this week: art, sound, nuts and mushrooms
STARTUP
Last week's note turned into a bit of an epic, didn't it? Let's see if I can be shorter this week. I will forgo the rant building up in my head about the word "content," a word which I do not wish to hear again for quite some time. I will refer you instead to this excellent essay by Martin Scorcese on Fellini, which I re-read last night.
Curating isn’t undemocratic or “elitist,” a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you.
This week started off slow and became progressively busier. So I'm in deep work mode in the office, switching between many many tabs of research, notebooks and text files, and playing several hours of Patrick R Park kosmische on a loop. Notifications are off and four screens are working.
I don't have a particularly pleasant writer's space - we live in a small house and the office became a dumping ground for stuff that wouldn't fit anywhere else years ago - so I focus on what's in front of me. But here's a piece about five female authors and their writing spaces, and it makes me feel like even more of a goblin. That said, my early work was done in spaces even worse than this one. LAZARUS CHURCHYARD was largely written in cheap notebooks while sitting at the back table of an all-night chip shop. A pleasant surrounding is nice, sure, but what matters is on the page in front of you.
All of which has just made me think that I desperately need to reorganise my shelves instead of watching Jean-Luc Godard films in my off hours. But I'm trying to learn, and if I can learn more, I can maybe be better, and I can curate the things that inspire me for other interested parties. All things good should flow into the boulevard and all that.
SOME NICE PICTURES
Mike Hinge, via 70s Sci-Fi Art. Putting that one up for Lordess, who will be amused. It's actually a piece collected for research, as it ties right in to one of my current projects. I love that blog because it so often shows me stuff I saw as a kid and had forgotten about.
Rather struck by this image of an Aletta Jacobs piece at the Venice Biennale:
During the late 19th century, Jacobs was, for a period, the only practicing female doctor in the Netherlands, and the models she created were a part of a larger effort to explain female sexuality to the public by peering into the body and displaying what was going on in there.
I learn so much from the art blogs.
CLOWNERY, 1989, via Experimental Cinema.
This is the weekly newsletter from writer Warren Ellis, which is sent to you every Sunday. You did subscribe to it on purpose, I'm afraid. If you like it, perhaps you'd send your friends to orbitaloperations.com to get their own.
If you're interested, I recently dropped a new 10,000 word story via this newsletter. I may do it again one day.
BOOKS
TROUBLE IS WHAT I DO
I'm across a few different books this week. Mind is wandering. I'm eking out my reading of INVISIBLE CITIES, because I like to savour each small section of it. But! I did accidentally fall into a rather marvellous little book.
I can't remember when I bought it or even why, but I blearily stabbed at my Kindle around midnight on Wednesday and opened the wrong book. Said fuckit and started reading TROUBLE IS WHAT I DO by Walter Mosley. The next thing I knew, it was 2am.
“This man you’re walking up on is Leonid McGill. He’ll break half the bones in your body for business and the other half for fun.”
It appears to be the sixth of the Leonid McGill Mysteries. I actually don't mind dropping in on the middle of a series like this one, that has clearly established its own mythology. When you don't know what is referring to a previous book and what is part of the weave of the mythology that Mosley may have just invented on that page.
When chasing down capitalist criminals, I follow the money as tradition demands. But for anarchists and other political extremists, I find it useful to step outside the box. The best radical detective in the world is a man who goes by the name Archibald Lawless.
I mean, that's just a wonderful paragraph all on its own.
Also, it sent me to search, and it turns out there is in fact a Mosley novella called ARCHIBALD LAWLESS, ANARCHIST AT LARGE, which I have immediately purchased for 99p. But I digress.
Leonid McGill is pushing sixty, Black, maybe five foot six, son of a failed revolutionary, a one-time career criminal who half-crossed the tracks some time back to become a private investigator in search of his own atonement, and is possessed of the most fearsome of New York City reputations.
Mosley writes in an amused and amusing neo-hard-boiled style, but, my god, he can make it sing when he wants to:
It felt as if they’d set music free in the world and, like some invisible alien god, that music was moving us, men and women, to a higher plane.
Obviously, like everyone else in the world, I've seen DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, and, if you're mostly into comics, Mosley once curated a wonderful-looking FANTASTIC FOUR retrospective art book. It's possible that I picked this up because I had no memory of actually reading one of his books? Even though I'm fairly sure I read one in the 1990s. But holy shit I was not ready.
It's a simple setup. Ancient bluesman shows up at the office with a letter he needs delivered to someone. He wants the recipient to know about her history. It's about heritage, hard choices, love and regret. And it just flies. Crime plotting and heartbreak and eccentricity and murder, all launched into fast air that lifts you along with it before you even know it's happening. This is the definition of being lost in a book.
TROUBLE IS WHAT I DO (UK) (US)
Got more time?
KEEP READING:
A Wild Dance Through History And Insanity: THE CAULIFLOWER, Nicola Barker
Disappearing Boxes: Comics And The Permanent Edition
And, this took me a couple of days, and is another reason why this is a shorter note, but:
Blog Diet: A Starter List For Your RSS Reader (Updated Spring 2022)
I hope that's useful for a few of you.
Also, Holoportation is a great new word.
warrenellis.ltd is active Monday-Saturday. I try not to break the chain.
spektrmodule
CURRENTLY LISTENING:
Among my many rotten habits is using my Bandcamp wishlist as, basically, a "save for listening later" list. This means I end up with, as I do today. 167 records in my list. Making this worse is that I only want music (on that service) that I can buy as physical editions.
(Note: I have Amazon Music, but I find myself using it for educational purposes only. Like, right now, I'm listening through the available oeuvre of Arvo Part, teaching myself about composers I know little about.)
So I end up going through the list and often just deleting the pieces that don't come on CD. I grew up with tape cassettes. You may think they're cool. Lots of acts on Bandcamp do. I remember exactly how many beloved albums of mine were eaten by tape players. I remember the childhood day I borrowed a new tape from a schoolfriend, brought it home to play, and jolted in horror as the tape player proceeded to chew the tape up. I remember being rushed out to the record shop and the shame of my family having to spend money they really did not have to replace the tape for the schoolfriend. Fuck tapes.
Incidentally, do you have a screen like this on your phone?
Yes, Radio 3. BBC Radio 3 gets weird at night.
If you love music and sound, and don't have a whole screen just for that? Maybe think about it.
(However, note that my kid, who runs a minimalist Android phone, thinks this looks insane.)
(It's possible that even Marc Weidenbaum is looking at me like I'm nuts right now)
Radio is the sound I grew up with. My kid grew up using YouTube playlists as her radio. I've been thinking a lot about radio lately.
(The ZEN folder is for sound apps that help me with meditation. It sadly does not denote the presence of the computer from BLAKE'S SEVEN.)
Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea by Olivia Block has been getting a lot of play this week.
During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward, adopting a regular practice of listening with intention while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron I had recorded earlier.
I started playing in my studio, creating bass-driven pieces on my vintage Korg synth organ, using a very limited tonal palette.
I approached this music as the soundtrack to this speculative science fiction film, an attempt to translate my emotions.
It frequently sounds so BIG, in surges, that it's hard to conceive of it as "limited" in any way.
I also kind of want to play it over the film PHASE IV as a soundtrack.
Additionally, this chunk has got me thinking again about how we refer to "smartphones" and how the "hand terminals" of The Expanse books got upgraded in the TV adaptation and the faint absurdity of referring to these devices as "phones" at all.
And putting my music screen up there reminds me of Dial-A-Disc from my childhood, where you could dial in a number on a landline phone and listen to a record over the handset, and of course the Theatrophone, where one could dial into a venue and listen to a concert over the phone...
...I may be sundowning. Time to go.
Sometimes I toy with the idea of doing a midweek newsletter edition. Would that be insane? Eh. Probably.
Take care of yourself. Whole world is weird and so is almost everyone in it. Hold on tight. Talk soon.
-- W