Now

Listening

It’s all the soundtracks all the time:

Oppenheimer by Ludwig Goransson

Nagasaki: Memories of My Son by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Blade Runner 2049 by Hans Zimmer

but also:

Seven Steps to Heaven by Miles Davies. Sublime.

Reading

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot. Re-reading the first story featuring Bryan’s dimension-hopping super-agent in preparation for (finally) getting around to reading the latest.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. The life of an itinerant chef that he describes bears certain similarities to that of a freelance writer. There’s an added poignancy reading it - in an edition published in 2012 - in the knowledge that he was to take his own life in 2018.

American Flagg by Howard Chaykin. A long-overdue re-reading of Chaykin’s dense, magisterial and eerily prescient vision of a corporatised, media-soaked and hyper-sexualized future.