field notes – Page 143

Scratch Pad: Houston, Scalzi, Doctorow, Welsh

From the past week

November 25, 2023December 9, 2023 / By 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.

▰ I’m in the supermarket squeezing produce when Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” comes on, and I’m like: Yup.

▰ Me: I’ve bought enough (e)books for 2023.

Me 10 seconds later: there’s an $18 sale for 21 John Scalzi books on Humble Bundle for charity, and the new non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow (The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation) is $2 at Verso.

▰ The TV series Irvine Welsh’s Crime: in which the captioning does a fine job of deciphering the Scottish accents, but then you still need to look up plenty of words

Dirty Dozen

Urban scrawl

November 24, 2023November 25, 2023 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Something about the positioning of the lock box next to the exceedingly generic dozen-unit doorbell, in combination with the multiple segments of black wrought iron gating, makes this entryway look less like that of a residence and more like a penitentiary. Someone has tried to lend some levity, but it’s a sloppy bid, muted by its surroundings. I’m trying to decide whether that Godzilla-spine outline drawn around the intercom speaker is supposed to look like Bart Simpson’s head, which the “HA” suggests.

KOs, BPMs, Dreams

November 22, 2023November 22, 2023 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This Teenage Engineering KO II is pretty sweet. I have the OG KO and love it. As is generally the case with these multi-track samplers, I wonder why different tracks can’t run at independent BPMs. When I asked TE’s Jens Rudberg this, about the OP-1, he had an interesting answer that had to do with the virtual tape format underlying the system. But that does not appear to apply to the KO II. Not a hill I’ll die on, but one I sit on and ponder. I asked a question along these lines about tiny MIDI controllers, and then Tom Whitwell developed one. So … I can dream.

Sometimes when I ask this BPM question, someone asks why, and then I say that this long after Steve Reich’s phase music, and the rise of generative music and sound art and ambient music — well, that’s, in essence, my answer to the question.