Back in the early 1990s, I was in a small car accident, and the passenger-side door was damaged just like this, and just like this, I had a friend — the cartoonist Justin Green, best known for Binky Brown, and whose comics I edited at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine — paint a comic-book sound effect on the side, complete with the little lines showing the action and/or sound of the impact. I wish I had a photo of my long-ago car door. This one here isn’t my car. I stumbled on this modern-day version in my neighborhood over the weekend.
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.
▰ Tryptych by Symbion Project (aka Kasson Crooker) is three 10-minute-plus not quite ambient, maybe “romantic ambient” / post-classical, excursions. Richly evocative.
▰ I always keep my eye on what’s new from a synthesizer module maker called Djupviks. A module called the Bunker Archeology, which I have, takes the source audio here and “smears it all up,” per the description. No doubt. It’s like the Blade Runner vibe filtered through a rougher industrial aesthetic.
▰ Archival recommendation: I picked up this live 1981 Robert Fripp solo Frippertronics set (use that link, as there is no embeddable player) based on a recommendation from John Diliberto, host of the Echoes radio show. It’s really great, very simple, austere even by Fripp standards, maybe even more musical than atmospheric. You can hear the loops as they accrue, the seams as he stitches and layers. Bonus points for the bit of conversation with Joe Strummer (yeah, of the Clash) in the liner notes. (And if that interview is of interest, here’s the full text. The conversation was moderated by Vic Garbarini, and originally published in the June 1981 issue of Musician magazine. Here’s a great snippet: Strummer: “Now, I’m not a born musician like maybe Robert is…” Fripp: “Not at all! I was tone deaf and had no sense of rhythm…” Strummer: “… I got kicked out of the choir…” Fripp: “…they wouldn’t even let me join the choir!”)
▰ Somewhat less archival recommendation: here’s a saxophone foursome, Multiphonic Quartett, performing a piece (“Mishima/Closing,” originally written for Kronos) from Philip Glass’ score for Paul Schrader’s film Mishima, shot in a massive concrete industrial space. (This video is the source of the “radicalization” joke I posted here yesterday.) The video is from roughly three years ago. (And a side note for those chasing virality: despite this video having over 200,000 views, the group’s Instagram account has well under 600 followers, and its YouTube channel a mere 1,500 subscribers.)
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.
▰ Afternoon trio for … a trio of electric vehicles (two autonomous, one driven by a device called a human) whirring by at once
▰ I’m with Milchik on this one topic. “The theremin works best in moderation.”
▰ I watched and liked a video of a saxophone quartet doing what was originally a string quartet, composed by Philip Glass. Now I’m getting solo guitar versions, guitar quartet versions, solo piano versions, theremin versions. YouTube radicalization is real. :)
▰ Your writing job is to write to best explore and express what you’re thinking, not to tweak until all the little blue underlines magically disappear
▰ One of my favorite current comic book illustrators, Declan Shalvey, draws MF Doom for just over 40 minutes:
▰ I am sitting in a gulf different from the one you are in now …
▰ I am almost done reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (I’ll be done by the end of next week), but have really fallen behind in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, perhaps (ha, no — certainly) because as with the two previous novels I have completed this year (C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jakob Kerr’s Dead Money), I started another in search of some closure: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. As with Cryptonomicon, it’s a book I’ve read before, in this case back when I was a teenager.
That prior reading provides a funny story. There was a “great books” book club being formed at the local library in the town where I grew up, and I was easily a quarter of the age of the next youngest member. I didn’t understand at the time that “great books” was a category, not a general descriptor, so I was confused by the proposed reading list. I didn’t understand why, for example, Frank Herbert’s Dune wasn’t on it (I didn’t even love Dune; I just thought it was a “great” science fiction book in that it was pretty well written and, you know, epic, which both seems like “great” things — look, I was young). Anyhow, reading The Good Soldier now, I’m amazed I even got through it as a teen, because I would have had no idea what was going on in the intertwined relationships at any emotional level, even as plainly as they’re laid out by the narrator.
Somewhat ironically, given my long-ago youthful confusion about what makes a “great book,” the author himself asks such a question about halfway through, when he has the narrator comment: “But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist.—Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.” And please note that the “fellow” here is a vile individual, and yet he is the person with whom the book’s narrator and, thus, author associate with the word “novelist.” And then, should the self-reflexivity of the statement not have been sufficiently self-evident, Ford aims the interrogation regarding literary quality directly at himself: “It is melodrama; but I can’t help it.” This moment is, in addition, the only point in the entire novel when Ford uses the word “novelist,” so I believe the low-level vexation carries some inferential weight. Weirdly, this bit popped up just after I had begun to wonder, myself, what sort of book this is. For a long time, during my current re-reading, I thought of The Good Soldier as a worldly literary romance with some existential heft — or, once the dead bodies began to stack up, more of a well-written psychological thriller: so, maybe less Virginia Woolf and more Patricia Highsmith. And then, just as I had shelved my categorical considerations and returned to the book, the author himself put the exact same question right on the page. It was sort of eerie.
I also read a few graphic novels this week, two of which I completed. Those would be the first two volumes of writer Tom King’s run on Wonder Woman: Outlaw and Sacrifice. I dug Outlaw quite a bit, especially how it dialed back the highly structured format that King has employed with other characters. Perhaps due to the switch in illustrators (Daniel Sampere for volume one, and both Sampere and Tony S. Daniel for volume two) and the broader array of superpowered characters and the absence of a central villain, the second volume didn’t seem to hold together as well, I felt.
I’ve got another piece up at hilobrow.com, which I love writing for. The editor Josh Glenn has assembled 25 entries in service of “analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993).” It’s a great line-up, including Heather Quinlan on Mystery Science Theatrer 3000, Peggy Nelson on Seinfeld, Tom Nealon on Miami Vice, and Nikhil Singh on Chocky. And Annie Nocenti landed a personal favorite of mine The Singing Detective. Here are the first two paragraphs of my piece, which is about the ancient MTV (mostly) animated anthology series Liquid Television. This is easily the most Gen X thing that I (born: August 1966) have written in a long time.
There’s an old saw about how MTV doesn’t play any music anymore — old as in MTV dropped “music television” from its logo in 2010, so quit griping. More to the point, music doesn’t need MTV, and hasn’t for almost as long, because music videos are ubiquitous (hello, YouTube and social media). We no longer must weather Glenn Frey’s “Sexy Girl” and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” while waiting for a network executive, bearing an Excel spreadsheet with the word “demographics” on the Y axis, to deign to share some of the good stuff.
Plus, even back in the day, much of the good stuff wasn’t even music. Take Liquid Television, the network’s classic animation anthology, which ran for four delectable seasons during the early 1990s. The sheer anarchy and variety of Liquid Television was its own special zone of mainstream weird.
Since early February 2023, I’ve managed to post 26 interviews with participants in the Disquiet Junto music community. I thought I’d hit 25, and then realized I’d mis-tagged one of them along the way, an error that’s now been rectified. The series is called the Junto Profiles. The prerequisite to be interviewed for a Junto Profile is activity in the weekly projects for at least nine months. That doesn’t mean participating every week, just often enough to be a regular presence. The process for the Q&A is that I send the interviewee a document that consists of the same set of basic questions (where they’re from, what their musical activity is like, what’s a good music-making habit, etc.). When I get their responses to those questions, I read through the document, and then I send back one or two follow-up questions, exploring topics the interview subject has raised.
The answers to the standard questions are always of interest, and the follow-up questions are icing on the cake. The internet is awash in templated Q&As, and I get the attraction: for the interviewer, it’s easier than recording something and then transcribing and editing; for the interviewees, it can be done on their own time, and there’s a paper trail for what they said, so no surprises or errors pop up when the material is ultimately published. But every convenience comes at a cost, and I hope that the follow-up questions I include enliven the Junto Profiles Q&As a little bit, getting at some of the spirit of in-person interviews I so enjoy doing, but just don’t often have the time for. At the heart of this is a focus on the idea of conversation. These follow-up questions — albeit committed asynchronously in the cloud in a shared document — have a touch of conversation to them. And sometimes a touch is enough.
There’s a handy #junto-profiles tag that pulls up all the interviews to date, and they’re also listed in this website’s Conversations category index.
