Notes from Pete

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Pete has a compost newsletter now

Hello,

Years ago you subscribed to this newsletter which has kept you informed of stuff I, Pete Ashton, have been up to. I last sent one in November 2021. Since then 22 months worth of things have happened, but now is not the time to go into all of that. Maybe later.

I simply wanted to tell you that I've gotten back on the writing horse with a newsletter all about composting, something I have gotten very interested in both practically and philosophically. I've written two issues and am fairly pleased with how it's going.

It's called The Aerobic Digest and it comes out weekly, except when it doesn't.

#22
September 18, 2023
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Art Pete updates

Hi all,

Another occasional missive from my seeming sabbatical from the online world. If you subscribed to this for updates from my art life, here are three bits of news.

1

I've got two pieces in the Artefact Winter Open group show, where all residents of Stirchley can submit work and pretty much all of it will be accepted. It's usually a glorious hodgepodge of styles and media that reflects a community in a delightful and often amusing way.

#21
November 18, 2021
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Paradise Lost: A rare public appearance

Hello,

This is the very occasional newsletter from Pete Ashton to which you subscribed at some point.

It's been a while - I've mostly been deep into co-ops and composting this year and not writing much - but I have an event coming up this weekend! In a venue!

As some of you will know, my good friend Andy Howlett finished his feature documentary about Birmingham's old central library this year. He decided that 5 years of feedback and long conversations about Birmingham meant I'd earned a Executive Producer credit, and so now I've executive produced a movie.

#20
September 23, 2021
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Notes from Pete s02e01

Hello,

This is the irregular newsletter from Pete Ashton which you subscribed to at some point.

I'm trying someting new, again, because that's what we do here. Notes from Pete is now a section of my blog where I write a short-ish response to something I've read or watched. I try and have it done within an hour, ideally less, and get it out right away.

This newsletter will bring the week's notes together in a massive, or not so massive, bundle for you to enjoy over the weekend.

#19
May 21, 2021
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Notes from Pete: New Art! Much pondering!

Hello, reader of my words.

Hope you are well. This is a long one so make a cup of tea (or skip it and read something shorter instead).

#18
February 26, 2021
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Notes from Pete for Dec 18th

Hello,

This is irregular newsletter of Pete Ashton, also available as a blog, to which you are subscribed.


Status Update

#17
December 18, 2020
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Notes from Pete for Dec 5th

Thanks to those who let me know that they liked the new format. I'm still not sold on the emoji's but the act of choosing the triptych entertains me enough to continue in this vein.

This newsletter from Pete Ashton to which you subscribed at some point is also available in blog flavour.


Brandwood End Cemetery this afternoon. I like how this photo looks like it's a 3D render. The gravestones are too flat, the green grass too green, the tree textures too uncanny. But this is how my Nikon captured it. Click for bigger.


#16
December 6, 2020
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Notes from Pete - Dec 3rd

Hello,

This is the newsletter from Pete Ashton, which you subscribed to at some point. Blog version here.

#15
December 4, 2020
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The Sunday Pete

Well, hello there.

This is the irregular Pete Ashton newsletter by Pete Ashton of peteashton.com

#14
October 25, 2020
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Notes from Pete - Domes, Extreme Noticing, peteashton.com is back

Hullo!

Hope you had a nice summer. Mine was good… I think? Memory is pretty atemporal these days. We’re on holiday in Wales this week, which is lovely. Here’s an image I made of the beach at Llanbedrog.

#13
September 24, 2020
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Notes from Pete, who has been writing. A lot.

Hello,

I’ve been writing a fair bit recently and it felt good to do so. Lockdown was rather paralysing and all-consuming at first but as this new-weird-normal becomes a bit more normal, though still very weird, it’s pleasing to look back and my output and be happy with it.


#12
June 23, 2020
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Notes from Pete: What day is it already?

Hello,

Since I last sent my newsletter (to which you are subscribed for some reason probably long forgotten) I’ve posted a few things to my blog which you might not have seen.

Whales on the Hudson (30th April, 400 words)

#11
May 19, 2020
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Notes from Pete: Closing the Covid browser tabs

Hi there subscriber to my personal newsletter. Here are some words for you that are also on my blog.

Closing the Covid browser tabs

I’ve been in a bit of a slump these last few days, knowing I’ve got things I could be doing but not finding the will or energy to do them. The warning signs of a depressive period are there so I’m going to try and head that off by just doing that might not have any purpose other than to shake my brain into shape. Sort of like jogging around the park.

#10
April 24, 2020
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Notes from Pete: Stopping

Hello newsletter subscriber person,

Somebody noted the other day that I hadn’t written anything about [gestures at everything] which they felt was surprising, and yes, I have wanted to do the textual equivalent of , but I’ve been a bit busy.

#9
April 9, 2020
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Notes from Pete - To be of use

Hello you,

I'm coming out of the other side of an annoying winter cold (as an aside, catching a stupid cold when there's a full-blown media panic about a flu virus going on is pretty weird because of course you don't have the danger-flu but even so, at the back of your fuggy mind, eating away...) which means I'm having periods of lucidity but not enough to actually do anything important without needing to lie down, so it's perfect time to write that overdue newsletter.

It's February 2020. It's cold and wet and nobody really knows what's going on, but we're going to try and make the best of it.


#8
February 15, 2020
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Pete Ashton's Newsletter - The 1972 Project begins

Hello you,

This is the irregular newsletter from Pete Ashton, artist, covering stuff he’s up to and pointing to things he thinks might be of interest. Please unsubscribe if you’re no longer interested, or forward to your friends if you think they might be.

New Art - The 1972 Project

#7
December 3, 2019
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Pete's Newsletter - Lindelof’s Watchmen, and the creative employment of corporate IP

Hello,

At some point you subscribed to my newsletter. I'm Pete Ashton. Hopefully this is still of interest but if it's not, the unsubscribe button is down there. ↓


First some notices, and then an essay what I did just write.

#6
October 22, 2019
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Pete Ashton's Newsletter for the 22nd of September

Hello!

Been a while. I spent the summer doing a fair amount of admin and plotting and am now ready to Start Some Stuff through the autumn. This missive serves as an update to where I’m at and a clean slate.

Possibly the big news is I finally retired my Twitter presence after 12 years actively posting stuff to their service. I outline my reasoning here but simply put, it wasn’t fun anymore and Twitter isn’t good for society so I don’t want to participate in that. This means I am no longer active on any commercial social media, which feels good. It also means this newsletter and my blog are the primary places I post stuff now.

#5
September 22, 2019
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Art-Notes from Pete

Pete Art News

Many of you subscribed to this because you want to know when I’m doing art-related activities. Here are some of the art-related activities I’m doing soon.

Dead Shrines

#4
June 6, 2019
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Notes from Pete: Three things that got me thinking this weekend

Hello.

We watched the Bohemian Rhapsody film last night, wanting something a bit light and fluffy after a long week, and wow, that's a terrible piece of film making, framing some amazingly well shot scenes. Its flaws are well recorded by this stage but that disconnect between the recreations of the stage shows and of off-stage life reminded me of First Man, the Neil Armstrong biopic.

As a massive Apollo junkie in my youth I got a visceral thrill out of the scenes shot from Armstrongs PoV because I'd always dreamed of being in that situation. The art and science of film-making put me right there. Surrounding those was a weirdly limp film that didn't seem to be able to find anything to say about this amazing man. BohRhap was similar, though maybe it had too much to say and no idea how to say it, but the power of putting you on the stage with Freddie was immense. Spine tingling stuff that almost made you forget you'd sat through this weirdly edited nonsense.

The power of modern cinema seems to be less about showing you things than about putting you in things. It's immersive, and not in a shitty 3D or VR sense. It's something I'd like to see someone do one of those video essays about.

#3
March 25, 2019
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More Stuff Pete's Thinking About

I often have a Wikipedia page for some concept or idea open in a browser tab. It gets closed when I'm done with it, so the longer it's there, the more useful it's likely to be. Currently I've had Imagined Community refusing to be closed every time I trim my browser down, so I guess it's a good one to dig deeper into.

Imagined Communities is a model for looking at how nationalism can work across a whole country of millions when we barely know a few hundred of our "fellow citizens". A nation is a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group, amplified by the media which promotes a common vernacular language, starting with print moving away from Latin around the 16th century.

The origins are interesting, but what really intrigues me is the fluidity of it all, the fact that something as seemingly concrete as a national identity is really anchored by the shifting sands of language.

I've never felt particularly patriotic or felt an explicit identification with my nation of birth - I get an acute dissonance when people talk about how "we" are doing in the World Cup or the Olympics because I don't really feel any connection with the people on those teams, other than we communicate in broadly the same sort of way. That said, I'd probably struggle to have a nuanced conversation with someone who's life has been totally informed by the culture of sport. We might be physically from the same country but culturally we're on different planets.

#2
March 14, 2019
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Stuff Pete's thinking about

Hello you.

I realised it's been months since I wrote anything for myself, and that might explain why I'm feeling a little constipated in the brain-department, so I need a method of loosening all those ideas up without the pressure of turning them into coherent explanations or statements, and that's what this ever-evolving newsletter is now going to be now. A place where I sketch out stuff that's floating through my brain in the hope that it's useful both to me as an exercise and to you as something to ponder.

Mirrored on my blog where typos will be corrected as I notice them.


#1
March 10, 2019
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