Category: jotter

I am drinking a mug of beef bone broth on a rainy early afternoon. I don’t like it as much as chicken bone broth I’ve had in the past. But I am reading a book set in rural France, and the shining quality of the prose (Matthias Enard) is not affecting me as much as the constant refrain of all these country people drinking aperitifs. I closed the book at one in the morning and just lay there for half an hour thinking about a life of drinking aperitifs every day.

I could right go a vodka gimlet and a few slices of saucisson sec right now, and just daydream about a life of aperitifs.

I’m going to grind myself a shot of Kenyan peaberry coffee instead. Sigh.

As a member in good standing of the Writers Guild of America, every year I receive DVD copies of films in awards contention. I have no idea what awards, because I’m pretty sure there are none I can vote in other than the WGA Awards, but, nonetheless, they arrive every year. We call them “screeners.” This is the first to arrive this year. There will be more. There was a point where it felt like the screener system would go entirely digital, but everyone seemed to back off of that a couple of years ago.

Amazon tend to send very elaborate screener packs – MRS MAISEL came in a hatbox a few years back. I am always very grateful for screener season. I don’t know who to thank, but if anyone who works on the screener programs is reading this – thank you.

Preserving a thought from the 13 August 2023 edition of my newsletter:

I feel like the term “media diet” just reinforces the current “content consumers” label for people who like to experience arts. “Content consumers” just summons the image of a trough full of gruel. Also, calling you a “content consumer” gives you a good idea of what they really think of you.

I’ve been on the whole “content” thing on and off in the newsletter for a couple years. It’s a term borrowed from the early web. Literally describing whatever has been wrapped in HTML and linked to. I recall Clay Shirky once saying somewhere, “it’s not content until it’s linked to,” and Susannah Breslin going off at him at some length about that.

I’ve used the term “media diet” for many years and I would like to retire it. I don’t like it any more.

My abiding memory of a few days in Utrecht remains that the side of town I was on was under reconstruction, and that they hadn’t put the pavements back yet.  And Google Maps hadn’t kept up.  So I walked into tangles of roads, spaghetti junctions and random traffic a lot. Oh, but they like their bicycle lanes, like good Netherlanders. In fact, in Utrecht, the cyclists are mad with power.  They want the bike lanes and the pavements now, and they will get really pissed off when you dare to walk on the pavement like a filthy primitive pedestrian.  I almost got run over at one point by a guy with a very well trained moustache on a wooden bicycle.  Do you know when the last time someone got killed by a guy on a wooden bicycle was?  The seventeenth fucking century.  It’s not right. They make Berliners look like the pure picture of politeness.

written 17 November 2017

I was watching some old episodes of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION the other day.  The whole series popped up on Netflix, and I haven’t looked at an episode since the 90s, so I was curious. Patrick Stewart was an acquaintance, way back when – Sir Patrick Stewart, now, and rarely was a knighthood for craft better deserved.  And I was reminded of this:

One night, I went into London to have dinner with Patrick.  We were working together on a project at the time.  My daughter, then very young, woke from a nap to ask where I was.  STAR TREK TNG had just come on the television. Her mother pointed out Patrick on the bridge of the Enterprise and said, he’s gone to see this man – they’re going to work together.  And my daughter got incredibly excited.  Her mother assured her that, yes, really, Daddy’s going to be working with that man.

There was then, I was later told, a painful couple of minutes when it had to be further explained to my little girl that, no, I wouldn’t actually be working on the bridge of the Enterprise with him…

I have been a disappointment to her ever since.

Originally written 12 August 2016

FAYA DAYI, 2021

I read today that having an Instagram account means that I automatically have a Threads account, which means I don’t have to worry about anyone taking my handle, which means I don’t need to ever go to Threads should Threads prove to be a thing that persists past Xmas

I don’t even want the social media accounts I’ve got