To transform the world and to change life are one and the same thing for the proletariat, the inseparable passwords to its suppression as a class, the dissolution of the present reign of necessity, and the finally possible accession to the reign of freedom.

[On the Poverty of Student Life, Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg, November 1966]




I boarded the elevated train at California Avenue, riding Southeast to Chicago Ave. I took a seat in the back of the car and began to sing. The entire journey has been recorded and posted at the bottom of this page.

The El Train is enormous in it's sonic dynamic, so for most of the journey, I could not even hear myself. I might have tried raising my voice to compete with the noise, abandoning the directive for 'beauty', but I had sung myself hoarse playing accordion the night before at Terpsichore's Life Party, and the pipes just didn't want to put out. I have overcompressed the following MP3 files so as not to destroy your laptop speakers, but in doing so have severely distorted the grandness of the noise. Please feel free to use your imagination liberally to recreate the actual roar of the El train, if you have never ridden one.

I took a short video of myself in the traincar traveling eastward, singing "The Siblings Greely," which is a lovely little song by my bandmate, Avery Burke. It is based on a true story of a woman who drowned her three children in the San Francisco Bay not so long ago.







I arrived at Chicago, where I was left to wait for a westbound train for quite a while. I sang half a dozen more songs on the platform, but as this was not the goal of the task, I have refrained from posting this part of the recording (although the acoustics in the tube were curious).

When the train came at last, I rode back to California. This time, being more brave, I sat closer to the center of the car. No one seemed to mind.