Panda Bear- "Mr Noah (Container Mix)"

Live from inside a neural network's dreams

Lee Bannon- "Artifical Stasis"

Artificial Stasis a far more aware, slightly less comfortable version of hyperstasis

Haunter- "Temps Perdu (édition de ténèbres)"

Haunter is an artist from out of Iowa City who contacted me a few years back about doing a show on the East Coast.  It never wound materializing, but it turns out he is still making some stunning music.  He has a new album out right now at bandcamp that everyone should check out.

RIP Charanjit Singh

Charanjit Singh wrote hundreds of Bollywood film scores and recorded a bunch of other material, but in the west he'll probably always be best known for Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, an album he recorded in 1982 that is infamous for sounding peculiarly similar to what dance music would sound like by decade's end.  It's interesting to see how over these past 5 years the narrative has distorted from "listen to how ahead of the curve this guy was" to "he invented acid house".   I think it's important not to subscribe to any of this false narratives because:

1. Acid house definitely arose out of a time/place, there's context and complexity into how it came to be at its specific historical moment  
2. It's unlikely any of the actual acid house pioneers ever heard Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat and thus it bears no real influence on the music or the scene.  Synchronicity is not a substitute for history 

and most importantly

3. Not being the guru of acid house music in no way diminishes the achievement Singh accomplished.  It's a reflection of historicity, not aesthetics.  Ten Ragas is a stunning album no matter what vacuum or what context it came out of. 

Dego and Kaidi- "Black is Key"

Economic Violence

"Economic violence is the critical issue of our day. When plants close on workers without notice, and leave them without jobs or training for new jobs -- that's economic violence. When three to five million Americans are on the streets and homeless -- that's economic violence. When merger maniacs make windfall profits and top management is given excessive bonuses, golden parachutes to aid a soft landing, while workers are asked to take a wage cut, a benefit cut and a job loss, a crash landing -- that's economic violence. When our children are victimized with poor health care, poor education, poor housing, poor diets and more -- that's economic violence against our children."- Jesse Jackson, announcing his presidential campaign in 1987

Saw this quoted recently and thought it was a nice sentiment, worth saving, but perhaps more shocking is the paragraph that precedes in in his speech, seen below:

Jackson couldn't really think, in '87 no less, that legalized racial violence was over? Certainly, the subject was at least being addressed, but as this year's track record of police brutality and murder attest, talk of purely economic violence ignores what a large component skin color still is in much state-sanctioned acts of terror. Was this sloganeering or a genuine movement towards re-positioning classism as the next frontier?

DOS X Machina- "111"

America needs to chillout

DV-i- "Shenzhen Miracle (Christmas 2.0)"

$10 Trillion on the Table

"Let me pause here once again to be clear about what the point of this extended historical comparison is and is not. Comparisons to slavery are generally considered rhetorically out of bounds, and for good reason. We are walking on treacherous terrain. The point here is not to associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels today.

In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it's all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today's climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they're asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy. No use trying to persuade people otherwise."

- Chris Hayes, The New Abolitionism 

Outstanding essay from a year or so back on the economic cost of fighting climate change, making apt but understandably careful comparisons to slavery/  

Scatological Skewers

Speaking of bodies as battlegrounds, I happened upon both of these recently.  The first is the new track from electroclash icon Peaches, who proclaims that she has "so much beauty coming out of my ass" and there's "light in places you didn't know could shine", a sentiment the track literalizes by showing an acrobatic dancer with something the end credits are calling a "laser buttplug". Reminds one a bit of the famous Kurt Schwitters sentiment on his Merzbaus creation that "everything the artist shits is art" (which Manzoni then took literally).

Simple and direct, not miles away from other teaches of Peaches.  The 2nd video is from Naomi Elizabeth, an artist who came up in the noise scene and now seems to be working in the viral video realm, making video that skirt that Lana Del Rey line between commentary on and reinforcement of sexist tropes.  "The Topic is Ass" immediately strikes you on first listen as pure novelty, but there's something to the phrasing that makes it sound like an intervention.  "We're here to talk about...again, again. Don't change the subject, my friend".  "If...were here, what would you say?" "If you think I'm joking, fix your priorities".  The melancholy loops in the backdrop also add a slight bit of extra gravity to it, as if the intervention may indeed on patriarchal assumptions or objectification itself- after all "Ass" is often a synedoche of "women"- but then purposefully undercuts itself by being highly silly.

And while Elizabeth is no doubt sexualized in the video, there's little actual "ass".  Her jerky movements belie hesitation more than horniness.  In fact, there's a voyeuristic way she's lit, her half-arched porn star grimace coming across forced and functional, not like someone in the thralls of desire.  Elswhere, she stands in front of an island vista, but totally surrogate from out.  She's a cut-out, literally a two-dimensional tool for some unseen (re:male) designer clicking away and creating this fantasy.  It's likely him that the intervention is for, but by song's end he continues to be in control.  The world is still his.

Man Ray, Monument to D.A.F. de Sade

Punish the Character, Punish the Story, Punish the Audience

Barbara Kruger- Your Body is a Battleground

"Half the time, people can’t even seem to figure out how to define rape, let alone portray it in responsible ways. Indeed, one of the most baffling things about so many rape scenes in popular culture is that the people who scripted them felt qualified to do so, despite seemingly knowing nothing about rape except that it exists and it is bad. In short, anyone canwrite a rape scene—but should they? Chances are, the answer is no."- Laura Hudson, Rape Scenes Aren't Just Awful, They're Lazy Writing

Wholeheartedly seconded this whole piece.  You'd think that with the amount of women out there experiencing this, one of their shitty boyfriend screenwriters (or god forbid, a woman screenwriter herself) might get it right, but there's almost always some lazy shortcut in TV/Hollywood rape scenes.  The more offensive thing is, of course, the way it trivializes a serious issue, but goddamn if as a writer you aren't allowed to take some level of offense as well  

The Wolf in PC Clothing

I cannot recommend Sarah Ahmed's piece "Against Students" in the New Inquiry enough. Far too much good stuff to quote here, but a few tastes:

"The figure of the consuming subject who wants the wrong things, a student who is found wanting, is hard at work. She is how an idea of universal knowledge or universal culture can be so thinly disguised as a critique of neoliberalism and managerialism. She is how an academic world can be idealised in being mourned as a lost object; a world where dons get to decide things; a world imagined as democracy, as untroubled by the whims and wishes of generations to come.

We have an understanding of how, when students are being critical of what we are doing, when they contest what is being taught, they can be treated and dismissed as acting like consumers. In other words it is when students are not satisfied that they are understood as treating our delivery as a product. Critique as such can be “swept away” by the charge of consumerism. Students become the problem when what they want is not in accordance with what academics want or what academics want them to want. Students become willful when what they will is not what academics will or not what academics will them to will.  What seems to be in place here is what Paulo Freire called the “bank model” of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into the bodies of students like money into a machine. Rather ironically, students are more likely to be judged as acting like consumers when they refuse to be banks.

...Another figure comes up, rather quickly, at this point, often lurking behind the censoring student. This is the over-sensitive student: the one who responds to events or potential events with hurt feelings. She also comes up as someone who stops things from happening. I could refer here to a number of recent pieces that I read as a moral panic about moral panics. Many of these pieces refer to US college campuses specifically and are concerned with the introduction of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

The figure of the over-sensitive student is invested with power. The story goes: because students have become too sensitive, we cannot even talk about difficult issues in the classroom; because of their feelings we (critical academics) cannot address questions of power and violence, and so on. A typical example of this kind of rhetoric: “No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress — no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change.” Or another: “While keeping college-level discussions ‘safe’ may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision.” Here safety is about feeling good, or not feeling bad. We sense what is being feared: students will become warm with dull edges, not sharp enough in wit or wisdom.

The moral panic around trigger warnings is a very good pedagogic tool: we learn from it. Trigger warnings are assumed to be about being safe or warm or cuddled. I would describe trigger warnings as a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that “difficult issues” can be discussed. The assumption that trigger warnings are themselves about safe spaces is a working assumption (by this I mean: it is achieving something). The assumption that safe spaces are themselves about deflecting attention from difficult issues is another working assumption. Safe spaces are another technique for dealing with the consequences of histories that are not over (a response to a history that is not over is necessarily inadequate because that history is not over). The real purpose of these mechanisms is to enable conversations about difficult issues to happen. So often those conversations do not happen because the difficulties people wish to talk about end up being re-enacted within discussion spaces, which is how they are not talked about. For example, conversations about racism are very hard to have when white people become defensive about racism. Those conversations end up being about those defences rather than about racism. We have safe spaces so we can talk about racism, not so we can avoid talking about racism!

The very techniques introduced to enable the opening up of conversations can be used as evidence of interlopers closing down conversations. Anyone with a background in Women’s Studies will be familiar with this; we come up against stereotypes of feminists spaces as soft, cozy, easy, which are the exact same sexist stereotypes that make Women’s Studies necessary as a feminist space. The very perception of some spaces as being too soft might even be related to the harshness of the worlds we are organizing to challenge."

Kendrick Lamar- "Alright" directed by Colin Tilley