News, essays, reviews, surveillance
The doorbell a few doors down from the apartment on 9th Street where I happened to be couch-surfing the night that the Tompkins Square Riot started in early August 1988, a few days after my birthday, the summer after I graduated from college. A doorbell to the past.
A highlight from the Es Devlin exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. This is a plan for her installation at the 2021 Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida. Titled Five Echoes, it was a full-scale maze based on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral, a “sound sculpture” that contained a “temporary forest”: “We immersed visitors within a soundscape that Invited them to learn each plant and tree species’ name, making a habitat for the non-human species within the human imagination.” The exhibit runs through August 11.
This old white van is something of a neighborhood white board. It gets written over, and then it’s painted over, and then the circle of urban life begins anew.
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.
▰ The sole downside to opening the living room window is the terrible music that people play in their cars
▰ I saw Brad Mehldau two weeks ago. I’m seeing Bill Frisell and Hank Roberts together in a few days. Both times as part of larger ensembles (quintet and sextet respectively). Life is pretty good.
▰ Are there any recordings of Bill Frisell and Brad Mehldau playing together other than those on the soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film Million Dollar Hotel?
▰ It’s extraordinary that a subset of the consumer electronics manufacturing class happily foresees a future in which everyone openly records every interaction, including face-to-face ones. It’s a glimpse at a potential radical realignment of what it means to speak not only in public but in private.
▰ Amazing how those AI discussion summary bots that join calls can totally diminish the small talk and casual interactions. It’s like someone purposefully set out to make video calls worse.
▰ I just noticed that April 14 isn’t just a favorite holiday of electronic music fans. It also was the first time, back in 2016, that the Disquiet Junto projects began appearing as part of the Lines BBS, after 223 weeks just on SoundCloud, Disquiet.com, and social media.
▰ If keeping a journal is a struggle for you, write a letter. You needn’t even mail it. Think of an ideal audience — friend or family, alive or not — and write to them. Much of my journal is excerpts of stuff I say to people in emails and texts I’d never have written had it not been intended for them.
▰ Honk if an email subject line about “markdown” makes you think file type not cost reduction
▰ Alert: We are now 25 weeks from the 666th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project.
▰ There’s a unique memory hole related to software that’s sunsetted before there’s a Wikipedia page to document it having existed in the first place
▰ My hotel room’s one, tiny window did provide a view of the Empire State Building.
▰ The spellcheck in Slack doesn’t recognize “Akihabara.” Oh, neither does this one. Must be system-wide.
▰ After seeing that new Taylor Swift album art, I kinda expected a Joy Division cover or two
▰ I saw a lot of mysterious doorways in Manhattan. This one was a definite favorite:
▰ When you get home from a vacation and start receiving the inevitable email offers from restaurants, bookstores, and other places you visited and are now 3,000 miles away from
▰ End of day:
I wrote about one of my favorite movies of all time for hilobrow.com, as part of a series of 25 pieces on “the topic of ‘offbeat’ movies from the Eighties” (the decade loosely defined). Here’s how it opens:
In 1993, the year Groundhog Day hit theaters, that furry near-term Nostradamus named Punxsutawney Phil gazed into the meteorological future and saw his shadow.
Historical records of this Americana hokum date back to the late 1800s, when Groundhog Day first became an annual ritual at Gobbler’s Knob, an inland Pennsylvania town with the sort of Capraesque name that lends itself to fables mixing homespun moralizing, commercial appeal, and a smidgen of self-awareness.
Groundhog Day legend has it that if Phil sees his shadow, winter will last another six weeks. What Phil — and Phil’s handlers, and the makers of the film Groundhog Day — certainly didn’t see coming was that 1993’s elongated winter wouldn’t hold a candle to the staying power of the movie itself.
On the one hand, this may seem off-topic for me — it even did to me, for a moment. I thought about adding a tag to Disquiet.com for “off-topic” things that I may post occasionally, but then I realized that part of the crux of my description of the movie is as follows: “It’s It’s a Wonderful Life reworked for memories trained on instant replay.” Which isn’t just on-topic; it connects directly to what I wrote about just yesterday, about music-making tools that let one access the recent past through memory buffers.
Other pieces in the Hilobrow series include Annie Nocenti on After Hours, Erik Davis on Repo Man, Susannah Breslin on Man Bites Dog, Dean Haspiel on Sid and Nancy, and Carlo Rotella on Robocop. Several are already up, and others will appear in the coming weeks.
