Author: Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ RIP, saxophonist David Sanborn (b. 1945). Night Music, produced by the great Hal Willner, was some of the best music television of all time.

▰ I love Tuesday mornings because the latest #DisquietJunto project has ended and there’s a playlist packed with music on a specific theme or following a specific approach, in this case: recording a part, slowing it to 50%, then recording something else on top of it.

▰ Been thinking a lot about two authors whose work I admire, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), how closely their lifespans overlapped, how surprising to me that overlap is when I’m reminded of it, and how much more contemporary I always think of Poe as being.

▰ I have no idea why it was only today that I finally thought, “Hey, those Minirig 3 speakers work with your laptop, not just with music-making gear, so why don’t you hook ’em up?” My M1 MacBook Pro 14″ has great sound, mind you, but the additional bass on these is incredible for desktop activity.

▰ I can retain no more information. My brain is full of 7th chords and topped off with some 9th chords.

▰ Yes, I had to order a second cable holder for my synth

▰ The stereo at the barbershop just went from Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” to the Cascades’ “Angel on My Shoulder” and I figure either there’s someone behind the wheel with a broad, generous, and humorous take on pop music, or there’s an ahistorical algorithm at work just kludging stuff together

▰ Guitar practice this week has been half 7th/9th chords, half “Easy Living” by Robin/Rainger (mostly Rainger, since I’m not singing along, though I probably should be), and half trying to get myself to hold the pick between my thumb and index finger instead of using my thumb, middle, and index finger

▰ I haven’t touched a guitar pedal this week, just been practicing guitar through VCV Rack on my laptop with a simple audio interface. Gonna fold in some MIDI foot pedals soon.

▰ The sausage spot during lunch went from a playlist of X-Ray Spex, the Dictators, and the Dead Boys to one of Sade and Tears for Fears, and I enjoyed the ride

▰ I finished reading two novels this past week: HG Wells’ The World Set Free and Anthony McCarten’s Going Zero, published over a century apart, both of them involving technological threat at a global scale, and both of them starting out strong and and eventually get overstuffed. After reading Rebecca West’s book The Return of the Soldier, which is quite good, I wanted to read something by Wells, because I had learned he was her romantic partner, so I sought out a book by him from roughly the time when they would have met. The first third is really good. The second third is so-so, a bit like if Anthony Furst wrote alternate-history military science fiction, but the last third, which takes place further in the future, is a mess, like random story notes were mashed together to complete a required allotment of pages. There is a wistful, fable-like quality in that last stretch that reminds me of Osamu Tezuka (zero doubt Tezuka read it), but that association isn’t enough to excuse the mess.