Disquiet

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.

▰ The day has begun with what sounds like fake rain from a YouTube channel, too perfect to be real, though that’s probably just the result on my part of a combination of drought-induced confusion and too much research about field recordings

▰ Since you’re wondering, guitar class went well. It’s a small thing for most people learning music, but for me being able to transcribe a melody from an old-school Disney flick, sort the key, and guess at some chords felt nice. Been deep in “Stay Awake” and, now, “Baby Mine.”

Just to be very clear: I am taking guitar lessons, not giving them. :)

▰ I’m looking forward to listening to your next drone album but fair warning my microwave has really been upping its game. May be an end-of-life cycle for the machine, revisiting its hits with diminishing energy but greater depth.

▰ My only Oscars comment is a question about the best score category: will the dead guy and the elder statesman split the codger vote and thus given one of the other three the win?

▰ A consequence of studying lullabies for guitar practice is that, as with any song you play over and over (and over), they get lodged in your head. These being lullabies, then you spend the rest of the day trying not to fall asleep to the sleepy-time earworms playing endlessly in your mind.

▰ Next up in guitar practice, after “Stay Awake” and “Baby Mine”: transposing “Easy Living” to match a Chet Baker recording — a natural transition, Baker being lullaby incarnate

▰ Just proofed some liner notes I wrote for an upcoming album. Had no idea how cool the graphic design was going to be, how appropriate to the material, nor how large the tape cassette booklet. I’ll share when it’s out (or getting closer to the release date).

▰ The city got a reprieve from rain for good behavior so I did open the window this morning, first thing. In came dog barks, a passing bus’ rumble, and the inimitable hum of a driverless electric car (steadier than most humans manage). Well, the barks were persistent but my brain eventually muted ’em.

▰ There’s an emoji for taking a look that’s two eyes 👀. The closest listening approximation is one ear👂so I guess we’re listening in mono. There’s an ear with a hearing aid, which is inclusive 🦻 and may come to suggest a broader array of mediated listening. There’s a deaf symbol 🧏. And of course 🌽.

▰ Sometimes I find things on last.fm that seem to make no sense, and then they end up being recordings that haven’t been announced yet, let alone released, but someone somewhere had been “scrobbling” embargoed recordings

▰ Probably old news for some people but it’s pretty great to use a secondary device, like an iPad, as a music player, and direct the sound to play through your MacBook (my M1 Pro has amazing sound). You can keep an eye on what you’re playing, and keep your laptop screen reserved for working.

▰ I recently set up a Mac Mini as a Plex jukebox and it has totally transformed how I listen to music. I’ll detail how I set it up in a proper blog post soon.

(And yes, I realize the concepts both of listening to MP3s/equivalent and of writing a blog post seem antiquated to some, but so be it.)

▰ Finished reading one novel this week, my third of this year: Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours, maybe his best and I’ve read ’em all. It’s in the Slow Horses world and will mean more if you’ve read them but it also stands on its own. It dials back the humor slightly, and the action is less slapstick. One moment in particular made the hair rise on my arms. Herron cares more for words than most writers of thrillers, spy or otherwise. Meanwhile, I’m still working slowly through an ancient Oulipo novel, and I restarted one I’d begun from Steven Soderbergh’s list of what he read last year.

▰ Finished reading three graphic novels this week: two more volumes of Minami Katsuhisa’s The Fable manga (5: The author sure keeps stacking the deck against the guy, but then again that’s the point; 6: It gets both darker in some of the incidents and lighter in tone at other points. Minami, the illustrator-author, starts to introduce incredible two-page spreads, and the depictions of action, especially hand-to-hand, really take off), and Kingdom by Jon McNaught: Wow, just wow. Incredibly beautiful, graphically intense, not-quite-wordless, onomatopoeia-packed depiction of a family vacation in which both very little and quite a bit happen. If M.C. Escher and Eric Drooker had a baby, the kid might hope to draw like this.