Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Tornado Alert

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. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one, though occasionally people do reply to posts I write — from the past week:

▰ White noise apps on your laptop have their own volume control because you want to keep the system sound low, so you don’t have your earbuds blasted with an alert.

▰ While I collate my social media activity in these weekly Scratch Pad posts, I don’t by any means collect here much of what I am up to on forums and BBS’s and so forth. But I do on occasion, and one thing I wanna track is my interest in izzzzi.net, so here’s a comment I made on the Lines forum about izzzzi and its potential. The discussion about izzzzi is private currently, so I’m careful here not to expose anything, not that there’s anything untoward about the discussion as a whole:

I really dig izzzzi, and I dig it both as a self-contained community and as something more akin to a protocol that is agnostic of specific communities. I think about people in different communities (like a set of friends or a subset of family or people collaborating on a project) using it as a way to, just within their own little unit, share things with each other — almost (not certainly, but possibly) to the point where it would be beneficial to have a different identity for each subset, so as to actively keep them separate from each other.

Perhaps down the road, there might even be a way to collate one’s follows into subsets that yield different daily izzzzi “today” pages, but that may be too many complications. (Though, it would also be a way to politely follow someone without, you know, seeing their stuff all the time. Less a mute than a shutter you can open and close.)

I’m into the network complexity that results from the collision of simple and frictional. That’s izzzzi. And it’s too bad I’m still on this social media hiatus right now, ’cause it includes izzzzi (but not Lines, for me). But it’s cool. I can watch izzzzi mature from the sidelines.

▰ I tend to wake early on Saturdays, some lizard brain from my childhood eagerly awaiting cartoons. So, I was up for a couple minutes before the actual tornado (!) alert — see below — went off this morning at around 5:50am. This is in San Francisco, mind you. I was actually reflecting at that moment on how barely a week ago we got the tsunami alert, right after the earthquake, for which I received no advance alert. Here’s evidence of the tornado alert:

▰ In some countries it is illegal for a phone camera app to not make a sound.

▰ This completes my third full week of an ongoing social media break, with about three more weeks remaining, and it’s been good so far. It took about two weeks to chill the part of my brain that is actively noting things to note, which is to say noting things to note things publicly. I wrote a lot this week, but I jotted down fewer of the little observations that have formed the majority of my social media output. Which means my brain is breaking that habit. I would say that for me, a two-week social media break is the minimum. For the first week, it’s not really a break, per se. The second week is when the chill begins, and the third is when the chill has taken hold, when the chill is the new room temperature.

Disquiet.com Turns 28

December 13, 1996, was a long time ago

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On December 13, 1996, I made one of the best decisions of my life. I purchased a URL, disquiet.com.

I was living in San Francisco, which is where I live now, though between then and now I also lived, for almost exactly four years, in New Orleans. In December of 1996, I was still fairly new to San Francisco, in a full-time sense. I had moved, seven years earlier, from Brooklyn to Sacramento to take a job at Tower Records as an editor on its magazine, Pulse!, and in my time there, I went on to co-found its Classical Pulse! magazine with my good friend Bob Levine, and to found, in 1994, epulse, which was Tower’s first email newsletter.

I visited San Francisco from Sacramento frequently, often weekly, sometimes more than once a week, but living here was different. The biggest difference I felt when I settled into my new job and my new apartment, in the Richmond District, which is where I still live, was a sense of rootlessness, one that had nothing to do with the physical location. For seven years, I had worked for Pulse!, and Tower had provided a focus for my activities in a way my new job, much as I enjoyed it, didn’t. The answer was fairly obvious to me.

So, long before blogs came to be given that name, and long before micro-blogging came to exist, and long before micro-blogging morphed into social media, and long before social media became recognizable as a broader sense of distributed asynchronous public inter-connectedness, I decided I wanted my own home on the digital range. I wanted to place to channel my thoughts, which at the time were largely about electronically mediated sound, and morphed to be about the intersection of sound, culture, and technology.

I already had a small website on some server space that came along with my ISP account, but I wanted what felt, in effect, like a vanity license plate in what we would later call the cloud. I had a few different names in mind for this website, but I was particularly enthralled at the time with The Book of Disquiet by the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), and so disquiet.com it was.

Initially, almost everything I posed to disquiet.com was simply something I wrote elsewhere and then repurposed. At some point it occurred to me that I could write directly for disquiet.com. That might sound obvious, but the internet still felt quite new in 1996. A friend proposed something to me that was not yet the norm, which was to put a dateline on each article, and so I did.

The word blog reportedly didn’t come around until 1999, but that isn’t to say that blogs didn’t yet exist. They did, and mine was one of them. They just didn’t have a name yet. I was not in love with the word “blog” at first. Like “wiki” and a lot of other web terms, it had, to me, at the time, a whiff of infantilization that really turned me off. But I became more comfortable with “blog,” and these days I’d say I am quite actively a proponent of blogging. I won’t get into details here, because I’ve already written about the topic quite a bit, especially back in 2019, which marked the word blog’s 20th anniversary, and then two years later.

Each year when the anniversary of my starting disquiet.com comes around, I try to do the same thing, which is to write a brief memory of the experience, both at the time and over the years, without looking back at what I have written on the subject previously. This year is no different.

I am sitting here at the dining room table on the 28th anniversary of the purchase and the launch of the website, and what is on my mind at the moment is not how much I have written, or the great conversations I have had along with way, or the creation of the Disquiet Junto music community, or the opportunities that this website has afforded me. What is on my mind is how much has changed.

The world is different today in so many ways from 1996, that we can’t really take stock of it all. One of the reasons I enjoy noting the role of sound in interfaces — from voice menu cues to the sonic exhaust of electric cars — is because those interfaces are always in flux. In 1996, the MP3 was only 5 years old. The idea that my laptop could automatically transcribe my voice existed in commercial sense (Dragon Naturally came out the next year), but the ease with which it does today is as comparable as my parents’ refrigerator was to their parents’ literal ice box. Each and every day, sound’s role in our lives evolves, and to me the line between the (largely ambient) music I write about and the role of sound in society gets blurrier and blurrier. I have no idea where it is headed, but I certainly have ideas about it, and I love using Disquiet.com to nudge those ideas ahead, and to pay witness to the changes I hear and see around me.

I said I wouldn’t go on about blogs, but I do feel the urge to close by saying if you’ve read this far and you don’t have a blog, I politely suggest that you start one. Choose a topic that is important to you and start typing, and uploading images, and audio, and video, and code, and whatever other forms your experience of the topic takes. And don’t just cover the topic. Write about your life. Write elements of whatever you would write elsewhere in public — on social media, in comments, in newsletters, on BBS’s, in email discussion groups — on your blog first and foremost. Make everything else — all the places online that you don’t own — ancillary to the central activity of blogging.

We can’t fully take stock of how different today is from 1996, but blog entries are like still frames in an unspooled film canister of the time between then and now. The more we document everyday life, the more control we have over the changes happening around us and to us, the more conscious we are of those changes. I really disliked the word “blog” at first, and then I came to appreciate it, and now more than ever I think of it as, frankly, incredibly important. I find it hard to believe that I once recoiled at the word blog, and now I think the word blog is powerful and beautiful. But like I said, a lot has changed — and it’s gonna keep changing.

More Junto Profiles?

Q&As make the community go round

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I had a great time in 2023 when I interviewed a heap of Junto participants for the Junto Profile series. The idea is to focus on individuals who’ve participated in the Junto regularly for, say, at least nine months. The series provided a great way for participants in the Junto to have a richer sense of the varied perspectives, backgrounds, and thoughts of the people they’re creating alongside asynchronously, and often across great distances. If you’re interested in being part of it, let me know. And if English isn’t your first language, that is no concern. I can put resources together for situations where translation would be beneficial (likely by asking bilingual Junto participants if they would pitch in). We do the interview via a Google Drive document. I ask you questions, you respond, and then I ask some follow-up questions. It’s pretty straightforward. Just email me ([email protected]).

Please

Just my type

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sign isn’t merely disarmingly polite. It’s also been saying the same thing for many years, judging by the rust and the sun damage. I’d love a typeface extrapolated from what has come of these letterforms over time. And I’ll file this one under “doorbell adjacent.”

Scratch Pad: Dalloway, Levienaise-Farrouch, Lasers

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. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one — from the past week:

▰ Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway might as well come all highlighted in yellow, ’cause that’s what it looks like after I’ve read it:

“For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

▰ I’m loving the score to The Agency (the remake of The Bureau, now with Michael Fassbender, most definitely playing a different spy from the one he played in David Fincher’s The Killer — his current mode seems to be, “What if I did what Liam Neeson did except the stories are interesting”), but the music doesn’t appear to be online yet, so I’ve been listening to other scores (Living, Censor, All of Us Strangers) and other music by its composer, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.

▰ There’s a great moment in the first episode of The Agency when Michael Fassbender’s spy character, having confirmed that his apartment is full of surveillance equipment, steps onto his balcony. The song “It’s Not Easy” by Ofege plays, and sonically superimposed on it, as the camera pulls back to show the expanse of London, are countless voices being overheard.

▰ I tend toward a mode one might call “handwringing” when it comes to year-end best-of lists. I used to do them more enthusiastically. I kind of don’t enjoy making them. I find the undertaking dispiriting — ranking, leaving things out, and so forth. And yet! And yet, I like looking at other people’s lists, because it’s a great way to discover things, and to think about things in a broader context. For example, anyone who puts new new Lia Kohl or FourColor records on a year-end list is likely to have something else on their list that I might never have heard of, and might enjoy. So, I did make a list (also because some publications I write for requested such a list). I would love to see other people’s best-of lists.

▰ Lies down on the couch after several meetings. Feels earthquake. Continues to feel earthquake. Recuperates, to a degree, from the earthquake. Is ravaged by phone’s tsunami alert klaxon.

▰ I like living walking distance from multiple establishments that sell handmade, inexpensive, frozen dumplings — and after I type this, I realize I meant Chinese, but there are also a lot of Eastern European options. Clearly, the ones I cooked up this week were meant to be steamed, not boiled. My bad.

▰ I was on a Rolling Stones kick for much of the week. “Hang Fire” is one of the best Cars songs the Cars never recorded. I would have loved to have heard the Bee Gees cover “Miss You.” I think of Bill Wyman as the Stones’ inker, in comics-drawing terms: the band sketches the song, and then he inks it.

▰ When I was young, it was Beatles, then the Who, and I barely gave a second thought to the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin were alien to me. To a degree, that sequence has now been flipped on its head. This isn’t a firm order or anything. And Black Sabbath was even more alien to me, and I’m not sure where they fit in the list, but they are no longer alien to me. Quite the contrary.

▰ I’ve been working on a bunch of scripts for a new set of four-panel, square-format (2 x 2) comics I’m working on with the excellent illustrator Hannes Pasqualini. We’re gonna get a couple finished before beginning to roll them out. One of them is essentially done. This process feels really good. It’s a totally different way of exploring sound than anything else I do — related, but with its own unique capacities. I made a script template for the four-panel format we’re using, and it’s funny how many different things fill that template: some light, some self-obscuring, some deeply felt. It’s a treat. It’s work, mind you, but it’s a treat.

▰ Neighborhood news: the old burger place that’s been closed for a couple years is now a sushi place that also serves udon

▰ TIL on a Mac, OPT + either of the brightness buttons pulls up the display settings

▰ You know the show is good when the person at the sound board is taking photos.

This is Robin Fox performing on December 6 at Gray Area in San Francisco as part of the Recombinant festival.

▰ I finished reading one book this week, a novel, Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway, featuring George Smiley, the greatest creation of Harkaway’s father, the late John le Carré.