757: The Ghost in the Machine
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
I remember back when I was first starting in radio working at NPR. This was in their old studios on M Street in Washington, DC, and my boss back then, and my mentor, Keith Talbot, who side note taught me what was possible with radio, I would not be here without Keith. Anyway, we were in the studio listening to some recording, and this was back in the days of real to real tape recorders, and so it was long ago, right? And back then, any real to real tape that you would throw up on a machine at NPR would start with, I think it was like 30 seconds, it might have been a minute of tone. You know what I'm talking about when I say tone, right? It's this sound. A thousand hertz. This tone actually has a practical function. If you picture, oh my god, this is really annoying. I'm just going to stop that. Okay, if you picture a sound meter with a needle, you know, that bounces up and down every time there's a sound. The tone is supposed to put the needle perfectly at this one spot on the meter with a black numbers and the red part of the meter begins, there's like a zero at that spot marking, this is where you want to be, and the tone is just supposed to rest there, rock solid. But this particular day with this particular recording, we put it on and Keith and I watched the meter as the needle first dipped below the zero, then climbed above the zero, and then floated sort of tentatively to the spot that it was supposed to be at the zero and rested there. And Keith said to me, you see that? That's a person in there. That's the hand of the engineer who ever recorded this, trying to find the right level. That's the ghost in the machine. I don't know why that stuck with me, the ghost in the machine. I have been recording people my entire adult life. I started at NPR when I was a teenager, and today, sometimes when I set recording levels, I think about that, the trace that I'm leaving of myself, when I push the knob up and down. I think sometimes when you record something, you can't even imagine what it is that you're really capturing, or who's going to notice it someday. I was talking to this woman, Michelle Dawson Haber, and she told me this story, how she had never known her dad, he died by suicide when she was three months old. And her older sister Ruth was five when he died, so she knew their dad. But then as she got older, this is so sad she found that she was not able to remember anything about him anymore. My sister spent many, many nights and days crying about not remembering him and wondering what he was like and what happened. And so it was her who did all the pining and longing, but I didn't really have any longing of my own, particularly, because I had no memories and I was only a baby, and I didn't actually think I had any right to long for him. To do that feeling as a kid of like, "Oh, I should feel more," or did you just feel like, "Nah, it's not my thing." I think a mix of both. Michelle's sister Ruth was in a perpetual search for information about their dad, but Michelle really had no interest, her mom had remarried, she had somebody else she thought of as her dad, and then a cousin was cleaning out their uncle's house in Israel, that's where that part of Michelle's family is from.
Transcription truncated.