The Utility Access Panels of Garachico
Graywolf Press is publishing two new books of mine in April, a novel called Subdivision and a story collection called Let Me Think. If you click those titles, you can preorder them via Bookshop.org, and I recommend that you use Bookshop to support your local bookstore—or mine, the superb Buffalo Street Books. I’ll write more about these books in the coming months.
Let Me Think, in its earliest incarnation, was effectively all the short fiction I’d written over the past decade that didn’t fit into a conventional story collection. Much of it was very short—less than a page long. Over time, I pruned and shaped the collection, and eventually arrived at what I hope is a coherent, if eccentric, whole. The stories I culled from the book weren’t bad, I don’t think, but they either didn’t fit with the developing style and theme, or occupied territory already adequately covered by other stories.
Here’s one I cut that falls into both categories: it’s a little bit silly, and is based on a kind of thought experiment represented better elsewhere in the collection. It was inspired by the men’s room in my building at work.
The Utility Access Panels of Garachico
Last year I visited Tenerife, a small Spanish island closer to Morocco than to mainland Spain. It’s one of the Canary Islands. It has the feel of an entire continent shrunk to the size of a video game map; you can drive all the way around it in a couple of hours. Some parts are lush and green; others, bright and arid. There are farms, villages, cities, and beaches. The south is overrun with tourists, and the north is populated by banana and avocado growers. The regional dish is boiled potatoes and fried cheese dredged in two kinds of sauce. This sounds pedestrian, but it’s delightful.
Also pedestrian, quite literally, and also delightful, are the utility access panels embedded in every urban street, over which people walk and drive every day. They’re like utility access panels anywhere, except surprisingly diverse in style, embracing a wide range of patterns, symbols, and typefaces. I love a beautifully designed utilitarian object, so I photographed dozens of them, mostly in the cities of Garachico, La Laguna, and Santa Cruz. Here are a few favorites.
Pandemic-Deferred Artisanal Electropop
One of my musical projects is a one-man, predominantly ambient act called Witch on Horseback, based on the semi-generative music I make with a modular synthesizer. Back in March, I issued a new EP of electropop tunes under that name, even though they were ostensibly outside the intended genre of the act. I suppose self-contradiction is part of the shtick? I’d planned to release a video for every song, but then the pandemic hit and I lost my creative mojo. Now I’m trying to recover it.
This tune is made with a bunch of hardware synthesisers—no plugins or modular. The percussion comes from a Roland TR-8S drum machine, and the bass from a Roland SH-01A, a reproduction of a beloved synthesizer from the 1980s. The rest of the sounds are a piano, a 12-string acoustic guitar, and the OP-1, a Swedish miniature keyboard I’ll probably write something about in a future newsletter. The video footage is from the always-absorbing Prelinger Archives. I think of this song as a tribute to Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn.”
