Smells Like Carrots

Meditation. I believe everyone either finds or creates a place to reflect or escape in childhood. My place of enlightenment happened to be my grandmother’s living room. Like any proper living room of most Portuguese households, it was not used. By no means does the sense of sterility waft through the air-- but a solitude is present; not unlike footprints on the surface of the moon. What was once a lush green fur, circa 1977, has since been matted down by excessive grooming. However thin and bland the once majestic carpet now appears, it hasn’t lost its nurturing crawl-and-sleep-on-me demeanor. 

A hard, dark wood, assembled into a Cold War economy parlor set was like some ancient relic beyond belief of understanding. The underside of the coffee table acted as a medium for the childhood graffiti of a previous generation. Professions of love, ritualistic drawings depicting icons, the territorial was here-- all of which were scarred into the organs of this warm, comforting piece of furniture (which also served the purpose of a Command Module for playing Apollo, after I added an array of Sharpie switches, buttons, lights, and gauges).

Like the surface of the moon has no wind, this wonderful oasis of mine had no time. Lacking any period artifacts engraved on its body, I could not tell you the exact age of the sofa set. The soft embrace beckons your slumber and relaxation as if is the first, and the last of many. Although the oak stubs for feet have been mended an indiscriminate number of times and the sagging cushions are formed in place by a nice long wood slab, acting as a spring, the couch which functioned as my headquarters showed no sign of inferiority.

Two second floor windows opening to a closed in porch decorated the east wall with indirect sunlight, one south window allowed to enter a comforting breeze. The room was brightly lit in daytime. Even though I was inside, the warmth of falling asleep in the late spring sun was still present. Despite the divine illumination, all three portals were constantly covered in film-noir blinds and transparent curtains. The glow of warmth resonated off the glossed paint of the white walls. A physical dreamscape, the objects of the room were highlighted and focused inwards: leaving the feeling of endless nothingness in all directions around. Daylight, in this place, is truly wonderful; however on an occasion or two my indulgent rests left me to awake in a dark wasteland out of what seemed to be Rod Serling’s nightmare. 

The white horsehair plastered walls bare no shawls after the couple framed watercolors. The blank monoliths creep up what seems to be a singularity of height only to meet a thick menacing horizontal mass at an angle which tricks the eye into thinking it’s a hair more acute than ninety degrees. This ceiling has the wonderful bow which can only be attributed by age, which meets its apex at a ceramic and frosted glass nipple above the center of the room. I might not have even noticed a lamp existed in this room, for it still expresses resistance to the modern convenience of alternating current electricity, cable television, and light emitting diode displays. It’s no joke, the experience which is fighting hesitation to be enlightened before you-- for as warm and encompassing the room is during the day, after sunset it is cold and harboring an erie emotionless sentiment. On the occasions in which I am subjected to it, the world appears to be as if shot with a day as night filter. There is no smell, no warmth, it’s even troubling to feel yourself; as if you’re merely controlling an avatar of your consciousness. That familiar point of a narrative by Lovecraft or Robert Bloch, the part where you finally realize the world has been turned upside down-- right about the time where the gravely out of place Serling casually walks into the picture, that is the feeling you awake to when this room is no longer on the surface of the Earth which faces Helios. I swear there is something preternatural about my grandmothers living room. Perhaps this is why everything experienced in it seems more sentimental, or why I retire to it when I mean to suck all emotion out of a novel or film. 

I’ve not ever seen the Arc of the Covenant. However, should Harrison Ford and Karen Allen have discovered in a Nazi camp; the twenty-seven inch color Zenith, contained in the darkly stained wooden sarcophagus, I would not have been surprised. The centerpiece of the room, the real control module, had all the fantastic attributes you would expect from the golden age of home electronics. The lush tube monitor literally sparked to life, in a wave of more-than-noticeable static electricity. Doubling as the power knob, a twist would control the volume level-- doing so was an exact science, as to achieve audible tones, one must ever so gently shimmy the knob back and forth. To change to any of the ninety-nine available channel ports, the navigation of a numbered key pad was required-- years of ware left the order recognition up to pre-cognition. Upon opening the front panel service hatch, you would discover the single five inch speaker hovering over an entourage of switches and dials controlling everything from the color spectrum, contrast, brightness, alignment, and picture tone.

Entering this realm was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. I was completely shielded from the outside world-- here a summer afternoon could last just long enough to read a novel cover to cover. From fourth grade or so onwards my post school routine existed here, aided by first-generation Pokemon on my GameBoy Pocket. The History channel and its network affiliates constantly droned through the split coaxial cable from the junction box, and into the Behemoth of the Zenith. If it surprised itself on being capable of receiving color broadcasts, the space-age relic must have been ecstatic when it was introduced to the Playstation and its sequel, followed by the DVD player. Even I thought of the DVD as an amazing creation, imagine how those engineers managed to fit an entire laserdisc into the same size as a CD. Throughout middle school and high school, even with the advent of high definition, I found it more comforting to spend my leisure in my grandmothers living room. Besides, hooking up a DVD player to a television twice my age triggered all the receptors in my Steampunk genes to fire.

Summer holiday, during one of my later high school years had found me near living in my grandmothers second floor oasis of a living room. Trying to to tarry the last remaining weeks of freedom away, I sat glued to the Zenith enjoying what would become one of the most influential pieces of creativity and film I would ever witness. I am normally quite reluctant to view new series, however a friend strongly assured me that I would be pleased, and gave me the first two seasons on disk (as the third would be airing in the fall). Perhaps the altered chemical state in my brain, from the induced relaxation of the room, created the prime setting for absorption; whatever the case, I was hooked. I could not have told you the number of episodes (or the day of the week, for that matter), as I watched the entirety of the first season straight through. The almost sardonic stereotype of a cliffhanger which capped the first season left me little choice than to rapidly eject one DVD and surpass Mach II while inserting the next.

What defines me as a musician, I believe, is the absolute strength of effect which music can have on facilitating, or enhancing, my emotion. The result of tenaciously studying and performing music since the age of eight is one which alters the way in which music is heard. In fact, the majority of the time, music is not heard. Instead music, particularly music which enthralls me, is consumed. Not unlike a sommelier, upon hearing the sounds we associate with music, I mentally separate the various instruments in my mind-- not only each instrument, but the multiple layered and dubbed tracks of them. With the power of muscle spasms, I pick out and piece together the series of pitch intervals, and regarding the consumption of audio from one of my primary instruments, I play along in my head. Such a relationship with music has a profound impact on everything I experience; likewise, when film is expertly paired with musical audio, the emotion of the experience can be ten fold, engraining it as one of the most powerful memories in my arsenal of thought. 

Juxtaposed to the chaos which has become the baseline of the television series in question, the second season begins in a precarious scene. The silhouette of a long haired scottish man wanders about in the early morning to the sound of a supermarket clerk attempting a price check. After what seems to be testing out the newly established ARPAnet, the scotsman chooses and plays an LP while going to work on his morning calisthenics. It was at this moment in time, sleep being a long lost friend, having just sat through a sixteen hour viewing, mildly delirious, and totally captivated when I heard the most beautiful voice emanating from the five inch, thirty-year-old, mono, speaker. I was instantly overwhelmed with warmth. I no longer watched the colored pixels dance across the screen, I was less than a foot away from the Zenith’s coffin, and staring blindly at the speaker cabinet. It was as if all five of my senses were re-wired to compensate, as so they could all process the wealth of information flowing through my ear canal.   Suddenly the song stopped. The acknowledgment I was watching a show was so minimal, theoretical astrophysicists would have had difficulty measuring it-- I mindlessly pushed the chapter skip button on the DVD player above the Zenith to restart the episode, to continue to listen to that beautiful noise. 

My introduction to Mamma Cass Elliot was a powerful one. Still to this day I associate Make Your Own Kind of Music to morning exercises, and the memory of that scene never fails to conjure. On occasion I even play the song myself, on my home stereo, directly after awakening. My living room oasis is my own timeless island, and it facilitates and enhances what can already be described as exceptional writing and filmmaking. I feel it is very fitting to have first witnessed  that scene, and discovered that music from that old Zenith inside the room which stopped growing in the 1970s.