Tuesday night: Some night in July 2021.
It was one of those calm and serene evening walks.
A reminder that the summer is some kind of fairytale, I should say the summer in Canada specifically is some kind of fairytale.
Just tapping into the sound of the wind and a little windchime here and there on someone’s porch.
Overall no one is really out as there was heavy rain earlier in the day that might’ve trained people to stay home for the remainder of it.
The most interesting part about this whole walk is at some point I hear bongo drums off in the distance. I take a detour to try to locate the source of these drums and came up short every time.
I thought I was zeroing in on the house that was hosting the random jam session on a random Tuesday night, and then the sound just disappeared. It became obvious after a while there was a drum circle happening in a far off park, its location never to be known to this day.
That beautiful feeling of wind throughout my walk was the same wind that was carrying me the sound of the drums from the park in the distance.
That fairytale life this summer in Canada is. Walking through people’s gardens taking in the oneness with nature. I know the fall has its merits too, as does the spring and probably not the winter. OK, winter can be nice sometimes. But on this Tuesday night I hand myself over to the sound of the wind and I drop into this brief moment in time, when everything seems to stand still, simply frozen in space.
Postscript: This piece makes me think about how we can be like little radios, walking around picking up different frequencies from block to block. But you can only be that radio if you consciously tune your mind to want to experience the sights and the sounds around you.
The track featured in this story is A Brief Moment in Time, which I made in June of last year.
You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or find my podcast on the app that suits your listening habits the best.
On Thursday, July 29th I have a new piece of music coming out, and I will go live on YouTube again!
It’s expecting to smash the records set by Michael Jackson’s halftime show in 1993 when he appeared in one corner of the stadium and then they cut the camera and he was all of a sudden on the other side of the stadium and everyone is like what the fuck is that I didn’t know a live performance could be so shocking and amazing at the same time.
Some stuff that came up for me this week:
Making art is code for the present moment. That’s why the place you live in, the people you hang out with or the media you consume all shape everything you make. What comes in through the senses eventually goes out.
What would it take for you to make the next 10-20 seconds of your life enjoyable? Just those few dozen seconds.
I learned a new term: hypermedia. It refers to having 100 tabs open, reading news feeds, meeting with your colleagues and texting your friends all day. It’s everything all the time on overdrive. Having a name for this experience might help us think about how necessary it is to spend entire days like this, and possibly discover an alternative way to experience our time here that is finite.
If my email resonated with you then you can buy me a coffee, which after some shady accounting gets redirected towards my bagel fund instead.
Have a great week and thanks for sticking around with me on this stuff
Elliott “Latke” Fienberg