Familiar things

8 February 2023

So much is so familiar here – I’ve heard the accents a thousand times before, seen the Starbucks and Krispy Kremes on their imperial advance into British culture, we have motorways and car culture back home too. And yet at the same time so much is alien – endless ads on the freeway: ‘WRECK?’ ‘Life is short. Get a divorce.’ ‘There IS evidence for God.’ Who’d have thoughts to call a supermarket ‘Harris Teeter or ‘Food Lion’.

On the drive to the Harris Teeter for lunch I spy a giant brick building, maybe 16 stories high, singularly towering over a flat horizon. I ask if anyone knows about it – Greg does. Apparently it is a giant empty hotel, the Heritage Grand Hotel, which was built as part of a failed theme park. Possibly part of the reason for its subsequent failure is that this particular theme park’s theme was God. A God-themed theme park!!! Yes sireee. A local hugely successful televangelist, Jim Bakker, made millions from his TV evangelism. As the story goes, God told him that his next project shoiuld be to build a Christian theme park, and so he did. It became the third largest theme park in the world, with five million visitors per year.

Eventually though the theme park collapsed around him in a cataclysm of disasters - he was mired in controversy for drugging and raping a secretary, which began to put punters off, and then tax fraud lawsuits and a hurricane (an act of god?) which ripped apart half of the buildings on the site conspired to put an end to ‘Heritage USA’. The great big towering Heritage Grand Hotel still stands, empty and looming over the flat wide terrain, a monument to the strange and yet hugely powerful marriage of boom and bust capitalism and religion which finds a home in this part of the world.

Jim Bakker ended up in jail, serving only five years of his 45 year sentence for fraud. He got back on the horse, and now prophesise the coming end of days, and does a successful line in promoting emergency survival products.

Super Bowl

7 February 2023

Apparently the superbowl is coming up next week. ‘Oh I don’t really pay attention to it – I follow college football’ says Shawn, ‘if you don’t mind which team wins it’s just like watching a ball go back and forth in front of a camera.’ This has always been my experience with trying to watch American Football.

‘The half time show and the commercials are great though – that’s what you watch the Superbowl for.’ Apparently Shawn even appeared in one of these famous advertisements. If he hadn’t been living in a ‘right-to-work’ state he would have made tens of thousands of dollars from this appearance, but only earned $2,500. For saying one line.

Everything’s bigger in America

5 February 2023

Bryan Adams and Meatloaf suddenly make more sense when you’re actually working in a big warehouse with real american guys and power tools. It doesn’t seem so cliched or inauthentic when you’re surrounded by the same accents and the same big-ness that come across in these epic anthems about desire and manly, chivalrous love.

‘Everything’s bigger in America’ - this saying is true – big cars, big meals, big pianos, big skies, big roads… and big problems. But it turns out that they have a saying here which is similar – and demonstrates beautifully the relative nature of our sense of scale. The saying here is ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’.

The use of single-use plastic is rife here – I thought we had it bad at home, but here it’s just silly. Coffee machine pods, bottled water at every turn, wine bottles wrapped in two plastic bags by the guy at the till. I told him we have to pay for plastic bags in Scotland. I don’t think it really registered. He was impressed to learn that I was here to build an art project. ‘You must be stacked’, ‘they payin’ for your flights to get over here an everything’? At first I was at pains to say that no, actually I wasn’t getting paid a huge amount for it, but really what it came down to in the end was that I am being paid to do something that I want to do, and love to do – in that way I am stacked. I guess that’s kind of what he meant. And relatively maybe I really am stacked.

In the Kitsch-en

3 February 2023

I sit at the table – laptop out, an empy packet of crunchy granola ‘raisin bran’ awaits its transport to the recycling pile, reminding me that I don’t yet actually know when the binmen come. I’ve added another cardboard box to the overflowing pile of dry rubbish – and that will be full once the raisin bran goes in.

On the wall of the air BnB bungalow I’m staying in is a clear kitsch instruction - ‘EAT’ - the command is shouted at me in capital letters on a circular backing, made to look like it’s constructed from wooden slats, but also to look like a plate? - it is neither created ‘artfully’ from recycled wood nor is it a plate. Maybe it’s not meant to be a plate? Maybe it’s just a white circular backdrop for what someone must have thought would be an endearing word for me to meditate on whilst in the kitschen-livingroom. But I know it’s meant to be a plate because next to it an oversized spoon and fork hang from the wall – these too are reproductions, plastic I guess, and painted with a wood-grain effect to appear as though they have been hand-carved.

They are so convincing in fact that I couldn’t resist just now but to take a closer look – I lifted the fork off the nail on which it was so tenuously hung. It was heavy, weighted just like an exotic hardwood, but I could now see the brush marks, getting a sense that it was made from some kind of dense polymer. I tried to re-hang it and it dropped to the ground – of course I’ve just broken three of the four fork ends! Nightmare! Though it has proved my suspicions – behind the skin is a white, hard and brittle, almost crystalline material – it was molded after all. Ironically it will probably be almost impossible to replace – I’ll have to see what I can do with some super-glue. 

This double fake is enlightening – the article provides an insight into the social environment. It seems that authenticity is no longer valued – so that the appearance of things becomes more important than the process or story behind the thing. These objects, displayed on the wall, unabashedly tell a story of creativity, bespoke endeavour, home-making, lightness and frivolity. But this story sits only on the very surface – a thin veil covering both the physical surface of the object and the metaphorical surface of my perception – just behind this film of awareness is a deeper, more complex story of extraction, mass production and acceptance of forgery. Post-truth apathy. A broken fake fork and all you can [think of is] EAT.

The boy in the laundry cupboard

2 February 2023

We are being put up in a nice, small bungalow, with a handy porch for the car to live in. Driving is everything – my routine is car-based. There aren’t even pavements in the neighbourhood where our airB&B is based. There’s an open kitchen-livingroom and three bedrooms. When I arrived Tim was in one, but now I’m on my own – working in the days and having a few hours every evening to cook dinner, wash, catch up with emails and read or watch a bit of telly.

Two nights ago I was also doing my clothes washing when I got the fright of my life! The big washing machine and dryer (everything is bigger in America) are housed in a room next to the car porch, which you can only access from outside. I’d managed to lock this door accidentally last time I did the washing and the key isn’t in the house, so I had to call out the people who manage the property to get them to unlock it – finally now I could do my washing!

It was 11pm and I was in my pyjamas when I grabbed the torch and went outside in the dark to fetch my nice clean washing. I opened the door with my eyes down and there in front of me was a mobile phone – it wasnt’ mine, and in my confusion I thought it must have belonged to the handyman. Strange – I picked it up and reached to open the door of the dryer. As I brought the light up I suddenly noticed there was somebody curled up on top of the dyer! A sudden fright – with 100 things passing through my head at once… then a doubletake. There was definitely someone sleeping on the dryer. They were crunched up awkwardly, using a box of fabric softener as a pillow.

‘Errrr, hello?’

Shining my super-bright torch into the space in front of me, the details of what I could see started to emerge. A curled up youngish man in a light blue jumper, matching trousers and multi-coloured silvery trainers – the whites of his eyes opening reluctantly, and a white spittle in the corner of his mouth.

‘Hello? Are you OK? Can I help?’

It took a while before he answered – with a murmer. His eyes were circling and his tiredness was clearly fighting to keep him asleep. I offered him some water, and told him that I’d just found his phone on the floor, which roused him. I brought in the water and I noticed the sour smell of someone who hasn’t changed their clothes for a long time and has been sleeping in corners. He was clearly scared, but didn’t want to go anywhere else, and was saying that his phone was dead and he hadn’t been able to charge it. Then I offered him some food and he said yes – he hadn’t had anything to eat since the morning.

I went back in to the house to heat up some pasta in the microwave – and had a moment to assess what the hell was going on. After the initial jolt of fear I recognised that this boy had possibly been more scared of me with my bright bright torchlight and my strange accent. I’m in America, so he could have a gun… but I guessed that if he was going to hold me up or steal something he wouldn’t be just crashing out in the washing cupboard. Anyway, I went back to him with the pasta and handed it to him. As he started to figure out the food, sitting on the washing machine, I started to get a sense that he was just really in need. I had to face up to my prejudices – could I really invite this random person in to the house? Would he steal everything? There’s an iPad in there…. Etc.

But what else could I do – I felt mean awkwardly standing there watching him eat while hunched over, sitting on the dryer. Calling the cops in this context could literally be a death sentence! I considered making a comfy space on the laundry room floor for him – but there are two spare bedrooms in the house. It began to dawn on me that I might be about to offer him a bed. At the very least I could let him inside to eat.

I told him he could come and eat at the table, but that he would need to respect my stuff. He agreed to come in. He was really hungy. While he was eating he told me that he had been thrown out by his mum. ‘I shoulda seen it coming’ he said a few times. He told me his name was Chris, and that he was 23. He was thrown out 8 days ago. I don’t think we was on drugs – he’d just been left out in the cold, wandering the neighbourhood and his mobile was completely out of battery.

When I told Chris I was here to build a Pianodrome he said ‘I was kinda in to that kinda thing at school’. Instead it turned out, he works in a ‘sub’ shop making sandwiches, and he was working there tomorrow. To prove it he showed me his cap. ‘I can’t see this being my career’ - ‘my manager is happy with it, but it doesn’t work for me.’ I noticed a tatooo on the back of his right hand – I asked him to show me and he pulled up his sleeve: ‘Self-made’ he said, showing me the black cursive lettering across the back of his hand. He has four siblings, a couple of them older, with families and a younger brother just starting college. It sounds like his mum had just got fed up with him still living in the house and had kicked him out finally.

He wolfed down the pasta, which he complimented, especially the ‘cheesy bits’ and then suddenly got strong stomach cramps. At that point, cliutching his stomach he looked scared, until I reminded him that if you don’t eat for a while and then eat quickly that’s what happens. Maybe he thought for a moment that I had poisoned him? Of course he just needed to lie down and digest.

I started to realised that I was going to offer him a bed – there is space in the bungalow, and why not? I didn’t feel threatened, but it did keep my mind occupied throughout the night. I offered him a shower and a bed – but he was clearly uncomfotable and just sat on the sofa. I told him to lie down, which he did – and closed his eyes, and then in a short moment he was asleep. I covered him in a blanket and went to bed – not until after I had gathered a few valuables and taken them in to my room for the night. I told him I’d be getting up early to go to work, so we’d be leaving the house at 8.

The next morning he was on the phone when I arose – to his 2 year-old daughter and her mother it turned out. She was staying with her mum who was not willing for Chris to stay with them either. I made him some breakfast - bran flakes (in this country they are covered in a film of sugar), he commented about them being the kind of ‘healthy’ food that that his mum eats – then he took something like a 40-minute shower, came out and poured the breakfast into the bin cause it had gone soggy. By this time I was eager to get going to work, and had been trying to get him to wrap things up and leave for an hour or so. I suddenly got a sense for the kind of frustrations his mum might have been challenged with which might have led to him being chucked out.

I got his number, we said good bye and he left the house. I had a good excuse for being later than expected at the workshop.

The first Pianodrome Charlotte volunteer day

31 January 2023

Today 9 volunteers turned up to get stuck in to taking apart pianos - it was an amazing experience to share what we know so well from back home, and to find such enthusiastic and like-minded people so far away. The group was really diverse and really reminded me of the kinds of turnout we get in Edinburgh when we run these kinds of events. There were of course differences. Around half of the people who were there work in the city - and that means essentially working in banking or insurance. Shawn brought a huge box of Dunkin' Donuts along.

It’s Krispy Kreme’s! Photo credit: Matt Wright

And we discovered an amazing sawdust pattern which came out the back of one of the pianos which had been dismantled. The patter shadows the ribs of the soundboard - all the sawdust which had accumulated in the back of the soundboard dropped out on the floor when the piano was turned around, forming this amazing hashed pattern. But the really cool thing we noticed was that there were a few large empty circles in the pattern. These corresponded to much smaller holes in the soundboard. I realised that these must have occurred when Dray was working on removing the bridges - these need to be tapped out with a combination of paint stripping spades and wooden wedges. This continued banging will have been vibrating the soundboard, causing a pressure change inside the cavity underneath and, like the hole in a subwoofer, pushing air in and out of the hole as it resonated. The air coming in towards the floor will have blown little puffs of sawdust away forming these large clean patches!

Photo credit: Matt Wright

Up the Interstate 77 to Charlotte

27 January 2023

The sun shines on the accumulation of tower-blocks that is Uptown Charlotte as I drive up the freeway – the Interstate 77. Charlotte is a banking boom-town – steadily growing through aggressive gentrification over the last 20 to 30 to 70 years. Almost everyone I meet has arrived as an incomer from somewhere else in the States. I have heard a couple times from proud locals that Charlotte is the second biggest banking centre in the US to New York. I’m heading in to town for a meeting with donuts to discuss programming with Robert Krumbine and Tim Scott, Robert’s ‘main music guy’. 

We're building America's first Pianodrome in this unlikely skyscraper - this place is obsessed with newness and gentrification, and the city has a history of essentially clear felling old parts of town to make space for big new developments. Hopefully we can create a living example of what can be achieved by taking a different kind of attitude towards materials and people, one where we acknowledge how much we already have, and where we work with what is already around us.