Super Powers
I memed again
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Upcoming on Hilobrow: Proto-Punk
This will be a lot of fun
I’m very excited to have a short piece on Ornette Coleman in this upcoming online series at hilobrow.com about “proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973).” And what a lineup of contributors, including Stephanie Burt, Jonathan Lethem, Lucy Sante, and Mike Watt. When I was invited to contribute, my initial idea was to write about “Excursion on a Wobbly Rail” by jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, because I’d read that its title was used by the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed as the name of his radio show on WAER 88.3 FM (at Syracuse University in New York), but that track wasn’t in any evident way “punk,” and it came out too early to slot into this Hilobrow conceit (1959 — it closed out his Taylor’s sophomore record as a leader, Looking Ahead!). I’d also read about Reed’s affection for Ornette Coleman around the same time, and then this track came to mind. My piece will be out in maybe a couple months?
Call Me
A heavy toll
These miniature photo essays on doorbells that I’ve now been writing for years, perhaps a decade if not longer, tend toward the neutral. The subjects are mundane, and they are purposefully so. That is what catches my eye, and my imagination. Often what makes the images — and their subjects — interesting to me is less the human factor than what the elements have brought to bear. Then again, what the elements have done reflects, generally, a lack of concern on the part of humans — lack of concern itself being a human factor, perhaps a defining human factor. Taking no action, making a poor decision, not planning ahead — these are themselves examples of agency.
Every once in a while, though, there’s clearly a different sort of human factor at play. The “call me” seen here expresses an act of desperation, one that is unfamiliar from all the doorbells I’ve studied or, for that matter, glanced at over the years. Each letterform here is the result of multiple layers of scrawl, an emphatic cry; to see the letters is to hear the scratching. And if the urgency of the writing isn’t evidence enough, then the paperwork in the background — the trespassing notice, the additional material taped to the front door, the image of a municipal seal — along with the heavy chain and lock says that something life-altering has occurred.
A doorbell, at its most basic level, is a means for someone outside a home, or business, to send an audible signal to someone inside a building. Occasionally a doorbell will include some form of writing, in addition to an address or apartment number, often affixed with tape to a gate or door — such as instructions to delivery services, or a note that the bell itself has ceased functioning. Circumstances here, however, have turned a doorbell into a platform for communication in the opposite of its normal, intended direction — not a loudspeaker, more a bulletin board. Here, in stark contrast with mundane daily life, the doorbell has been repurposed by someone who has been removed from their home, and who needs to get a message out.
I Watched My Voice Take Form on the Screen
Speak truth
One of my nighttime habits is to record myself speaking at the very end of the day before I go to sleep. I used to scribble notes, but after a day spent writing, the act of writing yet again at the very end of the day, just before sleep, can feel like one task too many. I generally sleep quite soundly, but part of preparing to sleep is winding down. To write, much as I enjoy writing — much as I am compelled to write — is to invoke work, which is not conducive to sleep. Also, my scribbles often prove illegible come morning, much as dreams can’t always be fully recalled.
In contrast, by simply recording stray thoughts with my voice at the end of the day, I can with ease unpack the day. To write is to work; to speak is to put work behind me. Speaking is unwinding, even if I’m only speaking to myself — well, to myself and to my phone. When I record my thoughts, I capture reflections on recent occurrences, and I make plans for the next day, and I collect extraneous bits of ideas. As with my scribbles, some of these I can’t even comprehend the next morning. If I’m particularly tired, the recordings can veer into the surreal, sometimes enjoyably so. (It can be an out-of-body experience, though that isn’t my goal.)
After simply listening to these recordings come morning, for years, I started using — or more to the point, beta-testing, a state many of us seem to be in in perpetuity — speech-to-text software tools. I spent a lot of time making the most of the tool built into Google Drive, and then the Recorder that comes with Android, and then the tool built into Apple Notes, among others. These are real-time recording tools: they transcribe as you speak. They trained me to speak more clearly, because as I spoke I watched my voice take form on the screen, and I self-corrected if the software was misunderstanding me. This was a positive feedback loop, but it also required me to observe my thoughts, which wasn’t as freeing as simply speaking aloud.
More recently I’ve gotten in the habit of using tools like MacWhisper and rev.com. These tools allow me to simply record something, and then after the fact have it transcribed into text. The quality of the results — the “fidelity,” to repurpose an audio term — is even higher, in my experience, than that of “real-time” tools such as Google Recorder and Apple Notes.
Now, one interesting thing about revisiting these auto-transcribed notes the next morning is that I also receive emotional cues: Was I terse or rhapsodic, prone to imagery or sticking to line items? I’m not recording my thoughts to keep track of my emotional state, but I can’t deny that is part of what I learn as the sun rises and I pull up the transcribed files. And, as it turns out, this is just as true about what happens between the words. The MacWhisper tool, in particular, lends an additional means by which I find myself gauging my emotional state: It actually characterizes my breathing and it notes the extended silences. The software is reading, so to speak, the way I communicate non-verbally, as then identified for me with brackets and parenthesis: “[sighs],” “[breathing],” “(yawns),” etc. It is eerie, fascinating, and, at a basic level, informative. And in my experience, not incorrect about what it observes.
Snazzy
Home studio loaner
On loan from a generous friend. Any tips, recommendations, or experiences with what is contained here? Note the heavy emphasis on modules from Snazzy FX. These are all new to me, with the exception of the Doepfer, the Make Noise, and the Tiptop.
