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.
▰ Terribly sad about the death of author Geoff Nicholson. Geoff wrote a bit for me when I was an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine in the early/mid-1990s. When a new Bush album came out, we were due to put the band on the cover, because they were popular, and covers played a different role in decision-making than did the interior material. I’d just read Geoff’s novel Everything and More, which takes place in a department store and said lots of interesting things about consumerism, and his earlier non-fiction book Big Noises, about the guitar in rock and roll (in classic Nicholson mode: it was about the role of guitar in the 1990s, yet was published at the start of the decade, not the end), and so I assigned him the interview. He did great, needless to say. He was also (as am I) an obsessive walker. I will miss him.
▰ I was looking today at some old newspapers from 1916, and I like that the word “‘phone” was new enough usage that they still included an apostrophe to show it was a shortened “telephone.” (The “Wilson” is Woodrow Wilson, due to address a convention in St. Louis long-distance. Very high-tech.)
▰ This new Gemini thing in Gmail that insistently inquires if I wanna “polish” my email is spelled with a capital “P” so every single time it pops up I wonder why the software is trying to get me to translate my draft into Polish. (And not today, AI. I don’t — neither polish, nor Polish.)
▰ The ice cream truck drives by — yes, it’s mid-January — playing its little ditty, and everyone in the cafe, employees and customers alike, looks up in unison from whatever they’re individually doing and out toward the street
▰ I watched the old Beastie Boys performance of “Ch-Check It Out” from Letterman where they emerge from the subway, rapping much of it outdoors before entering the studio. Automated captions read “swap the fish” at the bottom of the screen for a long time, then replaced by “down,” and that was it.
▰ That thing where an app pings you and it’s pretty clear it’s nothing remotely important, just somewhere a product manager decided to try to juice engagement statistics
▰ Chinese food gurus: Any recommendations for restaurants serving spicy douhua in San Francisco? Thanks. (I’m not big on sweet.)
▰ It’s a small thing, but it still feels a little magical when I add a Disquiet Junto participant’s just-uploaded track to the week’s project’s playlist, and then somewhere else, where the playlist is embedded, like on my own website or the llllllll.co BBS, the track appears.
▰ Loved this essay about David Lynch by music critic Ned Raggett, and am stoked to have my little piece on Lynch’s The Straight Story mentioned.
▰ As a heavy Obsidian user, I’ve found the expedient Bebop iOS app to be nearly perfect. One other thing I’ve done is use an easy Shortcut so from my iPhone with one click I can open a specific doc (like a to-do list). Just paste in a doc URL and the Shortcut works. (This link is the Shortcut template. I still find Shortcuts very confusing, but I manage to get a little bit done with them.)
▰ I’m still plugging away at my two extended reads that have defined the start of this still very new yet already very long year: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (closing in on halfway, and it’s a re-read, my fourth time since it was published, back in 1999) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (more like a quarter-ish). In the midst of two very long books, I needed some sort of short-term closure, so while doing so cut into my predetermined reading, I made quick work of a short novel in the meanwhile, the first (or second, depending on publication or storyline sequencing) of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, which I never completed reading as a child, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, mostly because I wanted to have read it before the in-the-works Greta Gerwig film adaptation comes out. I also finished reading one graphic novel, Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, by writer Kyle Starks and artist Chris Schweizer, neither of whom I knew much about before, and which I liked the heck out of, especially Schweizer’s ability with cute-yet-chaotic moments in tightly packed little panels. There’s a lot of Kyle Baker in Schweizer’s drawing, and Tex Avery, and other elements I can’t immediately tease out. He can put more drama in a still frame of a casually drawn car hovering in midair than does much of the splash-page bravado I’ve been faced with lately, and more characterization, as well, in faces drawn simply.
