I will be shocked if this actually works, but writing is pretty smooth for me. Nice interface. The question now is whether or not formatting survives the transfer. And if I can get the font size right. Note to self – the font set is Spinnaker 16!
It is entirely possible to post direct to LTD from Word. I’ll be damned. It’s not quite as straightforward as the late lamented Windows Live Writer, but I’ll take it.
I’ve been doing research reading, and I finished BRITISH RADIO DRAMA 1945-63 by Hugh Chignell last week. Some of the most revolutionary, groundbreaking and future-facing drama in the world during that period was done with the BBC on radio.
This appreciation of radio drama as having a unique capacity to understand and reveal psychological states was one identified fifty years earlier by arguably the most important radio drama producer of the post-war era Donald McWhinnie who wrote the following: ‘Perhaps the most potent quality of the spoken word in close focus – not projected artificially to several hundred people – is its power to communicate secret states of mind, the inner world and private vision of the speaker.’
For McWhinnie, radio drama is at its best an exploration of the inner world, an intimate representation facilitated by the original use of sound.
I need to read it again and make more notes, as I found myself getting lost in the rich layers of detail Chignell brings to bear. But here’s the deal:
Dominated though it was by white men, sometimes writers whose work could be of a misogynist cast – and even though the internal and artistic struggles were chiefly of patrician old white men against “angry” younger white men, so the stakes look absurdly low to us now – the period under consideration here provided some of the most challenging and innovative narrative art in the world.
Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT may have been setting fires in theatre, but Beckett’s first play specifically for radio, ALL THAT FALL, not only directly led to the inception of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop just to be able to make it; not only is it actually a bit of a skeleton key to understanding Beckett’s work; but it builds, rather than collapses, things.
(One way to enter Beckett’s work is to think of him as an outlier genre writer like Lessing or Vonnegut. ALL THAT FALL is a deconstructed crime story. His ENDGAME is science fiction – and I always found it amusing that it (and maybe GODOT) was the obvious and main influence on the post-apocalypse comedy THE BED SITTING ROOM by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. WAITING FOR GODOT is Laurel & Hardy’s first horror film.)
I’m wandering. This is the story of a group of men and women at the BBC, in a time we generally conceive of as smotheringly conservative, working to evolve a new art form and introducing challenging and often avant-garde narrative art to a mainstream culture.
I read this for Reasons: to learn the history, and look at the early tools. I grew up with radio drama, and there is still wonderful radio drama being produced – go look for WHO IS ALDRICH KEMP? by Julian Simpson, which is really fun in a modern Steed/Peel AVENGERS way. Alan Bennett’s monologue plays are always most chilling on radio. But you can never be sure what’s been left by the wayside, which routes to the future got overgrown and hidden. This book did a lot of scything of weeds for me.
There’s an honourable mention of US radio drama, too:
…around the middle of the twentieth century, radio drama in America was not only a ‘theatre of the mind’ but also ‘that as American broadcasters built a theatre in the mind, radio drama necessarily became a theatre about the mind, in an era in which that concept was a site of extraordinary contest’.
…okay, reading back, I’m not sure any of that was useful or made sense, so I will stop here. Good book.
BRITISH RADIO DRAMA 1945-63, Hugh Chignell (link)
Apparently I started a text file in April 2021 about some films I watched that month, and then didn’t do anything with it, so I’m putting it up here so I can find it later:
Daïchi Saïto – earthearthearth (2021)
“The expansive mountainscapes of the Andes are the basis for this new, 35mm film by Daïchi Saïto, who won the 2016 Tiger Award for Short Films with Engram of Returning. Once again propelled by the free, pulsating improvisation of saxophonist Jason Sharp, in which his heartbeat and breathing play a prominent role, the series of images slowly becomes more abstract. The end result is a hypnotic, sensory meditation on ‘our’ earth.”
Matthew Barney – Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)
“Drawing Restraint 9, a film by Matthew Barney with a soundtrack composed by Björk, represents the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.
“It is an apt pairing. Refusing to choose between pop pleasure and restless experimentation, Björk’s musical vision weds technology and emotion, countering gut-level expression with an insistence upon formal modernity and innovation.
“Similarly poised, and celebrated, within the world of contemporary art as Björk is within her own field, Matthew Barney is a visual artist whose ambitious, rigorous multimedia work encodes esoteric meanings while providing lushly immediate aesthetic rewards. Best known for The Cremaster Cycle, the sprawling sequence of five films made over ten years which was the subject of a recent Guggenheim retrospective, Matthew Barney’s work is multimedia in execution but singularly focused in conception: tightly unified fusions of sculpture, performance, architecture, set design, music, computer generated effects and prosthetics, Barney’s films deploy the full range of cinematic resources in the service of a hermetic vision rich with densely layered networks of meaning drawn from mythology, history, sports, music, and biology.”
Johann Lurf – Star – 2018 assemblage
“A film that defies easy explanation, ★ is filmmaker Johann Lurf’s inventive examination of how outer space has been portrayed in movies.
“You don’t have to be a scientist to find space fascinating. Few things in the universe have enthralled, perplexed, and inspired such a diverse group of people, from astronomers and philosophers to artists and ordinary people walking at night. Artists were so inspired by the heavens that they created artwork of celestial objects — even when you see a “photo” of other planets and stars, it is often an artist’s rendering. Lurf playfully shows how cinema turned the stars into endless metaphors, dreams, and warm blankets. There is no story or characters — only movie scenes worked together outside of their contexts. We put our own thoughts into the stunning scenes while each clip’s sound design presents us with ambience, brief dialogue, or loud music. The editing enthralls us as space is not depicted the same in every clip. If you have a love affair with movies and the sky, ★ is the ultimate romantic art film.” (Sundance)
I’m writing this post in Typora on my main laptop.
I often write my newsletters in the Typora app, or straight into the Buttondown text window, which toggles between Markdown and “Rich Text.” My newsletters have got very long and rambly.
My blog posts are most often written directly into the WordPress post window. My posts are getting shorter and more stuttery.
I have a feeling the current iteration of WordPress posting is getting in the way of my flow.
I mean, I always wanted LTD to be more controlled and focussed than the more personal newsletter writing. But the difference is getting ridiculous now.
I’m reconfiguring the newsletter to stop me rambling into it so much, but I also need to take a look at what’s getting in the way here. I suspect it’s the “Blocks” thing — there’s a tendency to have to mouse around to click the Add Block thing to start a new paragraph with my preferred spacing, rather than flow into it, and little elements of formatting that introduce little pauses into the writing. The sense that every element of a piece needs to be in its own little box and closed off.
Typora doesn’t connect to WordPress, so I will have to select all and copypaste this in to WordPress. IA Writer on my iPad does, but it dumps the piece in as an untitled draft. But, right away, this is flowing better, but when I copy it in to WordPress, my paragraph breaks vanish and I have to put them in by hand. So I need to apply some new tools. None of which is to take away from WordPress – I’d be lost without their special application blocks, the custom HTML and shortcode inserts and all. But, for me, they do seem to enforce a more staccato form of production. Going forward, I need to solve that.
Anyway. Once again, the cardinal sin of blogging about blogging. But, since I think some people who write on blogs read this, maybe there’s some use for them in here, as well as me getting my thinking in front of me.
Daily Portrait Series by Chiron Duong. Phenomenal.
Distance — immeasurable, humbling, stupefying distance — is the leitmotif of Agnes Giberne’s 1879 Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beginners. This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom.
In his second paper, Caballero addresses this issue by conducting a statistical analysis of possible hostile civilizations in our galaxy and the possibility that one or more of these would detect signals coming from Earth (and possibly choose to invade). Because radio antennas and radar constantly leak signals into space, Cabellero felt a risk evaluation was necessary.
From a certain perspective, capitalism is the environment into which we are born, and conditions within it are corrosive: we either adapt to those conditions in order to survive — people will always have to be taught how to tend the machines, and it has been said, after all, that humans are the reproductive organs of machines — or build a sturdy environment suit, or we are seriously harmed. Which casts many of us as good little prisoners or effective wasteland scavengers.
Which train of thought always, somehow, puts me in mind of this most pure and most awful statement on wrapping industry around you like poisoned armour:
The pursuit of making money is the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money, and to make money, it may be important to make art, it may be necessary to make history. To make money, it may be important to win the Academy Award, for it might mean another $10 million at the box office. Our only objective is to make money, but in order to make money; we must always make entertaining movies.
– Don Simpson, 1980.
(written February 2015)
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The Parish News is an online radio program and podcast created since 2016 to showcase experimental music and artists.