A Sense of Doubt blog post #4109 - Know Your Tools and the Music of Danielle Dax - Music Monday for 2605.18

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4109 - Know Your Tools and the Music of Danielle Dax - Music Monday for 2605.18

I know Danielle Dax from Robert Fripp's 1981 album The League of Gentlemen, one of my favorite albums.

And the cover of the Beatles' single "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1990 which I saw on 120 Minutes on MTV (or at least I am reasonably sure of this).

But I had not followed her career.

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Danielle Dax - Wikipedia 

Danielle Dax - Inky Bloaters

Danielle Dax - Jesus Egg That Wept (FULL ALBUM)

Danielle Dax - Tomorrow Never Knows (Official Music Video)

Orbital Operations for 5 October 2025

THE WORLD SERVICE

PATIENCE

By the time you read this, if everything’s gone to plan - and there’s no reason to expect it will - the entirety of graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA should have been delivered to the upload site by the artist, if she hasn’t experienced yet another bizarre Fortean accident that has led us both to believe this book is cursed.

PROJECT BORLEY’s artist is in the last half of issue 3 - 4 is on his desk, which mean I need to get a wiggle on and produce two more scripts to stay well ahead of him. PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER is into its final pages now, I believe, PROJECT KNIFE HILL and PROJECT ROANOKE are still waiting for their artists to get free, I’m already into the projected 7500 words of contracted ebook PROJECT SODA SPRINGS (I suspect it’ll end up around 10k, like DEAD PIG COLLECTOR, and I don’t even bother mentioning all the film and tv activity - options, attachments and the like - because none of that stuff matters until it physically happens on a set or in a studio.

Patience. I was having a conversation about that with someone earlier. Things will happen, or not happen, in their own time, and there is rarely anything you can do about that. If you want to make things for a living and not go batshit - and I have to remind you that all creative industries are filled with people who went batshit - step one is to learn how to wait and let things go.

It’s among the hardest lessons to learn, but it’s the one that will save your life. Take it from someone who’s lived through a lot and nearly died a few times.

OPERATIONS

KNOW YOUR TOOLS

Actors talking about acting can be painful to listen to. But actors who have really thought in practical terms about what they do and how they do it - that’s fascinating.

Michael Caine would talk about acting on film as “surgery with a laser” as opposed to theatre acting being “surgery with a scalpel.” Film doesn’t let you be broad or take your time and you can see every little detail in that frame. Hence his famous “eye trick” - he won’t blink during a shot unless he’s trying to show nerves.

Anthony Hopkins doesn’t blink when he plays Hannibal Lector, either - but he does hold his mouth slightly open in every shot, the way a snake does.

I once saw a short documentary about the film THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, and in an interview Angela Lansbury said something brilliant. Her character, the slightly creepy grandmother, wore little spectacles. And, every now and then, Lansbury would hold her head a certain way, because she knew the lighting would catch the glass of her spectacles and hide her eyes. And when you can’t see someone’s eyes, you unconsciously stop trusting them. Therefore, Lansbury would make it so you were never quite sure about Granny, without her doing anything except tilting her head a bit.

Because she was in command of the tools. She knew what everything on a set did, she knew what a camera did, and she knew that the tiniest of movements would change everything.

And here’s musician and actor Danielle Dax, of the Thames Delta, as the werewolf girl in COMPANY OF WOLVES:

DANIELLE DAX ENTR’ACTE

And since I ended up talking about the sainted Danielle Dax, here’s a short musical interval:

Danielle Dax - Bad Miss 'M'

Daisy

07. The Spoil Factor - Jesus Egg That Wept (1984) / Danielle Dax

Danielle Dax - White Knuckle Ride

ORBITAL

SOCIAL MEDIA WINTER CONTINUES, ALMOST EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

I’ve seen this quoted in a few places - it’s a piece on the FT that I don’t have access to because I’m too cheap to spring for the FT, but this is the bit, this time on Marginal Revolution:

It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus. Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users — teens and 20-somethings… Additional data from GWI trace the shift. The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Meanwhile, reflexively opening the apps to fill up spare time has risen, reflecting a broader pernicious shift from mindful to mindless browsing.

There is, of course, one notable exception to this global trend. America.

Recently: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM., THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY with AJ Brady

One More Won’t Hurt

There’s nowhere to stand in this country that doesn’t have twelve feet of human bones under it. Every day we're walking on nine hundred thousand years of buried bodies.

These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2605.18 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3973 days ago & DAD = 627 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.