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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
▰ I posted: We live in the golden age of movie scores (that is, movie — and TV — scores being released as albums). But that means we also live in the golden age of recognizing just how much most movie scores sound alike, or more to the point alike within a type.
And Ethan Hein replied: “In grad school I learned that the homogeneity is partially due to regular risk aversion but also due to the rise of very detailed temp scores. The music editor makes an entire placeholder score by remixing and editing existing scores and then the composer has to just SBD it (Same But Different).” And then he added something particularly interesting about a later John Williams piece for Star Wars: “A guy in my PhD cohort wrote his dissertation about the Duel of the Fates sequence in the Phantom Menace. John Williams wrote the score, they recorded the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road, but then they made over a thousand edits to the sequence.”
▰ I asked: Anyone have trouble getting Bandcamp embeds to work in self-hosted WordPress and then figure out how to fix the problem? Thanks.
And then: Michael Donaldson, aka Q-Burns Abstract Message, aka editor of the excellent Tonearm, sorted it out for me: “it’s been a while but I seem to remember the WordPress code never worked for me — I always had to just use the regular HTML embed code in an HTML block.”
▰ Finished reading two books this week: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Camden Joy’s 35 Days of Fe, about the Souled American album Fe (I bought the book at the Souled American concert last week).
