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.
▰ The most off-putting score cue I’ve heard in a while occurs five minutes into the new TV series Prime Target. An adorable little girl and her mom fall into a hole after a bomb explodes in a Baghdad market, beneath which are ruins of an ancient tomb. The music gets all Da Vinci Code / Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I’m like, “Uh, a cute kid just died. And her mom.” The camera even pauses on the kid’s dropped ice cream cone, but mysterious music soon erases the deaths that occurred seconds before.
▰ RIP, New Orleans food figure Pableaux Johnson, whom I hung out with quite a bit during my NOLA days (1999-2003). He was the first person I ever saw burn a CD.
▰ The next two Frame by Frame four-panel comics I’m doing with Hannes Pasqualini are done. One comes out February 3, the next one after that on February 17.
▰ I’m a heavy user of Discogs to find appearances on other people’s records by musicians I like in supporting roles. Is it possible we’re almost a full month into January and there isn’t a single new record featuring Bill Frisell, Ambrose Akinmusire, or Eivind Aarset? (As someone tipped me off after I made that comment: a new Akinmusire album, honey from a winter stone, was announced and due to come out a few days later. I’m not sure why it’s not on Discogs yet.)
▰ Tired: is the Beat tour line-up (Belew, Levin, Vai, Carey) gonna record a live album?
Wired: are they gonna write new material?
▰ As I do each morning, I was looking over my notes from yesterday and, no kidding, there is one that reads “I somehow didn’t finish my” — and that’s it. I have no idea what it was going to say in full, not even with the context of the other notes around the half-sentence.
▰ Traveling virtually. Today, listening to sounds of Mexico City.
▰ Social media tips:
1: Post before you follow anyone.
2: Stick to a beat (sports, music, books, your profession) or be entirely personal.
3: Whichever option you decide for step 2, do a little of the other for balance.
4: If none of this is appealing, get out while you can.
▰ Current mood
▰ The evolution of my matzah brei over the years:
1: made basic matzah brei
2: added salsa
3: swapped out matzah for tortilla chips
4: swapped out salsa for chili crisp
I said it was my matzah brei, but I then realized it is the matzah brei of Theseus. (And yeah, I realize it’s become chilaquiles with Chinese hot sauce on it — which is to say, as always, what matters is the journey, not the destination.)
▰ Sentence I just wrote as part of a longer message about dealing with music PR: “Your name is a field in a database and your email address is like a number on a bathroom wall.”
▰ Reading update: I made a lot of progress on Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (I’m 54% of the way through, having completed the chapter where WWII-era Waterhouse meets the love of his life in Brisbane) and some more progress on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (which is about a lot of people hoping to meet the loves of their lives, and it’s going more slowly for them — and for me). And I finished reading one graphic novel, The Prague Coup, written by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Miles Hyman. It’s a fictional — more to the point, hypothetical — retelling of a visit that Graham Greene actually took to Vienna while writing The Third Man. (Fun fact: illustrator Hyman is a grandson of author Shirley Jackson, whose “The Lottery” he previously adapted into a graphic novel.)
