January Newsletter LungA School

Read the LungA School January newsletter and subscribe for news from the fjord 🏔

lunga.beehiiv.com/p/january-ne...

Amazing

Plug me straight in to this

Wow!

Gonna spend this morning watching my phone battery run itself into the ground and then hide the phone for 2026

I stood up to get off a bus in South London in the late '90s, whereapon a stranger took hold of my hand before realising that I was not the person, wearing a very similar coat, standing behind me. After a protracted moment of silent mutual confusion, we all left the bus as if nothing had occurred.

As soon as i realised as socially awkward expat kid that rpgs and rpg-adjacent wargames like Warhammer were >90% preparation and <10% actual playtime I was in.

My daughter has friends around, all speaking a language I do not understand. I wait for them to leave and then walk through the debris: torn bank notes, a smouldering flag, the head of a crow sown to the body of a seal, a half drunk goblet of human tears.

A comments book response to a group art exhibition that I curated when I lived in the UK. The response read: "The worst exhibition I have ever seen. Ugly and stupid." I googled their name, and they were 80 years old. Which, I guess, is likely to be a lot of exhibitions.

My 6yo has announced that she wishes to be vegetarian, which makes me immensely proud for two reasons. Firstly, her argument is about not causing animals suffering, and secondly, her announcement came the precise moment we serve up a very meat-heavy Estonia Christmas dinner. So... a punk vegetarian.

AI sloppery has ruined our tradition of photoshopping our family christmas cards. We are now thinking we might start having to add a disclaimer.

Austin (of the Flat Earth Film Festival) has made this wonderful film about Seyðisfjörður for Le Guess Who? 🤍

It lives!

Tidying up the house, I found a 3 CD boxed set of Gregorian chants. It is suddenly the early '90s again. I feel the need to source some random joss sticks, a ghutrah, and some bell-bottomed jeans ragged at the hem.

Dammit there is always something important I forget to put in the news letter.

When I wrote my PhD and when I wrote books and also other things besides, I would add the word 'BANANAS' into any place that I knew I would need to go back and check before publication. The ol' Ctrl+f BANANAS find. But it always made me want to write something about bananas someday.

A panel:

(School of the Commons @schoolofcommons.bsky.social / LungA School @lungaschool.bsky.social / Strother School of Radical Attention @schoolofattention.bsky.social / NØ SCHOOL NEVERS / School of Machines @schoolofma.bsky.social)

Here are some links - CRiSAP on Resonance: extra.resonance.fm/series/liste... - and the FEFF: flatearthcinema.club

Hi fans. I've something playing on Resonance Extra today just before 2pm UK time as part of CRiSAP's 'a mixtape to the future'. (I've also a film opening today's programme at the Flat Earth Film Festival, but if you're not in Seyðisfjörður then: 💀, so forget it) Let's all have a great day, right?

I have stacked up a series of dominios running into 2026... write a text that becomes a journal article that becomes a workshop that becomes an exhibition... but it only one of these were to fail ⚰️

I was using it recently and found this in both the UK and in Copenhagen. Buses that didn't exist (and had never existed) and directions that took me to the wrong place. Something has fallen off.

Hi, cyberfriends. So the 'my little buttercup' song from The Three Amigos just sprang unbidden into my waking mind direct from the id, and now I wanna watch that film. But I'm scared because I haven't seen it since the '80s. Is it... okay?

Watering the heather with our breath and sweat (from the dehumidifier)

Starting soon x

Joking aside, this particular family is closely tied up with some heavy and complicated feelings that my mother holds (and to some extend i do to) about that time in my family's life, crossing, as it does, the invasion and its immediate aftermath. So. 8 out of 10 spookies.

Now, here's the thing. He died two days ago. His ghost is not visiting me in my dream. So I'm either psychicly linked to my mother (possibly), or I'm psychicly linked to my email inbox (oh).

Awoke from a dream in which I was trying to recognise a man staring at me from a military-style parade and wearing my beloved Kuwaiti fawra bisht. "That's mine! How did he get hold of it?" When I wake up, I get an email from my mother that a family friend from Kuwait, a soldier, has died.

Also, while I have you here on the subject of technology, contact lenses should be embedded with the tech from key rings that whilstle back, so when I drop one trying to put it in I don't spend twenty minutes searching with two differently-focused eyes only to then find it stuck to my belly.

Seeing an artist being described in marketing by an LLM is a tragedy. Like, say something. Anything. Don't be afraid. Say nothing at all. Anything is better than running them through a generator. Art practice descriptor clichés are off-putting enough without them having never even touched flesh.

Spent the day with the LungA School talking together about the art they were making, and it's always such a damn treat. Being around people being creative, artists making art, is such an intensity.