Scratch Pad: Fog, NCC-1701, the ’90s by Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).

▰ Tried to type “Tonka truck.” My phone corrected it to “atonal truck.” Now I want an atonal truck. I assume it’s an EV with bespoke music licensed from the estates of serialist composers and revised by an AI.

▰ I’m so into the music in the TV series Rabbit Hole that last night I apparently dreamed a scene that wasn’t in the show. The composer is Siddhartha Khosla (Only Murders in the Building, The Mysterious Benedict Society, This Is Us).

▰ Morning sounds: ticking clock (the only one in the house that ticks, in the kitchen), passing cars, distant motorcycle revving (now drawing closer), overhead jet plane, low level hum of the refrigerator

▰ The foghorns are in full-blown Wookiee-in-heat mode

▰ The Roddenberry Archive (roddenberry.x.io) of all the major Star Trek Enterprise ships in 3D is pretty cool, but it feels like a missed opportunity in that, far as I can tell, there’s no sound, which was such an important part of the place-setting in the shows and movies:

▰ Now this took me back: “The History of the Bay Area’s Most Notorious ’90s Rave Warehouse” (sfgate.com). The article itself was published a year ago, but the events at the Oakland International Trade Center (near the Home Base store, from which the space took its name) were back in the 1990s, not long after I’d moved to California. I used to joke, back at the time, that it shoulda been called Home Bass. I recall one night with Juan Atkins and Derrick May, where they played for hours without seeming to look at each other once and yet remained perfectly in sync. Magic time. I remember a DJ — maybe someone in Cold Cut, or maybe Kid Koala? — had a camera focused on the turntable’s tone arm, projected on a huge screen. Anyhow, lots of great memories. My favorite spot was standing in the void between two different simultaneous acts, and enjoying how the contrasting music overlapped. Eventually cellphones changed everything. You no longer got lost in the crowd. Safety-wise, definitely a good thing, but it also changed the experience irreparably.

Disquiet