jessica
hi...
i have somewhat of a request. i initially asked my sister, but she doesn't have the space. and, to be honest, i'm not sure it's the best idea, anyways. that's a scary preface; it's not what you think.
i don't want to freak you out or anything, and the truth is that we don't know each other very well and this is the kind of thing that would require a very long explanation to even begin to understand, and i'm hard to understand in the best of situations, but i've been thinking for some time about what it is that i'm going to leave the world. people have different ideas about why we exist and what is that we're to do when we're alive. i'm pretty unconventional about this, i think pretty much everything about our lives is absurd and entirely pointless. it would make sense if i wrote you a book, it really would, but it won't otherwise...
the short end of it is that what i have is a lot of data. i don't really have much else, and i'm not really interested in much else. but i am sort of interested in having that data outlive me. i guess that the desire to have something outlive us - to leave some kind of memory - is somewhat of a universal. i'm some kind of abstract artist. it's not really that unusual for me to want to preserve it some way.
so, what i'm looking for is somewhere to place that data. an archive, if you will. i'm not going to find myself a museum any time soon. i have the internet, but it only offers the possibility to store parts of it. so, i can upload a song to the internet. but i'd like to have somewhere to store all the files i used to build the song, &etc.
it's the kind of thing that - in the end, who knows what happens to it. it could sit in your closet for thirty years and be destroyed by a fire. it could be found by an art critic in 2132 and proclaimed brilliant and ahead of it's time. or, it could just be a source of amusement two to three generations down the road, as a time capsule of the early twenty-first century...
so, my request is that you allow me to mail you a series of blu-ray discs that document completed projects as i complete them. i'll order these in a logical manner that will make whomever finds them able to understand them. a bd-rom is 25 gb; there shouldn't be more than twenty in total, and will probably be less than ten.
now, i need to be clear: i'm really not asking you to *do* anything with these discs, i'm just asking you to put them in a box somewhere and ensure that that box is safe, and maybe pass it down when the time comes with the instructions to continue it forwards, until somebody decides to take a look in it and do something with it or throw it away.
a rather strange request on some level - i agree. but not *that* strange. not really...
the youngest aunt
Well
hello there! That is a pretty unusual request. Especially as I live in a
tiny house and already have too much stuff. Perhaps if I had a big
house with lots of storage space I could consider this request. Why not
find someone who might be interested in this sort of thing? Someone on a
music blog or whatever. You could also make a will and leave it as part
of your estate.
I know you are a very different sort of human
and your creative expression is paramount in your life. Surely you have
connected with others who have ideas about what to do with your data?
You should write a cbc radio doc about this. It is an interesting
dilemma.
You say everything about our lives is absurd and
pointless, which is probably true, but I hope you are happy in Windsor.
Do you go to Detroit much? Must be a cool music scene there.
jessica
i've been a little disappointed in the music scene in detroit, but it might be partially a function of how hard it is to get around in it, and i may have just not found the right space. detroit's been through a lot of financial problems, and is still run as a joint subsidiary of ford and little caesars, which has gutted any kind of public transportation. the buses off the main line up woodward stop running at 9-10 pm. and the urban sprawl is immense.
one answer is to get a bicycle, but i'd have to leave it there locked up somewhere. there's really only one way over, which is a tunnel bus, and they don't allow you to bring a bicycle on it because of anti-terrorism legislation. you can't walk or bike over the bridge because of a string of suicides in the 70s.
there have been a few times when i've been over to see touring bands. but i don't see much of an organic scene at all. in 2015, you'd expect an organic scene in detroit to be more leaning towards techno and hip-hop than punk rock or motown, but even with that caveat it seems very small. it's consistently the same handful of local bands at every bar, "museum" and "house". the kind of thing you'd expect more from a small town. i guess, in literal terms, detroit is actually little more than a small town nowadays. i had some obvious concerns about walking around in detroit late at night, but what i learned is that it's so amazingly empty that i'm more likely to get attacked by coyotes than people. even when you get out to the suburbs a little, the population density is really amazingly low. it's a big area with a lot of people but they're separated by a huge distance, which makes it seem like a nexus of small towns rather than an integrated metropolitan area.
i'll find something to do with this. i had some ideas attached to the premise of leaving it within the extended family, as some kind of proof i existed. but, if that's not going to play itself then so be it.
the youngest aunt
I've
been living so long in small towns now it's a trip to be in urban
areas. I can imagine the destroyed Americaness of Detroit. You know the distant, unknown aunt used to live in Windsor. I remember visiting them in the
70's and the crazy stories of them living in run-down apartment
buildings in Detroit. the distant, unknown aunt sleeping with a big knife under her pillow.
She's always been paranoid. Maybe that's where it started. Sounds
post-apocalyptic and surreal.
It's nice talking to you. Let's keep this up. I'm off to Montana to see Wilco this weekend. Stoked!
