Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0709151211240.20547@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Frustration
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 12:11:35 -0400 (EDT)
Frustration Two crystal radios (crs) in parallel through the same antenna/ground system. The larger, older one is in the box and can fine-tune through a vario- coupler, loose coupler, and now an air condenser. The output is drawn from the larger. The system is increasingly frustrating and baroque, more and more stations are picked up, the tuning peaks are sharper, the sensitivity and amplitude much greater. Everything is passive and metal, except for the diodes - two in parallel for the older cr, one for the newer. It's frustrating. The output is always similar, content-dependent, and I'm not interested in content, or rather the content of the wave-envelopes - interference, noise, static, and spherics included. But the frustration - the content dominates, so I've now thrown filter after filter at it, reducing everything to nonsense, nothing but spew. Why listen? Because it's a symptom of frustration. The cr itself is of interest - every inductor has resistance and capaci- tance, every capacitor has inductance and resistance, every resistor has inductance and capacitance. But there are no resistors, only a small rf choke. I arrange and rearrange components, trying for the highest q- factor (filter sharpness), the loudest output. Sometimes a clip loosens and everything changes for the better or worse. Sometimes my hand brushes a coil and things change again. Reverse the clips, antenna/ground or the diodes, and things change yet again. Nothing's predictable, but the q and amplitude tends towards the same old thing. If I look for a signal in the noise beneath the signals, it's canceled out even in the noise. Or some- times not; you can hear straight-forward voices in the middle of crs.mp3, even with all the manipulation. Again, it's metal come to life, arrangements of metal, nothing else, even the earphones are coils and magnets and thin metal diaphragms. There's none of the interiority of electronics, vacuum tubes, solid state, except for the diodes of course. Use a razor-blade diode, and even the solid- state's eliminated. And manipulation of the output? Reverberation, hiss filters, hard limit- ing, normalizing, equalizing. To no point at all except to eliminate my own nausea. This might have been a search for aesthetic pleasure; instead it's grounded in an impossible novelty - what with the tuning coils and capacitor, cr sound is narrowly defined, almost traditional. I need a violin. I need something. crs1 and crs2 are images of the interior of the older cr, which has now been placed in a box. There's a cat around. cr3 is the second cr on top of the closed box. The fourth file is the mp3. http://www.asondheim.org/crs1.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/crs2.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/crs3.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/crs.mp3 (I wonder in terms of the poetics and phenomenology of the 'thing' here - they lie in arrangements, in channels - stations and noise, etc. are par- asitic, the whole a swirl, entanglement. Listen through the cross-sec- tions. There's also the semiotics of the flesh, the relationship and placements of antennas and grounds, the body, flustered, moving all those coils and dials. The oldest radio sets have a variety of tuning mechanisms - everything balances on everything. I'd say the pleasure quickens fast in all of this, but then, like plate cameras, a kind of exactitude emerges and delight when something after all comes clear. I'm thinking of modeling all of this as a _knot_ in the mathematical sense.)