One of my pet peeves of living in America was how fresh herbs were treated like gold. You'd get less than an ounce of the stuff squished into a palm-sized plastic container for 2 bucks or more. Egypt has the opposite problem. Fresh herbs are in great abundance, and they're always sold in big bunches that go bad faster than you can put to use. So today, we are oven-drying rosemary for the first time. 4-6 hours apparently on the lowest setting for best results.
Writing is going oh so swell today.
“Conan in a trenchcoat.” – May just be the best line in this Frank Miller/Rick Rubin interview.
Eyeing my reading corner aspirationally until Ikea get their shit together and restock the chair's cushioning, which they only informed me was out of stock the day of delivery. A full week after I'd originally ordered it.
Haven't even had a chance to put this part of the space to any use and Tiger has already mauled one end of the rug to shreds. Comes with the territory of being chosen by a cat, I guess. And I really do need to have that tinted glass replaced. Fall is here and the sun has already shifted to where it seldom enters the space.
Given the above situation, not much reading has been getting done (I'm not great at reading in bed), but I did manage to write 11,451 words in September. Looking to churn out much more through October. Very little drawing this month. Hopefully I'm not too rusty by the time I do return to the drawing board.
STATUS:
WORKSTREAM: Got to see proofs for issue 2 of ELON magazine, which features my collab with Dominic Boyer, and it's fantastic! The Gigacities Collective have done a really great job at creating the new culture-jamming publication for our times. I'll remember to post again once it's out and there's more information on how to get it.
The complete THE SOLAR GRID box-set can now be nabbed through Asterism.
October is already here, which I'm gonna need to dedicate almost entirely to wrapping up TIMES NEW HUMAN if I can. Quite a bit of work travel slated for November, which knowing me will disrupt any semblance of flow.
Got the strangest email the other day inviting me to be interviewed about THE SOLAR GRID for a podcast... in exchange for a fee. Didn't even realize that was a thing now.
RADAR: Great Kim Stanley Robinson interview over at the Crisis and Critique Youtube channel.
Watched SOYLENT GREEN the other night for the first time! What a great goddamn movie! Can't believe it passed me by. It must be Ganzeer-discovers-the-70s season over here.
STATUS:
Better start to the morning today: Exercise followed by a chickpea scramble, together with cottage cheese mixed with diced tomato and kalamata olives and a side of cucumber.
Freshly-minted short story shipped off to Jared Shurin for his forthcoming edited issue of ParSec. The brief he sent me, a single image, was impossible to resist:
More TIMES NEW HUMAN rewrites this morning, reserving the backend of the day for email and podcast notes.
Inbox: 17, RSS: 5.
RADAR:
THE SOLAR GRID makes The Markaz Review's The Anthropocene Book List, a handsome list of 10 very fine books that I am humbled to see my demented graphic novel share company with.
Steven Heller showcases 10 cover samples of UN SEDICESIMO, a 16-page Italian quarterly that provides a blank slate for a different artist to do whatever they want with each time. How I wish more books and graphic novel covers looked like these.
WORKSTREAM:
Today, apparently, is brain fog day. A condition I must overcome because there is much writing to be done and quite a bit of email to catch up on. Four coffees and a handful of cigarettes for breakfast did not help.
Inbox: 17, RSS: 9
STATUS:
My friends at Radix Co-op are debuting THE SOLAR GRID box-set at Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair as we speak. If in New York, swing by MoMa PS1 and check it out.
Front cover preview until I get glamor shots of the actual box in all its glory.
It has been a week of strange, slow-paced sci-fi from the 70s at the Ganzeer cinema this week for some reason:
1. WORLD ON A WIRE (1973)
Second screening for me. The first time I was probably too young and immature to pick up on what it was actually about. This time around, I was actually surprised to discover that it dives into simulation theory, the core premise of the entire film! What with simulation theory kind of being the topic du jour in 2026, the movie is way ahead of its time having been released in 1973! I was always under the impression that it was 1999's THE MATRIX that first introduced the idea in popular culture. The internet tells me that the first “formal” proposition of a computer-based simulation hypothesis was not until Oxford philosopher put it in a 2003 paper titled “Are you living in a computer simulation?”
Though German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse seems to have laid the groundwork in his 1969 book, CALCULATING SPACE, arguing that the entire universe operates like a giant computer, a slight difference to suggesting that we were in fact potentially living inside a giant computer. Philip K. Dick though certainly kicked around very close ideas in a bunch of his stories.
Albeit slow, with stunted and often times laughable performances, WORLD ON A WIRE is still worth the watch (and worth keeping in your library) for the gloriously aesthetic 70s-era ultra-modern interiors alone.
2. SILENT RUNNING (1972)
Based on the premise, I expected to be into this one more than I actually was. The ecological ethos of the film is probably more urgent and relevant now than at the time of release, but the ending is just too much of an unnecessary downer to warrant sitting through the excruciating slowness of the entire movie. Really great production design though.
3. SOLARIS (1972)
Slowness is to be expected with Andrei Tarkovsky at the helm. Not great, but again, great production design, and so different and far more philosophical than Steven Soderbergh's 2002 adaptation, which Sanislaw Lem (author of the original novel upon which both films are based) loathed, surprising of course no one. Lem was known for his scathing essays critical of the standard flare of American sci-fi (and this is in regard to novels let alone movies), often citing formulaic tropes and low-quality trash that lacked any sense of philosophical inquiry (singling Philip K. Dick as a rare exception). I should probably get around to reading more Lem soon.
OneDrive have notified me that autosyncing with my camera app will be discontinued in a couple days, so I am now scrambling to transfer all media from my phone to an external harddrive. Some 20,000 photos and videos that I have to archive in batches of 500 or so, because my newly downloaded Photosync app crashes otherwise. This will probably take me all goddamn day. Going forward though, I should be able to set it to auto-archive (and delete from phone!) on a monthly cycle without any hiccups.
Looking forward to ridding myself of the various cloud-storage services, just as I have with streaming.
This floor-lamp I ordered from Ikea (The KLÖVING) refused to adequately screw onto its damn base.
A quick look online revealed that wobbliness is indeed a common issue among buyers. I could've returned it and exchanged for a less pain-in-the-ass lamp, but who are we kidding? I wouldn't be me unless I attempted an unnecessary roundabout problem-solving idea.
Black aluminum wire to fashion a closed hook atop the lamp, and hook clips to secure a [too long] boxing-bag chain between the lamp and and a brass expansion hook-bolt drilled into the ceiling.
The chain is probably overkill, given that the lamp doesn't really weigh that much. I'll probably replace it with a sturdy enough rope of some kind.
