So yeah, it’s been a week since I last posted. I had a major chronic fatigue crash on the 19th, the likes of which I haven’t experienced for a long time, maybe since Christmas? It wasn’t nice and I don’t really feel the need to revisit it now but suffice to say it took a while to get over.

I’m still feel a bit on the edge of exhaustion but I appear to have fleshed out my notes about some links today, with a degree of verbosity that resembles the bursting of a festering boil of thought-juice, so something is clearly better.

John Wilson on his unlikely concrete movie

Obviously his new film looks great and I’m looking forward to it. I was struck though by his struggles to get it made, which reminded me of my own issues as an artist: the catch-22 of getting funding for something you haven’t made yet from people who want to know what you’re going to make.

I want to try, and then experiment and get lost along the way as I usually do.

I remember thinking, while putting together Arts Council applications back in the day, that my dream would be for them to just give me a lump of cash to live off while I just noodled around to see what emerged. On paper this is an outrageous way to spend public money, but it’s also how the creative process works. I never knew what I was making until I made it, and I could never retrace those steps to make something new.

That said, I did have that experience once, on a residency in Austria where I was given a studio, a thousand Euro and a month to do whatever I wanted around a theme, which would then be exhibited. When I asked what they were expecting I was told someone on this programme once drew a single line on a wall, so there wasn’t really a low-end of effort required. That was incredibly freeing and I produced work I’m still pretty proud of.

The show’s digressive style “wasn’t a shtick. This is how I think. I just think this is the right way to do things. I like essay films, I like shooting things from my perspective.”

I get the feeling Wilson was slightly protected while at HBO by people who knew he needed to be left alone to noodle. The role of protecting artists from the world is an underrated one.

As he hits 90, master minimalist Steve Reich looks back

As you’ll know I’ve been having something of a Steve Reich moment recently so I was delighted to see he’s not only still alive but comes over as a perfectly decent bloke.

A darkly funny thing happened while I was listening to his work on shuffle. Different Trains: Europe — During the war came on and I realised this is what my brain feels like. The sludgy paradiddles at the start that feel like they’re barely holding time — that’s what I do with my jaw. I find it impossible to describe this stuff so to find it realised in music was mildly euphoric. I can point to it and say this, this is what it’s like inside my head!

And then I looked up Different Trains to find out more about it.

During World War II, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been traveling in Holocaust trains.

So, the piece of music that most resembles my inner brain noises is about the Holocaust.

• See also, Steve Reich at 80.

The Soviets drilled the deepest hole ever

As shown on that XKCD a while back. Say what you like about Soviet Russia, the drive to do things for the glory of Lenin certainly got results where capitalism faltered, and in this case discovered fascinating things about the earth’s crust.

To anyone who thought they knew granite, that sounded ridiculous. Granite is supposed to fracture. Hit it with enough force and it breaks into chips that a drill can carry away. But nearly 8 miles beneath the Kola Peninsula, the rock had crossed some bizarre invisible threshold. Instead of shattering, it slowly deformed. As soon as the drill bit passed, Nestrenko explained, the surrounding granite began creeping back toward the borehole, squeezing the shaft shut almost as quickly as the engineers could deepen it. Every trip to replace a worn drill bit gave the Earth another opportunity to reclaim the hole they had just created.

“It would pinch the hole closed,” Nestrenko recalled. “When we pulled the drill string back, the rock flowed inward.” The engineers had reached the limits of drilling. The rock simply no longer behaved like rock.

Moar links:

• George Mombiot: Abandoned, dismissed and gaslighted: there is no excuse for the way ME sufferers have been betrayed — Lots to take home from this characteristically comprehensive litany of problems. For me it was a reassuring read as my NHS treatment for chronic fatigue is not based on graded exercise. The chronic fatigue service in Birmingham follow the NICE guidance and while the waiting period was too long and potentially hurtful in itself, I’m grateful my GP quickly put me on the list and didn’t try any treatments that might have been damaging.
• Snow (1963) by Geoffrey Jones for British Transport Films — A delightful short film ‌(7:46) showing how railway workers dealt with the immense amount of snow the fell in 1963 to keep the railways going. The very existence of this sort of film is fascinating from today’s perspective. Why were these things made? Where were they shown? What was the rationale? I have my own ideas — something about lifting the veil on the work that went on behind the scenes giving the British consumer (not that they would have been called that then) an appreciation of what was involved in getting the trains running. And I’d imagine they would have been shown in cinemas before the main feature, or filling a gap on the BBC. The strong emphasis on the worker is interesting too, and the shot of the two men’s arms, one black, one white, working together to turn a big screw at 4:58 seems very notable given the time. Nominated for an Academy Award, no less.
• John Harris: Labour is nostalgic for two-party politics. That cosy, simple time is over – let it go — It occurred to me reading this that I’m now a swing voter. Depending on candidate, party manifesto and, let’s be honest, vibes I’m as likely to vote Green as Labour. I’ve never been a swing voter before, especially in this previously safe Labour seat. It’s oddly refreshing and not a little confusing to be this enfranchised.
• Why UK conspiracy theorists are destroying traffic scanners — A decade or so back Fi and I were involved in a bit of data privacy advocacy, helping people understand what was going on with their devices and information online. Fi went as far as to work at The Glass Room, an installation in London run by Mozilla. One thing I remember coming up was how wrong people were about what their phone was doing, specifically about recording what they were saying and then showing them ads about it. This is classic correlation does not imply causation stuff, along with a chunk of confirmation bias, and it really showed me how the most nonsensical ideas can fester in a critical thinking vacuum. If you don’t know how to understand what’s going on with the cameras sitting on the traffic lights in your neighbourhood then they might as well be “phased array electronic assault weapons”
  • The current panic is about smart TV’s listening recording conversations and while I would never buy one of those devices let alone connect it to the internet I guarantee you the dominant ideas as to what they’re doing are bullshit.
• 🎶 Ensemble Offspring - Songbirds — I’m utterly torn as to whether this album of compositions mimicking birdsong is cheesy or profound. I suspect it’s a bit of both.