Disquiet

• Lao New Year celebration at Civic Center in San Francisco: minor chords on massive Casios are traditional, as in Russian & Thai festivities. #
• Military aircraft just shattered unusually sunny day with its jet engines. Not sure if the sound lingers in the sky, or just in my ears. #
• The bus is oddly quiet. Something should penetrate my iPod’s chamber music. My entire neighborhood has decided to make it a 3-day weekend. #
• Favorite new-to-me phrase: “festina lente,” Latin for “to make haste slowly.” #
• Neat insta-rewind: Play MP3 in Quicktime in Firefox to the end; hit Command/Backarrow & it plays backward with no clipping. #
• RIP, pop provocateur Malcolm McLaren (b. 1946). Tonight: Duck Rock & Fans. Here he is on 8-bit as the new punk from 2003: http://is.gd/bkyzg #
• Garbage truck rumbles past clumsily, continues for a block, turns down another street. Someone else’s sonic Thursday morning is my Monday. #
• Q: “What is that sound/Where is it coming from/All around” –Billy Bragg … A: The hum of the industrial carpet cleaner a few houses down. #
• The office printer at various points during the day performs a hypnotic, deeply modal qawwali-like drone for minutes at a time. #
• Wondering what sound on a given morning triggers the activity of noting sounds. Today: hard drive, airplane, bus, ice in glass of coffee. #
• Both @bandcamp and @soundcloud are great web platforms for musicians. I just wish the latter had “clickable tags” the way the former does. #
• Morning sounds: hard drive, fridge, bus, shower, heater, plane overhead. Each truly ordinary but in combination a kind of ambient cacophony. #
• From George Prochnik’s book In Pursuit of Silence: “I was as tired of hearing myself complain about noise as I was about the noise itself.” #
• Lovely quiet after long, intense rain. Is the water-logged street quieter, are our wet walls thicker, or are there just fewer cars out? #
• Sunday morning = new Ava Mendoza album. #
• There are mornings when the refrigerator sounds like a body shop for hovercraft. This is one of them. #
• Just saw flick Staten Island, with great Seymour Cassel as deaf mute deli worker in trouble with mob. Great handling of his lack of hearing. #
• Washing machine is sound of industriousness. Birdsong reminds me I need to clean the yard. #

By Marc Weidenbaum