a writer's notebook
Arrow Video were having a sale. Had my eye on these ever since I read Ian Penman’s Fassbinder book, and decided I couldn’t leave them behind at the sale price. And I like giving my money directly to places like Arrow and Second Run.
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Research.
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Just logging this. Left it in my basket and bought by accident, when I meant to move it to my lists in case it got cheaper. Ah well. Sometimes I’m just too cheap about myself: as has been pointed out to me, I’ll spend a couple of hundred on someone else without thinking and won’t spend more than four quid on my dinner. Fifteen quid on this thing I’ve coveted for a few years isn’t so bad. Notes on it once I get time and space.
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🌐 Paul Kagame isn’t going anywhere
📡 NASA cans lunar rover after spending $450 million building it
OPERATIONS: Sunday’s newsletter is already written and scheduled, but I need to build stuff into the 28th and Aug 4th editions today. Across PROJECT BORLEY, UNCODENAMED SIDE PROJECT and UNCODENAMED COMMISSIONED SCRIPT I AM LATE ON. Got the Canon Selphy working again for more and better printing, more paper and ink ordered. Tonight is notebook and the Rabbit for research (they thought people would use it to order Ubers, I am currently using it to calculate distances between exoplanets and travel times at multiples and fractions of lightspeed)
STATUS: 8hrs 31mins sleep. Inbox 86. I’ll handle email after 5 unless it’s urgent. Apps will get me faster.
READING: finishing, finally, THE BLACK CIRCLE, Jeff Love (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Le Jardin – d’été S2E2 podcast
LAST WATCHED: THE CONTRAPTION (short film)
STUCK IN MY HEAD FOR NO REASON:
WORD OF THE DAY: ENERGOLOGY: “the division of philosophy into three basic elements—ontology, phenomenology, and what Kojève refers to as “energology.” wtf that even mean geezer
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. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.
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Six quid on Amazon. Originally intended as a tv pilot for ABC, who rejected it – more material was shot and it was released to some acclaim.
The American-French co-production was originally conceived as a television pilot, and a large portion of the film was shot in 1999 with Lynch’s plan to keep it open-ended for a potential series. After viewing Lynch’s cut, however, television executives rejected it. Lynch then provided an ending to the project, making it a feature film. The half-pilot, half-feature result, along with Lynch’s characteristic surrealist style, has left the general meaning of the film’s events open to interpretation. Lynch has declined to offer an explanation of his intentions for the narrative, leaving audiences, critics, and cast members to speculate on what transpires. He gave the film the tagline “A love story in the city of dreams”.
I’ve only seen it once, but I wasn’t going to leave it behind at that price. Goes next to INLAND EMPIRE and TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN on the shelf.
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I watched this on MUBI last year, but it inevitably got cycled off that service. Last week it showed up for a fiver on Amazon UK (ten bucks on Amazon US), so I decided to get a copy to keep. The writer, John Logan, does an intelligent job of cutting and combining characters and dialogue, which has the effect of adding pace and clarity and gives Brian Cox a lot more to do. He’s in full twinkly charm mode as a Roman politician, and has one of my favourite lines of Shakespeare, which he delivers with a perfect dose of weary acid: “More of your conversation would infect my brain.”
Gerard Butler was the big surprise for me here: doing some research afterwards, it turns out he started as a well-regarded Shakespearian actor.
There’s a superb choice here: exposition and reports are taken from actors in the text and given to the British newsreader and journalist Jon Snow, in the context of television news programming. It works perfectly.
If there’s a loss here, it’s that Jessica Chastain isn’t given enough: it may work for the story that she’s dominated by all the giants looming about her, not least the formidable Vanessa Redgrave, but, since we know Chastain isn’t without talent, she seems somewhat wasted.
It’s a very well made film, and it makes me wonder why Fiennes hasn’t directed more: it’s cleverly made, and stands up strongly beside McKellen’s RICHARD III and Stewart’s MACBETH.
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🌐 TODAY IS 24jun24
📡 VOICES, LIGHTNING
Some 1,000 years ago, a small band of Polynesians sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific to settle one of the world’s most isolated places—a small, previously uninhabited island they named Rapa Nui. There, they erected hundreds of “moai,” or gigantic stone statues that now famously stand as emblems of a vanished civilization.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Eventually, their numbers ballooned to unsustainable levels; they chopped down all the trees, killed off the seabirds, exhausted the soils and in the end, ruined their environment.
Their population and civilization collapsed, with just a few thousand people remaining when Europeans found the island in 1722 and called it Easter Island. At least that is the longtime story, told in academic studies and popular books like Jared Diamond’s 2005 “Collapse.”
A new study challenges this narrative of ecocide, saying that Rapa Nui’s population never spiraled to unsustainable levels. Instead, the settlers found ways to cope with the island’s severe limits, and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.
Very unusually among the virtuoso composer-pianists of the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan spent much of his life as an apparent recluse.
He shunned the concert platform in favour of keeping his own company, reading, studying and creating some of the most spectacularly demanding piano music ever written.
Choosing a life like this meant that rumours flourished about him during his lifetime, as they have ever since. For instance, the story that he died when reaching for a volume at the top of one of his bookshelves, which then toppled forwards and crushed him, is now known to be a fabrication.
To see the quick corruption of the revolutionary minds and the ease with which the general population accepted conformism as the way to go through the life, it was an interesting experience which shaped my feelings about reality, when I’m thinking about history, and the sociological and psychological mechanisms of people and societies.
“One of them was called Cone of Variable Volume. It was very simple, just an exploratory film in which I tested the idea of a circle that would change its volume, by expansion and contraction. It was at four different speeds, from frenetic to so slow you could barely see it moving. To my surprise, I realised that it was doing something I had never noticed before. It was quite obviously breathing.”
🌐 TODAY IS 19jun24
📡 PEACE, NITRATE AND WARP FLUID
Nitrate film stopped being used in the early 1950s. What had once been the industry standard was replaced by a variety of “safety” film stocks, so named because they, unlike their predecessor, were not prone to spontaneous combustion into inextinguishable fire. A festival dedicated to the projection of nitrate film will inevitably hit a historical limit. Every year at the Nitrate Picture Show, hosted by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the prints get older and more brittle. At some not-too-distant point in the future, it will become impossible to run the festival at all.
I liked this bon mot from later on in the piece:
In his opening remarks, Festival Director Peter Bagrov quipped that an “esteemed colleague” likened the festival to “spoiled billionaires eating extinct animals.”
Warp drives could generate gravitational waves. This is a current area of research for me, and there’s all kinds of good stuff in the piece.
“From the perspective of simulating the warp drive dynamically, the key challenge is stability,” the authors explain. Equations show that the Alcubierre Drive can initiate a warp bubble using the Einstein Equation, but no known equations can sustain it.
“There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time. Therefore, while one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state, and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point.”
Though instability is a prime obstacle to warp drives, it’s also what could make them detectable.
After analyzing the remains of 64 ancient sacrificed individuals, most of whom were children, researchers have revealed new details about human sacrifice at the ancient Maya site of Chichén Itzá.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Published in Nature, these results show that contrary to popular belief, every one of the ritually sacrificed individuals was male. Additionally, many of them were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, evoking important themes of Mayan mythology.
These ancient genomes also show that despite European colonialism, the genetic legacy of the ancient Maya continues in today’s Indigenous people from the region.
🌐 TODAY IS TUESDAY 18jun24
📡 NOTEBOOKERY
Julian Simpson on creating in notebooks:
These notebooks may hold the key to who I was and who I am now, and if there is any substantial difference between the two. As storytellers, it is drummed into us that characters must change. Must they? Have I changed? As the star of my own movie, surely I must have some kind of an arc?
A pile of notebooks on a desk. A record of a section of my life. messages from a previous version of me, messages that, until now, I have left largely unopened…
Notebook artist Jose Naranja on Satoshi Kon.
Somewhere between dystopian and historical fiction, reality and the imaginary, dreaming and waking, sits East of Noon (2024), the second feature film by the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy. Ostensibly a film about the spirited rebellion of youth in the face of an authoritarian regime, its narrative abstraction makes it a beguiling prospect; this work, set “outside of time,” to use Elkoussy’s own words, floats in an undefined space, both temporally and geographically, yet the world it portrays is so richly detailed and specific. This contrast makes for a fascinating tension in the film—the question “Where are we?” soon gives way to “Where are we going?”
