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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
▰ I was distracted during the movie Tuner when a piano tuner, in one of many such metaphoric excursions, said that a single key can seem in tune yet may not fit in with the other 87 — all while sitting at what we’ve been told is a Bösendorfer, which I associate with expanded keyboards (92 and 97). I then read up, and was reminded that Bösendorfer makes regular pianos, too, so no foul. Still, I wondered why mention that specific manufacturer, beyond a very pro-Yamaha production over all (note the t-shirt worn by the younger tuner, and the shade thrown on Steinway by the maestro — and Yamaha owns Bösendorfer).
▰ Has a composer been announced yet for the upcoming Neuromancer TV series? The cast and crew are listed in detail on IMDB (including a lot of puppetry — what’s going on there?), among them both sound and music supervision, but no composer is named.
▰ If you happen to go back in time and meet much-younger me, please mention that in the future I’ll live walking distance from at least five Burmese restaurants. And after an inevitable pregnant pause, mention how tasty Burmese food is. Thanks.
▰ It’s alarming how many fire engines, with alarms blaring, have gone by the living room window in the past half hour, all headed toward the ocean — and this all the more alarming because it is not noon on a sunny day.
▰ No music in the barbershop, just two scissors, not in anything approaching sync. … Eventually the semi-silence was broken by the Hollies’ “Jennifer Eccles.”
▰ I many years ago turned off all alerts on my phone except texts, which I mute after hours, and phone calls. At some point I turned on Slack weekdays during work. The only other app that snuck through and that I stuck with is YouTube Music, so on occasion I get these random alerts about a new release by Atarashi Gakko! or some string quartet or John Fogerty or Sarah Davachi, and those are all sort of a treat. In other words: thumbs up to treat alerts. Just, as with sweets, not too many of them.
▰ Finished reading some manga tankobon this week. There was the first volume of Ao Kojima’s Hon Nara Urdu Hodo, about a bookstore, its owner (and previous owner), and its customers, all of which sprawls into these lightly connected stories that have a bit of a Midnight Diner (by Yarō Abe) vibe in terms of structure. And then there were the first three volumes of Tomoko Yamashita’s Ikoku Nikki, which is about a 15-year-old girl whose parents die in an accident, and who is taken in by her mom’s sister, a fiction writer. The aunt is somewhat anti-social and the teenager is more outgoing, and while they truly don’t understand each other, they understand that they don’t understand each other, and that appears to be enough to provide a foundation for their relationship. Both series are quite good, and I’ll continue reading them for sure. Nikki ended after 11 volumes, after which Yamashita moved on to another series about a novelist, this one titled Tatsumaki, which I’ll check out as well.
