| 00:03 |
Hannah McGregor: |
[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listen to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, pitch an episode to ShortCuts season three. You can start with a blog post on SPOKENWEBLOG, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno] |
| 00:43 |
Hannah McGregor: |
[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights, that’s every second week, following the monthly [[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts, on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine MacLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] |
| 01:45 |
Katherine McLeod: |
[End Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts where we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Sound Effect: Scissor Snip] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. This is the last episode of our second season. It’s a chance to think back to our sonic journeys into the archives and the questions that have emerged from them. How does archival listening listen to liveness and sociality? How do we hear time? How do we hear the marking of time in a recording? How can a podcast episode hold sound with care? This season of ShortCuts was a practice in feminist listening with recordings of poets Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Allison, Phyllis Webb, Alexei Perry, Cox, Dionne Brand, and now in this final ShortCuts for season two, Tanya Davis. We’ll start with the clip of Davis from the archives. Usually on ShortCuts, we build towards hearing the clip. But this time we’ll be starting with it because this ShortCuts is as much about the clip as it is about the conversation afterwards, with a special guest. Let’s dive in. Here is spoken word and musician, Tanya Davis, performing “How To Be Alone” at the Words & Music Show in Montreal. It was performed on the stage of Casa del Popolo on December 16th, 2012. |
| 03:14 |
Audio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012: |
If you are at first lonely, be patient./ If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were you weren’t okay with it, just wait./ You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it./ Start with the acceptable places./ The bathroom, the coffee, shop the library, /where you can stall and read the paper where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there/ where you can browse the stacks and smell the books/ you’re not supposed to talk much anyways, so it’s safe there./ There’s also the gym./ If you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you could put headphones in./ And there’s public transportation because we all gotta go places/ and there’s prayer and meditation./ No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath, seeking peace and salvation./ Start simple./ Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles. |
| 04:06 |
Audio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012: |
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow downers/ employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they like you will be alone./ Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone./ When you were comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner./ A restaurant with linen and silverware./ You’re no less intriguing a person if you’re eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger./ In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were./ Go to the movies, where does dark and soothing,/ alone in your seat to midst of fleeting community./ And then take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you./ Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. |
| 04:56 |
Audio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012: |
Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not./ And if they are assume it is with best and human intentions,/ the way bodies move genuinely to beats is after all gorgeous and affecting/ Dance until you’re sweating and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things/ Down your back like a brook of blessings./ Go to the woods alone./ Trees and squirrels will watch for you./ Roam an unfamiliar city,/ there are always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting./ Give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute./ And those conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches may have never happened had you not been there by yourself./ Society is afraid of alone though./ Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements./ Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them./ But alone is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it/ You could stand…
|
| 05:58 |
Katherine McLeod: |
That archival audio was selected by SpokenWeb researcher, Ali Barillaro. Ali selected it for a ShortCuts blog post, or what was then called Audio of the Week. Ali is a SpokenWeb researcher who recently completed her MA at Concordia. You may have heard her present her research on audience applause in archival collections, and you very likely have heard her voice. She sings the vocals [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] in the SpokenWeb Podcast theme song. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] And so, it is very fitting that my conversation with her here veers into talking about singing and performing and the challenges of doing that through times in which our access to spaces that might otherwise have been used for artistic practices have changed. I invited her to revisit what she had said about Tanya Davis’ recording.
|
| 06:51 |
Ali Barillaro: |
I originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How To Be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain about life in the midst of a pandemic. |
| 07:00 |
Ali Barillaro: |
I’m someone who under normal circumstances would gladly endorse and espouse Davis’s hopeful, poetic guide to finding freedom in solitude and learning to be comfortable inside your own head. But what struck me about this performance was that it made me realize just how far removed I now felt from Davis’s concept of being alone. The public locations listed as ideal spots to practice being by yourself, the coffee shops, libraries, movie theaters, and even the bus and Metro were no longer available to me. The version of alone evoked in the poem is not the alone most of us have come to know since March, 2020. And it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss while listening. The echo trailing each of Tanya’s words, fittingly conjures up an image in my mind of the poet reciting her work alone at the center of a vast empty room. Even though I know she’s speaking to a crowd from the small stage at Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Though, the recording left me longing for what felt like a lost form of solitude, I have also come to hear it as a calming and quiet reminder to try to find peace amongst the chaos, to reach out to community and loved ones however we can, and to be patient with yourself, as you learn to adapt to a new normal.
|
| 08:21 |
Katherine McLeod: |
You wrote that about a year ago, was it?
|
| 08:24 |
Ali Barillaro: |
Yeah it’s been a while.
|
| 08:24 |
Katherine McLeod: |
– Yeah, July, 2020. What does it feel like for you to hear yourself reflect on Tanya Davis’s recording in that way?
|
| 08:35 |
Ali Barillaro: |
It was kind of an interesting experience actually, because I think I do feel differently now. Like I’m not at that same point that I was when I wrote that and when I was experiencing those emotions. With vaccines coming out, getting my first dose, having an appointment for my second dose, having seen quite a lot more people outdoors… I do still have some lingering sense of that strangeness of this new concept of alone and what that means to be alone while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, even though circumstances have changed.
|
| 09:11 |
Katherine McLeod: |
It struck me with listening to it, how they’re actually very public ways of being alone, like the sitting on the bus. And he says the phrase like “alone is a freedom” and just that very statement is much more complicated when alone –that doesn’t feel like a freedom. [Laughs] So, yeah.
|
| 09:35 |
Ali Barillaro: |
It’s actually made me reflect back on something – I used to not really like the phrase “alone together”, but I think that has been –anyone who’s been living through this pandemic and lockdowns and isolation but that lives with a partner, a roommate, someone else that has really [Laughs] – that sentiment, that phrase has really become a reality for a lot of people, and how to navigate that differently when you might have lived together beforehand, but things are different because it’s really most of the time just going to be you and maybe this one other person and how that changes the dynamic of your own relationship, but also of your own personal activities, whether that be work, or hobbies, or just relaxing. Things are now different. So at first, around the time, especially when I was writing this piece for the blog, I think I was feeling a little bit boxed in and in my own apartment. Because, my partner works from home. |
| 10:39 |
Ali Barillaro: |
And we do have an office space, which we do use as well. He’s also a musician and we use that space normally for music, for recording things or just working on things. But that has had to change during the day, the regular nine to five. I don’t have access to that space. So that is one limitation that I had to deal with. But then in addition to that, what was really frustrating as well on top of that is yes, I have access to the rest of my apartment, but it’s not– I don’t live in a giant apartment. And if I was going to be making a lot of noise that comes with either just practicing or wanting to write or record something, I can’t do that either during those time periods. So that was a block that I felt that I had. |
| 11:28 |
Ali Barillaro: |
And it was a little bit de-motivating for quite a long time. I’ll also say additionally that even though my partner and I both do music, we really do things or we did tend to do things quite separately where he has his endeavors and I have mine. And I’m also someone who’s very private about music, even though I like to share things when they’re like – when I’m happy with them when they’re finalized. But there is a huge amount of vulnerability that comes with even if it’s not your own original music and even if you’re just working on a cover song, like I’m very –I get very nervous even around this person who is so close to me. So finding times when this person is around to just like practice and maybe make mistakes and things like that was a little hard for me at first. |
| 12:26 |
Ali Barillaro: |
But more recently, just in maybe like the last couple of months even, I have started to say like, “Hey, you know, well, we can try to, we both like this song why don’t we try to work on this together on the weekends when you’re not having to work and be in that space.” And it’s actually been really great. So I’ve tried to [Laughs] – I guess also with this change in mindset that I’ve had in terms of the pandemic in general and aloneness in general, how things have sort of changed that relation to music and performance with this particular person who I’ve been alone together with has also transformed, which has been really lovely. And we did a acoustic cover of a song called “Digging My Own Grave” which is quite an emotional song actually. [Laughs] [Start Music: “Digging My Own Grave”] |
| 13:31 |
Ali Barillaro: |
[Music Continues in the Background: “Digging My Own Grave”] It really interesting experience as well, because I was doing primarily the lead vocals on it. And he’s done quite a few covers of their songs prior, just on his own. So it was kind of a nice change as well – and dynamic of that he would be there to be playing the music, but also to be doing the backup vocals and that I would be taking the lead on it. And we had to do some transposing to get that to work for both of us to get that range to be okay on both ends and that we both sound good [Laughs] making this. So yeah, we recorded that in the office slash music space, filmed it just a very basic video and put that together and up on my YouTube channel [Music Continues as Full Interlude: “Digging My Own Grave”]. |
| 14:15 |
Ali Barillaro: |
[End Music: “Digging My Own Grave”] And people –friends and family were really enjoying it, they were like, “Oh, it’s really nice finally, that we get to hear the two of you together. And not just one of you, like it’s, it’s nice. It’s a nice change.”
|
| 14:57 |
Katherine McLeod: |
That is beautiful. And thinking that it’s yeah, the collaboration, the coming together also is that –it almost is representative of the energy that like, okay, we’re slowly being able to see people that we hadn’t seen in a long time. So it feels like it’s part of that energy and part of that slow coming back to being together. One thing I wanted to ask you was about, if you could tell us how you found the Tanya Davis recording in your work for SpokenWeb and the Words & Music archive.
|
| 15:28 |
Ali Barillaro: |
Sure! One thing I’ll say is it’s been actually probably the best part of my SpokenWeb experience is getting to listen to these collections that we have access to. Because even though I’ve lived in Montreal my whole life, and that I think that I’m involved in the entertainment and the arts scenes and things like that, I didn’t know about the Words & Music Show, even though it’s been around for 20 years. So getting introduced to that and then fully diving into, I was responsible for about half of that. So about 10 years worth of recordings of these shows was really amazing. And essentially with that work, beyond just researching things, I did have to sit and listen. We weren’t creating full transcripts of things, but to an extent we were doing some transcription work which required full listen throughs, if you will. |
| 16:26 |
Ali Barillaro: |
So I became familiar with quite a few different people who I didn’t know about and became very quickly interested in. So sometimes something would catch you, for whatever reason for maybe the types of work they’re doing with sound, especially some of the poets that are more invested in sound poetry, which again is something I wasn’t familiar with. Some of the music that I had never heard from people, either from Montreal, from other parts of Canada, and this particular recording, I don’t know if it was the– I think it was honestly the quality of the sound that really brought my attention to it and made me remember it. It was that echo to everything and how still it was, because often on those recordings, you can hear quite a bit of shuffling around in the audience. You can hear some noise from the bar of people, their glasses moving around or hushed sort of conversations. There’s a lot of extra sort of background noise in many of those recordings. And this was really as if everybody was like holding their breath and just listening. So I think that’s really what made it stand out beyond obviously the content and me being like, oh, wow, this is [Laughs] relatable, but also not quite relatable right now. But yeah, it was that particular sound of her voice and the way it was amplified that really got my attention, I think, when I was doing this kind of work every day.
|
| 18:01 |
Katherine McLeod: |
As I talked with Allie, I started thinking about how she is an archival listener who has actually attended, in her own way, almost all of the Words & Music shows. No, she wasn’t standing in a crowd at Casa del Popolo, but she was listening to them and she was hearing the communities forming through performances. She was hearing how artists were invited back often, artists were trying out new work, artists perhaps performing the same piece, but many years later and with a different introduction and in a different context of other performers. Her listening was showing how an archive can document communities forming through sound. [Music Interlude: Strings] |
| 18:41 |
Katherine McLeod: |
[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of this episode. Check the show notes for this one to find bonus content, or rather Tanya Davis also revisiting “How To Be Alone” over this past year. Plus find links to more of Ali Barillaro’s music. ShortCuts is a monthly series as part of the SpokenWeb Podcast. It is hosted by Hannah McGregor, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thank you for listening. [End Music Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
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