[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #012
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(That is, either this is the PDF edition or that is a link to it.)
04 December, 2020
This is the twelfth issue of the newsletter.
If you received last week’s newsletter by email, you may have noticed that the title erroneously said “10” rather than “11.” If you received it in another way, you probably didn’t, since I quickly fixed it.
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Onward (draining the sog?)!
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, November 27th, 2020
I finish sauteing the onions and garlic, cube the beef, put it all in the refrigerator, and head out. It’s after noon. The stew is never going to be ready for even a late dinner tonight. I need to do my Friday shopping, finish my newsletter, and then get back to it. I’ll put it in the slow cooker overnight for tomorrow’s lunch. Everything is wet outside, but it has stopped raining for now. As I understand it, an entire year’s worth of rain fell yesterday. We’re told that climate change will be giving us longer dry spells between more of these intense storms. I don’t see any snails on the pedestrian street. They were out last night but must have headed back under the shrubs. There are few cats where they usually gather. They may still be hiding out in case it rains again. The city square is crowded. Long lines stretch back outside the hummus joint and the shoe store. Across the main intersection, the street corner violinist plays a slow blues over an orchestral recording. I quickly do my shopping. As I enter the supermarket in the Heart of the City, the loudspeaker is already telling customers, once a minute, to finish up and to have a good Sabbath. I buy some fruit and vegetables, a loaf of bread, and chicken breasts to cook for dinner. I get a challah and a donut at the usual bakery, an espresso at the cheap coffee stop, and a shawarma at my favorite place, and head home. I go directly to my desk and get back to work. I’ll have to finish cooking later on.
Saturday, November 28th, 2020
I take the bones out of the stew first. A lot of the meat was still attached to them when I cubed the beef. They’re larger than what I had cut away. I figure I’ll have what’s on them in this first meal so I don’t have to deal with storing them. I don’t need to. After seventeen hours, stewing overnight in the slow cooker, the meat has come right off of them on its own. Everything has cooked down just as I’d hoped. With the flour coating the meat before I browned it, the added tomato sauce, and the other ingredients, the texture of the gravy is just as I’d hoped. The recipe was vague on spices. I should have put more in. I had guessed on how much sumac and baharat to add. I also didn’t have beef broth. Following other recipes, I just used water and a splash of wine. I eat two servings for lunch. It’s too much. I feel heavy for the rest of the day. I pack up and freeze eight more servings. There is still a lot of the gravy left. I freeze that separately. I may add it back in when I make the next stew, in lieu of prepackaged beef broth. And next time, I may add beans and barley back in. I could adapt it into an excellent cholent.
Sunday, November 29th, 2020
The municipal billboard has changed again. At first, I think that it’s about being safe in traffic, but it’s not. The city wants our help in keeping its “green light” status in the face of the virus. At the front of the square, several people sit in intense conversation. Hand-drawn signs say “We’re here to listen” and “Let’s talk about the situation.” Further back, running along the center walkway, barricades bear printed posters about the Day to Eliminate Violence against Women. Against a common background, each has a black and white death notice, four times the usual size, giving the name of a woman and how she died. Heading in to work late after an appointment, I get a falafel at a nearby shop and sit down on a bench to eat it. I make a phone call and head up to the office. A couple of meters in front of me, a white-haired man falls off his bicycle into the street. The cars stop in time. I think of helping him, but I wouldn’t know what to say. Three other people rush over and rescue him and the bicycle. He seems OK. Down the street, a soccer ball flies out of a schoolyard and lands near me. Another man about my age trots over and expertly kicks the ball over the tall fence back to them. I pause closer to the office as a car parked in front of the supermarket plays chicken with an SUV who wants the space. I wait until I’m sure they’re stalemated then walk around them and in.
Monday, November 30th, 2020
I finally get to play back my long piano score. I’d recorded its four lines, one line a week, playing each without listening to the lines that preceded it, over a month of Saturdays. Each follows the same structure, beginning and ending at the same place at the same time, but wandering in between through a field of possibilities. I’d recorded each in the same octave, then arbitrarily assigned them to different ones, low to high in the order that I recorded them. It sounds like a single piano, though I would never be able to play the result. Unexpected melodies occur. A phrase starts in one octave and continues in the next. Chords appear, and moments of harmony. Silence has its place. Stretches of four or five seconds at a time, though rarely more than that, pass without new notes being played. I may add a pedal to everything, so a haze of tones drifts in the background. I may not. I planned it to be played by others, and eventually it will be, but this is what it has become for now. It’s one layer of several. I have already recorded four tracks of my voice reciting a text, similarly connected and separate. There will be sounds from the environment and elsewhere. Birds, seascapes, and children will appear, as well as clusters of massed violins that I played some twenty years ago. All this goes along with visuals: pillars of text, images of my city, and other layers not yet known. I like what I hear in the piano score. I know that I made mistakes, but I can’t hear where they are. I leave them in. It’s time to start combining things. The whole thing is soon, though I don’t know how soon, to be a minor motion picture. I want to watch it as I fall asleep. If only I can understand and enjoy what it becomes, it will be enough.
Tuesday, December 1st, 2020
A bicycle darts past me as I wait for a traffic light across from the city square. It zooms ahead, not paying attention to much. A dog crosses into its path. The bicycle rolls over the dog’s leash, inches from it. The dog flops onto its side. The bicycle just keeps going. The dog gets up. It doesn’t look pleased. I cross the street and step into the pizza shop. The worker asks me what I would like. I point to the one remaining slice of Sicilian pizza. She tries to scoop it up on the large pizza peel. That’s the English name for the tool they use, somewhere between a spatula and a shovel. I don’t know the word at the time, but look it up later to write this. The pizza keeps sliding off the peel. The other worker turns and takes the peel’s handle. He gives it a quick flip. The slice slides forward, seated securely. The woman with the dog comes in. A little girl is with her. The girl disappears almost immediately. She emerges near the ovens on the other side, having walked under the piled-up tables that keep customers out of that area. The woman yells at her. The girl grumpily stomps back under the tables to our side. The woman wants four slices. The other worker tells her they add up to the same price as a large pizza. He uses the English word “large.” She doesn’t like that. “But they’re slices!” Yes, but they add up to a full large pizza. He spins the slices around on the metal counter and forms them into a perfect circle. The woman doesn’t like the price, but she gets them. The worker who took my order tries to scoop my slice out of the oven. She fails. The other worker shows her, again, how to flip it onto the peel. She rings up my pizza and a soda but gets confused at the register. The other worker shows her how it works. I take the pizza and soda and try to leave. The girl is leaning up against my leg. The dog has wandered between us and wrapped its leash around my ankles. I gradually extricate myself without dropping anything. I look down at the girl and smile. She smiles back. The woman doesn’t notice. I carry everything over to a chess table, take off my mask, and eat.
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020
I stare at my phone yet again, trying to figure out what has gone wrong with it. Ever since last week’s storm, I can’t get online via mobile data. I have gone into the settings screen and checked that mobile data is working. The screen claims that it is. It isn’t. I depend on the phone in all sorts of small ways. I don’t notice them until they’re gone. Without the mobile data, I can’t get at WhatsApp at work, since it depends on my phone having a connection, and the WiFi is flaky here. It’s how our team communicates, as well as my family. I can’t check when my bus is coming. I also can’t use the bus, since my transit pass ran out at the start of the month, and I use the phone to recharge it. I stare at the phone some more. On the top bar, I spot an icon that I’ve never noticed before, like an N with two crossbars. I swipe down from the top. There’s a whole array of settings for things that I’ve never seen. The odd N is for NFC, which is how the phone talks to the transit card. It’s off. I turn it on. There’s a setting for Mobile Data. It’s off, even though the other screen said that it’s on. I tap it. The phone immediately begins buzzing and beeping with incoming messages and alerts. Apparently this hidden screen overrides the one that’s easy to see. I must have fat-fingered the interface as I tried to hold onto the phone while walking through the flood. Odd are the ways of the Android. I’m relieved. In the states, I would have taken the phone in to the AT&T store or the equivalent. Here, it seems you buy phones and get them repaired from small shops, many of which look sketchy. I’m glad that I didn’t need them. I press my transit pass to the back of the phone and start the app to recharge it. My email comes in. My podcasts update. The world begins to get back to normal.
Thursday, December 3rd, 2020
I take a five shekel piece out of my wallet on the way from the bus to the bakery. The baker sees me coming. He’s seen me before. “One donut?” I nod. He takes the coin and hands me a bag. All they have left are jelly donuts with powdered sugar. They usually have a wider array. A group of teenage girls wearing identical white t-shirts over warmer clothes are carefully picking through what’s on the rack. To me, the donuts look identical. I pick up the tongs from the top shelf and take the nearest one. I drop it in the bag. A cloud of sugar poofs into the air. Much of it gets on my shirt. I brush it off. The street corner violinist plays a klezmer tune along with a recording of an orchestra. A man on a chair near him stomps, claps, and shouts in rhythm, speeding up and slowing down along with the music. I’ve heard the tune before, though not in a long time. I think my parents had a record of it. My mother may have played it when I was young. Bartok may have done something with it. I can still hear it clearly when I cross into the city square. I think of getting a mushroom burger, but I’m too hungry to wait for one. I didn’t get to eat anything in the later afternoon as I hurriedly edited video for another webcast. I stop into the pizza joint and get the nearest slice. It’s wonderful, with olives and other toppings that I can’t identify. Olive oil dribbles off of it as I eat. I catch the oil on the piece of cardboard with which I carried the slice to the small stone table. I avoid dripping oil on the chessboard embedded in the table top. The violinist stops playing right when I sit down. I had looked forward to hearing more from him. I settle into the silence and the sounds of the square.
On writing as if in dreams
The word for today is “antecedents.”
The writing in these posts tends to be both spare and dense. I also do a lot of whittling away at what I’d written in earlier drafts. This can break connections between sentences and the references within them.
It’s a particular problem for pronouns. If I use “it,” “they,” and other such terms, they tend to refer to the noun that preceded them. If I have cut something out or shuffled the order of sentences, that can break. A sentence that referred to, say, a slice of pizza can now appear to refer to a dog. That can get weird really quickly.
These things can be hard to catch. When rereading or proofing my own writing, there’s a good chance that my knowledge of what I meant to write will keep me from seeing what’s there. No famous aphorism will tell you that anyone who proofreads himself has a fool for an editor, but one should. (I’m grateful to have had an excellent editor for my books, starting with my very first.)
I’d rather not have to fall back on the famous statement that Richard Nixon apparently never made: “I know you believe you understand what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you comprehend that what you heard was not what I meant.”
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
The new documentary on Frank Zappa is, by design, a glorious mess.
Zappa, which premiered this week on various streaming media, might not be the best introduction to the man and his work. It jumps around like mad, drops in impressionistic film edits (some of which Zappa himself did when he was young, before he got interested in music), and gives an appropriately jumbled sense of his life. Zappa was a mass of contradictions, both in his personal life and in his work, and any attempt to make it linear would probably fail.
For the first time, the Zappa family gave the filmmakers access to Zappa’s legendary vaults, where he kept recordings of all his work. At several points, we see Zappa, who died 27 years ago, giving someone a tour of the vaults, with its meticulously labeled boxes of tapes. Many of these were not preserved well. The filmmakers spent a couple of years recovering and digitizing the media before they started building the movie itself.
Director Alex Winter and his team managed to interview people who had been elusive before, including Zappa’s widow (who also passed away several years ago) and his star percussionist, Ruth Underwood, who left Juilliard to play with him and reportedly hung up her mallets soon after leaving the band.
Despite all his well-cultivated bizarreness, Zappa comes across as a traditional, almost romantic composer in his ways of working. He was focused on the music above everything. (There’s a tearjerking moment where his daughter, Moon Unit, speaks of trying to remind him that she exists.) The musicians that he collected and formed into bands were tools to get the music performed. He was rarely close to any of them.
For Zappa aficionados, this movie is a treasure. People new to him might want to check out other resources before watching it.
One thing I’m hearing
It’s #BandcampFriday again, at least until midnight tonight. I had made up my wishlist for my month’s music shopping in advance. As always happens, though, a record was released today that I had to add: A Pan-Air Music by Roland Kayn.
I had heard of Kayn before and accumulated some of his music but never listened to it. My Twitter feed exploded this morning with tweets by people whose ears I trust. Several said that if they hadn’t already done their “best of the year” lists, it would be on them. I immediately headed over to Bandcamp and listened to it. (You can stream the whole thing for free from the link.)
The blurb on the page describes the piece well enough that I don’t have to rephrase it:
> The latest unearthed gem from Kayn’s home-studio archive is a meditative, textural study dated 2003, yet in some ways redolent of the work of certain experimentally inclined rock musicians of the 1970s. Across its two-hour duration, ‘A Pan-Air Music’ locates the ethereal space between drone and rhythmic antiphony, and charts a gripping journey through it.
It most reminds me of early Tangerine Dream, before they were seduced by sequencers. Most of it functions well as ambience, though there are some startling sounds in it (including one brief queasy-sounding melody early on).
Kayn put out a ton of music, and more is coming out. I’ll be paying more attention to his work now, and I suspect I’ll be listening to this one a lot, once I buy it this evening.
One thing I’m reading
Late in 1995, Brian Eno was trying to figure out what to do about a book contract he had. He was active in several of the other arts, but hadn’t done a book before. His friend Stewart Brand told him “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already – and all you have to do now is find it?”
Eno had been keeping a diary that year for the first time. He hadn’t meant to publish it, but he realized that it was the book that he didn’t know that he was writing. The diary, with reworking and additions, was published soon after. Now, 25 years later, it has been republished as A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary.
Eno writes about anything that strikes his fancy: his home life, his work, and various bits of philosophy. He hadn’t quite turned into the ubiquitous pundit that he is now, but, as someone I can’t recall anymore once wrote, he speaks as a person who is used to having people listen to him. That year included some of his most interesting projects, including his collaboration with David Bowie on Bowie’s album 1. Outside. (That album didn’t turn out quite as Eno hoped. For a glimpse of something closer to how the project started, check out the bootleg The Leon Tapes, available on YouTube.)
The book also includes about 150 pages of his other writings (the “swollen appendices”), with interviews, short stories, and other pieces, including his seminal article on Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning.
In a new introduction (also published in British GQ), Eno writes about the words that are common now that weren’t around 25 years ago. The words for the letter D for example, are:
> daisy-cutter, dark money, dark web, data-driven, data harvesting, data point, data set, Davos, day trader, declutter, deep state, deepfake, denialism, derivatives, digital audio, dirty bomb, disaster capitalism, disinformation, distance learning, DM (direct message, Instagram), DMT (drug), dox, drone warfare, doomscrolling, dot com bubble, drones, dubstep
The whole book is a worthwhile read. I got the original edition that day it came out and cherished it, but lost it in one of my many moves. I pre-ordered this the day it was announced. I’m glad to have it again.
One more thing
My internet connection has been flaky again today, even though it hasn’t rained this week.
I’m noticing, though, as I have elsewhere, that my browsers often tend not to clog up on loading the pages themselves, but on other sites that those pages call. And more often than not, the sites are related to Google; Google Analytics, googlefonts, gstatic (which caches static pages), and others. I appreciate that Google is providing these services, but they aren’t helpful if they cause connections to fail. Google Translate and Google search itself also often time out, more often than other sites.
I wish I knew what Google was getting at, or what else was causing this poor performance related to their sites. It isn’t my ISP, since I had noticed this even in the States. It’s just annoying.
Google Search itself isn’t what it once was. As often as not, it completely ignores the search terms that I give it. Preceding them with a plus sign used to mean that it wasn’t to give any results that didn’t contain the term, but that doesn’t work anymore. It usually helps to put the term in quotes, even if it’s a single word, but that doesn’t work all of the time.
Google (or its mothership, Alphabet) may be the world’s greatest advertising market. But from what I see, as technology providers for end users, their products are falling apart.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line.)
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