Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Nathan Wolek’s bench 6, every morning edits a year’s worth of just pre-pandemic field recordings made at DeLeon Springs State Park in Florida. The cuts jump around in time: near silence, then water, then chatter, then an announcement, a car, bugs, all at various volume levels. Moments of extended natural silence glitch into stutters of quite different experiences of the exact same spot. Wolek’s approach both enlivens and gives lie to the concept of a soundscape, emphasizing inherent change over idealized stasis.
▰ A live performances by a string ensemble of a beautiful work by Roger Eno from a series of EPs. This is “Venerable Dilemma.”
▰ Eliza Brown has been posting weekly selections of field recordings since September of last year. The one from two weeks back, “TLY Week 31 – February 3, 2023” (“TLY” is for “the listening year”), is seven-plus minutes of an icy creek — the highlight being that Brown breaks the near silence by narrating what it is she’s witnessing.
▰ Roily, haunted sounds — muddy with a glistening surface — comprise the track “Language” by Christopher Hanlon. Set this ambient treat on loop.
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (especially because the Algorithm keeps kicking me off Facebook even though I’ve down nothing even remotely inappropriate). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ The phrase “unforeseen consequences” is generally employed by someone who has never read a science fiction novel in their life
▰ After guitar class I sometimes shoot a quick video of myself playing what my instructor had just gone over, especially chord voicings that are entirely new to (and currently befuddling) me, and my face in them always look like someone shared some sort of really shocking state secret — eyes wide, brow furrowed, mouth shut
▰ Donald Fagen needs to get Pushead to draw his next album cover just to see if the haters can resist the lure of purchasing it
▰ The best thing about a new Soderbergh movie is new Soderbergh interviews
▰ Sometimes elegant solutions are more elegant than they are solutions
▰ That explosion at 9:20am (San Francisco) on Thursday, February 9, 2023, was something else. Whew. Incredibly loud. Set the hair on my arms up and frazzled my nerves. I saw reports of sirens across the park, so I got the sense it was in the Sunset, not the Richmond District (where I live), because I wasn’t hearing the sirens here. Looks like it was on 22nd Avenue, maybe near Moraga?
▰ That thing where after playing a video game for a while you stand up and are all too aware that moving and looking around are entirely separate actions
▰ PCB designs are my visual cotton candy. (This is the 4Swing module from Gieskes.)
▰ Ooh, Jean Painlevé’s The Sounds of Science, with the Yo La Tengo score, has been added to the Criterion streaming service this month
▰ 1993: “I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.”
2023: “I didn’t know if I should use the laugh emoji or the cry emoji.”
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously saw a commonality¹ between intelligence and a sensitivity to noise, which may have been on the mind of author Benjamín Labatut when, in the novel When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), he put² physicist Erwin Schrödinger through the misophonia wringer.
I dug the Supergirl collection, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2022), written by Tom King and drawn by the Brazilian illustrator Bilquis Evely (suggesting a combination of P. Craig Russell, Kevin O’Neill, and Richard Sala). As a longtime reader of King’s, I was relieved it managed to not fall back on a combination of PTSD and faulty memory. It also had some welcome humor. It pairs Krypton’s most famous daughter with a young girl fueled by revenge for her father’s death. They travel the universe together for different reasons: similar goal, different aims.
We learn a bit about Supergirl along the way, in particular about her power of hearing. I’m always up for someone who’s willing to rewrite the overstated idea that there’s no sound in space. King does it well.
As to why there’s a schooner in space — just read the book.
. . .
I continued my Tom King–athon during my unfortunate if brief (27-hour) Facebook limbo. Facebook had, in its all-thumbs manner, temporarily (and in error) deemed me a troublemaker, so I read a graphic novel about one of comics’ most troubled troublemakers: Rorschach (2021). It’s pretty darn good.
Having not read any of the other post-Moore Watchmen stuff (I’ve been fairly wary), I don’t know how much of the rest of that material aligns with the TV show, but I dug the touches, like the race history material about the untended graveyard. I was surprised by the role a certain Batman storyteller plays in it, that’s for sure (The Dark Fife Returns, indeed). I took the main bad guy to be a kind of Steve Ditko figure, though perhaps someone else was the intended model. Fascinating how inside-baseball comics have gotten — this book is so knee-deep in self-referentiality, it feels like it limited its audience to a degree, but maybe those characters are fine even without the background knowledge. I loved how pirates are the big-screen superheroes in that world, which is especially funny since Marvel’s having a lot more success than DC is in that regard. The pirate stuff also feels like it changes the context of the meta-comic in the original Watchmen, because it makes pirates feel more mainstream, less retro, but maybe I’m just misremembering the original (and maybe this is a theme in some of the other “expanded Watchmen” material).
King does what he does well. He mixes up past and present so you don’t often know where you are until you’ve been there a while. The color-coding of time periods drifts into confusion, first on the audience’s part, then on that of the characters themselves. King also works so well with parallel structure, in particular when the three visitors to the ranch are telling their individual stories simultaneously yet separately. That was super duper. (His artist collaborator, Jorge Fornés, is totally up to the task.)
For better or worse, I saw the ending coming from quite a distance. Maybe that just makes this a tragedy. It’s not giving anything away to note that one character’s “hm” was paired with another’s telltale “hurm” several times too often for any actual surprise to have been intended. As a result, the end felt oddly certain whereas the rest of the book was enjoyably unfixed. And of course I greatly appreciated all the stuff about voices secreted in the silences of audio tape.
I’ve started a new Junto undertaking, where I’ll be doing short profiles of members of the Disquiet Junto community in Q&A form. If you have Disquiet.com in your RSS reader, then you likely saw the piece on Daniel Díaz that I posted on Monday. I have two more ready to go, and several others in the works. (Daniel’s includes his photo and his full name, but that isn’t a requirement if you’re especially camera-shy or privacy-minded.)
Going forward, my plan for this series, which is simply called the “Junto Profile,” is to focus on individuals who’ve participated regularly for, say, at least nine months. We’ll see how this takes shape. Things evolve (which is also the theme of this week’s project).
I have wanted to do something along these lines for a very long time, and I actually took stabs at it in the past, and now I am finally actually doing it. I think the series will be a great way for participants in the Junto to have a richer sense of the varied perspectives, backgrounds, and thoughts of the people they’re creating alongside asynchronously, and often across great distances.
If you’re interested in being part of it, let me know. And if English isn’t your first language, that is no concern. I can put resources together where translation would be beneficial.
