hanging on the telephone

The latest on the Disembodied Women of Microsoft HQ: I'm now dealing with Jyoti, who doesn't put a husky word out of place. I initially had the suspicion that these women on the other end of the phone -- always projecting flawless business-speak -- weren't human Microserfs at all, and were actually artificially intelligent Turing Test candidates. But the thing is, sound is really visceral. At Sonics/Synergies, I think Katy Stevens' rereading of the aural properties of Freud's primal scene narrative really uh, nailed this point: you don't have to see your parents fucking as a child to get that deeply imprinted sensory "trauma" -- you can overhear their moaning (a fact that destabilises the privileging of vision in traditional approaches to sensory experience).

This viscerality of the aural doesn't have to be some kind of primal scream to be felt in everyday life. Indeed, often it's the exact opposite of a scream that gives us access to the stuff that Freud regards as the "primal". Like Aaliyah's often placid tone (which is itself the gothic R&B equivalent of Suzanne Vega's vocal texture), Jyoti-from-Microsoft's voice is just so. And this neatly "pneumatic" quality cannot but have a shadow side, an "aural unconscious", full of more dangerous meanings. Beneath the veneer of Jyoti's constant diplomacy, I kept reading an infinity of sadness. This reminds me of a comment that Allison Anders made about her film Grace of My Heart (which was a tribute to the Brill Building era): that ironically, polished pop is often much more emotionally wrenching than contemporary grunge-whine because it doesn't wear everything so literally on its sleeve. Pop bites harder.

Christ, I can believe I'm doing a record review of a Microsoft web producer's fucking phone manner. Must have something to do with the music-based Fluxblog free-for-all that I've been writing for.

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C, K and D's accident has been a bit of a freakout. I hope there is healing in all respects, but also strange openings. "In an interstellar burst / I'm back to save the universe."

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Mars is SO FUCKING BIG that I think I might explode.