5 Days Away

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Quick mid week update from me, just to clear this weeknote/draft I started a week ago before I went away.

5 Days Away

I got back from a really busy 5 days in Berlin late on Monday night fully intending to finish this weeknote yesterday, but I crashed out real hard totally exhausted all day and then dragged myself to band practice which finishes late.

Today was all catching up on correspondence, then lunch in central London, then various things this afternoon. Up early tomorrow for routine blood test in the first slot at the doctors with the nurse (which is before it opens). It’s all go.

My trip to Berlin was good, haven’t been there since 2023 so much has changed. I had loads of meetings and coffee catch ups, then hyper caffeinated I met Carly and Lil Internet from New Models IRL for the first time, recorded a #talkcore episode and enjoyed their hospitality. Also for the first time ever took the train out to Spreewald and spent the weekend in the German countryside in Brandenburg. What a beautiful part of the world. If you follow me on Instagram, when you will already know that I explored a cottage in the woods that hasn’t been touched since the GDR. Wild.

After navigating broken down trains and quite frankly public transport as unreliable as any part of the TFL network back in Berlin, I popped in and saw Mat and Holly for an hour, who were prepping / setting up for their exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art that opens this Friday, 31st October.

Its nice to be home now. It was Hectic!

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On The Blog

No posts here on the blog the last week. But nearly day posts continue over at Byenne blog!

You can feel when a world

has been tended to.

And when it hasn’t.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• BERLIN!!
• Worked a little more on Monsters in the Mirror
• Did some work on a submission for a book of abstracts that hopefully will include a game I worked on. I never want to have any entanglements with academic publishing ever again. So onerous. Yuck
• Did an interview with New Models
• Lots of walking.
• Many meetings
• Read the last section of SLOP MACHINES and made notes on what I need to say next.

Terminal Access

Aaron wrote a really good read for the New Statesman on Great Britain’s failed state.

Be under no doubt, Britain’s degraded public realm is paving the way for a Reform government. The overwhelming sense of national malaise is helping that rise, but so too is the easy lens by which Farage helps the public understand it. Rarely mentioned are things like a lack of resources and a state apparatus fragmented by the Blairite era of PFI and short-termism, and by the Cameroon fantasy of the “Big Society”, which was merely a rhetorical cloak for less protective government. They never acknowledge the dual cause of our present inertia: an ultra-liberalism that, with no real sense of national mission, co-exists alongside economic stagnation. Rather than labelling modern Britain a failure by design, they instead insist that the system has been corrupted by mendacious people.

Reading

I finished The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr. This book was really interesting and open ups the ‘concept’ of Christ as a cosmology in a passionate way. I particularly appreciated his dismantling of Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory. As someone who grew up Protestant I’ve always thought it a bizarre interpretation of what was going on. Saint Anselm of Canterbury did a great deal of psychic damage to the world 1000 years ago. There are better books about direct contact (even by Rohr himself), but his wider theological framing is very useful.

A few weeks ago I pre-ordered Whalesong by Miles Cameron on audible. Book 3 in his Arcana Imperii series and it was fantastic. A good continuation of the Marca N’baro story. One of the things i appreciate about Cameron is his technical ability as a writer. This book is built around 4 acts and a tether story that prefeces each act. They all converge together in a very satisfying way. Everything is super well paced. Even I you’re not a fan of space opera I think most sci-fi fans will like this series.

I also finished The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. He argues that fulfilling work requires confronting fears and embracing one’s dreams, and poetry is the medium for that.

Headache – Thank You for Almost Everything

I listened to Headcahe’s first album ‘The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth’ late last year, after it was recommended to me by a friend. So I haven’t been waiting 2 years for the follow up like some people.

I saved Thank You down to my phone on the day of release just before I went to Berlin and throughout the trip was waiting for a moment to give it a spin. That moment came on the SL7 bus home from Heathrow. In amongst the late night rain and late night lights, having just flown over it all on my way in, where looking out the window i’d had a ‘this is my city’ moment. Perfect soundtrack.

Headache is a spoken word project, abstract lines of poetry over 90’s style beats. The songs them selves are all personal, and confessional in a way that makes sense to the listener though ‘dream logic’. I have always been a spoken word stan, and Headache is, in my opinion, one of the best things in British music right now. Also how about the line in the song below: “All I am is whatever is not up for debate right now”

Damn.

Remember Kids:

“Drama” means problems that trigger interesting new paths in a World, that arouse its members in unexpected ways…

Emissary’s Guide to Worlding by Ian Cheng