language origin. petroglyphs

 Cormac McCarthy essay on the origin of language, The Kekulé Problem. If i read it before, i forgot it. It was linked in this excellent, yet depressing substack by Chase Woodruff on the West's petroglyphs.  

Junji Ito's The Lighthouse

 It's satisfying to see Junji Ito adapting The Lighthouse. It's only a preview of two pages of the full adaptation of the comic distributed in theaters when The Lighthouse is released July 21st. 

2012 Calvin Johnson interview

I haven't touched Love Rock Revolution since this morning, but I stumbled onto this 2012 Calvin Johnson interview (by Ian Svenonius.) Compelling. 

I've still not started Love Rock Revolution, but i might watch The Shield Around the K (2000) in a few days instead.

Moebius with David Lynch at a printing press in Paris. 2013

 

This seems from around the time David Lynch did Idem Paris. 

Idem Paris has been on Youtube this whole time, yet i've still not seen it. 

early Italo Calvino collection

review of Calvino's Last Comes the Raven.

This passage is irksome. 

Since then, he has acquired the veneer of cultish allure that I associate with authors—David Foster Wallace, John Kennedy Toole, J. D. Salinger—who are frequently name-checked on Reddit. He is clever and protean, and his metafiction has a galaxy-brain swagger.

There seems something off about shoehorning a European writer in conversation with a wealth of world literature into American disaffected white young males.  

The reviewer gives the game away when referencing Elena Ferrante. That's the other Italian writer she truly knows & obviously prefers. No need to waste that precious Yale degree on reading Buzzati, Levi, or de Maria. 

Great job, New Yorker.  

Interview with Alan Moore by Daniel Whiston. 2002

 2002 interview with Alan Moore by Daniel Whiston. 

Moore mentions Brian Eno. I need to dig deeper on any more mentions Moore has on Eno's Oblique Strategies. 

binge of indie rock label books continues

I remembered to read the last chapter of the Merge Records book this morning, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small. Arcade Fire wasn't a band that commanded my attention. The postscript that Touch & Go downsized in 2009 made me wince. I felt bad for Corey Rusk & his laid off workers. I'm not comfortable with laying that at the feet of Merge Records, although Mac & Laura admit that they should've been more communicative with old friends. 

The Butthole Surfers seeing Touch & Go sprang to mind. That hurt too. Listening to And Introducing cover Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life clouded by memories fondly of the Butthole Surfers. That was a shitty move. I wasn't a Fugazi person back then because they always seemed too dour. MacKaye's perspective made me come around. 

When Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79–'83 comes back into print, i need to snag it. It was published 2010. Copies are going for upwards of $80 now. 

I started Baumgarten's Love Rock Revolution this morning. Reading these indie rock books has been a healing salve for my long binge on reading the machinations of the CIA.  

Slow Century

 I finished an unexpectedly touching 33 1/3 book on Pavement's Wowee Zowee this morning. Despite being on a Pavement listserv in the 90s, i never much approached them as a band, only listening to their albums in isolation. The fandom actually turned me off. The precious indie boys on that time irked me. Maybe it's because i hung out with quasi-goths and traded zines with earnest DIY punks.  

Wowee Zowee is my kid's favorite Pavement record lately. I'm not clear why. He's always seemed to like more songs from Brighten the Corners, but "Rattled By the Rush" is his jam. 

David Berman popped up a couple of times in the book. He came off as more of a jerk than i expected. I've listened to more Silver Jews in recent months than any time previously, in part because of his recent death after Purple Mountains. 

I half-watched Slow Century before, but i'll watch it in earnest ASAP. 

blogging again

My kid wants me to blog again, so here we go. My intent awhile back was to put together a zine with the same energy i threw into blogging twenty years ago. I keep looking up subjects to read instead. 

40,000 year old bone from Tianyuan Man

 By sequencing the genomes of people who lived many millennia ago, scientists are starting to fill in the picture of how Asia was populated.

Woolly mammoths and horses were likely still present in the Yukon's Klondike region as recently as 9,700 years ago.

The oldest Neanderthal DNA of Central-Eastern Europe

 80,000 year old Neanderthal molar from Stajnia Cave in Poland contains DNA. 

Meteorite study suggests Earth may have been wet since it formed

Enstatite chondrite meteorites, once considered 'dry,' contain enough water to fill the oceans -- and then some. 

Why Every City Feels the Same Now

 Why Every City Feels the Same Now. Darran Anderson article. 

Ust-Kova site: 20,000 year old figurine carved from mammoth ivoy

Ancient mammoth ivory carving technology reconstructed by archaeologists. 

Fast Radio Burst predicted

Mysterious radio burst from space repeats at time astronomers predicted. "The presence of a repeating pattern could imply that the powerful bursts are linked to the orbital motion of a massive star, a neutron star or a black hole."

Solar System is Traveling through Cloud of Supernova Debris

 An international team of scientists has found interstellar iron-60, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 2.6 million years that is predominantly produced in massive stars and ejected in supernova explosions, in deep-sea sediments dating from 33,000 years ago to the present.

Possible Local Interstellar Cloud is the remains of a supernova. 

Musatils in Saudi Arabia 7,000 years old.

 Massive stone structures in Saudi Arabia may be some of oldest monuments in the world. "It is quite possible that these structures would have been visually spectacular, and perhaps quite extensively painted."Huw Groucutt. 

Few artifacts associated with them and seem distinct from the "kite" structures. Too low to be animal corrals. 

This is what Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus has bookmarked on his browser. So many on Twitter have been dunking on Malkmus for saying Chapo Trap House says obnoxious things. However, they do say obnoxious things. That's why I enjoy listening to them. It was in context of saying the fucking godawful Guardian is good that made Malkmus look like a lost cause shitlib. The rest of the interview is pretty good, although n+1 very rarely does shit for me. The Baffler is great.

Anyone who starts proclaiming their love for Smashing Pumpkins in reaction hasn't been paying attention to what our boy little Billy Corgan has been up to for many years.

impossible mission

Vice President Pence Gives NASA Five Years to Put Americans Back on the Moon—or Else. Oh, that's not hard to figure out. They're going to kill NASA. Either the Republicans will sell it off or fold it into the military. There is no plausible way that NASA can make it to the moon with its current funding.

It’s important to note that returning to the Moon will be expensive—one estimate suggested $104 billion in 2005, or almost $135 billion today. Estimates calculate that the Apollo missions cost $120 billion in today’s dollars. Congress appropriated NASA $21.5 billion, more than its $19.9 billion ask, in 2019. The president’s proposed NASA budget includes cuts to scientific programs like the WFIRST telescope and NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, but does offer over $300 million in funding for developing a lunar lander.

 This is a sad joke.