A 25-minute film wherein an old telephone pole in Iceland is chopped short and a treehouse is built on top of it, finished and maintained by three young siblings. Fixed POV throughout.
I shot this frame just for the colours:
This is a wonderful little film. Shot over eighteen months, with the director’s own kids (and, I suspect, on or adjacent to their own home), it’s kind of everything. It’s the seasons. It’s kids being weird and shitty. It’s kids working together, often badly. There’s even some dramatic tension in the last half, that actually hooked me – really cleverly done and really effective. And it’s utterly beautiful. I’m so glad I found this film today. I watched it on MUBI.
ON DECK: Wrestling a script to the end, wrestling an outline to some kind of readability, had an idea last night that I want to work up into one page, figuring out the shape of a novella idea I’ve been grappling with on and off since 2019. INBOX: 88, mostly receipts and dispatch notes for Xmas shopping! LISTENING:New Music Show, right this minute READING: re-reading Penman’s FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS. LAST WATCHED: NEST (2022)
CONDITION: I’ve spent quite a long time waiting for other people to do things. Time to put some long-standing notions into action.
I got an unexpected royalty check and decided to hit the seed catalogues. Note to self: they’re in a bag in the utility room next to the roasting tins. The previous bag is in the utility room drinks cupboard at the back, top shelf, behind that weird vermouth. Now I have amended soil, some clear beds and the garden shredder to clear and mulch the others, I can spend the winter clearing up, rebuilding and pruning, and try lots of stuff next spring.
Next up: shopping for some fig trees, as the one I bought last year did not do anything, to the point where I suspect it arrived as a dead stick in some dirt rather than as a dormant living plant.
Yes, none of these are flowers. Do not tell my partner. I want a little food forest. I think I can probably get most of the way there next year, now I have deeper knowledge of the issues I’m facing on this small patch of the Thames Delta.
Got given a dormant redcurrant and loganberry, and so I spent a chunk of the afternoon digging holes, digging compost and sticking them in the bed at the back left of the garden. We’ll see how they do.
The link between music, sound and the paranormal is manifested in many different ways. Gerard van der Leeuw, the Dutch historian and philosopher, wrote “Music represents the great struggle of reaching the wholly other, which it can never express”. Furthermore, “The effect of music on the emotions is so mysterious as to seem magical. There is no logical explanation why a particular combination of musical notes, whether in the form of a tune or of a simple chord, can affect the heart. Nothing in nature has perhaps so persistently resisted explanation”, as said Derek Parker, the British journalist. Since music is arguably the most intangible of the arts and since the paranormal, in all its manifestations, continues to intrigue people, the placing of these two subjects together seems obvious.
I finished a graphic novella script on Thursday, so I took a long weekend to break down and box up the old garden shredder, assemble and install the new one, and then spend several hours stuffing (some of) the giant pile of cuttings at the back of the garden into said shredder. Chunky mulch for what is planned to be a fruit bed.
This week, I want to finish a long-gestating graphic novella (the contract was signed back in May, at roughly the same time everything went to hell here with sickness and operations and deaths). December 1, I commence rewrites on another thing, and then a brief consultancy on someone else’s project, and then I think I’m wrapped for the year. By which time a lot of stuff in the garden should be dormant, and I can start cutting stuff back, preparing soil, transplant a climbing rose that’s gone insane, recover and clean the mini-greenhouses (one got invaded by wisteria) and otherwise prep for spring.
I’m roasting and grinding coffee and juicing carrots and apples. Winter protocols. Lovely.
It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, so nothing will happen again until the middle of next week.
INBOX: 113! First job today is actually to process a lot of that before I lose control of it. LISTENING: Pulling stuff up from the collection today: LIVING TORCH, Kali Malone READING: THE VARIATIONS, Patrick Langley LAST WATCHED: rewatched F FOR FAKE for the newsletter, also Patrick Stewart’s MACBETH CONDITION: I know it’s winter, and that I’m doing a lot of physical work, because I’m oversleeping. 8 hrs 42 mins, with a lot of wakefulness scattered through it. I have a readiness score of….1.
Every now and then, I think about the fact that Karl Lagerfeld owned over 300 iPods. I remember looking at the Sotheby’s website when they went up for auction.
Lagerfeld famously had an “iPod nanny” to digitise his collection for the iPods and to add new music to new devices. This is how he ended up with over 300 of them – he treated them like cassette tapes.
(He also had twenty iPads, which he treated like sketchbooks and diaries, and four iPhones. But did not use email and wrote letters on paper to the end.)
Aside from the obvious crazy-rich fantasy of owning 300+ music devices and employing a full-time curator for them – which doesn’t have a complete appeal for me, because I like to discover stuff myself, I’ve been an online version of a crate-digger for decades — there is something fascinating in this for me.
This is all I have:
And, of course, walls and stacks of CDs.
I bought this phone this year, and it already has 40 GB of audio on it. I don’t think that fills a final generation iPod? 10GB of that cycles around, because it’s my podcast app, Downcast. (The ZEN folder is my meditation apps.) Less than 4GB of that is Bandcamp, oddly – I keep forgetting that I can download purchases directly into the app. I usually download them to the laptop and put them in external storage, as I tend to do most of my listening at the desk. MP3s and CDs and streaming whatever I’ve subscribed to on BBC Sounds.
When, as I often do, I feel like I’m not doing enough, I think about this: Karl Lagerfeld had 300 iPods, lots of them loaded with new music. This job only works if you’re drinking enough new art to feed the gut bacteria.
What a shame this wonderfully atmospheric hour-long journey of a piece is digital only.
“Ligeia” is a sonic adventure in which every sound is an immersion into the world of mysteries, mysticism and philosophical revelations. The album takes the listener into dark atmospheres created by a unique combination of mystical ambient music and avant-garde.
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