I read 47 books this year. This is too many. I love reading, but I do hope this won’t happen again. That said, here are the best ones (and a few I wished I’d never picked up).
Read More2020: The Year of the Book
Favourite Albums of the Pandemic Year
Spotify says I listened to 58,000 minutes of music this year, not including all those 8-hour loops of fragments from the Blade Runner soundtrack mixed with rain. Here are the 10 artists who released my favourite albums of 2020. Starting with the best…
Read MoreNeon threads woven in the stars - Grand Illusion by Blue Loop
Most tangentially linked post ever coming up: the London-based electronic artist Blue Loop has released her debut EP today. Titled Grand Illusion, it’s a 22-minute-long exploration of ambient techno, IDM, progressive electronic and found sound. Genau meins, as the Germans would say. The best (or perhaps pertinent to this website) part is this: the first track is titled By the Feet of Men, which Blue Loop composed after reading the sort-of-but-not-really-internationally-acclaimed, definitely-not-a-smash-hit dystopian novel By the Feet of Men, which I happened to write.
Quite the honour, I would say.
As for the title, Grand Illusion:
Grand Illusion takes its name from a garish billboard in the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, a terrifying depiction of humanity and our merciless colonisation of the natural world.
Poetry, man. Pure poetry.
mechanical trees.
Chart / November
This year is tearing ragged holes in my routine. I write, I stop for a day, I write again for a few days, I stop again. When I sit at the computer the words emerge as they always have done; when I’m away from the keyboard my mind is blank, devoid of any real-world impulses or energy or cues that I can latch on to and gain motivation from and build in to whatever world it is I’m trying to give a veneer of authenticity. I’m reading more than ever, but it doesn’t have the same effect as overhearing a conversation in a bar, pressing my face up against new situations and cultures or listening to other people spin their own stories.
It’s a lean period for inspiration, in other words. And that barren-looking stretch through till spring doesn’t look too promising.
Book of the month: DISPATCHES by Michael Herr. "Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar." How do you top a sentence like that? It tells a mini story, sets the scene and overall tone and plays with grammar conventions, all within the space of 20 words. Essential post-Ballard, pre-Gibson proto- neo-noir New Journalism.
Cosmic music beamed from Space Radio Luxembourg:
the magic bus.