I don’t think I have the correct cable to connect this library branch with my home stereo system.
Slight Return
The Daly City experience
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
What’s So Funny?
Down Lowe
I write on occasion for hilobrow.com, and it’s always a treat, in part because the topics are something to really spend time pondering, and in part because my little essays end up in good company. The latest Hilobrow series, edited by Josh Glenn, is about “analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art.” Contributors include Heather Kapplow, Mandy Keifetz, Tom Nealon, Lucy Sante, Nikhil Singh, and Mike Watt, among others.
When Josh first invited me to participate, I had various thoughts about things I might focus on: any one from a number of works by Gerhard Richter or Anselm Kiefer, or entries in the long-running World War 3 Illustrated, or a Billy Bragg song. By the time I weighed in, Matthew Battles had already claimed Woody Guthrie’s guitar.
Tons of examples came to mind, but throughout my consideration, I kept humming the same tune: Nick Lowe’s (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” It just so happens I saw both Lowe and Elvis Costello, who helped make the song famous, in concert separately last year, so it was especially fresh on my mind.
As I continued to nudge ideas forward with little snippets of exploratory writing, I happened to have lunch with a college friend, one I’d bonded with over Nick Lowe all those years ago. I mentioned this endeavor to him, and how it felt odd to worry a bit about a song as well-intentioned as this one. My friend, who is wise, said that feeling is what I should lead with. And so I did.
The essay begins:
Just imagine for a moment having second thoughts about praising a song as pure as Nick Lowe’s 1974 pop classic, “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” a jukebox favorite all the more famous thanks to Elvis Costello having popularized it.
Read the full piece, and all the other entries, at hilobrow.com.
On Repeat: Oslo, Nottingham, Phoenix
Home/office playlist
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ “Deep Green” is a fantastic, slow-burn track off Eivind Aarset’s new album, Strange Hands, which features the electric guitarist with bassist Audun Erlien and the dual drums/percussion team of Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen. Aarset is based in Oslo, Norway.
▰ Blissful slice of everyday sound and granular synthesis, from Caustic Gates, of Nottingham, United Kingdom:
▰ Axercism 2: No Cuts is subterranean guitar noise, just shy of half an hour of experiments from Parker Weston (based in Phoenix, Arizona), who describes it as “Folded times of extension and preparedness.” (The automated embed is failing, which happens on occasion, so just click through to the recording’s Bandcamp page.)
Scratch Pad: Noise, Stars, Abandonware
From the past week
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.
▰ You think it’s a really quiet day in the park and then you recognize that your earbuds have been in noise cancellation mode for a couple hours and it’s actually really loud in the park
▰ There is light construction going on a few buildings away and rather than be annoyed by the intermittent metallic hammering, I’m imagining a behemoth Transformers woodpecker at work
▰ Weirdest thing about the heat spell is how walking around your neighborhood doesn’t feel like your neighborhood. Not just the heat but the air is alien. Walking home from dinner out, I saw more stars than I’m used to. I’ve been through blackouts, neighborhood and city-wide, with fewer visible stars.
▰ The Vivaldi browser just added UI auto-hide and it is quite nice. I feel like I spend 90% of my worktime in Vivaldi and Obsidian.
▰ We live in the golden age of future abandonware.
Peter Kirn replied: That was a Star Trek episode title, no? “All Our Updates Are Tomorrow’s Yesterdays.”
And I, in turn: “For the Ethos Is Hollow and I Have Touched AI”
▰ It’s a nice touch in the first episode of the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters that Mari Yamamoto’s character, a 1950s scientist who ends up in our time, uses Arthur C. Clarke’s original term, “artificial satellites,” when first encountering modern satellite data.
▰ Read a lot, finished nothing. Sorta like life.
On the Corner
In the video game Resident Evil Requiem
When I travel, I’m more likely to stay in one place for an extended period of time than to go from place to place. You still travel in one place, because the world passes by you, instead of the other way around. A lot of video game ASMR channels — that is, footage collections that highlight the diegetic, which is to say in-scene, sound of a given game — tend toward the latter, wandering through towns, touring amid landscapes, meandering the depths of dank tunnels. But some do take a chance at just plopping the virtual camera on a corner and seeing (and, more to the point, listening to) what happens past.
This is a tricky mode, because video games don’t match either the pixel density or the chaotic complexity of reality. Stand at an intersection of Cyberpunk 2077 for long, and you’ll see variants of the same characters, and hear the same sounds. The YouTube account Video Game Weather ASMR explores the potential of static recording in a recent video from Resident Evil Requiem, much as the Atmospheric Gaming channel did earlier this month in the same game, albeit in a hallway; this newer one is shot outside. Cars and pedestrians make their way by, while rain soaks everything. Inevitably, you do see the same faces, the same outfits. At least once I could swear a pair of the same character nearly collided on the sidewalk. Likewise, little disturbs the monotony of the weather, though as background white noise, it works well. Per the channel’s description, “Due to the nature of ASMR, any comments or narration will be minimized. The idea is to offer viewers and listeners a calm, relaxing atmosphere.” Pull up a stool and pay attention to the world, and to the attempts to simulate a world, as it goes by.