A most happy new discovery (thank you, Skyjelly): haunting, elegiac vocals over endlessly intriguing instrumental permutations. Releases in a couple of weeks but I’m presently taking a dive into their back catalog to sate me until then. So good.
Every time I go into what used to be my office to put on clothing or punch a punching bag and see all the boxes on top of the closet door on saw horses and all the boxes on the shelves and all the boxes on the floor and across I tell myself that I've got to get on with cleaning this shit up. Even get notions of how, exactly to go about doing it. But I haven't brought myself to do it yet: I only finished emptying his house a month ago and I was able to do it only by not caring about the things I put in the boxes in the name of meeting a closing deadline. To embark upon this great cleaning and organizing means that I have to care about the things I put in those boxes. And I'm not ready yet, no matter how nice it'd be to take a full swing at a punching bag.
A rare feat: a show that managed to bore me (in spite of having an excellent cast and characters that I, for the most part, enjoyed having in my life) for at least half of the far-too-long episode count and then excite me for a second season over the last few episodes, especially the last few seconds of episode ten (again: it didn't need to be that long; I forgot most of the first half of the show). But hey, Godzilla! And I love Godzilla – though my favorite part was seeing the mad Swede from HELL ON WHEELS as a straightlaced American general. Heyerdahl forever.
Experimenting with returning links to being their own weekly post (or perhaps twice-weekly, on Weds and Sat?), a hodgepodge of trailers and quotes and more. Plus it’s easier to update these at the last minute than it is trying to update the newsletter before it sends (and K said she enjoys clicking through them so there). Anyhow…
Fans Flock to Witness a Single Chord Change in John Cage’s 639-Year-Long Organ Performance | artnet
See Stunning Photos of Pompeii’s Wall Paintings and Mosaics, Now Compiled in a New Book | artnet
You may take my money now. Dan Trachtenberg To Direct New Standalone ‘Predator’ Movie ‘Badlands’ As 20th Century Expands On Universe | Deadline
Her work is amazing, modern art in quilt form: Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilter | American Age Fashion
HIGH AND LOW is my favorite Kurosawa film; I'm hopeful that this will be better than the last time Spike Lee remade the work of an Asian filmmaker: Denzel Washington & Spike Lee Reunite For High And Low Remake | Bleeding Cool
A Portfolio: Ji Zou | Juxtapoz Magazine
Just finished A RAGE IN HARLEM, and Himes has already become one of my favorite authors. Good timing, NYT: The Crime Novelist Who Was Also a Great American Novelist | NYT (paywall)
And finally, an intriguing read on the notion of embodiment and the potential for prostheses to become a mix of personal sculpture and human augmentation: Why prosthetic limbs need not look like real ones | The Economist (paywall):
And if a prosthetic need not mimic the limb it is replacing, then perhaps prosthetics could be more than just replacements? Ms Clode is an expert in the design of robotic prostheses controlled by artificial tendons. She is keen to explore the possibility of augmenting existing bodies with new capabilities, making prosthetics “a technology that could be of use to everybody, not just amputees”. To that end she has designed the “Third Thumb”, a small and robust prosthetic digit that does exactly what it says on the tin. Controlled, like Ms Knox’s vine-arm, by pressure sensors in a pair of shoes, the thumb can be used to replace a missing one. But it can also be added to an intact hand on the opposite side from its existing, biological thumb.
Much as I adored RED I was simultaneously underwhelmed and over- here: Robinson's unparalleled worldbuilding is, as ever, on full display, but the sense of discovery that made RED so irresistible was lacking, both in characters and in reading (due in part, of course, to us, character and reader, having been on Robinson's Mars for decades; a general dulling of wonder is, unfailingly, human – though I'm not sure that employing a retread of the structure of RED was the best choice). Good as it was to reunite with Maya, Coyote, Hiroko, and, most of all Sax, it felt like we didn't have much to talk about this time. Perhaps BLUE will provide a rekindling of the spark.
Frears + Winslet? Add another one to the “must-watch” list:
Didn't plan on spending much of this first morning chunk re-doing my reading page into a full-on log of each year's inputs (movies, books, comics, games), but here I am. Blame Cassavetes: SHADOWS was so brilliant I wanted to write more about it than SixWords – but in a different format from my previous postscripts; in other words, needed to separate the words from the log. Think I've found the best way to do it: yearly list which moves to archive (which is just reading until next year) at the start of the next. SHADOWS thing coming in a bit.
