Locomotoring

Episode 4 of our podcast, Archy and I, is now out. It is titled “Search for quiet“.

The world feels noisier and not simply from the decibels generated by human activity. It is the frenetic pace of modern life. I often think of what Dr. Martin Luther King wrote from Alabama jail in April of 1963 in the context of injustice – “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” His thoughts also feel apt in the context of the anxiety I feel at times being part of this human network. Escaping to Death Valley is an excellent option, but that offers temporary respite. Lately, I have been searching for everyday quiet. This episode is about how that search looks like, right now.

The extra good thing in this episode is the podcast, “The Wild” by Chris Morgan. Our search for quiet is inspired by these two episodes, “The hunt to find just one square inch of silence” and “The quietest place on earth“, both aired in 2019.

Episode 3 of our podcast, Archy and I, is now out. It is titled “No two blackholes sound alike“.

This episode is an ode to the universe and the amazing human species that lives on this “mote of dust” that we call home. Universe is brilliant, whether we live or die. But the fact that we can explore the universe makes us ultra special. This episode has been swirling in our head for nearly a lifetime, but was made possible during the pandemic years.

First we see a blackhole and then we hear one. And it takes hard work of thousands of amazing scientists to see and hear something that we have theorized mathematically for almost a century. Isn’t that the most wonderful thing! In the coming years, we will see and hear a lot more blackholes. No two of them will be alike. I expect that the frequency of their discoveries will be a bit like the discovery timeline of exoplanets – first there was one, and soon there were many and last year, we surpassed seeing 5000. It is a bit like walking. Once you learn how to walk, you don’t stop, do you? And in the case of blackholes, there are 40 quintillion of them, that is 40 billion billion, waiting to be seen and heard.

The extra good thing in this episode is not one but two items, one is the Universe of Sound project for visually impaired and the second is System Sounds, a sci-art outreach project that translates the rhythm and harmony of the cosmos into music and sound. The common theme between the two is a human, Matt Russo, an astrophysicist and a musician.

Episode 2 of our newly minted podcast, Archy and I, is now available. It is titled “Melody is in the ears of the listener“.

DECEMBER 28
Happy Inspirations

"excuse me if my
writing is out of alignment i
fell into a bowl of
egg nog the other
day at the restaurant down
the street which the doctor
says he is glad to
hear you are keeping away
from and when i
emerged i was full of happy
inspirations alas they
vanished ere the break of 
day i am sure they
were the most brilliant and
witty things that ever
emanated from the mind of
man or cockroach or poet ..."

Page 61, The annotated Archy and Mehitabel, 
Don Marquis

Earlier this year, we heard the podcast, The 11th. It left an impact. You may remember, Dear Reader, that we took the concept of Exhausting a Place and applied to a photo in the blogpost “An attempt at exhausting a photo“. Another episode that blew our mind was the The Happiness Project, we heard it in March this year. That was the inspiration behind our second episode. We want to experience all conversations like Charles Spearin does in his Happiness Project. There, we said it. Charles says that all of the melodies from this project are the melodies of every day life. To listen to all of the songs from this 2009 album, visit Charles, founding member of Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think.

Episode one of our new podcast, Archy and I, is now available. It is titled, “Archy, the poet, reincarnate has moved in my ear“.

SEPTEMBER 6
Butting These Keys With My Head

say boss its a good
thing for you
that you don't bay me any wages for
the stuff i write
for you if you did
i would have to have them raised all
these strikes are getting
me feverish and excited one of
my long pieces in your column
often costs me twelve or 
fifteen hours of steady
labor and i am drowsy
all the next day butting these
keys with my head is no snap boss
anything i got for it would
be underpaying me i wish you would
buy a pear and leave it under the
metal typewriter case where the rats
can't get to it

Page 42, The annotated Archy and Mehitabel, 
Don Marquis

Borrowing a term from Ottolenghi’s Test Kitchen, the extra good thing in this episode in Dr. Susan David. She speaks to grief differently . Here is a link to the Ted talk that made me realize that there are alternate narratives to “glass half full or glass half empty” one.

I am on a new kind of journey, one that celebrates sounds. The medium is podcast. We created a new page on our locomotoring website to share these auditory adventures with you.

You may wonder if this journey is yet another outcome of the pandemic? Perhaps it is. Or perhaps it was a long time coming, two dozen years, give or take a few. This year, I rolled up my pajama bottoms and decided to learn the skills of podcasting. I was inspired by my birth mother, Ratnabali. She is a writer and she has been writing audio plays for her local Durga Pujo. More on her latest tour de force play at a later time. Suffice to say that she inspired me. With help of Kelsey, my teacher from the continuing studies program at Stanford, I started exploring. The introduction to the podcast was a class homework and my very first exercise in creating two minutes of audio content. The Creative Commons community helped me build. My significant other, Sachin, had seeded the idea of jugalbandhi between Archy and I. My personal coach, Antonia, gave me the courage to show up to this jugalbandhi. My other mother, Rajni, is contributing to the cover art (she doesn’t know yet, but she will know soon). In summary, it has taken a number of strangers, friends and family to start this journey.

We are not on podcatchers yet – we are merely learning to put one step in front of other before we break into a run. We hope that we will be able to do so before long.