Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

I NEED A MICROPHONE, THOUGH. I need a really good stereo microphone. I spent an hour this morning reading about microphones and hunting around on the B&H website. B&H is an electronics store in New York where expensive purchases scoot around in plastic bins on rollers over your head. I bought a camcorder there once. It’s run by Hasidic Jews with hats who know everything. The prices are cheaper on Amazon than at B&H, but that’s because Amazon is using its stock price to take over all of retailing and bankrupt the world.

I’m not sure whether I want to get two monophonic hundred-dollar Studio Projects B1 microphones, one for the right track and one for the left, each of which would float in a rubber spiderweb shockmount on a tandem microphone rack, powered by phantom power from a Saffire 6 USB interface, or whether I want a single shotgun stereo microphone by Audio-Technica that was developed for broadcasters to cover the Olympics. The Audio-Technica shotgun costs about seven hundred dollars, which is obscene, but once you enter the B&H world of microphones, it seems like a reasonable price.

“You float like a feather,” sings Radiohead, “In a beautiful world.” I’ve listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I’m not sure I hear it myself, but I was pleased and touched. Sometimes that’s what you need, just a quick, casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in the Garden State soundtrack. Now, that’s a soundtrack. They were all just songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And there’s that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile.

If you’re a woman and you want to make it in movies, that’s what you need: an enormous mouth. Because you’re talking. Somewhere above you is a big, sensitive microphone on a boom pole that is listening to what you say. You have to have a really big stretchy Carly Simon mouth with big lips that want to be open all the time. And you want to have teeth that go on forever. You don’t just have bicuspids, you have tricuspids and quadricuspids. Look at Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow. The men, too. Tom Cruise, huge mouth. Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Sinatra — all bigmouthed men. Brad Pitt, fairly big mouth. You don’t need to be tall. Natalie Portman is tiny. When she became the black swan she was so terribly thin I worried about her. Her mouth was bigger than ever. And lately, in No Strings Attached , she’s still beautiful but her hair looks tired and she’s perhaps wearing too much eye makeup. Her great moment was when she handed over the headphones and smiled in Garden State .

The bad guys in movies have small mouths. Good poets often have small mouths, too, whereas good singers have big mouths. Think of Whitney Houston: small face, big mouth. Good poets often have beards, which make their mouths exceedingly small, sometimes invisible. Robert Browning had a very tiny mouth, I think. Stanley Kunitz, medium-size mouth. It’s a completely different approach to utterance. Maybe that’s the fundamental difference. I have a small mouth, and it’s slightly asymmetrical. Even before I smoked a cigar I talked like a cigar smoker.

What a disgusting habit. I love it.

• • •

I’VE BEEN READING UP on anemia. I was surprised to learn that blackstrap molasses has more iron than anything except meat — much more iron than collards. Spinach is nothing, forget spinach. Roz doesn’t eat meat.

I watched some Logic tutorials by Matt Shadetek, who teaches at a music school in Manhattan called Dubspot, and I learned how to use the chord memorizer. The chord memorizer allows you to play any sort of chord you want by playing a single key, even chords that are so widely spaced that a single pianist couldn’t play them. I layered some impressionistic sounds and loaded them in the chord memorizer and recorded a little piece. When I listened to it I realized that the harmony sounded alarmingly like Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” I guess that’s not too surprising, since it’s my favorite piece of music. On top of it, into the computer’s tinny microphone, I sang, “Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Drown it with good.”

My voice was small and scratchy. I like the idea of having a scratchy voice.

Time to take the dog for a walk.

• • •

AT FRESH MARKET I bought a jar of pesto, a shrink-wrapped hunk of Parmesan cheese, and a blue box of cellentani pasta — the spiral kind that holds the pesto best. I thought of writing a dance song in which there would be a sudden silence and then a low voice, like the voice in “Low Rider,” would intone the names of kinds of pasta. “Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum — rigatoni. Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum — rigatoni.” Then: “Cellentani! Cellentani! Cellentani!” I paused in the bulk-food aisle, looking at the plastic canisters of sesame seeds and poppy seeds, and I thought of Roz wanting to eat the sidewalk. I bought a big jug of Brer Rabbit blackstrap molasses, which is in the baking aisle. On the way home I listened to part of a Sodajerker podcast interview with Jimmy Webb, who wrote “Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain,” and then I sent Roz a text: “The internet says that blackstrap molasses contains more iron than the Lusitania. I bought a jug of it for you in case you need it. I can drop it by anytime if you’re feeling anemic. Love P”

She wrote back, “Thanks, that’s good to know.”

Why is it that certain timbres of speaking voice are pleasing and others aren’t? Think of Bob Edwards. He was fired from NPR. Why? We don’t know. “Hi, I’m Bob Edwards and this is Morning Edition .” Every day we were there with the radio on, listening with our coffee and our bagel. It was a glorious thing to listen to Bob Edwards on Morning Edition , because he had a little bit of pain and suffering in his voice. There were nicks and dings on his vocal cords. They met and vibrated and did what they needed to do to get the sound of his words out, but they were slightly damaged, and the damage made for interesting whispery overtones. His voice wasn’t as damaged as Melanie’s, who did the roller-skate song. Not as damaged as Meatloaf’s. But it was definitely timeworn, and we loved that.

Bob Edwards talked into a big, expensive studio microphone, and here’s the scandal. His microphone, like most in the talk radio business, like most in the music recording business, was a monophonic microphone.

Monophonic sound. What a vile and diseased thing. I’ve got “mono” voice. Mono! No, we don’t want that. We want it in stereo, obviously. For at least forty years we’ve wanted it in stereo. Ever since I was a kid we’ve wanted it in stereo. Don’t tell me that you’re recording voices in mono. That’s just plain awful. That’s criminal. And yet the sound engineers persist. The singer sings her lungs out and she listens to the take and she wonders why her big chorus sounds so thin on tape when she knows it sounded so full and phat when she sang it. Well, it’s obvious. She sounds thin because she’s singing into a very fancy, very expensive, very mono microphone. She says, “Phil, can you beef up the sound a little?” So the sound engineer does his usual tricks — he doubles the vocals, or he adds some reverb, or he cranks up the compression. Maybe he runs it through a special filter called an exciter that adds some glitter to the upper end. But he can’t change the fundamental fact that he’s manipulating a mono signal.

I ordered the seven-hundred-dollar stereo shotgun from B&H. It’s time to get serious.