Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Singularity, Reading, Shortwave

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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.

▰ Fortunately, my brain was long ago trained to interpret the ongoing nearby construction as abstract minimal techno

▰ Overheard at restaurant this week: “Human connection is going to be outdated in five years.” Someone in the group also said, “Human connection is overrated.”

▰ I have a choice between the drummer near the office and construction near home

▰ Nice: my (successful) attempt to have Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) run on a modern portable gaming console made it to Jason Kottke’s blog and Austin Kleon’s newsletter.   

▰ I finished reading two books, both novels, this week: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the second in Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, The Black Ice. That brings me to the average I’m going for, two novels a month, a dozen so far this year — and with a few days in June to spare. I’ve paused Middlemarch at about a quarter of the way through, and I am currently reading Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, and a few others.  

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: John Kelly shared, on Threads, some Justin Green comic drafts from the 1990s, some of which I edited for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. ▰ John Kannenberg, whose Museum of Portable Sound has an admirably broad scope, reminded his followers of a 1981 assassination attempt involving a tape recorder. ▰ A post on Instagram from Music Thing Modular introduced me to the Shortwave Collective, “An international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.”

A Thief Moment

It's Mann's world

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), his feature film debut, is having a moment. It was mentioned in “One Last Job” (a recent episode of Poker Face that focused on an aspiring filmmaker) and a track from the movie’s score, by Tangerine Dream, was featured prominently in the opening episode (“Groundhogs”) of the latest season of The Bear. The latter makes particular sense, since both the movie and the show are based in Chicago. The Bear team knows what it’s doing, in that the track used in the episode, “Diamond Diary,” is buried under a lot of dialogue, which is true to how Mann’s movie, even when a scene was free of actors speaking, generally mixed the music with a lot of diegetic sound.  

On the Line: CSE, Lockwood, Surveillance

Some favorite recent writing

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

▰ Whale of a Time:

“You ever hear about the loneliest whale in the world? Whales have songs, right? They sing to each other, and the songs are at, like, 160 MHz, something like that. I forget the specifics, but they’re all within that range, yet there’s this one whale who sings at, like, 50 MHz. No one knows why. But none of the other whales can hear him. So he just goes around singing, and the other whales don’t even know he’s there.”

That is Agent Copano (voice: Joseph Lee Anderson) in the animated series Common Side Effects (season 1, episode 7, “Blowfish,” written by Karey Dornetto), from Joseph Bennett, one of the two creators of the fantastic Scavengers Reign, and Steve Hely. This moment occurs right after Copano’s newly assigned partner turns off the car radio and says, “I don’t like music. It’s distracting.” Copano misses his previous partner, Agent Harrington, with whom he’d often listen to music while on stakeouts. Fortunately, unlike Scavengers Reign, Common Side Effects was renewed for a second season.

. . .

▰ Locked In:

“I am seeking ways to recognize that we are part of that world, not dominant and not separate. And sound is so powerful for that. It affects our blood pressure and muscle tension. You can’t control it.”

That is composer Annea Lockwood, profiled in The New York Times by Joshua Barone.

. . .

▰ Mic Drop:

“Some of the conversations inside the embassy were picked up by bugs. The various branches of British security, sometimes unaware of one another’s activities, devoted much effort and ingenuity to inserting tiny microphones through the 22-inch-thick wall of the embassy and the 15-inch wall of the building next door. This required drilling holes by hand through granite and dense Victorian brick to avoid making a sound likely to alert the gunmen to what was going on. Fake roadworks were staged outside, to hide the noise of the drill. The aim was to come out behind an electric socket, so that the microphone would be hidden behind a piece of plastic. In the event, the field telephone which had been given to the gunmen for communications with the police, and which contained a permanently active bug, appears to have been the most useful listening device.”

That is Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books summarizing information from Ben Macintyre’s book The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama.