Scratch Pad: Dalloway, Levienaise-Farrouch, Lasers
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. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one — from the past week:
▰ Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway might as well come all highlighted in yellow, ’cause that’s what it looks like after I’ve read it:
“For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
▰ I’m loving the score to The Agency (the remake of The Bureau, now with Michael Fassbender, most definitely playing a different spy from the one he played in David Fincher’s The Killer — his current mode seems to be, “What if I did what Liam Neeson did except the stories are interesting”), but the music doesn’t appear to be online yet, so I’ve been listening to other scores (Living, Censor, All of Us Strangers) and other music by its composer, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.
▰ There’s a great moment in the first episode of The Agency when Michael Fassbender’s spy character, having confirmed that his apartment is full of surveillance equipment, steps onto his balcony. The song “It’s Not Easy” by Ofege plays, and sonically superimposed on it, as the camera pulls back to show the expanse of London, are countless voices being overheard.
▰ I tend toward a mode one might call “handwringing” when it comes to year-end best-of lists. I used to do them more enthusiastically. I kind of don’t enjoy making them. I find the undertaking dispiriting — ranking, leaving things out, and so forth. And yet! And yet, I like looking at other people’s lists, because it’s a great way to discover things, and to think about things in a broader context. For example, anyone who puts new new Lia Kohl or FourColor records on a year-end list is likely to have something else on their list that I might never have heard of, and might enjoy. So, I did make a list (also because some publications I write for requested such a list). I would love to see other people’s best-of lists.
▰ Lies down on the couch after several meetings. Feels earthquake. Continues to feel earthquake. Recuperates, to a degree, from the earthquake. Is ravaged by phone’s tsunami alert klaxon.
▰ I like living walking distance from multiple establishments that sell handmade, inexpensive, frozen dumplings — and after I type this, I realize I meant Chinese, but there are also a lot of Eastern European options. Clearly, the ones I cooked up this week were meant to be steamed, not boiled. My bad.
▰ I was on a Rolling Stones kick for much of the week. “Hang Fire” is one of the best Cars songs the Cars never recorded. I would have loved to have heard the Bee Gees cover “Miss You.” I think of Bill Wyman as the Stones’ inker, in comics-drawing terms: the band sketches the song, and then he inks it.
▰ When I was young, it was Beatles, then the Who, and I barely gave a second thought to the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin were alien to me. To a degree, that sequence has now been flipped on its head. This isn’t a firm order or anything. And Black Sabbath was even more alien to me, and I’m not sure where they fit in the list, but they are no longer alien to me. Quite the contrary.
▰ I’ve been working on a bunch of scripts for a new set of four-panel, square-format (2 x 2) comics I’m working on with the excellent illustrator Hannes Pasqualini. We’re gonna get a couple finished before beginning to roll them out. One of them is essentially done. This process feels really good. It’s a totally different way of exploring sound than anything else I do — related, but with its own unique capacities. I made a script template for the four-panel format we’re using, and it’s funny how many different things fill that template: some light, some self-obscuring, some deeply felt. It’s a treat. It’s work, mind you, but it’s a treat.
▰ Neighborhood news: the old burger place that’s been closed for a couple years is now a sushi place that also serves udon
▰ TIL on a Mac, OPT + either of the brightness buttons pulls up the display settings
▰ You know the show is good when the person at the sound board is taking photos.
This is Robin Fox performing on December 6 at Gray Area in San Francisco as part of the Recombinant festival.
▰ I finished reading one book this week, a novel, Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway, featuring George Smiley, the greatest creation of Harkaway’s father, the late John le Carré.
