Wednesday, March 07, 2007

This is a not too lame excuse for avoiding my blog obligations for today. The fact is that I have to interview the dancer/choreographer Emily Molnar at 1:15 with a new voice recorder I bought yesterday. I have to be able to set the correct time on the tiny unit before I can use it. I have a few hours to figure it out. The Sony broadcast quality tape recorder cannot be fixed. It has a cracked capstan so the recorded voices speed up and slow down randomly. I first bought it in 1990 to take to Lima to interview Mario Vargas Llosa. It was there that I made the first of many mistakes that one is capable of doing with this recorder. On pause the sound level meter happily tells you of the ups and downs of your speaker and the earphones show you that the microphone is working. But at the end of one of my Vargas Llosa interviews I had nothing. My affection for the Sony has been a troubled one. I hope that the Olympus may be a little more foolproof for a man who has had problems with resistentialism a word I first read about in William Safire's column. It has all to do with objects rebelling to human masters who mistreat them thinking that since "they" are machines they have no soul and can be mistreated at will.