Friday, March 23
Tallinninaukio, 14:52
We went to bed very early last night. I woke once, dreaming of sitting somewhere with a sixteen year old Auo. I remembered that it had been fun, and that she had made me laugh. I stayed awake for fifteen minutes and then slid back to sleep, holding onto fragments of the dream, which seemed to start again as my eyes closed. I had the uncanny feeling that I slipped from one room into another, just as normal.
Monica and I arrived first and the Fred and Jani joined us briefly. Everyone else worked from home. I read through some notes, made some more, answered some mails, and then settled down to today’s main task.
At 10:15 I went to A313, the drop-in studio, and settled down to record soundtracks to three Powerpoint decks for the Interactive Storytelling course that starts in four or five weeks.
The first one took about two hours, because I used it for various technical experiments, to establish a viable work flow. I had no scripts because I had decided that I would treat them as lectures.
I began to suffer from solo album syndrome as I did take after take in search of the mythical perfect narration. With Aki in control we would have stopped after take 3, with a brusque “that’s good enough”. I finally got a version that sounded alright although I almost started again because I thought I had left out some interesting material from takes 17 and 23.
I did the second two in forty minutes, acting as my own internal Aki. I didn’t even listen back to the final take of the third Powerpoint because I realised that I could redo it another day.
At 14:05 I backed everything and packed up for the weekend. I ran to the tram and just made it before the lights changed.
I get to Itäkeskus and walk out of the metro into Tallinninaukio. The sun shines bright blue and the summer drunks have come out to play. Winter has receded, piles of snow or not. I watch a woman walk across the square adding her own long shadow to the others.
At 15:00 Jessica and Jolanda will arrive and we will join Irma in her office in Stoa for a meeting about the branding for the MakeSomeNoise project. After an hour we will have dicussed everything on the agenda, and have arranged the dates of the next two meetings, neither of which will include me.
After a brief trip home we will meet Naa at Stoa at 18:45. Irma has tickets for Race Horse Company’s new show Urobtek, a circusy show that will remind both of us of Archaos without ever reaching those heights. We will all enjoy it, and it will certainly empty our minds of anything else.
We will return home tired and ready for another early night.