Fiona scavenged a bird drinking bowl thing from a skip. It’s significantly larger than the one we used to have on the garden table. May have to rethink its location.
Status:
Rest day before week with a few things scheduled in it. Not feeling too bad after the bonfire. Hoping the restorative nature of being outdoors offsets any fatigue.
Am breaking with the usual posting format for this post because the usual posting format is the wrong posting format for today.
Overnight listening:
Four in the morning rabbit-holing:
Cornish language to get same protected status as Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic > Cornish language > Brittonic languages > Breton language > Goidelic languages > Insular Celtic languages > Cumbric > Yan tan tethera
Discovering:
The other day I linked to a delightfully readable article on an art website called Corridor8. I then had a poke around said website to see what it was all about and was astonished to discover it was founded by Michael Butterworth. Michael is a British counterculture legend whose work in the 1970s within the orbits of Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard is recounted in this piece on the site, but I crossed paths with him in the 1990s when he was actively publishing comics with David Britton as Savoy Books.
I first came across one of Savoy’s Lord Horror comics in 1990, high on the back shelves of a comic shop in north London, the sort of shelves where the weird and radical would bleed into an unsuspecting world, tempting young Pete with taboo delights. Within a few years I’d come on their radar through my zine reviews and was put on the new publications mailing list, meaning I have pretty much everything they put out in that era. To say it’s strong stuff is an understatement (Britton even went to prison for obscenity) and I’d consider it the sort of culturally and historically important work that is tricksy to contextualise in the modern era. It often feels to me that the deeply transgressive nature of so much pre-millennial counterculture material means it fails to connect with the rebels and outlaws of today, and that this is a shame as so much baby is being thrown out with the nasty bathwater.
So I was delighted to see that Corridor8, while honouring the roots of its octogenarian founder, is not some throwback, nostalgia vehicle but an actively progressive, contemporary journal of art as it is practiced today, with a refreshingly young voice. I like what I’ve seen and have slapped it into my feed reader.
I’ve found a valuable thread connecting two worlds of great importance to me, and that makes me happy. It only took me 15 years to notice it, though to be fair they only started covering the Midlands last year. Long may it continue.
Reading:
- What I Know is What I Am: Jimmy Cliff (1944-2025)
- Can a 50-year-old book on Paris help repair your attention span? - yes, Georges Perec’s psychogeographic masterpiece An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris is 50 and it’s lovely to see it still inspires. (Fiona did a variation on the theme in 2019.)
- Anarchist Monopoly with Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman and Nozick.
- Minute papillon! The 285 Manifesto girlcott halts the 2026 Angoulême Festival
- Garbage Day: Your kids are watching nazislop on TikTok - dispatches from the internet I no longer want anything to do with thank you very much.
Not listening to just yet:
- The Quietus Albums of the Year 2025 - 100 albums to go through at some point.