FPS #1: A Jukebox of Memories

Site-Specific Salad Days to Site-Agnostic Opry

I began my final semester answering distant echoes of my arrival as a first-year student, when Gabe BC sent me to Central Park aboard Janet Cardiff-Miller’s soundwalk Her Long Black Hair, cascading into my subsequent effort to author an audio experience of my own. The resulting piece titled Salad Days was my inaugural ITP project, a site-specific embodied narrative originally devised for the ITP kitchen area. Hoping to channel the aesthetics of an unusually formatted game called Verdure (by ITP alum Sharang Biswas), part-recipe part-meditation part-enchantment, set in a kitchen ultimately culminating in a profoundly symbolic salad. What this experiential meal prep did so well was tie my intention to an otherwise mundane task and engage my memory through all the senses in the process, transmitting each sequential step with nothing more than printed instructions on a page. A ritual designed into an herbaceous solitaire. 

My iterative process was organic: contemplating a rosemary bush by the kitchen window near the coffee maker, I pushed record to voice memo my improvised role-play of a lonely lady dwelling in reflection, following my senses to conjure her memories and narrating her internal monologue. After rounds of transcription and edits, I navigated turkish and spanish language barriers with my collaborators Beste Saylar and Helen Zegarra to produce this experience that lends participant’s ears to the ennui and inner thoughts of one Mrs. Rosemary Yilmaz-Garcia. The listener hops aboard her routine as she prepares dinner awaiting her neglectful husband’s return from work. I was aiming to create an experience you could taste without eating a morsel, like a culinary pantomime down memory lane. Attempting to expand Sharang’s concept, I wanted to invoke memory through temperature, gaze, objects, movement. After JCF’s example, we made a map with instructions, a starting point and numbered locations following the sequence of this movable feast.

However, I was disappointed this wasn’t an experience I could share with my friends and family outside of the ITP building. I was proud of the accomplishment nonetheless, so at the gang’s insistence, I quickly reconfigured this map to my buddy’s garden level Park Slope apartment. After all, their space met all the requirements: a window with plants, a kitchen, a refrigerator, a countertop, a knife, a sink, a table, and a door. The results were staggering. For one, each of my friends pressed play within 45-second intervals, staggering their entries and thereby producing this effect of a live-action Carousel of Progress, a performative loop that somehow deepened each moment along the sequence by enabling a hocketed present tense that catches simultaneous past and future from the corners of each eye. I knew I had scratched at something special here, yet figuring out the what, how, and why has been the pursuit of my last three semesters. 

As I remarked in my initial response to Her Long Black Hair, I was struck by the revelation of my personal inflection point coming from years on the road and by the campfire steeped in country music. In  particular, a song titled “The Grand Tour”, which had signaled me toward this channel of expression years before I imagined how expansive its mechanics could possibly be. Voicing the narrator, George Jones tenderly invites the listener into his house, his memory palace through which he guides the listener through the lonesome rooms of his house with stops along the way at various exhibitions of places, possessions, and furniture that literally yearn for better days, like the old photograph by his bedside when he hallucinates “don’t it look like she’d be able just to touch me and say ‘good morning dear.’”  Reverberating in the shadows of long lost domestic bliss, as if the moment his heart broke scratched the record to skip into a perpetual loop. The tour ends where it began welcoming “step right up, come on in”, signalling that this song starts all over again, that each day he relives this same routine stumbling through this chamber of woe, scars scrawled into the vinyl of time into interminable circular groovelines. Quite literally, this is how records are made.

 Vinyl in this instance can be understood as an impressionable non-space that captures and stores glimpses of time, a physical incarnation of movement and memory. If you sit and close your eyes while listening, you don’t miss a step. However, I recall Aristotle’s view that “sound is the movement of that which can be moved”, and I’ve found that these words exemplify a model of interactivity through performance via a method of movement itself. Physical space and designated pathways have long been used to mark the canvas of memory and ritual, like crossings, holy pilgrimages or the loci method, traversing specific physical places trace the groovelines of life as performative memory. For some animals, these songs are hardwired into seasonal migratory patterns. Aboriginal songlines, the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, the Hajj, the Iditarod are among some of civilization's greatest hits. Like my experience with Salad Days, I realized that if you start this country classic at your front door, you can walk through your own house on  the narrator’s grand tour, a host to his painful memories defamiliarizing the listener’s space to superimpose the narrative events, lending the body to the instructions and movement of the character. In this instance, like in Cardiff-Miller’s piece, the listener’s body becomes a vessel to be inhabited by the narrator. In country songs of loss, the form is an empty beer glass for the listener to fill up with their own memories, punctuated by collective metanarratives drawn by frequent direct allusions to the timeless catalogue of other sad country songs, a jukebox of collected memories. 

In a semiotic deconstruction of country songwriting, anthropologist Aaron Fox maps the psychological terrain of these songs in his characterization of the competing metanarratives of Loss and Desire wherein the “immersion of feeling itself is the raison d'etre, and in which the poetic subject is simply a self-consuming pile of memories.” He grounds his theory in the distinction that the metanarrative of Desire makes feelings and people into ‘things’ with exchange value to be bought and sold, used up and replaced, for example:

In these objectifying narratives, the old and worn out is discarded and forgotten to be replaced by something shiny and new, much like the practice of consuming music as a commodity. After all, even songs on a jukebox have to earn their rent, and their performance is measured in quarters. On the other hand, the metanarrative of Loss turns ‘things’ into speaking and feeling presences, and in this mode country songs are not consumed to be disposable, but rather in a proud historical appreciation that re-values the old and worn-out, unable to forget the past. “This inability to forget, which is the potential obverse of this ‘subjectified’ mode of self-consumption is a poetic archaeology of the piled up memories which constitute the subject in the poetics of country music.” (Aaron A. Fox, “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music”, Popular Music, Jan., 1992, Vol. 11, No.1, pp. 53-72)