Are You Listening? (Transcript)

Dierdre: When a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it... IT MAKES A SOUND!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have found the music. It had been lost, as so many things are lost. Missing, disappeared, misplaced, vanished. Every day what falls into obscurity without anybody noticing.

WIthout anybody paying attention. What is locked in the attic, I mean let's talk about some things that have been found in an attic, or spaces like attics.

Did you know that Van Gogh's,  Sunset At Montmajour, that beautiful painting was found in an attic?

Or That the original handwritten manuscript of Huckleberry Finn was found in an attic? The Venus de Milo was… well no, not an attic but buried in a farmer's field unearthed by a peasant who came across some stubborn soil. Did you know that the only copy of the pilot of I Love Lucy lay under the bed of Pepino the clown for 30 years until it was swept out by his widow when she finally cleaned up around the place and thought to herself “this is pretty funny.”

All these masterpieces just a broom-sweep away from history’s dustbins. And today, today recovered from a neglected attic of a suburban townhouse, one cassette tape destined to be sold in a garage sale containing what is likely to be the first recorded concert of Wim Feros!

So… who is listening? *cricket*

Hello. I’m Deirdre Gardner, and I welcome you to my new show, it makes a sound! *chimes*

It's the first and only show in the nation dedicated to Wim Faros, the native son of our rosemary hills! *peacock sound*

Where together we’ll be part of a musical legacy we will prepare to receive the genius that is Wim Faros and to return him, like a prodigal son to this deprived land. I will be the one to provide you up to the minute news and information about the artist as I discover it.

The name: Wim Faros. The subject: genius and its location. Where is extraordinariness? I ask myself. Don’t you, don’t you ask yourself that? Extra ordinariness. Where is it today? Where are the truly exceptional ones who out of our sheer proximity to them allow us to glimpse the intersection of our little lives with the profound who walks among us? Is there anyone? Who walks among us? All the little usses. Usses. *Sigh*

Rolling lint off our pants, usses squeezing avocados at the grocery store and never picking the ripe one. Usses, um driving up and down the side streets to work because the highway frightens usses. Usses um... drinking chamomile attempting inverted yoga poses, popping melatonin and crossing our fingers as we slink into bed for the night. Where can we look here in this vast wearied landscape of rosemary hills where our weathered old water tower reminds us in fading letters of past town mottos, such as “Golf Capital” or “Rosemary hills is alive with the whir of comers” or “Lets tee in the hills.” But where now the best boast we can muster is the easy access to the highway. Well, here amidst the now abandoned golf course and its neglected grass, amidst the shuttered strip malls and these potholed streets the extraordinary has tread. And the footprints they linger, if you know how to look for them. And I think I do. My fellow people of rosemary hills citizens of the world, what have you forgotten? What treasures have we hidden under cobwebs and dust what beauty awaits us on the other side of the drywall as we wrestle fitfully in our sleep? What life lingers on these old fairways. What wonders just past us by as we bowed our head towards ugh a brighten 3-inch screen our necks hurt our brains are zapped from too much screen time our souls ache and suddenly decades have passed us by, like, poof! What are we missing?Do we remember what used to be held in the delicate folds of our heart? Don’t we remember how things used to sound? Smell? Feel? Taste? I want to. It's time to unpack the attic. Today we have a kind boggling discovery, a confirmed to be authentic tape containing what is known to be Wim Faroses debut public musical appearance here! In Rosemary hills! IN the year 1992. And so we're not going to rush this moment. Like we rush everything. We’re going to slow down. We’re going to savor. We are going to consider the tremendous significance of this relic. In order to fully appreciate it. And thus, it is my privilege on this day of days to hold in my hands this freshly discovered tape. It’s an ordinary looking cassette tape, but...

It's possible some of you have never held a cassette tape. I will explain. Because though it contains the stuff of wonder, to the human eye it is just a 3 and a half by 2-inch clear plastic rectangle. with 2 holes in the middle and these holes they have 6 little black teeth nonthreatening teeth so that you could feasibly insert a pencil or a pinkie finger should something go wry like if the delicate tape needs your manual assistance no that tape is a very thin translucent gray strip of  course containing some magnet um magnetic properties and its spooled around the left howl. And as the cassette plays in the cassette tape player, the tape will run along the bottom edge of the rectangle across a tiny magnetic strip, and the magnets pull the music out with magnetic force until it is fully spooled around the right hole which means the tape is finished and you have heard the music. And that's how a  cassette tape works, I'm Deirdre Gardner. This is it makes a sound. I am describing a cassette tape perhaps the most important cassette tape that ever was.

Now on this particular model, we have a yellow sticker. That covers the smooth section of the cassette and written on that cover in purple felt tip pen in bubble letters is "Wim Fa" but a water spot has obscured the "ros "leaving a purply pink splotch. It's.. very pretty like a watercolor. And underneath with that same pen and font "1992". Crudely drawn stars in... um... multiple colors of pen speckle the entire sticker. I mean, it's great. It's really incredible that one small object can capture so much about an entire era even just aesthetically.

We all seek the soundtrack of our lives, don't we? And we just wish to be privy to the causes of our generation yet it is a  profound rarity that an artist like Wim Faros crosses into your limited sphere of existence. It's like an alien prophet touching down on an ordinary Tuesday in a chain store called "The Last Tupper". Suddenly making the universe crack open to reveal infinite shards of meaning. Barely comprehensible to you standing there in cargo shorts holding a casserole dish. Yes, yes, it's hard to determine the full effect of Wim Faros' music on the simple town of Rosemary Hills in the early to mid 90's. It's difficult to quantify the extent of sacred devotion he inspired in his earliest fanbase. How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? That was a time without social media and it's um incessant public proclamations to "hashtag" trending desires of the moment. Yesterdays youth had to be more... intuitively united in our common affections. Had to keep the faith that even in a friendless existence, for instance as an example, living in an inherited furnished townhouse on the edge of Rosemary Hills gated golf course community there were kindred souls somewhere under the same blue sky wishing and waiting for a connection just like us. *peacocks*

Though perhaps at times to love in solitude from afar in the most generic of settings was lonely and painful. *sigh* That melancholy was trumped by a feeling of purpose, the purpose that comes from knowing that if someone out there could so perfectly capture the nuance secrets of your soul, there must be greatness and solace in this universe indeed. Isn't that why we listen to the music? Isn't that why we listen to the music? We must ready ourselves to listen to the music. But I will say that even without that the ease and the benefit of fan pages or blogs serving as testimony to the early Wim Feros effect, the artist did manage to be a catalyst of cultural awakening in the towns zeitgeist if a town can have a zeitgeist can it? Sure. And there is archival evidence of the first reactions to Fero' artistry. In fact, I happen to be in possession of documents from a rosemary hills resident who encountered Wim Faros in his earliest musical phase. Well.. Some of these pages are enclosed within a purple velveteen diary that I now have in front of me. The writing appears to be by the hand of a 12-year-old? I would estimate... And the paper is wide ruled... and I seem to have come across a lengthy series of haiku. Perhaps I should share just a few of these with you for the sake of research.

It's a segment: (ugh) *bang* We'll call it: The Poetry Of A Little Us *Bang*

You have changed my life

By allowing me to see, even

Though you don't see me.

* Bang*

I am hard to see

In a golf community

With many sand traps

* Bang*

You have a blind spot

For almost nothing but one

In the size of me

* Bang*

I am the catcher

You are a rare butterfly

That I cannot grasp

* Bang*

Butterflies up close

Freak me out but you fly free

Beautiful and free

* Bang*

I catch butterflies

Yes, but I am afraid too,

A contradiction

* Bang*

Faithfully you come

To the window of my dreams

Singing la la la

* Bang*

What is this music

Like, I never heard music

Before you played it.

* bang bang bang bang*

Now those are just a few haikus and there are lots more. Written here in rosemary hills circa 1991-1992 likely dedicated to one Wim Faros.

If you're just tuning in, hello. Welcome. I'm Dierdre Gardner, and this is the first episode of my show: It Makes A Sound! A discovery has been made in the attic; it's Wim Faros' first live album. It's the real deal, it's not a hoax, and it's so rare that the only known copy exists recorded from some distance on a cassette tape. There is nowhere else in the entire universe where you will be able to hear a 16-year-old Wim Faros shaping what comes to be known as the sound of an epoch. E-P-O-C-H. Stay with me and you will hear it here first folks because I have the tape, and you're going to get exclusive access.

So, we're discussing Wim Feros' formative teenage years as a musician, right here in Rosemary Hills. We've just begun working towards a fuller understanding of the human behind the mu-

Other Voice: Whos there? Hello?

Dierdre: Oh, jeez,

Other Voice: I know, I know.

Dierdre: Are you okay?

Other Voice: I know you, I know...

Deirdre: Are you asleep? Are you? What's that? *scuffling* Ok. Ok. Ok. Everything is good. I'm back. And, I'm excited to introduce a new oral history segment of the show, based on town legend and lore around Wim Faros. It's called: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

A light in the window of the second floor. The only window on the second floor means Wim Faros is in his bedroom. And almost always when he is in his bedroom, he is drawing on the wall. What was on that wall? EVERYTHING WAS ON THAT WALL! The winds of change blew on that wall! The- unfettered scrawl of technicolor wonders, the rainbow a poultry container for the variety of colors applied to that wall. New color names would have to be invented. The ongoing overlapping shifting images and symbols mural, frescoed, appliqued on that wall, all these ideas spewing forth from the eclectic multitudes of a single creative mind. In a blue and tan flannel shirt. His right arm braced against the drywall in an "L" shape above his head. The bottom of his sleeve ripped and hanging down he looks like he is whispering secrets in a confessional. But he is drawing. There's a lava lamp somewhere out of view of the window, and it casts blobby spots that climb up and down the room, catching Wim's distorted shadow when he's out of view of the window frame. His left-hand moves delicately, or scribbles furiously; he's left-handed as statistics prove that most geniuses are. Then if you'd been watching over the course of several months, you would have seen his fantastic mural take shape.

In the center, a five-foot-tall octopus with the uncannily rendered face of Diane Sawyer, her arms spread open christlike, with magnolia blossoms and spiders dripping from her fingers. A flock of owls flying over a forest of pine trees each phase of the moon, paired with a pizza pie of differing toppings, eight personalized pan pizzas for eight different moons. A ninja army battling a family of squirrels throwing sharp acorns. Pages falling from a Gutenberg Bible into the gaping mouth of a Native-American chief. Snoop Dogg. Scully riding a Molder centaur as Ross Perot hoverboards over their heads, he was getting political! As the seasons pass, the wall incrementally becomes an intricate map of his fertile, fertile inner life repetitions of hummingbirds, starfish, cans of beans, nunchucks, later peacocks, a dragon breathing fire, melting the iceberg just before it sinks the Titanic which passes into clear skies. Dracula playing video games in front of a television set flickering with an image of outrage from the Rodney King Riots. And toaster strudels flying out of toasters into the rings of Saturn! Kurt Cobain, offering an origami swan to a sobbing river phoenix. And hundreds of other elegantly drawn details too small to make out from a distance that create a constellation of... enlightened connectivity across the peeling beige wall. And almost every night, after all the lights and windows of the bungalow go dark, if you cared enough to pay attention, you would see the single beam of a flashlight splice a path behind the house pointed towards a lopsided shed. Some 40 yards away. And if you were standing right up against the fence that separates Rosemary Hills Gated Golf Course Community from the unincorporated land, that stretches out behind the scattered houses on Chamilion road. You would hear a soulful strum of guitar. And the crescendo of drums because in that decaying shed, surrounded by the loneliest darkness that is suburban darkness is where young Wim Feros made the music. It was that music that pulsed through this town permeated the air. Pumped through the water, did everyone harken to the call? NO! If a tree falls in a forest and no ones around to hear it fall does it make a sound?

Well, I'm here to tell you trees have fallen trees are falling, and you may listen, but do you hear? People of Rosemary Hills, it is time to hear. It is time to harken! HARKEN! I believe in your ears, Wim Feros sang for you! You didn't know! But he will sing for you again, he has been lost in the attic, but now he is found! And maybe I don't know, maybe... maybe you've been lost in the attic too. There was greatness in our midst, transcendence eccentricity, nuance, I'm Deirdre Gardner and I believe that when a tree falls in a forest, it makes a sound! And I'm inviting you to try to truly hear and to remember. So stay tuned for my next episode when that music lost but now found will be born again, straight into your ears when you hear the first track from Wim Feros' debut concert, the first track perhaps of the rest of your life.This has been the inaugural episode of the first and only show in the nation dedicated to the music and legacy of Wim Feros.Thank you for listening. If you have any info about Wim Feros that you think should be shared with our listeners, or if you own a working cassette tape player, do not hesitate to contact me, um, I- guess, for now, just, um email me at ddg@... no, let's not do that.. um... I'll create, I'll create a new, yes you can contact me at wimferos@aol... actually no, please contact itmakesasuond@aol.com. Thank you. I'm Deirdre Gardner, 'till next time, *chimes*