🌕 018 — Whatever Happens in the Room is the Show

Hi, hello, how are you? It’s autumn and the moon is full. What more could you ask for? I have started bringing home pocketfuls of conkers and distributing them throughout my home for their well-established and indisputable spider-deterrent properties. This, of course, is Syzygy Business, your lunar-monthly newsletter miscellany comprising a bunch of unrelated things that have been on my mind. As always, if you want more structured thoughts, you can find some of those on the blog. Recent posts over there have included a new painting; a comedian we saw; a film we saw; a personal milestone. • • • I enjoyed this article in National Geographic: ‘Learning to Listen in Japan’, which is a portrait of the country’s jazz café culture. It’s reminiscent of the work of Craig Mod, and particularly his book on the same topic: Kissa by Kissa (2020). It sounds kind of ideal to me — spending a few hours in one of these warm, dimly lit rooms, listening to jazz vinyl on a top class sound system at a…