Scratch Pad: Clapping, Punk, Reading
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ Afternoon trio for washing machine (spin cycle), passing buses (several), and guitar amplifier buzzing from across the room (but I’m on a video call and can’t get up to turn it off)
▰ A nifty synthesizer-related card deck I’m excited to have played a teeny tiny role in: patchdeck.cards.
▰ It’s Eschers all the way down
▰ Rivalry or unfortunate coincidence?
▰ I was listening to some particularly raucous music on YouTube, a live performance, and the Algorithm must have sensed a disturbance in the force, because it followed it up with Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon
▰ The rules of concert attendance, in case you just landed on Earth:
Jazz: clap at the end of each solo, even though the band is still playing.
Classical: hold applause until the end of the piece; don’t clap between movements.
Rock: talk through the whole show about how the band used to be better.
▰ The collection of short essays on proto-punk songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s is now up at Hilobrow. I wrote about an Ornette Coleman track. Check out Jonathan Lethem on the Monkees, Lucy Sante on the Count Five, Mike Watt on the Stooges, Stephanie Burt on Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Miller on Brian Eno, Nicholas Rombes on Yoko Ono, and much more.
▰ An example of “enshittification” is how it’s easier and more useful to track in a spreadsheet the books you hope to get around to reading, versus apps like Goodreads and StoryGraph. Hey, add a column for who recommended it. Hey, add colors or ranking to track what is of highest personal interest.
▰ After this many years, my guitar teacher knows me well, which means if my chord picking veers too close to “Dust in the Wind” he guides me back from the abyss
▰ I’ve read 25 novels so far this year, the latest being Richard Powers’ The Overstory. I think, with the holidays underway, I may get a few more in. At the start of 2023, I thought I’d double that to 50 but I read a lot of non-fiction, and I spent a lot of time on Duolingo German and guitar lessons.
Q: Marc, don’t you also use synthesizers?
A: Yeah, largely as an overly complex guitar pedal.
