The Apartment

What is it to be in the place of people who are significant? 

It’s not so much a pilgrimage, rather I am interested to see  the environment in which Schaeffer created, thought, thrived. He lived opposite a library, up the road from a gallery, around the corner from a garden. Did he have time, amongst all his projects, to walk in the garden.

I think he would’ve taken time to walk there. Now there are daffodils, yellow with the occasional white variety, and the magnolias starting their outrageous purple blooming. 

I’m having a cortado and a Matcha Madeleine. The area has a lot of Japanese restaurants now which I dare say were not here in his time. The Madeleine is stale and certainly not worth the praise of Proust.

I stand on the street near his house and tried to record. Nothing spectacular — cars, the whizz of pedal and chain, a coughing e-bike, people talking in Russian, walkers whistling to dogs*, horns tooting in the distance. Although I notice a lot of the cars are quiet now,  the taxis seem to be electric. In a UPS truck the driver sings along to his R&B with an infectious happiness. The difference between boot heels and sneakers. Nothing extraordinary. Yet if you choose to listen all sounds are extraordinary — the intention to listen makes them so. The same can be said for looking as I notice the paper serviette flipping over and over in a kind of bridal waltz. That woman’s boots like the moss at a Kyoto temple. Her white fake coat a cloud. These things are so because I decide to pay them attention and frame them this way. I choose to find the smell of the fat cigar that went past a while back, sweet and musky rather than repellent….

I make my way to the end of the park and stand in the reverberant entrance listening to the construction. I don’t monitor with headphones, just hit record to create a frame and listen with raw ears. It makes the recording process a little closer to old fashioned film photography, waiting to get back home to see if there’s anything there. Most times there isn’t. The moment was a moment and now it’s just noise again.

*A little later, I hear a man behind me yelling droite, droite – (right, right) and then I see he has three large dogs. Do they know they’re left from their right – I don’t most of the time?