Me: Why does every music piece start with two to three paragraphs of obtuse setting unrelated to the album? Also me: The 8th international Cybernetics Conference in 1976 was set to take place in Namur, Belgium, home of Aldophe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone.

After 4 days of being office / house bound by the heat, happy to say we are resuming #MarloweSummer

Welcome back prime-era Slayer

What a poet

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Long been a fan of Martha Skye Murphy, one of the few musicians I feel really understands the tangle of personal and digital identity and the discerning chasms it creates. I'm sure this will be really great

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this took way too long

We’re so excited to be working on this book with @davidhering.bsky.social. It’s going to be very special 🎞️ 🎥

I get politically triggered by this weather in the afternoon, but in the morning I have the complexity of a flower, esp when this is the (10 min) commute to work

A dead duck in the reflection pool is the most lesser-known but top-tier Philip K. Dick motif I could possibly imagine

Philip Marlowe summer continues

10 years since Brexit vote. I found out ppl in my immediate family & friends voted for it. I found it weird, esp. as a clear ambassador (Erasmus year, job on continent, etc), but people have their reasons (not all racist). I tend to think who knows what a disgruntled UK in the EU would be like now.

Jfc

I think Starmer resigned because his cabinet ran out of Co-Pilot credits

Can't dispute the outcome (more people of all classes aware & interested in politics), but you do have to question the shallow interpretation that has been injected into social media and governments pandering to it. This book does a good job of explaining how we all reduced politics to a husk

As always in the run-up to a short return to London, I am devouring the best of the British Poetry Revival.

Absolutely delicious

Watching the football, work tomorrow, you know what? Fuck it, I'm gonna have an ice cream.

I'm staying in east Dulwich for a few days soon. Does anyone have any cool suggestions for things (big or small) to do / eat / visit in the area? I'm from London, so know all the stuff outside there - but that area is a blindspot. No car, one 5 year old!

Anecdotes that no longer exist as constructs: youtu.be/8epmrsZCS7U?...

No kid home, hopeless article written; free to return to the laps of the gods

Jacob van Swanenburg

Only read Machen's 'The Great God Pan' today. That short story is unreal. Utterly timeless appeal

You'd be surprised how often I hear about exciting UK bands in the like 2 or 3 Belgian music websites here. This is one, really gritty Osees esque psych from Manchester. Debut album been out since April and it mauls so fucking hard: youtu.be/UpSWu6XhdBc?...

Lost in the funhouse again

networksofny2026.bigcartel.com/product/netw... hi, did you like my book Networks of New York when it came out in 2016? you might like the updated 2026 edition which I'll be releasing in September and you can pre-order now

As I've been a Belgian for 3 or 4 years now, I am fully supporting them alongside England and boy following both teams is a speedball of hyperanxiety

Sad to learn of passing of eminent historian Carlo Ginzburg; his "The Cheese and the Worms" is one of the books that had the most impact on me as a grad student, as the writing is lively & builds insight from small, carefully observed details of the historical record en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Che...

I'm nearing my forties, it's too late for me, but somebody young and brash needs to just start a band and call it 'What Shall We Do To Pay The Rent.' and use the Walter Sickert painting of the same name as a self-titled album cover. Say you're antenatalist or something, get the streams in, LIVE!

Sometimes a dude has just got to carve out some time and read the Wiki entry for James Whistler from top to bottom. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M...

Happy 40th B'day The Queen Is Dead! Here's an oldish piece I wrote for @thequietus.com on the title track's connections/synchronicities with VU's Sister Ray, Van Morrison's Madam George and their (possible) urtext, Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn... thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

Picked this up at Housmans after a browse. Read a lot on train back. Tom McCarthy / Luke Kennard-y premise, shadowy 'research' agency. But the writing - woah. Real shades of frenetic, fragmented & incisive Savage Detectives. Not read a book that felt it was written today. Good fucking book. Buy it!

I come back to this a lot & think is it one of the great Bowie songs? It has those distinctly Bowie horns (the definitive Bowie motif?) & the collapsing fragility that ballasts the sombre depths of its refrain. & Absurdly good lyricism - intoxication as coping mechanism & check-out strategy. Sublime

Picked this up at Housmans after a browse. Read a lot on train back. Tom McCarthy / Luke Kennard-y premise, shadowy 'research' agency. But the writing - woah. Real shades of frenetic, fragmented & incisive Savage Detectives. Not read a book that felt it was written today. Good fucking book. Buy it!

I'm only 36 but I get sparks of the 'good old days' when I go to London via Lille. I park 2 minutes down the road and pay €10 for 24-hour parking. Then I get thru passport, security within 20 mins. It makes Kings X, London door to door from Ghent 2.5hours.

It's entirely suppositional, but what makes the Walter Rathenau séance in Gravity's Rainbow literature's greatest passage (for me) is I feel Pynchon changed the entire book based on it. I think that passage's power was a black hole that warped the novel around it & made one of the best books ever

Happy Sunday! Jules De Bruycker, drawing for 'En ville morte', 1906 (a dead city)

Good morning all. New Substack up. I wrote about Arthur Machen’s extraordinary The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering (1924) Machen’s London… harrysword.substack.com/p/arthur-mac...

Sometimes a man just needs to carve some time out for himself and read Orson Welles wiki page from top to bottom.

One of the more special albums to me.

Is there anything more vehemently pre-pandemic than Rick & Morty?

Did good by selling a dozen books and was about to cash-out, but then saw the second book in the Philip Marlowe series which I have been meaning to read for fifteen years since I read the first. They also had the third and the fourth. So naturally it's now #PhilipMarloweSummer

Happy to find that this recondite (and now extremely unobtainable / unaffordable) book has been archived and readable online. URL in first comment if interested.

The only reason Nick Land has any relevancy today is because his dumb as shit philosophy which has been proven wrong at every single turn is referred to in mass-shooter's equally dumb as shit manifestos they post after they've killed innocent people. Total fucking loser and built for tiktok clips

Jules De Bruycker was born in Ghent, but alongside many other Belgian artists he fled the country during WW1 to London. It was illegal to sketch on the London streets during the war due to fears of espionage, but he was given a first floor flat in Piccadilly Circus to survey & sketch from.