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:
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Fantastic video essay on Steven Spielberg's MUNICH, which I haven't seen since the first watch when it originally came out. Definitely due for a rewatch if for nothing else but the truly unparalleled masterful camera work alone.
Spent a full day assembling Ikea furniture and another full day breaking down all the boxes. I really hope it's the last time I crack open an Ikea box ever again as I am somewhat traumatized by the sight of anything Ikea after all the relocations made in the U.S. and the obligatory Ikea visits that would soon follow.
Though, realistically, I will soon have more Ikea in my immediate future; they somehow discovered on the day of delivery that certain items were out of stock. Items relating to some of the stuff that was actually delivered. Like say, the armchair's cushioning. I now have the frame of a chair assembled in the studio, completely unusable as a chair until its cushioning is restocked towards the end of the month, yay.
Alas, the dream of kicking back on a reading chair will have to wait for a while. Speaking of reading, I moved on to Tochi Onyebuchi's GOLIATH after dropping Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS. Paul Graham Raven shared an article by Alan Jacobs with me that perfectly summarizes my feelings about the book (before even finishing it), and I suspect those same feelings are likely to be carried forward into the remainder of Banks' “Culture Novels” were I to embark on diving into them, which I won't. I think I'm good. Unless new knowledge or insight is attained in the process of experiencing a supposedly entertaining piece of fiction, it actually isn't all that entertaining imho.
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Season 3 of SILO ended with the media equivalent of being blue-balled.
Got around to watching PROJECT HAIL MARY with my significant other for the first time, and we might as well have put on a Disney cartoon.
Halfway through Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS, and it's fun and entertaining enough but I'm honestly a little surprised it's talked about as some great touchstone of sociocultural commentary and forward-thinking ideas. But perhaps I ought to wait until I finish it before jumping to any conclusions.
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Someone at the conference took a jab at TRANSCENDENCE, a film I had never heard of and thus decided to watch despite its horrendous ratings.
I quite enjoyed it! It does falter terribly in the third act, but its first half is pretty darn good. It is almost certainly every delusional techno-optimist's wet dream; It isn't hard to picture our feudal tech overlords frothing at the mouth through most of it (it's even got a 2-second cameo of Musk). But, there is something there.
In other news, Xi Jinping landed in Egypt yesterday, a visit that was much publicized and can likely be taken as a clue of what's to come. Interesting times.
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One of the great things about attending scholarly conferences—aside from all the really smart people you meet—is the treasure trove of book recommendations you get. Now adding to my tbr pile:
- GOLIATH — by Tochi Onyebuchi
- GRACE — by Barbara Boswell
- MUTE COMPULSION: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital — by Soren Mau
- MORE AND MORE AND MORE: An All-Consuming History of Energy — by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
That last one, I cannot even count the number of times it was mentioned or cited.
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Mark Millar interviewing Traves Charest is so great.
Downloaded Ian M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS on kindle for my travel reading, which I have embarrassingly yet to read. Even more embarrassing is that I haven't read any of The Culture novels, but they've been coming up enough in conversations for the past few years that it is high time.
Been a minute since I busted out the kindle, after having amassed a number of Arab-language paper books at the Cairo Book Fair earlier in the year. Last thing I read on the kindle was Walter Mosley's ARCHIBALD LAWLESS: ANARCHIST AT LARGE, which I really really loved.
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Koshary's kittens have all scurried off to explore the world, save for Tiger, who has decided to make the garden his domain. Curious, because he was the most avoidant of the lot. Now all of a sudden he's become an immensely affectionate little slut.
Amsterdam-based graphic designer Hans Gremmen has created over 400 books. While making these books, a miscellaneous pile kept growing in his studio: notes, sketches, photos, printed matter, screenshots, ephemera, and other breadcrumbs. ‘In Between’ is an attempt to deconstruct and re-organise this pile. The publication is a scrapbook about a hybrid design practice, but also a plea to consider failure as an option.
I would absolutely love to do something similar. I have an unruly amount of scraps, sketches, notes, process stuff, and photographs that I can absolutely see packaged and preserved in a similar way. Perhaps not in one big phonebook of a publication, but maybe an ongoing zine of sorts. A strange and regular rag that collects this stuff would absolutely work, given that such typically discarded material is likely to continue being a byproduct of the kind of work I do. Problem with that format is that it wouldn't sit on the shelf very well. But if each unit was in the hundred-page-range, you can give it a spine and make it work. A print-on-demand model might be a good option for this sort of thing.
Still, just the time it would take to gather this stuff and package it into a coherent and decent-enough design sounds like enough of a daunting sinkhole that I'm not sure I have the time for.
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There's a bit in Robert Rodriguez's interview with Quentin Tarantino where Tarantino admits to being affected by how much of a commercial flop GRINDHOUSE turned out to be, and goes on to laugh about how Rodriguez doubled down and proceeded to come out with MACHETE and MACHETE KILLS.
Despite publication difficulties faced by THE SOLAR GRID, there's a part of me that would love to follow the Rodriquez method and double down and go on to make a series of short graphic novellas set in the world of THE SOLAR GRID anyway. Because you gotta admit, that would be kinda badass.
And if that doesn't shake away the whole “street-artist of the Egyptian revolution” thing that's become so intertwined with my reputation, I'm not exactly sure what else would.
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The world's first digital nomad: One Planet Journey interviews Steven K. Roberts.
Why Do Tech Bros Always Learn The Wrong Thing From Sci-fi? – Demonitzed on Youtube.
Music is a weapon – Chords and Discords on Youtube.
“Your eyes keep the world at a distance. You can look away from a horror film, you can step back from a painting, you can put down the book, or just close your eyes. But your ears can't do any of that. There's no such thing as earlids.” — Knrad, Chords and Discords.
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Dresden presentation in the can. Accounting taken care of. Laundry done. Inbox 0, RSS 0.
I can now spend the next couple of days tending to house things before boarding my flight with little worry.
From Ahmed Naji's latest:
“There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: 'Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet.'”
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