Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 170

A Glitch in the Canyon

It was only there for a moment, but scrubbing back through YouTube is so simple as to be an inherent part of the viewing process. For a moment, the album cover is in view, and there it is. In The Matrix, the appearance of a black cat, the experience of deja vu, is evidence of being in a simulation; the glitch in the matrix is a short circuit, flubbed data, a sign of the system failing to maintain perfect verisimilitude to real life.

Back up a week. A walk in the park. My interlocutor tells me that Joni Mitchell’s album Ladies of the Canyon has only one good song on it, “The Circle Game.” Not looking for an argument, I just politely note that the album has at least four other excellent songs (“Morning Morgantown,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “For Free,” and, of course, “Woodstock”), and arguably more. Two days later, I bring up the conversation opener with someone else, who says the same. I bring up the other songs, and my second interlocutor is astonished, not having remembered many of them were even on the album. I search and put my cellphone up the screen as evidence: one screen against another screen, to be displayed across town on a third screen. This is not an argument. It is not a debate one wins. One simply opens the window, points to the clear sky, and everyone agrees the sky is clear, no matter what they had thought previously.

And then, today, YouTube recommends I watch a short video about a small apartment in Paris, around 350 square feet. I live in a small home, but by no means that small, and I occasionally watch small home videos to marvel at and even take tips from the organization and design. At 7:10 in the video’s nearly over timeline, I pause and scrub back. Something looks familiar as one of the residents is giving a tour, at that moment of how the home stereo system is secreted behind plain panels. A home this small must have only the essentials. What is true of furniture is true, as well, of books, and of record albums. You see where this is going. And yes, there, briefly in view, is the sliver of an image: the cover of Ladies of the Canyon.

I’ve been rewatching the TV series Person of Interest lately, and doing some writing about artificial intelligence, so these things are on my mind, key among those things: the way a nascent intelligence might make its presence known. I thought I was watching a “small home” video because I’d watched a few in the past. I came to wonder if it had been recommended because of some searches I’d done of a record album nearly a week ago, something then viewable for a second or two, and even then just as a tiny image beneath someone’s arm. I came to wonder if by pausing the video to confirm, I had now further encouraged the Algorithm to send future messages through barely visible snips of relevant cultural artifacts.

Disquiet Junto Project 0516: Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3)

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 22, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 18, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0516: Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3) The Assignment: Record a minute or two of nature.

This is the first of a three-part project sequence. You can participate in all three parts, or any two of the three, or even just any one of them. Part one began on November 18, part two will begin on November 25, and part three will begin on December 2. Thanks to Alan Bland and Mark Lentczner for having proposed the project.

There is one step for this project: Record a minute or two of nature, whether that be bubbling streams, leaves rustling in the breeze, the sounds of birds and crickets, etc., however it is that you might define nature.

Note that the three-part sequence will eventually draw from this project’s results, so it’s helpful if you set your track for download so that other musicians can make use of it down the road.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0516” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0516” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0516-outside-in-co-exist-1-of-3/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 22, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 18, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Around one or two minutes is best.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0516” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 516th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3) (The Assignment: Record a minute or two of nature) — at: https://disquiet.com/0516/

This is the first of a three-part project sequence. You can participate in all three parts, or any two of the three, or even just any one of them. Part one began on November 18, part two will begin on November 25, and part three will begin on December 2. Thanks to Alan Bland and Mark Lentczner for having proposed the project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0516-outside-in-co-exist-1-of-3/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Solomonic Co-op Dispute

Just enough buttons that you really need to count your way up if you’re looking for one of the higher ones. It’s as if someone in the building wanted Braille, and this result was the compromise that the co-op board decided no one in the dispute would be happy with.

Under Cover

This photo doesn’t quite do credit to the makeshift apparatus, but if you look closely you’ll see there is a piece of reused carboard folded to serve as a little brim atop the buttons. Of course, you’d need to know where to look to find the doorbells in the first place, so unhelpfully masked are they by foliage. There’s such a thing as too much protection.

Shangri La

This neighborhood is a Shangri La, in its own way.

Marine Layer

I will never tire of the marine layer. I will never cease to be astonished by the marine layer. And any day when the sky is bright and clear and, nonetheless, the foghorns are in full voice, I’ll know where to go to witness the marine layer.

twitter.com/disquiet: Silent Meals, Background Sounds, Robo-whispers

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ I am here for your detailed exegesis of the two near-silent, attenuated meal scenes in Billions (Season 5, Episode 10: “Liberty”) and Succession (Season 3, Episode 4: “Meep-Meep”).

▰ I know it’s total absurd anthropomorphism to say my current laptop’s health decline has sped up significantly since I placed an order for its replacement, but my current laptop’s health decline has sped up significantly since I placed an order for its replacement. (I totally Colossus: The Forbin Project-ed myself.)

▰ My phone has a feature not listed on the manufacturer’s website. Tiny raindrops that fall on the screen have a vibrant, hyperreal, kaleidoscope quality to them.

▰ I reposted a Dean Stockwell monologue from Battlestar Gallactica on the occasion of his death: “Way Beyond Electric Sheep.” After doing so, I remembered that I drew from the speech for a short article I wrote for the current nerd sequence by various writers (among them Annie Nocenti, Lucy Sante, Andrew Sempere, and Jessamyn West) at hilobrow.com, edited by the indefatigable Peggy Nelson. That’ll be out by end of the year.

▰ It says a lot about November 2016 that while everything I said in this doorbell interview with me (by Marke Bieschke, who reposted it this week) makes sense to me, I actually barely remember it. Nice to revisit it. Being out and about more of late means I’ve been taking more doorbell photos, and getting back to writing about them.

▰ Listening to the background sounds or “Background Sounds,” as it’s a feature)on my phone, specifically the “rain” one, and it sounds like I’m eating Pop Rocks while standing at the edge of a rushing river.

▰ “About 15% to 20% of concussions cause persistent sound-processing difficulties,” per Nina Kraus, neurobiology professor (npr.org). “For those with lingering symptoms, she’s experimenting with something called rhythm therapy, which has its roots in dancing.”

▰ “It’s a VHS tape. It’s, like, full of YouTubes.”

Have I mentioned how much I love the series City of Ghosts? It’s on constant rotation at home. One week: “The art is what really makes it.” The next: “It’s the voices.” And then: “No, it’s the script.” And then: “It’s ’cause the show really gets Los Angeles.” And then: “It really gets friendship.” And on and on. So good!

“It’s a photocopier from, like, the 20th century.”

▰ Morning sounds, 7:39am, Friday: unidentifiable (by me) bird flying by, distant car revving up, person by all appearances talking to their dog as they pass by on the street below, ice crackling in coffee, plane overhead (then briefly viewable through the living room window)

▰ Sunset with headlight bleed on the sand from someone’s car in the parking lot, and it’s nice to be able to walk to the ocean and back at the end of the day. And this does have an Ed Ruscha vibe.

The most crazy thing about this photo is not that it is untouched, but that it is exactly what it looked like last night (at around 6pm) at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, here in San Francisco’s Richmond District. There’s no “cameras see things differently” going on here.

And this was 90 degrees (to the left, not temperature) and a few seconds after the previous photo:

▰ Get a prime seat for the greatest show on earth movers:

▰ Marking Britney Spears’ freedom from conservatorship with the instrumental of “I’m a Slave 4 U,” production courtesy of Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams. White noise sand paper shuffle? Check. Robo-whisper chorus? Check. Sour Jolly Rancher synths? Check.

▰ Already lots of great music flowing in from musicians tackling the latest (515th consecutive weekly) Disquiet Junto music composition prompt. If you make music, join in at disquiet.com/0515. The instructions are in 10 languages, so please share widely. The Junto music prompt instructions have been translated into all these languages:

Portuguese
Italian
Dutch
Polish
Spanish
Greek
Mandarin
German
French
English

No kidding.

▰ Have a good weekend, folks. Got a heap to finish up. My just-arrived copy of Nina Kraus’ book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World stares at me like a puppy waiting for work to end.

And I think I’m due a frozen yogurt. Anyhow, be well. Back on Twitter Monday.

Alien Night Club

Judging by the entry signage, this new alien night club is happening.

Thumbs Up to YouTube Dispensing with Thumbs Down

“YouTube has announced that it’ll be hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site, starting today,” reports Mitchell Clark in the Verge (“YouTube gives dislikes the thumbs-down, hides public counts.”)

This is good. The dislike button on YouTube has long been a distraction. It usually takes the form to the viewer of something along the lines of “Who are the 3 people who disliked this versus the 840 who liked it?”

YouTube experimented with this move earlier in the year, as, also at the Verge, Ian Carlos Campbell reported, in a piece titled “YouTube is experimenting with hiding dislikes to protect creators’ well-being.” I do think that article’s framing of the situation was mistaken, in that I don’t think it’s about “creators’ well-being,” at least not entirely.

I pushed for this back in 2019, in a piece titled “Speaking Privately to the Algorithm,” where I asked, “What happens when we assume that always stating our opinion is in anyone’s best interest?”

I think it comes down to this, as I wrote at the time: The tools have trained us to let them know what we think, because it’s in our best interest (to train our flavor of the Algorithm). But is it in anyone else’s interest that you found the given musician’s music uninteresting?

And as for creators’ “well-being,” I’d wager that the dislikes count may actually go up, now that people won’t have any concern about a public reverberation of their rating. They’ll just click a down thumb as they do on Netflix and elsewhere, to register a personal preference, speaking personal truth to the Algorithm.

Six-String Workout

Haven’t spent time with these in a while.