Soundtrack
2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.2006.0152
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Music Technology and Sound Studies
ResumoSoundtrack Gregory Pardlo 3:36 Harvey, your car stereo left rhythm's tinnitus patting my head, a diaphanous afro, as I gathered steam in the glancing shafts of sad and angry light playing about the purblind alley the idling cruiser's fingers drumming alike each wall, uniform and alleged offender. An empty lot jagged with the fallout of forties targeted along the brick glimpsed the familiar rodeo of arrest. A plastic bag threshed snagged on a twigged umbrella. I was momentarily immersed in those resinous moments in a way I still recall sharp as the pine trees from the carwash, as if I could set a needle on the ridge between them—not the pine trees, Harvey, but that vinyl fermata between memories, lower my eyelids like a dust cover and let it play. This is where I begin again in this wasted province before rowhouses whose dooryards are the street. A block whited like covered wagons out the verge. A block away, your stereo continues to train coins of car- flung beats astride my heels' hollow drops along the shoveled walk. Still I'm searching for excuses to celebrate you. Still searching for the source of the impulse to celebrate. Yet I loved not you but your attentions thus I sing myself. And how know the man but for his rhythms? Your music would make me authentic. So goes the rhythm so goes the nation. Miss Jackson notwithstanding. 2:48 Your music would make me authentic. Each bass beat shadowed by trill richter I can still hear the car body chattering as if it were hitting the rumble strips approaching a toll. Still its absent pulse jacks the fish seat of the brain where the body is taken in tow like a Viking burial: police lights lob small [End Page 718] comets at my feet the ground littered with ziplock dimebags and the origami boxes of General Tso. I sigh submission to the tide my shoes sniffling pebbled ice and snow. I can't help but keep step with the music. I'm hard wired for the groove and am the groove the beat absent mindedly. Harvey, I am the only address I can reach you: both call and response you slow the surface of my voice until it casts only reflections. Like my image in the tinted window of a parked car reducing to yet another prior self, the pre-teen of me nested like a Russian doll inside this memory, holding the shoulder-strapped recorder with creaking spools I once when innocent sang I Wanna Get Next To You into as if packing a little suitcase, working the catches—the words like shoes too big to fill I pushed them around the cassette barely knowing what they want, singing them like someone's name I didn't know 4:43 I'd gotten wrong. What escapes, the present it loses sequence as I slip the cuffs the stir-crazed drama of moments filled with contingency. Music in the bones they say. In fairness it is not that the goldfish experiences memory loss, born to each moment anew, but that the goldfish is aware of time no more than it is aware of water. I know these things. I once wore black canvass shoes with transparent soles the color of goldfish when I hit house parties with you in 8th grade. It hurts me to recall. But there it is: Shame leaning against the closet door each morning whistling tunes of limitation and regret. Still I live for days when the metaphorical knotted string on my finger goes absent as the glasses lost on my grandfather's forehead and the earth bears me in a personal surf where the ground moves like an airport walkway and there could be a camera on a dolly leading me as sounds of the town meeting melodies in my head drown out the voice-over maundering evening's self-conscious intentions. I'd play the street life like a ouija board, the dynamic landscape shuttling the fragmented aural text...
Referência(s)