“Last Recording of a Porn Palace”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/sg94h-2w428
In the “Sound and Noise” chapter from Aden Evens’s Sound Ideas, he asserts that “to hear is to hear difference” (1), and while he is referencing the variation inherent to the sine wave of a frequency, more broadly we can see this statement as also applying to notions of sounds and their associated historical timeframe in recordings. This is to suggest that the sound quality and fidelity not only speaks to understandings of what makes a recording “good,” but also helps to place it in a historical framework constructed not only of the sound quality, but the means of recording it, delivering and its purpose within the culture, and how this might capture a particular cultural/historical moment or feature. Evens also asserts that “sound is repetition at every turn” (3), and such repetition breeds such an immediate familiarity that sounds can begin to sound dated as they become less common (and thus less familiar) as the push of technology and economics makes them obsolete.
In February 2006, the Polk Theatre in Jackson Heights, Queens closed its doors for good. The theatre presented a daily festival of pornographic films for the waning audience of men who preferred a public showing of lewd offerings to the private show available via VHS and DVD. Despite the relatively recent closure of one New York City’s last porno theatres, the answering machine message giving the show listings and times bespeaks not of the mid-portion of the first decade of the 21st century, but rather harkens back to an older time when such recordings informing patrons of showings were more common. The recording sounds anachronistic and stands out in an anomaly in terms of the typical ways we find information these days. The low-fidelity, background noise, and timbre of the 70-something old man’s voice, not just the content, suggests a particular era of sound communication (and also a stark contrast to the visual mode most used these days to gain information about movies being shown, e.g. the internet).
Click Here to listen to the “Polk Theater Answering Machine”
The recording also speaks to a localized and low budget operation that is marginalized no longer for its lurid content, but by the failure of this dying porn economic model. “This is a recording,” says Harold Guissin (the proprietor) on the message, feeling it necessary to remind callers that it is not a live person that can be engaged with, that is, no questions can be asked of him. There is a clicking hum of a projector in the background, and his coughs, unedited from the recording, present a lackadaisical and spontaneous approach to the recording of the week’s featured films. Furthermore, the old man’s intonation underscores the absurdity of the titles of pornographic movies, such as “Sexo a la Mexicana,” which he makes sound like “Sexualla Mexicana.”
In comparison to the current mode of using a phone to find out listings for movies, the Polk Theatre answering machine is dated and quaint. Moviefone, by contrast, presents a contrived announcer’s voice, and presents a method with which to interact with the recordings, moving through menus and portions of the announcement as desired. The recording is digitized and free of any context that may alert the caller to where or how it was recorded or the experience to be had at any of the movies listed. Furthermore, Harold Gussin includes his own opinion (ostensibly) on the pictures, something we’d never hear on moviefone, “Brazilian Mulatto, great title, great picture!” Ultimately, however, even Moviefone has started to feel dated and obsolete, or perhaps it is my own decreasing familiarity with it, preferring Netflix to theatres, and a website to the telephone on those rare occasions that I do go out to see a movie. The recorded listings reinforce the multifarious ways that time is involved in the how we hear and interpret sound. Sound is noted for its change over time; both in an immediate physiological way in how out eardrums react to changes ton air pressure, but also a marker of time in a broader historical way.
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Osvaldo Oyola
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The Grain of the Voice or the Contour of the Ear?
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/pgkhx-70g14
One of the most exciting possibilities emerging within sound studies is the emphasis on the listener and his/her role in shaping a sound’s meaning and content. Sounds disconnected from their contexts of reception rarely answer our questions about the past, but merely make for new listening experiences in the present. Thinking with our ears is profound, but thinking through our ears can be life-changing—moving us closer to an understanding of sound’s power and its intensive connection to memory and the emotive forces of both life and death.
Until very recently, I had not heard the sound of my Grandmother’s voice in over eight years. I had actually never expected to hear it again, as she died in 2001. It is a clichéd understatement that I loved my grandmother very much; when she died, I was barely a “real” adult and I felt like we had just gotten acquainted. However, I thought I had already made peace with the passing of her beloved throaty crackle into the world of furtive dreams and spotty memory, until one night in 2004, when this loss was suddenly found.
Somewhere around two a.m. on a weekday, the phone rang. Once you are past a certain age, the shrill peal of a telephone after midnight can be downright terrifying. Someone has died. Someone is calling from jail. Someone’s life is in shreds. Nothing good. My hand hovered over the receiver for a second, as I rubbed my tired eyes and steeled myself for whatever might be at the other line.
“Hello,” I mumbled, hesitatingly.
Silence, for a second. And, then, the keen of my sister’s voice, choked through tears, “I found it.”
Inexplicably, my groggy listening ears automatically knew precisely what “it” was : an oral history of my grandmother I recorded in 1998, on teeny-tiny tapes in an itsy-bitsy recorder my sister used to record her professor’s lectures. I borrowed it, and like a good sister, I returned it. Tapes included. At the time, I thought there would be plenty more opportunities to have deep convos with Grandma. I had always assumed my sister recycled it, replacing my grandmother’s words with her bio prof’s. With three little gasped words, I realized she hadn’t.
You’d think my first reaction would be excitement—and I was thrilled, but in the nineteenth-century sense. My heart was pierced by even the thought of hearing my Grandmother’s voice again; the imagined sound tremored through me and, in a moment of pure protective reflex, I immediately cast the receiver away. In a sense, I had heard my grandmother’s ghost. The sounds magnetized on that tape seemed to resurrect her and mock the promise of that hour of conversation, when we had no idea what lay ahead.
Even though I made the conscious decision not to listen to the tape, I let the thought of her audio presence haunt me for five years. I could not escape the thought of her voice both in my memory and in this new audio embodiment. Oddly enough, I surrounded myself with pictures of my Grandmother as remembrances—cheeky 1940s shots from her youth as well as seasoned photos of us together—but those images brought me cool comfort. Their framed borders demarcated a long-gone past. When my chest got too tight, I could look away. Not so with the vibrations of her voice, which sounded out the contours of her absent body. Her voice threatened too much wonder, and with it, an attendant dose of insatiable longing. Unlike the frozen photographic slices of life, the sound had an animated heft to it. It breathed.
Ultimately, I was unable to listen to the tape through my own ears. It wasn’t until the birth of my son that I even considered playing it. Suddenly, my grandmother wasn’t mine alone, but also the great-grandmother my son would never really know. The new relation between the two of them allowed me to fashion another set of ears; I became a new listener, connected to the voice by life rather than death, by shared possibility rather than the solipsism of grief. So on a snowy night last January, I finally pressed play. With my infant son in my arms, I listened, at long last, to that beautiful crackling voice spinning stories of her childhood in Iowa and adult life in California. Ironically, I almost immediately realized there were actually two dead voices on that tape. I had long since shed the happy-but-halting girlish voice of my youth like an ill-fitting skin, but hadn’t quite realized it until I heard my old nervous laughter fill the speakers. I realized that, someday, I’ll have to introduce my son to that young woman too.
My Grandma and I talk about WWII and the sinking of the Ruben James:
Grandma Maryanne’s Interview Segment 1
My Favorite part of the interview:
Grandma Maryanne’s Interview Segment 2
Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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