WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

Offline day: finishing up in the office and then out for lunch, shopping and then a gig.

We’ve learned to crave feeds that impose a steady stream of unconscious, dreamlike images we struggle to forget, but also to fully remember. In the millisecond interval during which we might practice perception, a “reconstructive doing,” another image already enters into our view. The patterns of digital media extinguish this interval, though they don’t make it impossible.

Once Terence McKenna suggested the most sought-after drug we could invent would be one that allows us to remember all of our dreams. We may have built something close, except the dreams aren’t ours, and we can’t quite wake up from them.

But the only way out, as McKenna might say, might be through.

OPERATIONS: marking up the boards AGAIN and setting a proper schedule for next week, I need to move sixty pages out of the office in the next week and it’s going to be a grind.

LAST WATCHED: SISU 2: ROAD TO REVENGE (2025) is, sadly, a more conventional film than the original. Still lots of bloody fun, but too similar to the original in its beats to be as enjoyable, trying harder to be “emotional” while losing some of the little textual depth that made the first film surprising. But there are a couple of good jokes in there – the bit with the spoon in the final fight is a nice touch, as is the last weapon our man used. Which is, as the film itself leads you to say to yourself, legendary.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Did you ever think about the number of films you don’t get to see because you’re self-harming your own brain cells with aggressively mid streaming shows?

I remember when the binge watch was a new and often joyous thing. I cleared a day to watch an entire season of the US HOUSE OF CARDS, and that was a good show in its first two seasons. Now a weekly release schedule is treated like a novelty. It occurred to me the other evening that the bingewatch and the doomscroll are the same thing: a symptom of having given up control of your life. But I had been drinking mead, so…

OPERATIONS: marking up the boards and laying down notes
STATUS:

The date window on the Ingenieur is being cranky!

READING: IN HER MIND A DARKNESS, LS Johnson
LISTENING: THE MODERNS ep 430
LAST WATCHED: I’ve been looking forward to watching IS GOD IS (2026) and it didn’t disappoint. Twins mutilated by a house fire are sent by their mother on a mission to kill their murderous shitbag of a father. The filming is a little bit Tarantino, but more literary, more heightened, more emotional. It is VERY well written, even though the top of the third act derails a touch. Some terrific acting. Cameo from Janelle Monae playing against type and killing it. Hell of a finish. The writer and director is Aleshea Harris, and it’s based on her play, and she is now on my list of instant purchases. Prime Video.
DRINK: some random sparkling white

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

AirPods with cameras in is a good thing because for a year they’re all anyone will want and proper earbuds will get cheaper. And then there’s a fair chance that anyone with camera AirPods will be shunned as unnatural and there will be a whole Conversation about them and I can ignore it all and read a book while listening to music over IEMs. Which I had no idea even existed until around 2013, when Fred Armisen was sitting in the airplane seat opposite me and using IEMs to review footage on a tablet, and when he took them out I leaned over and asked him what the hell those weird earbuds were.

OPERATIONS: I need to nail down a long essay today.
STATUS: I should be thrilled that it’s temperate again
READING: finished THE KILLER’S MARK, MW Craven (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: CELLOSCAPES, Emma Caterinicchio & Pete Swinton

LAST WATCHED: FLUX GOURMET (2022), which probably hits a bit different if you DON’T go and see a lot of experimental and improvised music gigs. And I’m not sure how many people can relate to third-division writers with gastric issues, but I personally wanted the ailing protagonist, a bad writer with a bad stomach documenting the performances of sonic artists exclusively using culinary techniques to make sounds, to win everything and become king. The film is actually very good, earthy and jagged and trippy with a marvellously gross ending. It’s just an incredibly niche satire. Sonic catering. Double-barrel it with THE MENU, made in the same year, or, perhaps more fittingly, Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Me too, mancub, me too.

Herself incubated what may possibly be plague at Bloodstock and is therefore in the Plague Cell (our daughter’s old room) once again. The internet is acting like an elephant is sitting on it. The humidity continues to be fucking terrible. But I am not ready for summer to end. I still need to get down to Old Leigh!

(Nightmare scenario: we are already talking about Xmas planning)

OPERATIONS: script/dev/essay/newsletter
STATUS: breathing soup
READING: THE KILLER’S MARK, MW Craven (UK) (US+)

‘Agreed. You want overt or covert surveillance?’

‘Surprise me.’

‘Covert it is then. Having a scrap with a bunch of Bruce Lee wannabes will let the boys vent some of that pent-up anger.’

‘Who you gonna use?’

‘Best you don’t know,’ Towler said. ‘But rest assured they’re fucking animals. Half of them still eat with their feet.’

LISTENING: IF WE COULD HEAR, Natalie Beridze

Yes, I am playing it in the CD drive! Like an Old!

LAST WATCHED: LET THE CORPSES TAN (2017) on MUBI, a Belgian film which roughly approximates what you’d get if you stuffed Sergio Leone full of speed and told him to direct a Seventies crime drama. With Saul Bass in the back yelling ANTS ANT ANTS and Ben Wheatley close by whispering spells from A FIELD IN ENGLAND.

It is drunk on style and very fun.

DRINK: herself brought some vile cherry “soda” home, which I saved with a shot of O’Donnell’s Very Cherry Moonshine like an hero

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.