Found some hose.

Status:

Sister came over for an overdue catch up, which was nice. Afterwards I had a nap, but beforehand thought I’d do one of the 20 minute meditation recordings. Turns out they don’t really work when you’re tired and are not for getting off to sleep. Kinda obvious in hindsight.

While I failed to meditate my mind got to thinking about the “sensations” the guy in the recording wanted me to notice around my body and how they weren’t really real but more abstractions of the state of my body, communicated through electrical impulses. A portrait sketched by an unreliable narrator, as it were. And at that point I realised I should probably meditate when I’m more awake.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Mariana Trench - when I said yesterday I was giving up on IOT I obviously didn’t mean the new Misha Glenny ones, ersatz as they might still feel. This one taught me that the Pacific Ocean is shrinking as the Atlantic expands. Presumably the Americas will eventually crash into East Asia?

Music:

• Diamond Grove by Weirs - I thought this was Godspeed You! Black Emperor when track 3 cropped up on Night Tracks and while it does have strong similarities, the rest of the album is quite varied. I like this description from Pitchfork: “gently dismantles old ballads, standards, and hymns and strews the parts across their three-legged workbench to see what they can find.”

Reading:

• Interview with Amanda Seyfried and Mona Fastvold about The Testament of Ann Lee - I’ve admired Seyfried’s work since Mean Girls and this film, from the co-writer of The Brutalist, looks quite special.
• Ian Dunt: Breaking Trump - fascinating to see the playground bully back down over Greenland and it be reported as a masterful strategic negotiation.
• Lee Miller: fashion in times of shortage - Miller’s work for Vogue during WWII is more interesting than you might think.
• Did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove? - clickbait-y headline but I like how debates about artistic “originality”, which mostly served to boost collector value, are coming around to the fact the artists just like to talk and share ideas.

Watching:

• Let it go! sung in the original Klingon 2:51
• Timber framed barn part 37: Milling in the snow and starting the floor 51.55

Telly:

• Steal - time for some proper nonsense.
• Dead Ringers - five stars, no notes.