Read Online In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik - Free Book Online
Authors: George Prochnik
Ads: Link
complaints that believers and nonbelievers alike might level against God in the big Western city today, but one thing you have to concede is that He is supreme at keeping the places where He is worshipped silent. The vast majority of churches in a city likeNew York are usually empty. The withdrawal of faith from the contemporary urban house of worship has left some awfully big dark holes filled with quite glorious, ecumenical silence.
I decided to visit St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street—a beautiful, cavernous chamber with long panes of stained glass above the altar. It was entirely quiet except for a very faint sound of an organ. It was almost completely dark, with not another soul in all the pews. I then walked north a few blocks and went into St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue. Magnificent. There was the famed eighty-foot-high ornamental screen behind the altar with all its spotlit carved apostles—everything was quiet, with not more than five or six other people in a space that can hold hundreds. I sat in one of the pews thanking God, or God’s absence, for the quality of silence that remains behind. Silence in a deserted temple is to God as the imprint left by sleep in some soft bed is to the departed dreamer.
When I left St. Thomas, my time was up. I had to get back to work, but I’d gotten at least an injection of minimal silence. I felt both calmer and less enervated. I could now face my journey into the heart of loudness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Soundkill
One hundred and thirty miles from Cape Canaveral, just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, near the border between Seffner and Mango, in a stretch of central Florida blistered with low-end strip malls and stamped with a waffle-iron grid of asphalt, stands Explosive Sound and Video, the principality of Tommy, the King of Bass. The Sunday before Memorial Day, Tommy, who owns the loudest music-playing, driving vehicle in the world, was hosting a double competition in his parking lot: a dB Drag Race and a Bass Race. Tommy hosts only one or two events a year, and the combination of this rarity with the fact that it had been some time since he’d broken a windshield had sparked a healthy turnout. “He’s going to let it bust today,” a member of the online forum FloridaSPL (for “sound pressure level”), “the LOUDEST Website in the South,” told me, nodding confidently at the 150-plus people clustered around different vehicles scattered across the lot, three or four of which were emitting an interplanetary vibrational hum. “The crowd’s decent, the time’s right, hecan control it—I mean, why wouldn’t he break his windshield today?”
I nodded knowingly. “He’s gotta bust it.” I raised the beer I’d grabbed from Big Red’s cooler after watching MP3 Pimp demo his special something on a long-haired lady. “He’s gonna massacre that windshield.”
As I threaded the labyrinth of energy-radiating boom cars in front of Tommy’s—swampy heat and bass merging into a brain-swamping blast—my thoughts turned to their loud-lovin’ ancestors: the Italian futurists.
“As we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!’” So wrote F. T. Marinetti, poet and revolutionary, in his 1909 manifesto announcing the founding of the new artistic movement he dubbed futurism. The futurists were dedicated to annihilating all cultural monuments to the past—indeed to eliminating the past itself—in the name of speed, machines, and noise. Luigi Russolo, one of Marinetti’s comrades-in-loud, wrote his own manifesto a few years later called “The Art of Noises.” Russolo declared that noise was born in the nineteenth century with the invention of the machine. “Today, noise is triumphant and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men,” he
I decided to visit St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street—a beautiful, cavernous chamber with long panes of stained glass above the altar. It was entirely quiet except for a very faint sound of an organ. It was almost completely dark, with not another soul in all the pews. I then walked north a few blocks and went into St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue. Magnificent. There was the famed eighty-foot-high ornamental screen behind the altar with all its spotlit carved apostles—everything was quiet, with not more than five or six other people in a space that can hold hundreds. I sat in one of the pews thanking God, or God’s absence, for the quality of silence that remains behind. Silence in a deserted temple is to God as the imprint left by sleep in some soft bed is to the departed dreamer.
When I left St. Thomas, my time was up. I had to get back to work, but I’d gotten at least an injection of minimal silence. I felt both calmer and less enervated. I could now face my journey into the heart of loudness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Soundkill
One hundred and thirty miles from Cape Canaveral, just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, near the border between Seffner and Mango, in a stretch of central Florida blistered with low-end strip malls and stamped with a waffle-iron grid of asphalt, stands Explosive Sound and Video, the principality of Tommy, the King of Bass. The Sunday before Memorial Day, Tommy, who owns the loudest music-playing, driving vehicle in the world, was hosting a double competition in his parking lot: a dB Drag Race and a Bass Race. Tommy hosts only one or two events a year, and the combination of this rarity with the fact that it had been some time since he’d broken a windshield had sparked a healthy turnout. “He’s going to let it bust today,” a member of the online forum FloridaSPL (for “sound pressure level”), “the LOUDEST Website in the South,” told me, nodding confidently at the 150-plus people clustered around different vehicles scattered across the lot, three or four of which were emitting an interplanetary vibrational hum. “The crowd’s decent, the time’s right, hecan control it—I mean, why wouldn’t he break his windshield today?”
I nodded knowingly. “He’s gotta bust it.” I raised the beer I’d grabbed from Big Red’s cooler after watching MP3 Pimp demo his special something on a long-haired lady. “He’s gonna massacre that windshield.”
As I threaded the labyrinth of energy-radiating boom cars in front of Tommy’s—swampy heat and bass merging into a brain-swamping blast—my thoughts turned to their loud-lovin’ ancestors: the Italian futurists.
“As we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!’” So wrote F. T. Marinetti, poet and revolutionary, in his 1909 manifesto announcing the founding of the new artistic movement he dubbed futurism. The futurists were dedicated to annihilating all cultural monuments to the past—indeed to eliminating the past itself—in the name of speed, machines, and noise. Luigi Russolo, one of Marinetti’s comrades-in-loud, wrote his own manifesto a few years later called “The Art of Noises.” Russolo declared that noise was born in the nineteenth century with the invention of the machine. “Today, noise is triumphant and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men,” he
Similar Books
