Went to see The Owl Service play at the Fickle Pickle last week and I may have bought quite a lot of CDs from the merch table:
OPERATIONS: Planning to get at least a dozen pages out the door today. STATUS: Fell back a bit last night, lost too much time to processing stuff on the phone. In my defense, I am in the middle of handling a lot of bank-related stuff, and I lost a lot of time yesterday dealing with banking and ordering new phones. But today needs to be better. READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+) LISTENING:EA, The Alvaret Ensemble DRINK: made herself a blood orange Negroni last night with some success. One part each blood orange gin, Campari and vermouth, several dashes orange and cinnamon bitters, blood orange soda to taste PAPERWORK: started a new notebook last night. Filled the last one in a month.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
That brain-tapping thing when you spend all night meditating on a story space, and get the penultimate solution to it about twenty minutes before bedtime. Also – and this isn’t the same for everyone, but – that rrrrreally annoying liminal point where you have everything the story wants except for the actual complete plot. Drives me bugfuck. I have a possible beginning and a possible end and nothing in between, so I’m going to be drafting story spines and checking logical progressions all bloody day. Except I’m not, because I have other scripts to write. So this will be haunting me all day.
OPERATIONS: ALL THE THINGS FFS STATUS: i have like five different deliveries scheduled for today, so no fun lunch at the deli for meeee READING:TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+)
…a notion of the divine as shadowy, dark, and absent (apophatic or negative theologies). But as Dionysius takes care to note, the divine is “dark” or “shadowy” not because it is lacking anything, but because it is superlatively beyond human comprehension. The most one can take away from this enigmatic thought is a negative knowledge, the thought of the limit of thought – or to use Lovecraft’s phrase, the thought of the “inability of the mind to correlate all its contents.”
LISTENING:
THE WILL OF TONGUES, Sarah Davachi (UK) (US+) (bandcamp)
LAST WATCHED: two episodes of season 2 of BOOKISH, which hasn’t engaged me as much as season 1 did. I admire Mark Gatiss’ writing a great deal. DRINK: dropped two shots of O’Donnell’s cherry moonshine into two glasses of cherry soda and made something cheerful
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Imagine a story where the events in our lives that happen online are never depicted or mentioned. A day would seem twelve hours long and the protagonists would spend two thirds of that time asleep.
I was gifted this Panerai Table Clock by a client a few weeks ago. I should be keeping it in its box, as it’s crazy expensive. But what’s the point in having things and not enjoying them? So it lives on my work desk, sitting on top of the little box containing a medal I was given in Ireland years ago. It’s a reminder to myself that I need to stay disconnected from the internet. Testing a site blocker on the laptop today.
Had dinner at the local haute restaurant on Friday night and it was as ever fully insane. There was a mushroom risotto with walnuts, walnut ketchup, fresh Parmesan and riced mushroom in place of the rice that was simply MAD and they made it just for us. We also got experimented on with a few dishes and god damn please keep doing that. We have been informed that we are Regulars now, and that is delightful.
I had an Idea on Saturday and realised I’d lost the day to sitting thinking about it, which was annoying, so I’ve booked myself a gig for next Saturday to make sure I leave the house. I am naturally so bad at leaving the house and I really need to.
ACCESSIONS:
MAIGRET IN VICHY, Georges Simenon (UK) (US+) was on sale, and it’s one I haven’t read.
MUD DUCK, Travis Malone (UK) (US+), because the author emailed me yesterday and since it’s currently free on Kindle (in the UK at least, I dunno about the US right now) it was easier to just grab a copy there.
Recently divorced and having drank himself to unemployment, Iain McHughes has no idea who he wants to be anymore. When his former rehab roommate offers him a second chance he hasn’t earned by way of a business opportunity he can’t afford to pass up, he loads everything he owns into his car and points it west on I-10.
Somewhere between San Antonio and Las Vegas, in the miles of nothing between the man he used to be and the man he hopes to become, mania, anxiety and a CB radio are the only tools left at his disposal that can help him rewrite his eulogy. Mysterious towers dot the countryside, phantom voices bleed through his radio, and Iain struggles to ascertain whether his mind is deteriorating or the world around him is. When Iain’s new business partner inadvertently pushes him into the middle of a dangerous business transaction, Iain must finally determine the legacy he wants to leave, and what it will cost him to leave it.
OPERATIONS: updating the boards, getting into scripting with one hand and story development with the other STATUS: slow to get started. READING:THE KILLER’S MARK, MW Craven (UK) (US+) LISTENING:THE REGYKLA VARIATIONS I-III, ASHTORETH & ONSTURICHEIT
I saw Teresa Hackel and Eiko Yamada play at the Fishermen’s Chapel last year. Turns out they recorded an entire album while they were there, FISHERMEN’S SOUVENIRS.
Adding up the numbers on the track listing, this could well be the actual performance I saw. I have had to order it from Japan, but what the hell.
My brain has been entirely empty and useless for the last ten days or so. Actually, it’s worse than that – I haven’t had a single good idea in two weeks and I keep losing things. Radical steps must be taken. Aside from messages and emails, I’ll be offline for the rest of the week.
Apple has reportedly considered… a version where the cameras can analyse the surroundings but cannot record photos or video. Such an approach could still support object recognition, navigation, Siri, calls, and music playback.
Hook that into Contacts and Calendar as well as Maps, say, and you finally have a use case for smart glasses that isn’t capturing for “content.” That is the actual assistant-with-eyes that people have been writing about for thirty-odd years. Which is why it probably won’t happen.
STATUS: heading out to a gig in London tonight. The weather can’t make up its mind as to whether it’s 28 and sunny or 21 and windy, so fuck knows what I’m going to wear READING:LOST LAMBS, Madeline Cash (UK) (US+)
The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot’s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.
A team of astronomers led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin identified the lucky dot in question: GLIMPSE-17775. By carefully analyzing the dot’s spectrum captured by Webb—the deepest spectrum to date of a little red dot—the research team has identified multiple lines of evidence, all of which support the interpretation that GLIMPSE-17775 is a supermassive black hole enveloped in a dense cocoon of partially ionized gas, a model referred to as the BH* (black hole star) scenario.
Among his many mythopoeic pronouncements, the great Sun Ra maintained that he was making music for the future. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and more than 30 years after he left the planet for the last time, his music is gaining more recognition than ever before. A recent slew of reissues, new compilations and previously unheard live recordings continues unabated. His Arkestra – under the direction of long-time member, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen since 1995 – continues to delight audiences worldwide. Just last year saw the release of two new feature-length documentaries about him. The Magic City examined his early life in Birmingham, Alabama; and the more comprehensive Sun Ra: Do The Impossible did the festival circuit before being shown on the PBS TV network this February as part of its American Masters series of artist biographies – bringing Ra’s improbable story to its widest audience yet.
For no good reason, I woke up today thinking about BIG WORLD CAFE, a music tv show that ran for… 1989. One year. Their idea was, if we can get you in by telling you New Order are playing, then we can also show you the Bhundu Boys and Erotic Dissidents and The Jungle Brothers.
Here’s Diamanda Galas playing live on Big World Cafe. Just typing big world cafe into YouTube will surface a surprising number of digitised VHS tapes of the show.
Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
READING: CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+), THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Vol 4, Robert A Caro (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Searching hard for my motivation today, because I am not particularly in my body or particularly with it. Not enough coffee in the world, everything is kind of wavy, and I really need to wipe down the boards and reset things. And also start backing things off this machine in prep for the arrival of the new one. But a musician has been sending me raws of her new music videos and maybe I’ll just sit and watch them for a while.
Received in post, a gift from the author as routed through my literary agent: A POCKETFUL OF HELLFIRE, Alan LaRue (UK) (US+)
Alan LaRue was a devoted reader of the Ken Socrates World News Organization when he was young. Like any fan, he read all the articles and books, he knew and adored the Gonzo journalism, the crazy adventures and the wild personalities. He was especially enamoured with Ken himself, the wildest and most Gonzo of them all. He had even written and sent in few fan letters full of glowing praise and insight only a truly dedicated follower would appreciate. The letters included his return address, and a joking offer of drinks on him, someday, should Ken ever find his way to Alan’s neck of the woods.
Then, after the sad collapse of the KSWNO, after its founder being missing, assumed dead for years, Ken showed up at Alan’s door, looking for those drinks, and his quiet life as a librarian and amateur pie baker was turned on its doughy little head. Humanity itself was under dire, imminent threat and, according to Ken, only they could save it.
Here’s the weird flex of the day: the cover of Charli xcx’s new record MUSIC, FASHION, FILM is a simple shot of… John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorcese. And an ashtray.
OPERATIONS: script and pitch STATUS: The weather has turned cool and rainy, and the mancub is sad and needs comforting, as he’s been living in the garden ever since the top of the summer arrived. Or, as I have long suspected, he thinks I control the weather and he figures that if he’s nice to me I’ll bring the sun back. READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) (hey, it’s a really long book) LISTENING: “Vika Hidas,” Draamakuu:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
After losing several hours yesterday to running every fix and check I could think of, I came to the sad conclusion that this laptop, a T580 from 2018, is now starting to fail and therefore must be sent to live on a farm. This machine has had its keyboard replaced twice over the years and kept on chugging, but now its chipset is dying. So I caught the end of the Lenovo May sale by a whisker and ordered a new ThinkPad. I doubt the new machine will have the durability of this faithful monster, which I will be sad to retire.
A biotech startup called Bexorg is doing something that sounds like it was ripped straight from the pages of a cyberpunk novel — or from the script of “RoboCop,” for that matter.
The company is extracting human brains just hours after their owners died and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the masses of pink mush no longer host electrical activity, most of their key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.
You’d hope that the disembodied cerebrums are most assuredly dead. But according to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.
OPERATIONS: got the new cover for a graphic novel reprint currently codenamed PROJECT WALLOPS, so we will be headed to solicits shortly. I need to get a script off the desk today and then figure out how to zero out all the fucking money I spent yesterday STATUS: I am physically de-teched until such time as the Google app that replaced the FitBit app is fixed to the point where it no longer hallucinates bicycles READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) LISTENING: a musician sent me her two new videos last night and I am playing them repeatedly today.
Annoyingly, this is just a quick logging, as I lost yesterday to trying to figure out new accounting software I’ve been told to use which doesn’t seem to want to work for me, inbox is at 160, I have three unopened packages, and I’m a few days behind on work production.
So on Saturday afternoon I went to the Jazz Centre to see blues guitarist Chris Corcoran play.
And on Saturday evening I went to Konsztrukting Soundz, which I’m going to try and note in a separate post at some point, but one of the performers was harpist Rhodri Davies:
Accessions:
Rhodri Davies was selling CDs, and I noticed the Eliane Radigue piece he and his sister played on that I discovered online in January, and grabbed his TELYN RAWN at the same time.
