News, essays, reviews, surveillance
Where to begin? The counterclockwise — and bleached-by-the-elements — numbering? The requisite additional text information for visitors? The damage to said information — notably to the words “button” and “can”? The misspelling of the word doorbell itself (and subsequent missing apostrophe)? The odd, solitary logo on the NuTone button? The fact that of the four buttons, there seem to be three different types?
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.
▰ Two seasons into For All Mankind, very much digging it, even if it’s more soap opera than space opera at times. I sure hope they start introducing pop songs that exist only in this alternate timeline (sorta like the Prince bootlegs in Counterpart).
▰ I’m about a decade and a half late to the documentary Thunder Soul (2010), about a Houston, Texas, jazz-funk band that gained much-deserved acclaim, toured the world, and then reunited 30 years later. It should come with a box of tissues, I’ll tell you that.
▰ Afternoon drone trio for idling bus, fog horn, and passing jet plane
▰ I’m definitely a sucker for a thriller in which the mark has an earbud in the whole time and they’re taking directions from someone else, be it antagonist or not. I imagine that mode doesn’t last this full movie, but I’ll be checking it out for sure.
▰ I’d swear that whoever does the voice menu for the jury duty phone line in this town was hired ’cause it sounds like he did the voiceover for the opening of Dragnet
▰ The feeling when you think that’s the ice cream truck down the road and it turns out to be the especially colorful van of a plumber
▰ My friend Matt Nish-Lapidus (@emenel) made a fantastic piece of online art, the less said about it in advance the better. Just give it a click, and then another and …
▰ Dream last night: I’m in a band with Kathryn Hahn. We share a manager with Depeche Mode. The manager set up the four of us to record together. Dave Gahan is being lazy somehow. Hahn marches Gore and me to the mall, pulls Gahan out of his fitness class, and lectures him about his responsibilities.
▰ Perhaps the best thing about this Martin Gore* video about his new (and very pretty) signature Gretsch guitar is the evidence that those famous floor-to-ceiling walls of Eurorack modules in his studio weren’t sufficient, and now he has additional massive cases on the floor.
▰ A friend told a friend long ago “Don’t read books; write ’em” and that’s my main excuse for having not finished reading a book since the first week of September, when I completed The Mercy of Gods, the first in a new series by Expanse author James S.A. Corey (actually two authors writing under one pseudonym). That was my 21st novel of 2024. I’ve read a bunch of stuff since, and am nearly done with too many books, but the first thing I’ve finished since The Mercy of Gods is a novella, titled Livesuit, in the same Corey series. It’s pretty short, but I’ll count it as a novel, I think.
This was the only set of doorbells at the entrance. There were none for the presumed even-numbered apartments. Also, 7 is below 5 for some reason.
I continue my light edit pass through the 7,500+ posts that have accumulated on this website since I founded it at the end of December 1996. This set of 20 posts — I’m working through them chronologically — are mostly album reviews, including several favorites from this period of time (1999-2000): Breakbeat Era’s debut, Gavin Bryars’ Cadman Requiem, Jake Mandell’s Parallel Processes, Bernhard Günter’s Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko), the great Raster-Noton 20′ – 2000 series (which I mentioned here in standalone not once but twice), Mouse on Mars’ Niun Niggung, μ -Ziq’s Royal Astronomy, plus Spring Heel Jack, Nobukazu Takemura, Matmos, Twine, Steven (J.) Kane, Beastie Boys, DJ Spooky, DJ Krush, and Eulb, and the compilation Brassic Beats USA from the label Skint.
And a software mention that really takes me back, PCDJ (it’s still around: pcdj.com!), which I used to use to play MP3s on top of each other. Doubling up Philip Glass recordings was a fetish of mine around the turn of the millennium.
And my 10 favorite records of 1999, which included Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, DJ Krush’s Kakusei (which was, along with Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, a CD I always had with me when I traveled), and the Mille Plateaux label compilation Modulation & Transformation 4. There’s a tag (#years-best) that brings up my top 10s from over the several past decades.
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.
▰ Truly odd. What seemed to be a car alarm on loop turned out to be from a bus stop. It had gone off accidentally. A call to 311 (San Francisco) led to a call to the police (non-emergency). The noise was sorted out quickly. Unlike (most) car alarms, this didn’t stop after a minute or so. Kept looping.
▰ The absence of an apostrophe in the title to this great 1997 David Holmes album always bugged me, but the apparent after-the-fact introduction of an apostrophe bugs me even more
▰ Love when my microphone during a call thinks my allergy-induced coughing is me trying to talk and alerts me to turn on my microphone
▰ This new Jeff Parker album is a reminder that when it comes to my favorite music, the whole is often seemingly less than the sum of its parts
▰ Insane heat. A few days of chill. Then the Blue Angels show up.
▰ The Blue Angles are back for more World War III pre-enactment, canine incitement, and remote-triggering of car alarms
