The G-Shock is running three minutes fast, it turns out! I love a big chunky G-Shock. I read yesterday that they’re coming back into fashion as the whole lo-fi anti-networked thing gains pace in some spaces.
Toby Standing, menswear editor at online shopping platform Lyst, where G-Shock currently dominates demand in the digital watch category, believes the trend is linked to the rise of “dumb” phones and wired headphones. “A willing adoption of tech that is ‘worse’ than something else available is a distinct style choice,” he says, and is redolent of “an era of less input, less doomscrolling, and more novelty”.
OPERATIONS: scripting, planning, thinking STATUS: I have been buying too many films, CDs, and possibly another watch. READING:HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+) LISTENING:Konstellationen by CAMILLA PISANI
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Sea levels are just the start of how climate change will upend the ocean. Rising temperatures are also threatening a critical artery that runs through the ocean known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. This current, in short, sends warm water northwards and dumps colder water southwards in a giant loop, massively influencing the world’s weather systems along the way.
If temperatures keep soaring, scientists fear that AMOC could collapse — and with it, climate patterns across the globe. Temperatures in Europe would plunge without the injection of warm water it brings. Rainfall in the tropics would be disrupted. And sea levels on the US east coast would rise.
To save AMOC from demise, two researchers have proposed a daring Hail Mary: building a giant dam across the Bering Strait, the channel that separates Alaska from Siberia, to stop the proverbial bleeding. As outrageous as it sounds, the megaproject could in theory stabilize the ocean current, according to the findings of a new study they published in the journal Science Advances.
20th Century Studios has released the first trailer for Whalefall, the adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ novel coming to theaters in October.
The film — which stars Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz and more — is described as The Martian meets 127 Hours, centering on a scuba diver in search of his deceased father’s remains. The diver gets swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.
I had this on VHS about a million years ago. HAXAN is a lovely little thing, genuinely strange, and I am looking forward to discovering the ton of extras they’ve bundled in here.
Yesterday, as is tradition, I gave herself the first ripe raspberry of summer. Today, we were out in the garden in the rain with a bowl collecting raspberries and redcurrants.
I had a whole plan to Go Outside today, but the weather has not cooperated, so I’m indoors going through my Bandcamp queue and probably buying too many records again.
On Friday, we went to see The Cobras in Harlow, because we know the bassist, and on Saturday I went to the final Konsztrukting Soundz of the season. Konsztrukting Sounds is a monthly experimental music night, and it’s become the highlight of my month – I’m going to miss it over the summer. They’re running a crowdfunder to support the upcoming third season of the event right now.
Julian Simpson connecting his various audio fiction and prose fiction “universes” into a single space and brand made me sit into space and think for a while. At the same time, a musician acquaintance has been sharing with me the video album she’s making to support her new music project (shooting them with an old comics acquaintance of mine, it turns out), and that’s been making my brain churn too. Social media is a dead zone but the wider internet is still a possibility space.
OPERATIONS: consulting job needs to be wrapped by Friday, but this week I also need to get a big chunk of the novella down, and I had an idea Saturday night for a short story that I absolutely want to get landed in first draft this week, so this week is going to get a bit crunchy. STATUS: was intending to go out this morning, but it’s cold and wet again. I also need to clear this laptop off in prep for the new one that should be arriving some time in the next week – this one is still working, so long as I don’t try to do too much on it at once. Software repair processes helped it a little, but the chipset is clearly failing. Very sad. READING: HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+)
I don’t know why I have stored this kind of detail while forgetting the rest of the story. It must have made some sort of sense – it was a story, after all, with a beginning and an end – but I remember nothing but the pips, which my memory, quite rightly, has had to spit out later on.
LISTENING: Harju sent me their new record and it’s amazing:
LAST WATCHED: MOCK THE WEEK summer specials DRINK:Cafe de Parisienne liqueur, for an affogato with double chocolate ice cream I made
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot’s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.
A team of astronomers led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin identified the lucky dot in question: GLIMPSE-17775. By carefully analyzing the dot’s spectrum captured by Webb—the deepest spectrum to date of a little red dot—the research team has identified multiple lines of evidence, all of which support the interpretation that GLIMPSE-17775 is a supermassive black hole enveloped in a dense cocoon of partially ionized gas, a model referred to as the BH* (black hole star) scenario.
Among his many mythopoeic pronouncements, the great Sun Ra maintained that he was making music for the future. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and more than 30 years after he left the planet for the last time, his music is gaining more recognition than ever before. A recent slew of reissues, new compilations and previously unheard live recordings continues unabated. His Arkestra – under the direction of long-time member, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen since 1995 – continues to delight audiences worldwide. Just last year saw the release of two new feature-length documentaries about him. The Magic City examined his early life in Birmingham, Alabama; and the more comprehensive Sun Ra: Do The Impossible did the festival circuit before being shown on the PBS TV network this February as part of its American Masters series of artist biographies – bringing Ra’s improbable story to its widest audience yet.
It has rained all damned week. Three thunderstorms yesterday alone. Teeming down today. It’s dark when I wake up. Middle of June and I’m still going outside in the morning in a heavy coat, winter gloves and a watchcap. Everything in the garden is suffering except the bindweed coming through from the neighboring gardens. I’m hitting pause on these notes for a few days. Sunday’s newsletter is already in the scheduler.
For no good reason, I woke up today thinking about BIG WORLD CAFE, a music tv show that ran for… 1989. One year. Their idea was, if we can get you in by telling you New Order are playing, then we can also show you the Bhundu Boys and Erotic Dissidents and The Jungle Brothers.
Here’s Diamanda Galas playing live on Big World Cafe. Just typing big world cafe into YouTube will surface a surprising number of digitised VHS tapes of the show.
Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
READING: CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (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.
Amazon Web Services are having issues. Which means half the internet is off. I’m okay with that. If I wasn’t buried in finishing a delayed job and it wasn’t forecast to monsoon out there, I’d say fuckit and walk to the deli for a glass of wine and a charcuterie board. But I AM in fact buried in putting an end to this job. Therefore I am indoors. But a music PR just added me to their press list, so later on I have some new music to listen to, for which I am grateful. So this is just a “hello Monday” note.
TELEMETRY:
…a condition called maladaptive daydreaming (sometimes known simply as MD). They spend often more than half of their waking hours creating elaborate and intricately detailed fantasies with narratives and characters in their mind. Ross says that in extreme cases, people can daydream for up to 12 hours a day. Their stories’ plotlines can go on for decades at a time. It may sound wonderful and inspiring, but these people are so immersed in their inner world that it can cause huge disruptions to daily life and result in severe distress.
This is not nearly as rare as it might sound. “It’s probably in the ballpark of 2-4% of the adult population,” Ross says.
OPERATIONS: finishing a job today. Tomorrow I am turning my alarm off. Wiped down the boards, commencing batching of material for the newsletter and rebuilding the STATUS and TO-DO boards. STATUS: I have a patch test for a topical copper peptide serum behind my right ear. So in six hours we get to see if my right ear falls off READING: CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+)
Marshall winced. ‘I watched her die.’
‘You saw her die?’
Marshall nodded. ‘Didn’t save her in time.’
‘You do know that self-pity is a symptom of a terminal brain injury.’
A killer opening to a piece that is actually about Kraftwerk playing a gig in Bournemouth: “I remember the shock at discovering that Marlene Dietrich was still alive in 1992. She lived long enough to have raised a glass with Brecht and listened to all but one of Kraftwerk’s albums; and if she hadn’t been careful, ample time to take in Klaus Kinski and The Scorpions as well. Perhaps sensing that contemporaneity would eventually kill her, Dietrich wisely locked the door and refused to read the papers, an option that does not exist for innovators whose enduring relevance requires meeting their public.”
READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
When Mohnhaupt travelled to Italy to talk to counterparts in the Red Brigades, the (male) militant she was supposed to meet at Milan station failed to identify her. He had been told that the ‘leader of the RAF’ would be sitting on a particular bench reading a crime novel but had abandoned the appointment when the only person he saw doing this was a woman.
LISTENING:
Just arrived, LIVE AT CAFE OTO by Laura Cannell. A gig I was actually at, but my position in the room meant that for much of the night all I could hear was the toilet door banging every fifteen seconds, to the point where I began to wonder if the audience had been poisoned with diuretics.
LAST WATCHED: THE LION IN WINTER was on tv last night – I own a copy, but I will always drop the remote when that film comes on. DRINK:Flint Vineyard Precoce
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
1938 photo of archaeologist Manuel Esteve wearing a freshly unearthed ancient Corinthian helmet while casually smoking, creating a surreal blend of ancient artifact and modern Habit
TODAY
Marjane Satrapi died, age 56: ‘“Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” a statement from close friends and family sent to the AFP news wire read.’
The bullshit of switching my diet back to where it’s supposed to be: I’m going to be permanently bloody hungry for a month until my body readjusts and I need to increase my protein. So I’m back on the powders, all mixed with pea milk: protein powder with frozen blueberries and cacao in the morning, meal replacement with frozen banana in the afternoons. Add in actual breakfast and actual lunch plus dinner and I am on five meals a day and two litres of water just to feel normal. And also experimenting with a functional energy drink mix. Because this is the idiocy we have to turn into a habit when we need just a little help and we have a lot of work to get done.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
