Scratch Pad: NY(C), Diploma, Block

From the past week

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ I was in New York for the past week — a few days in the city, then out on Long Island for family time — and thus I posted very little to social media. Back in San Francisco now. I’ll catch up with some items in the coming week.

▰ If keeping a journal is a struggle for you, I can’t express how much it helps to make a list of topics at the end of the day, just before bed — a list of words or phrases (events that occurred or ideas on your mind) that the next morning you can flesh out into brief (or not so brief) commentary. I will either jot these down or record myself stating them as they occur to me.

▰ This is the paragraph from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography/memoirs that focused my thoughts on what eventually became the Disquiet Junto music community:

▰ Always looks like a record album to me:

▰ I’ve been reunited with my high school diploma, which means I’ve been reminded of the ever so slight distinction between how the r and c in my first name are depicted. And no, despite this typeface’s appearance, I was not raised in Germany during the early 1800s:

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep by Lawrence Block, several of whose Matthew Scudder novels I read recently. This one, while also the sort of crime story that fits in a back pocket, was more whimsical. The conceit that the main character can’t sleep didn’t seem to matter much to the story, except as a way to explain on occasion why he happened to be able to be awake, but made for occasional interesting asides. I may read the sequel.

Disquiet Junto Project 0641: Re-re-re-re-revise

The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better.

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0641: Re-re-re-re-revise
The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better.

Step 1: Listen through some of your recent recordings.

Step 2: Choose one you think would benefit from being updated.

Step 3: Revise the track you selected in Step 2.

Step 4: Document the changes you made in Step 3, how you came to conceive the changes you wanted to implement, and how you achieved them.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0641” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0641-re-re-re-re-revise/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, April 15, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 641st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Re-re-re-re-revise — The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better — at https://disquiet.com/0641/