2:00

on a CD or better still a mini

2:02

disc and it can really lean

2:04

in to the atmosphere. This

2:11

is shortcuts. Brief

2:13

encounters, true stories,

2:15

radio adventures and found sound.

2:17

Today, sound

2:26

waves. Sometimes

2:29

that city can make so much noise

2:32

you need to make your own

2:34

sounds to find your place within

2:36

that. And so he learned how

2:39

to make very nuanced sounds.

2:41

He could make letters

2:43

of the alphabet. I

2:45

became obsessed with getting to know Hong Kong again,

2:48

walking the city with my field recorder, capturing

2:51

its sounds to keep in a hard drive.

2:53

As though this would help me recover a missing piece

2:56

of myself. Sound waves

2:58

all around us, completely

3:01

unseen, bouncing

3:09

off every single thing. I

3:12

really like the idea that somehow you'd

3:15

be able for a moment to see

3:17

them all lit up

3:20

in bright neon lines, like

3:22

the trajectory of a stone that you

3:25

throw across the water or a ball

3:27

bouncing down the stairs, like

3:29

a jewel thief tripping

3:32

the burglar alarm and suddenly

3:34

realizing they're surrounded by

3:36

a web of lasers. Sadly,

3:39

the closest I've got is

3:42

just standing really still

3:45

and listening in and taking in

3:47

every single sound around me, from

3:51

the largest nuisance to the

3:53

tiniest little thing, each

3:56

one its own wave hitting against me. You

6:00

can tell this place is being built by skaters

6:02

because there is just this complete freedom

6:05

of being yourself here. Everything outside

6:07

of it is almost doesn't

6:09

exist when you're here. It's like a little secret

6:11

island. It

6:14

was really accessible as

6:16

a newbie skater and as a

6:19

female skater. I'm not from London

6:21

or the UK and being here

6:23

is what made me begin to feel

6:25

like this was fun. It's

6:29

like always available as a safe space for

6:31

people to come to and like people come

6:33

and find community

6:36

or find company. Any

6:41

skater thinks that an abandoned place can turn

6:43

to some sort of creation so every

6:46

day I almost look for something new and

6:48

there's just always some things being built. This

6:53

was like the

6:56

first permanent obstacle

6:59

bill at the Grove and

7:01

it's super unique on

7:03

top of it is

7:08

the gas canister from

7:11

the pub that pumps the beer

7:13

through the taps which makes

7:15

for excellent

7:19

sliding and grinding. And

7:28

again so much of the ramps and stuff

7:31

are all part of the

7:33

local neighborhood. I

7:35

think originally they were the corners of

7:39

like a sidewalk curb and they've been

7:41

cut into right

7:44

angle triangles and put together to create

7:48

what looks like I'd say a shark fin

7:51

and you sort of ride up it and

7:54

then like shoot out and it

7:56

makes quite a satisfying sound.

8:05

So this ramp has

8:08

been built in a way to mimic

8:11

bricks, which again is kind of

8:14

testament to the idea that sound

8:16

and texture is adding something to the

8:18

skateboarding trick. I

8:30

think that the relationship between

8:33

sound and placemaking in skateboarding

8:36

partly comes down to the

8:38

engagement that you have with the

8:40

material environment, which when you're riding

8:43

over surfaces produces like

8:45

a vibration which is sensed as

8:47

sound but is also sensed sort of haptically through

8:49

the body. And I think that this sensation

8:52

gives people like a really close connection

8:54

to place. My

9:00

name's Ben Dixon and I'm a PhD

9:02

researcher at Goldsmiths and I'm

9:04

doing research into skateboarding, sound

9:07

and placemaking. I've

9:11

been kind of like heavily processing

9:13

my skate sound field recordings to

9:15

kind of create almost like ambient

9:18

soundscapes using skate sound

9:20

as the raw material. And

9:29

I've kind of enjoyed working with the challenge

9:32

of using this

9:34

sound that a lot of people consider

9:36

reasonably abrasive and finding a way

9:38

to turn that into a piece

9:41

which kind of gives you the feeling that

9:43

many skaters describe. The

10:00

architecture and space of the whole

10:02

city changed, noticing elements

10:05

of the city that invite you in

10:07

different ways, but also hearing, if you

10:10

hear a skater down the block, as

10:13

someone who skates, hear them and try to figure out

10:15

what they're doing or where they're skating or is there

10:17

another spot over there that draws you through the city

10:19

in a different way. I

10:23

grew up in places where there's a very different

10:25

relationship to public space and in

10:27

the UK there's a freedom to move through

10:29

public space that feels really revelatory

10:32

and skateboarding amped that up as something

10:34

where I could not only be in

10:36

public space but really make it mine

10:38

and be loud and be messy

10:40

and be noisy. It

10:42

feels like a wild space in a way

10:45

because there's a wild energy that can

10:48

be at home here. Yeah,

10:51

it's open for kids and families. I

10:53

think it's mostly positive. I think the

10:55

negative bits come from noise complaints from

10:58

residents nearby. To

11:02

the back of us now is a housing estate,

11:05

maybe like 15 metres away from me right

11:07

now, and

11:10

they started complaining, saying,

11:12

you know, it's making too much noise. One

11:15

issue that can tend to come up again and

11:17

again is the issue

11:19

of skate sound being labelled as

11:21

noise and therefore as noise pollution.

11:24

So there's kind of an interesting dichotomy

11:26

there between what people label as sound,

11:29

which is generally sort of accepted

11:31

activities in the city, which is

11:33

sort of expected to be heard

11:35

by participants in public space. Whereas,

11:42

labelling something as noise tends

11:44

to imply that that activity

11:46

is disruptive, then it

11:48

might be linked to other types

11:51

of negative or antisocial behaviour. I

12:06

think that skateboarding provides

12:08

such unique ways to

12:10

access, perceive and

12:12

navigate the city and

12:15

the growth assessment for that. Sometimes

12:18

that city can make so much

12:20

noise you need

12:22

to make your own sounds to

12:24

find your place within that and

12:28

for skateboarders that can be

12:30

the immediacy of doing tricks

12:33

but then actually there's this wider

12:35

soundscape that exists within the culture

12:39

which reflects the community that

12:41

upkeeps it. Rather than thinking

12:43

about skateboarding in terms of

12:45

noise, if we

12:48

think of the different sounds

12:50

that skateboarding makes it

12:52

reveals answers to these deeper questions

12:55

about who has access to the

12:57

city or who may not. Sonic

13:10

Skateboarding was produced by Alice Boyd

13:12

and Tom Critchley. It featured

13:14

Grove skaters Hannah, Zip, Blue and

13:16

Tom as well as PhD candidate

13:19

and sound artist Ben Dixon whose

13:21

music you were listening to throughout

13:23

the future. Emily

13:35

Moss is a writer and musician who

13:38

grew up in Hong Kong at a time

13:40

of historic change. I

13:49

once had a sleepover in a place that

13:51

doesn't exist anymore. That

13:54

place was called 90s Hong Kong. That place

13:56

was called Nat's Park. That place was called

13:58

Adolescent. It was November and

14:01

I had just turned 13. My

14:03

family were visiting Hong Kong. We'd

14:05

actually lived in Hong Kong most of my life,

14:07

but had recently moved to England. This

14:10

was my first visit back and I was looking

14:12

forward to seeing Nat, my best friend who

14:15

I missed a lot. It was

14:17

lucky actually that Nat was still there, since

14:20

her family was about to move to Germany.

14:23

It was only a few months before the handover,

14:25

when Hong Kong would be returned to China after

14:28

156 years as a

14:30

British colony. A lot

14:32

of people were leaving, especially those like

14:34

us who had a parent from another

14:36

country. So this was

14:38

a bonus hang and I wasn't going to waste a

14:41

moment. Nat, who was

14:43

four years older than me, had always been my

14:45

hero. She was funny, creative

14:47

and so, so kind. She

14:50

still is. Hong

14:56

Kong in 1996 was a city on

14:58

the cusp of history and we knew

15:00

that, but for us at

15:02

that sleepover everything was personal. I

15:05

was so freshly a teenager that Nat tried

15:07

to throw me a birthday party at her

15:09

building's pool, which nobody came to,

15:12

which was fine because I just wanted to hang out with

15:14

her. She made us costumes so

15:16

we could be the characters from Wayne's World. And

15:19

then, at the end of the weekend, we wrote

15:21

a song out of nowhere. It

15:23

was called Fly. It was the first song I ever

15:26

wrote and it was about childhood

15:28

and never leaving that behind. Then

15:31

my mum came to pick me up and

15:33

as the elevator doors shut, everything

15:36

about my childhood was gone. Years

15:41

later, I played a show in Berlin where

15:43

Nat was living as an artist. She

15:46

was about to have her first baby. That

15:49

night, I stayed at her studio flat in

15:51

Mitter. It was the

15:53

day the UK triggered Article 50 to leave

15:55

the European Union. What's with

15:57

us? I thought. Why must we always

15:59

play a game? We planned sleepovers around political

16:01

schisms. But

16:05

we knew the drill. We ate spaghetti,

16:07

talked and laughed. Before

16:09

I left, Nat asked me to be

16:11

godmother to her baby. It

16:17

was 2017. While

16:19

my friend settled down, I wandered back to

16:21

Hong Kong. And the city tugged

16:23

at me. You left

16:26

something here, my old home told me. 20

16:29

years had passed since the handover. And

16:31

Hong Kong was almost halfway through the

16:34

50-year transition known as One Country, Two

16:36

Systems. I became

16:38

obsessed with getting to know Hong Kong again, walking

16:41

the city with my field recorder, capturing

16:43

its sounds to keep in a hard drive, as

16:46

though this would help me recover a missing piece

16:48

of myself. A

16:50

Hong Kong traffic light, a bush in

16:53

Hollywood Road Park, the oily,

16:55

choppy, llama channel, laughing against

16:57

Aplay Chow, an island

16:59

on the south side, where I soon found

17:01

myself living with a family of my own.

17:05

Sometimes I'd pass Nat's old building, its

17:08

salmon pink tiles fading against the jungle

17:10

foliage of a nearby hiking trail. And

17:12

I'd text her. Once,

17:15

I asked her if she remembered that song we'd written.

17:18

And she sent me some lyrics, which were

17:21

happier than I remembered, so I countered with

17:23

a more melancholy version. Over

17:25

the years, our song had changed. Hong

17:28

Kong was changing, too. I

17:31

kept meeting people who were mirror images of me

17:33

and Nat, musicians and

17:35

artists whose families had stayed beyond 1997.

17:40

They were busy and filled with energy, working

17:42

to define Hong Kong's identity before

17:45

it became fully absorbed into China. The

17:48

city was theirs now, and I

17:50

was grateful for their stability. Then,

17:54

in 2019, a series of protests against

17:58

a proposed extradition bill. escalated

18:00

into months of civil unrest. In

18:04

the aftermath, Beijing introduced a

18:06

tough new national security law, and

18:09

almost 150,000 people moved from Hong Kong to the UK on

18:14

a scheme set up by the British government. Some

18:18

of them were the musicians and artists that I'd

18:20

met, people who had never

18:23

planned to leave. When

18:30

I left Hong Kong again, after the protests,

18:33

I decided I would never find the thing that I'd lost

18:35

there. But the search had led me back,

18:38

and I'd gotten to know it again, which was

18:40

something. And

18:42

the story should end there. Except

18:45

the other day, I found a cassette

18:47

in a storage box. It

18:50

said Nat and Em's world on it in Sharpie, so

18:53

I put it on expecting a 90s mixtape. Instead

18:57

I heard us. When's the world party time?

19:00

Giggling, trying on accents. Our

19:03

attention spans shorter, and our

19:05

words cruder than I ever could have imagined. Then

19:09

we were singing Fly, our song. And I

19:12

was there. Looking in through the

19:14

window of Nat's room, her

19:16

little desk with all her plastic McDonald's

19:18

keepsakes. Me writing

19:20

lyrics into a line notepad. My

19:23

voice morphing into hers because she was always so

19:25

much cooler. Such a

19:27

safe port. How

19:29

had I not realized? That

19:31

sleepover, which I always thought of as

19:34

an ending, had also been

19:36

a beginning. Our

19:40

lives move in circles. They repeat

19:42

and repeat like the lyrics of a song.

19:46

I don't take Hong Kong for granted these days, and

19:49

I don't know where its next cycle of change will take

19:51

us. But I

19:53

know what to do with the sounds that I collected there,

19:56

which is to share them. Because

19:59

it's these moments that I've had. of exchange that

20:01

make our lives worth capturing. My

20:04

friend Nat taught me that. This

20:06

is a song I wrote with her a long

20:08

time ago, in a

20:11

place that will always exist, in

20:13

some form, to me. In

20:30

such a mouth, don't

20:33

ignore the rainbow-free.

20:37

Growl at the people

20:39

as they rush

20:41

on by. I'll

20:46

never forget that the

20:48

more you live, the

20:50

less you die. And

20:53

we all can get

20:55

away from our busy

20:58

hectic lives. Fly

21:01

away and have a

21:04

look behind. Take

21:09

the third star from the

21:11

right, go straight on, deal

21:14

for a heather. Come

21:26

and touch the

21:28

stars with me.

21:33

Come and feel the

21:36

sky, forget your life,

21:39

forget your problems. Open up

21:42

your mind and you

21:44

will fly. Give

21:50

me a heart and I'll

21:52

take you away to where

21:55

fairy tales are made. Don't

21:58

ignore your family. I

24:02

love this scene as a kid, but

24:04

things change. My dad

24:07

died young, too young, and

24:09

now I'm no longer a kid. I'm a dad

24:11

with two kids of my own. But

24:14

there's one constant that has stayed the same.

24:17

They too have a father who

24:19

also loves fart jokes. Dolly, do

24:21

you think farts are

24:24

funny? I

24:26

think about this. Why are farts so

24:29

funny that they can make you laugh?

24:31

My boy gets it. Farts are the

24:33

funniest and the baddest. It's

24:38

the epitome of good, harmless fun.

24:41

And as a result, there's a lot of fart humor

24:43

in our house. What does it sound

24:45

like when the plane takes off? It

24:48

sounds like this.

24:50

Like that. And

24:54

yet farts aren't only funny. They're

24:57

meaningful. To me, they've become this

24:59

bond that links my kids with

25:01

the grandfather they'll never meet. When

25:04

me and my children are laughing about

25:06

farts, I recall my own

25:08

dad laughing about them. And

25:11

suddenly, generations are joined. Do you

25:13

say I fart bad? Dolly!

25:20

Lately, I've been finding it deeply

25:22

meaningful how in this messed up,

25:24

fractured world of ours, fart

25:27

humor is something almost every homo

25:29

sapien can relate to. In

25:32

Blazing Saddles, the governor is

25:34

named Le Petomaine, a name

25:36

that serves as an homage to a

25:39

19th century performer of rare

25:41

and exquisite talent. Joseph

25:45

Puyol, Le Petomaine, was

25:47

the most successful performer at the Moulin

25:50

Rouge in Paris in the 1890s. And

25:53

his act was making sales

25:55

with his anists. mean?

26:01

The farthest. I'm

26:07

Alison Downham Moore, a historian at

26:09

Western Sydney University, and

26:12

mostly studying histories of medicine and

26:14

the body. And

26:16

so I came to the study

26:18

to do interesting in Pujol as

26:20

a result of studying 19th century

26:22

French ways of dealing with excremental

26:24

waste. So Joseph

26:26

Pujol was from a working class family

26:29

in the south of France. And one

26:31

day when he was only about eight years

26:33

old, he discovered that he had this unusual

26:36

ability, he could suck air in and expel

26:38

it. But he didn't just leave

26:40

it at that. He decided

26:43

that he was going to train this

26:46

capacity. He was like

26:48

a virtuoso musician of the anus. I

26:50

mean, I found that astounding. And

26:54

so he learned how to make very

26:56

nuanced sounds. He could make letters of

26:58

the alphabet. So what would a fart

27:00

sound like if it was like the

27:02

letter B? He

27:06

could say yes with his anus. He could imitate

27:12

all the different possible farts that anyone

27:14

could ever produce. So that was that

27:16

was his big joke, because he could

27:18

do the prim lady fart, he could

27:20

do the priest farts, the prime minister

27:22

fart, the judge farts. What

27:24

do you think it would sound like

27:26

if you heard a police officer fart?

27:29

It was

27:31

a lot about juxtaposing wealth

27:34

and this base element. And he

27:36

was most successful before it than

27:38

when I was by long shots.

27:41

People thought it was hilarious that

27:43

you could make money out of your

27:46

anus. That was ridiculous

27:48

to everybody. Anthropologists

27:50

talk about rights of inversion,

27:52

practices and customs where social

27:55

hierarchies are disrupted. And I

27:57

think that's why fart humor

28:00

funny. So much divides us.

28:02

We can't agree on definitions of love

28:04

and marriage, life and death, man and

28:06

woman. But given the right

28:08

situation and setting, people

28:10

tend to agree. Farts

28:13

can be funny. They unite

28:15

us across barriers and across

28:17

time. And in my

28:19

Philadelphia home, they connect

28:21

generations. What does it sound like when

28:23

a plane lands? Can we go like

28:25

this? Pffffffft! Well thank you for sharing that with

28:27

me. Yeah! That

28:35

was made for us by Noam Ozpan. Before

28:39

I had children, I was very disdainful of

28:41

fart humour. I didn't think it was for

28:43

me, I thought it was pointless and childish.

28:47

But now, I love,

28:49

I love to make

28:51

fart jokes for my children. Never before has

28:53

there been such an easy win with

28:56

an audience. If there's a

28:58

simulated fart, or the mention

29:00

of the word, or the insinuation that

29:02

it might happen, if my children fart

29:04

on me or at me, as they

29:06

do on a regular if not daily

29:09

basis, it is the most

29:11

delightful thing in the world. The most rich,

29:14

no pun intended, easy

29:17

pun intended source of

29:19

humour. And I think I've got

29:21

at least 10 years before I

29:24

have to get any new material. Thank

29:41

you for listening to Short Cuts. I

29:43

really hope you enjoyed today's programme. If

29:45

you did, you can find many more

29:47

programmes to listen to and enjoy at

29:49

bbc.co.uk slash Ready for or on BBC

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