#angela nagle

[sammeldeineknochen]

Wenn wir einen Punkt erreicht haben, wo Faschistinnen anderen moralisch überlegen sein können, weil sie als avantgardistisch, gegenkulturell oder transgressiv gelten, sollten wir den Wert dieser abgestandenen und überholten gegenkulturellen Ideale möglicherweise ernsthaft überdenken.

Angela Nagle: „Die digitale Gegenrevolution“, S.130

[dhaaruni]

It is sometimes said that the right won the economic war and the left won the culture war. And as political theorist Walter Benn Michaels has argued, it is the recognition of identity that has triumphed over economic equality as the organizing principle of the Anglo-American liberal left and of mainstream discourse more broadly. In full agreement with him, I would also argue that the most recent rise of the online right is evidence of the triumph of the identity politics of the right and of the co-opting (but nevertheless the triumph) of 60s left styles of transgression and counterculture. The libertinism, individualism, bourgeois bohemianism, postmodernism, irony and ultimately the nihilism that the left was once accused of by the right actually characterized the movement to which Milo belonged. The rise of Milo’s 4chan-influenced right is no more evidence of a resurgence of conservatism than the rise of Tumblr-style identity politics constitutes a resurgence of the socialist or materialist left. [...] The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.

— Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

[1000rh]

The cautionary tale […] is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for).

– Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk (2017)

[jujupepi]

Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

“The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.”

Finished the audiobook version of Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. First of all, I appreciated the investigation into the development of the alt-right from a journalistic perspective. Much like Jesus and John Wayne, the author weaves together disparate figures, organization, and themes into a coherent narrative.

I am not an expert on this topic but I think it suffers from its narrow point of view. Nagle's thesis, as I understand it, is that the alt-right developed 1) as a reactionary backlash to Tumblr identity politics and 2) to appropriate the social capital of counterculture hipness. This feel truncated, probably by necessity.

One of the things that frustrates me most about Nagle's thesis is that she calls for the end of counterculture at large. The mere existence of the aforementioned social capital of hipness being appropriated by fascists is enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hasn't counterculture been the cradle of queer liberation movements? Of the rejection of white supremacy? If not the cradle, then certainly nurtures and expanded in these environments. Counterculture broadens our imaginations and give us alternative pictures of life.

Nagle also seems to be preoccupied with creating a left that acts in a way that will guard against reactionary backlash from the right. I don't really have to say it but, eschewing neopronouns will not stop the right from attacking the left. This kind of mindset gives leftists the go-ahead to leave behind our most vulnerable.

I have some more quibbles, like her assertion that brown, Muslim, male protestors are given more leeway than white ones (I mean, have you seen what we let white men get away with?) but I don't feel the need to get much into them. Overall, I admire the examination of the evolution and tactics of the alt-right, but struggled with many of her conclusions.

[swamp-world]

oh dear new cj the x video i am slightly afeared

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Seeing discourse online has reinforced my belief that every leftist is against ableism until somebody says watching something with subtitles is hard for them. In that case that person is racist for asking for a dub instead of swapping out their set of eyes for a pair that can read text better.

Leftism leaving the body once accessibility issues are brought up, sighs. I do remember back in 2019 during a DSA convention, where there was some discourse/debate regarding how to be respectful towards the disabled communities. Some clips of the convention leaked and predictably, Rightwingers seized it as an opportunity to make fun of the Left. However, what was even more shocking was how there were prominent leftist figures/pundits like Angela Nagle and Ben Burgis who kinda saw it as identity politics gone too far.

It's frustrating and sad to see how there is still internalized ableism within leftist circles, amongst other issues like rape apologism, racism and transphobia etc., etc. Esp when a large portion of the working class/working poor are disabled or would eventually become disabled later in life.

Here's a good essay on that 2019 DSA convention:

- mod sodapop

[klykcielewe]

Droga redakcjo! Dzień dobry :DD

Mam okropny problem, a nie wiem kogo lepszego można się poradzić niż szanownych Was...

Od dobrego tygodnia męczą mnie dziwne sny, w których pojawiają się ludzie, z którymi kiedyś chodziło się do szkoły niszczący mój ogródek. Najgorsze jest to, że za każdym razem jak depczą po moich petuniach słyszę zbijającą się doniczkę i nagle zrywam z łóżka tylko po to żeby zobaczyć jak zza okna spogląda na mnie ogromny kruk. Wtedy się budzę.

Z moim ogródkiem w rzeczywistości nie dzieje się nic złego ale ta wizja jest naprawdę przerażająca. Co jeśli jednego dnia naprawdę tu przyjdą i podepczą moje pomidorki? A co z krukiem? Co chwila mam wrażenie, że mnie śledzi...

Proszę o pomoc, naprawdę nic z tego nie rozumiem!

Pozdrawiam, okrutnie paranoiczny czytelnik.

Witaj, okrutnie paranoiczny czytelnik!

Niestety, wygląda na to, że została na Ciebie rzucona klątwa. Kruk to forma często przyjmowana przez duchy. Prawdopodobnie zazdrosny sąsiad, lub ktoś, kto żywi do Ciebie urazę wynajął go, żeby Cię nastraszyć.

Masz 2 wyjścia w tej sytuacji: możesz spróbować zdjąć klątwę, lub przeciągnąć demona na swoją stronę. Jeśli uda Ci się zidentyfikować osobę odpowiedzialną, znachorka Angela powinna być w stanie pozbyć się kruka (chyba, że to ona go przywołała, wtedy masz problem). Trudniejszą, ale i bardziej opłacalną opcją jest próba oswojenia ducha. Najlepiej zacząć to robić w snach. Nawet jeżeli przez większość snu go nie widzisz, to on najprawdopodobniej je kontroluje. Spróbuj nauczyć się śnić świadomie i mówić do demona. Kruki nietrudno do siebie przekonać, jeżeli obiecasz im odpowiednie łapówki, jednak uważaj; one nie lubią, kiedy się im rozkazuje. Po dalszą pomoc polecam zwrócić się również do cheerleaderek i znachorki Angeli.

Życzymy powodzenia w zdejmowaniu klątwy! Redakcja

PS Może Cię zainteresować twórczość Edgara Allana Poe, jeśli już się tak nie stało. Osobiście najbardziej lubię jego wiersze, ale wiele z jego opowiadań, też jest wartych uwagi.

[grandhotelabyss]

what was the experience of going from no internet (atleast in its modern form) to it suddenly dominating everything in one's life?

I enjoy the genre of question in which I am implied to be a touring carnival exhibit, The World's Oldest Living Man. "Do you remember when you had to wind up cars with a crank before they'd drive? Was the world really black and white or does it just look that way in the movies?" (I'm not mad at you, anon; I'm just teasing.)

Anyway, I may be in the minority here, but the really rough patch was the intermediate period between the last decade the world was mostly analog (the 1990s) and the first decade it was mostly digital (the 2010s), despite the socio-political chaos (wokeness vs. populism and then the pandemic) caused by the latter. If you were extremely online in the 2000s, which I sort of was, and the monoculture still reigned, and even in some respects seemed like it would reign forever, everything felt sort of hallucinatory and unreal, a bright waking nightmare; this is what Fisher's writing captures well, the disappointed cyber-utopian's dazed horror at a permanent zombie mainstream. Before that, in the analog days, counterculture and mainstream culture were more stably sealed off from each other, and you didn't necessarily expect them to bleed into each other, but also thought you could make a go of it in the counterculture if you could find your way there. (I didn't start going online until I was 18, in the year 2000, when I went to college.) Whereas now, it's all one thing. Pace Angela Nagle, there are no normies left to kill. The Boomers can't stop fiddling with their phones at the restaurant table while I keep mine politely in my pocket; they read their ebooks while I still only read (at least anything serious) in print; and they've seen memes I've never even heard of. Perhaps we're all hallucinating these days, but we're in it together.

Now certain shifts from the old world to the new are a little overstated. Remember, television killed your elders' attention spans before the internet came along, and my parents' generation were the first that happened to, back in the '50s. Everything McLuhan said about TV is 10 times truer of the internet, but it was true of TV too. Then there was talk radio and the print underground, which is how I and my father before me learned all the conspiracy theories before "online" came along. I do not speak of pornography, but it was there, and one knew where. I grew up on MTV and comic books, so I've never had much of an attention span to speak of. I like books, though. I don't think they'll ever disappear; I think the internet will disappear, and books will be all that survives of us, which is why I insist, no matter how online I am or ever will be, on writing books, real-life paper books, for our successor empires—human, robot, or alien—to ponder over in the lone and level sands.

[icedsodapop]

There should be studies about post-leftists, aka people who possess reactionary politics under a leftist veneer. Think dirtbag leftists, think tankies, think the class reductionist leftists. Think of public self-proclaimed leftists Glenn Greenwald, think Matt Taibbi, think Aaron Bastani, think Lee Fang, think Jimmy Dore, think Angela Nagle, think Ben Burgis, think redscarepod hosts.

[gothicprep]

you know, for all the ink that’s been spilled over woke this and woke that, it’s surprising to me that tumblr’s role in creating this sort of online culture remains under-discussed. angela nagle is the only academic I can think of off the top of my head who’s ever taken this idea seriously.

to use kind of a dumb example without any emotional stakes – you’ve probably seen multi-image instagram posts that argue in favor of a specific political cause. sometimes people make these on twitter too. thing is, they have the exact same tone and aesthetic as the powerpoint presentations that people used to make on here in the early 2010s for the same purpose.

idk, it’s just weird to me that commentators have been beating this dead horse to the point where they’re having a snowball fight with its cremated ashes, and still make such a huge oversight.

[destiel-vs-anything]

destiel vs kill all normies by angela nagle

[whitehotharlots]

Sophie Lewis is a revolting dunce

It’s 2023, and in spite of a near-constant barrage of catastrophizing about the supposedly imminent reemergence of fascism, the American left cannot stop themselves from providing ammunition to the right. To put it more bluntly, they somehow cannot grasp that conservatives would be less likely to believe paranoid conspiracies about liberals wanting to take their kids away if liberals would be less open in saying that they do, indeed, want to take people’s kids away.

What’s this? Has Ol’ Man Harlots finally lost his marbles and succumbed to the evils of right wing disinformation? I’m afraid not. My conclusions have been drawn by Just Listening to left itself without receiving the slightest input from conservatives--in this case, an execrable piece by Sophie Lewis recently published by Tank Magazine. This essay is so extreme in its conclusions, so dishonest in its argumentation, that I challenge even the most ardent of lefties to read it all the way through and not see how it makes Ron Desantis-style conspiratorialism appear downright plausible. 

I hesitate to paraphrase Lewis’ piece--doing so without the liberal use of direct citations could easily come across as me making stuff or otherwise reading it dishonestly. I strongly encourage you read through it yourself (here’s the link once again), but I will still include somewhat lengthy passages so as to confirm that this is an actual essay by a living, lauded writer, and not something I hallucinated after drinking a whole bottle of Benadryl. 

Before we get to the essay’s primary assertions, it’s worth recapitulating Lewis’ foundational beliefs (in doing so, we’ll also get a sense of her profound dishonesty--although fully capturing as much would require a nearly book-length work. Angela Nagle has a digestible and effective piece here, and I have touched on in briefly about a year ago). 

Lewis is one of the loudest and most repulsive advocates of the “Family Abolition” movement, which has earned her a manuscript published by Verso, bylines at Lit Hub and The London Review of Books, and a fawning personal profile at Vice. Family abolition is an ostensibly left-wing project that is pretty well defined by its name: its advocates believe that family structures (particularly heterosexual, two-parent families, but others are still problematic) are the driving force behind nearly all of the world’s problems, and that social progress cannot be achieved until we replace natal homes with weird poly communes. 

Here’s Lewis in her new piece:

We are seeking (in the immediate term) to make the private nuclear house- hold visible as an institution of the market and of the state: a structure held together by violence and coercion, both internal and external. As such, perhaps our most pressing challenge is linking ours and other present-day abolition- isms. In conjunction with police-, border- and prison-abolitionist movements, for example, a movement to deprivatise care must prioritise the undermining of the racist “family policing” system, colonial child-removal apparatuses, and the kinship violence of immigration officers. In conjunction with youth-led climate-justice campaigns trying to halt the desecration of humanity’s collective planetary household, those who aspire to the deprivatisation of care must articulate the centrality of youth liberation (child suffrage, gender autonomy, all-ages universal basic income, for example) to the future care-centric society that is now widely linked, in the popular imagination, to a “green transition”. Private households are both labour-intensive and ecocidal, after all. They are incubators of sexual and patriarchal violence. It is time to denaturalise them.

Families are unnatural, evil incubators of inequality and inequity, and also they cause direct harm to vulnerable folx. Why? Because it is the family--and only the family--that prevents kids from being “queer:”

Of course, the fact that child sexual abuse still now occurs overwhelmingly within cisheteropatriarchal family structures does not result in similar scrutiny on the family- form. In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged: this is what is referred to as a decent upbringing, a.k.a. the invisible transmission of the “right” kinds of re/productive desire, which many of us seem to sense is coming unstuck. 

It’s easy to find yourself so overwhelmed by Lewis’ schizophrenic prose style that you gloss over the profound number of falsehoods in her claims. Let’s start just with that last passage, which can most charitably be understood as a midwit recapitulation of first wave feminism. Lewis is technically correct in that most domestic abuse occurs in “cisheteropatriarchal” (AKA “normal”) families, but this is for very much the same reason that most violent crime is intra-racial and most car accidents occur within a few miles of the driver’s home: the more commonplace an event, the more frequently it occurs. On the whole, there are (probably) fewer abuse incidents in multi-parent trans polycule households than there are in regular households--but that’s just because there are far, far more regular households. The fact says nothing about the relative frequency of abuse, nor does it come close to establishing that there’s something inherent about not being a gross freak that makes domestic violence more likely.

Because, oh no, I got some bad news for you: Lesbian and trans couples have significantly higher rates of intimate partner violence than regular hetero couples. And the numbers are much, much worse for children. Kids who live in foster care or with adoptive parents are TWENTY EIGHT TIMES more likely to suffer physical or sexual abuse than kids who live with their natal parents. Not 28 percent more likely. 28 times. 2,800% percent. This figure is so staggering that its absence from Lewis’ analysis should be understood much more as an outright lie than as a careless omission.

So, okay, Lewis’ political project is to make it so way more kids get raped and abused. Cool. That fact alone--which, again, she never comes close to acknowledging, let alone addressing--should be enough to invalidate her work to anyone who hasn’t been completely poisoned by indentitarianism. But, ohh, ohhh we’ve only barely breached the weirdness. 

Contrary to the dominant narrative among Trans Rights Advocates, Lewis argues that social contagion does exist and that it can influence a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation--only it just goes one way. Straight, non-trans people are obviously molded by repressive social structures. The pronoun folx, meanwhile, exist gloriously unaffected by the malignant influence of anything other than their internal gender identity, which is basically a soul and exists independent of everything else.

I hate to repeat myself, but this claim is so bizarre and self-contradictory it really must be stressed: Lewis believes that what most people consider the default status in regards to gender--the belief that you weren’t born in the wrong body and therefore do not require medicalization--is the result of a social construction. Literally, she says it’s due to “grooming.” While making this claim, she also states that believing oneself to require medicalization to achieve equanimity between your body and your inherent gender identity is the actual default that would exist if there were no social pressures imploring children to believe otherwise. 

In other words, children are indeed groomed, only the groomers are inherently evil “cissexual” people, and their grooming ways are perpetuated by oppressive social structures (”In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged”). This, Lewis contends, is why some people don’t react kindly when she and her rainbow pals in the publishing industry tell strangers they want to take their kids away: those strangers are themselves evil (cis, hetereo, and sometimes.... sometimes even white!), which means they are fragile and stupid and their response is a fascist reaction to social progress:

 In light of this, today’s trans “groomer” panic begins to look like a reaction to, and appropriation of, #MeToo. Notice that within the framework of the 21st century’s save-our-children-ists, the existence of self-declaring trans children is a sign of sexual violation in and of itself: an outside corruption of cis girlhood, or a “forced feminisation” of boys, if you will.

These reactions--the very definition of fascism--are themselves only possible because of the evil existence of families:

If the patriarchal institutions of mum and dad – which manufactured us all! – are to survive, then private parents must retain control of the prerogative to inseminate the minds of kids with things like pronouns, proper nouns and other sexual spells. And none of us knows what deprivatising father-care or mothering-labour feels or looks like. Family abolition, as such, is hard (perhaps impossible, for now) to desire fully. But an inconvenient obstacle to the revanchist re-entrenchment of cissexualist right-reproduction exists, in the form of parents who affirm, support and care for transgender flourishing in kids. Regardless of the stubborn reality of trans parents, the task of anti-trans educators and propagandists is framed in terms of “parental rights”: how can politicians, along with suitably cissexist moms and dads, defend families, while also breaking them, in the quest to Make Kids Cis Again?

Now, you might assume that most people are heterosexual for the same reason that almost every other dimorphic animal species is predominately heterosexual: an innate drive to procreate, something that requires a male and female. You may likewise assume that the majority of people aren’t trans because transness by definition requires medicalization, the mechanisms of which were not available until quite recently, and that in the past the vast majority of butch girls and faggy boys would have simply been regarded as gender non-conforming (and then either ostracized or tolerated or praised, or some combination thereof, according to the particular contexts of the time and place in which they lived). Well, guess what buddy, that’s exactly what Hitler also thought. It turns out these default states are actually a social construct--the only social construct that effects gender and sexuality--and that the only reason nearly everyone doesn’t have a septum piercing and mastectomy scars is because their horrible families forced them to not be their natural, immutable, Edenic selves (the identity markers and beliefs of whom just so happen to line up perfectly with the aesthetic preferences of Lewis and her cohort).

Once again, if you think I am misreading Lewis’ work or otherwise being unduly dismissive, I implore you to read it for yourself. If you approach it with an honest and open mind, rather than a predisposition to believe and support anything you imagine upsetting conservatives, you will find I have described her general worldview accurately, and without undue prejudice. 

And now we have an obvious question: to what end is this social project aimed, other than a desire for more kids to get raped and beaten and to send most normal people running away from the left as if we were a superfund site? Here’s where Lewis turns the Schizo Scale up to 11. The result is simply that children will be “liberated” once they are freed from the presence of their parents and granted full legal agency from birth (the age of consent isn’t mentioned specifically, but, uhh... I think you can infer what she wants out of this):

Unfortunately, it is only on the fringes of the left today that one hears any mention at all of child sovereignty, juvenile body-autonomy, or youth liberation – let alone calls to imagine abolishing the family for, and with, kids. In my experience, it has usually been in the skilful domains of anti-authoritarian or anti-state communist mutual-aid networks, social centres and grief circles, that problems of “adultism” and “adult supremacy” are taken seriously, rather than mocked (the same, by the way, goes for disability-liberation concerns). It is among anarchists that I have generally encountered conversations about trusting kids; believing kids about who they are; listening to them; supporting their self-organisation; and yes, learning both with and from them, practising, for instance, the arts of coexisting with others and their wants.

The segregation of the generations is both epistemic and material, as “kids’ libbers” in the late 1960s and early 1970s used to emphasise. Still today, children are not only the most disenfranchised, but also the poorest people in our societies. Their segregation, and also the omni-pervasive theory of education our institutions apply, whereby knowledge flows unidirectionally, downward, from “us” to “them”, stems from an “unspoken truth” that Lane-McKinley identifies: “while many children fear adults, many adults also fear children.” To conquer this fear, it may be necessary for leftists in the 21st century to first give up apologising for the production (and self-fashioning) of non-innocent young people, and practice vindicating it. Only then are we likely to move beyond the “defence” of trans childhoods, towards their celebration. In the final lines of her 2018 study Histories of the Transgender Child, scholar Jules Gill-Peterson writes: “If we adults really desire to learn to care for the many transgender children in our midst, we need to learn what it means to wish that there be trans children.” Let us, as a matter of urgency, set to training ourselves and each other in this wish.

As is typical of identitarian writing of all stripes, Lewis is pretty vague as the material specifics of her grand ideal. Same as conservatives, these people understand power purely in terms of the presence or absence of certain people in certain spaces: social justice, or Democracy, or Freedom, or whatever the goal may be--these are achieved by making sure the good people simply exist among one another, free from the contaminating presence of bad people. The material realities faced by those who enter into these vastly reimagined societies are of no concern, nor is there any reason to wonder about the beliefs and actions of the citizens of these utopias. If everyone is Pronoun Person, and kids are trained to be pronoun people from birth (only they’re totally not trained because only cishetero people are capable of that), victory shall simply manifest itself; equity shall have been achieved. 

In her older works, Lewis did make some reference to the creation of anarcho-syndicalist-style “autonomous zones,” a concept adapted from the work of theorist Hakim Bay. You might have thought that the “CHAZ” that was built up in Seattle during the protests of 2020 was a spontaneous creation, but such efforts were actually fairly thoroughly theorized. And, well, if you were paying any attention to CHAZ as it unfolded, you’d understand why Lewis no longer leans on this concept: what was proposed a zone of “radical safety” and immediate equity quickly devolved into a sea of filth and unhinged violence, with CHAZ “security” managing to murder at least 2 black children in a span of a few weeks (and shoot at least one more). That, I’m afraid, is Lewis’ ideal world--even if she’s too much of a coward to articulate it, there’s no other way forward within her narrow, birdbrained worldview. And, even more sadly, that is what a lot of very stupid publishers are trying to establish as the brand of the post-Bernie left. 

Maybe I’m being too harsh? Lefties love few things more than apologia for their dumbest ideas, and I’m sure we will encounter some version of “a true CHAZ has never been attempted.” Fine. But please ask yourself: what do you honestly believe will be result of handing everyone’s bodily autonomy and the very agency of children over to the people who presently dominate the left? What will happen when the people who already revel in ruining the lives of strangers over minor semantic indelicacies are given control of state violence, in the absence of an actual state? Will empowerment suddenly make these people less paranoid, more forgiving, less convinced that everyone who disagrees with them is a fascist who wants to kill them and therefore should be met with violent resistance? What gives you faith in these people to believe they are anything but who they have repeatedly, doggedly demonstrated themselves to be? 

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Jordan Martins

Jordan Martins is a musician, organizer, educator, and visual artist whose works have been shown in Chicago and Brazil. While he has played steel guitar and other instruments for years with the singer / songwriter Angela James, his first solo album, Fogery Nagles, was released by the Astral Spirits label in the fall of 2023. In his review for Dusted, Bill Meyer wrote, “Fogery Nagles arrives, seemingly out of nowhere, but just at the right time.”

Sarah Davachi — Cantus Figures Laurus

I’m a sucker for long-form droney music in general and as of late I’ve been bathing in organ music of this kind as much as possible. I had really enjoyed Davachi’s other works but fell fully under her spell with this box set of works from the last few years with over four hours of heavy tones unfolding in various ways. I like to listen to this as loud as possible to feel these sounds as vibrations. There are several shorter tracks that focus on a particular palette or tonality, with the later tracks being from live recordings of longer performances. Even though the set is a compilation joining these sets of works together after the fact, I love this body of work as a sequence of experiences.

Caetano Veloso — Araça Azul

It’s hard to pick a favorite Veloso record, but if I had to it would be the utterly unique Araça Azul, recorded in 1972 when he returned to Brazil after being exiled by the military dictatorship years prior. The record is markedly outside of the original zeitgeist of the Tropicalia movement — less ecstatic, hopeful, collaborative, and postmodern in the mixing of styles — but at the same it’s maybe the purest expression of the experimental range of sounds and poetry that the movement ushered in. There are other musicians playing on some tracks, but the whole thing feels like a single creative brain tinkering with ideas and sounds until they take enough shape to be a “song.” There’s a fundamental collage approach that I love — where he engages in field recordings, musique concrète, dissonant orchestrations overlapping on simple folk melodies, and transformative and ballsy covers of classics by singers like Monsueto and Milton Nascimento.

Angelika Niescier, Savannah Harris, Tomeka Reid — Beyond Dragons

I had the good fortune of seeing this trio play at Elastic in Chicago this past spring. When they finished their set, my wife leaned over to me and said “THAT WAS HOT SHIT” which is maybe the most accurate thing to say about these players and this music. Niescier’s compositions are somehow tight and specific while simultaneously giving each player ample room to flex and explore with abundant space around the components of each piece. I love their ability to charge into a piece full steam with an almost aggressive sense of urgency and then allow their interactions to gradually fragment and dissolve into textural interplays and quiet call-and-response improvisations.

Paul Franklin— solos on “Together Again”

A friend hipped me to a video of Paul Franklin soloing over the Buck Owens classic “Together Again” and I’ve since gone down YouTube rabbit holes watching as many clips as I can find (and I see other people in the comments on the same journey). Franklin is a Nashville legend who has played pedal steel on hundreds of recordings since the seventies. As a member of the Time Jumpers, he plays as a sideman to Vince Gill at local venues in Nashville covering classic country songs, often playing this tune which originally featured Tom Brumley playing a quick steel solo that used some very innovative voicings at the time. Franklin’s playing is so technically brilliant, but it also illustrates the ways in which the instrument can be psychedelic and disorienting, even in a conventional setting. His solos always follow a basic architecture but there’s subtle variations, improvisations and flourishes in every version where you can see him trying to find new ways of cracking it open. My favorite clips are the ones where he goes out on a limb and the audience is noticeably giggling as they experience the sonic floor drop out from under them like they’re on a carnival ride.

Nicholas Britell— “Unto Stone We are One”, funeral “March Song of Ferrix,” season 1 finale of Andor

I sometimes dabble in the questionable array of new Star Wars projects and absolutely loved Andor’s vision of a bureaucratic fascist space empire, not spending a second on jedis and lightsabers, instead examining the interrelationships of imperial occupations, military contractors, and resistance movements. The last episode is masterful in part because the tension of the entire season simmers to a boil during a funeral procession with working class miners playing junky space orchestral instruments. The score of this funeral march by Nicholas Britell is a haunting, yearning motif that steadily builds but the stroke of genius is how perfectly out of tune the instruments are! Such a simple and surprising choice does such heavy lifting in terms of adding a sense of materiality to the setting and imbuing the dramatic build up with a subtle unease beneath the gorgeous arrangements.

Terry Riley— Music for The Gift

A very early work by Riley experimenting with tape loops, with an approach that is uncannily prescient in the way it does a live remix of a jazz quartet as they improvise around tunes. The fact that this particular quartet was Chet Baker’s (with trombonist Luis Fuentes, drummer George Solano, and bassist Luigi Trussardi) is a surprising interlocutor in all of this: it would maybe seem more fitting to for this to involve an unorthodox voice rather than a more straight ahead, idiomatic jazz player for these out-of-the-box experiments. But I think the music works precisely because of the nimble-swinging of the group as Riley cuts up and repeats their melodies and phrasing back onto them in a slurry of loops that piles up and interacts with their improvising in unexpected ways. The clarity and charm of Baker’s playing is a perfect fit. Peter Margasak wrote a great piece about it for Sound American that you can find here.

Macie Stewart and Lia Kohl— Recipe for a Boiled Egg

Two of my favorite improvisers in Chicago. They are so emblematic of what I love about the creative scene here in the ways that they endlessly collaborate across a range of genres and scenes, whether improvising or composing, playing songs or deconstructing forms. This is a biased pick because they recorded this at Comfort Station, the small and idiosyncratic multidisciplinary art space I run in Chicago. The thing that first drew me to Comfort Station was the building’s unique vibrant acoustics and the porousness of sound that you get with an old building directly facing a busy street. Macie and Lia lean into that context in stunning ways on this recording, narrowing in on their voices and their bowed instruments reverberating and inviting in sounds from the outside world instead of recording in the controlled environment of a studio. You can hear ideas take shape as each listens, responds, builds, grows, dissolves into the other’s playing, with a recording quality that grounds them to a particular time and place.

Olivier Messiaen — “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,” from the Quartet for the End of Time

This is probably the single most impactful and cosmic piece of music I’ve ever encountered. Messiaen wrote all the movements for the Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a Nazi POW camp, and the entire work is on another level. But the sixth movement — just piano and cello — brings me to my knees every time I hear it. The first time I heard it was somewhat random and personal: during my freshman year of college, my mom was coincidentally the staff accompanist at the conservatory of the university I attended. And I would often borrow her car to run errands while she was rehearsing with music majors preparing their senior recitals. On one such occasion I was tip-toeing back into her studio to return her keys and heard a bass player (bass majors often adapt cello pieces for their senior recital) bowing the opening notes of the melody which seems to ask for a dissonant response from the piano. Instead, I heard my mom play the slow, pulsing major triad chord that entered in response, settling the piece into a hypnotic journey. I felt like the floor gave way in an instant and I had never experienced anything like it. Susan Alcorn has adapted it for solo pedal steel in a really unique way melding the harmony and melody together, and Atomic included it on their 2018 release of covers, Pet Variations, playing with deep restraint that the piece calls for while also letting the energy bubble up restlessly.

Jeanne Lee — Conspiracy

It’s hard to find a better expression of vocals and poetry integrated into a free jazz setting than this brilliant 1975 record, with Jeanne Lee leading a killer ensemble including Steve McCall and Sam Rivers among others. I had never heard Lee’s work before coming across this album when it was re-released by Moved-by-Sound in 2021 and I was struck by how much sparseness there is (somewhat similar to some of Caetano Veloso’s delicate moments on Araça Azul even), and how simple utterances give way to grooves and freakouts with the rest of the players wrapping around Lee’s command of the sonic space. If I’m being honest, I think these kinds of approaches to free form improvisations can often collapse into a kind of cheesiness or ham-fistedness, and this record NEVER once gets close to that, everything feels so purposeful even when the exploration is at its outer limits.

Olaibi — Mimihawasu

Although I had heard her playing on works by Japanese band OOIOO, this is a musician/project that I hadn’t heard of by name until someone I follow on Instagram posted that they had passed away this October (coincidentally on my birthday). Something in the way they eulogized her touched me deeply and I listened to all of her records in the days after (and often since). Maybe it is because my exposure to her music was immediately tied to her recent death, but there’s something so profound, tragic, beautiful, frail, intimate and loving about her music all at once. I wish I had heard her more before her passing, but I’m grateful that in the wake of her death this world of sounds has entered my life.

[930am]

since i said i wanted to read at least one book a month here are 12 books i would like to read next year (in no particular order):

1. since yesterday: the 1930s in america by frederick lewis allen

2. public enemies: america’s greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by bryan burrough

3. blood meridian by cormack mccarthy

4. crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky

5. the brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky

6. the death of ivan illyich and other stories by lev tolstoy (i have a short story collection)

7. the three body problem by cixin liu

8. project hail mary by andy weir

9. the jungle by upton sinclair

10. kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right by angela nagle

11. allergic: our irritated bodies in a changing world by theresa macphail

12. invisible women: data bias in a world designed for men by caroline criado perez

[dhaaruni]

One of the things that linked the often nihilistic and ironic chan culture to a wider culture of the alt-right orbit was their opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., and its encroachment into their freewheeling world of anonymity and tech. [...] The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence and while these were left leaning it was tempting for politically sympathetic commentators to see it as a shiny new seductive shortcut to transcending our ‘end of history’. What we’ve since witnessed instead is that this leaderless formation can express just about any ideology even, strange as it may seem, that of the far right.

— Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

[cl0udbursting]

2022 reads!

since everyone is doing this, i figured i might as well join in! i track my reading through thestorygraph and aim for 30 books in a year, though i don't usually count shorter texts read for class or the plays i skim when looking for material in my acting classes. favorites in each category are bolded. feel free to ask questions on any of these!

FICTION: 

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters

Sula – Toni Morrison

The Infinite Noise – Lauren Shippen

A Neon Darkness – Lauren Shippen

Some Faraway Place – Lauren Shippen

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

Paradise – Toni Morrison

Gideon the Ninth (Reread) – Tamsyn Muir

Harrow the Ninth (Reread) – Tamsyn Muir

Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn

A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers

This is How You Lose the Time War – Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

A Room Called Earth – Madeleine Ryan 

Nona the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir

Frankenstein (Reread) – Mary Shelley

Hell Followed with Us – Andrew Joseph White

Dracula (through Dracula Daily) – Bram Stoker 

Eartheater – Dolores Reyes (trans. Julia Sanches)

My Heart is a Chainsaw – Stephen Graham Jones

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 

NON-FICTION:

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right – Angela Nagle

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Reread) – Alison Bechdel

POETRY: 

War of the Foxes – Richard Siken

Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology – W. Todd Kaneko & Amorak Huey

Life on Mars – Tracy K. Smith

Anglo-Saxon Judith – Unknown

Beowulf – Unknown

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – The Pearl Poet

PLAYS:

Cloud 9 – Caryl Churchill 

How I Learned to Drive – Paula Vogel

Mr. Burns and Other Plays – Anne Washburn

In the Other Room (The Vibrator Play) – Paula Vogel

Becky Shaw – Gina Gionfriddo

The Skriker – Caryl Churchill

The Tempest – William Shakespeare

This is Our Youth – Kenneth Lonergan

Bully – Amina Henry 

The Merchant of Venice (Reread) – William Shakespeare

The Marriage of Bette and Boo – Christopher Durang

Measure for Measure (Reread) – William Shakespeare