Wednesday Investigations v 2.0 [001]

Tomorrow the Internet will be good again

Well, hello.

As many of you likely know, capricious showman billionaire Elon Musk has been the owner of Twitter for a little over two weeks now. Aside from providing ample fuel for a ferocious 2022 round of the perennial game the Web loves to play, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” this has also generated a fair amount of genuinely notable chaos, much of which has provided an extremely grim form of entertainment value.

Some make a persuasive case that the fun will end soon, arguing that Musk can only wander around cavalierly knocking out the load-bearing supports for so long before the site collapses. Is this true? I have no idea. (Some say we’ll know when the World Cup rolls around—it’s traditionally a time when Twitter strains under a major increase in traffic.) What I do know is that many of the weirdos, artists, and activists I follow are already making arrangements for going elsewhere, either because they feel the site could disappear tomorrow, or just because they’re not interested in sticking around, creating more value for the world’s richest man. Whatever might happen in the long term, it’s a fact that right now Twitter is Musk’s plaything, and that lends a sour aftertaste to whatever antics we might still get up to there.

I, too, am considering my alternatives. I’ve got a group Discord going. I set up an account at the Twitter-like website cohost. I even made a… blog post? At itch.io? But I also had a thought… something like “oh yeah, I have a dormant newsletter that could stand to get an update…”

So hi. I don’t know if this will be a new regular thing. I don’t think I’m going to go back to the old format of writing about items in the note index right now, though that was a fun project. But I continue to love the world, and I continue to make a practice of investigating the interesting things and people in it.

Robin Sloan, a writer and designer, left Twitter some time ago. (He also, as it happens, has a very good newsletter.) In this thoughtful piece, he writes “The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking. More than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city.”

So if I’m to reimagine this newsletter, then, I’d like to reimagine it as a place for investigating that city, to see what one can savor and enjoy when one isn’t engaged in the chaotic process of daily shitposting.

I’m up to some cool stuff and I want to tell you about it. But more on that later. First here’s a bit of what I’ve been investigating lately.

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Pretty tempted to go to New York City to see one of these upcoming shows from multi-instrumentalist Catherine Christer Hennix and her just intonation Kamigaku Ensemble. They’ll be performing “a new work in which precision-tuned and continuously sustained tones on trumpet and shō—a Japanese free-reed mouth organ—harmonically coalesce in a framework of intervallic modalities constituted in part by electronically enhanced combination tones.” I am here for it! (I say this even though I probably won’t make it down for the show (I was just in NYC last month to catch a rare screening of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Face at the MoMA and I’m not sure another trip is in my budget right now.)

While on the topic of just intonation: I wrote a lot of this entry listening to Terry Jennings’ Piece for Cello and Saxophone, arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young. This recording is… a masterpiece? Unimpeachably so? My vote for the best album of 2022, hands down. This is a pretty wild interview with the cellist Charles Curtis, who performs Young’s arrangement on this recording. Sample: “death is inscribed into the work, the emotional life is accelerated and amplified and magnified, and the art becomes a kind of personal memorial to loss and human fallibility.” OK man, yes, whatever you are on, I want some.

While on the topic of upcoming shows: I’m pretty interested in hitting Providence-area venue Machines with Magnets on December 7 (a Wednesday!) to see “three sets of electronic, ambient, and experimental music,” including “the helmsman of 12k records Taylor Deupree, the tape music master BlankFor.ms and Micah Frank & Chet Doxas performing the music of medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen.” Well, OK. Deupree is one of my favorite ambient musicians working these days; this autumn I’ve gotten a ton of mileage out of Februarys, his most recent collaboration with similarly great musician Marcus Fischer, on the terrific Ghent-based label Dauw. Dauw is notable not just because they release a lot of amazing music but also because they have a very strong visual aesthetic—each album features a collage cover by Femke Strijbol, and all of them are wonderful. Here’s the Februarys cover, but you owe it to yourself to visit the Dauw Bandcamp page and take a look at what else is there:

The venerable label Touch released Resistenza, a posthumous release of material from experimental turntablist Philip Jeck, who would have turned 70 this week. Jeck was an important influence on me both when I was a young audio terrorist destroying thrift store vinyl but also more recently, in my collage work: “anyone mining the accreted detritus of mechanical reproduction could learn a lot from him,” I wrote (on Twitter, naturally) when he died, back in March of this year. Don’t miss this moving track, a duet with the pianist Jonathan Raisin, recorded at the Liverpool Philharmonic.

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I’m pretty busy these days, so it doesn’t always feel like I have time to immerse myself in a movie. But here are a number of films streaming at the Criterion Channel that are 90 minutes or less.

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Catch you again soon.

-JPB, writing in Providence, RI and Dedham, MA (in the week ending Wednesday November 16)