Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

A daily posting on living with chronic fatigue, thinking about stuff and finding interesting things on the internet.
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Notes and links from 17 Sept

Overhead view of a lawn with two rabbits munching grass on it. There’s a fenced off area at the front where the grass is longer. Scattered around are various short tunnel-type structures for the rabbits to run through. The rabbit lawn. The fenced off area at the front is growing and will be swapped with to the rear once it’s tall enough to eat.

More pottering today, though I appear to have accidentally gestated a couple of plans so I guess my brain is over the fatigue?

The first is to extend the water harvesting to the shed roof and pipe it to the existing rabbit-run roof system. This was always the plan but I was going to put this off til much later. Today I realised it would actually be quite simple and cheap, and that I have most of the bits, so am looking forward to getting that done next week.

The other plan is a potential collaboration with someone else, so I need to run it by them first and see if they’re even interested, but it might resolve a few stumbling blocks I’ve been having with writing and give me a project to focus on for the next year or so. I’d articulated it out loud to Fiona and it doesn’t seem totally stupid so fingers crossed they’re interested.

Hard parties, cheap rents and horrible flats: how 90s art and fashion redefined British culture

I try to avoid Miranda Sawyer’s skewed historicising of my 20s decade but this is a particularly egregious example and fuck it, I’ll bite. My memory, such as it is of that time, is of a load of interesting things going on that would occasionally get swooped upon by cool-hunters and ruined through over-exposure, so you had to keep digging deeper. This is not necessarily a bad thing, being pushed further into the weird to find something they couldn’t co-opt, but let’s not let those wankers write the record, please?

Of course she’s not talking about the whole of the 1990s. She’s talking about a very specific scene with very specific people whose experiences do not scale to the rest of us, so it’s clearly going to be very annoying to anyone who was producing ‘culture’ back then.

While I was stewing on this, and beginning to regret writing the above, I started thinking about my zine collection which, thanks to my putting it online for a brief period, got a tiny bit of attention. People think of zines as being cool, but the truth is most of them were not very good. They were produced by normal awkward people with limited means, most of whom hadn’t done this sort of thing before, and that’s what made them exciting and important to me. As a cultural movement they’re fascinating but as cultural items they tend to be underwhelming. Just like blogging, or digital photography, or anything that gave the means of production to the masses.

The great Scottish underground cartoonist John Miller, who is unlikely to suffer a retrospective at Tate Modern, had a line in his comics about his childhood: “the sixties never made it to Lanarkshire.” That’s not to say those years weren’t revolutionary and exciting on their own terms.

Yeah, I’m regretting writing this. What even is my point? Go read the John Miller stuff and make it worthwhile.