Man With Sign, July 10, 02026

Man With Sign, July 10, 02026 Friday is one of those days when just getting out of bed seems like a challenge, and even after I drink my pre-vigil coffee and set out for Roosevelt Circle I'm still foggy and out of focus. I arrive at 7:32, greet Craige, and set up my signs. Today I'm holding up my plea for temporal literacy: THINK IN EONS — ACT NOW! The weather is lovely, clear, holding promises of heat. Traffic is light, but for all that we get some good responses, including a woman who calls out, "CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL" as she goes by. The air is warm and I feel the sun beating down on my hat, raising the temperature of my head (& perhaps speeding up my lizard brain? I dunno). My mind is not really working very fast, and this forms a direction for the morning practice... ...I'm going to take the 7x5 bol-taan construction I've been working on and basically drive it into the ground, or lift it up into the heavens, or some damn turn of phrase. I start by singing it a bunch of times in the lower octave without a set tempo, solidifying the interval relationships and the embedded leaps, and only after about ten minutes take it into the middle register. I take the tabla down to a slow and ponderous 105 bpm and practice the line in sargam, getting my entrance (on the offbeat of beat 15) very secure. Once the basic line is fixed, I sing it with text, and immediately fall apart. It takes several minutes for the bol-taan to cohere, and at this tempo there is no disguising poor joinery with the glamorous illusion of swift melisma. But cohere it does, and this begins the morning's foundational work: the same line over and over, incrementing by 2s and 1s over the rest of the hour. Each fresh acceleration changes the quality of the exercise slightly, altering the relationship of breath to syllable to pitch to taal. Some increments catalyze a breakdown (in which case it's back to sargam once more), and others... ...mysteriously make things easier. I have vocal technique to sing bol-taan far faster than this, but the combination of the raga's vakra behavior, the on/off-beat structure of the line, and the text flow make for a substantial cognitive load. Gradually I inch closer to the morning's goal of accuracy at 150 bpm, the point where the song begins to sound like itself. This takes me till 8:25, at which point I make a video. This clip contains a bunch of improvisations of varying quality as well as multiple iterations of the 7X5 boltaan, of which only the last is really satisfactory. Which is to say, it remains a work in progress, and I guess I'll be back at it on Monday (and why ever not?). Craige and I do a not-too-bad rendition of "Sounds of Silence" before packing up and heading our separate ways. Today is full of teaching including a bunch of in-person work, which is vastly more rewarding than doing zoom (though also more demanding). I'll fit my resistance work in there somewhere, along with the usual video editing (and a batch of cookies to bake). These are wearying times for us all. Please stay safe, and keep singing. See you Monday. Man With Sign