This is my notebook. Stuff I’m doing, stuff I’m thinking about, stuff I’ve seen online and feel is worth sharing.
Looking at videos from great-neph’s birthday today and wondering when it was I came to resemble Uncle Fester.
Out of nowhere I remembered being told as a child by a trustworthy grown-up that the word “berk” came from a Mr Berk who did a daft thing. Since a lot of stuff I was told as a child turned out to be nonsense I thought after 40+ years it was time to check. Yup, adults lying once again.
A few times recently I’ve sent something cool I’ve seen on the internet to my wife who then (offhandedly but devastatingly) says she saw it on Facebook last week. I fear I have become the barely-online friends who would send me the All Your Base video in 2001, months after I’d seen it.
It’s damningly indicative of something that despite them dominating our streaming for the past few years, the BBC iPlayer algo doesn’t have the facility to notify us that Only Connect and University Challenge restarted this week. So if that’s also you, here’s your notification nerd fans.
Edited to update! Only Connect isn’t back yet. We tried re-watching it but have a disconcertingly good memory for the questions from a year ago.
The tragedy of FireWire, an elegy for a 2000-era cable that was sort of like BetaMax to USB’s VHS.
I have weirdly fond memories of FireWire. It was fast, sure, but it also felt good when you plugged it in. Like proper future-of-computing shit. But USB was good enough and that always wins.
Alex Cox on the legacy of Moviedrome ahead of a BFI retrospective.
My generation bangs on about how Cox’s film introductions taught us the importance of arthouse and weird cinema. I’m delighted (and not too surprised given we’re in our 50s now) to see them getting some proper respect.
Every issue of Arthur magazine is available to download.
Arthur was a counterculture mag in the spirit of the underground presses and alt weeklies. Published from 2002-8 and again in 2013 it gives a valuable perspective on an era that’s been somewhat smoothed by nostalgia. Highly recommended!
The Moral Economy of the Shire
As someone who actively dislikes Tolkien I enjoyed this thorough attempt to explain why the Hobbits can laze around all day.
Our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry.
A letter I still owe Dan Nadel about Robert Crumb and racial obscenity
I enjoyed Nadal’s biography of Crumb and would highly recommend it, but a Crumb biography in the 2020s is a curious proposition as a lot of the work has not aged well. (To his credit, Nadal addresses this throughout.)
R Fiore is a comics critic from the no-censorship, anything-goes days who respects that we live in a different and better time now, so how do we deal with an artist as vital and important a Crumb?
Cory Doctorow reviews Bill Griffith’s Three Rocks, his biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of Nancy. I read this a while back and it’s splendid.
It’s time for a new audiobook and I’m stuck.
Recently enjoyed the R Crumb biog (5*), Ben Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity (4*) and Klein’s Doppleganger (5*). Prefer long books as I need it to last a month. Here’s my waitlist but I’m very open to suggestions.
Wally didn’t exercise good cooling yesterday and was off his food in the evening, which worried us a bit. Thankfully he’d cooled down by midnight and was back to his idiot self. Next time flop on the cool slabs, dude! (Lav did and was fine.)
Very much liked the look of this wispy cloud on this absurdly (for the UK) hot day.
I hated being a child. My happiest day was when I left school and started an adult life where I could travel the world, or at least go to the bathroom without a teacher signing off on it. My early 20s, for all their excitement, were a procession of broke-ness and sexual harassment. But being a grown woman is damn fine.
64 eggs
Sook-Yin Lee with Chester Brown on the film version of Paying For It. Like most truly indie films this will take a torturously long time to be available for me to see, but as a big fan of both their work I’m looking forward to it. Bonus - includes photos of when they were young cuties and of Chester’s current mad-impressive beard.
The Woodstock sticker box - on the site of the Woodstock festival’s message tree is a utility box covered in stickers. Noah Kalina has documented it. “They are communication distilled to its essence: visual, immediate, and unfiltered.”
When Heidi Met Carrie by Lynda Barry. A comic strip review of two key texts.
Shifty, the new Adam Curtis visual essay thingy, is devastatingly good, especially if like me you were a kid in Britain during the 80s. I suddenly had this sense that I could be in these clips, that this was about my life, about events I hadn’t fully understood at time but had lived through, and the implications of which we’re still struggling to deal with.
If despotism does come to Britain, it will not be painting itself blue and breaking into Whitehall half naked. It will happen because nobody wants to make a fuss. It will happen because it’s socially awkward to stop it happening. Fear and loathing are powerful emotions, but in the end, there’s only ever a finite number of true fanatics. What tyrants really rely on is cowardice.
Laurie Penny - TERF Island: the embarrassing truth about Britain’s Trans Panic.
RIP Richard Appignanesi, author and editor of the Introducing / For Beginners comic book explainers on Marx, Postmodernism and much more.
Why am I filled with nostalgia for a pre-internet age I never knew?
I found this article fascinating, not just for the piece itself but the many comments after it, none of which seems to identify the root cause - the wholesale commercialisation of public spaces online.
Due to my chronic fatigue my minimum viable hot lunch is a fried egg on toast. This has become totemic of my condition so I’ve been photographing them and publishing them as grids, Becher typologies style. Here’s 49 eggs. Coming next, 64.
Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature.
The full story of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go on it’s 50th anniversary.
As fascinated by the industrial world as any serious truck-spotting four-year-old, Scarry captures the ballet of traffic in a sort of frozen mimesis that’s reanimated by the act of reading and page-turning itself.
Found a link to my site on a local photography group’s website (I gave a talk there a decade or so ago) which, if I was in the market for testimonials, I would definitely use.
“Pete Ashton. Difficult to explain, easier to just visit.”