I spent last night looking at cheap vintage watches on eBay. Usually I come up empty – nice things that I don’t necessarily want to spend the asking price on, or broken junk. Turned up some fascinating things in my self-imposed price bracket last night. Expensive watches are nice, but the fun for me is in finding a bargain-priced weird thing I have never seen before that I love. The watch has to say something to me. There’s a terribly beaten-up 80-year-old Swiss watch I have a bid on, just because something about its design spoke to me. And here’s the thing about 80-year-old Swiss watches – they still work.
“Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax” – by which they mean certain very successful paid newsletter operations have noticed Substack takes 10% of subscription fees to run a business that is otherwise free to use
He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.
This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.
A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.
When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.
This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s – and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.
“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”
da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.
There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.
THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)
Politics in Britain has returned to high psychodrama, the kind you normally find in failing states.
Just noticed I haven’t set the date window on this watch! 8C with a feels-like of 4C, which explains the pain in my hands and wrists this morning, and the sky to the east has turned black.
Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on April 1, mechatronics engineer Rodrigo Trevisan Okamoto received confirmation he had been waiting for since the Artemis 2 mission was announced in 2023. The email from NASA stated that the crew of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century would carry a device developed by Okamoto and his team at Condor Instruments, a São Paulo-based startup.
“The NASA announcement was sudden and caught us by surprise. And it was only after the mission concluded that we learned the astronauts had been using the equipment in tests for the past two years,” Okamoto told Agência FAPESP.
The device, called an actigraph, is shaped like a wristwatch and incorporates accelerometers, as well as light and temperature sensors, to precisely map the user’s sleep and wake patterns over the course of days or weeks.
In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, colleagues at Cornell University, published “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature as part of the emerging field of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.3 Recognizing the spin-flip resonance frequency of hydrogen and noting the ubiquity of the element throughout the cosmos, they deduced that other technologically advanced civilizations would similarly attempt to transmit messages on what they termed “the hydrogen line.” In effect, the scientists had identified a pre-civilizational cosmic commons: the hydrogen envelope enshrouding the Big Bang’s host of celestial bodies, cosmic detritus, and all potentially existing lifeforms beyond planet Earth—an open field for interstellar communication held in common before any civilization arrived to claim it.
The 1420 MHz band is now protected by international convention, reserved strictly for the reception of potential transmissions and restricted from commercial or terrestrial use. The hydrogen line is thus shuttered to the appropriations of what Bataille terms “the restricted economy.”4 In our secular scientific world, the hydrogen line serves as the part of the frequency spectrum humanity holds open for contact with inhuman realms…
You notice the anxious darting of his eyes, then the makeup: thick, chalky concealer layered over skin that looks irritated, acne ridden and painful underneath it. His content team trails him carrying bright portable lights, but he doesn’t speak to them like a boss or even a collaborator. He speaks to them like an insecure thirteen-year-old midway through a panic attack: rapid little bursts about how the angle is wrong, how his skin looks bad, how he’s not even talking to the right people.
Within thirty minutes he’s completely withdrawn, sitting alone at the edge of a banquet, scrolling on his phone. Every few seconds his face twitches slightly, tiny repetitive tics perhaps a side effect of the chemical cocktail he’s on.
I had no desire to speak to him. I watched several girls try, only for Clavicular to speak about them while they were still standing there, openly complaining to his entourage that the interactions weren’t interesting enough to clip into content.
Before I leave I glance over Clavicular’s shoulder to see what he’s scrolling on.
No surprise: himself.
He flips between platforms checking views with total concentration, pausing at different uploads like a trader monitoring stock performance.
STATUS: spring is apparently on pause, and this week has turned into a cluster – lost yesterday to plumbing issues that cost me five hundred quid, the day after I said, we’ve got a little money, let’s go out to that very expensive restaurant on Friday… READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
At dawn, he walked a short distance to a stream to wash. He had just knelt to splash water on his face when a tremendous blast of hot air flattened him among the rocks. When he recovered his senses, staring upwards, he saw the afterburners of two Israeli F-4 Phantom jets disappearing into the sky and, very close to him, a small green lizard that he would remember for the rest of his life. Apart from cuts and bruises, a bloodied forehead and singed hair, Ekberg was unhurt. As he staggered back, unable to hear anything other than the ringing in his ears, he saw men running and gesticulating, a severed leg on the ground, what looked like entrails caught on tree branches. Fires were burning among the trees and the air smelt of roast meat, cordite and faeces.
Another cold snap. Had to take a rootbound acer out of a pot yesterday and plant it in the ground, sowed some seeds around it, so of course I woke up today to discover the local wildlife turned over the ground and tried to dig the acer out.
I think looping and iteration are very much a part of the creative process. Often I find myself starting with a feeling or an idea. I know I want to get to a place and then it’s just a matter of putting in the time, the thought, and the effort until I get there. You can be looping and looping, and then sometimes you’ll have a conversation with a friend, or you’ll encounter new ideas about technology while you’re working, and that’s what kicks off new ideas. Maybe you’re running a lot of loops simultaneously and they’re all informing each other—so it’s not so much a closed, but expansive system. I don’t think of loops as a trap.
OPERATIONS: dev day. Too many half-finished ideas and outlines hanging STATUS: running all the damn heaters in the middle of May READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
…when Timothy Leary, the counterculture icon who advocated the use of hallucinogenic drugs, wanted to travel to Jordan he was rudely rebuffed.
Yesterday was a braindrain day, so my plan is to mostly check out for the next couple of days and just get Sunday’s newsletter done. New material coming in that newsletter.
READING:HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+)
Oceanine, Jolanda Moletta’s third album and her first for Beacon Sound, is a powerful and ethereal statement of artistic community. Expanding on her previous work, each track represents a collaboration with a different female vocalist (see list below), with the foundational elements being generated entirely by her own voice.
OPERATIONS: scripting day, converting up development notes STATUS: it turned colder, so I’m staying in READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+), THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Vol 4, Robert A Caro (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I am very much sick of people sticking -maxxing on the end of words, just like I’m sick of -punk as a suffix, but the looksmaxxer pentastack is worthy of note, the “enhancement” cocktail consisting of Adderall, dextromethorphan, pregabalin, ketamine… and an industrial solvent called BDO.
“The purpose extended beyond personal protection. These rites aimed to stabilize political authority, ward off misfortune, and neutralize perceived supernatural dangers that could undermine a king’s rule. This reflects a broader Mesopotamian worldview in which cosmic order and political stability were inseparable. A threat from witches or malevolent forces was not merely spiritual—it was a potential crisis of governance.”
HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD was gifted me to the author, for which I am very grateful because it looks very much My Shit. BLANK SPACE had conflicting reviews, but when it showed up on Kindle for 99p, I figured I may as well find out for myself.
HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, Robert Guffey (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: Crash week. By Friday night I want to have moved at least eighty pages of material out of the office. STATUS: Major reset. I’ve booked two gigs to go and see on the 16th and currently wondering where I can fit some small amounts of travel in. Inbox at 100, but a ton of those are delivery notifications READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
But despite the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 they, like most of the approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees scattered across the region, still believed they would one day regain their villages, land, businesses and property. The nakba, meaning simply ‘catastrophe’, as it became known, prompted feverish debate among the refugees and throughout the Middle East.
LISTENING: SONGDREAMING, Saadet Turkoz & Nils Wogram (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
OPERATIONS: work pressure is real now STATUS: 8hrs 40m sleep! Sleep isn’t cumulative, but lack of sleep is, and I’m hoping I’ve handled the sleep deficit from the last six weeks now. READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) LISTENING:THE MEDIEVAL DRONE SOCIETY III, Laura Cannell
LAST WATCHED: dunno how we ended up rewatching the first two VENOM films last night, but we did. Here are my notes on the third.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
