Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 5

Long Weekend

It was my birthday and I spent it up the coast. Back home now.

Bridge to Nowhere

I love impossible architecture. I love absurdist architecture. I love when both are explored in a classical form, as with this bridge at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Also, the story behind it is sort of insane:

Scratch Pad: Noise, RSS, Conway

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.

▰ The problem isn’t the construction noise. The problem is that the construction noise sounds exactly like a giant dental drill.

▰ RSS 4 Life

▰ With great power … comes a lot of drop-down menus I get confused by and lose track of

▰ I love the front of the C.G. Jung building on Mission in San Francisco, and not just because the tiles make me think of Conway’s Game of Life.

▰ Morning trio for street construction noise … — and who am I kidding? I can’t hear anything else.

▰ Synths!

▰ Finished reading one novel and four graphic novels this week. The novel: Lightness by C. A. Higgins. The graphic novels — this is me getting back into the swing of things with my Marvel Unlimited subscription — were largely in the recent Ultimates line (Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri’s Ultimates: Volume 1: Fix the World, Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man: Volume 1: Married with Children, and Peach Momoko’s Ultimate: X-Men: Fears and Hates), plus the start of Al Ewing and Martín Cóccolo’s run on Thor, Immortal Thor Vol. 1: All Weather Turns to Storm. And I’ve started trying out leagueofcomicgeeks.com as a way to track my comics reading. So far, so good.

Eduardo Miranda’s Quantum Explorations

The field is still somewhat new to me, despite how much I’ve read and continue to read about quantum computing, but on Thursday night I attended a performance and presentation at Gray Area here in San Francisco by Eduardo Miranda. Miranda is a professor of computer music at the University of Plymouth, and he is currently visiting as a fellow at Stochastic Labs, across the bay in Berkeley. He’s the editor of several related books, including Quantum Computing in the Arts and Humanities (Springer), Quantum Computer Music (Springer) and Advances in Quantum Computer Music (World Scientific).

At Gray Area, Miranda performed three works and then gave a brief talk about the use of quantum computing in the production of music, and took questions from the audience. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but a key distinguishing characteristic seems to be the unique nature of superposition in quantum physics, a topic explored in particular in Miranda’s piece Heisenberg’s Hammer, shown up at the top of this post.

He’s been involved in artificial intelligence in music since the mid-1990s, but says of the current state of the technology, during the ongoing boom, “It makes it easy to make music, but not to be creative.” He also expressed a concern that “big data averages everything and creates mediocrity,” and explained he is currently exploring “small data” as an alternate path.

In Miranda’s own description, the state of quantum computing today is equivalent to the age of punch cards in the overall development of computers. If I followed him correctly, then he expressed uncertainty, so to speak, that this particular path will even pay compositional dividends, but he’s continuing to see how far he can go with it.

Disquiet Junto Project 0709: Overclocked

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 0709: Overclocked
The Assignment: Speed up a machine (or process) until it falters.

Step 1: Think of a machine (or process) you use frequently.

Step 2: Push that machine (or process) by speeding it up, until it begins to break down.

Step 3: Record something making use of the sounds resulting from Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0709” (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-0709-overclocked/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How fast can you go?

Deadline: Monday, August 4, 2025, 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 709th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Overclocked — The Assignment: Speed up a machine (or process) until it falters — at https://disquiet.com/0709/.

2/3rds of Yo La Tengo

I first heard about the Arts Center at Duck Creek when guitarist Bill Frisell played there with his trio two years back, in June 2023. Duck Creek is way out on Long Island, in East Hampton. I grew up further west on the island, toward the north shore. I mentioned the Frisell gig, which the venue uploaded to its YouTube channel, at the time, and have kept an eye on the place ever since, hoping that the concert schedule might coincide with my occasional visits back home.

All of which is how I learned about a newly uploaded, fantastic live ambient performance from June 21, 2025, by two thirds of the band Yo La Tengo, Georgia Hubley on electric guitar and Ira Kaplan on keyboards. With echoes of Robert Fripp and Laraaji, they played a quietly psychedelic set, initially gentle and then more abrasive and out there as it proceeded, with lots of warbling noises, backwards effects, and held notes on the eBow transformed through effects pedals.

While Yo La Tengo are rightfully thought of as indie rock, they venture into ambient zones on occasion, as on the track “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” which appeared when the band first launched its Bandcamp page (it was part of the album We Have Amnesia Sometimes), and the instrumentals collection The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, which was all composed to accompany short aquatic documentary films by the late Jean Painlevé (1902-1989).

Side note: ambient, contemporary classical, new age, and guitar pedal fans will want to check out an Emily Hopkins harp performance at Duck Creek from last November:

Teensy 4.1

I picked up a teeny tiny little Teensy 4.1, and I’m looking forward to toying with it. I think my first project with it will be the “headless” Dirtywave M8 Tracker (which isn’t really headless because I’ll be using the laptop as the screen, and as the controller).

Beatles Forensics

Yes, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared — in one of the photos in the latter’s current exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco — to be contemplating handwritten notes that were blurry, which is to say, not the focal point of the image, I sure did take a close-up shot and flip the detail upside down so I could ascertain what song they were in the process of writing. It was “I Saw Her Standing There.” The exhibit is Paul McCartney Photographs 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which runs from March 1, 2025, through October 5, 2025.

When I first entered the exhibit, I found I immediately had an early Beatles song running through my head. Then it occurred to me that what might be neat would be to wander around the galleries and ask visitors what they were hearing in their heads. But then I realized that in some room several rooms away, audio from an ancient live performance was playing, and thus seeping into all the other galleries, and that the song in my head was, in fact, the song that the playback had ever so quietly placed there.

Font Generation

Whatever new generation of cash register printers kicked in some years back is now, in turn, old enough that it’s begun to show signs of idiosyncratic deterioration, and the resulting glitch of mechanical shortcomings is coming into its own. I am here for these unintended fonts.

Scratch Pad: Teensy, Lowe, Athena

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.

▰ Afternoon trio for passing bus, passing plane, and passing person singing to self

▰ Me: It’s incredible what you can do with merely a Teensy 4.1 and access to a 3D printer.

Also me: I can’t believe entire days have to pass before items arrive by mail.

Then: Me slaps me upside the head. 

Exit, pursued by a bear — which symbolically represents self-flagellation regarding impatience.

▰ Been a few years. If you’re headed back in time, please tell late-teens/early-20s Marc that in the future he’ll live a few blocks from Golden Gate Park where, quite often, Nick Lowe will perform (for free!) as part of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. Also this year: Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Rosanne Cash (and, admittedly, a buncha people I’ve never managed to dig, but such is festival life).

▰ I have many favorite spots in the art museum at Stanford. In first place must go this statue, which is “a copy of a copy,” and the sculptor of which apparently lived backward in time (1935–1892).

▰ That was bizarre. I got some post directed at me from what was apparently a scam account claiming my Mastodon account had been shut down due to copyright infringement, and when I clicked on the post to see more details, it disappeared, likely because some Mastodon security apparatus removed it, or perhaps because the scammer backtracked.

▰ Finished reading one novel this week, but it’s one I’m editing, so I won’t identify it. Also read a bunch of comics, though not enough to round up to a graphic novel. And maintaining pace on Blood Meridian, Moby Dick, and one other.