September 5, 2007
When we came home from our nice dinner tonight at Tabla, we parked and got out of the car and heard music. The trumpet-heavy, thin, monaural sound of 1920′s orchestral music, like flappers and early radio sets. It’s funny to think that in the 20′s this house was already in its 30′s, established. It continues, the music. Like the soundtrack to a black-and-white cartoon or a retrospective French art film. It’s kind of eerie because it has no apparent source: the somewhat halfway house apartment complex across Belmont with its meth heads and hopelessness? The weed-humped hippy co-op next door, into which we get a new shiftless neighbor planted every few weeks or so? Or is someone in the vacant lot on 12th pumping a gramophone with a fiendish sense of expression?
I vote for the latter. I like to imagine we have our own version of the blind man in the metro station… with the houses, shops, and warehouses thereabouts serving to create the echoes that would otherwise have been rebounding from the subway tiles.