Nice purple sky last night.
Status:
Still not quite up to snuff today. Thought I might be good to do some work but nope, somethings off. Got the tinnitus warnings and the mild brain fog warning me to keep things light. Looks like the recovery from last Friday’s workshop is a full week.
After posting last night I watched Breathless, the Goddard film that Richard Linklater has made a film about the making of and which I realised I’d not seen. In fact, other than Jules et Jim and Weekend, I haven’t seen a lot of the French New Wave, which is something I should probably rectify.
Afterwards I did the Wikipedia deep dive, as I do, and my jaw dropped at the horrors Jean Seberg experienced over her short life. For supporting civil rights groups including the Black Panthers she was subjected the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme to a campaign of harassment and defamation that ultimately led to her miscarriage and suicide.
It reminded me of how in the 80s, when I was growing up, there was this general sense that the FBI were the baddies and how curious and confusing it was that, as we moved into the 90s, Clarice Starling, Dale Cooper, Johnny Utah and Mulder and Scully were portrayed as good-guy FBI agents. I’ve never looked into it but I wonder if, as J Edgar Hoover’s legacy faded, there was a concerted effort by the agency to clean up their image in popular culture. Or maybe I was just coming to the age where I noticed this sort of thing.
Overnight listening:
- In Our Time: A Christmas Carol - I’m methodically working through the archive so this coming up now is just a nice coincidence.
Reading:
- Land War or Self-Terrorism? Trump’s likely next step - by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny.
- Bournville Radio Sailing and Model Boat Club Boathouse and associated concrete boating pond - just got listed status. I spent some nice times photographing trees around here in the 2000s. Never seen inside the boathouse though.
- Gnome #2 - Weird Walk’s new “hand picked digest from the weird margins” is shaping up nicely.
- Adam Greenfield’s Dispatch - “What I’m going to do … is identify some small-scale cultural projects I profoundly admire, and ask of each one of them: in what dimension did they achieve something I would have liked to, and for whatever reason haven’t (yet) been able to?" Good brain food.
- Aging out of fucks: the neuroscience of why you suddenly can’t pretend anymore - an interesting companion to why autism/ADHD diagnoses spike in middle age.
Watching:
- Oatmeal Stout - short film about Gordon Hush, a bottle hunter who digs in Victorian rubbish dumps. via
- Dodge & Burn - by the same filmmaker as above.
- Photographing the Andromeda galaxy for 10 seconds vs 10 hours