I don’t know if tonight was the final night of the Luggage Store Gallery Music Series, which Rent Romus has run or co-run for the past 22 of its 30 years. I think there’s one more concert, on January 8, but if I understood correctly, there may not be, something about a possible cancellation, but I may have misunderstood. In any case, if tonight was the last night, it was a great one to go out on. Two bands, both trios, a musician shared between them, first on guitar as the leader, then as the youngest member of a group in which he played the drums. That would be Inkwells Trio (Lorenzo Arreguin, guitar; Elijah Pontecorvo, six-string fretless bass; Christian Arriola, drums) followed by saxophonist Romus’ long-running (since 1995) group with a shifting lineup, Lords of Outland (tonight: him; Ray Scheaffer, five-string bass; Arreguin, drums). Both bands played out, the Inkwells a loud jazz metal, with Arreguin calling out directions with a combination of cards and hand signals, and Outland a keening, spirited free jazz. The gallery building, here in San Francisco, on Market Street, around the corner from 6th Street, is due to be sold.
And the city smiled for its close-up on my way home:
Did I mention* I attended one night of the Recombinant Media Labs festival this month? There were lasers, courtesy of Robin Fox, as part of Triptych, a tribute to Polish audio-visual artist Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski. The accompanying sharp, somehow sparse yet tightly packed techno was not just perfectly aligned with the ever-shifting images; it was so exhilarating that I found myself closing my eyes just to listen, which was sort of exactly the opposite of the concept, but so be it. A great night at Gray Area, courtesy of impresario Naut Humon.
A quick lunchtime experiment. The Music Thing Workshop System (the device here dressed in black) does, indeed, supply sufficient power to run the KOMA Elektronik Field Kit (the device here dressed in white), which means I can easily run the randomly sampled FM radio from the latter into the modulated filter in the former. I imagine someone will recognize some of what is being sampled in realtime, but I certainly can’t. I wrote a story for The Wire magazine a few years ago about musical instruments that contain radios, and during the research phase I learned from KOMA that the radio portion of the Field Kit might someday become a standalone module, and that happened recently (though just the FM reception, not the AM or shortwave). Anyhow, much exploring ahead.
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.
