Busy day
Bacon
I started with breakfast at the West Side Market Cafe where I didn't even feel guilty eating those four big strips of bacon.
Last night I had a salad made with rice, feta cheese, tomato and parsley for supper, and Saturday lunch was homemade baba ganoosh, lettuce and parsley in a pita. So breakfast was a big meaty exception to my other meals.
Sound safari
The afternoon was sort of a busman's holiday. I went to a "forum" at SPACES Gallery, part of the Plum Academy: An Institute for Situated Practices.
The Academy is school-as-exhibition. There are not-classes, called forums, taught by not-teachers, called facilitators. I was intrigued by the not-course description:
Sarah Paul, musical artist and assistant professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art; Nicholas Economos, digital artist and educator 1 credit: Saturday, October 3, 12:00–2:00 p.m.
Join us on a sonic exploration of the ArcelorMittal Steel Yards of Cleveland. We will parade through the public streets of the steel yards, stopping to record and observe the sonic diversity that Cleveland’s post-post-industrial landscape has to offer us.
We didn't exactly parade through the streets, but we put on headphones, carried recording devices and microphones, and went on what I'd call a sound safari.
I bagged sounds in these locations (haven't gotten the audio files yet):
In an overgrown area between the road and the railroad tracks, trees, bushes, and tall grasses swayed in the wind. Putting the microphone among the leaves led me into a swishing, rustling private world.
The curved pipe to the left of the rusty girder puffed out steam at regular intervals. The hiss was joined by a far away clanging sound.
With almost no visible activity anywhere around the plant, it seemed like an abandoned machine that hadn't completely ground to a stop.
When the wind blew just right, two big rectangular plates slowly swung back and forth with desolate clangs, like the tolling of a bell.
The day had been cloudy, but while we were exploring the steel mill the sun broke through. My shadow on the gravel reminded me me of another photo from the Cuyahoga River valley.
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