Got an Impromptus column for you today — a little Northern Ireland, a little San Francisco, a little Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. Yesterday, I had a piece called “Freedom from Music: On the marring of a morning.” That morning was Easter morning, in Central Park, when rockers with huge amplification decided that, no matter what, everyone in the park was going to hear them and nothing else: not birds, not giggling children, not wind through trees — nothing but great, glorious them.
Seldom have I written a grouchier piece. (Well, seldom this month, and it’s only the 13th.) But I believe my grouchiness was righteous. And now we’ll have some mail.
Mr. Nordlinger,
. . . Here in Grand Rapids, Mich., we don’t have quite the same problem you have described, but I’ve noticed something similar that’s quite annoying. There are numerous parks and nature preserves in our area, and I enjoy walking those trails from time to time. It has happened more times than I can count that I’ll be strolling along and someone will pass by, either on foot or on a bike, with music playing loudly from a portable Bluetooth speaker. To be sure, the moment passes quickly. But it’s disruptive to be one moment listening to the birds singing or a stream burbling and the next to hear rock or hip-hop music blaring. I’d be willing to bet that the people who do this also own a pair of wireless headphones, but for some reason they elect to play their music through a speaker. It’s very rude, but I have yet to muster the courage to confront one of them. Probably not worth the argument.
Another note:
Sing it. The people who bring their music to the expanses of wild National Seashore beach on Cape Cod, the people across the creek from us who set up speakers outside so that I have to garden to their music, the people on the plane who don’t bother to use headphones — these are the people who drive me craziest.
One mo’:
Street musicians who are busking for some bucks, with an acoustic guitar or what have you, are one thing. But marauders with an amplifier are another. Maybe they should have a bucket with sign saying something like, “I need just $50 to stop playing and that’s it!”
Hang on, I have a little coda for you. Last night, I stopped at a food kiosk outside a subway station in New York. It was about 10:30. There were several of these kiosks, selling items of various kinds. Wedged between two of them were a couple of men at a table, blaring music with their amplifier. I said to the man at my kiosk — yelled at him, really, in order to be heard — “I’m so sorry you have to endure this.” He said that the men blared music in this fashion from 10 in the morning till about midnight. They sold weed. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The police would not interfere.
This man, in the kiosk, is just an immigrant trying to make a living, like so many others. I could barely stand to stand there for two minutes. This man, all day long, has to work next to this deafening, punishing noise. Remember when our soldiers tried to drive Noriega out of his lair by blaring rock at him all day? It’s like that.
It is so unjust. So uncivilized. So wrong.