All Posts (8)
Sort by
On Friday, 27th December at 10pm UK time, BBC radio 3 will transmit a repeat of Jonny's Proms performance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cpsm
A dream. In the Ed Sullivan theatre, a place I’ve never been.
I am backstage. A nobody behind the cordon.
But backstage is a weird mirror of the theatre. I'm on auditorium stairs looking up toward heavy velvet curtains. From there, I will be able to look down into the audience and see the Stage.
All around me are clusters of oddly laid out seating and lacunae. Blue-velvet perches everywhere, little snags of tables and seats- beanbags and bouncy seats and curvy divans and concave half-shell chairs…
Artifacts of parties- mini liquor bottles- the litter of lost people....
Also, artifacts of life. The people who work in the building spend breaks here and there. Little shelters & nests— some tables have woven nests of paper and origami napkins…. mind-discharge doodles crosshatched in octopuses and tangled flowers… ashtrays with layers of butts. I see a flip-book of solitude over months and years, small memorials without context.
I climb…. I want to see the stage. Close now, a flight from the top, and a gaggle of girls appear, coming down my stairwell as I face up. I stand aside. who are you? Will you greet me? They pass, speaking to each other. I turn and see beneath me now is a jungle of plastic. Tubs and benches and pipes and walls of the sort of beige textur-ey material cheap stand-up showers are made of. I don’t belong here and I shouldn’t be….
I better go (where?), so I start back down the way I’d come. The girls are just beneath me in an empty hot tub. My stairs pass through. One chatters about her fiancé, their dates, their texts, their vacations, their furniture, their cars, the wedding….
He’s a sniper. She’s very proud.
I arrange my face. I'm going for: a not-butting-in-but-also-can’t-help-hearing-and-obviously-have-no-opinion-but-if-I-did-i’d-like-you-to-interpret-it-as-very-politely-happy-for-you-but-I’m-noone-and-it’s-none-of-my-business-can-I-pass-please? sort of face. One squints at me. I change course and climb around instead, on the jutting pipes and shelves and plasticware. My hand slips and I fall. I land in a dry waterslide. Suddenly it’s all very fast and I know there is a pool waiting and it will be a disaster if I get wet- I'm carrying something (what?) that will be lost forever. I round the last curve, throw out my arms and leges but can't slow… and pile into thin vertical gold railings, like birdcage bars. It hurts to hit them… but I am so relieved.
I pass the waterslide attendant and want to tell him what happened. He shakes his head- they’re waiting for me at my new apartment. I have to hurry.
*************
Now, I’m looking up fifty feet at my new front door. Is this where I was headed? A woman I don’t know and my eldest friend are waiting for me. My things are on the sidewalk and stairs in trash bags and thrown about loose. The stairs are made of thin gold rods. There are no rails.
I climb above the street, picking up clothes and papers and pictures and things. Near the top I am so heavy that the stairs fall from where they are hooked into the landing. I begin to fall. I shoot my left hand up and grab the platform. The left things I carried fall. One pink sweater, a sweater I actually owned a decade ago, fell to the ground in feather swoops, so slowly I had time to recognize it and remember a day I had worn it (on a day when someone loved me). It lands in the oil-puddled street and for a moment I nearly let go to reach out for it. Instead, I choose to cling and I yell for my friend to help me. She doesn’t come. I hear her inside, talking and laughing and very near. I scream. Now let go of what I have left in my right hand. The stranger comes and asks how to help me. I ask her to give me her hand. Together we pull up the stairs and reattach them.
The rest is garbled.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c0ff
Lasts an hour
New York, New York, is where Unclassified is heading this week. As Radio 3 continues its season ‘The Way I See It’, celebrating the reopening of MOMA, Elizabeth Alker heads to the Big Apple to investigate New York’s contemporary music scene. This episode also features interviews with Thom Yorke and Edward Norton. They discuss the music for Norton’s new film Motherless Brooklyn, which is set in 1950s New York. Thom Yorke contributes a new ballad called Daily Battles to the soundtrack.
Elizabeth also speaks to New York Times music writer Giovanni Russonello who gives her some top tips of new acts to see and venues to visit in New York. And this episode has an exclusive first play of new music by Julianna Barwick which is inspired by the sky above Manhattan.
We also hear experimental saxophone music by Lea Bertucci, created using resonances in the Marine A Grain Elevator at Silo City in Buffalo. Daniel Wohl and Caroline Shaw represent New Amsterdam Records and Christopher Tignor takes inspiration from La Monte Young.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c0rv
First part just under an hour after the start of the programme (Shaun Keaveny). Still listening to the programme so will post timing for the second part of the interview when it's on.
