WA lamp by Akasaki & Vanhuyse is crafted from decommissioned Tokyo train parts.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
Comments closedWARREN ELLIS LTD Posts
UNCLASSIFIED: Edinburgh Festival Highlights
Join Elizabeth Alker with a selection of fresh music from genre-defying artists as we journey through landscapes of ambient and experimental sounds. Tonight she plays highlights from some of Unclassifield’s favourite artists’ live concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Today’s jacket was the Yarmouth Oilskins sailcloth Engineer chore jacket.
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Yes, brow-bar sunglasses are back, deal with it.
Mancub seems largely back to his old self, and is getting increasingly pissed off at how hypervigilant I’m being.
OPERATIONS: Working up a treatment, organising schedules, looking for some notes I made years ago about a certain style of graphic novel that I think I’m going to try and eventuate in the near future
STATUS: Inbox 94, but I think most of that is delivery notifications. 8hrs 11m sleep. I did everything right today: pint of water with the juice of one lemon in it, protein shake, walked two miles (cheapo HTC open-ear buds I bought for walking and wandering worked well), sat in a coffee shop for half an hour to try their espresso and clear my head, did some development notemaking, and now I’m home in front of the laptop and the first tranche of today’s deliveries starts in two hours…
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Ambient Daily: Constellation
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
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“The key is to understand how my body works and work with it, not against,” she explains. “I know I’m crap in the mornings, whether I had enough sleep or not. I wake up at 8, but I generally tackle admin, emails, and social media for work, rather than scrolling endlessly. Then, past 1pm, I go into full work mode.”
This self-awareness pays dividends. Sandrine says she can achieve four to five hours of uninterrupted deep work, excepting toilet breaks, by aligning demanding creative tasks with her peak energy periods.
Expert tips on getting into creative flow (and staying there)
Scientists studied the cognitive behavior of astronauts who have spent six months on board the International Space Station — and made some fascinating yet ominous discoveries.
…a series of tests revealed that their cognitive abilities slowed down while in space, “suggesting that processing speed, visual working memory, sustained attention, and risk-taking propensity may be the cognitive domains most susceptible to change in Low Earth Orbit for high-performing, professional astronauts,” the researchers wrote.
So astronauts’ brains malfunction. Great news.
Bonus round: microgravity activates “hidden, ancient sections of DNA called the “dark genome.” We didn’t have enough to worry about. There’s a Dark Genome now.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
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I got this a full year ago and apparently didn’t note it here. I picked it up from the LRB Bookshop, and it’s sold out now, but I imagine copies are floating around out there.
A unique tribute to a remarkable writer, film-maker and walker, in an edition of only 400 numbered copies – each signed by Iain Sinclair – this 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Marina Warner.
Featuring original essays, poems, images, letters and reflection from writers, artists, musicians, publishers, friends, critics, booksellers and readers, it is not only a celebration of a unique body of work but also a de-facto history of the last 60 years in experimental literature and culture.
I’m sure much to his horror, Iain Sinclair has become a British cultural touchstone. I remember discovering WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS around the age of 19 and being knocked flat by the thing. You have to remember, I’ve spent most of my life living an hour from London, and half my family came from the East End, and so Sinclair’s London rites and quests spoke very directly to the mists of my history.
Iain is a British writer, documentarist, film maker, poet, flaneur, metropolitan prophet and urban shaman, keeper of lost cultures and futurologist.
The son of a Welsh GP, Iain studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past.
If you’ve read the entire LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN cycle, you’ve met Sinclair – he is Norton, the prisoner-ghost of London. His influence stretches across all the back streets of the London-adjacent writers’ work and all who look for magic in the urban ancient.
Of his later work, I would also recommend AMERICAN SMOKE, which takes him out of London, much to his benefit.
- seems that new public toilets in China make you watch ads in order to get toilet paper
- The Economist would like you to be more worried about North Korea
- How the rich and powerful plan to live forever (I am life extension curious, as anyone whose entire family dies before 65 would be)
The mancub is currently eating second lunch. He got a quarter dose of his antibiotics yesterday, so today I need a new plan to get them into him, but he’s moving around normally now and said a whole sentence or two to me today. Which was probably “where’s my second lunch, fuckface?”
OPERATIONS: New newsletter is out.
STATUS: I bought samples of five fragrances from Noted Aromas that arrived yesterday. I’m currently wearing the Havana, which has more vanilla than I was expecting, and has an almost peppermint hit when first sprayed – you have to wait for the dry-down to get the other notes. The Berlin, which I tried yesterday, is much more me, if slightly sweeter than my usual taste. I used to wear scents all the time, but stopped at some point in my 40s. I spent too much money on clothes last night. I feel like a change. 8hrs 41m sleep. Wearing the Timex today, because I have to go outside later and cut and dispose of some wisteria seed pods. Inbox 88, but a disturbing number of those are receipts.
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closedFrom HVAST. That first track is a wonderful late-night stomper. Superb percussion. I fucking love it. Zoharum often send me care packages, but I may well shell out for this one just for that first piece alone.
Comments closedLate Junction: Railway Junction
It’s “All aboard!” as Verity Sharp presents an eclectic selection of sonic odes to rail travel, 200 years on from the first ever passenger railway journey in the UK. Expect an archival adieu to the steam locomotives from Carnforth, Lancashire, echoes of a station piano recorded during a transit interlude, and a ticket inspector’s nod to the quiet solitude of the trans-European night train cabin in the form of contemporary field recordings.
A London Dreaming: Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat At 50
Late Junction: radiophonic lullabies and distorted dreams
Jennifer Lucy Allan presents your weekly dose of adventurous explorations in sound. There’ll be distorted cello sounds from Seattle, composed by Nirvana’s cello player Lori Goldston, who hopes to give her listeners room to breathe and dream. Leo Chadburn also brings a dream-like labyrinthine recollection of misty quarries, disused railway lines, and shadowy monumental factory buildings, via closed-mic spoken word, vibraphone, wine glasses and drones. Plus a sonic dedication to “Radium Girls”, female factory workers exposed to radioactive luminous paint, courtesy of Phew, Dieter Moebius and Erika Kobayashi, composed in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011.
What Roland Allen, author of the excellent THE NOTEBOOK, uses.
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TODAY:
- ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER to open in the US around $21m, which, given its budget, seems not ideal
- Genndy Tartakovsky leaks footage of his next film to try and get backing
- new Meta smart glasses apparently not awful
The mancub slept in his usual spot last night, has apparently eaten today, but is now back in his hideyhole under the bedroom sofa, because he knows in his evil little soul that today is the day I have to try and give him antibiotics. He informed me yesterday that I am permitted to feed him but we are no longer friends and I should no longer look directly at his royal personage.
OPERATIONS: Given I have to give pills to a small Tasmanian Devil twice today, I don’t fancy my chances for producing much material or keeping all my fingers.
STATUS: 7hrs 12m sleep, which is not an improvement. Short term memory still not working. I’ve put the Maven watch on today, as I don’t need to be across comms quite so much now everyone’s home for a bit.
READING: HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Bloomberg Daybreak Weekend podcast right at this moment.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
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