Category: status

The tools I need to prune back this overgrown lilac don’t arrive for another week or two. And the weather has turned so mild that the damned thing thinks it’s spring and has started producing new buds a month early.

ON DECK: Finalising the full outline for PROJECT RED HOUSE
INBOX: 70
OPERATIONS: Marking up the boards. I need to send a couple emails about things on the Pending board, and I’m taking a couple things off it entirely. They’ll either come back on their own or they won’t.
LISTENING:

CONDITION: 8hrs 8mins sleep. Still a bit groggy but doing better.
THINKING ABOUT: Coffee.

Picking music off the shelves for a few hours of thinking time. Just been outside zip-tying a wandering hibiscus to a stake. Weather’s going to be crap this week, so raking out and mulching the rose bed will wait until next weekend.

Taking today to finish getting my brain back wiping up cat puke.

LOT 2046 has re-emerged, as LOT Systems. That was unexpected.

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore released a track, “Canyon Lights.“

It’s a glorious winter morning out there.

I slept for nine hours, I’m still tired, and I don’t have a single good idea in my head today. I produced a lot of material in January, but today it’s time to switch everything off and recharge a bit.

ON DECK: I have a pile of scriptment here, and today I’m going to turn the first chunk of it into one complete episode script, then leave the rest to cook down for a couple of days, so I can go back into it next week and see the voids in it more clearly.
INBOX: 61
OPERATIONS: My WordPress theme has started popping the “This color combination may be hard for people to read. Try using a brighter background color and/or a darker link color” warning again. It does this every few months, for no reason.
LISTENING: preview of BODIES, Madeleine Cocolas
READING: THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL, Nin, still
LAST WATCHED: DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME is up on the big screen right now.
CONDITION: 8hrs 17mins sleep, way too many non-work things happening this morning. I can’t even keep track of my open tabs through it all.

ON DECK: converting scriptment into script to see how far I’ve gotten.
INBOX: 80
OPERATIONS: I wanted a gooseneck phone holder for my desk. That way, I could prop my phone right where the wifi is best, about a foot off the surface of the desk and to the right of the monitor. That would make it easier to do calls in the office. However. I bought this desk second-hand thirty years ago. Its edges are five inches thick. The mounting clamps for gooseneck phone holders top out at three inches. WHYYYYYY

I might be able to connect one to an adjacent shelf edge, but, jesus, things shouldn’t be this hard.

LISTENING:

READING: THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE, Anais Nin
LAST WATCHED: WORLDS: Selected Works By Ben Rivers
CONDITION: 8hrs 41nins sleep and very weird dreams. At one point I seemed to be shooting a film where, circa 25 AD, Galilee politician Yeshua ben Yosef (that may not be the correct patronymic form) cynically enacts a prophecy about the Anointed One being tested in the desert by ha-satan, the Adversary, and eats cannabis while he’s out there, has visions, and comes back convinced he’s the Christ. I kind of wonder how dream-me got the funding for that, but I was pleased to see a Palestinian Jew cast as Yeshua, and the guy was correctly short (average height in the region at the time was five feet five inches).
THINKING ABOUT: Next steps. The avant-garde. The Slow Graphic Novella.
OUTSIDE: “A new book, “Reading with Jean-Luc Godard,” provides an innovative way of exploring the director’s famously reference-rich films.”

It turns out that if you recommend MUBI to enough people, MUBI send you a tote to say thank you. It looks very close to International Klein Blue. A colour that is permanently associated in my head with Hubertus Bigend. Thereby sending me down a pleasant memory lane during morning coffee outside.

ON DECK: Same as before, and some reading in order to write a book blurb I agreed to produce.
INBOX: 85. There’s a bunch of order notifications in there, though.
OPERATIONS: Planning on adding some tools, and getting rid of others. Beginning the long process of buying more shelf space in the office and throwing a bunch of stuff out.
LISTENING:

READING: I got a sample of a book about Stockhausen on Kindle and the book is apparently so long that even the sample takes an hour and a half to read.
LAST WATCHED: I have the blu-ray of THINGS TO COME up on the big screen right now, and have been immediately presented with the following:

CONDITION: exactly 8hrs sleep. I’m wearing the Ganymede 01 watch today, because I don’t want to be disturbed by incoming material too much.
THINKING ABOUT: Tools, efficiencies, squeezing more out of every day, design.

ON DECK: First newsletter of 2024 went out. I need to hit around ten pages of scriptment today, but I’m moving slowly, distracted by other thoughts, and would like to spend a couple of hours just laying on the bed and thinking.
INBOX: 94
OPERATIONS: cannot figure out how to make different templates for different WordPress categories, so I need to make logo stamps to append to posts in certain categories. Also hit the new landline phone handset several times to make it work (eventually had to run the line through a microfilter). Looking at IFTTT again to see what it can do for me – I stopped using it much when it went paid.

Small things: when I say the word “Zen” to the Echo Spot in the office, it says “Confirmed” and then plays “Deep Blue Day” by Brian Eno. Four minutes of cleaning and centering.

LISTENING:

READING: Read the Times Literary Supplement front to back, then went to the app to carve out two pieces I wanted to save. THE CREATIVE ACT, Rick Rubin. THE PRACTICE, Seth Godin.
CONDITION: 9hrs 3mins sleep. I’m around 20 pages behind where I need to be, so hopefully I have reset enough that I can get back on the usual schedule Monday.
THINKING ABOUT: Serialising prose. Experiments.

ON DECK: continuing CONSULT 2/2024, developing PROJECT RED HOUSE, peering at PROJECT TANGIERS
INBOX: 92
OPERATIONS: installing a new landline phone handset. Informational admin required today.
LISTENING: LATE JUNCTION
READING: THE CREATIVE ACT, Rick Rubin
LAST WATCHED: re-watching SUCCESSION
CONDITION: moving stuff around in the office stirs dust, which I am deathly allergic to. Dozed fitfully for less than an hour last night before I had to get up and take things. Finally dropped off at 242am, apparently slept like the dead for 8rs 2mins. My Fitbit seems very confused, in that “no no I’ve been listening and you’re definitely dead” way. I think I’ve been doing too much reading on my phone at night.
THINKING ABOUT: while I was wandering the halls like an insomniac, I attempted to connect my bookmarking service, pinboard.in, to WordPress. There are two plug-ins that claim to do it. Postalicious still doesn’t work – it’s old, unsupported, and broken. WP Pinboard is supported, but can only start working by importing my entire bookmarks collection into WordPress. Which means its first post would collect something like 3500 bookmarks and try to present them as a single post. This is not an option. So what I’m thinking about is: if I want links reproduced here in my digital notebook, I’m going to have to keep adding them manually, like a peasant in the olden days. One more reminder, if one were needed, that weblogging is depreciated and many things need to be hand-rolled now.
OUTSIDE: Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist Survival Kit

SHIPPING FORECAST: Working on restoring the pulse to this notebook.

More storms. Third mini-greenhouse experienced unscheduled rapid disassembly. Got my work cut out for me out there next month.

Last night I took off my Fitbit, took some painkillers, and slept for what I’m guessing was about ten hours. I am very much behind the moment. And when I walked into my tiny little office after my “morning” coffee, I decided it is very much time to clear the place out.

ON DECK: switching to “scriptment” form on the job in front of me, just to maintain forward progress – just a chain of rough descriptions and rough dialogue.
INBOX: 95
LISTENING: new Laura Cannell
CONDITION: Weird. I read something at the end of that Schutte KRAFTWERK book last night that resonated oddly with me. Might be why I’m in the mood to tear the office down and rebuild it. This box full of junk is the equivalent of my studio, and I really stopped treating it like that a long time ago.

I dunno. As work spins up, I’m feeling like it’s time for more change.