Notes from the Desert

1.  I took an overnight trip to Nevada with my brother about two weeks ago.  I was a city dweller in need of a desert fix, an injection of sand, a shower of still air.  My brother had never been to the desert.  So, I picked a spot about six hours by car from San Francisco—a small town that nobody makes a destination of: Hawthorne, Nevada.

2.  To travel to Hawthorne in the winter, when the road through Yosemite is closed, one drives through Reno.  Thankfully, I had a reason to be in Reno: to see two exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art.  Even aside from the museum, the city is something fun to pass through, like running one's fingers through a faux fur coat in a thrift shop.  (You know that fur coat has been to Burning Man and back).  The casinos of Reno present a sonic glitter and sensory spectacle at great contrast to the outlying desert.

3. The first exhibition I saw at the museum was Landscape Futures, guest-curated by Geoff Manaugh.  (Hurry to get out there, it closes Feb. 12th)  This room, packed with objects, contraptions, drawings, and dreams at all scales, reminds me of Borges' citation of "a certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which animals are categorized: "a. those that belong to the Emperor, b. embalmed ones, c. those that are trained, .... h. those included in the present classification, i. those that tremble as if they were mad, j. innumerable ones, k. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush... " and so on.    How is it that all these things exist in a single space? We could say it is testament to the imaginative power of the curator, which is no doubt true.  It is also compelling to look at the atmosphere which allows these things to exist together.

One must hold in suspense a certain scale, say 1:48, when looking at mountains of vegetation and models of drone/ferret hybrids scurrying about.  Swelling to fill a two-story volume immediately adjacent is a Goldbergian machine without scale, standing in for some planetary hydrological system consisting of wind sails, pumps, and a simulator for the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.  On a wall nearby, large images of London and New York are shown as living museums in a world not much more absurd than the one we know.  Then, glossy faceted objects painted in bright colors - things made at a 1:1 scale - are to be worn by human beings in order to experience the sensory kaleidoscope of an ant.  We don't get to try them on, but that's part of the point.

What holds all of these things together is the visitor's willingness to go one step further than the separation already exercised from the city to the museum (the city itself a separation we unconsciously make from the landscape).  If not in a desert, and then if not in a city, and then if not in the building which we call the museum... what is the space of the exhibition but a fictional world swirling inside of my head.  Landscape Futures says to me: Why not imagine all landscapes as infinitely malleable.

4.  The other show at the Nevada Museum of Art is The Altered Landscape, a selection of photography which in a broad swath,  "examine(s) human interaction and intervention with environments".  My brother, on our drive out of Reno, made it clear to me the value of having just witnessed all of these photographs of massive-scale interventions in the landscape--rock quarries, gold mines, river deltas, and Christo.  We were flying past some gravel yard on the I-80 and it was though we were seeing these trucks and mounds of rock as alien interventions.  Who is it that makes piles out of earth, who carves terraces out of mountains and yet, as large as these interventions may seem, how small they are, and how unchanging the earth is.  So, the opposite is also true: when viewed at a large enough scale, a landscape is immutable.

5.  The museum was our threshold to the desert, the vestibule which permitted a shift in atmosphere as we left behind the anthropocentric city.  I gained a new appreciation for the museum as a perceptual acclimatizer, just as it is necessary to physically acclimatize in order occupy the desert (warm clothes for the winter, drinking water, chapstick, etc)  The museum enabled us to see on another level, which, in turn, I am always translating to the world of sound.  What kind of space in a museum might permit an acoustic threshold.  Further, how might we hear in the small space of a gallery a sound at the grand scale of the desert.

6.  Over halfway to Hawthorne, we pulled off the road to eat a lunch of Manchego cheese, salted almonds, and olives.  Foods from some far off, verdant land, preserved by salt.  What a luxury to eat salty things in the desert, for we could quest our thirst with the greatest ease with the water we drove in with.  In that case it wasn't a true desert.  Each town which offered us human comforts negated the desert.  Even the road itself, while beautiful in its simplicity, negates the desert.  It is the string which reminds us we are still tethered to the city.

7.  A lake stretched out below us, its blues shifting into greens superimposed by the reflection of yellow hills on the far shore.  Hundreds of small white objects appeared to float motionless in the lake.  As we scrambled down the rocks, I could see these were not inanimate objects but rather birds, probably Loons.  Here and there, the birds ducked down to get something in the water.  They were a long distance off, probably a quarter-mile away.  And yet, when we stopped rummaging through the bag of almonds and sat silent, you could hear each of the birds make their tiny moves in the water.  The astounding thing was this: the landscape was so massive, and here were these tiny sounds that were almost negligible yet still audible. There would be no way to hear them at that distance if not for the stillness of the air.

8.  T.E. Lawrence said he liked the desert because it was clean.

9.  The United States Navy also liked the desert because it was clean.  In 1930, by order of Congress, a new ammunition depot was opened which would later service the war in the Pacific.  And so Hawthorne, Nevada--our destination--became a bunker city.  There are over 2,400 bunkers containing 600,000 square feet of storage for weapons, bombs, and other such not-so-clean things.  Curiously, the Wikipedia article linked to above lists as "capabilities of the center" both "demilitarization" and "ammunition renovation".

But that's par for the course when it comes to the history of the military and the desert.  The apparent 'cleanliness' of the desert has always provided an excuse to drop bombs and test missiles.  I have witnessed this elsewhere--for example, at White Sands, New Mexico.  The desert does not demonstrate the same malleability when it comes to demilitarizing.

Hawthorne Army Depot via Google Maps

10.  I had recently finished reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a conversation with the artist Robert Irwin.  He describes visits to the desert outside Los Angeles as incredible sensory experiences that he wished to share with others.  But to intervene in the desert, to add something (or subtract something ala Michael Heizer) so as to signify "PAY ATTENTION" would be pointless.  Whatever it would be, even something as simple as a painted rock or an arrow, would be mistaken for part of the experience itself.  The experience of the desert is already complete.

SF Lunchwalk: North

SF Lunchwalk: North, third in a series exploring the city instead of eating lunch.

I am exploring north along streets mechanized from below. Gears, pulleys, and cables live under the street, humming and clapping, droning and singing, partaking in the communion of automata.

I would begin not listening to machines, but to the bells of the Salvation Army. Passing a giant tree which these islanders clearly worship, my legs took me swiftly beyond the sparkle to the hard, clean edges of less populated terrain. I walked through a tunnel where the city's sound stretched out in long bellowing reverberance. There: on the other side, another world with yet another tunnel leading west. As I had decided to head strictly north with my hour of exploration, I left this second tunnel for another lunch hour walk.

Little boxes under the street are now singing out, easily heard in the calm of the northern streets.  I step off from my sheltered, raised path to get a closer listen.  I stand in the middle of the street, kneeling over the crevices where the heavy cable cars slide, laden with travelers seeking the typical view, those seeking to own the iconic moment.  I am vulnerable here, where walkers should not be, and especially because I am kneeling over these mundane things and, triggering a passerby to think "I see something, should I say something?"

I reach the edge of the map half an hour into the walk.  Returning south to the office, I trace this infrastructure which supports the endless touristic loops of the city.  Surprisingly, even the most cliche of San Francisco icons has a depth to it.  The gear boxes and cable junctures add a constant hum to the background static of the city.   Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk : North by nicksowers

What other machines are driving the city?  The street is not the only place to look for them.  An entire expedition is forthcoming which walks the escalators of the city.  Later, I will explore the elevators.  Then, revolving doors:  an endless loop of machines moving an endless loop of people.

SF Lunchwalk: West

A traveler on this new island, my first forays radiate out from the center.  At 12:36 pm, I start walking due west.

Not a few moments pass before I am pressed up against fellow travelers, compressed in the space of the city, stacked like the bricks around us.  A clicking signal indicates to the blind, such as yourself, that a street crossing is permitted by the local authorities.  Let loose once again up the concrete walk, I slip around pedestrians along my strict course of travel.

This staccato pedestrian pace of long strides along the blocks and standing still at the corners is the dominate rhythm of a city walk.  Giving in to this rhythm does not preclude the variety of encounters--spatial, social, sensorial--which are possible.  The corner of a block leads to collisions between unlikely actors.  The frictionless straightaway, on the other hand, permits a certain isolation, allowing me to observe and record a singular cut through the cityscape.

These blocks of buildings form larger groups of blocks with distinguishable characteristics (tall buildings, hard surfaces, voids of parking garages, etc).  These groups may form called districts or neighborhoods, but I abandon those artificial boundaries.  Look, listen, to the physical properties which unite them.  This walking radius is an island: the order it contains is the order I have given it.  By walking through the heterogeneous clusters of built and un-built space, I produce an organization.  I organize space by walking through it.  Then recording sound and reassembling that sound into a single track, I attempt to illuminate that order, to give clarity to it through a language of sound.  Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk: West by nicksowers

At the beginning of the track, I am compressed on a corner.  Layers of travelers cross over me, vehicles shred the space of the possible, and a man with a cane bends over talking to a woman inside her car with a small dog in the driver's seat.  An open-deck tour bus with the driver's well-beaten narrative, amplified, is momentarily captured by my microphones before disappearing off the edge of the map.  Above my head taps a hand against the stucco face of a building to a beat independent of the street.  Shrill brakes and electric bus straw snapping, the volume thickens.

Cars roar up and down an artery named after Van Ness.  They drown out the layering of space, flattening the sonic sphere momentarily until I cross it.  Walking further up, a slight increase in elevation, and I find a tennis court.  Leaf blowers signify greater affluence.

Later, at a two-block wide park, at the boomerang moment on the walk, I welcome the great depth of field. Hills to the south are visible with their own little orchestras of sirens and cars tinny like the sound from a miniature train model.   At the park, space releases itself from a tight coil.  The aural vista opens wide. The city is out there.

SF Lunchwalks

Lunch break. Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.

SF Lunchwalks: Morsel of San Francisco which I can reach in a one-hour roundtrip from my office.

SF Lunchwalk 01 : Cracks is the first in a series of soundwalks, where I take a walk for an hour instead of eating lunch (or eat lunch while walking). My goal is to record the sounds of a unique slice of the city, to hear the city anew through the stereo microphones of my Zoom H4n recorder.

On this first soundwalk I am looking for cracks between buildings. When I find one, I stick the recorder in there.

 Giant cracks exist too, beneath freeways, where freeways unfold, colliding ever so slowly.  Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk 01 : Cracks by nicksowers