This is my notebook. Stuff Iโm doing, stuff Iโm thinking about, stuff Iโve seen online and feel is worth sharing.
Found myself shouting “nasal hair is not a joke” up the stairs to my wife. #middleagedmanproblemsarerealproblems
My Libro.fm subscription is proving very fruitful. After a couple of heavy history books I plumped for Lucy Sante’s autobiography of her gender transition in her 60s. I’d very much enjoyed Sante’s portrait of New York in the 80s featured in the Beastie Boys book and this had come highly recommended by someone on my feed. It’s beautifully written, bringing out the fear and uncertainty of not fitting in and knowing something is clearly wrong but not wanting to accept the inevitable. 10/10.
A particularly resonant strip by Jules Feiffer.
via this collective reminiscence. And while I’m here, I’ve realised since his death that two of my favourite cartoonists, Kyle Baker and Glenn Dakin, owe a lot to his influence. Can’t believe I hadn’t noticed before.
A review of Distant Ruptures a collection of work by Fort Thunder alumni CF
Noise is a culture that dissolves distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, rooted in both Stockhausen and the sound of power tools, but is basically antagonistic to all things middlebrow and brunch-friendly, such as book clubs. Repeated exposure to loud antagonistic performances can render them rote or ritualistic, but I believe the ideal initial reaction is one of confusion, of what is even happening.
Pondering watching Queer soon and am thinking of when I saw Naked Lunch in the cinema as a teenager. I knew nothing about Burroughs but had seen some Cronenberg horror on BBC2’s Moviedrome and knew Peter Weller from Robocop so it seemed a safe bet. Blew my mind and changed everything. I wonder if kids who know Guadagnino from his films with Timmy Chalamet and recognise James Bond will take a punt and have a similar experience with this.
The Making of David Lynchโs The Angriest Dog in the World
One of the regular features was a comic strip called The Angriest Dog in the World. It was comprised of four panels, hand-drawn by Lynch at one time. It featured a growling dog tethered outside a home, with his owner unseen except for captions that drifted out a window. Lynch had submitted the art a few years before I arrived. Every week he called in the captions by telephone. They varied each strip, but the art stayed the same.
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Our shed blew over in the storm so the allotment community rallied round to help us get it back up again. I was expecting a ship of fools, blind leading the blind farce but it all came together very professionally.
RIP Jules Feiffer. Not unexpected but still a jolt. Feels like the end of an era. What a man, what a life, what a body of work.
Got an email from a relative who hasn’t disabled the auto-sig in their Yahoo mail (no shade, people shouldn’t have to work that shit out) which someone in branding has decided should read “Search, organise, conquer”.
Conquer?
Y’all OK there Yahoo?
RIP David Lynch. I vividly remember renting Wild at Heart as a teenager and nothing ever being the same again.
Compost Culture: An Introductory Film
A nice video about Birmingham’s community composting project which I was involved with before long-Covid took me off the board. This features the three-bay structures I designed and co-built last year and it’s quite emotional seeing them in use.
I see The Jesus Lizard are touring a new album (first in 26 years) so I checked it out and, yes, it’s very good indeed.
New Folding Ideas video essay on dinosaur footprint fossils and the creationist industry that emerged around them. Excellent as always.
I’ve never gotten to sleep easily but the last year of long-covid chronic fatigue has made my nights a real struggle. Not only am I exhausted but not sleepy (because I’m not able to actually do anything tiring) but my ability to control my autistic brain is severely compromised so it spirals as I lie staring into the darkness for hours.
One solution I’ve found is to listen to audio shows that are just interesting enough to hold my attention but monotonous enough to send me to sleep. Men with low voices talking about history are perfect, for example.
So here’s my current go-to sources to sooth the trauma of the wee hours.
All of these are ad-free or have the adverts read in the same voice and style as the rest of the show, so they don’t jolt you awake.
Desert Oracle Radio - I wish I could remember where I came across this. It feels like it just appeared on my phone like magic. Ken Layne rambles quite coherently and passionately about life in the Mojave Desert for half an hour. It’s unique and entrancing and is one of the shows I listen to to fall asleep and then again the next day because I fell asleep and missed the end.
Revolutions - I was recommended this as a good introduction to the history of the Russian Revolution, and it really is a thorough deep dive into how is came to be presented in very accessible episodes. But it’s also wonderfully soporific and has saved me on numerous occasions. He’s currently doing a fictional account of a 23rd century Martian revolution in exactly the same manner and format as his factual historical ones, which is a lot of fun.
Weird Studies - this is often too interesting for me to switch off, but sometimes the subject isn’t quite in my wheelhouse and just becomes another “men talking about stuff” show and sends me right off. Perfect.
Also of note: The Fall of Civilisations, Crash Course Pods: The Universe.
The steady extraction of BBC audio production from the constraints of broadcast radio has produced some subtly interesting formats that are much more in tune with my nocturnal needs. Here’s some useful stuff I’ve found.
Dream Time with Zakia reminds me of the late night radio of my youth while being quite distinct and modern, with a slight tinge of something 1970s. The music is broadly in the weird/jazz/global end of ambient (except when it’s not) selected by someone who’s done their time exploring the dusty corners of record shops. It helps that Zakia’s voice is Bob-Harris-level whispering in your ear maintaining a chilled vibe.
BBC Radio 3 Unwind answers the question, what if you stripped all the intellectual content away from Radio 3 and dumped the remains at a mindfulness seminar. Sounds terrible, but it’s actually perfect for my needs. My go-to is the awful sounding Mindful Mix which has no presenter and is like listening to classical music on shuffle. Nothing too challenging, nothing too jarring, but not cheesy or bland.
In Our Time, being a bunch of academics talking about their speciality to Melvin Bragg, seems like a no-brainer as a sleep aid, but one has to be careful as it can be a little too interesting. Also a podcast, of course.
Books on tape, as we used to call them, are tricky for this purpose as I don’t really want to fall asleep to them - I want to listen to them properly. But I also want to fall asleep and sometimes it’s worth sacrificing a chapter and rewinding it later. I get a book a month with my Libro.fm subscription and have found Werner Herzog’s reading his memoir Every Man for Himself and God against All to be perfect at brain soothing.
I keep hunting and welcome suggestions.
In an effort to avoid doomscrolling the news I’ve taken to hitting Wikipedia’s randomiser function. If you go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, or hit the random article link on the app homepage (scroll down past the “on this day” section) it’ll take you to some page you’d likely never have gone to on purpose. Often it won’t be of any interest at all, but keep clicking. Eventually you’ll hit something much more interesting and enriching than whatever the idiot billionaire fascist enablers are up to.
Today I learned about George Helm, a Hawaiian activist who campaigned against the use of the island of Kahoสปolawe as a bombing range by the US navy. He was part of a rising political awareness of islander’s rights in the 1970s and following links on his page has taught me all about the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom leading to it’s eventual annexation by the USA. It’s one of those subjects I knew very little about, and now I know a little more.
I look forward to whatever the Wikipedia randomiser serves up next.
There are two great photos of an old brown labrador being extra cute in this series.
(Sidebar - I’ve never seen a young brown lab in the wild, only old fat ones. I’m convinced they’re black ones that have faded with age.)
Why yes, I did just spend ยฃ10 plus shipping on an empty box.
Essential tools to make the modern web more bearable
Always good to keep up to date on the latest developments in blocking and bypassing corporate nonsense. Big win for me is the SocialFocus plugin for taming YouTube’s clickbait.
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Melville to Bannon: How We Got Here (Truth Isnโt Truth)
A 30 minute accounting of the intellectual steps that led to our post-truth reality (if reality is even the right word). I never know if I find this stuff reassuring or terrifying. Bit of both.
It’s made from selections from David Shields' feature film How We Got Here, which I’m looking forward to getting hold of, and there’s also a book. (via)
Ben Teitelbaum on Traditionalism
Since its birth in the early 20th century, Traditionalism has defined itself against modernity and Enlightenment values. Traditionalist thinkers celebrated hierarchy, denounced the idea of progress, and regarded liberal secularism, capitalism, and communism as aligned forces working to replace social, cultural and political norms. Ethnographer Benjamin Teitelbaum had been studying Traditionalism for years as a sort of novelty, associated with a restless subsection of the right โ too antisocial for activism and largely without influence. And yet when Steve Bannon entered the White House in 2017, reports suggested he was an avid reader of Traditionalist teachings.
A Dance to Jules Feiffer at 95
A brief (he is 95 after all!) interview with the master by Peter Kuper.
I was there because I fucking wanted to change everything, and I was trying to figure out how best to do that.
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This year-spanning series of images reveals a pattern in the seasonal drift of the Sun’s daily motion through planet Earth’s sky. The figure-eight curve was captured in exposures taken only at 1pm local time on clear days from Kayseri, Turkiye.
Movies:
The Holdovers
Nyad
Poor Things
Molli and Max in the Future
Drive-Away Dolls
The Royal Hotel
Love Lies Bleeding
Furiosa
Challengers
Civil War
The Bikeriders
Past Lives
Dune: Part Two
The Apprentice
My Old Ass
Lee
I Know Where I’m Going!
Docs:
Tish
Seth’s Dominion
Lydia Lunch - The War Is Never Over
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
A mention in the Spiegelman interview made me realise I’d not looked at the Garbage Pail Kids since they were all over my school circa 1985-6, so I dug out some scans and went down memory lane. Like a lot of kids things they’re simultaneously tamer and edgier than I remembered, as befits the fever-dreams of weirdo cartoonists filtered through a corporate card company. A bit confused that Fiona, only four years my senior, has no memory of them, but 13 and 17 are very different ages…
