Went to Konsztrukting Soundz last night, for what turned out to be an abbreviated session. Here’s Lev Dudas, the creator and organiser, finishing the setup for what he did not expect to be a ninety-minute evening.
The first set, with Lev and Lawrence Casserley, was incredibly good, and later in the event Viv Corringham did a frankly magnificent vocal improv.
Going offline aside from messaging apps for the rest of the day, as I have lots of house stuff to do. And then Monday begins another very busy week.
OPERATIONS: big scripting day – I fell behind again. I have put Sunday’s newsletter to bed already. READING:RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+). LISTENING: COMPLETE CELLO WORKS, Kaija Saariaho (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: MEGALOPOLIS DRINK:Radlow Hundred Rose 2023 PAPERWORK: read part of a very unusually-made magazine called CIRC, which has a weird foldout design
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Been off for a few days. Went to a birthday party at the weekend, at a pub I haven’t set foot in for almost forty years.
Partway down the Little Wakering Road. Go allll the way down that road and you’re into Barling Magna, where I lived with a girl for a year. We used to go to this pub for lunch at the weekends.
ACCESSIONS:
Ordered a bunch of magazines from the excellent MagCulture that arrived yesterday.
I do appreciate a thoughtful bit of packaging.
MONOCLE is there because I haven’t read an issue of it in about fifteen years and I was simply curious. I’ve read EYE and REAL REVIEW before. The others are new to me.
I need new inputs. And there are kinds of input you can only get from print. Going back to the source and back to analogue means going back to small magazines.
STATUS: after a crappy couple of days, I am trying to pull my focus together. READING:RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+). LISTENING: Ultimate Calm with Erland Cooper ft: Claire Rousay PAPERWORK: (pens pencils paper etc with amz)
“this quote by Helmut Lang always stuck with me: “You cannot put a personality together with clothes. It only reaches up to the neck. And then it ends.””
Autumn is creeping in step by step. Colder starts to the day, now. The managed retreat begins. Played yesterday with Dirty Little Zine for making tiny photobooks to clip into notebooks. Dropped a frankly absurd amount of money on a shipment of magazines from Magculture.
The Real Danger May Be AI as Dumb as Us: “Some of the most concerning security risks from AI may come not from super intelligence but from what researchers sometimes call “jagged intelligence,” the way in which models can appear to be vastly more knowledgeable than humans in many respects but still lag bafflingly behind what we’d call common sense.”
OPERATIONS:all the things. My to-do list is ridiculous. STATUS: awaiting a delivery of stationery items and peering unhappily at my bank balance READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
I saw a straight razor and strop, plus a toothbrush stuck in a half pint of vodka. Stalin brushed his teeth with vodka.
I’ve sometimes thought that that’s why I became a painter, because I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, yes, it hurts me when they keep popping up again and again, like visions almost, and in all kinds of contexts, and I can’t do anything about it, the only thing I can do is paint, yes, try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away, one by one
“While the idea of God has received much attention from philosophers and progressive theologians, its counterpart, the dark figure of the Evil One, has been much neglected”. So begins The History of the Devil, wherein this perceived wrong is to be righted by Paul Carus, a self-described “theologian of science”.
Although an unfamiliar name now, at the end the nineteenth century Carus was hailed for his attempts to “conciliate science and religion”. He also played a key role in the introduction of Buddhist thought to the United States, to which he emigrated from his native Germany in the mid-1880s.
Went out to dinner last night. The first autumn menu at our restaurant. Venison three ways, a potato and black pudding terrine, squash puree.
Just a placeholder today.
READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+). DRINK: Pocketful Of Stones Cornish whisky, which I can’t link to because the website’s cookie-permissions panel won’t go away and everything is broken
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
This is the face of a mancub who blames me specifically for the drop in temperature and the loss of the sun.
I have sympathy: it’s dark and rainy, and so is my mood.
THE RUMOURS that emerged sounded like the opening of a thriller. A young woman working in a Siberian research lab supposedly breaks a test tube containing a lethal plague pathogen. She is dead within 48 hours. Authorities race to contain the situation. The questions outnumber the answers, breeding suggestions of conspiracy. The fears may prove unfounded: there may not have been a leak at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. But the world can be forgiven for its panicked interest.
STATUS: it’s an offline day – work and housework during day, out tonight READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
I said, “Have you ever had a hotfoot, Reggie?” Reggie laughed. His sidemen laughed. They went say what? in sync. I poured the bottle of scotch on his shoes. I flicked my lighter and dropped it on his feet. His shoes and socks immolated. His trouser cuffs torched. He screeched. I smelled scorched flesh. He flailed for a water glass. I tossed it out of reach. His trumpet man snatched at a belt piece. I caught his hand and pinned it flat to the table. I grabbed a steak knife and stabbed through flesh and tabletop. The blade severed bones and went in half hilt deep.
Just proofed the complete GHOST DRIVE STATION and I am stunned at what Lordess Foudre has accomplished. The joy of making comics is not in the sales and the release and the grind of getting a piece done – it’s seeing what your collaborator has made of your work, and the transcendent object they have turned it into. That miracle of your thoughts being elevated by an artistic mind never, ever goes away.
OPERATIONS: my to-do list fills an entire index card. Already knocked off the rewritten W8 form I needed to submit to a television network, which took forever. My brain hates forms and my whole body hates Adobe Acrobat. Now I am across two scripts and hope to land one by 5pm, STATUS: And, yes, I have folded index cards into the daily system. READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+). LISTENING: The Snake, the Frog and the Argument by Dolphins Into The Future LAST WATCHED: caught some of an old Anita Brookner programme on 100 great paintings. All new tv looks and sounds the same to me now.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
