Oceanine, Jolanda Moletta’s third album and her first for Beacon Sound, is a powerful and ethereal statement of artistic community. Expanding on her previous work, each track represents a collaboration with a different female vocalist (see list below), with the foundational elements being generated entirely by her own voice.
OPERATIONS: scripting day, converting up development notes STATUS: it turned colder, so I’m staying in READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+), THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Vol 4, Robert A Caro (UK) (US+)
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I am very much sick of people sticking -maxxing on the end of words, just like I’m sick of -punk as a suffix, but the looksmaxxer pentastack is worthy of note, the “enhancement” cocktail consisting of Adderall, dextromethorphan, pregabalin, ketamine… and an industrial solvent called BDO.
“The purpose extended beyond personal protection. These rites aimed to stabilize political authority, ward off misfortune, and neutralize perceived supernatural dangers that could undermine a king’s rule. This reflects a broader Mesopotamian worldview in which cosmic order and political stability were inseparable. A threat from witches or malevolent forces was not merely spiritual—it was a potential crisis of governance.”
HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD was gifted me to the author, for which I am very grateful because it looks very much My Shit. BLANK SPACE had conflicting reviews, but when it showed up on Kindle for 99p, I figured I may as well find out for myself.
HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, Robert Guffey (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: Crash week. By Friday night I want to have moved at least eighty pages of material out of the office. STATUS: Major reset. I’ve booked two gigs to go and see on the 16th and currently wondering where I can fit some small amounts of travel in. Inbox at 100, but a ton of those are delivery notifications READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
But despite the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 they, like most of the approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees scattered across the region, still believed they would one day regain their villages, land, businesses and property. The nakba, meaning simply ‘catastrophe’, as it became known, prompted feverish debate among the refugees and throughout the Middle East.
LISTENING: SONGDREAMING, Saadet Turkoz & Nils Wogram (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
OPERATIONS: I need to finish a piece today, but my mind seems to be wandering towards a couple of new project requests I’ve received. STATUS: 8hrs 26m sleep, finally clearing the sleep deficit. The wind is BOOMING out there. READING: finished THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+) last night, back into HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: ARMAGEDDON was on last night and I always have to sit and watch at least the start, for the camera moves. The camera is always pushing in, in that first sequence, hurtling towards the scene.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The next door neighbours are clearing their jungle of a garden and the mancub is furious.
I’ve just expired my entire RSS feed, removed some accounts, got rid of a couple of news provisions, and am gearing up for the new week, which needs to be very productive. I’m looking at a line of around 40pp of material out the door by Friday.
I was out last night at Konsztrukting Soundz 24, (almost) all musicians represented in links here at the gig page.
The first set in particular was marvellous, an improvised 25-minute vocal piece. I love these evenings so much, not least because I never know what I’m going to hear – as I told the organiser before the show, I never listen to the acts in advance online, so I come with open ears.
I may have bought a few CDs that night:
It’s slightly chilly but very bright out there today. Soon as I put this down, I’m heading out there with a list of planned tasks that I certainly will not finish. This is the way of things.
OPERATIONS: none today READING: finished THE GANG OF THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+) last night
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I have seen great minds of my acquaintance eaten by “the blockchain,” IoT, NFTs and now AI across the last fifteen years. I used to think of them as distanced, but now I think of them as gone. It seems like, when your brain gets wormed by one of these things, there’s not a path back. Reminds me a little of when people got what I always thought of as “Twitter psychosis” – typing their every waking thought into the machine, and other people ceasing to exist for them unless they were on Twitter too. I guess people do that with ChatGPT now.
I finally spent money on a proper steel watering can. I have bluebells and apple blossom, and the first hints of cherry blossom.
OPERATIONS: yesterday was mostly eaten by life admin, but I did get 400 words of material down and some thinking done. Just not enough. But there’s only so much you can do when a cat goes to sleep on either side of you. STATUS:
READING:HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+), THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+) LISTENING:SUNN O))), Sunn O)))
LAST WATCHED: Watched all five seasons of PERSON OF INTEREST, because I never did finish that show. Rewatched THE IDES OF MARCH, rewatched episodes of the unjustly cancelled FRANKIE BOYLE’S NEW WORLD ORDER: Frankie’s monologues were some of the best writing on TV at the time.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I need to get clearing up and planting in the garden, but there’s still too much to do in the office.
So coders who use AI heavily are having their brains fried, apparently. Meta’s next AI environment doesn’t work properly – apparently X’s Grok is going to need to be rebuilt from the ground up too – but Meta still plans to lay off 20% of its staff precisely because one coder who’s all in on Claude can do the work of ten coders – and get their brains fried.
Last night I read WRITING, Marguerite Duras (UK) (US+) cover to cover: the author was clearly mad as snakes by the time she wrote it, but she was still brilliant and the main section of the book is jaggedly true and coldly luminous.
A writer is an odd thing. He’s a contradiction, and he makes no sense. Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn’t speak much because it’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing. It’s impossible. It’s the opposite of the cinema, the theater, and other performances. It’s the opposite of any kind of reading. It’s the hardest of all. It’s the worst. Because a book is the unknown, it’s night, it’s closed off, and that’s that.
Accessions:
Madeline Cash’s LOST LAMBS was on Kindle sale for 99p. I also read this interview with her, where she talked about wanting to write a systems/maximalist novel, which is a form I’ve been thinking about on and off of late. It’s gotten a lot of press, so I thought I’d give it a go.
STATUS: moving more music to SD cards, to power the non-networked digital audio player.
READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
For me, reading and writing mean COLLECTING. That remains true even today. It stands in contrast to the postulate that an author creates what they write from within themselves. Following the author’s inner voice, I write sentences that come from me. What truly inflames me, however, is my discovery of THE ALREADY SAID. Amazing finds. For me, what I think inside would be too ‘repetitive’.
Leipzig, Germany-based artist Alexander Endrullat has traded traditional Intaglio printing plates for discarded laptops. His ongoing series titled Off the Grid emerged from a familiar yet annoying scenario: owning an older device that can no longer be updated, rendering it practically unusable. Endrullat’s frustration led him to a moment of impulsivity as he pushed his device through a printing press, coincidentally discovering the distinctive technique.
I’m fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and have followed for years various theories about what was in the drink that was consumed there. Ergot has often been floated as the active ingredient, but ergotism fucks people up and can easily be fatal:
The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret religious rites in ancient Greece honoring the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, and aimed to remove the fear of death. The ceremonies included days of fasting, rituals and the drinking of kykeon, a concoction associated with profound mystical experiences.
While written records list ingredients such as barley, mint and water, some scholars have proposed that the potion also contained hallucinogenic substances derived from ergot (Claviceps purpurea). Now, scientists have new experimental evidence that priestesses may have used this highly toxic fungus to create psychedelic hallucinations.
Briefly opened IG and decided that’s a bad idea. If IG is a drug, it’s a crap one. Rediscovering following the brush to some extent. From the Kluge book I’m currently reading:
Commentaries are not linear narratives. They work vertically. They are mines, catacombs. The working form of commentary is closer to the idea of collecting than to that of shaping. Closer to the poetics of the Brothers Grimm than the dramatic or novelistic form. Putting this particular form of narration to the test excites me.
Not least respect for the principle of FRAGMENTATION, respect for the particular and for the individual (and its defence against the merely generally available), speaks for attempting something like this over and over. Observing our ‘torn reality’ grants permission to the incomplete message.
To keep up with the algorithmic behemoths of the Big Five in Silicon Valley, any modest means will do.
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
Accessions:
This has been sitting in my wishlist for a while, and last night I decided to pull the trigger, because sometimes you’re just in the mood for a great writer writing about writing.
OPERATIONS: across several things today STATUS: Today’s watch is the Dan Henry, which is a strong signal that I’m going to be pretty disconnected READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING: great episode of Night Tracks
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Yesterday I wrote my newsletter and then the Beehiiv editor deleted half of it, never to be seen again, which will teach me to write directly into a web page. Everything is so fucking broken these days that even writing into a web-based word processor is like reaching into fog and fooling yourself that there’s something solid in there.
I’m not on Bluesky, I glance at X once in a blue moon, I never bothered with Threads and I can go days without even thinking about IG, but this piece by Sean Bonner made me wonder what the hell is going on out there in the fog:
…a lot of conversations on BlueSky are still about how they aren’t using X. This is a pretty common thing in the beginning of any social site, but I admit I was surprised that this far long that’s still such a common theme there. And it isn’t just X, but posting about not using a whole collection of other apps and services, and also guilting/shaming others for using any of those apps and services. People are even making block lists (more on that next) of people who use other services.
OPERATIONS: really need to crack a broken ten-page section of script today STATUS: 💀💀💀 READING:THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
Fashion writer/editor Tish Weinstock‘s newsletter is a riot.
There’s nothing like landing in LA to make you realise you’re definitely not as hot as you thought you were. In London, I rarely leave the house unless I’m going to dinner. i.e.under the cloak of darkness and wearing copious amounts of slap. And if, by some freak chance, I am out during the day, I won’t be travelling by foot, which means I’ll never be caught en plein air. But even if I was, because it’s so grey and depressing outside, I find that my wrinkles, bags and jowls tend to be miraculously, mercifully obscured. Well, not in LA, they’re not. Bathed in the golden light of the Chateau Marmont, I was reminded how old I really was: 185.
THE MEDIEVAL DRONE SOCIETY by Laura Cannell arrived and has been on repeat.
OPERATIONS: I did manage to get a foreword written for someone. But, honestly, I’m looking at that grindcore piece and thinking that’s not the worst idea. STATUS: all is plague READING:SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Ambient Daily 47 podcast LAST WATCHED: BLOODSPORT. We rarely turn off a JCVD film in this house.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
