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Tag: film

morning computer horses

Himalayan art.

Herman Melville’s writing farm:

Melville’s desk is flanked by bookshelves. A fireplace behind him boasts a poker forged from a whaling harpoon. According to the docent who led us on a tour, this setup, impressive as it is, was only temporary. Melville’s eventual plan was to raze the house and build a grander structure featuring a “writing tower.”

How did Melville make use of these spaces? We can gain some insight into his daily routine from a letter he wrote to a friend during this period:

I rise at eight–thereabouts–& go to my  barn–say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast…My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire–then spread my M.S.S. on the table–take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.  At 2 1/2 p.m. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be. . . .

Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.

I think a lot of writers ask questions like, “what are the stakes here? Why should a reader care?” I don’t think I ask those right away. I just start writing and try to write something that isn’t boring and then, only later, once I’ve written four or five stories, do I get a sense that this story, for whatever reason, seems to have something more going on. When I’m writing, I’m trying to get in a flow state and trust my gut and not overthink things and discover things as I’m writing them.

ALSO:

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day

I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. My weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/. Out now: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast.

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Screener Season 2024 Begins

As a member in good standing of the Writers Guild Of America West, when awards season rolls around I get sent copy-protected editions of whatever’s up for a gong that year. This year’s first just arrived. Its a blessing, because my local cinema rarely gets anything indie and I don’t get out much anyway. Looking forward to settling in with this one.

CONNECTED:

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16sep24

Smacked awake by the cat, twice. Had to use the phone to check the time and it was blowing up with news notifications. None of which were of any interest or use to me. I didn’t even bother opening the news apps when I went outside with my coffee. Which I think of as reading the papers, although the experience no longer feels that rich. There was a time when my phone was full when I woke up, and I was thirty thousand seconds behind where I needed to be. It makes me shudder now. I sometimes miss the “social telephones” aspect of life, and I used to hear a lot of interesting stuff through them, but my god it ate so much time that I could spend farting around outside with the cat or walking around the block saying hello to the neighbours or thinking about new things.

Too many deliveries already today. Late breakfast of nuts and berries.

OPERATIONS: Completed a project last night, a two-week sprint to generate 120 pages of material. Taking a breath today – I have some plants to get in the ground — but I do need to finish breaking down a story in the notebook so it’s ready to start typing up tomorrow. A brief newsletter went out yesterday. That was a difficult one to write.
STATUS: Inbox 74. I’ll pick up email after 5pm BST.
READING: THE ORIGIN OF EMPIRE: ROME FROM THE REPUBLIC TO HADRIAN, David Potter (link)
LISTENING:


LAST WATCHED: THE TWO POPES, beautifully shot, nice touches in the sound design, but generally too thin and conventional for my tastes

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

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WEEKEND (1967)

While I was reading that Godard book, I tripped over this on a flash sale at Amazon. I haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, but I remember that long take of the traffic jam vividly. Pretty sure I watched it on Channel 4, when it ran world cinema at night. This is me catching up on my logging still. Looking forward to getting a couple of hours to sit with this and seeing how it plays to me forty years later.

WEEKEND (UK) (US+)

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Finally, The Complete Bela Tarr

I could not resist preordering this. I was never able to complete my Bela Tarr collection – some films were just impossible to find.

And now, there it is: a complete Tarr filmography, with some new remasters in there. (UK only, it seems.)

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17aug24

The first groundfallen fruit from the cape gooseberry I raised from seed. It was small, but herself and I shared it, and it was sharp but delicious. Good start to the day.

🌐

On the latter, my money says the stone is from Orkney, which was the cultural center of the British Isles at the time, and it was brought down in a years-long ritual procession. With what we now believe we know, look at the structure of Stonehenge:

England, Wales and Scotland: and, if the altar stone is from Orkney, then the central piece represents not just Scotland but Orkney itself, the heart of religiocultural activity in the region at that time. I find that wonderful.

OPERATIONS: I’m behind on probably half a dozen things, but right now I am taking great joy in writing and rewriting a project that was delayed a few years ago, and in a few days will take great joy in wiping it off my board.

Kraftwerk’s legendary Kling Klang studio was famous for containing many weird and wonderful electronic instruments, but one of the strangest was also one of the most mundane: the telephone. In order to avoid any irritating disturbances when the band were at work, it didn’t have a ringer. Occasionally, the story goes, a journalist with the rare opportunity of interviewing the band over the phone would be given a precise time to call, and at that moment one of the band, usually co-founder Ralf Hütter, would pick up the receiver. If there was no one there, he put it down again. That was it.


STATUS: Inbox 88. I’m across email, but it’s in triage mode. Apricots and pears for breakfast, and I’ve cracked the code on making very good lactose-free ice cream. The lime sorbet needed more agave syrup. Tomorrow I get her to test the rhubarb gin infused I canned on the 4th. If I get time tomorrow I’ll try making a rhubarb compote, but right now the focus is on getting pages done and then making good drinks.
READING:  I’M TRAVELLING ALONE , Samuel Bjork
LISTENING: LATE JUNCTION
LAST WATCHED: DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE: exactly what you think it is. Matthew Macfadyen appears to be having tremendous fun. TWISTERS: That was a cleverly crafted script. It’s a flyover country USA film, there are some musical tricks in the middle that make it feel like an old-style big-country movie, the last act slightly upends expectations while staying inside character traits, the romantic subplot rolls pleasantly low in the mix. It’s what I think of as a Sunday afternoon film. One hopes this is the last film where “Glen Powell’s resting smug face conceals a heart of tarnished gold” and he gets to do something else going forward.


THINKING ABOUT:

…the central tenet of his theorem – is the proposal and demonstration of a cinematically inspired method of fabricating history based on the principle of the montage of disparate phenomena in poetic imagery. “Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so,” he suggests simply, citing Robert Bresson.

Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian, Michael Witt

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.

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A Frog’s Fart

Jean-Marie Straub once wrote of the great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer: “The fact that [he] was never able to produce a film in color (he had thought about it for more than 20 years) nor his film on Christ (a profound revolt against the state and the origins of anti-Semitism) reminds us that we live in a society that is not worth a frog’s fart.”
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THE MAD FOX

I’ve only seen a bit of this film before – yes, it was on sale — but what I saw of it had an intense artificiality that seemed to prefigure a favourite of mine, TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER.

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THE VISITOR, Because It’s Insane

Also from the Arrow sale, a film I watched on VHS in the Eighties that’s stayed with me because it’s so fucking demented. John Huston as a space wizard. Franco Nero as Jesus. Satan as cosmic ghost. A cult of bald children. Documentary-style shooting followed by Seventies sci-fi paperback cover visuals. Lance Henriksen, Shelly Winters and Glenn Ford are in there somewhere. It was super cheap and I couldn’t resist.

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