screaming.computer

YouTube autoplay has been running constantly while I code this site and work diligently on “the project,” playing a fairly fantastic mix of snythwave/dreampop/indie grooves.

Not gonna lie, this mix began exclusively with searches for the musical performances featured in the Twin Peaks Revival — Chromatics and Au Revoir Simone in particular.

Aside:  These musical interludes, staged at The Roadhouse, are some of the most intense, most perfect performances ever included in serial television. Their placement underscores the dreamlike world of Twin Peaks in a delightful and awe-inspiring way. If you appreciate David Lynch or Twin Peaks at all, you owe it to yourself to see these — nestled though they are amongst inscrutable scenes of pure Lynchianism.

That unpredictable YouTube rabbithole of autoplay — working in my favour for once — spiralled outwards from there to include pretty much anything in the orbit of Johnny Jewel/Italians Do It Better (more from Chromatics and Au Revoir Simone plus Heaven, Desire, et al.), classics like Fever Ray, as well as new-to-me This Mortal Coil, Cigarettes After Sex, and London Grammar.

And Chrysta Bell. Damn!! A voice that gives you shivers and a performance you can't take your eyes from. Totally mesmerizing.

I wrote about 90% of the code for this blogging platform in under three days. Over the course of the following week, I wrote the next 90% of the code.

I figure I only have about 90% left to go. Should be done within a month.

When it's late and I find myself in a particular headspace, I often crave a night film; one of those movies that evokes the 4am vibe: everyone's gone home, the air is humming with silence. Now only the underside of the world exposes itself; that which is too strange to be active by day, or too corrupt, or too outside society's standard operating parameters.

Does anyone else know the 4am vibe?

Some night films that evoke this feeling for me: Nightcrawler, Drive, Zodiac, Mulholland Dr, Collateral, Good Time, Summer of Sam, among others.

I used to take walks in the middle of the night, just to absorb this sensation. I haven't really done that in a while.

And yet it's this 4am vibe (experienced vicariously, if necessary) that keeps me feeling like the world is still a place of unexplored possibility; the antithesis of my usual 9to5.

One of several offshoots of the aforementioned free-association with project ideas is this blog.

I have a habit of writing my own minimalist blogging platforms every few years when the mood strikes me to soliloquize publicly. This is probably iteration three or four. The final post of the previous version was made in late 2010, so I've been away for, eh, a while....

On the tech side it's pretty standard HTML5 & CSS3 on a LAMP backend. The clean-look design took a few evenings to get where I was happy with it. Definitely emulating style elements of a few other sites, but it's all cobbled together with handwritten code that I like to imagine imparts some kind of personal touch.

I was recently sparked with an idea for a minor art/tech project.

This feels significant to me in a support-group-breakthrough kind of way; it's been ages since I've had any creative motivation whatsoever and I've been feeling quite underwater with the notion I'd lost it for good.

Still fleshing out the project concept, which for some reason is involving a great deal of free-associative thinking... this makes my brain tingle. Also revisiting some past sources of creative inspiration (which I'd unwittingly cast aside over the years), and noting a few curious parallels between their recent ideas and mine. Is there some cosmic muse secretly influencing us all?

The project itself is entirely pretentious and lacks any deep artistic motivation [so far]. But I feel compelled to bring it into the world, and that's good enough for now.