these days. I know a place with good falafel. And there’s nothing like a real Wurli. Even better if the pots are scratchy, though I hear his place is a proper, acoustically treated studio. We might end up doing vocal tracks there.
But here in this office is where Ana’s books are. I’m glad she hasn’t taken them. They make of this place a kind of archaeological site: life as it was, overlayed with life as it is, a happy mess of guitars, cables, pedals, papers, keyboards—and Ana’s books, each one corresponding to its own archaelogical layer. Every now and then I’ll take out my excavation brush and open one. It was nice to revisit Watership Down recently, the last book I read to her. We had been making good progress until about halfway through. I had to catch a plane. Another tour. By the time I came back she had finished the book all by herself. And then she grew up.
I'm beginning to hear some of your earlier work differently. The Next Best Western came up on my Ipod and I heard, I imagine, more of the process of the song and a bit less of the product. I think the essays are shifting my attention to something deeper in the music. Interesting.
My memories are from the other side of the equation, since I never had children. My mother read to us when we were very young. My gratitude for that parental gift lingers to this day. It's how I learned to read: Pre-school was not free then, so my first formal education was first grade which I entered already knowing how to read. So bless all of you who read, or have read, to your children. You are the best!
I love the photo. Smiles all through this essay.