In the spirit of Noam Chomsky’s optimism that I rambled on about earlier this week, I’ve been re-examining old projects that I had previously invested a lot of time and resources, and then subside for whatever reasons: possibly lethargy, more likely due to my busy social calendar. Regardless, this is an introduction to my psychogeography project, one in which I attempt to remap the urban landscape through music in an attempt to understand my surroundings better and, maybe, to narcissistically render them in my own likeness. Who knows…it’s just this thing that I do.
The City of San Francisco: the Landscape I'm Remapping
The way I see it, the longer we live the larger we grow spatially, which is to say the more we displace the atmosphere in which we move; each experience adds to our girth and either focuses or splinters our vision. Of course, we naturally affect and effect our surroundings, and those surroundings reciprocally alter us in different fashions, but with similar mutations. The more ground we tread, the more we erode the infrastructures that fall beneath our feet and, thus, the more we absorb the historicized ingredients of that which falls before us into the essence of what we are at the very core of our beings. The longer we stay in one city, the more we become it- my San Francisco may barely resemble yours or your neighbors’. Daily we walk by our past lives, our past loves which become partial memories continually reenacted throughout the course of a mundane activity such as grocery shopping or grabbing a quick cup of coffee. As we meet new people, new facets of the spaces around us are unlocked and exposed, and this effecting reciprocity explodes outward, further creating ourselves and our cities. We are the institutions, the structures that categorically define the world in which we interact, but, at the same time, we also built them; we are concurrently the signifier and the signified.
This relationship that we develop with our surroundings has a language and a soundtrack that is uniquely its own; different dialects develop around the individual that is attempting to speak, and what we are able to extract, to understand is the result of how we interpret the emotive properties that comprise this. All of the senses are involved – sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste – as we are a combined product of them all. This is the language I am attempting to map, and I am hoping to do so by musically identifying how a neighborhood emotes and how we as its guardians and benefactors internalize this interaction and become it at a fundamental level; essentially I’m musically sussing out the phonetic pretext of our daily interactions.
In the same vein, the specific elements of our world that we choose to hoard around us are the product of our dialogue with the present, derived from how we were affected in the past and linked to how we want to speak to and interact with our future worlds, our future selves. The shoes we wear, the art we hang on our walls, the sausage we buy at our local ethnic markets, the dive bar we drive out of our way to have a pint in are all our attempts to construct ourselves, albeit in a largely unconscious way. This is how we occupy the multi-layered atmospheres that surround us, this is how we live our lives. And what better way than music, the unconscious distillation of life into melodies, to explain our lives and the spaces we live in to us.
Like I said, this is a project that I started a long, long time ago, and I’ve recently picked back up. What I’m saying to you, my fine readers, is this is a project which is part of me and I hope you’ll follow it with the same persistence with which I seem to be creating it; it’s about music, it’s about urban myths, it’s about friendship, it’s about sex, it’s about love, it’s about hatred, envy, greed, respect…it’s about every single thing that makes us human.
But most of all, it’s about music. Stay tuned.
