While she sits in what she refers to as her "black, windowless room," guests -- mostly authors, musicians, professors, journalists, dancers, scientists and politicians -- are ensconced in other distant studios, or sometimes simply on a telephone, somewhere else around the world.
Those who ranted smugly in distant television studios about the tactical blunders of Ramsey were toying with the edges of the issue.
Fifty years after she reluctantly travelled down to Alabama, the ideology of white supremacy is once again being openly expressed in parts of the American south not that distant from the studio where she recorded her first great soul song, surrounded by white musicians awed and inspired by her talent.
But most of the great new, underexposed innovative talent is usually not out on the street, but hidden from sight in the back room of a gallery, or gathering some dust in a distant artist's studio that may never literally see the light of day.
In 2010, Nas released his tenth studio album Distant Relatives, a collaboration with Damian Marley that reinvigorated Nas creatively.
A couple of Sundays later, I made my way up to his fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, a studio with a distant view of Central Park, if you crane your neck out of the window.
And on "Mature Themes," Ariel Pink and the Los Angeles vocalist DâM-FunK DâM-FunKaby," the gently soulful 1979 single from Joe and Donnie Emerson, two teenage brothers who recoverd a lost, recently reissued alBabyof winsome pop in a home-builthetudio in the distant town of Fruitland, Wash.
Good Vibrations and California Girls similarly remain infusions of pure joy, seemingly beamed in not from a beach or recording studio but from some distant, superior planet.
The noise could have been filtered out in the studio, but then the distant sound of croaking frogs would have been lost.
