Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 8

Scratch Pad: Din, 40, 耳鸣

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.

▰ Gonna start a noise band called Din DeLillo.

(I got some fun responses to this, most mentioning White Noise. My favorite suggested a producer: Thomas Punch-in.)

▰ I managed to crash the dictionary on my MacBook. That’s a first.

(I was searching for whether we spell it “labeled” or “labelled” in the U.S., and it’s the former.)

▰ Three men sitting silently in a barbershop while Rod Stewart sings “Hot Legs” on the stereo

▰ I had a dream, before Bill Viola died, that he’d film an Earth music video focused just on drummer Adrienne Davies

▰ Ah, summer in San Francisco.

In case it’s unclear, the temperature is 60º Fahrenheit. And it felt a lot colder.

▰ I now recognize my best use of a large second screen (that is, when I’m at my desk) is not as a larger version of my laptop screen, but as a digital cork board for various smaller windows: notes, audio player, messages apps, browser windows, etc. I just keep working on my laptop as usual, and the large screen plays a supporting role.

▰ Either a funny choice or a modern absurdity, this is a captcha I had to do when trying to fill out some forms on the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) website to renew my driver’s license:

▰ It occurs to me there isn’t a day of the week I don’t spend with the Disquiet Junto. From Thursday to Monday there are new tracks arriving. Tuesday is for listening to the final tracks that appeared overnight. Wednesday is prepping the next project. And then it begins all over again.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird. I enjoyed how it jumped around in time and employed lots of different formats, including email and letters. I posted, earlier this week, a list of the dozen novels I finished reading during the first half of 2025.

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Woshibai, based in Shanghai, China, is one of my favorite comics artists working today. Check out this piece, posted on Threads, about tinnitus. You can easily translate the brief captions using Google Translate or a similar service. I’d reproduce the rough English translations here, but I’d say part of the pleasure for me of reading Woshibai’s comics is the time that it takes for me to copy and paste. In an age of constant and immediate media, I’ve come to appreciate the pace required to select an individual caption at a time, paste it into a browser window, and wait to see what is revealed. Much of Woshibai’s work feels fractured and elliptical. This one, titled “Tinnitus” (“耳鸣”), is especially tight, and it closes expertly. ▰ Mode Exchange is new to me. It’s a venue (or maybe a promoter?) of sound work in Tokyo. The aesthetic and line-up are aces. Check it at instagram.com/mode.exchange. ▰ I love how a local used record store, Noise, one of two that are walking distance from where I live, fills its Instagram with photos of people and the vinyl albums they’ve purchased. This occurs on Instagram. Here’s a recent set of 10 such images.

Science Fiction Authors Under 40

This week I asked the following question on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Mastodon: Who are your favorite science fiction novelists under the age of 40 who have had at least two novels published? For future reference, this would be as of July 2, 2025.

As a kid I naturally read mostly people who were considerably older than myself. However, many of their best books were published when they were under 40. Isaac Asimov had numerous novels out before he turned 40, including The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and Foundation. Ursula K. Le Guin, born 1929, saw A Wizard of Earthsea published the year before she turned 40. Robert Heinlein would not have made it onto a list such as this at any point, or maybe just for a few months, because his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, came out the year he turned 40, 1947. (I had forgotten how much older he was than Asimov. When I was a kid, they seemed like peers.)

In the years after I graduated from college, I was reading novelists who were closer to me in age. Many remain favorites to this day who were well under 40 when I was getting into them (Neal Stephenson: Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age; William Gibson: Neuromancer, Count Zero; Jonathan Lethem: Gun, with Occasional Music; Amnesia Moon; As She Climbed Across the Table; Girl in Landscape; Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude — jeepers).

Earlier this year, I re-read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which was published in 1999, the year he turned 40. For dessert, as it were, I re-read “Mother Earth Mother Board,” the fantastic non-fiction article he wrote for the magazine Wired in 1996. That got me wondering: if Wired were to assign an author under 40 years of age an article like that — a globe-trotting endeavor in hacker journalism amounting to well over 40,000 words — who would write it, and what would the topic be?

And that thinking helped me recognize that while I’ve read many science fiction authors while they were under 40 but no longer are under 40, as well as many science fiction novels, albeit after the fact, written by authors when they were under 40, I’m not at this moment reading a lot of science fiction authors who are currently under 40 (excluding comics, manga, graphic novels, etc.).

Which is why I asked. And various people helpfully responded with the following:

Marie-Helene Bertino*
Gautam Bhatia
Pierce Brown
S. A. Chakraborty
Alix E. Harrow
C. A. Higgins
S. L. Huang**
R. F. Kuang***
Masande Ntshanga
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Tochi Onyebuchi****
Eliot Peper*****
Grant Price
V. E. Schwab
Emily Tesh

*I’ve started Beautyland, and I’m digging it.
**I’ve read Zero Sum Game.
***I’ve read Babel.
****I read a third of Goliath and should get back to it.
*****I’ve got a copy of Breach waiting for me.

Wrist Radio

The latest in wearables features no fewer than five transistors.

Disquiet Junto Project 0705: Book Start

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 0705: Book Start
The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music.

This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.

Step 1: Choose a favorite book, or simply choose one at random.

Step 2: Read — preferably aloud — the first sentence in the book’s text.

Step 3: Make music that somehow reflects the line you read in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0705” (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-0705-book-start/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it a novel or a short story?

Deadline: Monday, July 7, 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 705th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Book Start — The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music — at https://disquiet.com/0705/. This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.

Beaterator 2025

Confirmed, per a suggestion by Peter Kirn, that you can, indeed, run Timbaland’s Beaterator game, originally developed for the PlayStation Portable, on a modern portable “retro” game console like the Anbernic SP, shown here. Shortly after its PSP debut, in 2009, the game also appeared on the iPhone.

Timbaland Portable

I was fiddling with my old Nintendo DS, and apparently I was so addicted to Timbaland’s production that I stored some instrumentals, including Xzibit’s “Hey Now (Mean Muggin),” on there at some point in the distant past.

And in case it’s not familiar, here is the track. It is fantastic:

And then Peter Kirn reminded me about Timbaland’s PSP (PlayStation Portable) release, Beaterator, which I now need to reacquaint myself with.

Novels Read — First Half of 2025

I’ve finished reading 12 novels so far this year. Two a month seems like a good pace, leaving room for other reading. Below are the titles in the order I read them. The ones with the + signs I recommend in particular. I put Middlemarch on pause after I was about a quarter of the way in, and I’ve picked it back up, though I really need to read a good essay or two about what I’m due to appreciate about it (recommendations welcome), as it’s precisely the sort of compendium of courtship micro-interactions that I could never get engaged by. I’m also currently reading Blood Meridian, Moby Dick (which I’ve started several times in the past, and this is the first time when I’ve felt like I will actually not just finish it but enjoy it), and The Hummingbird.

1: C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

2: Jakob Kerr: Dead Money

3: + Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (reread)

4: Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier (reread)

5: + Cory Doctorow: Walkaway

6: + Ali Smith: Autumn

7: + Joan Didion: Play It as It Lays

8: + Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time

9: Michael Connelly: The Black Echo (Bosch Vol. 1)

10: Stephen King: The Long Walk

11: Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley

12: Michael Connelly: The Black Ice (Bosch, Vol. 2)

On Repeat: Deupree, Pritcher, Orio

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Gorgeous live solo performance by Taylor Deupree (apparently a promotion for Benson amps?).

▰ A solo guitar performance by Andy Pritcher from the same series as the above Deupree.

▰ An album, Santa Rosa, of Federico Orio’s music for church bells, recorded at Basílica Santa Rosa de Lima in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While the sound of the bells is familiar, their use here is distinct in the employment of repetition and an emphasis on percussive elements, all amid a range from quiet minimalism to the chaotic.

Scratch Pad: Singularity, Reading, Shortwave

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.

▰ Fortunately, my brain was long ago trained to interpret the ongoing nearby construction as abstract minimal techno

▰ Overheard at restaurant this week: “Human connection is going to be outdated in five years.” Someone in the group also said, “Human connection is overrated.”

▰ I have a choice between the drummer near the office and construction near home

▰ Nice: my (successful) attempt to have Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) run on a modern portable gaming console made it to Jason Kottke’s blog and Austin Kleon’s newsletter.   

▰ I finished reading two books, both novels, this week: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the second in Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, The Black Ice. That brings me to the average I’m going for, two novels a month, a dozen so far this year — and with a few days in June to spare. I’ve paused Middlemarch at about a quarter of the way through, and I am currently reading Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, and a few others.  

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: John Kelly shared, on Threads, some Justin Green comic drafts from the 1990s, some of which I edited for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. ▰ John Kannenberg, whose Museum of Portable Sound has an admirably broad scope, reminded his followers of a 1981 assassination attempt involving a tape recorder. ▰ A post on Instagram from Music Thing Modular introduced me to the Shortwave Collective, “An international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.”

A Thief Moment

Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), his feature film debut, is having a moment. It was mentioned in “One Last Job” (a recent episode of Poker Face that focused on an aspiring filmmaker) and a track from the movie’s score, by Tangerine Dream, was featured prominently in the opening episode (“Groundhogs”) of the latest season of The Bear. The latter makes particular sense, since both the movie and the show are based in Chicago. The Bear team knows what it’s doing, in that the track used in the episode, “Diamond Diary,” is buried under a lot of dialogue, which is true to how Mann’s movie, even when a scene was free of actors speaking, generally mixed the music with a lot of diegetic sound.