Today I received some copies of the latest issue of Sound American (check it if you don’t know it; it is an essential publication). I collaborated to this new issue revolving around how musicians and artists in general are living amidst the pandemic. After the initial invitation to collaborate, i had a couple of email exchanges with SA‘s editor in chief, my friend and colleague Nate Wooley, and we decided to make a kind of magazine in the magazine, based on my Corona Diaries.
The Corona Diaries Digest presents 15 pages that have been published here over the past year and a half. I was nevertheless surprised to see how much they can say a story when they presented together in this concise and close ended form.
The story is completed by a new text that i wrote in September 2021; this text that is meant as an introduction and a summary of the past 18 months, acts also as a new boundary stone and as a (pessimistic) view on what might come next. Reading it again today, exactly three months later, I feel a certain fatigue.
I am reproducing the text below, and you can find the whole Corona Diaries Digest in pdf format here.
A Year and a Half Later
On March 13, 2020, the city of Berlin announced its first lockdown ito fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Sensing the beginning of something that is going to last, I started The Corona Diaries on that morning. This first period was so rich in discoveries that I cannot look at it today without a feeling of nostalgia; I was – we were all – adapting to the novelty of the situation and, even though I had some worries about how things will go, I had the strong conviction of living something exceptional: the first globalised event where everyone in the world was fighting the same problem in the same time while knowing that everyone else in the world was doing so too.
After that came the first return to normal in July 2020, where we had to get used again to life with other human beings. Going out and seeing people in the streets felt like we were back on earth after a long interstellar voyage. I remember the social awkwardness I felt when I met some friends for real. I remember also the first concert I played for a real audience (of ten), and how I suddenly realised that my trumpet is potentially a very dangerous instrument (I have a horrible self-awareness when I play ever since). I remember being in a restaurant again, in an exhibition again, on the road again, in a train again, in the air again… until there was nothing to remember again.
I work much less on The Corona Diaries since summer 2020; the sense of urgency slowly disappeared and we all adapted our lives to a new seasonal cycle. I try to keep track of the evolution of the situation and of my grasping of it, but I actually feel that The Corona Diaries could become the title of all my diaries from March 2020 onwards. I feel that the third millennium started for real with the Covid-19 pandemic, as much as the 20th century started with World War I.
Mazen Kerbaj – August 31, 2021
