Disquiet

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as 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. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself.

▰ RIP, Wayne Thiebaud, who died on Christmas at age 101 after bringing so much pleasure to so many eyes. I only got to speak with him once, on the phone while writing a profile of painter Mel Ramos, his lifelong friend, for sactownmag.com.

▰ If IMDB indexed furniture, the entry for Emeco chairs would be the longest page on the internet

▰ Dishwasher (two rooms over) to the left of me, rainstorm (outside living room window) to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle again

▰ I am totally down for Mos Espa parkour.

▰ I’m 67% (45% when I first tweeted this) of the way through Fonda Lee’s third Jade novel, Jade Legacy, and it’s truly thrilling. It never takes the easy way out. On the one hand, I’m sad to see the series come to a close. On the other, I’m so glad to see how compelling and transportive it is, how far it goes.

▰ There’s a lot I love about Dickinson, the TV series, and right now everything else takes second place after the jazz that plays every time Walt Whitman speaks.

▰ Excited to spend more time in Bogdan Raczynski’s new https://clang.gg community in the coming year. For fun, here’s an email interview I did with Bogdan 22 and a half years ago: “Turning Japanese.” (In response, Raczynski likened decades-old interviews to high school yearbook photos.)

▰ My day began with @’s related to poetry (via Rachael Nevins) and to livecoding (via Bogdan Raczynski), which is alright by me.

▰ So glad Bruce Levenstein is digging the trio of Michele Rabbia, Gianluca Petrella, and Eivind Aarset on the 2019 album Lost River. One of my favorite albums of the past few years. The guitarist Eivind (autocorrects to Divine) Aarset is great as a leader and often at his best as a collaborator and supporting player.

▰ Mornings sounds, last day of the year: external drive beeps and whirs as it reboots; a bus’ breaks bring it to a stop briefly (clearly no one was waiting to board, nor did anyone disembark); a car speeds west on the wet street at pedestrian-defying clip; house creaks as it warms.

▰ This week in the annual end-of-year project, Disquiet Junto music community participants are stitching together year-end retroactive sonic diaries by concatenating brief snippets from existing tracks to represent the past year. Playlist in progress at soundcloud.com.

▰ Only three episodes left of our Dickinson holiday spree*. :(

*née binge

▰ Only two now. :( :( On the bright side, when they’re over there are exceptional leftover Salvadoran tamales for lunch.

▰ Wow, Dickinson is a treat. TV has no shortage when it comes to flights of fancy, genre blending, hi/low mashups, public-domain spelunking, self-aware reboots, and professional-grade fan fiction. Dickinson is all of those, and it makes good on its source material and its conceit.

▰ Best receipt font of 2021

Side note: The “little spicy” following “medium spicy” is apparently how the kitchen is signaled to find the zone between medium spicy and very spicy.

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as 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.

▰ That tweet about my favorite living ambient(ish) guitar players led to to a heap of great recommendations.

▰ I’m now getting Instagram ads for soldering equipment.

▰ I’m reminded on occasion that the musical saw is an analog theremin.

Following Twitter feedback, make that an “acoustic theremin” rather than an “electric theremin.”

▰ What are your favorite VCV Rack 2 modules that aren’t in the app’s library?

Among mine are these ports of the Monome Teletype, other modules, and Grids:

More at github.com/Dewb/monome-rack.

▰ My Twitter #protip is to make an unintentionally bad joke at the start of the day, and to then appreciate the informative conversations that follow it up.

▰ Folks asked about fave LPs by the 6 guitarists I highlighted recently and now all I’m listening to is Eivind Aarset in quiet electronic collaboration with Michele Rabbia (percussion) + Gianluca Petrella (trombone) on the 2019 ECM Records album Lost River.

This will sound like high praise because it is, but there are days when this album is precisely everything I want in music, locating as it does a rewarding balance between familiar/remote, lush/arid, soft/glitched, live/processed, hermetic/communal.

▰ Person of Interest rewatch continues. The show is even better than I recalled. Expertly internecine, patiently and rewardingly plotted, and funny as heck. I always think of it as excellent Colossus: The Forbin Project fan fiction that overshadows its seeming source material.

And the songs used are a great big beat / trip-hop / electronica flashback, so much Unkle, and Lo Fidelity Allstars, and DJ Shadow (among other acts and types of music), plus Ramin Djawadi’s score.

It’s fun to see Leslie Odom Jr. (later Aaron Burr in Hamilton) as the recurring leader of an anti-surveillance, quasi-nationalist crew (name: Vigilance) who add 1776-era flourishes to their violent acts. Bonus: Chris Jackson (aka Hamilton’s George Washington) has a tiny role.

Foremost there is the beautiful glitch aesthetic at work visually and, to a degree, sonically. It’s often like if Oval, Trevor Paglen, and Herman Kolgen teamed up. Gorgeous stuff.

▰ “I’ve got an arrow here. / Loving the hand that sent it / I the dart revere.”

Starting to watch Dickinson after first catching up with Hawkeye can be a bit confusing, in a dream-state crossover sorta way.

▰ My brain is so on holiday time, I almost sent the Disquiet Junto project out a day early. :)

▰ I love my neighborhood: The local movie theater is hosting live music, not that I’m attending live music indoors yet, or going to movies (48hills.org).

▰ Late afternoon quartet for TV audio bleed from next room, revving gearhead sports car, passing bus, and bare footsteps on nearly century-old wood flooring.

[As Heard Through Earbuds While Transcribing Text for Longform Writing Dub Mix]

ft. Gate Slam

▰ Starting one New Year’s resolution early, which is getting the Disquiet Junto projects out earlier on Thursdays.

▰ Wasn’t expecting those Pokémon in the Matrix sequel

▰ Went for a walk. Got dark. Then very dark. Then realized there’s a power outage in the Outer Richmond.

▰ Well, that was a lot of firetrucks going by. Blackout in the neighborhood last night. No idea what’s happening west of me at the moment. After those sirens, when cars zip by afterward they sound like little children keeping up with the big kids. And another siren. The sound’s passing is especially striking in its east-to-west fluidity because it’s clear the car carrying it is not stopping at any of the stop signs or lights.

▰ Scene report

▰ Scene report

▰ And, finally, it’s unusual that anything I post on Twitter gets particular traction, but the following blew up quickly, at least by the modest parameters of my social media activity. As of this evening, this actual screenshot detail from a local restaurant’s web delivery page had over 330 likes, 30 retweets, and 20 comments, a day and a half after I posted it.

My initial instinct when posting was to use this image as a way to comment on the fourth Matrix movie, which is heavy on the meta (I had a bad “feta” pun in mind), but I kept it simple. It read just:

Was gonna order some food. Not sure which of the two Greek salads to get.

(For the record, ended up getting sausages at Berliner Berliner in the Lower Haight instead of a Greek salad.)

It’s day 10 of the 13-part Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown. Or, that time I got to ask novelists Richard Kadrey, Pat Murphy, and Rudy Rucker, “Where did the future go?”

Shortly after I moved back to San Francisco from New Orleans in 2003, I sat down with the three science-fiction writers to talk about two parallel topics, how both San Francisco and science fiction — the two “SF”s — had (at the time) hit a glass window called reality.

For the city at the time, it was life post-boom, after the internet bubble had collapsed. They joined me for Memphis-style barbecue in the Lower Haight to discuss earthquakes and cyberpunk, Sputnik and the Holodeck, the Gold Rush and bioengineering.

Murphy: I think when you’re writing fiction you’re aware of, like, 10 percent of what you’re doing. You might be aware you’re doing 10 percent, but the other 90 percent you realize when you look at it 20 years later.

Rucker: One of the interesting things to try and do is imagine an art form in, like, one thousand years, that would be something people might be doing instead of writing novels.

Kadrey: Science fiction is dealing with daily life stuck on fast-forward. We’re rewriting both the map of the world and our own genes. How can you write about life 20 or 100 years from now when you know that by Christmas some event or research is going to shake up your worldview?

This was for a magazine called Big, a single, special-issue shindig masterminded by David Peters and Rhonda Rubinstein.

At Disquiet.com, a few years later, I posted a longer version than fit in the magazine: “Lique-fiction.”