At 4:18 AM I shut down my laptop and prepared to retire for the night. Failed attempts at a song about the Toyota Camry were leaving me exhausted, and I was ready to give up and go to sleep forever. My desire to describe the shape of the Camry as it passed through the decades was turning up nothing but bad jokes.

I took off my t-shirt and threw it hastily over the bathroom towel rack (thus literally "throwing in the towel") before sitting down on the toilet to defecate. As I was pooping I began to doubt all of my organizational systems, wondering if a general MIDI counterpoint could reach any profound level of sadness, wondering if all my work should be abandoned -- when I looked up and saw, emerging from the shadow of my t-shirt, the unmistakable profile of Johann Sebastian Bach!

Thanks to four evenly spaced bulbs on the bathroom vanity, the shadow of Bach's bust was ornamented with four rhythms inflecting off of his profile. The rhythms were like a 1970's video effect somehow equivalent to the synthesized renditions of his music from that same time period. I saw his bust as a logo, a flat icon, and the inflections of the shadows as operations performed on the shape according to a set of rules. While the shape of the bust alone had a very limited poetry, the application of the set of rules expounded upon the shape by re-describing it in four ways. A set of operations was causing the ornamentation, the ornamentation was not ornamentation for ornamentation's sake. The rigidity of the operations revealed a playfulness in the icon that was exactly the type of poetry I was looking for.

Without touching the shirt I ran to my computer, rebooted it, and began again on the song. The finished song, "The 1989 Toyota Camry," can be heard here.


Kevin Bewersdorf
2004