Disquiet

1. phone interference

2. background noise

The phone call was solid, an interview as part of a project well underway, me asking questions, my interlocutor filling in blanks: responding in detail, informedly nudging the narrative, providing verbal source code. The line quality was below average from the start, never breaking up, never dropping off entirely, but the audio remained tentative throughout, like the conversation had already taken place and was being played back after several runs through a fax machine, a generous spray from a water gun, and week left out in the sun to dry.

The audio quality changed in phases, first muffled, then squelchy, then fairly clear, then jittery, then muffled again. The transitions were curt, quick. One minute the voice on the other end of the line sounded like it was submerged, the next like it was behind concrete, the next like a window had opened, doubling the background ambience.

At one point early on, a particular background clicking sound kicked in. Tick tock. Tick tock. A paranoid person would guess they’re being tapped. This clicking seemed more prominent than a wiretap telltale. It was also familiar: a turn signal. The voice on the other side of the line was in a car, driving. The voice on the other end of the line had a hand on a wheel. The sound quality transitions were about distance, and physical structures, and cell tower triangulation.

I suppose I could have been perturbed. The call was important, but I found myself pleased that the person on the other end of the line actually used turn signals, something so few people seem to do. What could have read as flaky and distracted instead read as responsible and attentive. To be clear, we were deep in conversation the whole time, recording it for later transcription. What I’m recording here, in text, is simply a recollection of tertiary impressions, of how the sound of the call impacted my experience of the conversation.

Toward the end of the call I noticed that the tick tock had ceased, and that the sound quality had been consistent for a minute or so. The interlocutor was no longer in a car. The interlocutor was now traveling by foot. Soon enough, the call was over, exactly on schedule. I could, perhaps, have been annoyed by the fact that the interlocutor was on the move the whole time, but instead I found myself admiring a certain mastery — discussion always on point, recollections immediate, all statements clear. The transcription will bear this out.

*(Photo by S Demmer, used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/dbqokB) and a [Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/).)*

1. speaker on a wall

2. television sound design

*[Yeah, spoilers. Boilerplate, polite version: I promise I don’t “spoil” anything that would have bothered me had I known about it in advance. That said, I cannot think of anything I have read or watched in my life that would have been spoiled had I known the plot-advancing facts. And this is not, I promise, a brief Cliffs Notes”“style detailed summary of the story. Perhaps the only real way to “spoil” something is to detail any serious flaws in logic, to the extent that you then can’t get them out of your head. I can’t promise that I don’t to that — but neither can anyone else.]*

In the director’s commentary to the American remake of *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*, David Fincher, a master of pixel-specific art direction, talks about the chance intrusion of a halo into a frame. There’s a scene in his film that takes place at a computer repair place. MacJesus, it’s called, in lieu of an actual Genius Bar. In the scene, a fluorescent light in the shape of a circle hovers above the head of our hero, the antisocial hacker Lisbeth Salander.

In the commentary he notes that contrary to appearances, this wasn’t planned. The production team didn’t realize how symbolic that lighting was going to appear until after the shoot was done. It seems like a rare instance of unplanned scenery for Fincher, who famously uses CGI to correct real-life settings to match his design expectations.

The TV series *Mr. Robot* owes much to Fincher, and not just how the plotting of the first season shares certain parallels to *Fight Club*, which like *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo* is in part about outsiders wreaking havoc on the establishment. The parallel isn’t just character and plotting. The direction of *Mr. Robot* has a strong, exacting design sensibility — individuals framed in lower corners, rooms like stage sets, adherence to symmetry, an overarching hyperreality — that echoes Fincher’s aesthetic perfectionism. In the hands of the show’s creator, Sam Esmail, *Mr. Robot* aspires to the smudgier, dustier, dirtiest aspects of Fincher’s vision, and also has time, thanks to corporate-tower machinations, for Fincher’s more clinical tendencies, too.

This week’s episode, “eps2.5_h4ndshake.sme,” the 7th of the 12-part season, featured a significant revelation about the show’s setting. This revelation occurred after a group therapy session that the show’s protagonist, Elliot, has been participating in all season. We already know that the character played by Christian Slater (in a role that I like to think of as a spiritual descendent of his pop-anarchist character in the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume) is in fact a mental image of Elliot’s deceased father — that Slater’s character is, quite literally, all in Elliot’s head. A side note: Like Mr. Robot, Pump Up the Volume was filled with as much prerecorded music as it was with a proper score, and the score to Pump Up the Volume was by Cliff Martinez, whose ambient approach to underscoring is now a veritable norm in the entertainment industry, and it’s a style employed artfully in Mr. Robot by Mac Quayle.

The woman who leads the therapy session tells Elliot late in the episode that she’s seen Elliot “talking to him.” Elliot thinks the woman means his father, but of course she doesn’t mean “him”; she means “Him.” She’s referring to Jesus; the group therapy sessions occur in a large room with a cross on the wall. She then leaves Elliot so he can have some private time in the sanctuary, and the cross comes into focus, with a sad little old-fashioned speaker directly below it. This placement is unlikely a chance occurrence, like the halo was in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The visual formulation — the cross and the speaker together, as if they are collectively one totemic object, an image of the source of voices that it can be said people hear in their heads — is almost too perfect, but almost too perfect is the nature of Mr. Robot.

1. ride-sharing car idling

2. nearly silent hybrid turing corner

There was a car idling as I walked to the bus from my house yesterday morning. Its engine was a rough, asthmatic purr. There was another car idling when I got off the bus. There was one idling when I grabbed a pupusa lunch to take to a friend’s apartment, and another when I stood waiting at the corner for the bus. I had second thoughts about the bus, because two conversations were scheduled in the next hour on my way downtown, and it felt rude to talk on the phone on the bus. Instead I used an app on my phone to engage a ride-share service. Soon enough the ride-share car arrived; it idled as I approached and got in.

When I got out of the car, two conversations later, another car near-silently passed by: a hybrid. At the corner, when I began to walk across the street, an electric car executing a turn came to a halt. Its wheels made a sound against the asphalt, quite exactly the sound of a large piece of rubber being abused, but the breaks were indiscernible, and the engine entirely absent, especially against the noise of downtown midday.

A sizable majority of ride-share vehicles, seemingly regardless of app affiliation, run on internal combustion engines, and the sound of their idling is something of a sonic signature of ride-sharing. Certainly there are HEV ride-sharing drivers, but those seem — to this pedestrian and habitual bus-rider — to be a small percentage of the overall makeshift fleet. The hybrid and electric cars represent one significant shift in vehicular technology, and the idle — as a sonic symbol of ride-sharing — represents another, and these two shifts seem to have little in common, to even be at cross-purposes. I’d like to see statistics about car models in ride-sharing and how they correlate with general consumer car use. One transportation revolution is signaled in silence, while another lingers on the street, awaiting a passenger, engine gently rumbling.

This morning the news was awash with stories about a ride-sharing service preparing in the very near future, later this month, to offer a self-driving car service — a third potential technological shift — in a major American city. Meanwhile, the ride-share driver waits for a fare to arrive, and the car’s idling seems like more than simply a sonic signature of a category of service; the idling seems to signal a lack of awareness of this third major vehicular shift, a threat to the driver’s economic well-being, that may occur down the road.

*(Photo by Mack Reed, used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/nvXwMJ) and a [Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/).)*