The Plumber heard lIttle, ears focused, poNdered the steel trails, the Galvanized voids
July 6 Golden Gate Bridge Singing
Theremin of the Gods
Today’s the loudest/clearest I’ve heard the Golden Gate Bridge singing. I heard it inside the house so I stepped outside to record. The wind, of course, is prominent, but through that wind is something like the theremin of the gods. I recorded 30 seconds.
Video originally posted to [youtube.com/disquiet](https://youtu.be/upohR-iLH90).
芽菜 Glitch
A secret recipe, apparently
I’m not entirely sure how or when precisely this glitch occurred. It was sometime yesterday shortly after I uploaded a series of camera shots of the [dan dan noodles](https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ7gWcDBfCC/) I made for dinner. [This resulting image](https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ89k4hhlPF/) just popped up in my camera’s photos, and I noticed it this morning, though I do now have some vague memory of it having appeared briefly on my screen yesterday. It’s a mystery.
I think of this as “happenstance glitch,” because it happened by accident and isn’t (to my knowledge) repeatable. I would have said “true glitch,” but the word “true” would get me into trouble The idea of “true” plays into matters of authenticity and purity, and that’s not my intention. I just mean to distinguish, not prioritize, actual accident from the aesthetic impression of accident. Then again, perhaps what happened here is, somehow, reverse-engineerable, and if someone knows how to accomplish this, that’d be cool (not [the end result specifically](http://datamoshing.com/2016/06/15/how-to-glitch-jpg-images-with-data-corruption/), but in the “what happened on my phone when I uploaded to Instagram” sorta way). Like, could I do this regularly if I chose to?
I watch a lot of YouTube videos in which expert video game players traverse unmarked borders beyond the game designers’ intention and explore artifact territories not in the official game. No doubt this glitch image of my bowl of noodles is simply a glitch, an error from which I happen to derive pleasure, though I do like the idea that perhaps there is a nascent or discarded-experiment glitch filter in Instagram that I somehow accessed by accident. I don’t have difficulty imagining that Instagram might, someday, add a “glitch filter” to its toolkit. Maybe they’ll title it Akihabara or Darmstadt.
There is an additional layer of irony here. Making dan dan noodles at home was a big deal for me. It’s one of my favorite dishes, Chinese or otherwise, and being able to prepare it at home from (relative) scratch by following [a recipe](https://www.chinasichuanfood.com/dan-dan-noodles/) was a remarkable feeling, not just how the end result tasted, but also how the various phases of preparation, especially in terms of smell, registered. (By “relative” scratch I mean that I didn’t, you know, actually pickle my own mustard greens. I just bought pickled mustard greens, which I now know are called ya cai, or 芽菜.) It is ironic that while I was documenting one favorite flavor, the glitch — another favorite flavor — surfaced, and it has a recipe I do not know how to access.
PS: Odder still, there is now a second glitch of the same image on my phone, and even though they appear in reverse order chronologically, I believe this one is a glitch of the one up top, resulting from when I posted the “original” (humorous word in this case) to Instagram.
Not a Photoblog
Also: thinking about document fidelity
This isn’t now a photoblog. I’m just getting used to my new camera, and I am thinking about how my visual documentation of the neighborhood corresponds with my sonic sense of place. The images I’ve shot on my phone the past few days are far better representations of how I think of the neighborhood than are the shots I’ve taken with my phone over the years. I think, then, about how audio representation might vary based on technology, as much as with capacity to employ the technology expertly, and what “fidelity” means in such context. It is more than the capacity of a file format, and it is more than having a proper wind shield on your microphone? And what is the sonic aspect of this neighborhood that is as prevalent as the rust resulting from the salty ocean air?
twitter.com/disquiet: Hassell, MIDI, Shazam
From the past week
I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form or otherwise) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Was tempted to break from my weekend offline status to pay tribute to Jon Hassell on his death, but I just listened and reflected. I don’t think, for me personally, any other musician created a sound world at once more magnetic, absorbing, anticipatory, and ecstatic.
▰ Apparently this device alerts me that its battery has been fully charged when its battery light goes dark. Which is also what happens when, you know, the device has ceased functioning entirely.
▰ Was wondering if I could hook a MIDI Fighter Twister up to a Bitbox Micro, and of course while looking around for information I realized that Trovarsi was already on the case.
▰ Uh, yeah, I sure felt that.
▰ Nest but it Shazams and logs each song blasted by every car, bicyclist, jogger, etc. that passes by your front door.
▰ There will be an outdoor gallery for sound art, the Butler Sound Gallery, at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas: [sightlinesmag.org](https://sightlinesmag.org/blanton-museum-receives-5-million-from-ernest-and-sarah-butler-for-outdoor-sound-art-gallery).
▰ Off to the known unknown
▰ Afternoon trio for dishwasher, drip coffee, and distant traffic
▰ Band name, logo, and album cover readymade. First come, first served:
▰ Have a good weekend, folks. Or best you can. Eat something new. Read something ancient. Kill an idol. Take a longer walk than usual. Listen to some quiet music loud. See you Tuesday (three-day weekend here).
