News, essays, reviews, surveillance
The illustrator Hannes Pasqualini and I revived our 2020 comics series in late December of 2024. We have posted two more comics since that one (“Audiobook” and “Stroll”), and today’s, “Megaphone Redux,” continues the run, revisiting both the cultural context and a specific comic from when we initiated the series. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf, which features a special index page just for the episodes. And check out more from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.
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.
▰ Yes, I was standing near three people and near-ish to a half dozen other people when an elder alert went out to phones this afternoon. Quite the readymade spatial sound installation.
▰ Two new Steven Soderbergh movies and a new Luc Besson movie? I appreciate this cumulative opportunity to convince myself not only that it isn’t 2025, but that the previous millennium hasn’t yet ended.
▰ The rain in San Francisco falls mainly everywhere
▰ I thought the printer had decided to just print out something on its own initiative, but that sound turned out to be a street cleaning machine coming up the block slowly in the pouring rain
▰ An earthquake during a rainstorm (which we just experienced) is like an elevator pitch by a Hollywood executive who already knows he’s being put out to pasture
▰ I finished reading my second novel of the year, that number masking the substantial amount of pages I’ve actually read, ’cause I’m nearly done with Neal Stephenson’s massive Cryptonomicon (I’d give it two more weeks), and continuing apace, if more slowly, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The novel I finished reading — which, like the first one I read this year, I read to attain a little desired closure amid the open-endedness of reading two roughly 900-page books — was Dead Money by my old friend Jakob Kerr. It’s a fun corporate thriller that takes place mostly right here in San Francisco, and it is twisty. And this week I finished reading one graphic novel, Superman: Year One by Frank Miller (writer) and John Romita Jr. (illustrator). And I just realized that at some point I stopped being one of those people who puts commas before and after the “Jr.” in names that have a Jr. in them. I don’t know when that happened.
And it’s been a week
I love this sign, which I walk by several times a week. The name of the record shop is Noise and these are its hours, but of course it pleases me to take the sign more literally.
Sometimes there are shows — and books, and movies, and so forth — that are so seemingly up my alley that it takes me a while to get around to them. A TV show that combines office drama, conspiracies, critiques of corporate in loco parentis, minimal-effects science fiction, and midcentury sets, and the cast of which includes Dichen Lachman, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken, seemed almost too good to be true. (I don’t watch a lot of comedy, so pretty much the only thing I’d seen the show’s star, Adam Scott, in previously was Big Little Lies, which I didn’t even connect him to until I pulled up his IMDB profile.) The show in question, Severance, is not too good to be true; it is as good as it might seem to be based on the ingredients, which is quite good. I’ve just finished season one, and am very much enjoying the occasional musical cues, the interstitial music by Theodore Shapiro, and the sound design of the various imagined technologies. In the episode of this makeshift screenshot, the winner of an office competition gets to choose the music to be played at a party. The character selects — appropriate to said character’s character — “defiant jazz,” emphasis on “defiant,” and indeed defiance is precipitated. I hope someday we get to hear the “spooky ambient,” though that could simply be Shapiro’s score.
