I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself.
▰ RIP, Wayne Thiebaud, who died on Christmas at age 101 after bringing so much pleasure to so many eyes. I only got to speak with him once, on the phone while writing a profile of painter Mel Ramos, his lifelong friend, for sactownmag.com.
▰ If IMDB indexed furniture, the entry for Emeco chairs would be the longest page on the internet
▰ Dishwasher (two rooms over) to the left of me, rainstorm (outside living room window) to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle again
▰ I am totally down for Mos Espa parkour.
▰ I’m 67% (45% when I first tweeted this) of the way through Fonda Lee’s third Jade novel, Jade Legacy, and it’s truly thrilling. It never takes the easy way out. On the one hand, I’m sad to see the series come to a close. On the other, I’m so glad to see how compelling and transportive it is, how far it goes.
▰ There’s a lot I love about Dickinson, the TV series, and right now everything else takes second place after the jazz that plays every time Walt Whitman speaks.
▰ Excited to spend more time in Bogdan Raczynski’s new https://clang.gg community in the coming year. For fun, here’s an email interview I did with Bogdan 22 and a half years ago: “Turning Japanese.” (In response, Raczynski likened decades-old interviews to high school yearbook photos.)
▰ My day began with @’s related to poetry (via Rachael Nevins) and to livecoding (via Bogdan Raczynski), which is alright by me.
▰ So glad Bruce Levenstein is digging the trio of Michele Rabbia, Gianluca Petrella, and Eivind Aarset on the 2019 album Lost River. One of my favorite albums of the past few years. The guitarist Eivind (autocorrects to Divine) Aarset is great as a leader and often at his best as a collaborator and supporting player.
▰ Mornings sounds, last day of the year: external drive beeps and whirs as it reboots; a bus’ breaks bring it to a stop briefly (clearly no one was waiting to board, nor did anyone disembark); a car speeds west on the wet street at pedestrian-defying clip; house creaks as it warms.
▰ This week in the annual end-of-year project, Disquiet Junto music community participants are stitching together year-end retroactive sonic diaries by concatenating brief snippets from existing tracks to represent the past year. Playlist in progress at soundcloud.com.
▰ Only three episodes left of our Dickinson holiday spree*. :(
*née binge
▰ Only two now. :( :( On the bright side, when they’re over there are exceptional leftover Salvadoran tamales for lunch.
▰ Wow, Dickinson is a treat. TV has no shortage when it comes to flights of fancy, genre blending, hi/low mashups, public-domain spelunking, self-aware reboots, and professional-grade fan fiction. Dickinson is all of those, and it makes good on its source material and its conceit.
▰ Best receipt font of 2021
Side note: The “little spicy” following “medium spicy” is apparently how the kitchen is signaled to find the zone between medium spicy and very spicy.