HISTORY OF THE LISTENING ROOM

Long convinced that his unborn progeny were attempting to contact him through "the texture of the aether," the young Serbian recluse and self-proclaimed seer, Rodion Petrovic, attended a lecture by Heinrich Hertz that demonstrated the existence of radio waves (1897). Hertz recalls the event as follows:

No sooner had I finished my demonstration than this ill-formed, ill-met lunatic – who, by all appearances, had failed to bathe, let alone dress appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion – rose from the rear of the hall and shouted, Will you join me in a discussion of voluntary simplicity? I remember thinking at the time that I had no choice. You are composed, he continued, of the matter that composes me!
He was promptly removed.
(Hertz, quoted from, Rosensweig, A; The History of Radio; p. 220).

At first impressed that his offspring would become so bountiful (and, retroactively, that he would become so prolific a progenitor), that they would come to "compose the air we breathe," the socially awkward Rodion embarked upon an ill-conceived journey to populate "any garden that will receive my seed." Finding no such gardens, however, but not without contributing the phrase, 'self-fulfilling prophesy' to the lexicon, the iron-deprived Rodion turned his attention to isolating the voices of his heirs from the air. It was his hope that, "my offspring will guide me to their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and will leave me instructions on how to intercourse with them."

         Using the fortunes provided him by his great-grandfather, Dorde Petrovic (who led the Serbian Uprising of 1813) he traversed the world’s centers of heightened spiritual conveyance, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the depths of the Sierra Madre canyons. While implanting the arid Mexican sands with his seed, he had a peyote-assisted vision of the Hotel St. George, a well-known center at the time for disturbances in the fabric of the cosmos:

I saw the foyer and, within the foyer, the door. 
I saw the door. I was drawn to the door.
The door is the mouth of the foyer.
The foyer opened its mouth the door as if to scream.
When the foyer opens its mouth the door, one expects it to scream, or, at the very least, one expects things to come pouring through it.

When the foyer opened its mouth the door
As if to scream
I heard the words
You are welcome here.
 (Williams, D., An Heir in the Air: a  recreation of the lives lived by Rodion Petrovic in prose poetry; p. 284)

Making his way from Mexico to New York, he joined a raid on the Hotel (1920), and sealed himself into this room, where he commenced, unto his death, to listen.

         During our renovations in the 1980s, Management discovered a handmade reel-to-reel device, which contained a single recording. A note attached to the recording claimed that Rodion had "captured the distant ramblings of my great-grandson, Aron, during the instant of his conception".

         While there remains every indication that Rodion died a virgin in this very room, and though our restoration of the recording does not represent an endorsement of his claims, we cannot deny that A Kind of Madness provides a compelling argument – of what position we will leave it to the listener to decide.

         Nor can we deny that, occasionally, when we are stoking the fires in the Listening Room, we, also, sometimes, hear voices, and are making our own attempts to record them. Some skeptics in our community suggest that the voices are an acoustical irregularity, the simple magic of architecture, carrying words, not from distant times or places, but from the various rooms of the hotel. We prefer, however, in an effort to honor the memory of the late Rodion Petrovic, to merely listen.