Status:

My monthly-ish occupational therapy for the chronic fatigue was today. The general consensus is I’m doing pretty well at pacing and keeping to my baseline while pottering around the house. That baseline is pretty unproductive though and while productivity is a toxic concept, I do need to feel like I’m contributing something.

So the next task is to try to do more things, see if and how they harm me, regroup and then try them differently. The goals we set are to go to a cafe/bar once a week on my own and to develop the writing I’m doing here into something more packaged and “useful” rather than whatever happens to come out of my fingers that day.

The former is to get me back into the community while the latter is to get to a position where someone might pay me to work from home. Both are very much long term goals which I don’t expect to fully achieve before the year is out, but they also feel doable.

Reading:

• Ghost Town, At The Club and Britain’s summer of discontent — A history of The Specials recording their 1981 number one single and its roots in the broader ska and reggae scenes. I would have been nine and vividly remember this song being everywhere and the riots being on the telly news. The coverage was all about “youths” and it was a while before I realised a “youth” was not a term for a violent rioter and that my older cousins were “youths”.
  • ‌Dammers had noticed it while on the road with The Specials. They’d arrive in each town to find shuttered shops and barren high streets. In an interview with the NME he recalled the particularly bleak sights of Glasgow where “little old ladies were on the street selling household goods.” He put pen to paper, jotting down a few lines which might capture those scenes. “This town…” it began.
• ‘People are picking the dumbest fights’: the tortured history of America’s culture wars — Interesting new book about the US religious right targeting contemporary art in the late 80s (Mapplethorpe, Piss Christ) because it was the last bastion of queer culture in a censorious mediascape, and how that informed our current clusterfuck of nonsense. This bit is a good lesson:
  • ‌ Asked why the liberal establishment failed to counter this rising tide, Butler identifies two fatal flaws that continue to plague the Democratic party today. First, they underestimated their opponents. Just as many initially dismissed Donald Trump’s escalator descent as a clown show, the Yale-educated liberal elite of the 1980s looked at figures like Wildmon and Helms and dismissed them as “yokels”. Wildmon, for his part, relished being misunderstood and underestimated.
  • The second, and perhaps more devastating error, was the liberal fetishisation of compromise. Butler says: “It is this feeling that, if you’re attacking me, if I give you a little bit of what you want, you’ll calm down and we can work this out like reasonable people. It doesn’t work and we saw that under Obama, who would often compromise even before the fight started.
• Turning front gardens into driveways is adding to night‑time heat — This is a big issue in Birmingham, the most car-centric of the big cities. It’s also a problem in new developments which seem to need to accommodate wide roads, pavements and driveways at the expense of lawns.
• Football, England and the triumph of modernity — Ian Dunt saves me the bother of writing about football. (90% agree with this.)
• The toxic legacy of Starmerite philosemitism — This reminded me of how, should we ever visit Fi’s extended family in Ireland, I should definitely not talk about Irish politics because while I have opinions about Ireland and GB’s relationship with it, they are comparatively on the level of “oh look, the dog thinks it’s people” and should rightly be ignored. Thankfully my opinions about Ireland have no impact on anything at all because I am not Prime Minister.

Watching:

• Social Singing with Moselele ‌(9:50) — My good friends Daz and Emma talk about the ukulele group they set up 16 years ago where being able to play the ukulele is optional. (Fi was an early regular and they played our wedding.)

Music:

• Ex-Easter Island Head is a name I’ve seen around for ages, mostly in Supersonic Festival communiques and the like, but somehow had never listened to until they cropped up on a particularly stacked episode of Night Tracks. For some reason I’d assumed they were heavy sludge metal (which is fine) but they’re a really interesting kind of percussion-y minimalist drone sort of thing. I like! I like a lot!