text:
Of Sound Machines and Recording, Sharing that Transcends Time and Space
This is the conclusion to a two-part post by SO! regular writer Maile Colbert. Read Part One from Monday, January 12th here.
As we are primarily a visual culture, no longer connected to what environments can tell us through sound, we've lost aural acuity once central to the dynamic of our lives.
From what we have just begun to see, it appears that ancient human beings had learned well the lessons imparted by natural sounds. Their lives depended as much (if not more) on their ability to hear and understand the audio information imparted by their surroundings as those given by visual cues. –Bernard Krause, Ph.D The Soundscape Newsletter 06, June, 1993
All newborns emerge with the same cry, it is near impossible to distinguish one from another, even as a mother. This could be for many reasons and serve many purposes. Should something happen to a birth mother, the indistinguishable cry may help draw attention from another. It could be that, considering niche effect (in which animals adapt their calls to a frequency less populated by other environmental sounds), aside from biological reasons, a newborn's cry is shaped by the wombscape from whence it came, and I speculate that generally speaking one wombscape is similar to another. Primarily what a fetus is hearing is low frequency. So it would serve that they would have an instinct to initially call out in a high frequency range. The baby then develops its cry according to its surrounding, such as a household in the city versus a country, a household with other children or not, a household with constant media sound.
My daughter has the most incredible earsplitting high frequency bark when she wants attention. If this doesn't work (such as when "Baby, Mama has to wash the garden manure from her hands before she picks you up"), she'll roll into a gritty horrific low growl that sounds like she's being strangled. One of these always works, and I often wonder about these sounds' relationship to the white noise (her specific mix in a more mid-range involving pink noise and a "rain on roof" recording) that has been a constant since her birth, and is still used for naps, some feedings, and bedtime.
Sound Machines and Noise
From my late pregnancy insomnia, to creating a calming environment in the labor room at the hospital, to keeping a consistent calming environment in the recovery room, to using that sound as a signal that it is time to calm, time to sleep…a sound machine has been a constant already in my daughter's new world. It started with an app in Paris, at a festival during my third trimester, my waddling condition wouldn't allow me to walk around much nor meet friends for drinks, etc. So I choose to stay in the hotel room and read. The fetal babe wasn't in the mood to read, kicking and dancing, perhaps excited from the music at the festival. For a little while I played with her, her kicking in response to my pokes and prods. But soon I knew we both needed to both settle down. I was always fascinated by my parents' sound machine as a child, it seemed something magical. I found and downloaded an app that allowed you to create your own mix, and so it began.
But recent research poses the question of whether a sound machine can actually affect hearing development. Some researchers have questioned if prolonged exposure to consistent sound could affect auditory pathways to the brain. I wonder what then of infants who grow up near, say, the ocean…or like my mother near a stream and small waterfall, a constant sound in her childhood and soundtrack to her memories from then. Or near a busy road or even walkway. Of course I want the babe to grow up to enjoy and focus on a varied soundscape. But at certain points, the noise has been a lifesaver! It's been especially useful now combatting construction sounds, as babies tend to focus on background sounds, most likely for survival:
Of course it is very important to be aware of the strength of the sound a baby is exposed to, all too easy for our very visual culture to ignore. Even a sound machine with the volume too high, or the proximity too close, could reach decibels over 80, a threshold that could cause the tiny hair cells in the ear needed for hearing to die. As we lose these, we start to lose our hearing. The amount of energy in a sound doubles with even just a three decibel climb. If any sound makes it difficult to hold a regular conversation, chances are it's past this threshold and could be doing damage. Our world is in many ways getting increasingly louder. As our cities grow, its sounds grow, and we are exposed to more constant and louder soundscapes. Will an accidental evolution be for us to adapt to losing our hearing? For me of course, this is a very bleak thought.
Your words are preserved in the tin foil and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke in then. . . . This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb, voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, speaks with your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm.
-Edison's Ars Memoria, concept for the phonograph
A recorded sound transcends time. It allows a listener to share a space and perspective with the recordist. It allows a future people to hear the songs of people passed, and of their shared past. It allows for an extinct bird to call into the future, for a child to hear that bird and wonder, and question, and to have that question affect her future and therefore perhaps the future of others. I often think about what soundscapes or sound I have experienced that my daughter might not have the opportunity to experience when she's older. Already since my childhood growing up in part in Hawaii, three birds I knew, I had heard, that my mother grew up with, that her father grew up with, that his parents grew up with (and so on)…are no longer calling in the wild. But what the world and I can share with her and her generation, can give her, can leave her, are recordings.
Kaua'i `O'o: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/6031
Po'ouli: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/5125
Hawaiian Crow: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/13434
The library I am constantly creating, shaped by my choice and perspective…where to hit start, when to stop, where to point the mic, what equipment to use, how to frame this aural moment that captured me and invoked the desire to save and to share.
I think of this very often these days, as a friend and great soundscape ecologist and composer has passed. Steve Miller (www.stevemiller.net ) left a wealth of music, sound, and writing that his daughter and family can share. His daughter will be able to put on headphones and share a space her father formed with his perspective, his choices, his interests. A sharing active with him.
A sharing that transcends time and space.
Future Memory, for Odette
Sound has a hold over my daughter in a way I wasn't quite expecting. It's almost a punch line that the daughter of two parents that work with and study sound would have such sensitivity. The smallest sounds can pull her from sleep, can pull her from eating. They can be a character for her, making her laugh, cry, yawn, widen her eyes in amazement.
It was only natural my partner and I decided to make an album as a gift to our daughter. We had wanted to do the same marking our history together years back, and had various sound recordings and unfinished ditties in a library marked "Future Memory." The idea behind it was an aural coming together of our history and feelings expressed and translated through sound and song. We realized, of course, in many ways this was Odette's history as well, and she our future.
The album became Future Memory, for Odette, a lullaby album in dedication and celebration to her, and including sounds from her growing in the womb, soundscapes we hope will be a part of her life, and in recording them in some way ensuring that, a score written for her while I was in labor from a friend, songs her father and I began and finished together during the stages of pregnancy, birth, and her first year, and collaborations and contributions in sound and music from family and friends would be her legacy.
This is her first song:
Dedicated to Odette Helen, and to the family, daughter, and memory of Steve Miller
"Future Memory, for Odette" to be released in 2015 through Wild Silence (www.wild-silence.com ). A dedication album to a new born daughter…a mix of her parents' recorded and shared sounds, memories, hopes, and dreams towards a future with her. Sounds of her womb-scape, birth, and first year…music in collaboration with friends and family across oceans and land…an album of lullabies for Odette.
Maile Colbert is a multi-media artist with a concentration on sound and video who relocated from Los Angeles, US to Lisbon, Portugal. She is a regular writer for Sounding Out!
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice– Yvon Bonenfant
This Is Your Body on the Velvet Underground– Jacob Smith
Sound Designing Motherhood: Irene Lusztig & Maile Colbert Open The Motherhood Archives– Maile Colbert
LMGM's "Lost: Choirboy" & El Jefe's "Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon. . ." (in memoriam José Esteban Muñoz)
Come, let us sing of great men. Well, just one man, not men—and masculine gender is not essential for our purposes. Come to think of it, his greatness isn't nearly as important as his fierceness, his queer significance, his brown sensibility. But we're still committed to singing—or at least to music—well, to sound and noise, in any case. José Esteban Muñoz often wrote about queer scenes where music and sound were central to participants' world-making activities. His archives buzzed with the sounds of West Coast punk, vogue-ball house, cruisy toilets, genderqueer burlesque, and salsa echoing down the barrio streets. And so, for this Round Circle of Resonance, we at La Mission are here to make some noise about a badass thinker who deeply impacted the way we dance/sing/talk/write/sweat about dance music, identity, and politics.
And this is just the beginning of our cacophonous, four-part response to Muñoz's intellectual holler. The first installment, written by La Mission's resident essayist / deranged propagandist LMGM (Luis-Manuel Garcia) provides a brief introduction to our collective, some reflections on Muñoz's relevance to our activities, and a frame for the next three missives from our fellow cultists. It is backed with a rousing sermon-cum-manifesto from our charismatic cult-leader/prophet, El Jefe (Pablo Roman-Alcalá). In the coming weeks, our Naked Mennonite/randy dramaturge (Mandie O'Connell) will prepare and film a urinary performance piece; and our saucy Choir Boy/Linguist (Johannes Brandis) will compose a dirge to our dearly departed José (August 9, 1967- December, 4, 2013).
LMGM a.k.a. Luis-Manuel Garcia
Lost: Choirboy (in memoriam José Esteban Muñoz)
La Mission
Named after San Francisco's Latino barrio, La Mission is a satirical utopian doomsday cult, a music label, a queer situationist art-gang, a magazine, and a group of dancers with a very dirty sense of humor. We release music on vinyl, publish DIY 'zines, and make performance art, aiming to re-politicize genres of dance music that have been important to queer people of color. La Mission's identity is perhaps best summed up by cult-leader El Jefe's manifesto-sermon, "The Sermon for the Steps of the Ziggurat in our Hearts," published in our first La Mission magazine:
La Mission is a Community. La Mission is a Collective. La Mission is a Cult. La Mission is a Situationist Art Gang. La Mission is a Anarcho-Syndicalist terror cell. La Mission is a Family. La Mission is You. La Mission is Us. La Mission is gonna strip you butt nekkid, gonna check all your body cavities, gonna give you a shower, gonna give you a goodie bag, gonna give you a clean sheet and a towel. You at home with us now children, you understand me? You home with us now.
La Mission was first formed in 2012, in a small café in the Neukölln district of Berlin. The collective initially began with just three of us—Pablo Roman-Alcalá, Mandie O'Connell and Luis-Manuel Garcia—but like any good charismatic doomsday cult, it quickly expanded to include a broad network of lovers and collaborators, led by a core of four instigators (Johannes Brandis joined us later in the year). After a fundraising run in the fall of 2012 (witness our surrealist fundraising video here), we held our first two performances in the winter and spring of 2013, which involved experimental performance art pieces held in unusual spaces. The performances incorporated music and text from our vinyl EPs and their corresponding 'zines, which were released at around the same time. These multi-channel productions were also conceptually coherent, with (kunst/WORK)001 introducing La Mission's "mission" and (kunst/WORK)002 focusing on the relevance of utopianism to dance music. After a "quiet spell" where we released an out-of-series vinyl record of "lost remixes," 2014 has been dedicated to preparing the next volume in the series (due in February 2015), which examines the depredations of capitalism, forced austerity, and false scarcity on music.
Hearing José
La Mission has no idols, but we do have influences—and José Esteban Muñoz is foremost among them. We share with Muñoz a focus on queer nightlife-worlds, a non-classical take on utopianism, a commitment to intellectual interventions outside of academic channels, and a certain brassy tone of voice. His revival of Ernst Bloch's notion of a utopia based in real-life struggles was crucial in helping us reconcile revolutionary politics with dancefloor utopianism; or, put differently, Muñoz helped us find the critical politics latent in the queer, brown, sweaty gatherings that form the core of our scene of commitment. As "EDM" continues to blow up into a primarily white, hetero, cis, mainstream phenomenon, his insights have helped us maintain clarity and critical focus.
From the outset, we have also been profoundly influenced by Muñoz's lifelong theorizations of brownness, affect, and (dis)identification. Since three of our four core members are Latina/os in varying states of stripped identity, we have been especially interested in Muñoz's notion of the "brown commons," as he was developing the concept in the last years of his life. In promotional texts that circulated ahead of his speaking engagements on the topic, he described brownness as "an expansive sense of the world, a feeling and being in common that surpasses the limits of the individual and the subject." Notably, he understands brownness and the brown commons as being shaped not only by suffering and struggle, but also by thriving, providing a pool of resources for a better, more vibrant kind of life.
The significance for La Mission's project in dance music culture should be clear already, but we also take great inspiration in how Muñoz developed an expansive view of brownness and the brown commons, using Latina/o experience as an entry-point for "a vaster consideration of the ways in which people and things suffer and experience harm under the duress of local and global forces that attempt to diminish their vitality and degrade their value." We here at La Mission are committed to exploring brownness for its potentials for lateral solidarities among people of color, who may have diverse cultural backgrounds but nonetheless share post-migrant experiences of struggle, devaluation, displacement, and inauthenticity. In fact, Muñoz's work was a direct inspiration for the "Brown Corner" in our La Mission 'zine (a parody of the "ladies' corner" and "kid's corner" of American mid-century lifestyle magazines). Published bilingually and featuring post-migrant authors, the Brown Corner reflects on aspects of brownness, as both specific to their contexts and generalizable to a wider "commons" of brown experience. In the process, we hope to highlight shared feelings, narratives, and resources for brown survival in a world of white supremacy.
Singing into the Horizon
Brother Muñoz, what are we supposed to do with the vinyl records, the zines, the performance videos we had been accumulating for you? We're trying to sing our way into a queer utopian horizon, and we had been counting on your voice. We know you're not coming back. As a radical lefty utopian doomsday cult, we're not so invested in the afterlife, anyway. But it still sucks for us and everyone else you left behind, left in the "here and now" that we struggle to turn into something less suffocating. The party was just getting started, dammit. Besides, we had such a kickass choirboy outfit picked out for you.
LUIS-MANUEL GARCIA aka "LMGM": LMGM/Luis-ManuelLMGM/Luis-Manuel is a Canadian of Peruvian-Colombian origins, currently an Assistant Professor in Popular Music at the University of Groningen (NL), after migrating between Toronto, Berlin, Chicago, and Paris. He has managed to turn his love of electronic dance music into a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, and into post-doctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Freie Universität Berlin. On the side, he writes about food and dances every chance he gets.
Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon for the Imagined Sanctuary We Built Together
Welcome. La Mission is a family. A family of chosen comrades, chosen brethren, chosen hermanos, chosen сестры, chosen lovers, chosen students, chosen teachers, and chosen arms. Arms, linked and brandished through common thought, common feeling, common goals. It is with a heavy heart that we find ourselves here, remembering one of our family who (though never officially an acolyte or collaborator) was one who contributed to the ecstasy that we have felt and will feel for many years. José Esteban Muñoz was said to be a believer. Ernst Bloch and the New Revolutionary Epoch. Our utopias were described and imagined and realized and experienced. Rise up, my brown brethren, and let us celebrate Brother Muñoz's legacy!
The words and deeds of this fellow freedom-fighter, who infiltrated the bourgeois güero academy and infected it with a polylateral program for de- and reprogramming, has been our parallel and our inspiration. Colleague and comrade. A representative of our struggle. Not quite a patron saint—that honor we've reserved for communarde Louise Michel—but no less a visionary. As queers, as minorities stripped of identity, as angry and happy children in revolt for something better, we must all learn from each other as equals.
Brother Muñoz made utopia political again and located that utopianism in performance. La Mission's performances bring forth utopias from our queer future through fleeting mindfuck happenings in the present. Through the work of Sister O'Connell and her band of terrorizing miscreants, we present a non-narrative and non-paternalistic path towards redemption, one of our own making. Can I get a "Fuck, yeah!"?
Brother Muñoz loved music and dancing and life-worlds connected by the beat and said, "Take Ecstasy with Me." He revealed to us the connections between collective dancing and feeling utopian. In his spirit, La Mission's music strives to bring forth utopia through that ever-lasting beat. Through disassociation and reassociation, through transcendental repetition, and through getting the fuck down! Can I get a "Fuck, yeah!"?
Brother Muñoz believed in learning and critical thinking. Analysis and the great revolutionary trek through the jungle of our critically thinking minds. La Mission's tracts enact utopia through a constant vomiting out of our recently digested learnings into the baby-bird mouths of those who read them. The brother was also a hilarious motherfucker, and from this we realize that it is not through the shrill screams of egoism disguised as activism that we will prevail. It is through the joy of laughter combined with thought that we will win our bread. Can I get a "Fuck, yeah!"?
Brother Muñoz loved fucking. La Mission's fucking creates utopias through the ecstatic act in and of itself. If you aint fucking to make yourself a Temporary Autonomous Zone of happiness, then you aint doing it right. Can I get a copulatory "Fuck, yeah!"?
It is not all loss, though. The ideas live on. Caminamos juntos. On the dancefloor. In the reclaimed Torre David skyscraper and the Taller Tupac Amaru collective; in the informal classrooms and the sweaty bedrooms. Our hearts must burst after sagging, our heads must fill after hanging low, and our linked arms will raise! Oh honey, please don't give your heart to a world system based on exploitation of the luckless, give your heart to US!
All images courtesy of La Mission
PABLO ROMAN-ALCALA: Yo. I am Pablo aka "Beaner" aka "Skirtchaser" aka "El Frijolero" etc. I am an internationally working musician and dj who has enjoyed a modicum of success, but who doesn't like what has happened to the musical landscape vis-a-vis "conservatism" in respect to both Money and Art. I mean the relationship of the two, okay? It sucks. And I want to change it.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
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"New Wave Saved My Life*"-Wanda Alarcon
"Cremation of senses in friendly fire": on sound and biopolitics (via KMFDM & World War Z)
There's a 20-year gap in chronology between KMFDM's 1993 song "A Drug Against War" and Marc Forster's 2013 film World War Z, but sonically and ideologically they're very, very similar. They contain the same kinds of sounds–machine guns, military orders barked over radios, buzzing crowds–and they use these sounds in the same way: to build sonic intensity past its breaking point (a "sonic bombardment brighter than sunlight," as the KFMDM lyrics say). Their sonic similarity is evidence of neoliberalism's intensification in the 20 years between them: what was once avant-garde opposition is later mainstream norm.
The songs' sonic similarity reveals the central role of sound in contemporary biopolitics. By listening closely to "A Drug Against War" and the soundscape of World War Z—a film in which Brad Pitt saves humanity from a zombie apocalypse by giving all survivors a terminal disease—I show sound as more than a privileged aesthetic domain; sound actually provides the epistemic background and the concrete mechanisms for organizing society. Just as vision and "the gaze" are the ideological and technological foundation of panopticism, sound is the ideological and technological foundation of contemporary biopolitics. Much more is at stake in this post than just a song and a film: it takes on how—and why—society is organized as it is. It's also about a particular understanding of "the sonic": sound as dynamic patterning.
Because "A Drug Against War" lays out, in fairly elementary form, this "biopolitical" sonic vocabulary, it makes sense to start there. But before I do that, I will briefly define what I understand as 'biopolitics.'
Like "neoliberalism," "biopolitics" is a trendy concept whose precise meaning can get lost in loose usage. By "biopolitics," I mean both an ideology of health and vitality and a political strategy whose medium is "life." "Life," here, isn't individual health, wellness, or existence; it's the ongoing vitality of the segment of society that counts as "society" tout court (e.g., in white supremacy, that segment would be whites). Biopolitics manages society like a living thing; for example, we often talk about the "health" of the economy, or use metrics such as obesity rates to compare different countries.
As Foucault explains in Society Must Be Defended, biopolitics' "basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings" (254). But to do that, power sometimes has to kill. Pruning my raspberry bush causes more berries to sprout, for example, just as weightlifting tears all my muscle fibers so they'll rebuild in bigger, stronger shape. Killing off the weak is a positive investment in society's overall strength. Again, Foucault:
The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. (Society, 255).
Hitler's "final solution" is an obvious example of this biopolitical approach to killing, but this practice also informs many contemporary US policies and practices. In the US, black people as a population have significantly higher mortality rates than any other race, for example. Following Foucault, we could say it's in the interest of white supremacist society to maintain a high mortality rate among black populations because this makes white supremacist society "healthier." The key point here is this: biopolitics promotes and administers life by generalizing and naturalizing what Foucault calls "the relationship of war: 'In order to live, you must destroy your enemies'" (Society 256). Biopolitical warfare is precisely what is waged in both "A Drug Against War" and World War Z, and sound emerges as a weapon of choice.
"Kill Everything"
In its original context, KMFDM's "A Drug Against War" used sound to counter US Presidents Reagan and Bush 1's War on Drugs/"New World Order" thinking. Indeed, in 1993, it was hard not to hear it as a response to 1991's Operation Desert Storm, the US's first military action as the 'winner' of the Cold War. It performs, in music, the "cremation of senses in friendly fire," that its lyrics describe. It burns out our hearing, realizing through sound the sort of "creative destruction" or "shock doctrine" that characterizes neoliberalism more generally. In this rather Nietzschean model, the only way to make something "stronger than ever, ever before" is to first kill it. Death is the means to the most vibrant life.
The lyric–"stronger than ever, ever before"–is the first line of the chorus. At the end of every verse, there's a short drumroll that leads into it. As S. Alexander Reed notes in Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, "clocking in at "322 bpm, the eighth-note snare fills at the end of the verses fire at about eleven rounds every second–the same rate as an AK-47" (29). This flourish foreshadows the gesture that, in the song's bridge [after the second chorus, around 2:17 in the video above], musically "cremates" our senses in friendly fire–in this case, in the rapid fire of percussion. This rapid-fire percussion is one of the sonic elements that "Drug" shares with WWZ; in fact, the chorus uses what is likely (according to Reed) a machine gun sample. The machine gun effect mimics blast drumming. As Ronald Bogue explains in Deleuze's Wake, blast drumming is a "tactic of accelerating meters to the point of collapse," produced through the "cut-time alteration of downbeat kick drum and offbeat snare, the accent being heard on the offbeat but felt on the downbeat" (99). "A Drug Against War"'s AK-47 rolls actually accelerate to the point of auditory collapse, i.e. to the point at which humans generally can't distinguish individual sonic events—the aural equivalent of seeing 24 frames per second as one continuous image. The AK-47's rolls of 'friendly' fire cremate our sense of hearing.
The song's chorus includes many other sonic elements shared by World War Z: doppler effects (such as the sounds of dropping bombs or planes buzzing the ground), rubble being moved around, military orders barked over radio. In the bridge several kinds of crowd noises are introduced: first, guitars buzz like a swarm of insects; then, a call-and-response in which singer Sascha Koneitzko echoes the chorus (which reverses the usual order in which the chorus echoes the individual leader); finally, a chaotic rabble of voices builds in intensity and leads into the sense-cremating climax.
An extended and intensified version of the "friendly fire" at the end of each verse, "A Drug Against War"'s climax builds to a peak by layering two full measures of AK-47-style drumroll on top of sounds of rabble, evoking the image of the military firing on an unruly crowd. This roll barrels towards the point of auditory collapse–if it got much faster, we'd be unable to distinguish individual rhythmic events, and hear a constant buzz (like in the beginning of the bridge), not a series of eighth notes. The roll's forward momentum intensifies musical energy to an apex, culminating on the downbeat of the next measure in a florid lead guitar solo.
Describing the song as "sonic bombardment brighter than sunlight," the lyrics confirm the music (and vice versa). The song overdrives sound until it sublimates into something else–if sunlight is more intense radiation than even soundwaves, here soundwaves amplify to a state more powerful than that. Cremating our senses in friendly fire, KMFDM channels soundwaves into a revolutionary drug, a drug against war. The band presents cleansing fire meant to purify us of disease: just as a fever kills pathogens in our bodies, the song burns our senses to kill a pathogenic ideology. Overdriving mainstream musical taste, offering something so brutal, so damaging to one's ears, that only the avant-garde can survive, KMFDM inoculates the population against its most reactionary, war-mongering elements. "A Drug Against War" uses sound to perform a biopolitical operation, one that emerges as the basis of WWZ's plot: the only way to save the human race from the zombies is to kill everything.
World War Z intensifies the horrors of contemporary biopolitics to the point that the only way to recuperate from them is to intensify them even further: in order for humanity to survive, everyone must be dead on their feet. In the sci-fi universe of World War Z, zombies aren't eating for their survival, but for the survival of the virus they carry; they only attack and eat prey that are also (and primarily) attractive hosts for the virus. Pitt's character, protagonist Gerry Lane, discovers that terminally ill humans aren't legible to the zombies as human—that is, as attractive hosts. They won't live long enough and/or are too weak to aggressively spread the virus. So, he decides the best way to protect humans from zombies and the virus they carry is to infect the remaining people with a deadly but ultimately curable illness. The World Health Organization develops a vaccine that allows healthy people to 'pass' as terminal cases. The only difference remaining in the post apocalyptic world of WWZ is between the quasi-dead and the walking dead. Death is the drug against WWZ.
The film doesn't represent or express the biopolitical recuperation of death visually, but sonically: to make audiences feel what the narrative depicts, WWZ cremates their sense of hearing–often with more amplified and complex versions of the same sonic elements mobilized in "Drug." Doppler effects, crowd noises, machine guns, military orders barked over radio bombards the film's audience as sonic "friendly fire." Though the film's soundtrack doesn't actually blow out its audience's ears (what lawsuits!), it repeatedly simulates sonic cremation; the tinitus-y buzzing one hears after auditory trauma–what one hears in lieu of hearing—functions as a constant refrain. Narratively climactic moments are composed, cinematically, as sonic overdrive. The massive car crash as everyone tries to evacuate NYC in the beginning of the film, the moment when Pitt's character thinks he may have been infected atop the NJ apartment building, the plane crash outside the Cardiff WHO office–each of these events culminates in tinitus-y ringing. As physical and psychological trauma overwhelms the characters, the film pretends to inflict overwhelming—cremating—auditory trauma on its audience.
In the WWZ universe, sound is destructive; it unleashes the zombie horde. At 49:00, a soldier says: "remember these things are drawn to sound…there's only one way we're getting you on that plane, and that's quiet." In a scene set in Jerusalem, excessive sound turns something miraculously positive—a Muslim girl and a Jewish girl leading a mixed crowd in song, a mini Arab-Israeli peace accord—Into a massacre. The sound attracts the zombie horde, leading them to swarm and overrun Jerusalem's walls. Similarly, at the film's end, Pitt's character empties a soda machine so the cascade of cans will attract zombies away from the doors he needs to enter. By this point, Pitt's character has injected himself with a deadly disease, effectively killing himself in order to preserve himself from zombification. The cascade of cans aesthetically represents this narrative point and hearkens back to KMFDM. The cans drop out of the machine at an increasingly rapid rate, mimicking "Drug"'s intensification of percussion events to and/or past the limit of human hearing. Just as Pitt's character has crashed his body, the cascade of cans crashes our hearing.
The climax presents a narrative and the auditory convergence on the same biopolitical idea: kill everything, because then the best will bounce back, phoenix-like, from that sensory cremation, stronger than ever. Zombies can't rebound from death, but still-living humans sure can (via immunization). Like a sonic bombardment brighter and more radiant than sunlight, this anti-zombie camouflage tactic phase-shifts death into exceptionally lively life. Just as the muted, tinitus-y moments in the film make the subsequent scenes feel comparatively more sonically rich and dynamic, intentional and carefully managed mass extinction ultimately makes the living more vibrant.
Sound & Biopolitics
Such vibrancy–that is, what Julian Henriques dubs "the dynamics of [the] periodic motion of vibrations" in Sounding Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (265)–is what "life" and "sound," as they are conceived by and function in contemporary biopolitics, have in common. "Sound," according to Henriques is "a particular kind of periodic motion, variation and change" (247). Sound waves are dynamic patterns of intensities (pressure); they move through matter and respond in turn, both to that movement itself and the secondary sound waves (harmonics) that movement produces. WWZ treats this notion of periodic motion, variation, and change as the conceptual basis for the ideally biopolitical "life." At around 20:00, when Pitt's character attempts to convince the Latino family sheltering him to leave their apartment with him, he says "movement is life…Moviemento es vida." Sedentary fortresses protect no one from zombies–we see this repeatedly in the film. The only way to survive is by rapidly adjusting to new conditions. The dynamism of adaptive flows—the ability to bounce back and recuperate (like an echoing pressure wave), to dynamically recombine (like both harmonizing frequencies and like a virus), to find signal in noise–this dynamism is life. Because it adapts to new challenges, because it moves, varies, and changes, life can bounce back from total annihilation, stronger than ever before. Only life lived like sound can be properly and sufficiently resilient. In WWZ, the zombie virus is a eugenic tool that weeds out insufficiently "sonic" life, life that is too static to respond to capitalist and biopolitical mandates for calculable motion, variation, and change.
When read through "Drug," WWZ illustrates the epistemic and ontological importance of sound to contemporary biopolitics. We think "life" works like we think sound works. Because "life" is the object and the mechanism of biopolitical government, power works on and through us sonically. If we want to analyze, critique, and fight the institutions, structures, and practices that put power to work for white supremacy, cis/het patriarchy, and all other forms of domination, then we need to start thinking and working sonically, too.
Some theorists, such as Elizabeth Grosz and Adriana Cavarero incorrectly think this move to sound and voice is itself revolutionary and counter-hegemonic. Just as the critique posed in 1993's "Drug" has been co-opted by 2013's WWZ, white feminist theory's sonic counter-modernities are the medium of biopolitical white supremacist patriarchy. When we think and work sonically, we're working with the master's tools; to bring down the master's house, we have to use them critically and strategically.
Featured Image by Flickr User crisper fayltrash
Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism will be published by Zer0 books this fall, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. She blogs at its-her-factory.com and is a regular contributor to Cyborgology.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
Queer Timbres, Queered Elegy: Diamanda Galás's The Plague Mass and the First Wave of the AIDS Crisis–Airek Beauchamp
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice–Yvon Bonenfant
The Noises of Finance– Nick Knouf
Toward A Civically Engaged Sound Studies, or ReSounding Binghamton
I want to enable my students to mobilize sound studies not just as an analytic filter to help them understand the world, but as a method enabling more meaningful engagement with it. This post, an abbreviated version of the paper I recently gave at the Invisible Places, Sounding Cities Conference in Viseu, Portugal on July 18, 2014, explores my pedagogical efforts to move my sound studies work from theory to methodology to praxis in the classroom and in my larger community. In particular, I am working to intervene in the production of social difference via listening and the process by which differential listening practices create fractured and/or parallel experiences of allegedly shared urban spaces.
Inspired by ongoing efforts such as ReBold Binghamton–the visual arts group alluded to by my assignment's title– Blueprint Binghamton, and the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, I wanted to articulate sound studies methods with long-term community engagement interventions. I decided to task the upper-level undergraduate students in my Spring 2014 "How We Listen" course with designing community engagement projects that identified and addressed an issue in Binghamton, the de-industrialized town in upstate New York housing our university. My students' proposals ranged from rain-activated sound art, to historical sound walks that layered archival sounds with current perceptions, and a "noise month" sound-collection and remix project designed to challenge entrenched attitudes. They then presented the projects via a public poster session open to faculty members, administrators, community representatives, and peers.
Working with local residents and using asset-based theories of civic engagement, the students' projects sought to re-sound Binghamton, enhancing existing forms of communication, amplifying hidden sounds and histories, and creating new sounds to resound throughout Binghamton's future. While the students initially set out to "fix" Binghamton—bringing year-round residents into the world as their largely 18-21 selves heard it—the majority opened their ears to alternative understandings that left them questioning the exclusivity of their own listening practices. Students realized that while they may have been inhabiting Binghamton for the past few years, they hadn't been perceptually living in the same town as year-round residents, and, conversely, that the locals' tendencies to hear students as privileged nuisances had historical and structural roots.
The historical, theoretical, and methodological groundwork that scholars of sound have laid in recent decades toward heightened social and political understandings of sound—fantastic in volume, quality, AND reach—have equipped sound studies scholars with powerful critical tools with which to build a more directly, civically engaged sound studies, one as much interested in intervention and prevention as continued reclamation and recovery. Scholar-artists such as Linda O'Keeffe have begun to fuse audio artistic praxis with the more social science-oriented field of urban studies. O'Keeffe's community project, highlighted in "(Sound)Walking Through Smithfield Square in Dublin," set out to solve an audio- spatial problem at the very heart of the city: why did the city's efforts to "rehabilitate" the landmark Smithfield Square—which had been a public market for hundreds of years—bring about its demise as a thriving public space rather than its rejuvenation? Equipping local students with recorders, O'Keeffe documented the students' understanding of the space as "silent," even though it was far from absent of sound. She noted local teenagers felt repelled by the newly wide-open square; the reverberation of their sounds as they grouped together to chat made them feel uncomfortable and surveilled—so it remained an isolating space of egress rather than a gathering place.
Importantly, O'Keeffe's conclusion moved beyond self-awareness to political praxis; she presented her students' self-documentation to Dublin city planners, intervening in Smithfield's projected future and attempting to prevent similar destruction of other thriving city soundscapes unaligned with middle-class sensory orientations. O'Keeffe's work sparked me to think of listening's potential as advocacy and agency, as well as the increasing importance of reaching beyond the identification of diverse listening habits toward teaching people to understand the partiality and specificity of their sonic experience in combination with the impact listening—and the power dynamics it is enmeshed in—has on the lives, moods, and experiences of themselves and others. Listening habits, assumptions, and interpretations do not just shape individual thoughts and feelings, but also one's spatial experience and sense of belonging to (or exclusion from) larger communities, both actual and imagined. Learning to understand one's auditory experience and communicate it in relation to other people enables new forms of civic engagement that challenge oppression at the micro-level of the senses and seeks equitable experiences of shared space to counter the isolating exclusion compelled by many urban soundscapes.
O'Keeffe's project also made me rethink how space-sound is shaped through social issues such as class inequity, particularly in my community of Binghamton, a small town of approximately 54,000 currently facing profound economic challenges. The end of the Cold War devastated Binghamton's economy—then primarily based in defense—and the economic downturn of the early-1990s provided a knock-out punch, severely impacting the region in ways it has yet to recover from: the behemoth local IBM relocated to North Carolina, manufacturing jobs permanently decreased by 64%, and the population shrank almost by half. Recent climate-change induced disasters have also left their mark; massive floods in 2005 and 2011—on a geographic footprint historically flooding only 200-500 years—displaced thousands of low-income residents, destroyed many businesses, and collectively caused close to 2 billion dollars in damage. The global recession of 2008 left over 30% of Binghamton's residents below the poverty line, including 40% of all children under 18.
The campus, 12,000 undergraduate students strong, often seems remote from the city I just described. Only 6% of BU students are drawn from its surrouding Broome County. The vast majority (60%) of BU's students hail from the New York City metro area, a site of racialized economic tension with the rest of the state, evidenced by campaigns such as "Unshackle Upstate." Indeed, Binghamton's student body is more racially diverse than Binghamton the city (Vestal, where the university is located, is 88% white), and even though the relatively low-cost public university–approximately eight thousand dollars a year for in-state tuition– serves many first-generation college students, students with generous financial aid packages, and students employed while matriculating, the city's poverty amplifies even slight class privilege.
These long-term structural fissures have led to tensions between the university students—whom some Binghamtonians problematically peg as wealthy outsiders and/or racially target—and full-time residents, dubbed "Townies" by many students and dehumanized as the backdrop to their college experience. While students and year-round residents inhabit the same physical spaces in Binghamton, they are not in fact living the same place and they often experience, interpret, and act on the same auditory information in drastically different ways. Binghamton sounds differently to each group, in terms of the impressions and interpretations of various auditory phenomena as well as the order of importance an individual gives to simultaneous sounds at any given moment.
Embodied aural perceptions shaped by class, race, age, and differing regional experience may in fact drive many of the "town and gown" conflicts—noise complaints most obviously—and exacerbate others, particularly mutually distorted perceptions that students bring Binghamton down and that residents are, as one student cruelly stated in the campus newspaper, "creatures" from "an endless horror movie." So how to address this divide? And how to use sound studies to do it? I knew I did not want to impose a community project on my students that did not have their buy in and creative energy behind it. I decided on a group-sourcing project that asked students to work together to design a sound-studies based community project. I envisioned the assignment as the first phase of a longer-term project, with the most workable idea serving as the basis for a full-blown service learning experience in future courses. However, the assignment proved to be pedagogically valuable in its own right, not just as a prelude to future work.
I arranged my course around the proposal assignment, providing students with the critical thinking skills to imagine a project of this type. We began with theoretical and methodological materials that would introduce them to sound studies—none of my students were familiar with the field and its assumptions—and ground their thinking in the idea that listening is a complex sociocultural, political, and critical practice. While we read and discussed multitude of pieces on listening, the students reported four scholars as especially inspirational to the project: Yvon Bonenfant's theorization of "queer listening" as a listening out (rather than the more normative taking in), Regina Bradley's work on race and listening in American courtrooms that focused on how white lawyers discredit witnesses speaking patois and African American Vernacular English, Maile Costa Colbert's artistic imagining of a "wayback sound machine," and Emily Thompson's work on noise and time/space/place, particularly in her new interactive "Roaring Twenties" project. Student Daniel Santos reported in a survey following the project,
The relationship between sound and time was very useful to our project; we understood the concept that no city ever sounds the same after a long period of time, and we sought to take advantage of this fact. Through our residents' stories, we learned that Binghamton was once booming with sound from numerous, lucrative industries. Walking into a factory brought an industrial cacophony: card punchers thudded as steel was pounded against steel. However, today, a walk into these factories results in an eerie silence. We wanted our soundwalk participants to realize and become affected by this lack of and difference in sound, and raise pertinent questions: what happened to these sounds? Why is there such a large difference in sound levels? Where do I place myself within this soundscape?
I worked with Binghamton's Center for Civic Engagement—a model program founded in 2010—and in particular with Assistant Director Christie Zwahlen, to equip students with basic-but-solid knowledge that would enable a new understanding of community work. Zwahlen brought home two major principles to students: 1) service learning has a pedagogical component; it is important to a project's success that students learn something through their work rather than merely donating time or skills, 2) Community engagement works best when based on identifying and mobilizing a community's assets rather than implementing an external project addressing perceived deficits. These two concepts meshed especially well with the students' evolving understanding of listening as multifaceted, political, and deeply impacted by temporal and spatial contexts, because it required the students to engage directly with community members and learn how to listen to their voices, histories, and needs.
For both civic engagement and sound studies, Zwahlen and I introduced students to the various methods used to solve problems and answer our most important questions. For civic engagement, Christie focused on the asset map, which forced students to think of the surrounding community in terms of its strengths rather than the weaknesses they could already readily list. This exercise not only flipped their perspective but also helped them imagine and hone their project by identifying community stakeholders who would be receptive to their inquiries.
In terms of sound studies, I introduced them to a multiplicity of methods through readings, experiential activities, and process writing, in particular sound provocations and sound walks. According to student Hannah Lundeen's post-project survey, the sound walks she performed proved especially fruitful:
Initially, solving a community issue through sound seemed next to impossible. It wasn't until sitting down and thinking about the sound studies methods of soundwalks that it became clear. I liked soundwalks because they are a way to engage anyone in sound studies. They are an easy concept to explain to people who may not have thought much about their soundscape previously. They are an active and fun way to engage all community members in listening well.
As Lundeen relates, interweaving these methods formed the foundation of their community projects, enabling their inquiries regarding understanding differences in listening, how to enable people to recognize and discuss aspects of their listening, and to provoke some kind of impactful social change.
The final third of the semester was devoted to working on the final project [Click these links for the Rubric for Final Poster Presentation we used to assess the projects as well as the assignment sheet with Tips for Successfully Completing this Project both of which I handed out on day one! ]. Following an initial period of research and discussion, students narrowed down their project ideas, identified and met in person with potential community partners–ReBold Binghamton, Binghamton's Center for Technology & Innovation, the Parks Department and several City Council members were especially helpful– and put together their proposals, emphasizing their new understandings of listening and its relationship to space and place via community mobilization. Students prepared a 7-minute gloss of their projects for public presentation that
- identified an issue (supported by research)
- described how project addressed the issue
- presented community asset map as a foundation
- shared list of potential community partners
- discussed sound studies methodologies supporting the project
- estimated benchmarks for the project's completion
- projected the project's long-term outcomes
- prepared personal reflections on the process.
Here is a sampling from the rich palette of student project pitches:
- Restoring the Pride: A public art initiative building rain-activated sound sculptures.
- BUCS: Binghamton Unites Community with Sound: A public group karaoke project.
- Safe and Sound: A "kiosk walk" of 10-interactive electronic sound art pieces that increase downtown destination traffic by day and operate as a "blue light" safety system by night.
- Blues on the Bridge Junior: A children's music stage at one of Binghamton's most popular yearly events.
- Happy Hour: A weekly campus radio show designed to combat seasonal depression.
- Listen Up!: Sound Month Binghamton: An annual themed digital "sound collection month" in March with accompanying "sounds of Binghamton" remix project. This project fosters community habituation to "Others'" sounds while also tracking long-term changes in the soundcape and in residents' ideas of noise.
- A Sound Walk Through Binghamton: Historical soundwalks through several areas in Binghamton, where archival sounds of the past (some compiled from recordings, some performed) are placed in continuity and contrast with contemporary soundscapes.
Zwahlen and I understand that this iteration of the project does not constitute civic engagement as of yet. Certainly, the students raised more questions than solutions: how to work with—and equitably solicit contributions from—community members rather than organize classroom-first? How to increase community involvement on a campus that is a foreboding maze at best—and how to increase student traffic in the many sites not reached by Binghamton's limited public transportation? Most importantly, How to share sound studies epistemology beyond the classroom, creating listening experiences that not only take differences into account but potentially re-script them?
As we move forward with long-term development, we will undoubtedly encounter more questions. However, even at its earliest stages, I believe guiding my students to integrate sound studies methodologies with asset-based service learning provided them with a transformative experience concerning the powerful resonance of applied knowledge and sparked the kind of self-realization that leads to civically engaged citizens. It created meaningful connections between them and a local community suddenly made significantly larger. For my students, listening became more than a metaphor or an individualized act of attention, rather they began to understand its role as a material conduit of location, outreach, and connection. As an anonymous student shared in my teaching evaluations: "This class was different, but in a very good way. It has been so involved with the human experience, more so than with other classes." In the middle of the so-called "humanities crisis," this response points to the potential power of a civically engaged sound studies, a branch of the field combining research with praxis to reveal the role of listening in the building, maintenance, and daily experiences of diverse communities in the city spaces they mutually inhabit but often do not fully and equitably share.
Featured Image by Shea Brodsky, (L to R) Binghamton University Students Robert Lieng, Daniel Santos, and Susan Sherwood, Director of Binghamton's Center for Technology & Innovation (CT&I)
Jennifer Stoever is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out! She is also Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University and a recipient of the 2014 SUNY Chancellor's Award in Teaching.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Sounding Out! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul– Brooke Carlson
Deejaying her Listening: Learning through Life Stories of Human Rights Violations– Emmanuelle Sonntag and Bronwen Low
Audio Culture Studies: Scaffolding a Sequence of Assignments– Jentery Sayers


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Leifer eager to sing in 'South Pacific'
Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015
Playing Emile de Becque in South Pacific requires at least two things: a strong bass voice and a face that suggests both wisdom and experience.
Thodos Dance to perform at Skidmore
Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015
More than 30 years ago, Melissa Thodos performed on the Skidmore College stage as a student. Now she's bringing her own dance company to the college for a residency that will culminate in a performance on Saturday, with works by Thodos, company members and another Skidmore alumna.
Review: Sinopoli's imagination soars, with a little help from friends
Sunday, Feb. 1, 2015
Review: Saturday night's program at The Egg served as a prime example of choreographer Ellen Sinopoli's fruitful partnerships.
Schenectady Civic Players present tale of loss with pathos, humor
Sunday, Feb. 1, 2015
David Lindsay-Abaire's "Rabbit Hole" is a series of scenes exploring a family's reaction to this unthinkable event, culminating in two powerful moments.
Gershwin musical sports classic tunes
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015
With the music of George and Ira Gershwin and a book by two-time Tony winner Joe DiPietro, it's hard not to like "Nice Work If You Can Get It."
Civic Players offer family drama; Wilde classic at Proctors
Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015
Jennifer Van Iderstyne's theater resumé is about to get a bit more diversified.
Patience required in funny, thought-provoking 'Water'
Friday, Jan. 23, 2015
Overheard at intermission: "I'm not sure where this is going."
Lubovitch's 'Transparent Things' to make SPAC debut
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015
Lar Lubovitch, one of America's most popular modern dance choreographers, will return with his dance company to Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, June 17. As part of the program, the company will present the SPAC debut of "Transparent Things."
'Boardwalk Empire' actress Nisi Sturgis enjoys Cap Rep role
Monday, Jan. 19, 2015
For many actresses, walking up to the producers of their hit TV show and letting them know you're pregnant might create a little anxiety. Nisi Sturgis, however, figured everything would be OK.
Review: Curtain Call finds humor, hope in battling depression
Sunday, Jan. 18, 2015
Review: How can a story of five people all trapped by depression and loss, mired in a mass of inertia and sorrow, be entertaining? Good question. Playwright Kim Rosenstock has crafted a humorous and human answer with her play "Tigers Be Still."
Two plays explore facets of the human condition at Curtain Call, Cap Rep
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015
"Tigers Be Still" is a great new play according to Christine Doidge, and it's also unique.
'Jersey Boys' is a memorable, nostalgic evening
Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2015
"Oh, what a night!" Lyrics from the Four Seasons' hit "December, 1963," the song that opens "Jersey Boys" and serves as an encore that had Tuesday night's full house on its feet. And it's what you'll be saying to your friends the next day at work.
Puppeteer Morgan Kelly to debut play
Saturday, Jan. 10, 2015
Morgan Kelly wants to open people's minds about the power of puppets.
Musical chronicles rise of The Four Seasons
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015
When "Jersey Boys" comes to Proctors in Schenectady on Tuesday night for six days, Drew Seeley, a native of Toronto, will be playing the part of Bob Gaudio, who in 1960 joined forces with Frankie Valli, Nick Massi and Tommy DeVito to form The Four Seasons.
Arts winter/spring preview: Theater
Sunday, Jan. 4, 2015
Productions that should stand out in the coming theater season.

subset: commoncrawl


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Logan County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2010 census, the population was 41,848. Its county seat is Guthrie. — Read more
The published records belong to the county clerk's office. All of the revenue from printing copies goes directly to support Logan county.


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I have been shopping at MJM Magic for many years. Great products are available here at the very best prices. I have never had any hitch with any...Read More ->
When I found out about MJM I instantly made it my number 1 magic store. There is no other magic store site that has better deals than MJM period....Read More ->


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Some historic contributions made by this great twentieth-century Krishna devotee and teacher—his books, his society, his exemplary life.
Except for stubbornness, there is no reason why anyone, anywhere can't chant Hare Krishna. Any time.
Srila Prabhupada very sweetly describes the qualifications and qualities of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
With everybody babbling back and forth about nothing of consequence, how can we meditate on things that really matter?
Audio: Radhanath Swami speaking in Gokul Mahavan in 2004 about Krishna's appearance.
How is it that chanting God's Names would make people want "to burst out of their homes into the streets?"
"When I was visiting India my aunt remarked, "You don't realize—if I went outside the house with japa beads in my hand, people would laugh . . ."
Srila Prabhupada explains the significance of the appearance of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
Srila Prabhupada describes the significance of the position of Srimati Radharani.
God doesn't have names like ours—mundane sounds provided to us for the sake of physical identification.
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Post Content
Governor Deval Patrick in Northampton today announced a new partnership between the Massachusetts Broadband Institute and the Executive Office of Transportation to bring broadband to unserved and underserved communities in Western Massachusetts. Joined by elected leaders, Transportation Secretary James Aloisi, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Greg Bialecki, MassHighway Commissioner Luisa Paiewonsky, and other administration officials at the MassHighway District 2 office, the Governor said $4.3 million in state bond funds will help build out broadband networks to enhance service for small businesses, schools and individuals and improve security and transportation operations in the area.
The new partnership builds on the existing MassHighway project, which has consisted of six 1.25" fiber-optic conduits that run from the Connecticut border 50 miles up I-91 to 4.56 miles south of the Vermont border. The Governor's investment extends the conduits up the additional 4.56 miles to the Vermont border. Completing these last five miles will enable collaboration across state borders in a variety of areas, including public safety, education, e-health and access to Internet2.
Two conduits will be used by MassHighway for their Intelligent Traffic System. The other four conduits, reserved for economic development and the build out of broadband networks in Western Massachusetts, will be leased by the MBI, which will own the fiber placed in one of the conduits and lease the other three for future development.
Broadband infrastructure investments are critical components of Governor Patrick's Massachusetts Recovery Plan, which combines state, federal and, where possible, private efforts to provide immediate and long-term relief and position the Commonwealth for recovery. Learn more here.
Learn more about the Massachusetts Broadband Institute.
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The MBTA has issued a Service Alert: No Weekend Service on the commuter rail Fitchburg Main Line for the period from April 25th, 2015 through November 22nd, 2015. The suspension of weekend service will allow construction of major improvements on the Fitchburg Main Line to …Continue Reading MBTA: Fitchburg Line Weekend Service Suspension
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The efforts of more than 170 Massachusetts businesses, colleges, and universities, who promote active, healthy, and sustainable commute options, were celebrated today for helping Massachusetts to reduce traffic congestion, to promote healthy lifestyles, and benefit the environment. The Massachusetts Excellence in Commuter Options (ECO) Awards …Continue Reading Employers Honored for Excellence in Commuter Options
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The Social Channel Roundup: Updates You Should Know About
By Madelyn Dow Each quarter, I compile a review of some of the major updates across social channels. I primarily do this because I've told my clients I would. BUT, it's one of those exercises that yields really valuable information for anyone who touches social media (and who doesn't these days, right?). So now I'm imparting continue reading


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Aerosmith - The Things They Say 19717
by WENN | 07 January 2011
"He's a good friend of mine. I went to a picnic with him and he taught me how to fry a turkey." Aerosmith star Steven Tyler refuses to enter a war of words with Kid Rock after he publicly criticised the Cryin' singer for becoming an American Idol judge.


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Fern and Thistle
The St. Louis Senior Dog Project is a not-for-profit dog rescue organization specializing in older dogs but taking in and finding homes for dogs of all ages...even puppies. Meet your new best friend 11 to 3 Saturday,March 28, and noon to 3 Sunday, March 29, in the Kirkwood Petco. To see which dogs will be there plus other available dogs, go Here.
We call them the synchronized beagles: Fern and Thistle. If Fern turns left, so does Thistle. If Thistle curls up for a nap, so does Fern. Side by side or following one after the other, they are always together. Should one of them notice that the other has stepped too far away, she will catch up and set things right. They are what we call "bonded." They need to stay together.
I wonder about their history. A rural shelter called us about them. They'd been picked up together as strays and were 8 to 10 years old. No one wanted to adopt them because of their age. After a short transport, they came to safety with us. What sweethearts! Imagine two beagles trying to climb into your lap at the same time. Imagine two side-by-side beagle heads resting on their paws at the side of your bed, begging for a lift. Adorable. Someone must have loved them.
But as every dog lady learns, love is not enough when it comes to dog care. We soon learned that both Fern and Thistle had advanced cases of heartworm disease. The vet who saw them said Thistle especially had one of the worst cases she'd ever seen. She could see the worms on the chest x-rays. The footlong worms live in the heart, lungs and associated vessels.
Heartworm disease is usually fatal if untreated. The worms stretch out the arteries and damage the heart and lungs. The disease is preventable if the owner keeps the dog on monthly heartworm pills. Their owner might have loved Fern and Thistle but also failed to give them the care they needed.
Now we wait. The vet wanted Fern and Thistle on antibiotics and steroids for a month prior to treatment. Then they will receive an injection of an arsenic-based solution that will start killing the worms. The treatment itself can be dangerous if the worms die off too quickly and form clots. That's why caregivers must make sure the dogs stay calm so that their hearts don't overwork.
We're worried about Fern and Thistle, but they're little troopers for sure. In a couple weeks they'll go to the veterinary hospital for their first treatment. A month later, they'll return for more treatment.
At Bose Rescue, we've treated a lot of heartworm dogs, but we've never taken on cases quite this serious. We worry that they may not survive treatment. Sometimes Thistle coughs and wheezes. She has trouble breathing at times. Fern, although healthier, tires easily.
The future is uncertain for our synchronized beagles. Please keep them in your thoughts. Here they are in a synchronized performance.
Ellen Ellick
St. Louis Senior Dog Project


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Poems and pictures portray our gratitude for Earth's natural resources.
Hear, read, write, draw and talk about scientist and inventor Thomas Alva Edison.
Heroes and heroines are people who step up to help in stressful, challenging times. Students connect with helpers by cre
Celebrate workers in one's school! Honor volunteers and staff with handmade certificates, medals, or ribbons. Let them k
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2015 SBC Annual Meeting Pre-registration is now open. Each pre-registered messenger will enjoy quick check-in when they arrive at the annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in June. Make plans now to attend! Read More...
Jeana and I have just returned from 12 days away, with much of that time in the heart of the mission field. As we conversed one-on-one and in several meetings with our missionaries in challenging fields all over the Middle East, we were able to hear their hearts loud and clear. As I have thought about this upon my return home, I feel it is incumbent upon me to share what I am able to within the boundaries of security. Read More...
The trial of Jesus Christ before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate is the most famous trial in human history. One of its most fascinating aspects remains somewhat of a mystery: Where was it held in Jerusalem?
From the Book of 1 Samuel:
And when the people were come into the camp, the elders of Israel said, Wherefore hath the Lord smitten us to day before the Philistines? Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of Shiloh unto us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of the hand of our enemies (I Sam. 4:3). - Continue...
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How To Make No-Sew Curtains That Make A Window Look Bigger
We're back with our homemade nursery curtain panel how-to. Remember when we revealed our punchy patterned find during last week's shopping post? Well here's how we took it from one big bolt of rolled up fabric (which you can find here)…
… to three gorgeous floor-length curtains (two for the window and one for the doorless closet). And probably best of all: there's no sewing machine required. In fact, here's my short and sweet list of supplies: tape measure, scissors, iron on hem tape, and an iron of course. Plus we even added a few kid-safe features so stay tuned for those details…
But before we get into all the dirty curtain-makin' details, we should mention that we hope our baby sleeps well. So in the interest of aiding our little one in that area, we decided that we also needed to grab some sort of 100% light-blocking blinds or shades. So we trolled the aisles of Home Depot and found some chic white faux-wood blinds. We loved them because they felt almost like substantial wood shutters when they were lowered (a lot more solid than those thin plastic or metal venetian blinds) and they definitely would block any and all light when in use (and could easily be pulled up and out of the way to let light stream in during the day).
But here's the bummer. Of course they didn't come in the exact measurements of our quirky old house's window (39 1/4″ wide in case you're wondering). Sadness. But we soon learned that Home Depot could actually cut them down to custom fit our window perfectly- and the cutting service is F-R-E-E. That turned our frown upside down. So we give the guy in the orange apron our window's odd width and he had our custom-cut clean-lined faux wood blinds waiting for us about five minutes later. The blinds weren't super cheap at $37, but they look convincingly like much pricier white wood blinds and we know the darkness that they'll provide will be priceless when we're dying for one more minute of sleep.
Of course we also liked that they didn't have those dangerous loopy pull cords (they were labeled as having "kid safe cords" that are actually separated instead of connected so they're less of a strangulation hazard- no loop to get caught in). And of course we plan to keep them wound around one of those cord wrangling pieces of metal at the top right corner of the window far out of baby's reach anyway, but we love the added loop-free design.
And since we love a before picture, here's the window prior to our little curtain and blind fest:
John had the blinds up in about twenty minutes, but they definitely left a lot to be desired in the length department. They were actually a bit heavy to raise and lower, all due to the fact that they were at least two feet too long for our window, so there were a bunch of slats that just clumped together at the bottom of the blinds when they were in the "lowered" position. Luckily in the installation instructions they actually detailed how to shorten them to customize their length to fit any window. Nice.
So John just followed the included directions and popped out these little plastic pieces on the bottom and could easily remove as many slats as he'd like and trim the excess string. Then he just popped the bottom pieces back on and we had an even more customized nursery blind that was a lot less cumbersome to raise and lower without all those extra slats at the bottom. Then, like a finely tuned relay team, John tagged me and said "your turn" and I began working on the curtains.
First I measured the approximate height that I wanted the curtains to be (just shy of 8′ for an almost floor to ceiling look) and added an inch and a half on the top and bottom to accommodate the hem. It was actually a nice clean measurement in the end because I determined that cutting two eight foot long sections of fabric would do the trick perfectly (since I wanted them a bit shy of 8′ but with the added hem measurement it brought them right back up to 8′ exactly). Hurrah for no quarter of an inch calculations!
The other super convenient thing about measuring out my fabric was that we already happened to have our new 5 x 8′ rug on the floor… so to cut my 8′ long fabric sections, I simply rolled the bolt from one end of the rug to the other and cut a straight line using the edge of the rug as my guide. It doesn't get much easier than that. And for the width I just left each panel as wise as the bolt allowed (so I didn't need to trim those edges at all).
Then it was time for my trusty Heat N' Bond iron on hem tape (I always grab the "ultra hold" variety). You may have seen us using it in this crib skirt tutorial from a while back and we've also used it to hem all the white Ikea curtains that we have hanging in the rest of the house. In short: I'm a hem tape black belt (the irony is that John does all the clothes-ironing in the house). Anyway it's great stuff for leaving a polished and clean-looking edge (a lot more reliable then me with a sewing machine!) and it's even washable and super cheap (we grab ours for a few bucks a roll at Michael's). So I whipped out the ironing board, fired up the iron, laid out my big eight foot long fabric panel and had my scissors and hem tape on hand.
All it took was an easy-iron hem on each of the four sides of my fabric (for step by step hem tape instructions, just check out this post). Then I had a nice finished panel (without any rod loops or tabs) that I could clip up using my cheap-o oil-rubbed bronze curtain rings and rod from Target. Just look at how seamless and perfect that edge is! Much more even and less bunchy than anything I could sew…
Then I tagged John to get to work hanging the curtain rod with heavy duty anchors (so it'll never come toppling down, even if over 100lbs of force is used) while I created a third curtain panel for the closet (this one only needed to be seven feet long). I also made a little rod pocket at the top of this panel (I just positioned hem tape about 4 inches below the edge of the fabric and ironed the fabric to that line of hem tape created a nice loop of fabric). Meanwhile John was already executing my let's-cheat-our-off-centered-window-so-it-looks-more-balanced plan.
This angle gives you a better idea of what we were dealing with. See how the window is shifted a bit too much to the left? Well it's nothing a curtain rod and some billowy floor length curtains can't totally solve. I asked John to hang the left curtain rod support hook only about four inches wider than the trim on the left side of the window but requested that he hang the right curtain rod support hook about fifteen inches wider than the trim on the right side of the window.
This way, once we hung each of the curtain panels, we could cheat them both over to the right (blocking a bit of the window on the left side, but adding a ton of balance and polish to the room):
And we also mentioned in our shopping post that we snagged our simple oil-rubbed bronze curtain rod along with two packs of curtain rings on clearance at Target for less than $12 total. We love the height and the elegance that the shot of dark color brings to the wall, and love that it echoes everything from the mocha finish on the floor to a few of the darker wood accents that we'll be bringing in to keep things from getting too sugary sweet and matchy-matchy.
Plus the clip-on curtain rings are actually something of a safety feature. Remember how we mentioned that someone could hang on those curtains without the rod coming down thanks to the use of some heavy duty anchors? Well we also realized that using clip-on curtain rings would allow for just the fabric panels to pull down if anyone got too rowdy and tried to swing from them (while the rings and the rod would most definitely stay put). We even tested them out by tugging on them a bit, and although it took pretty much all of my pregnant adult weight, sure enough the fabric was released from the rings and fluttered lightly to the floor while the rod and the rings stayed nice and securely in place on the wall.
And as someone who has never used curtain ring clips before I just have to sing their praises. Not only are they nice little secret safety features, they also create such perfect little "waves" in the panels which result in such an amazingly high end look (and best of all, there's no rod-pocket required, so you can hang any panel of fabric without worrying about extra sewing or loop-making).
Oh and we can't forget our tiny little blue closet (thanks to John's cute idea to bring the aqua color from the ceiling into the mini enclave for fun). Doesn't the curtain panel add some nice pattern and sweetness to a closet that was formerly pretty bleak looking?
Maybe we should refresh your memory with a before pic:
It's looking better already, right? And of course we still have to add bins, baskets, and more hanging rods (along with some sort of storage piece on the floor of the closet).
As for how we swagged our curtain panel so it's mostly out of the way, we just hung it on a $3 tension rod (one that screws into both sides of the molding for more reinforcement than those that rely only on tension). Then we added a regular old Ikea coat hook that we already had on the left side of the closet's interior trim. Next I made a little strip of fabric (using my trusty hem tape to finish the edges) and used that to create a loop around the curtain panel. Note: it's safety pinned in the back so it can easily be removed and readjusted.
Then it was as simple as slipping my loop of fabric onto the hook on the side of the closet to hold the curtain off to the side.
So that's the story of how we made our off-centered window look more balanced, blocked out all the light for less sleepless nights (fingers crossed) and added a fun pop of pattern to both sides of the nursery in the form of breezy floor-length curtains (which make the ceilings feel about a foot higher). Plus we only spent about $35 a panel (with almost an entire yard of fabric leftover!). Oh and it always makes us smile at our fabric luck when we recall that it's actually indoor/outdoor fabric, so it's a lot more stain and fade resistant than the average bear (although still completely washable). Which is a good thing when it comes to sticky fingers and goey faces…
But what about you guys? Have you made your own curtains before? Do you have a closet with a panel of fabric on a tension rod in lieu of a door? Spill the sewing (or hem tape) beans.
Psst- Wanna see our nursery progress from the very beginning? Here's our painting post, our big shopping spree, and our crib hunting rundown.
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439 Comments
Oh my goodness! I just stumbled on your blog-I swear in real life we'd be best friends! I LOVE the nursery-we're in the process of moving from apartment to house, and I'm shopping around for ideas especially for my toddler's room. Were the rod anchors purchased seperately from the rod, and if so, where did you find them? (the hooks too… such a great idea! I just keep a short curtain now but those are so gorgeous!)
I love you twoAND all the updates about the bean's room. Even though I'm 21 and still live with my parents while I'm finishing school – I check the blog every day!
I want to take the mirrored doors (2) off of my closet and just lean them against the wall so I can access my closet easier. Do you think a closet with an opeining of around 5 feet would still be able to accomodate a curtain panel or would you just leave it open?
THANKS! xo Steph
What an awesome room for a baby! What a lucky baby! :)
Speaking of Local! On RVANews.com, a local news source you probably have seen or been onto, you've been nominated under the "Best Overall Blog". Just wanted to pass it along in hopes many of your loyal readers would get out and vote. Votes close 10pm on Feb. 19th. Here's the link:
I've already voted for you (and for my neighborhood blog!)
Good luck!
Yay – your instructions on using iron on hemming tape are just in time for me to put them to use tonight! Thanks!
Hey guys! The nursery is looking great and I love the fabric you chose for the curtain panels. Do you know the name/designer of the fabric?
Cute curtains! Last summer I made my living room curtains with the sewing machine. They were incredibly easy to do. Instead of having them go on a rod, I used clip rings. I love the look of them!
One thing I might suggest is to add a liner. Before you know it, your curtains are going to be sun-bleached, and all that beautiful fabric design will fade away. If you line them with broadcloth or some cheap white fabric, it will keep them bright and beautiful. You could certainly add it to yours!
Have a great one!
Hi guys! I love all the nursery posts! Keep'em comin!
One question on your ceiling color – is it a true aqua? I looked at a swatch of the color you choose and it looked more green but in the pictures of your room it looks aqua. I love that color and I was just wondering if the color on my computer is way off…
Thank you for answering my question. You guys are always so helpful!
Re Megan and the 4″ curtain hem: the extra fabric helps weigh the curtains down so that they will drape properly. It's really helpful for light-weight fabrics that you don't want fluttering all over the place. Just a little extra info on that. Looks like yours are plenty heavy enough to keep themselves in order.
I LOVE that fabric! And since you've got so much left over, maybe you can make some springy throw pillows or something.
Absolutely wonderful, par for the course. I would recommend though, instead of a safety pin (because they get bent over time if there's too much weight, and they can just be a hassle) that you might want to try some stick-on velcro for the fabric strap holding your door curtain to the side.
Thanks for all your great ideas!
The nursery is adorable! Thanks for the tip on hemming curtains – gives me a lot of hope for making some of my own.
Thank you so much for all your help. You always answer all my silly questions.
Can I just say that I'm still trying not to be insanely jealous about your GORGEOUS aqua capiz light – for $50!!!! Talk about perfect!! I'm trying to find something for our daughter's room, but since we plan on having her share with her soon-to-arrive baby brother for a couple of years, I don't want anything too girly. So I have no idea of what to put up there. But, what I reallly wanted to say was that it was interesting HD cut those shades for you. I've wanted them for so long, but didn't think 2″ would work. (and they don't make the faux wood in 1″) Also, Lowe's said they wouldn't cut them (unless they were a certain expensive brand) so I never even bothered to ask HD. So it was good to know that they did for you and that they still look good (even though they're wider). But . . . out at WalMart today I found 29″ jute Roman Shades that are what I've been looking for for oh, about 8 months!!!!! I have looked all over, (at W-M before too) and they just didn't make that standard size. So I don't know what changed, but I snapped up 4 of them for our odd-sized windows, and I'm going to measure a couple other windows as well. So excited! So I guess I won't be needing HD to cut blinds for me afterall!
Sort of a random comment but I like the way you painted the furnace vent the same colour as the wall.
nice job! I love how you "balanced" the window. why do they make houses/rooms with such off-balanced windows; it drives me nuts! (I like symmetry.) :-)
Great work! I love the way you centered the window with the use of the curtains! I did a similar thing in our kitchen to make a small window appear bigger. However, I am not so sure about just seaming the curtains without sewing. I made my own curtains the same way, but followed through by sewing them. I honestly doubt I'll ever buy curtains again :-)
Here's the link to my project:
Let me know how the seams hold up… it could be different in Virgina than hot southern California weather where the seam tape might un-stick.
Great job once again though~ I love the closet hook idea, our closet has a curtain as well because of an dresser that makes a door too complicated, so we might be adding that on ;-)
Those curtains are fabulous! Love the pattern – it works really well with the wall color. Great idea to cover that open doorway, too! I like how wrapped the loop of fabric around to fasten it on that little hook – clever!
I haven't made curtains yet, but have seriously been considering it for some of our windows. I did, however, make a table runner with that no-sew adhesive and it turned out really well! That stuff is ingenious! It was a nice little test run before I buy a bunch of fabric to make any curtains with. Trying to pick out a fabric is so overwhelming though! Good choice on the indoor/outdoor fabric.
Love it! I have been a fan of curtains on closets since college. For our first baby's room we didn't have a closet, but I actually took the door off the room (it was a 100 yr old house and the door didn't even fit into the door frame properly). Instead I hung a shower stall sized tension rod in the door frame with breezy expresso silk-look curtains- draped them off to both sides and put a walk-through safety gate on the bottom. It was like a modern dutch door :) Our house was quiet enough that we didn't need the door to be a sound barrier for him and it was fun to draw the curtain back to peek at him at night. More importantly, it meant I could fit a tall dresser right next to the door (where the door would have normally swung). It made the room feel so much bigger without having to worry about the swing of the door. Now that we have a different house he has a regular door, but I took the bifold doors off his closet and hung drapes on either side. It doubles as theater curtains when we want to do a puppet show and it's so much easier for a toddler to open and close curtains than the finger-pinching bifolds!
As always, love the inspiration!!
I LOVE the curtain in lieu of a closet door. I have been in my house for 6 months now, and my bedroom was the first room I re-did. The closet doors just seemed so bulky, ugly, and boring. I used a simple tan linen curtain panel and a tension rod (both from Target) to create a billowy, softer cover-up for my closet mess. While my father thinks it "just looks like I can't afford a closet door," I think it makes the closet seem more special, somehow, and it totally fits in with the serene, natural feel I want my bedroom to have.
I love how your curtains turned out! The nursery is looking so lovely already! Your little girl is going to LOVE her room.
You inspired me to post a similar no-sew curtain project that I did (over a year ago) in our bedroom. I had the same closet idea – great minds think alike! We also tried our hand at making a cornice. We learned some things while in the process, but I love how the room turned out. Thanks again, for sharing your wonderful ideas and being an inspiration!
The curtains look great! And this post came at the perfect time…I am just getting ready to order fabric for curtains in our master bedroom tonight. I already bought the hem tape and am really excited to try it out!
So beautiful. It is so fun to relive vicariously through you two that very special time before the first baby. There is nothing like that in the world. Decorating a nursery together. Putting together the crib where this "new person" will sleep. I remember standing in the nursery before our first arrived and saying "someone is really coming to LIVE here… with us!" Such excitement for something you know is going to be wonderful….but just how AMAZING… you'll soon find out. Thanks so much for letting all of us follow along:-) Best wishes!!!
Love your Blog. Love your nursury.
Just wondering where did you pick up the Super CUTE light fixture?? I love it and think it would be perfect for my little girls surfer room. :)
The fabric is PERFECT!!!! I love the colors so much for your sweet little gal's nursery. Every detail is simple and lovely. Can't wait to see the rest.
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I work as a document controller in an office. Due to my job position, i need to enhance my official english way too good rather than daily expression and others! Does anyone has a good suggestion?
I couldn't find a webpage that teaches official English. However, you might try googling "document controller", and read those webpage which describe the duties of a document controller. You might be able to pick up useful vocabulary there. For example:
Good luck!
You had better get familiar with speacial terms of your work . Since you do not care vocal conversation , you need to master your vocabulary in your special field anyway.
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Grand Forks lacks some interest for high-density development
Although some say building denser is more efficient for cities, local experts say Grand Forks doesn't seem to be at that point yet.
"I think that we'll get there," said Jonathan Holth, president of the Grand Forks Downtown Development Association board of directors.
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Torino defender Angelo Ogbonna admits he's a fan of AC Milan.
Ogbonna has been linked with the Rossoneri ahead of the January market.
"I do like Milan," he admitted when asked about his footballing preferences. "However, that doesn't mean that I will end up going there..."
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Tom Cruise Goes Rogue in 'Oblivion' Trailer (Video)
The sci-fi thriller from "Tron: Legacy" helmer Joseph Kosinski also stars Morgan Freeman.
Tom Cruise falls deeper into interplanetary intrigue in the new Oblivion trailer.
It starts off well enough for Cruise's Jack Harper, with the drone repairman shooting hoops by a scenic lake and listening to vintage tunes on vinyl. But this is Earth 60 years after an alien attack destroyed half the planet, and Harper is one of the few remaining humans on the planet. In a few weeks, he'll join the rest of humanity somewhere off-planet.
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VIDEO: Tom Cruise Discovers Dangerous Secrets in 'Oblivion' Trailer
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