When I talk about growing up in Pasadena, I oftentimes relate how, instead of snow days, we had smoke days. Days on which we weren’t allowed to go to school because nearby wildfires made the air too unhealthy to breath. I was, of course, happy to stay home and play video games, but the sense of doom radiated around me: from the TV, my Mother’s face, and the powdered ash that seeped through gaps in our window frames.

When I was 10 or 11, I remember driving east on the 210 and seeing flames creep down the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. These were mountains which we, and the rest of the city, used as a respite from the urban environment: to hike, to swim, to smoke weed and stare at the stars. Each time a fire rolled through the brush-covered foothills and oak-lined valleys, our favorite trails and creeks would be permanently re-routed (I’ve probably walked on six different versions of Millard Canvyon Falls Trail). In the following Spring months, when torrential rains can fall for weeks at a time, debris flows would spill off the charred mountain faces, sending boulders and parked cars down winding streets through people’s homes.

All of this is to say that anyone who grew up under the shadows of the San Gabriels is used to the spectre of disaster. As Mike Davis has written, Los Angeles is an impossible city in the popular imagination: erected on an arid desert, constantly on the verge of various apocalypses. But even though ecological destruction may seem quotidian to most Angelenos, what has transpired over the past 48 hours of the Palisades and Eaton Fires is unimaginably devastating. Altadena, a neighborhood of 40,000+ residents, has been seemingly wiped off the map.

My family is fortunately safe for now: they live south of the 210 freeway, several miles from the fire’s reach. Pasadena, like many American cities, was strategically divided by a highway in the 60s to segregate the predominantly rich, white, and conservative enclaves from the historically black and hispanic areas of North Pasadena and Altadena. Famously, Pasadena’s public school district was the last in the country (west of the Mississippi) to desegregate in 1970. And when it did, dozens of private schools (one of which I attended) sprung up in the south to accommodate the ensuing white flight. 50+ years later, Pasadena’s public schools, largely north of the 210, are still struggling with funding.

Still, until the recent wave of gentrification, these neighborhoods, filled with modest homes originally sourced from the Sears Catalog, represented an achievable American Dream. These were houses middle-class families could afford to own, set on idyllic tree-lined streets, with easy access to the myriad trails and streams that criss-cross the San Gabriels. It’s no wonder so many residents ignored evacuation orders to save their homes. Unlike the Palisades Fire, which has largely displaced the tremendously wealthy, the Eaton Fire has destroyed a racially and economically diverse neighborhood. For many families, particularly those who’ve been in the area for decades, these houses represented generational wealth; resources to help them send their kids to college or retire comfortably. And now they’ve been subjected to the horrible whims of flying embers.

Given all this, it’s been disappointing to see so many people on social media refer to the 210 freeway as some sort of firewall for the “cultural icons” to the south, as it if were a literal red line:

I have more thoughts but I’m too tired and sad to formulate them tonight. I pray that the flames subside and the community, north and south of the freeway, will rally to help the recovery. Climate change is too much for us to handle alone.

Following this simple tutorial, I added a search page to this Jeykll-site.

It harnesses Lunr.js under-the-hood. The cool thing about it is that, since Jekyll is a static-site generator, you can build the search index on each deploy using liquid templates.

<script>
  // Template to generate the JSON to search
  window.store = {
    {% for post in site.pages %}
    {% if post.exclude_from_search != true %}
      "{{ post.url | slugify }}": {
        "title": "{{ post.title | xml_escape }}",
        "categories": "{{ post.categories | join: ' ' | xml_escape }}",
        "content": {{ post.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
        "url": "{{ post.url | xml_escape }}"
      },
    {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
    {% for post in site.posts %}
      "{{ post.url | slugify }}": {
        "title": "{{ post.title | xml_escape }}",
        "categories": "{{ post.categories | join: ' ' | xml_escape }}",
        "content": {{ post.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
        "url": "{{ post.url | xml_escape }}"
      }
      {% unless forloop.last %},{% endunless %}
    {% endfor %}
  };
</script>

I added an “exclude_from_search” parameter to certain page’s front matter so I can control what shows up in the search results.

This is mostly for my own usage, but maybe if I blog more, it’ll be useful to others.

As a part of auditing Todd Anderson’s “code poetry” class at the School For Poetic Computation last year, I made an upside-down website. The prompt was “Make a ‘bad’ website that breaks the rules.”

At the time, I had just read Ingrid Burrington’s book, Networks of New York and was thinking about the physicality of digital infrastructure. What small gestures can a website make to remind the viewer that what they are looking at is more than just a “website” but an accumulation of natural resources, human knowledge, and cultural norms?

Here’s the full-text, right-side up:

This website is upside-down

The internet is a digital space built on physical infrastructure.

Too often we consume information from the web in a mindless manner, executing a rote set of movements - swipes, clicks, keystrokes - learned from years spent interacting with familiar interfaces.

In the same way that an upside-down map changes our perception of the planet, and the relationship of the Global South and Global North, this website changes our perception of the internet by altering the way we physically interact with it.

To comfortably read this website, you’re encouraged to flip your device upside-down.

Notice how, through this small gesture, your computer becomes more of an inanimate object and less of a portal to meaning and connection.

I was interested in re-engaging with my prior Twitter habit without falling down a rabbit hole every time I went to post something. Since I’m trying to blog more, I figured I could send summaries of my posts to Bluesky.

Bluesky has an easy-to-use API with good documentation. It doesn’t even require registering an OAuth app – you just login with your username and password - which reminds me of how simple it was to make Twitter bots back in the day.

Building upon the CMS I built for this blog, I added a script to post my most-recent entry to Bluesky. The script keeps track of which posts are already on Bluesky by adding a “bsky_uri” parameter to the post’s front matter. I used Python’s schedule library to run it every hour.

Over the last month, I borrowed the excellent MFB-522 Drumcomputer from the Synth Library. The MFB-522 is an all-analogue drum machine that’s quite similar to the Roland TR-808 except I’ve always thought the hi-hats sounded better.

I previously owned this unit, but felt more people would get use out of it if I gave it to the Synth Library. However, I always regretted not recording its sounds before I did. So when I saw it was available last month, I took to the opportunity to check it out :).

I ran the samples through a SoundCraft mixer with a bus that included a Warm Audio WA273-EQ Pre-amp (basically a Neve 1073 clone) and a FMR Audio RNC1773 compressor, which served mostly as a limiter. The samples were recorded in stereo but also exported in mono.

You can download the resulting sample pack from my new samples page. I plan on sporadically adding more in the future.

Speaking of the Synth Library, I’ll be hosting another Floating Synth Room later this month featuring the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. Hope to see you there!

Light and Sound Design is a treasure. One of the few remaining DIY spaces in the city, it features a vintage sound system sourced in part from Magick City (RIP) and custom light installations built by the volunteers that run the space. Ascending the LED strip-lit stairs last night, Amanda and I came to see Ayanna Heaven, a local DJ and radio host on WKCR who I booked last summer to play Solar System.

LS&D is a communal effort and their Thursday shows - Present Sounds - feature meals made by volunteers for purchase on an honor system. Last night, Kim made an excellent Kimchi stew sourced from homemade Kimchi to which he added sunflower seeds because he “likes the crunch.” While Present Sounds tends to highlight experimental and ambient artists, Ayanna focused on Dub, Reggae, Funk, R&B, and Soul. I was surprised that many people fell asleep on the mattresses laid out on the floor, as my head was continually nodding throughout the set.

Here were some of the highlights for me:

• Bobby Hutcherson - Montara (The Roots Remix)
• Dorothy Ashby - Come Live With Me
• Hiatus Kaiyote - Sparkle Tape Break Up (Mndsgn Remix)
• Augustus Pablo - Say So
• Nu Genea - Stasis (Calm Before the Storm) [feat. Tony Allen]

This year, I’m going to try to use this blog more. Inspired by Simon Willison’s daily link blog, I’m going to try to at least post one thing here a day. It may be a link, it may be a song, it may be a movie or book. It probably won’t involve much introspection or analysis. The point, as Simon puts it, is that:

the value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).

Watching: Perfect Blue

Listening: John Beltran - Ten Days of Blue

Seeing: Ayanna Heaven and Loum Present Sounds

Reading: Kaliane Bradley - The Ministry of Time

I was first introduced to Raven Chacon at Dronefest last year when he performed a transfixing three hour noise set involving hyper-directional speakers. By manually adjusting their position, often at high speeds, he created disorienting effects of laser beams or overdriven insects buzzing around the circular space. I had never seen or heard anything like it and instantly became a fan.

I’ve since seen one other of his compositions performed in which a quartet soundtracked one of his graphical scores for which he is well known.

This piece, currently on display at the Swiss Institute in NYC, trades a graphical score for the shapes of the rolling hills surrounding the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, which was formed 1.25 million years ago when a Volcano erupted (it’s also 15 miles from the location of the Los Alamos National Laboratory where the Atomic Bomb was developed).

In the piece, four singers are positioned around a small pond, each facing in a different direction. The “singers slowly rotate and while scanning the horizon line, singing the contour of the landscape.” The resulting sounds are haunting and beautiful, as the overlapping voices gradually shift between harmony and dissonance, evoking the tension between the tranquility of the landscape and the violence of the forces that created it.

Joe Delon included John and I’s release last year in his 2023 roundup and gave us a kind writeup. Always nice to be included in the same breath with anything Davis Galvin does.