Category: morning computer

“…the newly-formed U.S. Space Force announced plans to create CHPS, the Cis-lunar Highway Patrol System. Despite an acronym harking back to a certain cheesy TV series in the 1970s, CHPS will provide a serious look at space traffic further out in orbit around the Earth-moon system. Such a network is vital, as private companies and space agencies are set to return to the moon in a big way in the coming decade.”

Space Chips. God help us all.

There’s a new Bauhaus song, so these could in fact be the end times.

Yes, Foulness Island is a real place. It’s sealed off and used as a military testing site. I have spent close to my entire life hearing the guns and booms from Foulness. Here’s a picture of a destroyed aircraft at Foulness that expressly refuses permission for reproduction. I always imagined Foulness as wild and bombed-out terrain, just because of a lifetime of listening to the explosion.

“Chaos Terrains,” in fact. In this instance, the wild cold landscapes of Europa that could be circulating and transporting oxygen through the water beneath them: “the amount of oxygen brought into Europa’s ocean could be on a par with the quantity of oxygen in Earth’s oceans today.”

I’m still far from sold on the whole NFT thing, but this is curious enough to record:

“Atlas” (2021–present), a new NFT series by Xin Liu, is the collision of digital technology with the analog. Billed as the first NFTs to be created in space, the works use an antenna installed in Hong Kong to receive radio frequencies from decommissioned weather satellites. The satellites Liu utilizes were launched by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1998. The data from those devices is translated into cartographic images that mirror Xerox copies of surveillance photos of Earth’s mountainous regions. The images, transmission metadata, and radio frequency are then minted as an NFT.

Listening: lovely new Midwife song.

Machu Picchu not actually called Machu Picchu: “researchers conclude that the Incas originally called it Huayna Picchu, for the rocky summit that lies nearest to the site, and not Machu Picchu, which is the name of the highest mountain near the ancient city.”

It wasn’t the cold that drove the Vikings out of Greenland: it was drought. Since I also come from a Viking colony, this caught my eye.

Microplastics found in human blood for the first time. Internalised Timothy Morton hyperobject. Per Johanna Gunzl, quoted here:

Looking at microplastics as hyperobjects triggers us to think of them as a very complex, multidimensional problem that might need several solutions to attack them.

(That bit from HURRICANE SEASON about floating corpses and plastic bags. Now we are the floating corpses and the floating plastic bag.)

This has nothing to do with anything else: A short documentary from 1969 on the traditional forging of a Japanese sword, narrated by George Takei.

Physicist Dr. Melvin Vopson has already published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the smallest known building blocks of the universe, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. Now, he has designed an experiment—which if proved correct—means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas and plasma.

Information as the fifth form of matter. Damn. As previously noted, these posts are for processing my morning reading, and I’m looking forward to folding this into my bookmarks and files and seeing what it connects to.

Glitch art rendered in marble by Léo Caillard.

Haha. Found at 70s Sci Fi Art. I owned this as a kid. I still vividly recall their mad arrangement of the DOCTOR WHO theme, which — and I just checked, here’s the YouTube — you have to hang in there to get to the part that starts around 1.27. I seem to recall there was a storming “Thunderbirds” on there, too. Note how the cover very carefully avoids copyright issues with the weird tweaks on recognisable imagery – the pointy four-nacelled Enterprise, the 2001 space station with two rings. Also the misspelling of “Quatermass,” in case you were thinking this was not a very cheap project. Here’s a nice little article on the making of this and the sequel album, from which I only remember one tune.

Geoff Love was an interesting guy. Born in Yorkshire to an African-American entertainer and an actress from Yorkshire, he was immersed in music from birth, and spent his time in WW2 “learning orchestration by questioning musicians how best to write for their individual instruments.” That, to me, is the true mark of a collaborative artist – asking the damn questions so you can do better for your collaborators. He spent years at Abbey Road, arranging for the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Eartha Kitt and, Paul Robeson. And it was at Abbey Road that he suddenly threw off decades of easy-listening recording and made four albums under the name of, um, Mandingo:

Working again with Norman Newell in Abbey Road, he recorded four albums from 1974 using the same title as a novel he had read about the exploits of a southern black slave called Mandingo on a plantation in Alabama during the 1830s. The records, done mostly in Studio Two, bring an eclectic mix of instruments and sounds drawing on African influences, experimental drums, layers of brass and electronic devices. The result is an explosive sound that’s completely unique, although at the time, sales of the records came nowhere near expectations.

Like Sun Ra, Love’s jazz background informs these weird new albums, and there are some full-on freak-outs to be found on the first record. For an “unashamed populist,” going full Space Is The Place must have been joyous.

Space is cool. There is even ice at Mercury’s poles.

William Anzalone, Red Passage, 2021

“It is too often accepted that during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the male writers who developed and pushed the boundaries of the weird tale, with women writers following in their wake—but this is far from the truth.” – Wyrd Britain on Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird.

Mermaids in Japanese folklore, and how they seem to have been replaced by the Western version.

When a hashtag seems to mutate into a literary subgenre: “dark academia” as the new campus novel.

Ruslan Kiprich

Nadin Mai on the film BALLAD OF A WHITE COW, which sounds terrifying, but I’m fascinated by this image:

A team of scientists from University of Waterloo have come up with an exciting new theory that explains the origin of the universe, its expansion, and the presence of dark matter. It involves the existence of a mirrored doppelganger called an ‘anti-universe’ where time runs backwards. And it might even be testable.

ANTI- UNIVERSE. A bit much for me first thing in the morning, but I’m going to sit with it later. Though my immediate thought was ANTI-CLOCK.

NASA is finally rolling the Artemis 1 rocket out; this is the transLunar injection rocket that’s supposed to get crew-rated in May, in what’s called a “wet dress rehearsal” test. They basically just toss an empty can around the Moon and back, and if the can doesn’t spring a leak it’s okay to stuff it with people.

In the meantime, lunar cave explorer robots are being designed. Previously: the Moon FedEx.

The Webb telescope did a calibration shot on a single star — but captured a background of hundreds of ancient galaxies as well.

I maintain that science has the best stories.

There is a star only ten miles across that is spewing a stream of antimatter out into the galaxy. “This beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons, scientists have detected throughout the Milky Way galaxy.”

Last night, I read this fantastic piece in the London Review of Books by Simon Reynolds on Malcolm McLaren and a recent biography on him, and this morning I find that they’ve made it free to read on their website.

Grugq is always an interesting read, and this is an interesting, useful insight:

The traditional model of cyberwar has failed as a predictive, descriptive, and analytic framework. In it, cyberwar exists only to emulate kinetic war capabilities. The sheer cost of developing such capabilities makes them unattractive. Cyber does not conform to the traditional model, indeed it is inherently nonconformist.

The only rule in cyber is that you don’t play the same way twice.

Atmospheric piece at Fluid Radio on the new Svarte Greiner record.

Devolving Trust is also a reflective listen. Increasing its dank atmosphere is the fact that this is a live recording, coming from the once-bombed bunkers of Schneider Brewery, Berlin. Its dark, heavy history continues to echo into the present. Erik describes the old cellars as being ‘wet and hollow with a dark past and long reverb’, and its cello and minimal electro-acoustic improvisations are left to rot in the dark, reaching out with long tendrils and looking to invade its shadows… The cello almost seems to want to dig itself into the ground, living underneath the earth instead of succumbing to the pain of living on its surface at street level.

New single from Forndom:

I absolutely cannot connect this morning’s reading into a coherent whole so I’m just going to leave this here and get more coffee

Today I am working on evolving the newsletter, which will require me to re-read everything I wrote in the Newsletter Development series a few years ago too.

A weird short interview with Cormac McCarthy about his method. While he gets away with saying as little as possible (aside from the post title he gave me), it’s still interesting to me on a technical level.

Great piece on unified design dress for authors’ back catalogues. Found at the same time: new unified look for Ishiguro.

Also: what we lose when we lose literary magazines. I also believe that the health of the art of comics is determined by its anthologies more than its serials or novels.

Okay, I really have to put this down and get to work. Listening:

Slice one apple, one carrot, and a centimetre or two of ginger, throw into half a litre of water with the juice of one lemon and blend until liquid. Add ice or a scant handful of oats before you blend if you like. Drink. Gain life. Start reading.

Astrolab wants to be “the UPS or FedEx of the Moon,” and are “building an all-purpose truck that is intended to construct lunar infrastructure and also ferry astronauts around, enabling work that would make long-term settlement on the moon possible…the rover can carry twice the capacity of a Ford F-150 truck bed. The company eventually wants to build a fleet of rovers.” I am of a certain age and background that makes me leery of commercial space enterprise. For me, the exploration of space is the work of collaborating nation-states, and leaving the lives of explorers to the free market seems to me to be an unpleasant throwback to times well past.

It is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. I read his entire available oeuvre by the time I was sixteen, which was either the best or worst time to experience his work. It is “of its time” in many ways, which is the phrase we use to explain away casual sexism, racism and other phobias in things we have otherwise loved. (Even in the eighties, and as a kid, I was shocked at how his celebration of marginalised people could turn on a sixpence into homophobia.) But it also means it’s a document of its time, which in many ways is what Kerouac intended. His own model was Proust, and we go to Proust for memory and place, not for the news. I don’t forgive Kerouac his monstrosity or his probable gynephobia, or the damage he left in his wake – at sixteen, at the end of my Jack Kerouac journey, I read Jan Kerouac’s BABY DRIVER (UK) (US), which makes a lot of that very clear as well as being a great book in its own right — but he liberated American prose and gave me a whole new world to think about. He could be many things, at least in his prime before the drink and the fame. In the year of Jan’s birth, he wrote the genre-bending novel DOCTOR SAX (UK) (US), at the end of which, the eponymous Shadow-like figure, stripped of his trenchcoat and slouch hat and other signifiers of mystery and power, stands in shirtsleeves in the aftermath of the transcendental climax and says;

“I’ll be damned. The universe disposes of its own evil.”

I must admit, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to read Kerouac now. Lots of unpleasant throwbacks to times well past, I would suppose. But he taught me to get the first thought down, and how to have music in the prose.

This was my copy of BABY DRIVER. Remember Jan Kerouac too. Put her back into print.

Going down my own memory hole: Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg fell out towards the end of Kerouac’s life, but Ginsberg had the last word(s),as he found himself writing introductions to at least one Kerouac reprint. I think it was VISIONS OF CODY in which, discussing Kerouac’s “bleak male energy,” he suggests that Kerouac and Neal Cassady (who was bi) should have fucked as “it would have done ’em both some good.” The late-period Kerouac, whose complicated sexuality hardened into weird Catholic conservativism, would probably have shat.

Fluid Radio has been doing a series of interviews with musicians from Ukraine. Here’s their interview with protoU, whom I own a few records by.

Listening: FAKE CREEK, Kate Carr

New single from GAIKA, who was a lovely guy when I met him.

The new edition of MONUMENT podcast is an immense set by Yukari Okamura, drifting from urbanscape ambient into a rising sequence of propulsion that is giving me life. The sort of collection of sounds that reminds me of listening to Mary Ann Hobbs on XFM at the weekends, way back when. I remember one night I was stuck on the pacing of a crucial sequence in GUN MACHINE – just couldn’t get the rhythm right — and Mary Ann played “Bolts” by Northern Structures. It was precisely the rhythm I was looking for. So that book got finished because of Mary Ann.

I got delivered the wrong coffee so today has started on a dissonant note. Onwards.