Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

It’s gourd season, and occasionally nice afternoon light season. Quite pleased with this photo…

If Books Could Kill on Dale Carnegie.

One of my go-to podcasts for entertaining insomnia brain food, they tackle exploitative easy-answer self-help books and this episode is the ur-text that started it all - How To Win Friends and Influence People. What struck me was how Carnegie comes over as an undiagnosed autistic who has figured out how to interact with normies and is selling that skill to businessfolk.

People who struggle with dealing with people will often get good at studying how social interactions work, mapping them out and developing strategies to survive (and occasionally thrive) in them. I’ve definitely done this, and have occasionally been paid cashmoney to point out the bleeding obvious to people who haven’t needed to think about it before and are shit at context switching. Early social media, for example, was quite lucrative for folks like me, at least until the straights figured it out and weaponised it for marketing. But that’s another story.

Point is, if anyone says there weren’t all these neuro-whatsit autistic people in the old days, Dale Carnegie was totally on the spectrum in the 1930s.

I’m the fucking best at Stackdown until suddenly I’m really not. (Yesterday’s results - no spoilers)

Was convinced for a short while that Addicted to Love was a ZZ Top song, but I think it’s excusable. Sharp Dressed Man could totally be by Robert Palmer.

ZZ Top have been on my mind as I’ve spent days wondering if they’re a novelty act or not.

Spotted the token jazz album in the Mercury shortlist by Emma-Jean Thackray is a) about living with AuDHD, b) called Weirdo, and c) about reclaiming the term. Clearly it can’t live up to that (it’s a bit too smooooth for me) but definitely going into my “things that are explicitly ‘weird’” folder.

I’ve noticed a few younger women artists embracing their outsider status in a militant manner recently and I’m here for it.

Chatting with my 20 year old niece and realising that she sees the 2010 internet (we were talking about lolcats) in the same way I, as a 90s kid, think of early 80s squat/dole culture (nicely articulated here) - with warm jealousy for a time of possibilities that has vanished by the time we grew up.

81 Eggs

I’m working towards a square grid of 100 fried eggs. This is the penultimate stage.

(The fried egg is my minimum viable meal with chronic fatigue syndrome #cfs and has become emblematic of my condition, so I’m making an art of it.)

Enjoying the new CMAT album a lot. (review.)

The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel. Lindsay Ellis returns to YouTube (she’s otherwise on Nebula these days) with a deep dive into the far-right’s war on empathy in pre-school TV and how this relates to the genocide in Gaza. Essential viewing by a master of the form.

Watched the Superman film. Gotta say, James Gunn is not backing down on his war against the sanctity and primacy of biological parenthood and for the saviourship of found and made families, and I am here for it.

Do any other people of a certain age find themselves looking up childhood homes and teenage haunts on Street View and aerial maps? Maybe it’s more pronounced if you moved a lot as a kid? I haven’t been back to Croydon since my teens so it has a strange alien familiarity.

Rabbits are being super-cute today, with bonus symmetry.

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.