Scratch Pad: Space, Soul, Depeche Mode
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.
▰ Two seasons into For All Mankind, very much digging it, even if it’s more soap opera than space opera at times. I sure hope they start introducing pop songs that exist only in this alternate timeline (sorta like the Prince bootlegs in Counterpart).
▰ I’m about a decade and a half late to the documentary Thunder Soul (2010), about a Houston, Texas, jazz-funk band that gained much-deserved acclaim, toured the world, and then reunited 30 years later. It should come with a box of tissues, I’ll tell you that.
▰ Afternoon drone trio for idling bus, fog horn, and passing jet plane
▰ I’m definitely a sucker for a thriller in which the mark has an earbud in the whole time and they’re taking directions from someone else, be it antagonist or not. I imagine that mode doesn’t last this full movie, but I’ll be checking it out for sure.
▰ I’d swear that whoever does the voice menu for the jury duty phone line in this town was hired ’cause it sounds like he did the voiceover for the opening of Dragnet
▰ The feeling when you think that’s the ice cream truck down the road and it turns out to be the especially colorful van of a plumber
▰ My friend Matt Nish-Lapidus (@emenel) made a fantastic piece of online art, the less said about it in advance the better. Just give it a click, and then another and …
▰ Dream last night: I’m in a band with Kathryn Hahn. We share a manager with Depeche Mode. The manager set up the four of us to record together. Dave Gahan is being lazy somehow. Hahn marches Gore and me to the mall, pulls Gahan out of his fitness class, and lectures him about his responsibilities.
▰ Perhaps the best thing about this Martin Gore* video about his new (and very pretty) signature Gretsch guitar is the evidence that those famous floor-to-ceiling walls of Eurorack modules in his studio weren’t sufficient, and now he has additional massive cases on the floor.
▰ A friend told a friend long ago “Don’t read books; write ’em” and that’s my main excuse for having not finished reading a book since the first week of September, when I completed The Mercy of Gods, the first in a new series by Expanse author James S.A. Corey (actually two authors writing under one pseudonym). That was my 21st novel of 2024. I’ve read a bunch of stuff since, and am nearly done with too many books, but the first thing I’ve finished since The Mercy of Gods is a novella, titled Livesuit, in the same Corey series. It’s pretty short, but I’ll count it as a novel, I think.
