A fun multi-author series of mini-essays has begun at Hilobrow on “metal records from the Eighties.” My piece on Celtic Frost will be up later in the series. I’m stoked to see my old friends Dean Haspiel and Erik Davis are part of it. You can read the introduction by Heather Quinlan, the series’ editor, now, as well as the first entry, on Metallica, by Crockett Doob.
I always love coming upon this three-dimensional piece by Roy Lichtenstein at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Painted in 1962, it’s a great example of how the artist, best known for his oversized appropriations of comic book illustrations, found beauty in the geometries, textures, and purpose of everyday commercial objects. The dots that depict this radio’s speaker here bring to mind the signature dots of Lichtenstein’s famous paintings, dots that were themselves investigations of the patterns inherent in the printing process. He blew up what was previously invisible, ignored, taken for granted, or merely a subset of a larger story in a different context, and drew attention to details in a manner that made them alternately abstract or hyperreal — sometimes both simultaneously. For the first time, I found myself focusing on the radio station to which this imaginary device is tuned, just above 94 on the clearly selected FM dial. I wonder what station that was at the time, presumably in New York City. (If it’s of interest, I’ve written previously about Lichtenstein’s famed Blam, a painting that also dates from 1962.)
I dug the raised lettering on the wall text at the Botticelli exhibit at the Legion of Honor. (“Marc goes to an art exhibit and takes pictures the typography” is a corollary topic to “Marc goes into nature and takes pictures of signs/infrastructure.”)
I read a lot more than novels this year, but these are the 30 novels I read. I have several more I’m almost done with, but that I won’t complete until early 2024. The books with the + signs next to them are the ones I particularly recommend. (I kept a list last year, too.) This is the order in which I finished reading them:
1: Carole Stivers: The Mother Code
2: Lauren Belfer: And After the Fire
3: Daniel Nieh: Take No Names
4: +Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow
5: +Elmore Leonard: City Primeval
6: +Malka Older: The Mimicking of Known Successes
7: +Benjamín Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World
8: Stephen Blackmoore: Dead Things
9: Fernanda Melchor: Hurricane Season
10: +Charles Cumming: Box 88 (Box 88 Book 1)
11: Annalee Newitz: The Terraformers
12: Weike Wang: Chemistry
13: Lauren Wilkinson: American Spy
14: +Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
15: Charles Cumming: Judas 62 (Box 88 Book 2)
16: Hiron Ennes: Leech
17: Yeo-sun Kwon: Lemon
18: Kristin Chen: Counterfeit
19: Alan Furst: Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers Book 1)
20: John Darnielle: Devil House
21: +Alan Furst: Dark Star (Night Soldiers Book 2)
22: Yukito Ayatsuji: The Decagon House Murders
23: Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts
24: Charles Cumming: Kennedy 35 (Box 88 Book 3)
25: Richard Powers: The Overstory
26: Lawrence Block: The Sins of the Fathers (Matthew Scudder Book 1)
27: Lawrence Block: In the Midst of Death (Matthew Scudder Book 3)
28: Lawrence Block: Time to Murder and Create (Matthew Scudder Book 2)
29: +Lawrence Block: A Stab in the Dark (Matthew Scudder Book 4)
30: +Sean Michaels: Us Conductors
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.
▰ Synth patch experiment: process audio so it sounds like when you call the banh mi shop with an order and the cashier answers but puts the phone face down (rather than hitting mute) so as to first complete an earlier order and you hear everything including a muffled conversation with another customer
▰ My current favorite retronym is “live agent.” When one contacts tech support one is informed that one’s interlocutor isn’t a chat AI reared on repair manual PDFs and episodes of The Big Bang Theory, but in fact an actual human. One is not told “This is a human.” One is told “This is a live agent.”
▰ I worked in an office once where it seemed like Pandora eventually resolved to a song by Fleetwood Mac, no matter where we started.
At home, my YouTube often resolves to Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon.
This is my argument in favor of working from home.
