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Hi! for this issue of waiting, pt. 2, I've chosen a song to be paired with each piece. These songs are not intended by any means to be an explanation of their partnered pieces, but rather an enhancement or reflection following each entry. At the end, you'll find a more topical choice just for fun. Enjoy!

- Meghan McEachern

"I made my first picture using camera obscura techniques in my darkened living room in 1991. . .Typically then I focused my large-format camera on the incoming image on the wall then make a camera exposure on film. In the beginning, exposures took from five to ten hours. One of the satisfactions I get from making this imagery comes from my seeing the weird and yet natural marriage of the inside and outside."

Abelardo (Abe) Morell // Camera Obscura
a. Image of Boston's Old Customs House in Hotel Room, 1999 // Camera Obscura, Abe Morell 
b. Image of Mill Alley in Room with Desk, Lawrence, MA, 2002 // Camera Obscura, Abe Morell 
c. The Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994// Camera Obscura, Abe Morell 
d.  View of Paris Looking Towards Montmartre, Paris, France, 2015 // Camera Obscura, Abe Morell 
e.  View of Manhattan and the Chrusler Building Looking West, New York, 2015 // Camera Obscura, Abe Morell 
f.  The Philadelphia Museum of Art East Entrance in Gallery #171 w/ a Decherico Painting, 2005 // Camera Obscura, Abe Morell 

 
NOTE: "Jacob and Christopher spent a summer gathering field recordings in Jamaica Plain, arranging the sounds of the world around them into one cohesive piece of music. This track features a homemade instrument crafted from street cleaner bristles, coffee makers, the T, etc. an unlikely marriage of natural and artificial compounds into something beautiful"


 
Homer’s Penelope waits for her Odysseus to return from the war for 20 years. In the interim, other men are basically lining up for her. To delay her suiters, she pretends to weave a burial shroud and claims she'll give these guys a chance the day she finishes weaving. But, Penelope also undoes part of her shroud each night when she goes home. 

"And here is another stratagem of her heart's devising. She set up a great loom in her palace, and set to weaving a web of threads long and fine. Then she said to us: "Young men, my suitors now that the great Odysseus has perished, wait, though you are eager to marry me, until I finish this web, so that my weaving will not be useless and wasted. This is a shroud for the hero Laertes, for when the destructive doom of death which lays men low shall take him, lest any Achaian woman in this neighborhood hold it against me that a man of many conquests lies with no sheet to wind him." So she spoke, and the proud heart in us was persuaded. Thereafter in the daytime she would weave at her great loom, but in the night she would have torches set by, and undo it. So for three years she was secret in her design, convincing the Achaians […]." (2.93-106)

The Odyssey, Homer // 750 B.C (ish)


 

NOTE: "Virginia's vocals can be muted or difficult to make out, but their ethereal, soaring synths create an unmistakable romance"

 

Brandon has been my pen pal on death row for three years. Each of his letters echoes this general tone and is characterized by a series of sentence fragments, progressively more despondent than the last, often comically so:
I look out for these nuggets of opinion, of humor and glimpses of his personality. But more often than not, his letters consist of “updates” on his case. And I put the quotes there because, despite being spread out by a month or so, they’re painfully repetitive and circular and I don’t think he even notices:
It’s exhausting to watch him struggle to interpret the progression of his case as it unfolds outside his cell and his control. He lives in a perpetual waiting room. He’s waiting too while the doctor decides whether to kill him or not. And so, unsurprisingly, it paralyzes him.
It affects how he perceives time.
Since entering prison over 10 years ago, he has earned 4 degrees, watched his grand-daughter learn the ABCs, and—to the horror of my parents–he married one of his pen pals. He’s learning to live while waiting to learn if he’ll live. Brandon seems to manage to grab onto pieces of life from within his 12x12 plot of earth, his waiting room.
NOTE: "Daniel often records his music for friends on cassettes and gives them out for free, devoting his life to his art with no intention of seeking fame or recognition"


 
"While waiting for you, I ended up creating something from our past​."
 
Veronika Radeva, Chopped Up Infatuation // 2017


 

NOTE: "With a voice that transcends time, Angel Olsen croons of heartbreak in one of her past lives"

 

Listen to the whole playlist here

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