(coffee break)

or, distant travels in a small room

Today I'm taking a coffee break. The coffee of choice is NeuRoast Classic Roast Mushroom Coffee. That's not an affiliate link — it's just something I enjoy immensely, and I'm enjoying it at this very moment. The reason for the coffee break is a busy weekend helping some family move to a new place. And I hurt my back, though that had nothing to do with the moving. I'm not as much of a mess right now as I should be, but I am exhausted. So I'm taking this Ringo coffee break and will return with a full episode next week. 

Now there's an insane lightning storm happening outside my window. More insane than usual, I should say — this is Florida, after all. Last week lightning blew out our thermostat. Right now, lights are flickering, and the internet connection is spotty. Let's make this short.

BUT — I don't want to leave you empty-handed. So I'd like to suggest distant travels in a small room. 

First, there's Drive and Listen. Click the link and then pick a city. Using dash-cam footage pilfered from YouTube, the site takes you on a ride through the selected city. Local radio plays — as if you're listening in your car — and you can change frequencies if the selected station isn't your bag. Other options include street noise if you'd like the experience of 'windows down,' and you can increase your car's journey twice the speed. Drive and Listen is surprisingly calming, and it's nice to get lost in a foreign city (sigh) while sampling the local airwaves. [LINK]

There's also Radio Garden. Here's global radio with many more options (some quite exotic) and without the city streets. Rotate the globe and pick a radio station in some faraway place. Listen and know this is happening right now somewhere in the world. I've just stumbled across a call-in talk radio show in Zambia. The host is having lots of audio problems, callers disconnecting, or not hearing him. I can't understand a word they're saying. It's so fascinating. [LINK]

Equipped with an impressive lockdown beard, Brian Eno mentions Radio Garden in this Zoom discussion about the act of listening. Nitin Sawhney gives an enthusiastic thumbs up. Laurie Anderson seems like she wants to check it out. Brian uses Radio Garden to listen to religious choral music broadcasting from the center of Russia. Of course, he does. [LINK]

For me, part of the appeal of these sites is the global randomness. You click, and you're transported. You have certain expectations when you select a radio station in Tajikistan, but you'll still hear something surprising, I assure you. And in the repetitious locked-in day-to-day of The Strange Times, surprises are especially refreshing. Which is why you should also head over to Astronaut.io. The randomness is still global, but any bearings you had before are entirely lost. The preamble on the site explains:

These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

Astronaut.io is intoxicating, and it's hard to click away. Every ten seconds brings an unexpected moment. It's a sea of new faces — quite a novelty right now — in the middle of what they do for fun or in their daily lives. Sometimes they point their phone-cams at something so mundane the fascination is in how someone, somewhere found it fascinating enough to film. There are a lot of animals. And people playing sports and musical instruments. There's also a chance you'll see something you weren't supposed to see. I can't stop watching these — just one more, I say to myself. It's the internet's version of a bag of potato chips. [LINK]

Some might imagine distant travels while stuck in their small home environments. Designer Lydia Cambron executed such a thing in her Brooklyn apartment, filming 2020: An Isolation Odyssey. This twelve-minute video takes the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the part after the infamous light and color freakout — and adapts it to lockdown ennui. This video is probably the coolest piece of art in response to The Strange Times that I've seen. Essentially a remix (or maybe a cover song — like when a song reinterpreted with different instrumentation), we get a scene-by-scene comparison to amplify Cambron's masterpiece. I enthusiastically celebrate anyone so inspired during this stifling summer of discontent. [LINK]

One more thing before I go: I forgot to give you my music recommendations playlist in the last episode. Here you go, featuring swell albums from Kramer's Let It Come Down project, Oneness of Juju (who I wrote about on the blog), Erik Hall, and more. [LINK]

Thanks for joining me for a cup of afternoon coffee. That seems like an odd drink for the middle of the August heat during a lightning storm, but it turns out there's nothing better. I'll see you next weekend for a juicier episode of Ringo. Until then, stay safe, keep focused, and enjoy your travels.

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

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