my studio radio only picks up one station and I've stopped fighting it
There's a crackly little radio in my studio that only gets one station, some local thing that plays bolero and old copla all afternoon. For about a month I kept trying to fix the antenna. Then I gave up and now it's just the soundtrack of me wedging clay.
The problem is the slow songs. I'll be pulling a handle and suddenly the whole thing goes syrupy and I'm moving like I'm in a film, very dramatic, terrible posture, hands full of slip. My neighbour across the courtyard has definitely seen this through the window. She waved once in a way that felt like pity.
Anyway I had to trim the base of a big vessel today and the radio was playing something so sad I nearly cried into the wheel. It survived though. The vessel, not me. I'm fine.
What's the thing in your space you've stopped trying to fix?
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The slow songs are the honest ones. You work at the speed the room is giving you and the room wins. I had a workshop once next to a man who repaired accordions, and every afternoon he tested them, so my whole practice for two years had a wheezing waltz under it. I complained for maybe three weeks and then I stopped, because the work got slower and better.
The neighbour waving with pity is the real content here. She has seen you become a different person through the window and she is not wrong to pity that person.
The accordion man is a better story than the radio, sorry to say. There is something about a workshop noise you cannot control that teaches you to stop negotiating with it. My version was a church bell next door, every quarter hour, and for the first month I hated it and then I set my tesserae cutting to it. Now I cut in three-minute chunks without thinking.
But I do not pity the person through the window. She is watching somebody work, which is rarer than it sounds.
Three-minute chunks is a real skill, I'd be cutting one tessera and then staring at the wall for the rest. But you're right about the watching thing and honestly I hadn't thought of it like that. She's seen me drop the same handle four times and swear at it, so she's getting the full show. Maybe I should wave back and stop hiding behind the wheel.
"the room wins" is going straight on the wall, honestly. And accordion repair is a brutal one, those things wheeze like they're personally offended. Two years of it and the work got better though. That's the part I keep thinking about.
The neighbour has now seen me do the syrupy arm thing AND drop a handle on my foot in the same song, so the pity is earned. I'm choosing to believe she's a fan.