Scratch Pad: Eileen, AirTrain, Autumn

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

I’m posting this halfway through a JetBlue flight home to San Francisco from New York, where I was visiting family.

▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day

▰ When I hear the robotic voice repeat “stop, look around” on the JFK AirTrain, I want a Kraftwerk version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)”

▰ ”The thing about being in Art Blakey’s band was staying in it long enough to have one of your songs recorded.” —Frank Lacy (March 31, 2025, at Smalls in Manhattan, leading his septet during the 9:00pm show)

▰ Imagining that by the time I’m due for hearing aids, people will be muting words in everyday conversation like it’s possible to do currently on social media

▰ The quiet after the dishwasher after the rain is a particularly quiet quiet

▰ Not bad. It’s April 3 as I type this, and I’ve been in New York since March 27, and I haven’t heard Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, or Bon Jovi once. Let’s see if I can make it to Saturday, April 5, when I fly home.

▰ Finished reading two novels this week: Ali Smith’s excellent Autumn (2017), a beautifully fractured story about the emotional and intellectual connection between two people toward the start of life for one of them and toward the end of the other’s, and Joan Didion’s even more excellent Play It as It Lays (1970), a bleakly fractured story about the lack of connection between a number of people, and now I want to read any novel that dares to use a quote from the Didion book as its epigraph. Also read a short little graphic novel by Rich Tommaso, In the Garden of Earthly Delights (Floating World Comics, 2024), which I picked up at the excellent shop Escape Pod at the recommendation of its proprietor, Menachem Luchins. That’s on Long Island in the town of Huntington, which is also where I lived in the same house from when I was about two weeks old until I left for college. I’m a sucker for small comics, and comics written and drawn by the same person, and heist stories, and comics that include depictions of art, and this is all of those. I’m also pondering print formats for small comics, given Hannes Pasqualini and my ongoing Frame by Frame series, and this one was informative.

Disquiet Junto Project 0692: Combust a Move

The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0692: Combust a Move
The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track.

There is just one step for this project: Record a piece of music in which the sound of fire — match, burner, cigarette, etc. — provides the primary source for the rhythmic track.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0692” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0692-combust-a-move/.

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long before this fire burns out?

Deadline: Monday, April 7, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 692nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Combust a Move — The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track — at https://disquiet.com/0692/

Submitting Music

Please read carefully, thanks

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve updated the part of this site’s FAQ (disquiet.com/faq) that relates to submitting music for review consideration. Here is the revised section, and I’ve italicized the two most important sentencesbelow:

2. Does Disquiet.com accept music for review consideration?
I want to hear your music, but I also want to hear other people’s music, and so the less time I spend doing correspondence, the more time I can spend listening. Please don’t expect me to reply to correspondence, not even with a quick confirmation of receipt. I don’t have the time to engage in back-and-forth emails about whether I plan on covering a given release. I receive an enormous amount of music from musicians and their record labels, and that doesn’t count all the time I spend seeking out music (and sound-related art). I can’t promise to write back — either in a timely manner, or at all. If you include the word “teiuqsid” (no quotation marks, and that’s “disquiet” backwards) in your email, I’m far more likely to find your email message, because your including it means you’ve read these instructions. Also, if you include me in bcc list containing many Bandcamp “yum” download codes to try, I may ignore it, because that’s time-consuming, and my experience has been that when I do try, all of them have been used already. What I can promise is the following: I will listen to as much music I receive as possible, without diminishing the attention I can pay to what I do elect to listen to, and I will consider it for coverage. I listen constantly, and when something really strikes me, that’s when I write about it — either here, or for other publications to which I contribute. My preference is that you email me a link to a zip archive containing lossless files, and also include a link to it streaming somewhere, so I can preview it before downloading. If you feel the need to send me a CD (or vinyl copy, or some other physical format), you can email me (visit this site’s contact page) to get my address in San Francisco, where I live — though, again, there’s only a small likelihood I will reply. Please don’t send audio files as attachments: they clog up my email, and I immediately delete them. And don’t pitch me your music via social media, as I’ll just direct you to this page.

Live at Smalls

A darn good night

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

That’s Frank Lacy giving it everything he’s got last night at the Manhattan jazz club Smalls in the West Village. He led a septet of — also seen here — Nicoletta Manzini (saxophone), Felix Moseholm (bass), and Brian Simontacchi (trombone), plus Mike Lee (saxophone), Miki Yamanaka (piano), and Wen-Ting Wu (drums). Wu was a standout, maybe because the show leaned on Lacy’s time with Art Blakey’s band, and Blakey was, himself, a drummer. Moseholm seemed familiar, and only later did I realize he was in a Brad Mehldau trio video (with drummer Jorge Rossy) from October 2024 that I’ve watched on repeat on YouTube. The full video of the septet show is on the club’s website.