Scratch Pad: Neighbor Band, Hate-Shazaming
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.
▰ Kudos to whoever on the Poker Face team ran the episode 7, season 2, credits in the typeface from the movie Heat
▰ It appears a drummer now lives near the tiny office I rent. I think I can work with this, as traffic noise and distance muffle much of it. Headphones can manage the remainder. I mean, someone can’t practice drums all day. Right? Right??
▰ So much of my favorite music is glitch. Thelonious Monk is piano glitch. Kid Koala is turntable glitch. Gregorian chant and early polyphony are architectural glitch. Janis Joplin is vocal glitch. I love when the fragility of engineering is put to purposeful use.
▰ The recent documentary (really more like a commissioned group memoir) Becoming Led Zeppelin was very enjoyable, and it was fun to be reminded of Jimmy Page having, in his early work as a session musician, done work on Muzak. I’d love if some superfan had managed to track down the specific material he contributed to.
▰ Keeping an eye on my Mac Mini via Screen Sharing on an iPad connected to my MacBook via Sidecar is my mundane version of Inception
▰ My Shazam is 90% music I disliked so much I had to find out what it was (maybe call this habit “hate-Shazaming”), and 10% stuff I loved but couldn’t identify, half of that originating from the inside of taco trucks
▰ I am far more up for this Superman movie than I expected to be. The trailer roll-out is doing its job. I mean, the teeth making a sound when they hit the camera after being knocked out by a punch (at 1:15)? Bonus points for major Frank Quitely vibes. Sign me up.
▰ Update: the drummer who moved near (but not too near!) the little office I rent appears to have made a bassist friend. They dig Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.
▰ This hold music is like a weaponized lullaby
▰ Update: The drummer near my little rental office skipped a day of practice, but filling the void was someone a few buildings away screaming on a phone for so long and so intensely that someone in a neighboring office started laughing.
▰ Finished reading one book this week: The Mushroom at the End of the World by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Well into several others, including the second Bosch and Stephen King’s The Long Walk, and probably too many others to count.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Tom Gauld posted, on Instagram, a four-panel comic involving the sound of a fountain pen, and I won’t give away the ending. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Robin Fox, on Instagram, posted the internal organs of a 1939 instrument, the Hammond Novachord, that contains no fewer than 163 (!) vacuum tubes. ▰ The account that goes by c1t1zen had a funny response, on Threads, to my latest doorbell post.
