Stuff I’m doing.
Stuff I’m thinking about.
Stuff I’ve seen online and feel is worth sharing.
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Tegan O’Neil on Nemesis the Warlock
How do you review one of the most batshit British newsstand comics? You review it like this. Far too many great lines to quote here.
The Hallucinogeneration Game – Terence McKenna & The Shamen
I’m deep in the McKenna section of Erik Davis’s High Weirdness book and keep thinking how my main reference point to his work is a stupid pop song from 1992. I probably read this NME interview. I wonder what effect it had on me.
Feel strangely calm today, after weeks (months?) of debilitating stress. It’s sort of like, hell, if the simmering volcano is going to finally erupt and destroy everyone and everything I care about, there’s actually very little I can do about it. It’s not a particularly nice calm, but I’ll take it.
I cannot write a witty enough comment to match the astronomical level of joy this video gave me.
WW3 Illustrated is an underground anthology of leftist and radical comics that’s been published since 1979, emerging from the ass-end of 70s counterculture and DIYing through the neoliberal imperium with issue 54 just released.
The Apprentice movie is good! By far the most disturbing thing is how Roy Cohn emerges a sympathetic character. Yes, to draw comparison with Trump, his Frankenstein’s Monster, but I was not prepared to feel sorry for Roy fucking Cohn. Intrigued as to how those unaware of his history felt.
I recently read and was blown away by Burn’s latest book, Final Cut, so this extensive overview of his 40 year career was very welcome (even if I might quibble with some conclusions…).
I plan to treat myself to a copy of this once I scrape the pennies together.
Made a couple more shelf brackets. Nice to see the shape is settling into something aesthetically pleasing. Earliest one is at the back in the photos. #woodworking
I got this copy of Arthur magazine for Alan Moore’s writing and remember the Newsome piece, though I didn’t know who Davis was back then. Nice to revisit it, and a good excuse to listen to Ys again. Amazing album.
I was struck by how Henry Fonda’s performance in Fail Safe (1964) reminded me of David Lynch as Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks, and in searching around found this lovely piece about his struggles with words which I strongly related to. I love words, but they are hard.
New Cure album is good. Like, really good.
Watched two films today, the new Woman of the Hour from Anna Kendrick and the 1664 cold war thriller Fail Safe. Both cast the past as a very flawed place while making me think that if things have improved that progress is desperately fragile. Both highly recommended.
Second attempt at a shelf bracket. Less shaving with the rasp this time and flattened the shape to suit the shelf better. Probably need a couple more goes before I’m totally happy and can mass produce. #woodworking
Made my first shelf bracket. Needs refining but really happy with the results. #woodworking
Thinking about Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking. www.tate.org.uk/art/artwo…
A thoughtful meditation from Deb Chachra on what we actually need when we want stuff that minimises harm during its manufacture and eventual disposal.
And better doesn’t always mean something will last a long time. The plastic packaging in which we buy and store food might have a useful lifetime of only days or weeks, but in that time it may keep food fresher than paper, or contain leaks better than aluminum foil. Longevity isn’t the right answer for everything, and neither is thoughtless disposability.
What we really need is more ways to limit the harms of what we buy, own, and discard.
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A deep-dive into some hardcore mapping arcana. “Null Island” is not an island. It’s a term for “the coordinates of 0º latitude and 0º longitude, a location in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa where the Prime Meridian meets the Equator, hundreds of miles from any real dry land.”
Null Island is not just a silly place to think about when cartographers are bored, it is a phenomenon that repeatedly and annoyingly asserts itself in the middle of day-to-day cartographic work, often when you least expect it. Sometimes you load a new dataset into your GIS program, but the coordinates aren’t parsed correctly and they turn into all zeroes: your data is on Null Island. Or sometimes if the map projection file for your data is wrong, you’ll find a tiny scaled-down copy of your coordinates floating around Null Island. Or even worse, maybe most of your data is showing up in the right place, but only a few of your records are missing coordinates; if you don’t think to check for it, you won’t even realize that some of your data points have “taken a trip to Null Island.”
Let me try to explain with a few examples.
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Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, aka Caitlin Dewey, is doing a bunch of posts about Gamergate, that moment when for many people the internet took a sudden turn into a dark and scary place and which arguably set the tone for the next decade of misogynistic culture-war shite. This post is an introduction for those of you lucky to not be that aware of what exactly Gamergate was, setting up what’s proven to be a fantastic series.
I hope you don’t remember Gamergate, or that you recall it dimly, like a bad book you read and largely forgot. The ugly, year-long spectacle, which kicked off 10 years ago today, disrupted the lives and careers of dozens of women and non-binary people — and forever changed culture and politics. Depending on whom you ask, and what your precise threshold for “credit” is, Gamergate can be credited with the rise of the alt-right, the prevalence of misogyny in online discourse, the mainstreaming of several harassment tactics and the normalization of abusive campaigns…
Before I got Covid I was involved in an art/eco project regenerating a patch of toxic canalside land in Birmingham. I brought my nascent composting knowledge and took away loads more about soil remediation, before I had to retire.
This is a very similar situation where “Danielle Stevenson cleans up carbon-based pollutants and heavy metals from contaminated sites using fungi and plants.” Fungus can digest most-anything carbon based, which includes oil and plastics, while plants can extract metals and toxins from the soil for safe disposal (or even reclamation) elsewhere.
In nature, it’s actually plants that pull metals out of soil. And so there are fungi, they’re called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, that can help plants do that better. And so on Taylor Yard [the Los Angeles railyard] and other sites, I’ve worked with a combination of decomposer fungi, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, and plants that we previously found to be able to pull metals like lead and arsenic out of the soil into their aboveground parts. These plants can then be removed from the site without having to remove all of that contaminated soil.
Fascinating stuff.
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One of those “I’ve been thinking about this for a while and someone has articulated it well enough for me to just link to them” moments. What if we approached writing online less in terms of publishing finished pieces which quickly go out of date and more like Wikipedia pages, constantly updated and never finished by design?
And also, have you noticed people using Google Docs as a publishing platform? Partly genius, partly a crushing indictment on the state of Wordpress-style content management systems.
Anyway, Jay wrote stuff so I don’t have to.
We recently had hedgehogs in our garden, which caused me to join Hedgehog Street, which has a blog, on which they posted a load of videos of hedgehogs doing “olympics” which are frankly genius level.
An artefact from the 1980s LA punk-art scene. When I found this I thought it would be a fun frippery to post here, but of course it’s very chewy and not a little complex, finding me both nodding and frowning. There’s some of that Wharholian “art is commerce” stuff, of course, which feels a little dated, maybe?
Item 10: In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.
But there’s plenty here that feels timeless, or simply shows that despite our so-called digital revolution nothing has really changed.
Item 5: Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don’t, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn’t funny.
If you’re not aware, Panter is a good friend of Matt Groening, meaning this is the ur-text for The Simpsons.
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A really interesting interview by Zoe Williams where I found myself agreeing with most of what he says, and that doesn’t happen often with people at his level. Well worth a read, but I’m posting this mostly for this bit:
He carefully enunciates the fungal theory of change – that when “mushrooms” (consequential movements or individuals) spring up overnight, it’s because of a vast, invisible, underground network. “Those manifestations of the angry mob or the system-change activist will only happen if we nurture civic life in all of its forms,” he says. “Start with whatever you’re passionate about. It could be as simple as the kids’ football club. Get involved, volunteer, connect with your community – do stuff.”
I like this a lot. There’s a huge psychological problem with feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues facing our survival as a species and our inability to do anything about it, and anything which bridges that is always welcome. It’s essentially a spin on “think global, act local” focussed on community building as means to consciousness raising.
Williams keeps pushing back on this, which I like as it’s a bit counter-intuitive (especially if you have a platform on an international news website where you have some change of enacting change).
I still struggle to process how getting involved with kids’ football could have arrested the country’s slide into British exceptionalism and casual discursive racism, but Sriskandarajah’s point is that you have to be able to imagine yourself as part of a world in which things improve. You can’t do that on your own: you need models of change, either looking outside to the world or backwards to the past, but you also need an “associational life” – to be part of a collective that does some positive, tangible thing.
“Models of change” can come from anywhere.
Molly Crabapple has posted drawings from her reporting on Trump’s coronation by the Republican Party in 2016, and they’re quite something. My immediate point of reference is Ralph Steadman’s grotesqueries, and I mean that as the best compliment.
It’s eight years later, and we’re in the midst of another coronation. Again, the country lurches inevitably towards a Trump presidency, the path greased by a craven Democratic Party that’s openly contemptuous of its base, and by a narcissistic, unelectable candidate who believes the office is theirs by divine right. It’s all stupider, uglier, and pettier. Such is the nature of reboots. It’s all about to get a lot more nasty, too, as this time, Trump has a competent machine behind him.
