Back To The Fields

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This week, I am going back in time. Just dropped a hundred and twenty quid on print magazines at Magculture. As you read this, I am probably drying mushrooms and filling jars with raisins and alcohol.

This edition turned out to be way too long.

In this letter:

• Notebookery and going back

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• links

• Deliberate Disconnection

• Graveyard Gallery

• difficult notes on the film DIGGER

• LTD

• Soeur L’Enfer

OPERATIONS

NOTEBOOKERY

I don’t look at too much on the internet any more - Herself keeps sending me videos and they’re all fucking AI - but I have gone down a hole of looking at how people use notebooks.

Sadly, I cannot draw, so I will never be Jeffrey Alan Love or Jose Naranja:

I also have terrible handwriting, so mine will never look like this, either:

Here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is writing things down.

There are no rules beyond “writing things down.”

I have, however, become the person with five different notebook covers containing containing something over fifteen different notebooks. Most of them are project-specific notebooks. The main driver is a passport-size leather cover containing three notebooks - one for this newsletter, one for LTD, and the “capture” notebook, which is for daily notes and catching thoughts and ideas and material. (The LTD one is about to be replaced with a blank notebook to catch magazine clippings, and the OO one is going to be swapped out for a sketchbook while I figure out a design and branding problem I currently have.) The passport size is so easy to just shove in a chore jacket and go, which makes it ideal for capture. But autumn is here and winter is doubtless on the way, which means I will go back to using my usual shoulder bag. Which fits the A5 Roterfaden nicely. The Roterfaden founder and designer wrote to me after I mentioned them here, which has made me feel terribly guilty for not having started working in it yet.

Carry paperclips or glue dots. Stick anything you want in a notebook. Things you need, things that are useful, things you like: things you want to remember. Revisit your notebooks every couple of years and see what you did back then. You’ll be surprised. You’ll also see that you did more than you thought you did. You’re always better than you think you are.

However.

I have ended up going a step further.

We are doing pencils now. 

Been years since I had pencils in rotation. How many years? I wrote DO ANYTHING in a super cheap notebook from the post office with a propelling pencil. 

(I thought about the Blackwing 602, but reading suggests it’s overrated, and the Tombow 8900, but I kind of wanted an eraser end. Also considered the Mitsubishi Uni. Yes, I did go down a pencil rabbit hole after all.)

But look at that box!

These are made out of recycled wood, and when you sharpen them they smell like forests. 

I also got a carry option; the Uni Kurutoga Advanced, an over engineered mechanical pencil that rotates the pencil core as you work to maintain the perfect point. 

What is the point of all this? For me, it’s about getting off screens and selecting tools with intention: tactile ones that are a physical and aesthetic pleasure to use. I like using a good pen. I like working on paper. I like writing notes to the future that I will discover in the archive box in a few years. Will graphite pencil marks survive years of archiving? God knows. I generally use archival quality pens.

Everything I do starts in a notebook. For me, it’s the only way to fly. And, honestly? With the internet gone dead and the digital space polluted by AI and people talking about AI all the fucking time? Paper is where I want to live now. It’s where I started, and it’s where I’ll end.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18. This week, I proofed the final files, and remain in awe of what Lordess achieved.

The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24.

ORBITAL

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

DIGGER

The film DIGGER is hard to discuss. If you’ve seen any of the discourse around it, you have a sense of why: there is a twist thirty minutes in that recontextualises everything you just saw. (Said twist is exquisitely visually set up.) There are smaller jumps throughout, and then another big twist at the three quarter mark that, again, changes everything you just saw. 

I want to talk about it for a minute without, hopefully, spoiling anything for you. 

It is not really a film about the climate crisis. It’s a film about perception and stories: who controls perception and who gets to tell the story and why. It is a film that says the conversation about the climate crisis is already over. It asks only one question: “Now what?”

The trailer had strong DR STRANGELOVE vibes. The film is about why satire is both the worst and the only response to doom. 

The problem with the film is that the first twist removes all audience investment in what’s happening. And you have to sit with that, with the tedium and frustration it invites, until the film begins to mutate again.

People were framing this as Cruise going for the Oscar, but I do not think he was. (His performance is done with his whole chest, but it’s a little over-observed, a little mannered, in places.) I think this was his “legacy” film - the thing that will be rediscovered and reappraised every few years. I think it’s the film that really, really works his acting muscles. You see him breathing like an actual out-of-shape 65 year old man. Within a five minute stretch he goes from Slim Pickens doing Peter Finch in NETWORK to minimal theatre actor. There are times where he is three different people in the same skin. John Goodman works his weight loss to Karloffian effect and Inarittu shoots him, in one scene, like he is actually IN a gothic horror film. Jesse Plemons is always good. Sandra Huller only has one scene of note, but she’s marvellous in it.

The film is stunningly pretty, and the set design is frequently astonishing. The monochrome of the “European Parliament” scene is amazing. 

It is a difficult cinema experience. By design, it turns out. Pretty sure it will be on streaming in six weeks. It says an awkward, complex thing, a little clumsily, and I’m not sure this is a culture that wants awkward complex thing in its cinemas. 

It’s a big swing. It perhaps doesn’t quite land, and the writer in me was irritated by a missed opportunity or two, and the avoidance of visual commitment to the bit that is introduced by the first twist. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the energy. 

(the film also connects with Inarittu’s BIRDMAN and BARDO in ways that suggest the closing of a thought.)

The more I think about the film, the more I find I like it. I hate to say it, but this will find its place in home viewing. Which is a shame, as the visuals belong on a big screen. But its nature, perhaps, requires some viewers to be able to sit without it without feeling trapped with it. 

DIGGER is allegedly going to lose so much money that there is concern that it will put a pause on auteur/art cinema in the mainstream for a good while.

It is, perhaps, worth arguing that patience is the “new” skill set that needs to be evolved while everyone else is still whining about having to learn “taste.” And, perhaps, that these two things do go hand in hand.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. The current format is between one and three posts a day. Like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

STATUS: the daily noon-ish roundup post

• GHOST DRIVE STATION, bits and pieces

• our impending doom and also James Ellroy

• behold an excellent meal 

• new Mia Wolff, a bunch of links, trying a new format

OTHER:

• morning computer one by one (Satan, art, Mars)

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AND FINALLY

SOEUR L’ENFER

The thing I love best about this project of Nina’s is that she’s made a video album with Dan Schaffer - a film for each track, like The The did with INFECTED in the 80s (and I probably still have that VHS tape somewhere!).

I think that next week I will be able to start one and possibly two serials here, with a couple more on the way. Always be starting something new. Start something new today. Maybe it’s just folding a couple of pieces of paper and writing something down on them. Everything starts with one line. It makes tomorrow better, and I’d like your tomorrow to be better. See you next week.

W