I try and post every week here, but things have slipped the past few weeks, just because I've been so busy with London in Bits.
I made the decision to publish three times a week: Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Of course, that means that I have to finish off the Saturday edition on Friday and then start straight into the Monday edition to get it done and scheduled by Sunday evenng (without impacting my weekend too much).
I'm enjoying it though. The mental muscle I'm using to get this done is slowly recovering the memory of how to do it, and that feels good. And I'm remembering why I used to enjoy doing this: the opportunity to bring people together around a shared thing, the chance to get to know some new, interesting people, and also to create a 'voice' for something; to slowly define the personality of this thing that's evolving. That's always interesting to watch happen.
Enough about that. What else have I done?
I started reading Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone. It's one of Wilson's novels (as opposed to his huge nonfiction output) and I picked it up after I saw Will Wiles recommend it (and it's awesome cover illustration) on Twitter. Really enjoying it so far, even though it's more of a philosophical essay that a plot-driven novel (so far).
Films watched in the past few weeks: a Talking Pictures TV special: The Night My Number Came Up from 1955 with a young Denholm Elliot. Lovely stuff. Low budget sci-fi from a few years ago: Coherence, reminded me of Primer but more middle class, a fun twisty watch though. Netflix's latest sci-fi offering, Stowaway was a little less enjoyable, although it has a good premise and great cast the story doesn't really deliver like it needs to.
Best thing I watched recently though was California Split, another George Segal film, this time directed by Robert Altman and co-starring Elliott Gould. I loved this. There's something about my personality that connects much more to Altman's style than, say, what Elaine May does with Cassavetes in Mikey and Nickey (which I talked about the other week).
Ben Thompson wrote about Taylor Swift, Spotify, Substack and NFTs in this article, which really encapsulated a lot of things for me, including:
while we used to pay for plastic discs and thought we were paying for songs (or newspapers/writing or cable/TV stars), empowering distribution over creators, today we pay with both money and attention according to the direction of creators, giving them power over everyone. If the creator decides that their NFTs are important, they will have value; if they decide their show is worthless, it will not.
Music this week is something suitably daft for a bank holiday weekend: