Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 24

Scratch Pad: Tron, NIN, Pacific

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Interesting that Tron: Ares, the upcoming movie, has a score credited to Nine Inch Nails, not to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Is this just a name-recognition / branding / attitude thing, or is there more to it?

A friend on Mastodon helpfully directed me to an interview with Reznor, who explained: “It is as Nine Inch Nails, and I think it’s influenced the way we approach scoring. It’s going to be a little grittier, and it’s just different; it’s still the same two people, but we’re in a different mindset. We feel like we can play by different rules a bit, and the people working on the film were excited about that, so we thought we’d try it.”

▰ That thing where a couple days after you get off a plane you use your pen and realize a little too late that at some point it began to leak under pressure.

▰ Random low-level Gmail weirdness: why it is, when I search for “label:inbox label:unread” and tag some email (say, one of 100 new music PR messages) to a “label,” sometimes it goes there immediately, whereas most of the time I have to hit “apply”?

▰ 7 weeks from the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project

▰ My hallucinogen of choice is realizing that I’ve been walking around with my reading glasses on

▰ End of day, end of week.

Whew, and what a week.

▰ I’m enjoying Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time more than I did his Shards of Earth, but as I may have learned the hard way, it’s also not a book to read if you have even low-level arachnophobia (which is to say, if you’re an even remotely rational human being).

▰ Over vacation I managed to read two novels and a graphic novel (Smith, Didion, Tommaso), and while I read a bunch this week (Tchaikovsky), I didn’t finish any novels, just one graphic novel, Kit Alexander’s Second Shift.

On Not Sounding Like Oneself

I sent this message as part of the email instructions to members of the Disquiet Junto, via the juntoletter.disquiet.com, on April 10, 2025:

We’re seven weeks from the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, which makes for a pretty great feeling. This week’s project — the 693rd — is extra abstract, and occasionally they go that way. It’s good to mix it up. I wanted to mention two related things to participants who sometimes may sense that a given project doesn’t “sound” like them — people say this to me privately, and also express it on the discussion boards, so this encouragement isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. First, if you are concerned some of your Junto projects are distinct from your work, you might set up a separate account when posting the results. Second, I like to paraphrase a writing exercise I believe I read in something Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs) published a long time ago, which is to try to write a character in a story as unlike you as possible and put it in an envelope for six months. Then open the envelope, and see how much of yourself you actually do see in that character.

Separately, we’ll be doing the trio project we do each year pretty soon. I may start it just before the 700th project, so the trios are complete coincident with that milestone, but I may take a different route. We’ll see.

Disquiet Junto Project 0693: Melody Sorted

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0693: Melody Sorted
The Assignment: Reorganize a familiar song note by note.

Step 1: Choose a familiar song for which you have access to the sheet music.

Step 2: Select a segment of the song, perhaps one round of the chorus and the verse — perhaps more, or less, after you finish reading these instructions.

Step 3: Write down all the notes (and their lengths) in the main melodic line.

Step 4: Alphabetize the notes, and also sort them by length, in ascending order, so an Ab goes before an A, and a quarter note goes before a whole note, and so forth. (You might also adjust for where the note falls relative to middle C, starting low and proceeding up.)

Step 5: Record results when all those notes are played in the sequence that was derived during Step 4.

Bonus round: Also consider appending to Step 5 what it sounds like when that same set of notes is played randomly.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0693” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0693-melody-sorted/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How much time do you have to sort?

Deadline: Monday, April 14, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 693rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Melody Sorted — The Assignment: Reorganize a familiar song note by note — at https://disquiet.com/0693/

Faded Warning

The warning fades over time

Transparency Mode

Friends don’t let friends walk around with 100% noise cancellation on.

Legacy

This is the 13th comic in the ongoing series I’m doing with Hannes Pasqualini. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf. More from Hannes at horizontalpitch.com and papernoise.net.

Amplifying Space

This is an amplifier made by the Terryphone Corporation, after that company’s acquisition by ITT, originally International Telephone & Telegraph. Photographed in the space exploration section of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, Long Island, NY. I need to decipher some of this, notably the “listening silence” and “int accent” settings.

Scratch Pad: Eileen, AirTrain, Autumn

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

I’m posting this halfway through a JetBlue flight home to San Francisco from New York, where I was visiting family.

▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day

▰ When I hear the robotic voice repeat “stop, look around” on the JFK AirTrain, I want a Kraftwerk version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)”

▰ ”The thing about being in Art Blakey’s band was staying in it long enough to have one of your songs recorded.” —Frank Lacy (March 31, 2025, at Smalls in Manhattan, leading his septet during the 9:00pm show)

▰ Imagining that by the time I’m due for hearing aids, people will be muting words in everyday conversation like it’s possible to do currently on social media

▰ The quiet after the dishwasher after the rain is a particularly quiet quiet

▰ Not bad. It’s April 3 as I type this, and I’ve been in New York since March 27, and I haven’t heard Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, or Bon Jovi once. Let’s see if I can make it to Saturday, April 5, when I fly home.

▰ Finished reading two novels this week: Ali Smith’s excellent Autumn (2017), a beautifully fractured story about the emotional and intellectual connection between two people toward the start of life for one of them and toward the end of the other’s, and Joan Didion’s even more excellent Play It as It Lays (1970), a bleakly fractured story about the lack of connection between a number of people, and now I want to read any novel that dares to use a quote from the Didion book as its epigraph. Also read a short little graphic novel by Rich Tommaso, In the Garden of Earthly Delights (Floating World Comics, 2024), which I picked up at the excellent shop Escape Pod at the recommendation of its proprietor, Menachem Luchins. That’s on Long Island in the town of Huntington, which is also where I lived in the same house from when I was about two weeks old until I left for college. I’m a sucker for small comics, and comics written and drawn by the same person, and heist stories, and comics that include depictions of art, and this is all of those. I’m also pondering print formats for small comics, given Hannes Pasqualini and my ongoing Frame by Frame series, and this one was informative.

Shifts

Apparently this zone had a previous life as a lane.

Disquiet Junto Project 0692: Combust a Move

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0692: Combust a Move
The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track.

There is just one step for this project: Record a piece of music in which the sound of fire — match, burner, cigarette, etc. — provides the primary source for the rhythmic track.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0692” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0692-combust-a-move/.

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long before this fire burns out?

Deadline: Monday, April 7, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 692nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Combust a Move — The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track — at https://disquiet.com/0692/