what I'm doing now #3
I’ve been playing soccer, watching hockey, reading Cormac McCarthy and David Lynch, watching The Wire and True Detective, developing Muze Radio, and more.
Life
My weight loss progress has slowed. I’m going to be patient and keep working on small, daily habits that have worked so far. Playing soccer, going for walks, eating vegetables, eating more slowly and mindfully, and not finishing my serving just because it’s served.
After a month of not playing soccer, I was excited to get back on the pitch. At my first game back, there was a middle-aged man
recording the gameman with a custom tripod
At my soccer game recently there was a middle-aged man recording the game from the sidelines with a camera mounted on a tall tripod. Turns out he films local Seattle soccer matches as a hobby and uploads them to his YouTube channel. When I emailed him, he told me he uses a Sony camcorder, a set of Arduino micro-processors, and Play Station 2 controller to control the pan, tilt, and zoom.
My goal is to film soccer matches so the play makes sense and the camera doesn’t distract, I enjoy both the technical and artistic challenges. I’ve used the pole camera to film other stuff such as high school band performances, or migrating birds outside my office window, but soccer has been my main focus. Over the last year I branched out from filming my old team and started doing matches in other [Greater Seattle Soccer League] divisions. It’s a bit strange to just show up and film, but mostly the response has been positive.
In the recording of my game, you can hear a player telling him “we appreciate you.”
from the sidelines with a camera mounted on a tall tripod. Only a few weeks ago I was wishing I had videos of my matches from years past. Since watching this recent one, I’ve been working on moving off the ball better. Adjust my position in anticipation of where the ball will be next.
I still haven’t gone snowboarding this season, but I went with Z, Z’s mom, and Z’s stepdad to
Harrison Hot Springshot springs
Hunched against the cold in our hotel bathrobes and slippers we crunched over the snow between the pools, looking for the hottest one. Of course, it turned out to be the one everyone was crowded into. For a few hours we crouched in the hot water avoiding eye contact with the multitude around us – a family reunion, couples on anniversary weekend getaways – trying to convince Z’s mom and stepdad that renting was a better option than buying in their current circumstances.
In the evening Z and I went for drinks and dessert at the hotel’s lounge, The Copper Room. We sat among the other couples at one of the cloth-draped tables surrounding the big empty dance floor. The waiter glided from table to table cracking jokes with his head cocked. The band started playing another oldie and a couple in their thirties came out onto the dance floor. They danced clumnsily near the edge of the hardwood rectangle, far from the stage, near our section of tables. The man smiled blankly as he tried leading his partner, who was grinning in embarrassment and bowing her head while she went through the motions. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised when she took a tumble, such was the lack of coordination between all components – music, limbs, lovers. They scuttled off the dance floor only to creep back on a couple songs later to join the couples they’d inspired onto their feet.
. The Vancouver area is stunning after a good snow. The hills speckled with evergreen and white, and the snow-capped mountains beyond. We stopped at Bridal Veil Falls on the way back. They were frozen solid, it was a sight.
Z won tickets for Canucks vs Blackhawks from a raffle at work, so we went to our first ever
Canucks gamehockey game
I liked analyzing the game’s tactics and patterns from my ignorant perspective. The production, too. From speakers hanging above pop music blared whenever the game paused, even if just for a few seconds. As soon as a referee dropped the puck again, the clocked resumed and the music evaporated. They also managed to squeeze in two performances from local country music singer, Antonio Larosa. He sounded good, but no one in the stadium seemed to care much.
This was my second time at an NHL game and my main memory of the first one, back in middle school, is being baffled when it ended after three periods, not two, or four. This time, I went in knowing a bit more, including the offside rule: players on the attacking team can’t cross the thick blue line into other team’s third of the rink unless the puck is already there. Watching the Canucks, I noticed that, right before crossing the blue line, attacking players would often fling the puck into the opposing end and swarm around it. It irked me how often they did it. I wanted them to keep dribbling. I’ve since learned that they do this because the defensive team can’t just dump the puck back out. They first have to regain possession and get it back across that blue line. Only then can they launch it into the other team’s end. Then the cycle repeats at the other end. It’s funny how
games are designedto avoid certain behaviors and can end up transforming the tactics of how the game is played.
. It was novel for me. The only sport I watch regularly is soccer. I’ve been watching all of Arsenal’s games. It’s been really interesting to observe Mikel Arteta build and develop his team. His tactics and strategies are pretty complex and they evolve constantly. There’s a hilarious moment in an interview from a few months ago in which a reporter asks him about the new formation he is using and he replies that his team used “36 different structures” in the game and he had no idea which formation the reporter meant. So far, his system has been working and adapting well.
Work
Took a few weeks to get back into the groove. My mind started running wild. What if I went to grad school? I got my calm back when I got more interesting tasks to do. I’ve been almost two years working on Loop and I can see myself continuing for another year at least. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.
Coding
I revamped the design of my app Muze Radio. Still waiting to hear back from Spotify regarding my request for an extended quota, which would allow any Spotify Premium user to use my app. I submitted it back on January 9th and the expected turnaround time of six weeks has now elapsed. Hopefully they’ll get back to me this week.
I started working on hoverbox previews for this site. I want them to look like the previews on Wikipedia or Andy Matuschak’s notes. I’m excited.
Reading
I’ve been reading a lot lately. I have about a dozen books on the go.
I sped through
Stella MarisStella Maris (2022)
by Cormac McCarthy
I’m 120 pages into this book and so far it has consisted purely of dialogue between a psychiatrist and a patient who has voluntarily checked herself in. Dialogue between these two I expect will fill the rest of the book. It’s an exciting endeavor to witness Cormac attempt.
He published this book alongside
The Passengerin 2022 as a “companion novel” known also as The Passenger #2. I tried this one first though because among its topics are math and philosophy. It is set chronologically after The Passenger, but my impression, assembled from fragments of scantily skimmed book summaries, is that reading them in either order is fine.
(Even more than novel summaries I avoid movie trailers. They reveal far too much. I’d be happy to watch them if instead of crudely summarizing the story and undermining its telling they showed a short sample of the movie. A scene at most and no more.)
This book is clearly a product of the years Cormac spent at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in conversation with scientists and researchers discussing consciousness, mathematics, physics, language, and philosophy. Much of what the protagonist Alicia says – about the unconscious, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, mathematics – Cormac himself says in conversation with SFI’s President David Krakauer in this interview from 2017. The interview is good companion material to the companion novel.
This book reminds me of another, which I intend to return to when I finish this one: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, in which a philosopher lying on her deathbed argues with her friend against the likelihood of an afterlife. In Stella Maris death also looms – not just over the protagonist but also its author. Cormac died six months after this final publication.
in a few days and now I’m reading
The PassengerThe Passenger (2022)
by Cormac McCarthy
This novel is like a long, restless dream about a man paralyzed by his guilt and his grief. Along one plotline tension builds, but then neither resolves nor dissipates completely. It remains an anonymous threat hanging over the protagonist’s head, a darkling mystery suspended, never precipitating. It’s a confounding book, and one that I would be thrilled to see adapted into film by David Lynch.
It is never clear who is after the protagonist, Bobby, or why. It seems at first related to his presence at a suspicious scene in a sunken airplane, which he encountered while working as a salvage diver. Later, it seems that anonymous authorities are after his father’s old papers. Mysterious men pay periodic visits and ask questions. Some of Bobby’s belongings are stolen. His cat disappears. His car get confiscated. The persecution seems operated through the US government, but it’s carried out obliquely and underhandedly.
Regardless, Bobby lives his life as if in penance. He is stuck in limbo, confined by his apparent ambivalence towards life, which has him constantly approaching and evading danger, all the while awaiting his death. He camps out for a while in a shed near a deserted beach. When his stalkers seem to be closing in, he flees from New Orleans to Idaho and squats in a derelict house in the freezing cold. In the end, he settles in the southern coast of Spain, holed up in a windmill with a crumbling roof. In the quiet of these exiles, without the comfort of shared food, drink, and conversation, the pitch of his grief reaches shrieking, hallucinatory levels, setting the stage for quasi-spiritual moments of revelation.
The most potent aspect of this book is probably its mood, which reflects the hopeless remorse that Bobby feels. Remorse for the unholy devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that his father and mother helped engineer. Regret for his helplessness before the great mysteries of mathematics and physical science. In these Bobby seems to bear the burden not just for himself and his family, but for all of humanity. Principally, however, Bobby’s remorse and grief are for his inability to prevent his sister’s suicide and their inability to enact the deep, incestuous love between them.
Throughout the book, Cormac depicts Bobby’s agonizing internal conflict regarding his feelings for his sister. Here, from page 184, is one of the most memorable:
In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw halfsentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?
The prose is a major reason I keep picking up books written by McCarthy. Who else writes like this?
Here, from pages 115 and 116, is another striking example of McCarthy’s prose – a description of the scenes following the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan:
There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solid not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.
McCarthy doesn’t make it clear what “truth” the mushroom cloud embodied, but it is certainly not a comforting one.
Later, on pages 175 and 176, he describes a factory where uranium was prepared for the bombs:
His mother was nineteen when she went to work at Y-12, the electromagnetic separation plant. One of the three processes for the separation of the uranium 235 isotope. The workers were driven out to the compound in buses, bumping over the rough graded road, through dust or mud given the weather. Talking was not allowed. The barbed wire fencing ran for miles and the buildings were of solid concrete, massive things, monolithic and for the most part windowless. They sat in a great selvage of raw mud beyond which lay a perimeter of the wrecked and twisted trees that had been bulldozed from the site. She said it looked as if they had just somehow emerged out of the ground. The buildings. There was no accounting for them. She looked at the other women on the bus but they seemed to have abandoned themselves and she thought that she might be the only one of them that while she did not know what this was about knew all too well that it was Godless and that while it had poisoned back to elemental mud all living things upon that ground yet it was far from being done. It was just the beginning.
The buildings held over one thousand miles of pipe and a quarter million valves. The women sat on stools and monitored the dials in front of them while uranium atoms raced the tracks in the calutrons. Measuring them a hundred thousand times each second. The magnets that propelled them were seven feet in diameter and the windings were of solid silver fabricated from fiteen thousands tons of it borrowed from the US Treasury because all the copper had already gone into the war effort. An older woman told her that the first day with the women all at their stations and having no least notion what any of this was about the engineers had thrown the consecutive switches and an enormous dynamo hum filled the hall and hairpins in their hundreds shot from the women’s heads and crossed the room like hornets.
That last sentence is exquisitely crafted. A tremendously vivid scene realized in fifty eight words assembled fluidly without any interrupting punctuation.
. Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels. A lot of what Alicia says in Stella Maris Cormac himself says in this interview, e.g. the subsconscious is “a machine for operating an animal.”
I’m two thirds into The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I’m taking my time, letting the ideas sink in, and observing their relevance to Seattle and Vancouver.
In the background, I’m reading a couple books that lend themselves to slow incremental consumption.
The Relationship Handbookwhat makes a good relationship?
Dr. George Pransky in his book The Relationship Handbook writes:
[M]aintaining a sense of well-being is all it takes to make [relationships] enjoyable and easy.
That seems a bit easy, no? If a couple fights a lot, shouldn’t they resolve the issues in question? Not according to Pransky.
[S]o-called “issues” in a marriage are symptoms and not causes of disharmony.
Interesting. If it is true that relationship issues are merely symptoms, then yes, we should attempt to cure the underlying illness. But what is the illness?
[Poor communication and unexpressed emotions and habit patterns from the past] are the symptoms of relationship distress, not the cause. The cause, the real bad guy, is insecurity. Painful memories, negative emotions, habit patterns and bad communication are all symptoms of insecurity.
Pransky goes further:
If you want to understand why people do as they do and feel the way they feel, you need only understand the role of insecurity in life. Insecurity is the source of distress and all counterproductive behavior…Insecurity is the generic human mental illness.
and Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. I was ready to ditch the latter but on a whim I gave it another shot and loved chapter five, The blackbird’s whistle. I intend to post about it on this site at some point.
Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to David Lynch’s biography-memoir Room to Dream and Mary Norris’s memoir about working at the New Yorker.
Flirting with starting Circe, one of Z’s favorite books. I’ve put Infinite Jest on probation. I feel neither compelled to commit nor ready to ditch.
Also reading New Yorker articles here and there. What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes makes a good point: new technology rarely aligns with our panicked predictions of catastrophe but often inflicts harm more insidiously and narrowly. This article about tipping – originally “To Insure Promptitude” – was really interesting. And this one about polyamory’s popularity. Finally, this one about the “philosophical-counselling movement.”
A guy from my high school posted an insightful mini-essay about how social media robs us of precious “idle time.” Reminds me of the concept of “ambient thought” and the ideas in
this mini-essaywhere do ideas come from? #2
There was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn’t finish, I would regret it forever.
In his book
On Writing, Stephen King recounts how he broke through the writer’s block he encountered 500 pages into writing his book The Stand:
I started taking long walks…looking at the same old trees and the same old chattering ill-natured jays and squirrels. Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam. I spent those walks being bored and thinking about my gigantic boondoggle of a manuscript. For weeks, I got exactly nowhere in my thinking. It all just seemed too hard, too fucking complex. I had run out too many plot lines and they were in danger of becoming snarled… I circled the problem again and again, beat my fists on it, knocked my head against it. And then, one day when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. It arrived whole and complete, gift-wrapped, you could say, in a single bright flash. I ran home and jotted it down on paper…I was terrified of forgetting.
Fellow American novelist Cormac McCarthy and many other creatives tell
similar anecdotesof receiving a solution to a conundrum from an invisible source inside their mind. Consistently, the conundrum was something the person had been mulling over in their conscious mind before their subsconscious found the solution. Tech entrepreneur Paul Graham talks about the importance of keeping the right conundrum at the top of your mind.
that I posted on this site.
I’ve also spent more time reading articles published on smaller profile websites. Some really good pieces about software: An App Can Be A Home-Cooked Meal, about programming as a practical skill for use in personal life. The Rise of “Worse is Better”, about a counterintuitive yet effective approach to buidling software. Reminds me of Skateboard, Bike, Car, which I’ve mentioned before. Finally, Situated Software, about another counterintuitive software development philosophy: built to not scale.
Writing
Stella Maris (2022)
by Cormac McCarthy
I’m 120 pages into this book and so far it has consisted purely of dialogue between a psychiatrist and a patient who has voluntarily checked herself in. Dialogue between these two I expect will fill the rest of the book. It’s an exciting endeavor to witness Cormac attempt.
He published this book alongside
The Passengerin 2022 as a “companion novel” known also as The Passenger #2. I tried this one first though because among its topics are math and philosophy. It is set chronologically after The Passenger, but my impression, assembled from fragments of scantily skimmed book summaries, is that reading them in either order is fine.
(Even more than novel summaries I avoid movie trailers. They reveal far too much. I’d be happy to watch them if instead of crudely summarizing the story and undermining its telling they showed a short sample of the movie. A scene at most and no more.)
This book is clearly a product of the years Cormac spent at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in conversation with scientists and researchers discussing consciousness, mathematics, physics, language, and philosophy. Much of what the protagonist Alicia says – about the unconscious, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, mathematics – Cormac himself says in conversation with SFI’s President David Krakauer in this interview from 2017. The interview is good companion material to the companion novel.
This book reminds me of another, which I intend to return to when I finish this one: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, in which a philosopher lying on her deathbed argues with her friend against the likelihood of an afterlife. In Stella Maris death also looms – not just over the protagonist but also its author. Cormac died six months after this final publication.
and
movieThe Elephant Man (1980)
John Hurt’s performance resonated with me like wine lingers in your gut. There is such a tenderness in the way he speaks to the few who are kind to him. The prosthetics are impressive, and Hurt’s acting brings them to life.
The movie has its flaws. It moves slowly and rather sloppily ends the story of the devious night porter. Apart from the last one, however, the sequences with the porter are brilliantly written. For much of the movie, he is an anonymous, unpredictable figure that pays cruel visits to the Elephant Man at night. No hospital staff is ever there to witness it and the Elephant Man never says a word about it. Is he is a projection of the Elephant Man’s terror? It’s a chilling effect and one not reversed by the revelation that the nightmarish figure is a hospital employee. No doubt there are demons haunting the Elephant Man that can’t be defeated with a silly bonk on the head.
reviews,
vignhot springs
Hunched against the cold in our hotel bathrobes and slippers we crunched over the snow between the pools, looking for the hottest one. Of course, it turned out to be the one everyone was crowded into. For a few hours we crouched in the hot water avoiding eye contact with the multitude around us – a family reunion, couples on anniversary weekend getaways – trying to convince Z’s mom and stepdad that renting was a better option than buying in their current circumstances.
In the evening Z and I went for drinks and dessert at the hotel’s lounge, The Copper Room. We sat among the other couples at one of the cloth-draped tables surrounding the big empty dance floor. The waiter glided from table to table cracking jokes with his head cocked. The band started playing another oldie and a couple in their thirties came out onto the dance floor. They danced clumnsily near the edge of the hardwood rectangle, far from the stage, near our section of tables. The man smiled blankly as he tried leading his partner, who was grinning in embarrassment and bowing her head while she went through the motions. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised when she took a tumble, such was the lack of coordination between all components – music, limbs, lovers. They scuttled off the dance floor only to creep back on a couple songs later to join the couples they’d inspired onto their feet.
hockey game
I liked analyzing the game’s tactics and patterns from my ignorant perspective. The production, too. From speakers hanging above pop music blared whenever the game paused, even if just for a few seconds. As soon as a referee dropped the puck again, the clocked resumed and the music evaporated. They also managed to squeeze in two performances from local country music singer, Antonio Larosa. He sounded good, but no one in the stadium seemed to care much.
This was my second time at an NHL game and my main memory of the first one, back in middle school, is being baffled when it ended after three periods, not two, or four. This time, I went in knowing a bit more, including the offside rule: players on the attacking team can’t cross the thick blue line into other team’s third of the rink unless the puck is already there. Watching the Canucks, I noticed that, right before crossing the blue line, attacking players would often fling the puck into the opposing end and swarm around it. It irked me how often they did it. I wanted them to keep dribbling. I’ve since learned that they do this because the defensive team can’t just dump the puck back out. They first have to regain possession and get it back across that blue line. Only then can they launch it into the other team’s end. Then the cycle repeats at the other end. It’s funny how
games are designedto avoid certain behaviors and can end up transforming the tactics of how the game is played.
,
noteswhat makes a good relationship?
Dr. George Pransky in his book The Relationship Handbook writes:
[M]aintaining a sense of well-being is all it takes to make [relationships] enjoyable and easy.
That seems a bit easy, no? If a couple fights a lot, shouldn’t they resolve the issues in question? Not according to Pransky.
[S]o-called “issues” in a marriage are symptoms and not causes of disharmony.
Interesting. If it is true that relationship issues are merely symptoms, then yes, we should attempt to cure the underlying illness. But what is the illness?
[Poor communication and unexpressed emotions and habit patterns from the past] are the symptoms of relationship distress, not the cause. The cause, the real bad guy, is insecurity. Painful memories, negative emotions, habit patterns and bad communication are all symptoms of insecurity.
Pransky goes further:
If you want to understand why people do as they do and feel the way they feel, you need only understand the role of insecurity in life. Insecurity is the source of distress and all counterproductive behavior…Insecurity is the generic human mental illness.
, and a couple of
mini-essayswhat are rules?
In chess, there’s a niche rule with an untranslated name that amusingly befits its esotericism: en passant. Many casual chess playes are unaware of it. It seems to exist as an afterthought, scribbled in to prevent a pawn from escaping an oncoming enemy pawn by leaping two spaces. It is itself a consequence of another weird rule: pawns in their starting position can move forward two spaces in one move. Why? To speed up the game and relieve some pawn-pushing tedium, I’m guessing.
Chess rules are clean and simple other than the two exceptions above and a third: castling. Under the right conditions, the king can move sideways two spaces, double his usual quota, towards one of his rooks and, inexplicably, in the same move, the rook can leap over the king and nestle beside it. Huh? This move seems normal because of its ubiquity. Casual players usually know it. And yet they are more baffled by en passant, which, compared to castling, is only a small deviation from the core rules.
Once we know the rules of a game, we accept and quit questioning them. We are naturally incentivized to do so, since, the better we internalize the rules, the more easily we can abide by them and get to the business of playing the game. But games are full of weird rules. In basketball, there’s a limit of how long the attacking team can have posession in the other team’s end. Oh, okay. Players on the attacking team in hockey can’t cross into other team’s third of the rink unless the puck is already there. If you say so. In soccer, an attacker must not go beyond the second-to-last player on the defensive team if they want to be passed the ball. Unless they are in their own half, then it’s okay. Sorry?
Weird rules are less weird though when you realize they’re added purposefully to facilitate certain behaviors and prevent others. This applies to laws and regulations, too. They are not corollaries of moral truth, but ways of incentivizing behavior in favor of particular goals. In happy cases, the goals are fairness and fun. But rule-makers are only trying to please the crowd when they themselves are incentivized to do so, by ticket sales, by votes, by social pressure. So next time you encounter a weird rule and you’re curious about its existence, ask yourself: who made this and what are they trying to make me do? And next time you write a rule, ask yourself: what new exploitative behavior will I be incentivizing?
, including
how to use restrainthow to use restraint
Even though Spotify categorizes it as a podcast, Random Tape is something else. It’s a collection of audio recordings that don’t have much to do with each other apart from having fallen into the hands of David Weinberg. They’re strangely engaging. I haven’t listened to the show in a while but I cherish it as a testament to the power of pure audio as a medium.
Recently during my routine cleaning of Google storage forced by their 15GB max and my determination to stay in the free tier, I came across a video that was all black. It was 1 minute and 34 seconds long and had retained its place in my Google Photos purely due to its audio. I had recorded it purposefully with my phone in my pocket during a recent Christmas trip I took with my mom and younger sister to Puerto Vallarta. In it you can hear only our voices and the sound of the beach.
I stripped the audio from the video and kept that instead, reducing its size 100 times. Inspired, I tried the same for a video I took that same trip of a live band at River Cafe, where we had dinner. The result was not only much cheaper to store but also more evocative.
Audio is not just a good alternative to video when storage is scarce, it is, sometimes, a superior medium. Sure, we’ve all heard it, Less is More – but how so? Because excessive information is noise? But how much, or which, information is excessive?
Locating the line via some analytical calculation seems an intractable task. And though I think there is likely an objective explanation – be it psychological, neurological, cognitive, or of some other kind – I’d sooner look to the intuition of artists to answer this question. Even if they can’t tell us where the line between sufficiency and excess is, they can help us develop a feel for where we are in relation to it.
Hemingway is a remarkable example. The restraint in his writing is so strong that it is sometimes radical. He wrote with a plainness that risks boring the reader but often succeeds at stirring their curiosity and drawing them in. This is intentional. Hemingway makes more from less by leaving plenty of space for the reader’s imagination to fill in details from their personal bank of sensory images. If the writer
provides too much, they block the reader’s unique contribution.
, which I plan to revise because I lost sight of my point towards the end.
TV
The Wire, seasons one and two, some of the third. A reminder of several depressing facts of American life: police brutality, perverted hierarchical bureacracies (“Chain of command!”), the ravage of drugs in poor communities. One of the great things about this show is its multitude of characters and lack of a permanent protagonist. Another is the show’s vividness. The shipyard and its workers in the second season feel so real.
Season one of True Detective. Really interesting character foil. I think Lynch would adore the concept of The Taxman, the detective that carries around a surprisingly large notebook and bears his duties like a holy burden. Does not believe in Christ but hangs a crucifix in his apartment to contemplate “that moment in the garden.” The Taxman is at the center of an aesthetically breathtaking action scene in Episode four. Not surprised to see a lot of talk about it online, e.g. Breaking Down the Best Scene in True Detective.
Rewatching Arrested Development, again. Still catching some jokes for the first time. Also watching the new season of The Eric Andre Show.
Movies
Anatomy of a Fall was fantastic. Two and a half hours long but engaging all the way through. A lot of dialogue. Beautiful to look at.
Talk to Me was also very good. It’s now one of my favorite horror movies. Reminds me of Insidious for obvious reasons and Hereditary for more subtle ones.
What’s next?
Work.
Keep playing soccer, going on walks, resume bike riding. Go snowboarding!
Keep reading, keep writing.
Continue working on Muze Radio. Implement hoverbox previews on this site.
Plan this year’s trips with Z.
Going to an improv class for the first time. Z signed us up after doing one with friends recently. She thinks I’m going to love it.
Continue nurturing my social life in Vancouver. Play chess and watch Lynch movies with friends.
Keep watching Arsenal games. It will be thrilling to see how the rest of the season plays out. It’s so tight at the top. Hopefully Arsenal will still be up there next time I write a personal update.
Super excited to see Ethiopian keyboardist Hailu Mergia in Seattle with my friend, who is also Ethiopian. I might go to a couple other live shows, too.
I’m looking forward to it all. Things are good and spring is coming.