Scratch Pad: Polymeric, Pulice, Luggage

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.

▰ Went to type “polymetric synthesizer” which was then autocorrected to “polymeric synthesizer” and now I’m trying to imagine what that could be

▰ I get tons of spam calls. Today I decided to see what one was, some sort of tax debt BS. I called back the number I had ignored, someone answered, they identified the organization as a “tax center” (whatever that is), and I said, simply, “Hi, what exactly is this?” And they hung up. So weird.

▰ I saw Cole Pulice open for Caterina Barbieri at Great American Music Hall on September 30th, and right now, between Pulice and Kin Sventa and Cecyl Ruehlen (both of whom I’ve also seen live), all I wanna listen to is people processing saxophones electronically

▰ Yeah, Thursday, October 3, 2024, marks the start of the 666th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto music community project

▰ Go back in time to New Orleans me (1999-2003) and tell him in the future he can’t handle a relatively dry 86° F

▰ Part of a paid newspaper subscription should be you get the non-clickbait headlines

▰ Fun fact: playing guitar chords with a wrist recovering from a fall is not advised

▰ Word’s out that the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco is closing and with it the Luggage Store Gallery Music Series. When I think of places where I regularly attended concerts and that are now gone, the two others that hit me as hard were the Knitting Factory on Houston Street in Manhattan and the Mermaid Lounge on Constance Street in New Orleans. :(

▰ Yow, there have been just over 7,500 posts on my Disquiet.com website since I founded it in December 1996. That comes out to roughly 270 posts a year. A lot of them have accumulated weird unicode characters and mangled formatting, and I’ve been thinking of going through the site from the start to the present and tidying things up. If I attended to 5 posts a day, that’d be 4 years before I was done. Eek.

▰ Fun fact: if you write something online about proofreading something, you are destined to have a typo in it. I didn’t make the rule. I’m just reporting gthem.

▰ Afternoon trio for shofar, roof repair, and washing machine — with special guest appearance by automated voice emitted by city bus

▰ I love going back through old articles I’ve written and finding not just record reviews but heavily researched longer pieces I’d entirely forgotten about. Like, of course I interviewed Ben Neill, Beth Custer, Jack Dangers, and Nils Petter Molvaer in 1998 for this one piece I just dug up.

▰ At first you’re like, “Oh, this is just from 2000,” and then you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’d be a quarter century ago”

▰ I will never understand people who talk continuously during concerts.

Let me rephrase that: I think I do understand them, and the psychological profile is not flattering.

▰ I was once in an otherwise empty movie theater with a friend waiting for the film to start, and a couple came in and every other seat in the entire theater was open, and they sat right in front of us. After a few minutes, one of them turned around and said, “Do you have the time?” and I replied, “I’ll tell you if you move.”

▰ So I started the week deeply enjoying Cole Pulice playing electronically mediated saxophone as the opener for a Caterina Barbieri concert, and I ended the week by unearthing, perchance, a 1998 article for which I interviewed Nils Petter Molvaer, Ben Neill, and Beth Custer talking about electronically mediating their respective horns (trumpet, trumpet, clarinet). I guess I’ve been into this stuff for a while.

▰ Been writin’ (and lifin’) more than readin’, hence no finished books for a bit now. On the cusp of a few, and yesterday after lunch I (self-admirably) delayed purchasing the new Alan Moore, The Great When, until my stacks (virtual and physical) diminish a bit. It may just be my imagination, but I feel like he and Neal Stephenson (whose upcoming one I did pre-order) turned in massive books to their publishers around the same time, and those publishers replied, “We’re splitting these into three parts and doling ’em out over as many years.”