I’ve been totally obsessed with the new FKA Twigs track. It’s a beautiful and emotionally affecting electronic ballad. The video by Andrew Thomas Huang is worth a look too, a mind-bending CGI confection. The director has done a few Bjork videos and here he’s pushing it to the point that it risks overwhelming such an intimate song but really it’s simply my favourite song of the year so far.
I’m a big believer in the power of human ingenuity. It makes me appreciate the wonder of renewable energy. I’m also incredulous we don’t have 100% renewables. I came across these biosolar panels that have twin functions of cleaning the air and also growing food. Britain has just gone an entire week without burning coal for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, which is a huge achievement for them and a huge indictment on Australia. We humans have unlimited problem-solving potential, we just need to apply it.
Like most of the world, I’m deeply into the final season of Game of Thrones. The Battle of Winterfell was massive as promised and the longest battle sequence ever assembled, following 55 nights of filming that exhausted everyone in the production. I really enjoyed a military deconstruction of the tactics used by the living in this battle. Including one by two military experts, one by a historian, and another by a defence writer, and yet another good tactical analysis by Wired.
Alex Bogusky is an advertising legend who mostly removed himself from the business after having an attack of conscience. He recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about how tobacco companies have used vaping and its legal grey areas to prop up smoking itself. Bogusky has the insight to see what insidious plays the old guard of tobacco companies are deploying.
The Amsterdam Light Festival brought the colour of Van Gogh to an epic scale and added movement to massive panels that let you get right inside some of Van Gogh’s famous artworks. Looks incredible.
