Stuff I’m doing.
Stuff I’m thinking about.
Stuff I’ve seen online and feel is worth sharing.
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An excellent issue of Just Two Things covering the seemingly mundane (the high hidden costs of free parking) and the utterly sublime (C.P. Cavafy’s poem Waiting for the Barbarians). Read to the end for Laurie Anderson’s performance of the latter.
How to help hedgehogs this spring
A short but essential guide to getting your garden hog-friendly. (Hedgehogs are becoming endangered in the UK.)
I’ve been using various tools to surface random Wikipedia pages in an effort to avoid doomscrolling the news and have been bookmarking the ones that held my attention. Filtering the random through my brain, if you like. Curious to see what patterns emerge.
On phone: WikiTok
On desktop: Bookmarklet
Was reminded today that there’s a track on Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack album titled “Crash Dive on Mingo City” which is the best title of anything ever.
Thanks to some help from Laura’s muscles we started spreading the mature compost onto the beds today. It looks great. I hate having chronic fatigue but it does mean my compost has time to really mature well.
A figure from the 80s UK small press scene (of whom I’m rather jealous as he was basically adopted as a kid by some of my favourite cartoonists) who has returned with his anthology Ugly Mug. I have ordered the latest issue and will report back.
Was reminded recently of Ed Pinsent’s Sound Projector radio show which has been running on Resonance FM for 20 years now and is a fantastic collection of the very odd and weird in sound and, occasionally, music. Latest shows on Mixcloud, older ones on Internet Archive.
I stopped seeking new music about a decade back, in hindsight because after years of vigorous activity I probably had enough music for one lifetime and there were other things to seek out. I also stopped going to gigs due to what turned out to be autistic sensory overload (the performances were fine - everything else was unbearable). But music continues to be an important part of my environment and I noticed I’d had a few new-ish albums on rotation recently.
Nothing particularly revolutionary, entirely by men my age or older, but it is what it is.
(I don’t know how to link to music these days. Music artist websites continue to be goddamn awful pieces of shit and I’m reluctant to link to one of the streaming sites over another, so go old school and copy/paste these into the search bar of your choice.)
When explaining the English language I generally say the common stuff is Germanic with some Norse, while the posh stuff is French, because of the Normans. Turns out there’s a movement to discard the Norman influence and establish a modern English as it might have evolved from Anglo-Saxon speech. As an intellectual game it seems a lot of fun (though I do have concerns about any attempts at “purity”).
A solid history, starting with the Norman invasion, through the industrial revolution and Thatcherism, to explain the continued dominance of the south east. I learned a lot.
A nice, meaty but very accessible interview. I always find Butler clear and to the point.
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Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25?
A frankly terrifying survey from YouGov that clearly illustrates how relentless anti-trans propaganda has made the wider public way more hostile than they were a decade ago. Well done everyone.
Molly Soda interviews an artist mining early Flickr
I was a very early adopter of Flickr and the people and communities there were very important to me and my photography. So when I hear about a young artist fascinated by when she finds when she searches the site around the date of her birth, I feel old, and weirded out that it was really 20-odd years ago, but mostly I think it’s cool that what we left there was interesting enough. Like me discovering punk singles in the 90s.
Seth’s Dominion and the Realm of an Artist’s Interest
Seth’s cardboard city, not made for public consumption, was exhibited in Paris last year as part of a big show of original comic art. It kinda didn’t fit, which is really interesting, says Tiffany Babb.
(Really wish I’d seen this…)
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 Lynch’s 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.
