Monday, January 07, 2008

96.3: New Classical

Had an out-of-life moment last night.

Driving home on a well-travelled, well-lit, well-known highway watching the city fade into suburbia. Except, tonight, there’s a fog that blankets everything around me, making all those familiar landmarks disappear and turning the yellow halogen overhead lights into non-specific glowing haloes. The red rear lights of the one car that’s close enough to see is the only thing that keeps me in my lane. There’s a light drizzle – too light to turn the wipers on – that creates soft patterns on the windshield. It’s Sunday night and there’s nothing good on commercial radio, so 96.3 fills the car: Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia”… a lonely piece full of longing and sad drifts. Suddenly, I enter a patch of highway that runs under another major highway and all the lights disappear and for about 6 seconds there is just me, the patterns on the windshield and Borodin. Two simultaneous thoughts run through my mind:
1) new classical isn’t a total oxymoron: just like one can rediscover a country once thought lost or look at an old friend and see something that wasn’t there before, anything old can transform under new eyes (or new ears).
2) twelve inches of unoccupied black microfibre can be the same as the yawning chasm of the Grand Canyon, given the right circumstances. I could easier contemplate crossing the Canyon on a rope bridge than closing that one foot of space.

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