WARREN ELLIS LTD

One dark summer. It’s been something of a trial here in the last week, and we probably won’t see the back of it for a while, but things have calmed enough that I can get back to work and open my notebook. Good morning.

ON DECK: scripting, listening through DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT builds and making notes, trying to clear some email, need to break ground on an outline and generally pull myself together
INBOX: 107
LISTENING: ALL’IMPROVVISO by Arpeggiata is in the CD player for a gentle start to a long day.
READING: THE FICTIONS OF BRUNO SCHULZ
LAST WATCHED: I own Bronowski’s THE ASCENT OF MAN on DVD, but it’s being rerun late nights on BBC Four and I happily rewatched two pieces of it last night.
SLEEP: 8hrs 10mins
OUTSIDE: First Image of Harmony Korine’s ‘Aggro Dr1ft,’ Shot Entirely in Infrared

SHIPPING FORECAST: Just going with the flow this week.

It is properly autumnal out there, chilly and rainy and dark.

Things are likely to be a bit chaotic here this week, as we’ve suffered a loss in our close friends circle – I may be a little slow with email for a few days.

I have an eight-page comics job that I need to get out in a single sitting today, so I’m at the desk until it’s done.

For when you become a person of a certain age who needs to get their shit together. Especially when that person often forgets to eat. Not pictured: the bag of B12 megadoses that I have put down and forgotten about.

ON DECK: Today I have to start putting the newsletter together, among other things.
INBOX: 77

SLEEP: for the first time in many years, I tracked last night’s sleep. I will not be logging that here, I don’t think! But it has an interesting metric called “restoration” -how restoring was my sleep? 92% – restless sleep. It also appears my resting heart rate has been creeping up overnights.
LISTENING: BABYLONIAN BLISS.
READING: I seem to be having trouble finding something I really want to read. I usually start my re-reading and catch-up reading projects in the autumn and winter, but I’m tempted to read 2666 again, and also Schrader’s book on cinema that has the long new foreword on Slow Cinema. Which I’ve read three or four times, but somehow always find new things in. I know I have a PDF copy of SCULPTING IN TIME somewhere that I’d like to convert for the Kindle just to have it handier at night than my print copy, but I doubt that would actually work.

There’s a certain… turning inward happening in my head right now. I may try to unpack it a bit in the newsletter.

Addition to this: I found the Fitbit Charge 5 on sale. It seems to be the state of the art. A little too watch-like for my taste, but I’m hoping there are settings I can fiddle with to make it a little less visually hot on the wrist – I don’t want to look like I wear two watches. It’s pretty water-resistant, apparently, and I’m not too worried about it getting banged up outside – the reason I don’t wear my old Apple Watch 2 while working in the garden, and why I bought a beater watch for that purpose.

Yesterday turned out to be somewhat stressful. Hoping today will be easier. Phone conference with a production company later.

ON DECK: the above, and hopefully getting some writing down in between things.
INBOX: 75
READING: ALL THE NERDS ARE DEAD, an essay I came across at the weekend. It ties a little into some recent thinking of my own, and also to the current state of popular culture – it was also noted elsewhere that there are four albums in the top ten by the same person and seven books in the top twenty by the same person at the moment. The author of the linked piece also observes:

It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation.

This is an interesting moment.

LAST WATCHED: I have a huge box set of Ingmar Bergman films that I started a few years ago but didn’t finish. I’m going to start again.

Well, we’re entering San Diego Comic Con week, which generally means nothing will happen anywhere until July 25. Nobody’s going to be reading anything, doing admin, answering email, anything. I have never liked the San Diego show, and, since my first visit in 1997, I have avoided it as much as possible. Consequently, this week has always been peaceful.

(The only time I enjoyed it was when I was contractually obliged to attend for the roll-out of RED, the film based on the graphic novella by Cully Hamner and myself. Never set foot on the actual convention floor once. I got to see how the movie people do San Diego, and it involves taking over a few floors of a hotel, riding in convoys of black cars, secure areas of the convention centre to hang out in, and secret entrances flanked by armed guards. Also having lunch with Helen Mirren, talking about Judge Dredd with Karl Urban and being surprise attacked by Bruce Willis. That was a good day.)

The garden has been wrecked by several days of high winds, and I probably need a full day just to put everything back and take up the plants that were killed by the gusts. (And the new young fox who is digging and trampling and chewing through the place.) But not today, as it’s still gusting and raining out there. I did manage to snack on a few raspberries right off the canes, though.

So today it’s back to work, so I can line up things to send as soon as the long SDCC weekend is over.

INBOX: who cares?
LISTENING: a bit of Sonnov today, while I get moving.
READING: I started reading a sample of SUPPLANTING THE POSTMODERN last night. But it turns out the book is eight years old, so maybe I need to look elsewhere for notions on the next new.