I drove to Los Angeles and back this weekend: one day down, two days there, one day back. I drove an electric car. Charging an electric car en route feels both futuristic and, due to the time required, old-fashioned. While I was there, I entered just one art gallery, and I saw no shows. I just hung out with friends, new and old. I’m looking forward to doing it again. Some quick thoughts and observations about sound from the trip:
▰ The most amazing thing about an electric car, putting aside how inexpensive it was to drive to LA and back, was how quiet it is — not just for listening to music I normally couldn’t even play in a (“traditional”) car, but for audiobooks and conversation.
▰ If you are staying in DTLA — where I tend to stay, and where I’ve been staying since before it was DTLA, a term I can’t quite bring myself to type unselfconsciously — it gets loud at night. There is no widespread pandemic lull in DTLA on weekend nights. And if you’ve driven solo for nine hours, you fall asleep, no problem.
▰ It’s not that I care if a reader of an audiobook does the voices or not. It’s whether they commit to an authorial voice or to a theatrical ensemble approach — really commit. Just reading isn’t reading.
▰ Back in the days of CDs, I had a couple of old — then new — Monolake albums I kept in the car, and they are often what I find playing in my head when I find myself on certain stretches of highway.
▰ I have long joked — more to the point, half-joked — that the song I want played at my funeral is John Cage’s 4’33. I have now attended, in person, a memorial for someone where that took place, and I can report that it is exceedingly moving.