Scratch Pad: Winston, Automobiles, Ocean
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.
▰ There are days when I look at — and listen to — my inbox full of music press releases, and I find myself wondering if George Winston may be the most influential pianist of the second half of the 20th century.
▰ It’s quite sunny out but I can tell the temperature is still low because there have been no sirens from emergency vehicles rushing to handle incidents at the beach
▰ “Slow Children at Play”
“End”
“Quiet Zone”
“Duck Crossing”
— this is some of the signage that Disquiet Junto music community participants are willfully mis-interpreting as compositional prompts in this week’s project. Follow along, or maybe even join in.
▰ End of day. China Beach at dusk.
▰ Another slice of car voice-to-text weirdness: Once — just once, at least so far — I verbally responded “cool” to someone’s text message in the car, and the car replied, “No, you’re cool, Marc,” and there was a little pause between “cool” and “Marc” as the system stitched my name into the phrase.
▰ The car’s voice-to-text text messaging has funny quirks: like, if I reply “sounds good” to someone, the car mistakenly interprets that as me confirming its inquiry as to whether I want to respond, so I say “sounds good,” then it begins to record my outgoing message, and then I say “sounds good” all over again.
▰ It’s March now and we’re due in the Disquiet Junto music community for the trio project, likely not this week, but soon. The trio project goes like this: the first week, people record a third of a trio; the second, different people fill in a second slot of these trios; and in the third, the trios are completed by another person.
▰ Yeah, it’s been a minute, but a new free issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter went this week
▰ We’re willfully misinterpreting signs this time around. When I saw the sign pictured here — near Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where I live — I wondered why there were so many dangerous arrows in the water, and what we could do about them. Then I wondered what this same sign might mean if it were interpreted as a musical instruction. Choose your own sign and do just that. The project went live at disquiet.com/0688 on Thursday, March 6, at 12:10am Pacific Time. That’s Pacific like the ocean — the ocean full of dangerous dangerous arrows.
▰ These are the first four novels I finished reading this year. I never completed the C.S. Lewis as a kid. I think I’m more of a Philip Pullman reader, let’s say (though I love Lewis’ The Great Divorce). Kerr is a friend and fellow workmate from many years back, just pre-parenthood; if you want a fast-paced mystery set among the worst of San Francisco tech bros, this is your schadenthriller.
The final two were both re-reads. Cryptonomicon felt fresher than ever, a fantastic and rewarding book. As for The Good Soldier, there was much to appreciate, but I mostly felt like if these people had to work for a living, they’d have a lot less time to be this insufferable and self-centered.
And I finished reading zero books this past week. George Eliot’s Middlemarch will be in the works for many more weeks to come, I’m making progress in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, and I’ve been dipping into a bunch of other things, including various graphic novels. But right now my life is a slew of bookmarks: both physical slips of paper as well as virtual placeholders and percentage trackers.
