Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 29

Fireworks

I’m excited to be back at it with Hannes Pasqualini. He and I collaborated on a half dozen four-panel comics in 2020 at the start of the pandemic, and now we’ve got a new batch in the works. This one, “Fireworks,” is the first of them, with more to follow. We’re calling the series Frame by Frame. The next one will be published on January 13, and after that the plan is to do one on the first Monday and third Monday every month.

A Night at Bird & Beckett

Caught the final concert of the year at the venerable Bird & Beckett, a book and record store in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood that doubles several nights a week as a music club, mostly jazz. The evening’s event, on Saturday, December 28, was a quartet led by guitarist Duncan James and featuring Bob Blankenship, drums; Larry Chinn, piano; and Carla Kaufman, bass. Bird & Beckett streams every concert live on its YouTube channel, and then leaves them there as part of its massive archive. If you look closely at the video, you’ll see the back of my head for the full run of last night’s show. I almost moved across town to Glen Park a long time ago. In such an alternate timeline, I’d have been at this place at least one night a week.

Scratch Pad: Commerce, SDI4M, Kjartansson

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. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one, though occasionally people do reply to posts I write — from the past week:

▰ I would like to meet the people who order Blank Forms publications through target.com. One-stop shopping for toothpaste, plasticware, Maryanne Amacher, and Éliane Radigue.

▰ Since I can’t solder, it’s usually not DIY but SDI4M (someone did it for me)

▰ Anyone who thinks contemporary children’s culture is too violent has not seen (or fails to remember) the Halloween sequence in the supposedly heartwarming classic Meet Me in St. Louis.

▰ Been watching the third and final season of the What If… ? series, all about Marvel alternate universe stories. I knew one episode was titled “1872” and had Kate Bishop in it, and so I allowed myself to hope it was Hawkeye as Emily Dickinson, or vice-versa, but it was a western. (There was one line about poetry, but unrelated.)

▰ Got a new household device, same manufacturer as one we already had (totally different types of device, one kitchen and the other living room), turned it on, and of course it makes the same startup sound

▰ Went to see Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors for the umpteenth time at SFMOMA. I swear it is better with each viewing. Each time I go I sit focused on a specific screen, this time on Kjartansson himself. The sound at his screen’s end of the nine-screen installation is a lot more sparse, as it’s further from the drums and the two pianos.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. I picked it up based on the recommendation of the owner of a local comic shop, and I really enjoyed it. It has a reputation as funny, but the funny is really just part of what’s going on. I had a blast and will definitely read the next in the series. This was the 30th novel I finished reading in 2024. I thought I might finish one more by the end of December, but with my mom in town for a week it’s unlikely, and that is, of course, fine.

Off Off

It’s been a solid five weeks since I logged off social media, and it’s been a good five weeks. It took two weeks before I really felt not just off but off off, and since then I’ve been enjoying the more insular than usual mode. I found I had approached, if not achieved, a kind of observational homeostasis, where I was still noting — and notating — things, even when not sharing them publicly. I always say my social media accounts are, collectively, my public scratch pad, which is distinct from my personal scratch pad. I do look forward to getting back online solidly by the first full week of January, in part because I miss some of the interaction, but also because it’ll be interesting to see how my off time has informed my next phase of on time. I do subscribe to the idea that being primarily offline, and seeing online activity as a break, is a potentially healthier and more productive approach that the obverse.

Disquiet Junto Project 0678: Commonplace Playlist

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 0678: Commonplace Playlist
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2024 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0678” (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-0678-commonplace-playlist/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How many samples will you use, and how long will they be?

Deadline: Monday, December 30, 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 678th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Commonplace Playlist — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at https://disquiet.com/0678/

Holiday Content

This household has a lot of holiday albums, boxes of CDs accumulated over the years, among them a ton of mixes by Eddie G. If I had to select my three favorite records for this time of year, they are: 

Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas
Low’s 1999 Christmas
The 2004 various artists compilation Where Will You Be Christmas Day? (on the great Dust-to-Digital label)

Sound Advice

Sign on the floor of a car wash in town

Caveat DIYer

Note to self, should I pursue soldering in 2025

Used Metaphysics

The local bookstore has many great signs on its walls. I don’t think I’d noticed this one previously.

Scratch Pad: Chainsaw, Overload, LitRPG

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. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one, though occasionally people do reply to posts I write — from the past week:

▰ The sound of chainsaws becomes immediately commonplace following the close call with a tornado

▰ There’s a new Steven Soderbergh–directed movie coming, titled Black Bag, starring Michael Fassbender in yet another spy role (following, recently, The Killer and The Agency), alongside Cate Blanchett. No composer is, at the moment, listed on IMDB, but Thomas Newman was reportedly associated with the project along the way.

▰ Had dinner at a Thai restaurant where I’m fairly certain the house stereo played just the same two Christmas songs on repeat the entire time.

▰ The practicalities of courtship in 1817: “the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader.” I started reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. If I understand this early passage correctly, a gentleman, Mr. Casaubon, is saying he is looking for a wife who will read to him when his eyes are tired. Now that is early audiobook culture. One of the sisters involved in this scene, only a few pages earlier, said taking care of the blind John Milton would have been a calling. So who knows what’s to come? Also, this is the third novel I’ve read this year that mentions Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations early on (the others being Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), the main difference being that at the time when Eliot wrote Middlemarch, Smith’s book’s publication was still a somewhat recent memory.

▰ Someday I’ll remember that Command+Option+Esc is the Mac’s Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Someday.

▰ Filed a 500-word article. You know how these things go: it would have taken me half as long had it been 1,000 words.

▰ The artist Hannes Pasqualini and I now have the first two of our four-panel comics complete, and we’ll begin rolling them out later this month (beginning on December 30th), with subsequent ones at a fairly regular cadence in the coming year. We did a half dozen of these during the first year of the pandemic.

▰ We had an earthquake, a tsunami alert, and a tornado alert, plus intense wind and rain, over the past couple weeks. I’d like a chill rest of the year. I’ve pretty much logged off of work until January 6.

▰ I hurt my left wrist 12 weeks ago yesterday, and I still can’t comfortably play guitar, but I’ve been using my synths a lot, and fortunately typing is fine.

▰ I think the only way through the onslaught of information and chaos in our the world is to make something of your own over a long period of time. That is the through line; that is where balance is found. You can’t just absorb; you perhaps should also produce. This proposal isn’t about becoming part of the problem; it’s about processing as a means of managing.

▰ My search data on this website inform me that a number of people have come here this week and searched for the title of the new Aphex Twin compilation, Music from the Merch Desk (2016 – 2023), which makes sense, since I wrote a book 10 years ago for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series about Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I don’t have much to say about Music from the Merch Desk at the moment. We’ll see where my ears take me. I will say this: I’ve just never been the sort of music critic who has an opinion about everything. If I don’t write about something, it doesn’t mean I don’t like it; it just means I feel I have nothing in particular to add. So much writing doesn’t add anything. I may weigh in at some point, but trigger-finger urgency is part of what’s wrong with the modern internet: hot takes, cursory judgement, filler, fodder, SEO optimization. AI isn’t the only entity on the planet that creates slop.

▰ It would be the most natural thing for me to start a record label, but it just seems like a lot of work to merely contribute another drop in the ocean, and in turn to undertake a vast amount of uninteresting promotional activity as a requisite to achieve the pleasure of sharing good work by people I admire, and to do right by them. Unless there was really a “different” way for me to go about it, something I think about regularly, I don’t think I’d do it. In many ways, the Disquiet Junto is that record label: weekly compilation albums that anyone can join in. Still …

▰ So far I’ve finished reading 29 novels this year, and that number doesn’t include getting well into War and Peace and Life: A User’s Manual before, respectively, pausing and stopping, and less far into many other books I won’t name. This week I finished reading two novels: Survival Quest, in the LitRPG genre (which is new to me), by Vasily Mahanenko, and Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson. Reading Survival Quest is a bit like playing an RPG campaign with a stellar DM and some highly experienced other players; they are top of their game, and you’re more along for an enjoyable ride. Considering I started reading it just out of curiosity, and fairly certain I wouldn’t enjoy it, I had a great time. Case Histories I’m not so sure about: so many characters, a lot of moments evocatively told, but perhaps so many that they become easily confused, and so many incidents and confessions and so forth, so much emotion right at the surface, but then so many significant events that just pass right by. That much emotion can feel like a meal that is all dessert, which for some people may sound excellent, but for me is a lot to take in.