From last week

Some tweet observations (twitter.com/disquiet) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited:

▰ When you join a Zoom call a couple minutes early and everyone has their cameras off and they’re typing and it sounds like rain

▰ “In his lap, Yeats’s Collected–the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition–and in the CD tray Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.” The minder of a network of elderly informers in Mick Herron’s novella The List comes upon a dead body. I already dug the series (Slough House), and this line sealed the deal. (Bachelor is the last name of the story’s protagonist.)

▰ It’s at 1:43:46 that Miles Davis appears in this 1987 footage of Prince performing live. Everything to that point is tremendous but that bookmark is where to start: the smile on Prince’s face, how he conducts the band to make space for the trumpeter:

https://youtu.be/v_aAug_PpUM?t=6227

▰ Kinda crazy that the new company combining Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vibe, and other publications is called PMRC, same initials as the Parents Music Resource Center, which gave us parental advisory stickers back in the 1980s.

▰ “Waiting for the host to start this meeting”

▰ I am fairly certain that I will at some point today no longer have “Interplanet Janet” running through my head. I am almost equally certain that it will immediately be replaced by another Schoolhouse Rock song.

▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet”

▰ Last night I watched the TV series The Repair Shop. Just as stuffed-animal vets were fixing the voice box of a WW2-era Irish teddy bear, the shofar bleated from a synagogue down our street, and I briefly thought that was the teddy bear’s sound. Had to mute the TV to sort it out. It was an especially confusing mundane synchronicity because at that very moment, the show’s host noted that the voice box sounded less like a bear growling and more like a lamb baaing.

▰ That amazing, mournful live three-hour Questlove set of dubbed-out, chopped and screwed Radiohead tracks has shuffled off the mortal coil that is YouTube, so I’ll go back to listening to the Tenet score backwards.