Admin For Purgatory

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I have lost two entire days this week to arranging to be a guarantor on my kid’s new rental, and let me tell you everything in the world is utterly fucking broken. It was warm, the sun was shining, and I was indoors trying to work out how to upload a shaving of my fucking liver to prove my identity and net value to a rental company that probably also handles admin for Purgatory.

In this letter:

• Relics of a dead universe

• notes

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• Hollywood haunts the world

• Thought For The Day with AJ Brady

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• Wizardly

• COLLAPSAR 2

• A playlist

THE WORLD SERVICE

RELICS OF A DEAD UNIVERSE

Headline of the week:

Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes.

I wish I’d had that when we did DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT.

OPERATIONS

NOTES

The sun is out, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and I’ve been stuck indoors all fucking week. Herself returned from her world travels with some bizarre combination of noxious infections, which meant I’ve had to lock her in the Plague Cell (our daughter’s old bedroom) for the last week, while everything else went to hell and back. A death in the family, a repeat hospitalisation in the family, having to help deal with the kid’s living situation, even my AirPods died. I now have the AirPods Pro 3, which I haven’t had the time to fully test out yet (see above), but the active noise cancelling is INSANE compared to the Pro 2. I put them in while in the living room and suddenly I couldn’t hear the TV or Herself asking me what I was doing - the outside world got sucked away. The noise cancelling is going to be fucking dangerous if you’re wearing them while walking through town.

Please enjoy my daughter’s opinion of my new passport photo:

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

ORBITAL

Author Robert Guffey sent me a copy of his new book, HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, via my literary agent David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management.

He had me at “the secret history of the world,” obviously. This appears to be extremely My Shit. Thank you, Robert Guffey!

HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD, Robert Guffey (UK) (US)

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These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ Brady. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

WIZARDLY

He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.

This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.

A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.

When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.

This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s - and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.

“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”

da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.

There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US)

PREVIOUSLY: my notes on the other da Empoli book I read, HOUR OF THE PREDATOR.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

29apr26

28apr26

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As you can see, I’ve been pretty bad at it lately.

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SERIAL

COLLAPSAR, Warren Ellis (2)

I looked in the tarnished mirror over the sink as I washed my hands.  There he is.  Erik Byron, the art curator.  Co-director of the famous Windham Gallery in London, England.  The great connectome.  The meme broker.  Hair in annoying tufts, half burned off by sleeplessness and airplane seat headrests.  Watery blue eyes, skin somewhere between white and clingfilm.  I looked terrible, frankly.  Not at all the image I like to present to the world, standing there saggy-eyed and near-translucent, wrinkle-resistant travel shirt hanging off me like a plastic bag caught on a stick.  I needed a rest.

I never got any rest.  Unless you counted being on planes.  But planes had WiFi now, which meant I was still always-on, always connected and connecting.  

I washed my hands and popped a breath mint.

Stanton was back in his studio space, pulling out a three foot high perspex cube on casters from his tall wall storage units.  "Check this out," he said, struggling the box out on to the bare wood flooring.

There was an ochre pyramid inside, on red sand.  The cube sat on a black base about six inches high.

"The atmosphere inside is just like that of Mars," Stanton said. "I got the idea from a preservation booth I saw in your British Museum once."

"Okay," I said, walking around it.  "A Martian pyramid."

"Right," he smiled.  "Like those conspiracy theories from years back. The gas tanks are in the base, and the box is airtight."  Stanton pointed out little sliding windows set into the cube.  "These are air vents.  Now look."

He went back to the storage space and rolled out a matching cube.  "I opened the vents on this one a week ago, when you confirmed you'd be here today.  See what happened."

Inside, the pyramid was rotting.  The body of the pyramid was devolving into wormy, penile extrusions.  "The material I made the pyramid out of is only stable in Martian atmosphere.  Exposed to Earth atmosphere, it starts to dissolve in really interesting ways.  I played with the material mix a lot to get this kind of breakdown.  Have a sniff."

I leaned close to one of the vents and very carefully inhaled through my nose.  I got notes of copper and soil.

"Can you smell it?  The smell of Mars rotting on Earth?"

"Marvellous," I breathed.

"It can scale up," Stanton said.  "You could put a big one of these up in front of the Windham.  "Your next festival exhibition is two weeks, right?  Open the vents on day one and it'll be all gone at the end of day fourteen."

I got down on my knees to study it.  Stanton walked around me, exulting.  "Look at the very air we breathe smashing a Martian pyramid into shit, Erik."

"Almost the gesamtkunstwerk," I said, examining the penile, faecal details of the monolith's collapse.  "Amazing."

"It's the showstopper, right?"

"No, Stanton.  It's the opening.  You're quite right.  Out front at the Windham, the first thing people see.  It's the overture."  I saw him frown at that.  'Overture' was too delicate.  "It's the cannon they fire at the start of an Ironman event, Stanton.  It's the biggest starting pistol in the world."

Oh, he liked that better.  Stanton's chest swelled.  "A cannon.  A giant art cannon.  So you'll commission it?"

I offered him my hand.  I immediately realised that was a mistake, but it was too late.  He gripped it, and turned it as we shook so that his hand was on top of mine.

Bastard, I thought, and smiled through it.

PLAYLIST

RELAY 3may26

A playlist of some of my more recent music purchases.

RELAY: 3may26

Links are visible when you hover over each track in the list. Start the first track and it will autoplay through the list.

I’m using Buy Music Club - it sits within Bandcamp’s protocol of allowing two free plays of any track on the service.

Next week: COLLIDE. Today: go get some rest. Tomorrow: nobody knows for sure what will happen, so quit worrying. See you next week.

W