A bit of a slapdash “Worms of the Senses” this month, as classwork and book promo prep and fatherhood have certainly pulled me away from Substacking for the past several weeks but that’s going to be changing as my schedule stabilizes.

Two reminders. First, I’ll be speaking in London at the Historical Materialism conference this coming week on “Modernism Against Exterminism” on a panel about popular modernism with Toby Manning and Paul Ewart. Those attending HM should stop by and see what we have to say. Second, the book is coming out soon, and those who sign up for a yearly paid subscription will get a copy. So…

Seeing

Candyman, written and directed by Bernard Rose (1992). When I lived in Chicago in the late aughts and early 2010’s, I passed the Cabrini Green housing projects every day on my way to work. As coincidence would have it, this was right as the city was starting its final demolition of the buildings. Every day, the wrecking ball had taken a bit more. Within a few years, a Target had been built in its place.

Some might call that ironic given that this film is about the permanence of the past, how traumas and atrocities never fully leave the place they were committed. I find it somehow appropriate. It’s one of the reasons I don’t fully buy the interpretation of the murders taking place entirely within Helen’s (Virginia Madsen) head. It’s an interesting take, and compelling in its own right. But it seems to undermine this notion that past and place matter – particularly when it comes to the throughline of American racism. In any case, it’s one of those films you should probably watch at least once every spooky season.

Funny Games, written and directed by Michael Haneke (1997). Word is that Michael Haneke abhors violence, that it makes him profoundly uncomfortable and fills him with sorrow. This always comes as a surprise to those new to his films. To be clear, even in its infamy, Funny Games doesn’t directly portray much in the way of violence. None of the family members terrorized by Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering) have their deaths directly shown onscreen. In fact, the only death we see onscreen is that of Peter when Anna (Susanne Lothar) shoots him. This is the one death that Paul undoes, literally unwinding the film.

No, this is a film that forces us to linger with the aftermath of violence, in turn forcing us to sit with the uncomfortable truth that we’ve wanted this. Paul tells us as much throughout the film. He’s correct. Otherwise we would turn it off. But we don’t. Also, it’s worth highlighting how well the music is employed in this film. Which is to say there’s almost none, save for a few classical composers playing in the family’s car and a fifty second John Zorn grindcore song. Masterful. I will be writing more about it soonish.

Buffet Infinity, written and directed by Simon Glassman (2025). Friends have been recommending this one to me for a while, and I’m glad I finally got around to it. It is delightfully bizarre. Telling a cosmic horror story entirely through TV commercials could easily descend into a gimmick, but the strength here is that Glassman doesn’t seem to be taking things too seriously. The absurdity is already there when you’re dealing with ads for local businesses, and it’s certainly there when you’re telling the tale of a sentient buffet restaurant feeding on its customers.

Glassman is clearly having fun here, then. Perhaps a bit too much fun. The final sequence of Buffet Infinity seemed disjointed, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to end things. Then again, how does one actually end this kind of story? Still, it’s nice to be reminded that there are filmmakers taking to heart the horror genre’s aptitude for experimentation and biting satire. That’s long been true of course, and often the schlockier the premise, the more space there is to go scathing and weird. Maniac Cop. The Stuff. It’s fair to say that Buffet Infinity could stand alongside.

Hearing

Madvillain, Madvillainy (2004). I question the judgment of anyone who doesn’t miss the hell out of MF Doom, which is not for a second to diminish the greatness of Madlib. Particularly here. Like much of Doom’s work elsewhere, it feels less like an album and more like a conceptual experiment. Get Madlib to mash together jazz, Bollywood film scores, and some video game noise (word is he created no fewer than a hundred tracks in preparation for the record), damn the messy pastiche, and throw it the emcee’s way and let his free-associating imagination do the rest. If anything seems commercial or to fit into a pop sensibility, do the opposite. Twenty-two relatively short tracks later, you’ve basically got a masterpiece. It shouldn’t work but it does, and brilliantly.

Black Sabbath, Paranoid (1970). This is normally on repeat for me during most of the month of October. Yes, it’s a blueprint for metal. Nothing that happens from hair to thrash to sludge to stoner happens without it. But it’s the kind of work that reveals something new every time you hear it. This time around I’ve been drawn into the sonic links between the jagged hardness and its psychedelic influences. Ozzy, Geezer, Iommi and Ward were all hippies for sure. They were also from very working-class backgrounds, which makes me think there’s something here redolent of what Fisher and Colquhoun say about the potency of working-class kids embracing psychedelic reason. This is only one specific example of what happens when these collide in a meaningful way, but clearly was an example that had legs.

Reading

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (1915). Another one I try to read at least once a year, specifically around this time of year. As always, I find myself returning back to this piece I wrote on Kafka’s best-known work for Jacobin eleven years ago. It’s one of the few pieces from that long ago I almost 100% stand behind. Particularly this part:

The grotesque is, much like Gregor himself, instrumentalized in The Metamorphosis. It provides a kind of slipstream between what Bertolt Brecht would distinguish as the lyrical and epic, the intimately personal and the grandly historical. The forces that can transform us may be far beyond our individual reach, but they are also ultimately banal.

This may be the most relevant legacy of Franz Kafka’s tale. It is a reminder that in a world dominated by capital, terror is so commonplace as to be almost hidden in plain sight. And in so being, it is capable of turning the human condition into something unspeakable.

Header image is from Funny Games (1997).

I was pleased to discuss Shake the City with Adam C. Jones of Acid Horizon last week. The resulting interview is now available for Patreon supporters of the podcast. If you’ve been looking for a reason to kick a few dollars the way of the project (one of the most consistently incisive and expansive on the left), now’s the chance.

As usually happens, I prepared for the conversation by typing out responses to the questions Adam sent to me. As always happens, the actual interview ended up going in wildly different directions. Some of the subject matter overlapped, some didn’t. So I’m posting the typed out version below. Also, please don’t forget that, for a limited time, subscribers to this Substack will receive a complimentary copy of the new edition of Shake the City.

How does understanding music, and particularly rhythm, rather than say lyrics, help us comprehend how the time of everyday life is mediated by capitalist forces?

Starting at the most basic point I’ll make, all art is a mediation and expression of the contradictions and tensions of the world that makes it as they are processed through the psychology of the artist or the creator. It’s not only that. We need to grapple with this and all of the excesses and ambiguities that come with it. So it’s not like the lyrics don’t matter. They absolutely do. When NWA rapped “fuck the police,” that mattered. So does the way a song sounds: its tempo, the shape of its rhythm, its sonic textures, and all the intellectual and psychological substance these conjure.

The reason I wanted to focus on the rhythmic and temporal construction of music – and I am hardly the only one to do this – is because what we call popular music starting in the 20th century and up through today has a rhythm that is very distinct compared to classical or pre-capitalist folk music or devotional music. That’s also true of capitalism. The manufacture of commodity on a mass scale requires a pace and intensity of rhythm and repetition that is neither possible nor necessary for production under feudalism. Capitalism needs something far more consistent and intense to meet the demands in its operative logic, be it in the rhythm of the assembly line or the algorithm. This doesn’t just predominate in conditions of work but in the design of our lives outside of work too (and by now of course we’re quite used to conditions in which work encroaches on life as a whole). It shows up in what kind of housing we have (if any), the way we participate in the production and consumption of knowledge and education, how we spend our leisure time.

This is one of the reasons I chose the city as my primary site of inquiry. Because upon reading Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, something clicked for me. Not just because the city as a whole plays a key role in the creation, production, and reproduction of popular music – agglomerations of capital and culture that create the conditions for cultural and artistic exchange. But because our cities are absolutely and obviously rhythmically constructed to create behaviors among its occupants that are suitable to the needs of capital. The way certain parts of the city are designed to discourage idleness or tarrying, to usher us between home and work and places of consumption. Or the way in which it invites or disinvites specific kinds of people to occupy it. Particularly as third spaces or heterotopic spaces dwindle, with so little left for us to have experiences of encounter in. What happens when the specific and unique rhythms of popular music meet the rhythms of the city? And what happens when that city is being (re-)designed to ice out dissent and creativity that work against its rhythms, when the cheap venues are closed down, when artists struggle to pay rent, when public spaces are increasingly policed and controlled?

Work, cities, popular music. All of these have an intense and repetitive rhythm because all exist under a system that requires a historically unique relationship to time. You can trace how this mediates between work and music through a variety of notions, be it mimesis, be it Sartre’s notion of the irreal – the way our knowledge and imagination interact to fill in the gaps of our experience and understanding – to even anecdotal evidence. Berry Gordy, founder of Motown, said many of his initial hits were written to match up with the rhythms of the assembly line of the auto plants in Detroit. And of course without Detroit, a former iconic industrial hub of the United States, you don’t have Motown, you don’t have soul music or rock music taking the trajectory it takes, you don’t have punk, funk, techno. It’s a city that leaves a very unique mark on popular music that tells us a lot about our relationship to capital, how amenable or oppositional or contradictory it is.

For me, the question I found myself asking is how the rhythms of our cities and the rhythms of our music interact. How they clash or feed off each other, and what possibilities these clashes create for a different conception of time and space in our lived environments.

There’s a phrase you pick up on from Mark Abel, namely that music is an “aestheticization of time”, and this is a curious phrase because time is already built into the senses, the aesthetic. However it is also perfect for what we are talking about here because this is anything but a redundancy, to aestheticise time is to time it again, to recode it, to produce, to synthesise a new kind of rhythm out of existent sensibilities latent within the realm of experience. From this you extract two kinds of synthesis, one from below via Fred Ho’s theory of Kreolization, and one from above via the forces of cultural imperialism. How might we distinguish them?

I really like that you call it the “recoding” of time. There’s a deliberation to the aestheticization of time as Abel describes it in his 2014 book Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, which was a big influence on Shake the City. The “recoding” points to the dual possibility you mention (also tips the hat to Stuart Hall, another big influence). Does time rule over us, or do we rule over it? That’s what’s at stake here. Do we experience time as empty repetition, or does it become an exploration that opens up different levels of experience?

If you think on a granular level, the way that music relies on time as opposed to other aesthetic and artistic modes of expression is very particular. The emotional resonance found in the contrast between two notes is dramatically altered if you increase or decrease the time between them. The notes of different instruments, the notes in various chords, the precise pattern of a percussive beat. These change our experience of time. And we’ve all been in an environment where a different song changes the sensorium of a room. If you’ve ever been in a dive bar without music you can feel how dreary its environment can be, but put on the music and it feels like a place of escape, yes?

This is where the different interpretations of the aestheticization of time start to come into play. You read Adorno, and he’s convinced that the tightly wound rhythms of popular music essentially serve to settle your senses into passivity, to fit your psychological contours into the slots of profit. And there’s something to this. Some of the examples I point to in the book are corporate-sponsored studies that encourage employers to incorporate music into their workplace because it helps boost productivity, and, if you’re in for example a retail space, to help customers feel more at ease to part with their money.

But there’s also another side to this, which is what Abel pulls out, and you can see a form of it argued in Stuart Hall’s essay “On Deconstructing ‘the Popular’.” Popular culture is never just something handed down from the culture industry to the inert masses. Nor is it something that springs entirely from the more noble instincts of the subaltern and is relayed back to us without the influence of capital. It’s both. And which side has more influence is always down to the balance of class forces on a smaller or larger scale. Which on the one hand means that there’s always the potential to depart from predictable time in the form of the music, but also, the culture industry is quite adept at recuperating – to now bring the Situationists into this – any gesture and aesthetic back into a temporality more at ease with it.

This dialectic is really important. You think of the “blue note.” The note that wobbles and bends and quavers that’s found in pre-capitalist African and European folk sounds among others, then you hear it in the blues and jazz and from there it becomes ubiquitous in popular music. This is a note that, almost literally, won’t behave, won’t obey the “rules of music.” For some time, the European music scale didn’t know how to quantify the blue note. As a result, Buddy Bolden, a lot of the other early New Orleans jazz artists – we really have no idea what they were supposed to sound like because the sheet music could miss certain elements. You also had countless institutions – from US Congress to evangelical churches – claiming that music utilizing the blue note was degenerate, that it was under the influence of Satan. And of course there was a highly racialized component at the center of this. Telescope that forward today, it’s not like the boardroom of a record label in the 21st century is afraid of the blue note.

So you have a dialectic. The commodification of music reifies the dynamism of a song, of a genre. It freezes the meaning of a gesture in place. That stasis is necessary for commodification, but it’s also not the way that culture moves, including under capitalism. That’s the contradiction. Capitalism, in uprooting people from their homes and native spaces, creates a cosmopolitan subject in the same breath it creates the proletarian subject. This is what allows new genres, new styles, new sounds to be forged. That’s the “kreolization” we talk about, whose definition I get from Fred Ho the late communist theorist and free jazz musician (though he had a very strong polemic against the term “jazz”).

For example, you don’t get ska and rocksteady in Jamaica – and therefore no reggae – without the combination of mento folk music (itself a combination of African and European folk styles) with the soul and R&B that Jamaicans were hearing over the radio. Culture wants to move and create its own meanings that stem from the subjectivity of its participants.

How do these two forces of synthesis establish themselves in a contestation, not in terms simply of time, but also of space, and how can we look at the way policing responds to this conflict, particularly in the age of the ascendant far right?

We’re talking about two interrelated ways to look at this. One is music as a site of contestation in and of itself. The other is music as an object within a broader contest over time and space. Obviously these are very intertwined. Marx wrote in the Grundrisse how capital’s pressure to speed itself up and subsume every local economy in its grasp is something like “the annihilation of space with time.” Fred Jameson noted in his book on postmodernism that late capitalism has a tendency to reverse this in a way, constructing spaces that arrogate themselves outside of time, almost as if suspending its inhabitants within it. He called it “the domination of space over time.”

Music and sound provide a unique prism through which we can see this. Riot police use acoustic cannons to disperse crowds. Train stations ban busking, or restrict it to licensed artists in certain zones. Some pseudo-public spaces have been known to blast classical music late at night to deter young people from loitering. This works in concert with the use of music to facilitate commodification of course. And it almost always has a highly racialized dimension.

In the book, I talk about the shooting death of Jordan Davis, who was killed in a parking lot by a white gunman in Florida after he and his friends didn’t turn down the music playing in their car. There’s also Alton Sterling, the Baton Rouge man who was shot and killed by cops while selling bootleg CDs in front of a convenience store. Neither of these men were killed because of their relationship to music. They were killed because they were black in a profoundly racist country, where white people are allowed more ownership over space than black people are, which police are more than willing to enforce. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy how Davis and Sterling’s interaction with music in public space becomes an entry point for state repression. Space must be shaped a certain way, with a specific rhythm, and those whose own rhythmic ontology might run counter to that must be removed.

But if the meaning of music and rhythm is up for grabs – if it’s not just down to the recapture of imagination by capital like Adorno says, but the possibility of its reinterpretation and control by artist and listener – then we have to see the ways in which music can assist in the explosion of spatial-temporal domination. How it can take the empty time of capital, its numbing rhythms and monotonous daily lives and reintroduce a dynamism from the bottom up, a reach from being ruled over by time to in fact ruling over time.

Thus, we have the relationship between hip-hop and Black Lives Matter. Anyone who was out at those massive demonstrations in 2020 will remember the way in which music blasted out of speakers on truck beds or out of cars helped transform city streets that, due to Covid lockdowns, had been virtually empty for months prior. This dialectic went the other way too, from music incorporated into the movement to the movement transforming music made by artists. Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” for example, was written and recorded to sound like it was a demonstration: the marching drums, the refrain of “say their names.”

This rings true with what John Berger describes in his 1968 article “On the Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” in which he describes them as rehearsals for revolution. This is a consciously created way of experiencing space and time that is entirely different from how they normally are.

In terms of the relation to music consumption, there has been a great atomisation pushed by the rise of headphones and platforms, pushing us into what Mark Fisher called the “OediPod.” Music has been used to push us back into ourselves, what kinds of musical innovations and inversions have been instrumental in pointing at ways out?

I think we should be very clear that there’s no such thing as a cultural problem that can be solved sheerly within the realm of culture. I think breaking out of the “OediPod consumer bliss” that Fisher talks about is going to require a fundamental shift in our relationship with the prevalence of headphones, with technology, and a different rhythm of life that allows us to interact with our physical spaces. We need to contend with alienation not just as alienation but as a central ontological component of capitalism. In short, I don’t think we’ll have a different relationship with our headphones until the other side of the revolution.

That being said, I can hear myself being very positivist about it, a bit manichean. And honestly, I’m rather tired of leftists saying that there aren’t cultural interventions to be made as culture, that we simply need to operate on the level of politics. We don’t have a choice except to interact with culture, or with aesthetics. Aesthetics are the primary and first way that we experience the word – to give a nod back to Kant. And so being agnostic before we have communism imminent is essentially to relinquish this territory back to the far-right, or the shrinking political center who have no clue how to contend with the far-right. If culture and politics interact dialectically, and they do, then refusing to engage dialectically… we do that at our own peril.

When Fisher was talking about the “OediPod consumer bliss” he was, to a great degree, pointing out that the transformation of music into an individual experience rather than a collective one meant that, on a granular enough scale, any music could be muzak. Any music could be used as a form of social atomization which in turn makes our spaces less collective, less heterotopic, and more amenable to the flows of capital.

It seems to me that there’s always a push against this, a tendency, something in music’s organic makeup that tries to turn the atomization inside out. Particularly when it comes to genres with a more recent collective memory. For example, in the video for Skepta’s “That’s Not Me,” he uses headphones as a microphone. This isn’t an uncommon gesture. Actually, it’s probably not fair to even call it a gesture, it’s more an act of necessity. Don’t have a proper mic? Just plug some headphones into the microphone jack and there you have it. The symbolism is obvious for our purposes here. Grime music is very much borne from the echoes of the lumpen and working class collectivities of the UK housing estates and so it’s fitting that it also became something of a soundtrack for the student rebellion of the early 2010’s. From an individual negation of headphone culture’s isolations to the mass negation. We always need to be looking for links between the two.

The title of the book comes from Plato, who warned that music shouldn’t be given to slaves, because the changing of the dominant modes of music threatened the fundamental order of the state, or his ‘beautiful city’. But as you note, this threat doesn’t purely come from the music being given to the slaves, but from the power the slaves already have. How does this illustrate the relationship between a counter-culture and a counter-politics, possibly even one necessary to the development of an Acid Communism?

I talk in the book about “music as a threat.” Which can come across as hyperbolic. But I think we’re in a moment when music is becoming a threat again, in the context of an increasingly authoritarian capitalism.

We’re only at the beginning of it. The revoking of US visas for Kneecap and Bob Vylan. The attempt to convict Mo Chara of material support of terrorism, alongside the criminalization of Palestine Action. We’re transitioning out of the moment when what Marcuse called “repressive tolerance” is enough to neutralize cultural dissent. I think that more and more the illiberal/post-liberal state is going to resort to outright repression.

I think this is where we should situate AI in music. It’s terrifying to me that the same algorithm recommending you listen to Yellow Magic Orchestra on Spotify can also be used to point a bomber toward a girls’ school in Iran. When Daniel Ek of Spotify contributed $700 million to Helsing for the development of AI-guided weaponized drone, he revealed a common underlying logic that’s really best understood through EP Thompson’s notion of “exterminism” when he was describing the Cold War nuclear arms race. The willingness to turn whole swathes of the planet into desolate sacrifice zones.

I harp on this notion a lot lately, as I think it’s key to understanding the moment we’re in, the moment we’ve been in. Exterminism isn’t just about the conscious choices made by the ruling or political classes. It’s an inertia, a dialectical movement toward oblivion that grows organically out of the disasters that came before. It’s not just the choices that are made but the choices that seem most obvious to those in charge. Trump, Netanyahu, Ek, Keir Starmer, Anthropic; these aren’t fully autonomous actors. They’re pushed toward a particular outcome by the sense of possibility that they see on offer. That they can’t see catastrophe they are helping unfurl day to day simply reveals that they’re prisoners of a timeline of their own making.

So, can we see it? Can we see the coming disasters for what they are in time to slam on the emergency brake? These disasters are apparent with Israel’s actions in Gaza, which makes plenty of notorious use of AI: the attempt to flatten space, to empty it of its population, its history, its culture. On a less dramatic scale the drive toward AI in music is an attempt to empty the human subject from the aestheticization of time. Very much in line with what Adorno warns about. Events emptied of history and our ability to make it.

When we talk about acid communism, we should remember the music and art that Mark Fisher pointed to and why he thought them worthwhile. It wasn’t just that these artifacts were utopian in their disposition, it’s that they had one foot in the utopian and one foot in the (often very dismal) here and now. Yes, these artworks pointed to a sublation of the latter, but they saw the need to reckon and grapple with the former. Only within the contradictions and shifting cracks could the way forward be found.

So it is with music. Either popular music comes to symbolize our domination by the empty rhythms of accumulation and exploitation or it comes to symbolize a redemption, an egress, a rupture from the prevailing path in the way Walter Benjamin talks about it. Either is within the realm of possibility. But the transcendence we’re searching for won’t come through acting like the present conditions don’t exist. Just like working people can only free themselves by taking control of what exploits them, so do we need to exert a collective mastery over our time, and its aestheticization.

Header image is a screenshot from Acid Horizon’s Patreon superimposed on a still from the video for the Stone Roses “I Wanna Be Adored” (1989).

I am excited and proud to announce that 1968 Press is publishing a new edition of my book Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis. This edition will feature new material that expands on my arguments and analysis around the role of music and urban rebellion.

What’s more, I am running a special that will get copies of the new book directly to readers of To Whom It May Concern... This fall, everyone who signs up for a yearly subscription (or already has one), will receive a copy of Shake the City mailed directly to them.

This is in addition exclusive paid content, including forthcoming installments of my ongoing essay series on modernism and liberation, and my new feature “Sound and Vision,” on the intersections between film, music, and radical critique. This is, to be clear, an excellent deal for $50 a year. But, for a limited time, I’m lowering the price for a yearly sub to $40 a year.

(If you can’t afford that and would rather do a monthly sub, reach out and we can work something out. None shall be deprived.)

Originally released four years ago, Shake the City sought to better understand why music plays such a specific role in our daily lives, and interrogated how that role transforms when the promise of radical social change becomes real. How do the rhythms of music and urban space collide, particularly as both the modern city and popular culture come under pressure from commodification and authoritarianism? How do both change when the pulse of protest and uprising reclaim urban space and reestablish a vibrant, democratic commons?

Answering these questions has taken me through Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” Lee “Scratch” Perry’s “Black Panta,” Moor Mother’s “Creation Myth,” and Burial’s Untrue. I revisited the role of hip-hop in the Black Lives Matter uprising, grime in the UK student movement the early 2010s, the height of the rave scene in the 1990s, and the mass public performances of Chilean folk music in the estallido social.

A lot has changed since 2022, and it quickly became clear there was going to have to be an expanded edition. The good people at 1968 Press, itself evolving and looking to carve a new path, agreed. And so, the new edition of Shake the City includes a new chapter examining the fates of popular music in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the rise of AI.

You can, of course, always order a copy of the new book through the 1968 Press site. And I would certainly encourage you to peruse and buy their other titles. This is a small press with a clear and unique intervention into radical thought. That is worth supporting. But if you want to support us both, and get some exclusive creative essays that will make you believe communism is imminent simply through the creation of art, film, and music, sign up for the $40 sub right now.

Here’s some praise the original book has received. If you don’t know whether to buy it or not, this will clinch it…

“This is a book about how music is used to teach conformism, from muzak, through gentrification, to the isolation of our earbud world. And it is a book about how artists have rebelled, raging against racists and authoritarians, and fighting to remake musical forms. You’ll find on Alexander Billet’s pages a dazzling array of characters, from Erik Satie and the clubbers of the 1980s rave scene, to Skepta and Lethal Bizzle, by way of the Ramones. Read, resist, and make music ours once more.” — David Renton, author of Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, 1976-82 (Routledge, 2018)

“Billet’s Shake the City is a tribute to the cultural resonances of the class struggle… a work of cultural criticism par excellence.” — Jonas Marvin, author of Breaking of the English Working Class (Verso, 2026)

“For Billet, music brings people together so it is possible to imagine a utopian future collectively. His belief that this form of imagining is not only pleasurable but essential to human survival suffuses the whole book, making for a dynamic and engaging read… a welcome addition to existing writing on music and politics.” — Kate Bradley, rs21.org.uk.

Header image is the cover of Shake the City. Art by Adam Turl. Design by Graham Smith.

Greetings from the depths of a Cultural Studies PhD program. This month’s “Worms of the Senses” clearly reflects my arrival here. Not all the films and albums and books were assigned, though some clearly were. One of the great things about being in a “Screening Violence” class is it forces me to sit down and watch some truly incredible films, including ones I have been meaning to see for years. A couple are included down below.

Also, something to put on readers’ radar is that over the next few months, there is going to be a lot more content for paying subscribers only. And though I won’t say everything now, I will say that there’s going to be a real-life, meatworld, material gift in the post for yearly subscribers. You’ll want to get in on this, so please sign up for a paid sub below. You could do far more wasteful things with $50 a year…

subscribe...

Seeing

The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah, screenplay by Peckinpah and Walon Green (1969). Peckinpah has always brought up sharply mixed feelings for me. He was singularly adept with the contradictions and markers of the western genre, excellent as using them to probe the darknesses of American life, particularly in the context of Vietnam. Without him, we probably wouldn’t speak of the “revisionist western” in the same way. That being said, it’s difficult to get around just how much he hated women. Or at least it is for me ever since I saw Straw Dogs. A brilliant film. One I will never watch again.

It’s interesting to me that The Wild Bunch was so reviled for its violence in its day. By modern standards, it’s not all that violent, or at least not uniquely so. Still, the entertainment codes were only a few years in the rearview. People simply weren’t used to seeing on film the way blood trails through the air when a bullet goes through someone’s torso. Peckinpah’s use of squib work was undeniably groundbreaking in that regard. More to the thematic point, look at that opening scene. A brutal massacre, bandits, bounty hunters, and innocents shot to shreds, children coming to imitate in the wake. It’s only topped by the final scene’s massacre. In 1969, that hit in a certain way.

Hana-bi, written and directed by Takeshi Kitano (1997). Kitano made a choice with this film: show violence as frankly as you can, and its absurdity comes out. The result is off-kilter, often funny, and an ultimately incredibly moving examination of violence itself to a certain extent, but more so of loss. One minute you’re shocked to find yourself laughing at an eye gouged with chopsticks. The next you’re moved to tears by a paraplegic former cop taking up pointillist painting. It’s very disarming. (Also, as a sidenote, Hana-bi very much highlights the argument from the comrades at Horror Vanguard that the only time cops are any good in film is when they stop being cops.)

Only during later discussion did I learn that the paintings featured are Kitano’s own. Violence and loss are traumatic. This is old hat in terms of subject matter. Far more rarely do we get the chance to reflect on their aftermath, still less to consider the regenerative possibilities in recovery. Hana-bi is strikingly unsentimental in reflecting on this. It’s also breathtakingly beautiful.

The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, screenplay by Franco Solinas (1966). An undeniable masterpiece, and a necessary part of any serious aesthete’s viewing. It had been a few years since I last watched it; what nudged me to so was an impending appearance on the Andorks podcast intended as a follow-up to my previous one in which I used Pontecorvo’s film as a reference point for understanding the anticolonial politics Andor (yes really, Tony Gilroy has been clear about the influence the film has had on this show, a Disney-Star Wars property).

Enzo Traverso, in briefly analyzing the film in Left-Wing Melancholia, homes in on how the defeat of Algerian guerrillas proves temporary, how the use of memory and defeat is transformed into the mass uprising that eventually frees Algeria from French rule. Defeat, loss, mourning as catalyst. All that and discussion of revolutionary tactics, and what that means for revolutionary filmmaking. As always, I state up front that I know little more than what the ordinary civilian does when it comes to the Star Wars franchise, but the episode of Andorks should be coming out some time in October. Will let readers know.

Hearing

Kneecap, FENIAN (2026). It certainly took me long enough to get around to listening to this album, considering both that it was released in May and that Kneecap are probably one of the few artists we could consider dangerous by today’s standards. It’s a fantastic album, no two ways about it. Definitely Kneecap’s best, and their most substantially cohesive. Let’s be clear: Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, DJ Próvaí have always worked incredibly well together, but here they seem to be pivoting off and with each other almost seamlessly. (As a side-note, while Tom Morello’s new album is pretty unremarkable, the track on which Kneecap appear is actually quite good.)

Perhaps it’s events in recent years that have deepened their artistic groove. As you’d expect, they’re responding to the increased attention of the past few years, most obviously the attempts by the British government to literally lock up one of their members. As such, there’s a good deal more grit and anger on this album than Kneecap’s previous two, but also a great deal more confidence. “Smugglers and Scholars” is straight-up menacing, but the beat is patient, willing to wait for you to come to it before it smacks you with its refusal. “Liars Tale” leans all the way in though (“Nah, fuck Kier Starmer / Netanyahu’s bitch and genocide armer”). Plus the video is intense. In my estimation, there aren’t all that many artists who manage to integrate their politics and art in a way that maintains a certain didacticism while also just being musically thrilling. Controversy aside (admittedly a stretch for Kneecap), it seems clear that the group is going to continue as an important, even influential presence in rap.

Protomartyr, Hotel Usona (2026). The new album is finally here, and it’s great. I say so as much in my review for POW Mag. Oddly, word is that Protomartyr’s frontman Joe Casey “despises” what I wrote, even though it’s pretty clear in affirming Hotel Usona as an excellent listen and a major leap forward for the band. Ah, well… I suppose I’d be disappointed if he weren’t as cantankerous in real life as he is in his songs. Undoubtedly, the album communicates a pessimistic and unsparing view of life in America. Not exactly new for Protomartyr, but shaping all these horrors and anxieties into the story of the most hellishly dystopian hotel you’ve ever been to is quite a fun conceit. As I say in the review:

Hope, in the view of the Protomartyr of 2026, is a precious resource. It can’t be clumsily superimposed on the devastations of the present, but it can be mined in the cracks of daily life, clutched fiercely but never jealously. Right now, even with all the investments and entanglements we have in this dismal establishment, there’s a non-zero chance it’s right outside. If only we can find the exit.

Blue Sky Black Death, Glaciers (2013). Far from the first time Blue Sky Black Death have appeared on my listening lists, here or elsewhere. Glaciers is a unique album though. Technically, it’s not even an album, but an EP. It’s got only five tracks on it, each one anywhere from eight to 14 minutes long, featuring collaborations with Child Actor, Lotte Kestner, and JMSN. It comes across like a more abstractly cosmic version of Noir (BSBD’s masterwork), where the flashes of memory aren’t felt as much as implanted from without.

Each track could, if the group so desired, be broken up into two or three separate tracks, but it’s ultimately far more interesting having them pieced together as they are, with each composition divided up into different “movements” that build on and explore different dimensions of sonic and rhythmic expression. The duo clearly gave themselves the room to experiment apart from the constraints of the traditional album format.

Reading

A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami (1982). Look, I know what people say about Murakami. Much of it is true. All of his protagonists are unfulfilled men trying in vain to fill the spiritual void. He can’t write women other than as objects to fill the needs (sexual or otherwise) of these protagonists. What I don’t, however, grasp, is confusing the plainness of his prose for blandness, when it clearly is the former rather than the latter.

In any case, I’m a completist, and because I found something to enjoy in his first two books, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, I’m on the Murakami train until it arrives at the final stop where everyone must disembark. A Wild Sheep Chase is when he starts to go in a more surreal direction. It’s bolder, more ambitious, and the first time you see his fetish for women’s ears. It’s also strangely captivating, alluring despite (or perhaps because of?) the postmodern winks. It also makes for a fitting, even moving, conclusion to his “Trilogy of the Rat.” Is he the literary master his boosters make him out to be? No. Is he a hack? I don’t think so. Even if we see his writing as a progressive dive ever-deeper into an impotent mind, aimlessly rifling through his delusions without ever unpacking them, it makes for an interesting journey.

Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders, by Claudia Verhoeven (2026). The conventional narrative around the Manson Family murders is that they were an organic outgrowth of the 1960s as hippie countercultural idealism curdled into a cultish fundamentalism. The competing take is that Manson was a thoroughly American creation. What’s interesting about Verhoeven’s book – and what allows it to stand apart from the hundreds of other, often far more salacious, books and films and documentaries made about the Manson murders – is that it argues, in a way, the blame lies on both ends, but also neither.

Yes, there was a certain kind of dimestore utopianism that had festered in the more unserious segments of the counterculture (“Helter Skelter,” the cheap millennarianism, the infantile views on race and racism that start going in pretty viciously racist views themselves). But the conditions that allowed parts of the counterculture to spin out into hallucinatory violence were very much a part of the American landscape. Verhoeven writes deftly of how Charles Manson’s warped sense of time was shaped by his years in and out of prison. She also closes the book with a chapter on how Manson’s trial ran alongside that of Lieutenant William Calley in the wake of the My Lai massacre (the similarities are eyebrow-raising). In other words, the murders were, more than anything, a tragic and horrifying manifestation of spectacle, a grisly result of an American life already being violently alienated from itself. Fascinating book.

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag (2003). The “Screening Violence” course I’m taking has us reading a few of the essentials of critical theory as it applies to the photograph. One is Camera Lucida (see below). The other is Regarding the Pain of Others. It’s worth remembering that this book came right before social media diffused and reconfigured our relationship to the repeated image, but when traditional media was already oversaturating and numbing us with atrocity. The violence that once might have outraged by this point started to become another method of overwhelm, a reinforcement of the idea that violence is simply part of daily life and there’s nothing to be done about it. And in any event, the image that outrages rarely does much to explain.

Which isn’t to say Sontag was completely cynical about the potentials for photography to communicate something essential about war; she ends the book on Jeff Wall’s “Dead Troops Talk,” a harrowing image for sure, albeit one that is deliberately orchestrated rather than “caught” on the battlefield. It would seem that the author, along with others, is urging us to rethink and possibly radically readjust our relationship to the still image.

Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes (1979). The best critical theory books are those where you have no idea what the author is saying until those final pages. You grapple and struggle through the tangle of different threads, grabbing onto those you can make out along the way and hoping they all link together later. That’s definitely what you get with Camera Lucida, where Barthes is trying to find the ontological distinctions, the “this-ness,” of photography, on the way to understanding why a specific photo of his late mother grabs him the way it does.

There is of course the temporal aspect, the realization that every time you look at someone in a photograph, you are looking at a point in time that will never return – and quite often looking at someone whose death doubles to freeze them in time. But it is Barthes’ notion of punctum that intrigues me (hardly unique; most readers and scholars agreed this is the book’s primary contribution). That flaw or errant inclusion in a photo’s content that jumps out from its compositional and contextual qualities to scramble and awe your sense of place in time. Heady for sure. Also surprisingly relevant, for reasons I probably don’t need to go into now, when the reproduced image dominates our lives so fully.

Header image is from the cover art for Theory of Immediate World Revolution (Verso, 2026).

Greetings from Hotel Usona. Protomartyr’s new album came out on Friday and I’ve got a review of it up at POW Mag. I am, first of all, very excited to be appearing at POW, and even more excited to be reviewing an album like Hotel Usona for them.

I’ll let the review speak for itself, but longtime readers will know I never miss an opportunity to write about a Protomartyr album. They’ve always pointed to the violent rot at the heart of 21st century America, but this takes it to another level. Going “concept album” brings real pitfalls with it. Not only does the group mostly dodge them here, in doing so they manage to open up a set of entirely new songwriting possibilities for them. First few paragraphs are below. The rest is up at POW Mag.

As you walk toward the check-in desk, you notice how unsettlingly quiet the lobby is. It’s late, but not late enough for a hotel to be this deathly empty and silent. No sound but that of your own footsteps on cheap tile and the buzz of that one fluorescent lightbulb struggling to stay on. For a few seconds, you wonder if this place even has a front desk clerk or if you’ll be left to wait here until your bones rot.

Slowly, creakily, he emerges from the back office, doesn’t bother to say hello or even make eye contact. Bedraggled and beaten down, he looks like the kind of person who’s always hung over, even if he hasn’t touched a drop in weeks. “Welcome back to the dream of a rotten mind,” he says. His voice sounds like he regularly chews asbestos. “The rooms are half empty, the hallways are where you’ll survive.”

He throws a shiny keycard at you and you start your long plod down the hallway to your room. You think the lightbulb’s buzzing is getting louder, giving way to the harsh sound of static. You can hear the clerk shouting after you, barking really. “The difference this time is you’re gagging for it. The difference this time is your appetite for hate.” The buzzing static takes on a pounding, punishing rhythm, like having your head held next to a mistreated amplifier. You thought you knew how brutal it could get. You didn’t.

Come see your room here.

Header image is by DJ Short.

Below are the first few paragraphs of my new piece, now up on the site for Locust Review. The rest you can read there, of course. All I have to add here is on the title. Sometimes you pick a title because it provokes. Sometimes you pick a title because you mean it. In this case it’s both. You’ll have to read on to see what I mean by that. And, as always…

So, read on.

True story… Several years ago, my wife and I were driving through the San Fernando Valley, not far from our house in North Hollywood. From about a block away, I saw a man standing on a street corner, talking on his phone. He was a short, scruffy ginger, with a vaguely rat-like face. “Is that Ed Sheeran?” I asked in that nonchalant way Angelenos are accustomed to asking when they see a celebrity walking down the street.

As we drove closer, we got a better look, and our answer. Pacing on the corner, speaking into his mobile phone, we saw he was wearing a white t-shirt with the words I’m Not Ed Sheeran across the front. Which means one of two things. Either the man in question was, in fact, not Ed Sheeran, and wanted people to stop asking. Or he was Ed Sheeran and wanted to forget that he was Ed Sheeran. The second seems more plausible.

There’s a truism in Marxist cultural criticism, insisting that there is no such thing as politically pure art, that it’s all tainted in one way or another. That people’s aesthetic tastes ultimately don’t decide whether they’ll be progressive, reactionary, or revolutionary. That ultimately, people can like what they like, and socialists have no place crudely judging people’s politics based on what music they like, which TV shows they watch, or which sport teams they root for.

Still, to every rule, there are exceptions. Should there ever be another storming of the world’s Winter Palaces, a chance for working people to once again take the reins of history, there’s a safe bet there will be at least a smattering of people who love “The Shape of You” or “Bad Habits.” Events will hopefully show them how wrong their tastes were.

We may not have to wait for the revolution. Events have already shown Sheeran himself to be as bloodless and lukewarm as most of his music. When he caved to pressure from real estate mogul and Epstein-affiliate Robert Kraft and booted Macklemore from his slot as an opening act on Sheeran’s tour, he emerged in his fullest form as a musical avatar for capitalist realism.

Read the rest here…

Header image is by Adam Turl.

Threads is a haunting, devastating film. First broadcast on BBC2 in 1984, the film was recognized as the first to fully portray the run-up to a global nuclear exchange, its apocalyptic happening, and the aftermath of nuclear winter. It is, predictably, a grim and bleak story. The kind of experience that sits in your chest and leaves all manner of chilling imagery etched on the back of your eyelids. Its impact on the culture of the Cold War’s last years was undeniable. One reviewer wrote that it “makes The Day After look like A Day at the Races.”

Toward the film’s end, we see children sitting in a derelict classroom, staring blankly at a television playing an educational video. It is cold and wet, but everywhere is cold and wet. Fuel and electricity are scarce. The tracking on the degraded tape makes it nearly unwatchable, but it’s more than most have. An artifact of a culture completely torn apart, employed in a vain attempt to impart some basic form knowledge.

The children, for their part, may have vague recollection of life before. Thirteen years earlier, the air base at Finningley, just outside Sheffield, was hit with a tactical nuclear weapon. So was just about every urban area in Britain, and the world. NATO and the Warsaw Pact had made good on their promise of mutually assured destruction. The country’s population reaches its lowest since the medieval era. Industry no longer exists. Neither does culture in any meaningful sense of the word. Radiation sickens, blinds and kills early. Most barely manage to survive on subsistence farming.

We are never shown the children’s faces and what they are watching in the same shot. Instead, the camera cuts back and forth between a full-screen closeup of the tape’s staticky contents – a program teaching young viewers about different animal’s skeletons – and the kids’ vacant stares. If they are absorbing anything, there’s little indication. Their slack mouths and drooping eyes indicate a short life lived in apathy. Earlier, it’s shown that those raised in the wake of nuclear war speak little more than a fractured, monosyllabic version of English.

No matter what they see on this video, they inevitably return to a world where learning is a largely futile pursuit. So are kindness and anything we would recognize as joy or dignity. The one adult in the room mouths along with the words, seemingly out of rote absent-minded memorization. The world of warm, smiling television presenters and words of encouragement for remembering the day’s lessons are utterly foreign to these children, close to illegible. Keeping the two diegeses separate is an effective choice on the part of director Mick Jackson.

This scene jumped to mind when Omar Ashtawy’s photograph went viral. It shows the ruins of the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City. We’ve seen countless versions of this scene, yet it is still, somehow, utterly alien. What might have been homes, shops, office buildings are piles of gray rubble, the occasional frame jutting out from the wreckage.

On the street, a portable projection screen. A few dozen children sit on folding chairs, or on the ground, their gaze forward. They are watching The Lion King. A grown Simba nuzzles Nala after their reunion. This is the scene that gave the world Elton John’s earworm “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”

For a few hours, the children get to be somewhere else. One has trouble imagining a wider contrast between the two worlds — one jagged, toxic and cruel, bombed of all vibrance; the other colorful and just, nurturing and forgiving.

The screening was organized by a project called Little Wings, organized by the Masharawi Fund for Films and Filmmakers. The aim is simple, and so is the method: set up a film showing in an accessible public area, and provide kids with a space where they can escape briefly from the horrific reality of war.

There’s little to criticize here. If a group of filmmakers is able to help kids forget that they live in a hell of a colonizer’s making, then there’s nothing impeachable to dissect. But how “forgettable” is this hell?

In his Ways of Seeing, John Berger examines how images of atrocity and famine can be recontextualized and, to a certain degree, sanitized and made bearable by their placement in a magazine next to ads for bathwash. That was in the 1970s. Telescope that forward today and you can easily see how this has been accelerated. A million different images deterritorializing and redefining each other through TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. Inhuman acts become at once more alienated and more digestible.

If the scene from Threads holds true, the showing of The Lion King may present the opposite problem. It is not the moving image that recontextualizes atrocity, but atrocity that recontextualizes the moving image. Most young Gazans have never left Gaza. Israel’s embargoes and travel restrictions have ensured that. Which means that for them, in the wake of Gaza’s near total destruction, this is the apocalypse. For as noble and fundamentally decent as it is to provide children a few hours when they can forget the hell in which they live, it is that hell to which they will inevitably return. Even a quick glance a few feet to the right or left, and they’re reminded.

Will they carry what they watch into the world? How? How can they take tenderness and humor and redemption with them when their entire surrounding world has been destroyed and reshaped to cannibalize these? One should never underestimate humans’ capability for kindness and empathy, but by that same token, we shouldn’t underestimate the (in this case) literal roadblocks we pile in front of these. All the more reason resistance is crucial; to keep alive the memory that humanity requires being human.

Twenty-five years ago today, some planes flew into some buildings. They weren’t special planes. Nor were the buildings particularly special, or at least they weren’t any more or less special than the places of work and residence obliterated in Gaza. But for a great many people, the world ended that day. Three thousand dead of course, as well as their families who had their worlds shattered.

There was also a world order that ended that day. Not only was America (and much of the west) disabused of the foolish notion that history was over, we were shown that nothing could protect us from it. The lessons one took from this varied. To some, images of collapsing towers were too horrific to tolerate the idea of it happening to anyone (Afghani, Iraqi, Palestinian, Iranian). Far too many saw these events as proof positive that America needed more bombs, more guns, higher walls and harder soldiers.

The images that sprung from this over the next two decades were legion. The Muslim as gun-toting fanatic. The soldier as noble warrior in latter-day Crusades. The Hurt Locker. Zero Dark Thirty. American Sniper. Isolated pictures repeated over and over and over to reinforce the idea of America as a fortress under constant attack, that no amount of torture or act of destruction is too great when done in its defense.

Earlier this week, Rudy Giuliani – former mayor of New York and contemporary Trump flunky – echoed this rationale when he said the current, Muslim, mayor Zohran Mamdani, shouldn’t attend the memorials taking place today. It wasn’t Mamdani but Giuliani who lied to first responders and New Yorkers in general about the air quality after the attacks, who watched with indifference as thousands more died of cancers and respiratory ailments that can be directly linked to the fallout after the attacks.

At the Pentagon ceremonies, Pete Hegseth regurgitated the same video game version of the world we’ve had crammed in our faces since Bush the Younger. “The struggle against evil continued, and it continues now,” he said. It will continue until judgment day. Our only answer here on Earth is eternal vigilance… [E]nemies plot to curb our power and kill our citizens, including from Islamic terrorists abroad and at home… [W]e’re still sending terrorists where they belong, to hell, and tankers to the bottom of the ocean, where they belong.”

Carrying an image with you into the world, clinging to it fiercely and running from anything that might disprove it; this is an airtight definition of ideology. But if it’s carried long enough, and by enough people with power, it might very well become reality. It’s called hyperstition, or just self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s therefore more than a bit concerning that Hegseth’s bluster isn’t the only place we find talk of judgment day.

Governments are already formulating plans for what they’ll do when the climate collapses. Tech CEOs are openly talking about their artificially intelligent creations wiping out humanity. Apocalypse is in the air. It’s also no mere speculation. All worlds can end. When they do, the images left behind won’t matter all that much. Most will barely be intelligible.

Header image is from Threads (1984).

i.

An exchange over text message, August 26, 2026:

Me: And now Tim Curry…

My partner: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
THEY ARE KILLING ALL THE CAMP

Me: Yup…

Partner: I am NOT ok
John Waters better not leave his house today I swear

Me: Oh shit that’s dark…
Wait, Dolly was 80, Tim Curry was 80…
How old is John Waters?

Partner: 80!

Me: SHIT!!!

Partner: I knooooooow

ii.

Sontag’s essay is so influential in any discussion of ‘Camp’ that it’s become trite to reference it. So trite that by now most won’t even read it. They’ll just say they did. The danger in this is obvious. One can only take a framework for granted for so long until key parts of it are forgotten entirely.

“To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it,” wrote Sontag. “If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.” The dialectic of subversive cultural expression. Boundaries are tested, conventions disrupted, only for the tester to settle into new (frequently marketable) conventions which must then be again tested. Will these new gestures make something different or something more itself? Hard to tell, but like the judges said of pornography, we should know it when we see it. Sontag did. So did Oscar Wilde (to whom her “Notes on Camp” are dedicated).

So did Dolly Parton, and so did Tim Curry. Their passings reveal something, as the death of the larger than life usually do. In this case, it’s that the aesthetic sensibility they inhabited so well is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The winking garish, the sincere irony, the extravagance of the artificial, the shiny-false glitter that embraces the privileged and the lowlife alike. “[T]he proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive,” wrote Sontag. An equalizing tendency, aesthetic leveling, something with the potential for humane democracy.

Camp has never been designed primarily to make people uncomfortable, to embarrass or expose through that discomfort. Still, when it does, and when it’s directed at the right people, it’s always a bonus. Now, a watered-down, overly ecumenical, defanged version of the sensibility prevails everywhere, a confused “Homer-phobic” Camp that is both populist and elitist, conscripting the support of people who in better circumstances might have loved winking back at the world through pancaked eyeshadow.

iii.

The political right loves Camp, or at the very least loves to deploy a vaguely Campy irony to disarm opponents, while the left has become too afraid of its own shadow to do this consistently. Milo Yiannopoulous engaged in a form of camp, at least until his fall from grace among the MAGA base, before he found himself detained by ICE. A hallmark of today’s populist Camp is in fact a collapse of distinction between Camp and kitsch (true, many objects can be camp, but the two are not synonymous).

It’s a tricky and slippery dynamic. The transgressive becomes accepted, boundaries are pushed back, but the transgressive gesture’s meaning is so open it can be adopted by those who have always wanted certain people to stay in their place. The democratic potentials of the transgressive are turned against themselves.

The artform of drag – to many, the quintessential celebration of Camp’s most transgressive sensibilities – is more popular than ever, even as it is also under attack by transphobes, Christian fundamentalists, and the far-right. This popularity is surely a good thing, but is some of the form’s critical charge lost in its mainstreaming? This isn’t necessarily the drag of Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera, as ready to throw a rock at a cop as flounce down the runway in a feather boa. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make it any less fun, or less worthy of defense.

As for those threatened by the Camp gesture, discomfort requires a sense of shame. As does any minimally functioning civilization. What becomes of Camp in a world where so many are losing their sense of humiliation at making others’ lives lesser is analogous to the ongoing dissolution of basic social bonds and the kind of coherence needed for any decent society to function. We will all surely miss Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. But we are also glad they won’t be here to see what happens next.

iv.

“There is no such thing as natural beauty.” I remember this line from Steel Magnolias so very well. It’s said by Truvy, played by Dolly Parton, as she hires the young and down-on-her-luck Annelle (Daryl Hannah) to work in her beauty salon. My mother, being the good southerner she is, loves this film; she’s watched it dozens of times, and often with a very young me in the room.

Truvy continues: “It takes some effort to look like this.” It’s as if this line were written specifically for Parton (in fact, it’s also in the stage play from which the film was adapted). She’s on the record saying “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” It reflects a valence of class as well as gender in Parton’s effusive, compassionate, uniquely big-hearted version of Campiness. It’s well-known that she grew up in a one-room cabin with no running water, deep in Appalachian Tennessee. And yes, the sympathies engendered in that background showed up in her decisions to act in 9 to 5, to record its soundtrack’s lead single, as well as “Poor Folks Town,” “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” and her own personal favorite, “Coat of Many Colors.”

That last one is of particular interest here. Not because it highlights how subjective beauty can be (we can take this as given, and in any event it’s impossible to argue against), but because it highlights the work, the act of synthesis, and the defiance of resourcefulness, in achieving whatever form of beauty. Famously, it is the story of a young Parton’s mother sewing her a coat from colorful rags they had collected. Her family couldn’t afford to buy a new one. Though the other children at school laughed and mocked, but Parton remained unfazed. “And I told ‘em all the story / Mama told me while she sewed / And how my coat of many colors / Was worth more than all their clothes.”

“[A]ll style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene,” wrote Sontag. “Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.” We must make it so, by whatever means we have.

iv.

Neither Parton nor Curry would likely be considered by Sontag to be “true Camp,” the more naive, sincere attempt at the production of excess that stumbles into its outrageous self. Both artists were a bit too conscious of what they were doing, knew too well that they were taking some kind of stance in a cultural landscape, even if that wasn’t what they were primarily doing.

In his socratic essay “The Decay of Lying – An Observation,” Wilde insists that the best kind of art is the total art. The art made of nothing but artifice and pretense, that is indifferent to its relationship with the rest of life and the world. A true artist creates an existence that is fully aesthetic, elevating the beautiful lie as far as they can be. This differs, drastically, from the fascist aestheticization of life, meant to alienate and desensitize us from a violent reality. Wilde – good socialist as he was – clearly knew that such an aesthetic existence would only be truly possible when life’s most basic needs are taken care of, when concerns around hunger, shelter, education, and health are a distant memory. Before then, the full aesthetic existence could only be an aspiration. Hence, his own Camp, in such works as The Importance of Being Earnest and The Portrait of Dorian Gray inevitably skewered bourgeois morals, puritanical hypocrisy and vanity by dint of their simple existence. Their farce, their exaggerated posturing, necessarily took on a social valence. Wilde knew what he was doing.

In this regard, we can see Wilde’s insistence on a beautified life as prototypical of modernism’s bold impulse to remake the world. We can also contextualize its frequent affinity for the outcast, the forgotten and exploited. Dolly Parton’s outspoken defense of trans people wasn’t simply a matter of sympathy (though we can’t dismiss the role of sympathy). Parton understood her public persona as a form of drag, as a construction as much as a reinvention. In her 2012 memoir, she wrote of the time she participated in a Dolly Parton lookalike contest at a gay bar in West Hollywood. “All these beautiful drag queens had worked for weeks and months getting their clothes. So I just got in the line and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little short gay guy,” she told Nightline. “I got the least applause.”

There’s still another aspect to this. In a world where some have and some don’t, anything can be weaponized. Even the very whiff of trashiness. Even artifice itself. Beauty aware of itself, aware of its own labor, threatens some.

Look, for example at late Senator and war criminal John McCain’s insult to his second wife Cindy when she dared joke about his baldness: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Note that the vicious insult here has nothing to do with whether Cindy was actually beautiful or not. It had to do with her showing she was trying, with the makeup being noticeable.

v.

In my early twenties, I was in a production of Rocky Horror Show. This is hardly unique among theatre kids and drama majors. It was, of course, a very naked, very sweaty production. A lot of cheap hairspray and mascara, with so many sets of cheap lingerie and ripped fishnets that didn’t survive our single performance at a gay bar in downtown Syracuse.

I played guitar in the band, and portrayed Eddie for the roughly four minutes he’s on stage. I had fun, but I was far from the most remarkable thing up there. Our Frank-n-Furter was bald as a newborn baby, and we decided against putting him in a wig. The guy who played our Rocky was out of shape, pasty and doughy, not to mention utterly uncharismatic.

If anyone in the audience was confused, they were outnumbered by those who instinctively understood that some of the best comedy comes not from trying to “make do” with your lack of resources, but by embracing the deprivation, letting the big, moist gaps in artificial belief yell back in the audience’s faces. Because the deprivation itself is also, ultimately, unnatural, a choice made by someone. Even if that someone was nowhere near our ragtag production of Rocky Horror. To make laughter not despite but because of this lack speaks to how democratic the scummier varieties of beauty can be.

It’s the deliberate usage of this ambivalence that made Tim Curry’s performance as Frank-n-Furter so unforgettable. The lacuna between dreaming it and being it, between desire and fulfillment, sincerity and irony, outcast and belonging, was where he as an actor let himself live while performing in the original stage musical of Rocky Horror and the Picture Show. The kind of laughs it produced couldn’t help but be subversive because they were queer in such a distinct way. Though we certainly didn’t get every joke ourselves. Or at least we didn’t fully grasp the nuances and context that made them so shocking and subversive. Maybe we didn’t need to. Or maybe we were part of the process of reification. (And we definitely didn’t know what that meant…)

vi.

Difficult as it is to picture today, Curry’s Frank-n-Furter didn’t start out as the sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania. Richard O’Brien’s original draft of the stageplay simply called for him to be your bog standard mad scientist in a white lab coat. This has plenty of Camp value in its own right, but it was director Jim Sharman of the Royal Court Theatre who suggested Frank be transformed into a lingerie-clad trans scientist, no less mad but far more fun and fetching.

This, however, wasn’t the only way in which the original stage production underwent a process of “queering.” Extending this gesture to its logical conclusion doesn’t just imply a scrambling of sexual coordinates – radical enough in 1973, a mere six years after gay sex and relationships had been decriminalized in the UK – but of every axis of existence. Take, for example, Curry’s decision to play Frank with a distinctly upper-class accent, as if Transylvania had a large population of expats from the Belgravia area of London. Having this ribald, double-entendre singing crossdresser sound like the Queen definitely sent some into apoplexy.

Then there’s the decision to have the look and feel and sound of the musical’s songs directly reference the still-ascendant glam rock scene, with, as Toby Manning put it, “all its queer, communal, proletarian glory,” taking the defeats of the 60s dream and radicalizing it into a distinctly fey, anti-macho toughness. You can see immediately how the decision to take the text in this direction – making the show less about queerness as ontology than queering as praxis – allowed it to be a more powerful, enduring artifact.

In fact, one of the queerest things about Tim Curry was that we never actually knew if he was gay. He was fiercely and mostly successfully mum about his romantic and private lives. No speculations about who he fucked or why he fucked them ever caught on. The closest we got was when he called Miss Piggy the one who got away. Delightful.

Curry called his 2016 autobiography Vagabond. When asked why, he pointed out that for much of history since the Middle Ages, actors were essentially regarded in the same light as the poor itinerant wanderer. The archetype best able to mock society’s cruellest narratives because they stand on the outside and can artificially adopt and discard its signifiers at will. Not dissimilar to Baudelaire’s ragpicker, the figure who, surrounded with the detritus of early industrial capitalism, tasks himself with repurposing and valorizing the discarded and forgotten.

vi.

Going to high school in Baltimore, one of my favorite things to do (when I had the time anyway) was search for the settings and locations of John Waters’ films. This could be surprisingly difficult given that literally all of his films are set and shot in the city’s area. There was no IMDb back then, and finding many of the locations was simply about knowing someone who already knew where this or that scene was filmed or recognizing it yourself.

I made sure to go to a show at Hammerjack’s, just so I could see the stage where Kathleen Turner lit her son’s friend on fire in Serial Mom. One could easily walk around the Hampden neighborhood – still very much a hangout for punks and misfit artists at that time – and pick out locations from Pecker.

Now, Hammerjack’s has been shuttered (though an outdoor version was reopened during Covid). Hampden has been gentrified, as have most formerly working-class neighborhoods not long after the artists show up looking for cheap space. The textile mills along the Jones Falls River have been converted into condos, and the area’s rents are increasingly prohibitive. (Though, to be clear, we should by no means idealize Hampden’s previous accessibility for a neighborhood 70% white in a city that is 80% black. Baltimore’s own history of segregation as a border city is something I’ve written on previously.)

Camp’s relationship to consumer culture is unique: it is impossible without a wealth of accessible goods, including those whose cheapness and disposability are lionized into extravagance. What then happens when nothing is cheap, or when humans themselves are disposable? In the case of Baltimore, as well as virtually every other medium to large city, gentrification is making existence itself impossible for many, to say nothing of the space to create from the margins.

We know by now that gentrification comes with a certain shallow reverence for the novel, one which stands in marked contrast to genuine Camp, whatever the pretense. Whereas Camp’s reference to disposability potentially points to a different temporal relationship, gentrification’s relationship to the past (i.e. the much-worn Hipster aesthetic’s reappropriation of certain “working-class” clothing and signifiers) flattens and defangs. Camp’s preoccupation with surface level stands in for a kind of winking sincerity and unbridled passion. Whereas the non-committal ecumenicism of contemporary pseudo-space (pseudo-brutalist architecture, pseudo-blue collar fashion and bars) renders everything around it cynically static.

It’s here that sincerity and passion must be recentered, their meanings interrogated in such a generous way that they can be supplemented and amplified. Camp’s affinities for punk are by now no surprise, each with their own overlapping penchant for the shocking and outrageous. We would be well served to remember that punk itself was – at least in its early years – heavily influenced by the Situationist movement.

It is not, therefore, out of line to see a similarity between the Camp gesture and the Situationist practice of détournement, hijacking the accepted hierarchies of beauty in consumer society. Nor is it out of line to see this gesture as a repurposed kind of Brechtian verfremsdungseffekt, an alienation in service of disalienation. If the fully aesthetic life that Camp aspires to is essentially modernist in spirit, and if it is ultimately impossible without a radically democratic everyday life, then we must ask about the moments when we require the aesthetic’s teeth to come out. To become a weapon simply by existing, and how to weaponize that existence.

Yes, there is something essential to be said for the unfettered kindness of Dolly Parton, or the unadulterated, de-libidinized fun of Tim Curry. But Camp, if it’s going to preserve these, is going to have to get subversive again. Not gay like happy, but queer like fuck the police. The humane impulses are, thankfully, still there. Protecting them may mean getting a bit less naive and a lot more ruthless.

Header image is from The Simpsons classic episode “Homer’s Phobia” (1997).

“The Judgment,” by Franz Kafka (1912). When Kafka got simpler, he got good. Brilliant even. This story is third in The Complete Stories, and it’s about a third of the length of “Description of a Struggle” or “Wedding Preparations In the Country.” The second, to be fair, was left incomplete by Kafka, but it makes for a tedious read nonetheless. “Description of a Struggle,” while maintaining a certain quiddity that we know to be Kafka’s signature, isn’t quite sure where it’s headed. Compare them to “The Judgment.” Meek nebbish who has been lying to his friend via letters for several years is bullied by his domineering father into throwing himself off a bridge into the river. Straightforward, grotesque, and pointing toward a kind of parasitic relationship between people and our neurotic habits. Never fails to make me laugh.

The Hawks and the Sparrows, written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1966). I’ve watched this film countless times, and each time I want to be the crow more and more. But the crow is eaten at the end I hear you saying. True. Perhaps it’s simply that I already am the crow. As is every left-wing thinker, including the filmmaker. Something about communists being dead men on leave… Pasolini’s take on the leftist fable was bound to be pessimistic. Particularly in the wake of Palmiro Togliatti’s death. The notion of so many tens of thousands of people turning out for the funeral of any politician, let alone the head of the Communist Party, is unfathomable by today’s standards. It was the circumstances themselves which, presciently, Pasolini seemed to be mourning. He doesn’t seem particularly optimistic about their revival, but can’t stop asking the question. Indeed, he clearly feels obligated to keep asking it, even if the only apparent answers are darkly comic. Like I said, I’ve watched it many times.

Mrs. Davis, created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof (2023). This is very fun, frequently funny, occasionally insightful, sometimes too clever by half, but overall a worthwhile watch. For as desperately as we’re in need of some good, anti-AI art, we still don’t have too many that take on the thornier implications raised by its existence vis à vis free will and the forcing of desire. Still fewer that take these up in a way that feels artistically earned. Mrs. Davis is a notable exception. The art direction has a very 1970s comic-book feel to it; somehow appropriate. The acting is overall solid, particularly Betty Gilpin in the lead role of Sister Simone. And though the dialogue is unremarkable, the writing as a whole is economical, doing what it must to build its world sufficiently, and there are enough flashes of cleverness to sustain your attention. Not a bad start for scripted TV shows facing down their biggest existential threat. The question now, three years after its premiere, is whether this trend going to remain stuck at the starting line.

The Durutti Column, The Return of the Durutti Column (1980). Punk was the explosion, scattering convention into the fields, the air, and the treetops, then post-punk was the rearrangement of it all – not just punk, but everything – into a thousand different shapes. The Durutti Column are an example of just how expansive that could be. Simon Reynolds argues it well: post-punk today is often confined to the angular and abrasive, but the Durutti Column were and are a group took the exploded elements and arranged them into something graceful, ludic, weaving its way into the sky in search of more ecstatic modes of being. The utopia waiting on the other side of the chaos and destruction. This is also, it bears emphasizing, a band that took its anarchist and situationist influences seriously (their name, many song titles, the decision to ship the record out in a sandpaper sleeve). Circumstance and intent reframe the sound, the sound reframes the intent, then doubles in and reframes itself.

Discourse on Colonialism, by Aime Cesaire (1950). Dare I say we return to this small masterpiece less for the analysis and more for a lesson in fiery rhetoric? Which isn’t to deny the arguments are sound. They are. When Cesaire takes into consideration how wide sweeping the complicities of colonialism are, how wide and deep its atrocities, how several his indictments must be, he could have either written a three hundred page tome like Walter Rodney did or encapsulate the reaches of rage into something short and, in some ways, more powerful. “A poetics of anticolonialism” Robin DG Kelley calls the essay. Which raises a broader question. Why bother with poetics, when the materiality of racism, of colonialism, of capitalism can better be exposed in base facts? Because it’s the poetics that, as the saying goes, “teach us to think,” that instill us with the structures of feeling apart from what we see in front of us. Honestly, Cesaire’s essay is difficult to best in this regard.

Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros, Streetcore (2003). I’ve attached a great amount of melancholy to this, the last album Strummer recorded, released about ten months after his death. Some of it is simply the loss of an artist who held fiercely to a vision of how the world could be even as that world continued to change rapidly around him. Some of it is perversely pining for a lay of the land which, bleak as it was, seems bright compared to where we are today. I’ve written about this before. There was a time when I listened to Streetcore at least once every few weeks. Not so much in more recent years. But something about hearing it would have been Strummer’s birthday on the 21st had me put it on just to see how it sounded again. It spent the next week on repeat.

Danse Macabre: Death in Print from Dürer to Dix, at LACMA until December 2026. Another title for his small, one-room exhibit at LACMA might be “Five centuries of European skulls in art.” Yes, there’s Albrecht Dürer in the late 1400s, memories of plague still fresh, and Otto Dix in the early Weimar era. But between, you have James Ensor (one of my favorites) in the decades after the Paris Commune. You have the macabre symbolism of Félicien Rops in the mid-1800s. And beyond the First World War, Mexican calaveras artists responding to the rise of fascism across the ocean. According to some, the European continent has been in a state of civil war more often than not for the better part of 500 years. Quite the affront to those who still cling to the belief that the continent is anything like a beacon. Which it may be. Just not in the way they think…

Header image is Taller de Gráfica Popular’s Calaveras Estranguladoras broadside (1942), part of the Danse Macabre exhibit.

Just a quick reminder that this site is a labor of love, but it is labor, and baby needs a new pair of everything. So please do subscribe, and kick in a few monthly dollars if you can. Good things are in the works.

subscribe...

It was a dream come true. A dream you didn’t even know you had. You walk through the doors of the gymnasium (or the event hall decorated like a gym) to the dulcet sounds of Britney Spears (when she was good), Blink-182 (when you still genuinely believed they were good), and The Blueprint-era Jay-Z. Everything is tinsel shiny. The bucket hats are extra fuzzy. You can probably smuggle a whole keg in the folds of your JNCOs, but luckily there’s no need.

In high school, you scoffed at Armageddon. You know better now, if only because it’s so much more ever-present than it was then. Unlike most nights, when you just simply swallow down your anxiety and get on with it, tonight it still feels avoidable.

And behind it all, warbling in the background, the panicked protestations of the culture industry. No! We’re the ones who are supposed to be shoving all this down your throats! You can’t find a different meaning in it all! That’s not allowed!

The world isn’t ending. It ended a long time ago. All of this is just prettied-up wreckage. But at least you’re among people who can admit it. And you’re all itching to dance.

I didn’t go to the DSA-LA Y2K Prom. My partner and I have a ten-week-old son, and much as we would have loved to slap a “teen pregnancy” sticker on his forehead before strapping him in a papoose over my favorite crushed velvet tuxedo, it simply wasn’t in the cards. So no, despite being a dues-paying member, and having many friends who went, I didn’t attend.

I wish I had for sure. If only because I would have loved to see what some were so afraid of. When the California Post got wind of the event, its writers had their keyboards at the ready. In the end, all they could muster was repeated use of the tired “socialists are selling tickets!” trope, then finding something to panic over in the fact that funds would be going to organizing efforts. Boring.

On Fox Business’ Varney & Co, melting wax statue Stuart Varney brought on Temu Charlie Kirk to speak about the “malignant force” of socialism that seems to be winning so many elections lately. The two spent most of their time trying to scare-monger about Hasan Piker and wondering why more mainstream Democrats aren’t denouncing the far-left spectre (plenty are of course, highlighting how hopping on the Red Scare bandwagon will do little to disarm the right). But they took about thirty seconds to performatively scratch their head about the DSA-LA prom:

I think they think it’s retro and cool. I think it’s cringe, all right? It’s going to be a masked celebration – if you could even call it that – of a bunch of people that are hypochondriacs [Note: footage of the event clearly shows a “masks optional” event] with purple and green hair and asking for points of personal privilege. I cannot imagine a worse place to be. But that does sort of capture the ethos of the younger wing of the DSA party, unfortunately. I’m sure it’ll be well attended [Note: it was].

Fast forward a few days later, after all the booze was drunk and the volunteers had swept up the streamers. On Fox’s The Big Weekend Show, anchor Johnny “Joey” Jones (fucking really?) publicly struggled with the concept of irony only to have it calmly explained to him by co-host Tomi Lahren, who “loves” Y2K culture and knows all Millennials identify with it.

Lahren, for her part, is oddly transfixed by dorks, and it’s a compulsion she finds both shameful and inextricable. How do we know this? Because she kept calling the attendees at the Y2K Prom “dorks” and “weirdos” with such vitriol it sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

We know what to make of this by now, because we know how projection works, and we know it’s a common feature on the modern right. Every accusation is an admission, a self-loathing gob of spit hocked at the mirror. Every snide remark, every calculated giggle, every frothy sneer these people lob at their opponents, tell us more about the knots they twist themselves into behind closed doors, how cruel-but-pathetically-milquetoast their desires are. The biggest difference between us and them? We have the good sense to freely admit that we’re perverts.

That Fox News talking heads can only resort to calling socialists losers and dorks comes from a curious inability to comment on even the most basic policy. Universal healthcare, unions, ending the forever wars, and making everyday life more fundamentally democratic; these are more popular and attractive than ever. This is not to be smug, or to say that the right is suddenly rendered defenseless. But on the rhetorical level, it’s fascinating that they think the only leverage they feel they have is to mock the aesthetic, and they can’t even do that without making themselves look culturally blinkered.

Why would an organization composed heavily of Millennials and Zoomers want to throw a Y2K Prom? It’s not difficult to understand, particularly in a cultural landscape so stuck in its own feedback loop. All one has to look at is the (not so) recent vaporwave phenomenon for an example.

It doesn’t take expertise in hauntology to get that there is something more than nostalgia in the reappropriation of past cultures. There is an attempt to reckon with the past, to disarm its catastrophes, to picture what could be if events took a different direction. And yes, it can be fun. Those of us old enough to have been in high school during the low-level cultural panic over the Y2K bug remember it as deliciously weird. Society was on the verge of collapse because computers missed some numbers. It was laughable, but also the font of any number of sitcom plotlines good and bad, stories and scenarios written in our heads.

Society didn’t collapse. New Year’s Eve turned to New Year’s Day, and the new millennium was ahead of us. Complete with all the slick, flat, wide-opens of a planet increasingly interconnected into the rubric of globalization. History was over. The future was ahead of us. Until it wasn’t. We all remember what came next. The 9/11 attacks, and the beginning of wars that would grind tens of thousands of us into the dirt. Then the 2007 financial collapse, neoliberalism’s roosting chickens, freezing the economic fortunes of young people in stasis.

The election of Trump, the shattered illusion that the center will hold, the rise of a far-right manically embracing the spectre of apocalypse, a global pandemic signifying ecological collapse. The 90s seem attractive by comparison, and as I’ve written elsewhere weren’t as bad as we make the decade out to be. Y2K seems to be the last time we were able to avoid the world’s end. When we could play with its signifiers and imagine different points of departure from a culture oversaturated with itself.

This isn’t difficult to grasp. If anyone at Fox does, they aren’t being honest about it. More than likely they just can’t. Strange considering how much of their own vision is based on a fervent return to a past where the queers stayed in the closet, where the black and brown knew their places, where women were seen not heard, and workers were expected to just go along with nuking the rest of the world. That era won’t return, at least not in all the grandeur they hope for. Worse disasters are waiting to fill in for it.

Header image is from Fox Business.

Welcome to this week’s Worms of the Senses, the regular list where I run down the best things I’ve heard, seen and read over the past week. Don’t forget to subscribe…

subscribe...

The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002). “Those evil-natured robots / They’re programmed to destroy us / She’s gotta be strong to fight them / So she’s takin’ lots of vitamins.” Yes, I know this song is widely interpreted as a metaphor for fighting cancer, but in the age of AI I can’t help but think we could use a Yoshimi of our own. (And in my opinion, cancer is an apt metaphor for AI).

It is by no means the Flaming Lips’ most expansive album (that would have to be Embryonic), or their most experimental and daring (that’s still, to this day, Zaireeka, simply because recording four different albums meant to be played simultaneously is hard to top). But as an album that blends the band’s penchant for the catchy and heartfelt with their unquenchable thirst for the cosmic weird, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is their par excellence. If anyone asks where they should start with the Flaming Lips, normally I tell them Yoshimi.

Granted, the robot-fighting premise of this “concept” album more or less disappears after about the fifth track, but when it drops away we’re left with the same naive questions that Wayne Coyne seems unable to stop asking. “Oh, what is love and what is hate?” he asks on “In the Morning of the Magicians,” “And why does it matter?” It’s an almost trite line of questioning, especially for songwriters, but it’s asked with such sincerity that dismissing it seems churlish.

12 Monkeys (season 1), created by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett (2015). In a world full of half-assed, ill-advised unnecessary TV adaptations, be SyFy’s 12 Monkeys. Terry Gilliam’s 1995 original is a tremendous film, with his gonzo fingerprints all over them. Fickett and Matalas’ adaptation is rare in that you can make the case for why it should exist. The art direction, dialogue, and acting are all very strong, each doing their part to carry the story forward. This was rare for a SyFy show in the mid-2010s. Though all the performances are solid, Emily Hampshire’s portrayal of a brilliant but severely unstable scientist and biotech scion is mesmerizing to watch: at turns vulnerable and pathetic, capable of seeing and knowing what nobody else can, then suddenly menacing and unhinged.

The show also got its fair share of easter eggs for those familiar with the origin of the material. One of the characters’ last names, for example, is Marker. It would be obtuse to claim this is anything other than a reference to Chris Marker, whose short La Jetée was Gilliam’s inspiration for this interpretation. Finally, it manages to actually bring something original to the subject matter. Namely examinations of history and morality through the prism of time travel that pivot from and elaborate on the ‘95 film. Who knows if subsequent seasons successfully maintain this, but so far it’s been a rewarding watch.

“Gramsci’s Ashes,” by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1957). Whenever I feel like my writing reserves are approaching empty, I read “Gramsci’s Ashes.” Pasolini’s talent at finding words and images that span the gaps between political defeat and personal tragedy really is unmatched. Taking this further, there are few locations, in the Italian context, that embody this same gap better than the grave of Antonio Gramsci at the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome.

Despite Gramsci’s atheism, Pasolini, a Catholic, clearly saw a certain injustice in the Marxist thinker’s interment in a non-Catholic cemetery ( “Here you lie, exiled, with cruel Protestant / neatness, listed among the foreign / dead: Gramsci’s ashes…”). Not because he thought Gramsci should have been a better Catholic, but because he insisted that there is in fact a gothic, earthy spiritual connection running through revolutionary commitment. I, a lifelong Marxist and a convert to Judaism, don’t disagree, though I can’t force a particular theology on the communist vision anymore than Pasolini could.

“I know that I am bound to it, in the heat / of instinct, of aesthetic passion / attracted by a proletarian life - / prior to you - it’s for me a religion…” The author is being both literal and metaphorical here. Most of the time, when writers attempt this, it comes off as either confusing or hacky, most often both. Not here.

Header image is Wayne Coyne’s cover art for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002).

The following poem was published in a previous issue of Locust Review. It does not appear to be currently searchable online.

subscribe...

Monday

On Monday, the news anchor will mock me,
call me ugly and talentless.

She’ll laugh
her cruel laugh,
and provide unassailable proof:

You have lost loved ones,
which can only mean
that you
and your love
are disposable.

And I will swallow the words,
late for work.

The headlines will all agree,
blaring through loudspeakers
and neon bullets.

Fellow passengers
lock eye contact,
conceding to me and themselves
as our train squeals and burrows
through cement,
plaster and bedrock.

Tongues locked,
throats clamped,
language scrambled into static
feedback loops,
filling without nourishing,
propelling us forward.

A code without a codex,
somehow intelligible
seared on our backs:

We have lost loved ones,
which can only mean
that we
and our loves
are disposable.

Ugly.

Talentless.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, my boss will admonish me,
rasping on my neck:

You are always late.
Even when you are early
you are late.
Your time will always be mine,
and I will never not chain you with it.

The call from the debt collector
will explode in my hand,
teaching me
to beat my heart at an irregular rhythm
and to numb parts of my skin.

Deserts will grow in my chest,
blisters rub raw,
clock-hands dig under my fingernails.

I’ll fall asleep at my desk
and dream only
of the hole in my brain
and the dancing seizures
vibrating like beetles in a garden bag.

And when my productivity
is about to dip
to unacceptable levels,
when it is time I bought myself
that pacemaker
I’ve had my eye on
all year,
when I finally work up the nerve,
I will go to my boss,
and let my brittle bones
do the talking for me:

Even when I am early
I am late.
My time will always be yours,
and you will never not chain me with it.

He’ll smile.

His breath will stink of arsenic.

Wednesday

On Wednesday, the police officer
will drown me in tar,
sealing me inside my apartment,
gluing my eyelids
to the text of the ticket:

You are charged
with vagrancy
inside your own home.
Your penalty is boredom.

My bed
turns to a concrete slab,
books to blood clots,
my clothes to brown paper bags.

The windows will be walled up,
gas vapor replaces sunlight.

Cracks in the walls
whisper,
tell me about
the other prisoners next door.

Tedious gossip,
bullshit.

And I’ll scratch
and scratch
and scratch,
looking for patterns
in the delousing powder
stuck to my face.

At long last, I confess:

I am charged
with vagrancy
inside my own home.
My penalty is boredom.

The police officer will act
like he didn’t hear me.

Thursday

On Thursday, I will be threatened
by a map of the world:

The only good nation
is an empty nation.
You must do your part
to keep our borders safe.
Make yourself vanish.
Demolish your history.

Chased across
longitude and latitude,
paper cuts and ink stains
form bruises and contusions.

Sons and daughters
drowned in the printed oceans,
caravans of napalm,
and promises of cages
whose bars slither
through a body’s sinews.

A friendless existence,
no solace, no allies,
helpless in the cruelty
of imperial karma.

Trapped between
burning grain silos,
mountains of ash,
and walls of dead thorn
a mile high,
I’ll join the choir.

Our mouths lose control,
spitting up,
against their will,
a pledge they –
and I –
did not write:

The only good nation
is an empty nation.
I must do my part
to keep our borders safe.
Make myself vanish.
Demolish my history.

The map will quiver with delight,
before scattering on the acrid breeze.

Friday

On Friday, congress will declare:

Weekends are decadent.
We can no longer afford your respite.
Saturday and Sunday
are forever canceled.

I’ll sleep through my alarm,
pulling the blanket
up to my chin,
my nostrils and stomach
predicting nausea,
soft secrets of manacles
in my ears,
eyes far from the panic
of thick, suffocating air.

Waking night-terror
in broad daylight.

And the news anchor –
the one with cruel laughs
and perfect proof –
will shake me awake.

Forgetting the feeling
of deep sleeps and tender touches,
I will relent:

Weekends are decadent.
We can no longer afford my respite.
Saturday and Sunday
are forever canceled.

Forgive me, Monday.

Forgive me.

Header image is a detail from George Grosz’s Down With Liebknecht (1918).

If you haven’t read my presentation for Sobinfluencia Edições of Temporada de conspiração, please do. Also, don’t forget to subscribe…

subscribe...

Blue Sky Black Death, A Heap of Broken Images (2006). Blue Sky Black Death were always among the more unique beatsmith teams out there. Not because they were particularly experimental – though they were not above tinkering with the forms of instrumental hip-hop – but because of how cinematic and expansive their soundscapes ended up being. It hits its pinnacle with 2011’s Noir, but even here, in their debut full-length, you can hear how strong the blueprint already is.

It doesn’t reach the same heights, but there’s a distinct feeling of opening up here – the opening track is appropriately titled “Skies Open” – of encounter with fractured memory taking on life of its own. This is of course intentional. The album’s title is taken from T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.”

That kind of thematic coherence and exploration also made BSBD stick out. It still feels like they’re trying to reconcile two split halves here, and that they haven’t quite found where they fit. That’s emphasized by the fact that it’s two discs: one primarily instrumental and sampling, the second collabs with MCs from Wise Intelligent to Mike Ladd to Gang Starr’s Guru. But even on the entirely instrumental half, there’s an not-fully bridged division: the cathartic reach to transcend on one hand (“Days are Years,” “They Came Around”), the ruthless rap swagger on the other (“Rap Creature Land,” “Heroin For God”). The closest they get to successfully merging these is on “From Sun’s Angle.” Urgent, rending, like revisiting a moment that you can only bear confronting if you can bend into something else.

It’s an engaging, and often immersive listen, even if it doesn’t reach what later releases do. There’s a 20th anniversary vinyl release imminent for A Heap of Broken Images. Probably worth getting our hands on.

“Fanon & Anders: On Revolution” an Acid Horizon Research Commons Public Panel Discussion, featuring Nicolas de Warren and Tyrique Mack-Georges (2026). Acid Horizon have done a service to radical weird misfits and acid communists by initiating the Research Commons. I haven’t been able to take advantage of their full classes yet. The public panels I’ve attended have been seriously thought provoking though, opening up new and experimental, unorthodox avenues of inquiry the way radical research should. Case in point: an encounter between Frantz Fanon ands Günther Anders.

I’ve listened to the respective Acid Horizon episodes with Tyrique and Nicolas already. Tyrique’s work in Fanon resonates with me more simply because I’m already so familiar with him through the rubric of anticolonial and existentialist Marxism. Nicolas’ episode was fascinating, however, and not only because I hadn’t previously engaged with the work of Günther Anders. It’s fair to say that Anders’ writing on technology, Prometheanism, and “the obsolescence of the human” (great phrase) has turned out stunningly relevant. To write about the degradation of human subjectivity by the machine in the 1950s was already prescient in the age of the atomic bomb. The age of AI? His writings fit the moment to an uncanny degree.

The focus of discussion at the AHRC panel was how Fanon’s concept of “the new man,” the subject able to fully realize themselves as they throw off their chains, interacts with Anders’ prognosis. The question I therefore have is how Anders’ thought in particular can be integrated into a communist framework. I attempted to ask Nicolas a question that could tease some of this out. He seemed pretty steadfast in accurately rendering Anders’ work, that Anders didn’t see the fundamental divide in society as one of work but of education. Fair enough. But if the affinity is there then, frankly, it seems that it has to integrate. There’s a caesura that still has to be filled. The conversation is just at its start.

“Existentialism In a Capitalist World,” by Kalika Padte (New York Journal of Philosophy, 2026). Another fantastic intervention. Another caesura. This was an excellent essay. Padte goes a long way toward successfully arguing the continuing relevance of existentialism as a meaningful and oppositionality under late-late capitalism. She joins together Sartre (of course) with Foucault, and sketches out all the myriad ways that contemporary capitalism keeps us from ourselves. It also helps that she’s an excellent writer. Observe:

A capitalistic slave is not born; it is self-made, stretched along the borders of excruciating labour, dedicating precious time to advocate for needs that were embellished onto them through soft power. And they carry these needs as though they make a genuine difference to their existence. It is rightly said that only a slave quantifies existence through productivity, but the more insidious truth is that the slave eventually internalises this quantification so thoroughly that productivity ceases to feel like a demand and begins to feel like identity.

As I wrote in my comment on the piece, my only quibble would be in its final words: “To practice existentialism in a capitalist world is not to escape the system; that is neither possible nor the point. It is to remain conscious within it, to keep authoring yourself even when everything around you insists the story has already been written.”

When I say “quibble,” I can’t even really say disagreement. Consciousness is unavoidable. To be out of step with a world that expects us to march in line is by its nature to be aware. Preserving a modicum of sanity demands it. Our psyches can’t take it otherwise.

Consciousness is not the only demand, however. Far from it. To the existentialist, the point is to transcend capitalism. It must be. A fully authentic life is, as Padte vividly illustrates, ultimately impossible within the strictures of a system that regimentizes life and experience. It’s for this reason that Sartre spent the latter decades of his life as a communist, and some of his best work attempts to sketch a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism.

To be clear, I am not trying to put Foucauldian thought in opposition to Marxism here (plenty of Marxists famously find a lot of use and insight in Foucault and integrate his thought into their framework). But maintaining and growing this consciousness of oppositionality necessitates a collective negation of some sort. It is both a prerequisite and an element of dialectical interplay. The consciousness is expanded by collective praxis as much as collective praxis is predicated on a consciousness of organic opposition. That doesn’t appear to be anything Padte disagrees with, and it wasn’t her intention to say that existentialism is an individualist endeavor. Why bring it up? Because it seems to me we’re long past the point where we can neglect the collective valence.

Header image is a detail from Blue Sky Black Death’s A Heap of Broken Images (2006).

The following is a lightly edited text from a presentation I gave as part of Temporada de conspiração, an online book club presented by Brazilian publisher Sobinfluencia Edições, on July 15. The discussion, moderated by Amauri Gonzo, was the Portuguese translation of my book Shake the City, Abalar a Cidade. I was asked to speak on the ideas that inspired the book, and how these might have changed in the few years since its publication.

subscribe...

I’m always a bit at a loss when asked about the process of writing and researching. Because to me it doesn’t really feel like a process. It feels more like a series of questions, answered in succession, each answer changing the way you look at the world, creating new contradictions that need to be interrogated. A new answer reveals itself and with that a new set of questions, and thus the cycle repeats itself, all in an attempt to discover something close to universality.

I find myself coming back to the same essential questions about social change, about art, about music, about human expression, about radical subjectivity, about insurgent democracy, about violence, about revolution. But every time we ask these questions, if we’re sensitive to their nuances, then we should find ourselves asking them in a dramatically different way than before.

While this may sound abstract and maybe even a little pretentious, illustrating why I wrote Shake the City is impossible without taking this into account. Marx, Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and practically every radical philosopher writes, in one way or another, through a pattern of thought and analysis designed to better understand the world that goes from the concrete to the abstract and back again, that moves between the particular and the universal, the progressive and the regressive.

Hegel insists that consciousness is a collective project. If true then every worthwhile question asked since is simply a better way of asking “how do we think?” Ergo, to ask questions about art is to ask questions about how we think in a specific way, and, necessarily, how we think collectively in this specific mode.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been trying to answer the question “what is art for?” Not “why do we create it?” This is a related though fundamentally different question. Of course I am also far from the only person trying to find the answer. To me it seems that if we can answer “what is art for?” or at the very least find a better way to ask it, then we can realize something about the essential ontology of communism, and of revolution. As I write in the book’s introduction, “Of course, music cannot literally “change the world” any more than a painting’s subject can walk out of the frame and shake hands with us. But music’s invocation of time allows us to feel a pace of life that may conflict with the world’s arrangements.”

Moving from “what is art for?” to “what is music for?” is on one level a recognition that, whatever art does, it does it differently when it’s the written word versus the painted image versus the composed sound. It was also, for me, a chance to look at aesthetics through the prism of very essential categories of human life. Time. Space. When we change anything, we change these, or at least our experience of them. And the hauntological dimension too: the specific way music, in rendering time aesthetic through rhythm, synchronicity, backbeat, brings previous moments with it into the present. The de-linearizing of time.

The sketches for what would become Shake the City started to take shape in 2018 and 2019 – writing about music as time, space as rhythm – but it was all dramatized especially vividly in the early weeks of the pandemic. When residents of Italian cities were forced indoors in March of 2020, the spaces of Rome, of Bologna, Naples, Milan, all changed. The shape of the streets and squares and buildings did not change, but the silence that was suddenly imposed undeniably changed the space. Walking down a busy street is radically different from walking down an empty street, and the reason for the street’s emptiness matters.

Then, when some of these same residents walked out onto their balconies or simply opened a window to sing the tune of “Bella Ciao,” the well-known anti-fascist anthem, the space changed again. Others joined in, another change. To sing this song in particular was, according to participants, an insistence of life over death. Interesting how many see this essential character in a song that recalls the fight against Mussolini.

It also recalled for me the events in Santiago, Chile just six months before, in 2019, in the estallido social, when President Sebastian Pinera, attempting to clamp down on a mass movement against austerity, imposed a curfew. And, once again, from their windows and balconies, participants sang “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” Victor Jara’s 1971 Nueva cancion song dedicated to the struggle of the Vietnamese. But also how the simple voice being carried through the empty streets stood in for what had taken place mere weeks before, when an orchestra and chorus filled the Plaza Bernardo Leighton for a mass public performance of Quilapayun’s “El Pueblo Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido,” the anthem of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in the 1970s. Time, under the pressure of mass movements, folding. “Jeitztzeit,” Walter Benjamin’s notion of the present exploding, allowing defeats of the past to burst forward and reassert themselves.

Then, another few months into the pandemic, a mass explosion in the United States in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Watching, and participating, in the transformation of urban spaces that had spent the previous few months completely abandoned, and before that were designed not for people to democratically thrive in them, but to usher people in and out in between different sites of exploitation and invisibility with the assistance of promised violence and repression. It brought to mind the way in which Black people in the United States have been slain for not turning down music in public, or shot while selling bootleg CD’s in front of convenience stores.

It also cast my memory back to the UK student uprising of late 2010 and the “grime rebellion,” when young people protesting against the imposition of prohibitive education fees, took over Parliament Square, blasting rap, R&B, dubstep, and yes, grime from Blackberry phones and DJ speakers. Bringing sounds that gestated and were nurtured in housing estates into spaces designed to communicate the impregnability of British empire.

subscribe...

What made these moments so informative and meaningful in terms of music itself was distinct, for me, to a certain mode of life essential to late-late capitalism, shaped as it is not just by austerity but by modes of exploitation highly technologized, where people are intensely atomized in work and leisure. This was not the 1960s, or the 1970s, or the 1930s, or any other time in modernity where we could speak of music and protest in the same breath.

Certainly, there is a common feature in the ways music provides a forum for collective identification: what Bruno Gulli and Richard Gilman-Opalsky call “transdividuality,” in which a common interest becomes a common wavelength of shared lifebuilding. What makes all of this different is the nature of the obstacles in front of musical subjectivity.

We live, after all, in the age of streaming, where every capsule of entertainment can be handpicked on your behalf, where human choice is increasingly made by a machine. No longer are we required to share the open air with others in order to hear music. Mobile devices and headphone culture have allowed us to both shut out the world and create an individual experience of a given space radically at odds with others. Alienation and mistrust deepen, flattening spaces into immovability. We cannot change the world in this mode of existence, but we can at least settle for one whose pains we’ve shut out, instilling in ourselves what Mark Fisher calls “Oed-I-pod consumer bliss.”

The point, it seemed to me as I wrote the book, was not to say that all music is a form of social pacification. That seems as wrong and simplistic as saying all music is inherently a tool of social rebellion. There has long been a back-and-forth between these two poles in radical thought. When Theodor Adorno insisted popular culture existed to remetabolize our sense of self into the needs of work and exploitation, he wasn’t incorrect. What he left out was what theorists like Stuart Hall emphasized: that in every cultural expression under capitalism there is both a bottom-up and top-down dimension. What determines which side is emphasized is down to the balance of class forces that surround it.

Even the most apparently radical piece of art can be used to tamp down dissent, to provide us the illusion of making change while leaving property relations in place. Conversely, even the most manufactured, corporate song can have its meaning radically reshaped in the course of mass struggle. This is, I think, what the Situationists were pointing to when they formulated their ideas around detournement, of taking an expression wholly designed to further intertwine our lives with capital and tweaking its aesthetics so that its meaning is turned inside out, so that the exploitation of each moment of existence is laid bare for all to see.

The question – new and old – is how this gesture of individual negation becomes a gesture of mass negation. It would be silly to say that only music contains this tension, this potential for dramatizing a collective, trans-dividual subjectivity. Nonetheless, because of music’s unique relationship to time through rhythm and synchronicity, has a particular capability of allowing us to glimpse time both lived collectively and stolen back from the demands of profitmaking.

It’s difficult to not be a bit frustrated by the timing of Shake the City’s release, however. The English edition came out in November of 2022, just as we were confronted with the possibility of artificial intelligence displacing the work of actual human artists. Less than a year later, after October 7, 2023, the state of Israel unleashed what the world now almost universally acknowledges as a genocide against the Palestinian people. War itself is no longer just about killing or repressing humans committing violence against them. It is about wiping them off the map entirely, exterminating them from their own timeline. And increasingly with the assistance of non-human tools designed to remove the human element from the act of dropping of bombs.

I would say that the connections between the algorithmization of music – completing its instrumentalization in the name of social subjugation, removing human labor entirely from its creation – and the rise of a renewed exterminism – as EP Thompson would call it – are quite clear by now. For one thing, it is widely accepted that Spotify and other streamers care quite little about the health of music or musicians. We know that they pay artists literal fractions of a penny. This forces these same artists to play in an ever narrowing sonic palette if they want to make money.

The use of AI in music is a final step in that direction. The successful work of writers and critics like Liz Pelly and Damon Krukowski have made quite clear in recent years that the bottom-up potentials for music and even sound itself are increasingly being evaporated in favor of pure spectacle.

Even past this, however, we see these connections borne out. Daniel Ek, until recently the CEO of Spotify, is heavily invested in the innovation of AI for military use, including technologies that have been used against the people of Gaza. In itself, the technological convergence of the music industry and the arms industry is nothing new. It goes all the way back to the Gramophone Company making munitions during World War I.

But it is difficult to ignore the parallels. As AI completely eliminates the musician from the composition of music, Israeli cabinet ministers call for the wholesale flattening of Gaza, of its transformation into green-zoned condos on the seaside, anodyne space without a history.

We are also in a moment when artists’ politics – not just “taking stances” but their music itself – has become dangerous again. Recording artists are being hounded for refusing to be complicit in genocide. Kneecap, a hip-hop group whose work both pulls from the collective spirits of rave culture and bears the memory of British colonialism, have been prosecuted for supporting terrorism. Thankfully, it hasn’t worked, but there are other cases like theirs likely in the pipeline. Not just over Palestine either. This includes the US, where a full-scale anti-communist witch hunt is in the works.

At issue here isn’t just music itself, but the potentials inherent in its creation, which have been there since its very anthropological inception as a social product. When we talk about a politics of life squaring off against a politics of death, we must recognize that this includes everything that humans are capable of creating. That art, literature, and music can be farmed out to a glorified computer program should raise every alarm bell. If one of the most essential traits of being human – the transformation of our built and lived environment – can be taken from the hands of humans, what does this say about how such a society regards humans themselves?

This process is deepening. Another feature of exterminist capitalism – disaster capitalism, whatever we want to call it – is the drive to make as much as possible off whatever you can before it all collapses, personified not just in private equity corporate raiders but in what Craig of Acid Horizon calls “the absolute casinofication of everything.” Including of music streaming numbers.

Feminist philosopher Robin James makes an interesting suggestion pivoting from this, that in this economic-creative ecosystem, music-making has become another form of feminized, reproductive labor. The money is made elsewhere, music is undervalued and often completely uncompensated, even as the most listened to music is increasingly made by women. This is, of course, another example of how any kind of justice for labor must include an awareness of gender. It also opens up some fascinating possibilities in my opinion. The idea that music can be a site for both defining social reproduction as something beautiful – which arguably it’s always been – and redefining beauty within a further redefined use value; this is intriguing to me.

Because to me, that’s what this is all about. The possibility that we might spend our time, rather than laboring for the wealth of a small few, for ourselves, in control of the conditions that shape our lives and where we live them. The very fact that we’ve come to view music and art as somehow separate from the work of lifebuilding itself says a great deal about how we are taught to view our lives. Frankly, the fact that we accept this is one of the biggest tragedies in what Marx called the “division of labor.” Among other social roles and functions, perhaps music and art are here to remind us that this division is far from a historical given. One of the greatest tragedies, faintly haunting us for all the history of class society.

I don’t think it’s out of line to ask why the tasks that keep us alive can’t also make our lives better. Or why the spaces we’ve built, the experiences of time we’ve helped shape, aren’t in our control. Why we aren’t allowed to remake them in our own collective image. Once again, these aren’t new questions. Hopefully, however, I’m simply posing it differently, and in a way that can be useful for others.

All images are from presentation on July 15.

Reviewing Antifascism and the Avant-Garde was a dizzying experience, and I mean that in the best way. Not just because author Julia Alekseyeva employs a tremendous breadth of knowledge in film, film theory, and the study of revolutionary ontology. She believes film, like all art, does play a role in the radical transformation of the world, but is unsatisfied to leave the explanation of that role in the vague realms of “help us imagine.” Yes, help us imagine, but how, and in what way? And how, in this imagination string through a specific moment in film? Marker, Varda, Matsumoto, Godard, Susumu, and of course Dziga Vertov… The full review is now up at the Historical Materialism website.

subscribe...

On a related note, I’ll be speaking on a roundtable Alekseyeva is moderating alongside Shiqi Lin at the ASAP/17 conference on Friday, October 16 in Madison, Wisconsin. The roundtable is titled “Dance Dance Revolution: Media, Technologies, and Politics of Togetherness.” See more info here.

It is an old story, though most likely apocryphal. Peasants, watching film for the first time, ran from the village’s makeshift theatre when confronted with footage of an oncoming train. In this story, the viewer is passive and easily led. At worst, they’re simply stupid. Either way, it was good news for whoever owned the film, or the studio that shot it. Not only does it attest to the power of the new medium, it also promises power over something.

The moving image, the capture of life on celluloid, could wield the masses’ minds. Today, the culture industry aims for a viewer just as passive, hopes their intelligence is even shallower and easily swayed. It is also, as an industry, more influential than ever before, more able to crawl into the cracks of daily life and shape it from within. There is, as the saying goes, no escaping reality. Netflix has seen to it. So have all the other big-name streaming services. All are ostensibly in the business of peddling fiction, works of entertainment and art. And, yet, in having such unprecedented access to the shape of our imaginations, they, in turn, shape our notion of the possible.

It is not merely a question of who owns it all (though the fact that David Ellison has merged several of the largest Hollywood studios, and controls two of the most influential news organisations, and is working hand-in-hand with his father’s development of artificial intelligence, is cause for more than a bit of concern). No, it is in how much of the programming itself claims a purchase on “reality.”

Around 80% of television viewers watch some form of “unscripted” programming: competition shows, true crime docuseries, or the dreaded Reality TV. If we were to categoriae “documentary” as a broad genre – the ostensibly unplanned, the “true to life” – then it is clearly more popular than ever. Why then does it feel like we have never been further from the truth? Why does every narrative seem to drift through the air of its own accord, waiting for some huckster to twist it into their preferred meanings?

Even the notion that reality can be commodified and consumed should be enough to call the very moniker of “Reality TV” into question. Even the rawest and unrehearsed sequence requires someone to press record on a camera. All entertainment is a form of labour.

Still, the pretence is powerful. Suggest consistently enough that reality acts and feels a certain way, and it might just come true. The decision to inundate the genre with frivolous and salacious gossip, next-door serial murderers, and rich people doing rich people things leaves us with the sense that reality is innately shallow, individualistic, and nothing but the glossy material that shows itself to us. It is the perfect hyperstition for the age of cryptocurrency, conspiracy theories, and authoritarian narcissism.

The ability of film to actively transform the way people see the world is seldom acknowledged. This is, of course, deliberate. Anything that draws attention to the deliberations shaping our understanding of the world is bound to raise deeper questions. Film, by virtue of how the medium operates, works on and with human consciousness in distinctive ways. Plenty of filmmakers haven’t just acknowledged this potential, but aimed it in radically different directions.

Read the rest here.

Header image is the cover of the book and a still from Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

Back on a regular posting schedule this week. Still feel free to get a glance at my essay on Repo Man (paying subs only) and my comment on a Trumpian July 4th.

subscribe...

Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño (1996). [Spoilers!] Roberto Bolaño had a talent for constructing a reality that thrives on its interstitials. This is well known by now. Distant Star is one of his earlier works. It’s a bit raw. But it’s still got a certain quiddity to it: subtly vulnerable, quietly unmoveable in the midst of cataclysm, watching history unfold following exile from it, hoping you won’t get sucked back into its rotors but knowing there’s nothing to do to prevent it.

Thinking through the role of poetry in Chile in the wake of Pinochet’s coup is a novel way to process the monumental loss. (Bolaño, an active supporter of Allende’s democratic socialist government, was arrested, narrowly escaped being tortured, and escaped to El Salvador, then Mexico.) You can feel him patiently unpacking the trauma, sitting with the pain only because he can’t purge it all at once. It requires both a reach for the fantastic and a frank willingness to face what’s on the ground.

There’s a convergence between this book and some of my interests (written about previously) in the role of poetry in daily life. Was that why I read it? Initially I decided to read Distant Star simply to get acquainted with Bolaño’s work. But reading about Carlos Wieder, the poetic darling of post-coup Chile, who communicated his celebrations of death across the sky, then wrecked his career by exhibiting photos of leftists and dissidents he personally murdered, revealed a new dimension in the interactions.

True fascist art requires death made pretty. The individual’s triumph, the aesthetic placement of singular genius, requires someone to be discarded. The problem with being a poet in a world that prizes this above all else is that it requires being honest about this, showing fascism its true face. The one thing it can’t tolerate.

Rites of Spring, End on End (1985). Growing up on the outskirts in DC in the late 90s, desperately wishing I had been living more at the center of its punk scene, Rites of Spring held that seminal position in my imagination. Halfway between the loud, propulsive outputs of Minor Threat and Bad Brains and the radical deconstructions of Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses (and of course, Brendan Canty and Guy Picciotto went on to found Fugazi after RoS’s breakup). Not quite hardcore, not quite “post-hardcore.”Rites of Spring played with the sonic conventions at the edges, unraveling them just enough so that those later acts could completely disassemble and reassemble them into something new.

A few words on Revolution Summer, in which Rites of Spring took part. I was way too young to remember any of it. Literally, around the time that Rites, along with Chalk Circle, Dag Nasty, Egg Hunt and others in DC were trying to adopt sounds and a collective ethos that would purge the local punk scene of idiotic machismo and violence, I was about two years old. Nonetheless, I find myself very interested in how these groups attempted to go about this.

Normally I find myself rather dismissive of attempts to “change the world by changing yourself.” They so often drift into solipsism and sanctimony, shrinking the world and its complexities down to the mere turmoils of the individual. I’ve never gotten the sense that’s what the Revolution Summer groups, including Rites of Spring, were aiming for. Take “For Want Of.” It’s one of those songs I need to immediately hear again after listening to it. Frequently, when making my way through the album I’ll hit repeat on it four or five times before moving on. Insanely catchy, yet raw and abrasive like rusty rebar. “But I woke up this morning with a piece of past caught in my throat… and then I choked” is probably one of the most perfectly punk lyrics I’ve ever heard, mining that anger of being forced to live in history’s liminality, on a level both personal and political-social. What one does after that realization is important, but it’s difficult to imagine any action whatsoever without reaching that realization first.

“Sounds We Cannot Hear,” song by Protomartyr, video directed by Danny Scharar and Harris Mayersohn (2026). The rumors and speculations were true. Protomartyr have a new album coming out in September. And yes, it’s going to be called Hotel Usona (currently shopping around a review if any readers out there might have a platform in mind). I’ve written twice before on the band’s two previous albums and maintain there are few groups that manage to mine the brutal, violent anxieties of this never-ending moment in history.

Making an album about anything else would be fundamentally not Protomartyr. The video for “Songs We Cannot Hear” makes it rather unmistakable that the band has no intention of abandoning their particular subject matter. It’s a video very much in their vein, reminiscent of the video for “Processed By the Boys” with its snide humor and lampooning of life’s more idiotic veneers.

It’s worth watching quite aside from how I might sum it up here, but it stars Nate Varrone (an LA comedian probably best recognized from season 2 of The Bear) as a volatile, ego-driven man attempting to celebrate his birthday at a hibachi restaurant. High on both cocaine and obsessed with how he presents himself online, he’s essentially driven to a violent outburst over his inability to catch shrimp in his mouth. Absurd. Laughable. Not entirely implausible. Especially in the age of the fucking manosphere.

Header image is of the Picador edition of Distant Star, a live performance of Rites of Spring, and a still of the video for “Sounds We Cannot Hear.”

Quick reminder that there will be no featured post this week while I focus on the last stages of a book project. However, you are strongly encouraged to read my most recent feature essays: “Dipshit and Repetition” (on the Trumpian spectacle of the 4th of July), and “Time, Time, Time, Forever Time” (my essay on Alex Cox’s Repo Man, for paid subscribers only). We’ll return to a regular posting schedule next week. In the meantime, “Worms of the Senses.”

subscribe...

Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker (2025). Horror seems to be just about the only genre where risk is still rewarded in modern film, where you can do far out things and still find wide distribution. Maybe it’s because without weirdness, horror doesn’t work. Ergo, when all other genres lose their nerve, falling victim to the middling principles of the market, horror is uniquely suited to step into the void left in good storytelling by simply becoming more itself. Consider Weapons or I Saw the TV Glow or Mandy or M3GAN (ignoring the sequel’s existence) or Possessor and you can probably see what I am saying.

In any case, Obsession is stunning. It’s a film that successfully mines the traumas of contemporary life, particularly regarding gender. That it winds up being utterly horrifying isn’t, however, merely an outcome of Curry Barker’s willingness to keep digging. Inde Navarette’s performance is breathtaking, remarkably committed, completely unhinged. Nikki’s arc is all about being forced into complicity with her own ongoing trauma, meaning that there’s a necessary tragedy that must run through the increasingly psychotic behavior. Add in some really smart editing and cinematography, and it became one of those performances I couldn’t look away from even as I was terrified to see what she would do next.

The core of this horror, however – its philosophical driver, the deep social contradiction that makes its content such a live wire for viewers – is its taking the too-common, misogynistic conflation of love with ownership. The “One Wish Willow” isn’t, Barker has made clear, a monkey’s paw, granting wishes only to inevitably reveal tragic, unintended consequences coming as a result. The evil is in Bear’s (Michael Johnston) wish itself. He would never admit it, but his version of love is the titular obsession, the hope that Nikki simply does what he wishes. Like a product. An object. Her ultimately violent behavior post-wish (not exactly her but a simplified-augmented version of herself occupying her body) merely reflects this truth back to him in its logical extreme. I could say more, but I think that Jon Greenaway (he of Horror Vanguard and The Haunt) does a better job in his piece in Current Affairs.

“Weird Horror Master Thomas Ligotti’s Review of the Hotdog Pizza from Pizza Hut,” by Zack Parsons (Something Awful, 2015). I had forgotten this gem existed, but something brought it back to my mind, and so I returned, like a lamprey slithering back to its birthplace, to the Something Awful forums. I’m a fan of Ligotti and his particularly cosmic-existential strain of horror, but introducing an irreverent comment on the grotesqueness of consumerism makes for a delicious read.

The story is obviously a parody, somewhere in the same vein as Werner Herzog’s Yelp reviews. But Parsons’ ability to ape Ligotti’s tone – the patient dread, the inescapable doom – is honestly impressive. Seeing this anonymous narrator get drawn into the lure of a greasy, over-processed, ostensibly edible monstrosity is a genuinely scary experience. The hotdog pizza has, thankfully, been struck from the Pizza Hut menu, but the horror remains. Observe…

Down in the musk of a refinery, where even on a dry night the gutters sang with effluent, I found what I had come to find. Among the rust, the Pizza Hut. It seemed all windows and its light spilled across a desolate blacktop. A single figure stood with his back turned to the counter and his face to a kitchen no more or less dirty than a spoon found in an alleyway. He did not turn to face me. There was a certain pubescent bristle to his cheeks, a redness as though a ring of acne surrounded his face, but he would not turn to show me the extent of his disfigurement.

“Hello,” I said. “I would like to order a hotdog pizza.”

He did not respond, save to emit a certain wheezing inhalation and exhalation. I noticed a blurry reflection of his features in the surface of a counter top. His face was red and bubbled. Or was it? His visor dripped with gore. Or did it?

“Please...” I took a step back. “I just want to order... a hotdog pizza.”

Something about how the humor and the terror are able to not just coexist, but become the same and neither, residing as a mutant fusion in the absurd. Even if it’s accidental it’s still surprisingly brilliant.

Protomartyr, Formal Growth In the Desert (2023) and Ultimate Success Today (2020). What brought this on was the announcement by Protomartyr of a new tour, then going to their website to see it’s been redesigned as a page for a fictional, liminal, aggressively mediocre hotel, the Hotel Usona. Breadcrumbs for a new album, perhaps? Some are speculating that the name for different “guest rooms” are names for new songs: “Sounds We Cannot Hear,” “Exalted Eagles,” “The Knife Dream,” and so on.

It’s understandably gotten me into the mood for their two most recent albums, plus several tracks off other releases. Both are brutal, sneering, sarcastic, unflinching dives into the psyches of individuals and experiences we can recognize a bit too well. These are easily framed by a political valence. “Processed By the Boys” (on Ultimate Success…) was inspired by reports of ICE detention facilities. “Let’s Tip the Creator” (from Formal Growth…) lampoons the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk and their parasitic pretension to creativity. But these fit within a broader theme of existential dislocation. “Elimination Dances” (one of the highlights of Formal Growth…) ponders the smallness of human life against desert rocks shaped by eons (and with some very creative, cutting guitar work from Greg Ahee). Even the more pointed social engagement on the songs of Ultimate Success… – “Michigan Hammers,” “Modern Business Hymns” – start from (and end in) a place of abject alienation.

Perhaps it’s down to the timing of listening to these around the time I watched or read the above, but what stuck out to me this time around is the way in which pretty much all of their stories take this kind of view: people reduced to their component parts, faced with the mundane horror of having to live life in such a state. As a post-punk band from Detroit, it’s natural that Protomartyr should be preoccupied with these kinds of themes. What’s impressive (and more than a bit bleak) is that there are so many different facets to be explored in that wheelhouse.

Header image is one of many abandoned Pizza Huts that litter the American landscape (source: r/AbandonedPorn subreddit).

There will be no featured Thursday post this week or the next, as I’m busy visiting with family, readying myself for going back to school, and in the final throes of a book project. Things will resume as normal the week of the 27th. I’ll still be publishing “Worms of the Senses” both weeks. I also have two essays from last week which I enthusiastically encourage you to check out if you haven’t already.

The first is a brief take on what the aesthetics of the bumbling America 250 celebrations tell us about the state of incipient fascism. The second, for paying subscribers only, is my long essay on space, time, and the meaning of escape in Alex Cox’s Repo Man. It is, if I may say so myself, one of the more interesting things I’ve written about film recently, and in any case there’s going to be more paid-only content in the coming months. So if you haven’t signed up for a paid subscription, now’s the time.

subscribe...

O Brother, Where Art Thou? written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (2000). By no means the Coen Brothers’ best film (Fargo, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski), but it’s irrefutably an original, fascinating adaptation of The Odyssey. (I have no idea how Christopher Nolan’s film version of The Odyssey is going to turn out. Frankly, I don’t plan to find out either.) A good creative choice is one that allows for deeper exploration of the thematics of the original source material, and that’s precisely what makes setting said odyssey in the Tennessee Valley region of Mississippi during the Depression a good creative choice.

One of the repeated tropes showing up in the Coen’s films – not all, but probably most – is they are clearly joined to a lineage of Jewish American life that, if not radical itself, was adjacent to radical and socialist ideas and saw them as a valid part of American life and experience. It’s less obvious in O Brother, but still there, especially in the opening sequence as the cuts of Ulysses (George Clooney), Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), and Pete (John Turturro) escaping from the chain gang to the tune of Mac McClintock’s Wobbly song “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

There’s something else, though, relevant to how the spatial and time-based valences of the story relate to the themes of freedom and escape. (In a somewhat different shape from what I wrote in my Repo Man essay.) The protagonists of O Brother escape the chain gang into a world that is (again, much like The Odyssey) is much wider, and with much more potential to capture and trap you. Time obeys different rules here (for example, a song recorded four days previously can become a massive hit whose singles sell out in every record store). The Tennessee Valley remains that kind of place. Before it was hooked up into the electrical grid by the TVA, it probably felt even more so.

“A View of the Woods,” by Flannery O’Connor (1957). The posthumous collection in which it appeared, Everything That Rises Must Converge, is full of remarkable works. But for some reason, this is the one that I’ve returned to several times over the years. It’s very difficult to find someone who does southern gothic exactly like Flannery O’Connor, who so frankly portrays the tension of being between worlds, trying to exist in a history built on sand. We must also acknowledge that her retrograde and vile personal views about race certainly complicate the sharpness with which she would lampoon the hypocrisies of southern segregation. Anyone who sidesteps them is doing a disservice to both literature and history.

For better or worse, race is not at issue in “A View of the Woods.” It’s a story about modernization, the visceral reactions against it, and how they tear previous loyalties apart. O’Connor is excellent at writing relationships animated by control. She’s also very good at sketching the vast tracts of land in the Georgia countryside. You can easily read why its parcelization is such a sin to some, even if young Mary Fortune’s rage initially seems to come out of nowhere. There are, as we know, other, deeper, more existential losses than aesthetics at play when green pastures are mowed over to build a gas station. The filicidal ending seems to point to it. And, perfectly for a southern gothic story, one gets the sense that it was always going to end like this. No avoiding it. Almost as if the watching woods made it happen.

Anton Pearson, Driving Through Belgium (2026). Finally, one of the more fascinating ambient releases I’ve heard recently. Anton Pearson has something of a musical alter-ego. His day job is as a guitarist for Squid, one of the best bands to come out of Britain over the past ten years. Manic, jagged, tense, jangly art-punk. Pearson’s guitar work capably veers in unexpected directions: from rapid scales to slicing, jabbing stingers, interlocking with each other in myriad different ways. Truly impressive stuff.

His ambient compositions are nothing like his guitar work in Squid. But there is a common focused intensity. Driving Through Belgium sees Pearson using the English countryside as a starting point for a single idea; through droning effects and notes lengthened over several minutes at a time, we start to feel nature expand, hills and skies start to descend on the listener. We frequently reach something like euphoria on the album. But a haunting, dangerous euphoria. As if the wild itself is showing its true self to you. Not out of desire but indifference.

Here’s Cal Cashin in The Quietus reviewing. I feel like it sums it up rather well:

Throughout, the best thing about Driving Through Belgium is its strong feeling of earthliness. In spite of complicated synth-work and a spaceship-control-console pedalboard, Pearson presents six pieces that teem, bustle, and then decay like the natural world. He so ably evokes the everyday beauty of his garden pond, of a quick walk to clear the head, of looking out the window on a long journey.

Header image is from O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).

Quick reminder: today’s post is, in its full and complete form, available for paying subscribers only. If you like what what you read in the first (free) section, then please consider supporting my work.

subscribe...

I could also possibly be convinced to send you the text if you’re really interested, and if you’d be willing to send me a few bucks in some form or otherwise suggest a way to support my work. You know how to contact me.

Punk and the city of Los Angeles coexist at a peculiar intersection. There’s London and New York City at the moment of birth. There’s Detroit where the rage at the fringes of the hippy movement gestated. There’s Jakarta and Johannesburg and São Paulo and Beijing where so many other disgruntled subalterns put their mark on the genre. But LA shows up as a specific kind of city when punk needed a specific kind of nihilism.

This is where the settlers of Manifest Destiny showed up and realized that the only way to keep conquering was to jump in another ocean. Instead they went to war against Mexico. “A bright, guilty place” Orson Welles called it. And by the time Rodney Bingenheimer was playing the Sex Pistols for the first time on KROQ it was when the postwar bust had fully killed the idea that America might “take care of its own.” The inviting smiles of LA – where there had never been anything like a social safety net, where even its public transit system had been eliminated lest its people get any socialist ideas – gave way to some particularly menacing snarls. All the more nasty because the smiles were so bright.

I love writing about Los Angeles for the same reasons I still listen to Black Flag. Both exhibit, in their own way, a distinctly American form of late capitalist collapse. While LA can’t help but be honest about it – so thin is its “anyone can be a star” veneer – Black Flag embraced the ugly truth with aplomb. They also found different ways to do so through different incarnations of the group.

Black Flag’s music repeatedly shows up in the soundtrack of Repo Man (1984). A jilted Otto (Emilio Estevez) drunkenly sings “TV Party” next to the train tracks, not long before Bud (the brilliant Harry Dean Stanton) tricks him into stealing/repossessing a car.

Suicidal Tendencies are also a haunting presence in the film. “Institutionalized” plays in the background as Otto is kicked to the curb by his soon-to-be ex squeeze Debbi (Jennifer Balogun).

Then there are the Circle Jerks, dressed in leisure suits and playing a lounge version of “When the Shit Hits the Fan” in a swank bar (“I can’t believe I used to like these guys,” remarks Otto). Zander Schloss, who later that year would replace Earl Liberty as the Jerks’ bassist, plays Otto’s friend “Kevin the Nerd” with a deft kind of aimless stupidity. He argues to Otto that there’s a future in a fry cook job, even with no future anywhere else; certainly not in the stockboy job he and Otto just got fired from.

All of these punk bona fides are well-known. Not for nothing is Repo Man known as one of the best punk flicks ever made. But what exactly does this mean? By the time Cox started making his film, “punk” had been around the better part of a decade. It wasn’t the shock to the system it had once been. What’s more, in the world of Repo Man, punks aren’t exactly the ones in the know. Sure, they fancy themselves outside and against “respectable society,” but for the most part they’re about as aimless and trapped as Kevin thinking he can build a future from a series of dead-end jobs, or that mindlessly singing a 7-Up jingle is time well-spent. By the end of the film, Kevin is as senselessly dead as anyone else.

Welcome to Edge City

Genre is a slippery concept. While it’s not colloquially untrue that Repo Man is a “punk film,” as a descriptor of the film’s themes and devices it is imprecise. Pull the film up on any streamer and it will most likely be labeled “sci-fi.” Appropriate enough for a film that involves stolen aliens and glowing, flying cars. It’s quite common for film writers to call Repo Man a noir, or “neo-noir.”

In fact, noir just about covers what makes Repo Man a “punk film.” Just as film noir and pulpy, noir novels gave release to all the repressed fears and anxieties of mid-century America – the violence and intrigue that the mainstream vociferously shuns – so did the early punk movement become a space of expression for people who, either by choice or circumstance, existed on the jagged margins of precarity and dispossession.

They navigated markedly different settings. The undercurrents of early Cold War America looked and moved differently from those of the economic downturns of the 1970s. But both noir and punk adopted a gothic posture in relation to dominant narratives of smiling optimism and faith in the system. Both rubbed outside audiences’ noses in the lives and practices that optimism can’t account for and tries to externalize, villainize or explain away. Both stood with two feet firmly planted in the detritus of a capitalist modernity that denies it produces anything of the sort. Both stare back at that straight-laced, hypocritical world with sneering glee. For these reasons, both were frequently subject to denunciation or even censorship.

We are faced with plain proof of this in Repo Man when Otto returns to his parents’ home, initially repulsed by the idea of joining Bud in the cutthroat world of car repossession, hoping to get his hands on some money they once promised him. They’ll disappoint him. Which perhaps he should expect coming from two former hippies, now devolved into burnouts glued to their couch and television. Without looking away from the screen, they’ll absently tell him they gave it to an evangelical preacher on TV. Otto won’t yell or react with anger or even exhibit much in the way of shock. It would appear he’d half expected them to renege.

Before any of that, though, before he enters the front door of his childhood home, he’ll have to get off the bus that brought him there. “Edge City” it says on the front, and it very likely is the end of the line. Edge City doesn’t really exist. There is no Edge City in the LA area. The destination is an easter egg, the title of Cox’s earlier short film.

We’ll see this bus periodically return throughout the film. At this particular moment, it is telling us something about Otto, the directionless, disgruntled punk coming to beg is braindead parents for money because he can’t stomach the idea of a repo job. He and his family are, rather literally, from the edge of the film’s world. The periphery, the place that normally exists just on the outer limits of people’s sight lines. Hazy, unremarkable, and easy to forget.

There was, in 1984, another sci-fi neo-noir floating around in the pop culture ecosphere. Released two years before to polarizing reviews, Blade Runner was already becoming a staple of arthouse theatres and on its way to cult status. Though the two films are obviously radically different in tone and content, Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk staple also shares a method of storytelling with Repo Man, distinct to both noir and the various understandings of “punk” (whatever iteration).

Read more

Just a reminder that this week will feature three posts: “Worms of the Senses,” this one right here, and an essay on Alex Cox’s Repo Man to be published this Friday.

Friday’s post, however, will require a paid subscription to read. So if you don’t have one, if you aren’t financially supporting my work here at To Whom It May Concern… this is your chance.

subscribe...

Let’s start with Walter Benjamin’s description of how fascism uses culture to its own ends:

“Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate,” writes Benjamin. “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”

Any footage of the Nuremberg rallies shows exactly what this looks like. The illusion of empowerment is the regimentation of bodies into simultaneous rhythmic movement. Only one person ultimately gains, and that’s the megalomaniacal fucker at the front. There are no powers of mass hypnosis here. Just a deeply and widely held belief your life can be made worthwhile simply by bathing in the light emanating from the podium.

Fast forward forty years, when David Bowie called Hitler “one of the first rock stars.” This was 1976, and he was so high on cocaine that he’d lost the line between himself and his Thin White Duke persona. He’d later recant what he said. Still, he wasn’t wrong.

Another fifty years, the rhythms of mass culture have gone slack. No matter how many times they rewind, they can only get so tight. Partly because every gesture has been repeated so many times that it takes real effort to find any original truth within it. The films suck, but there’s a lot of them and we can stream them anytime. The music is derivative, but it’s just for the background anyway. Pop stars are utterly sexless. The kids don’t fuck, because why would you fuck when you have so much porn at your fingertips?

The “Salute to America” in DC on July 4th was not Nuremberg. The crowd was big for Trump’s speech, but hardly shoulder-to-shoulder. It wasn’t packed out. Nor would it be if the utterly embarrassing attendance at the Great American State Fair was any indication. Or the parade cancellation due to heat earlier in the day. The cheap, flimsy displays for each state, the classical columns printed on theatrical flats rather than built; these communicated to Americans that they’d best content themselves with the bargain bin, the step in the downward spiral of life’s commodification. Most stayed away for this reason. But for a significant minority – including those who turned up on the evening of July 4th – it was an appealing promise. History transformed into a roadside tourist trap, by way of Willy’s Chocolate Experience.

Trump drones on and on about communists. Deleuze tells us that repetition is transgressive, that it raises the meaning of the word or symbol above the generalities of society, that each time it’s repeated it takes on more irony or humor, more reflexiveness apart from its actual meaning. In Trump’s case, it becomes limp like a wet sock. Watered down, losing all charge outside of the hardest core of his supporters. “Difference without a concept” Deleuze calls it.

But that’s enough. If anti-communism does become effectively weaponized (and if the new McCarthyism is to spread beyond the targeting of pro-Palestine activists) it will be in no small part thanks to the Democrats trying to prove they’re more enthusiastic defenders of capitalism than Trump. Pathetic. But clears the way for the chuds picketing DSA meetings to get braver, to inherit the boldness of the Patriot Front marchers in DC this past weekend, the carte blanche afforded to ICE, and the paramilitary training of the blackshirts. The concept emerges, and the concept is regimented violence.

A hundred years ago, marching band music was distinct from popular music for many reasons. The most distinct and basic among them was the presence of backbeat. While the military marches of John Philip Sousa placed equal emphasis on every beat, the rhythms of jazz, the blues, and what would become rock and roll would specially emphasize some beats over others. Whereas popular music thrived on difference and invited the listener to insert themselves into the rhythm, military music enforced everyone who played and participated into the same line.

Today, we can see how the not-yet-fascism of Trumpism attempts – albeit clumsily – to repurpose the individualism of popular music to the rote imaginary of state violence. It certainly helps that individualism itself is a commodity, mass produced, picked off the rack, and repeated ad nauseam.

Most of the artists or their estates almost certainly didn’t give permission for their songs to used by U.S. Military Joint Armed Forces Orchestra & Chorus after Trump’s speech. Stevie Wonder, Miley Cyrus, and Prince (RIP) have all spoken in opposition to the administration or taken social stances anathema to it. This didn’t matter to the administration, and didn’t stop “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “Party In the USA,” and “Let’s Go Crazy” from being played as fireworks went off over the National Mall.

The audience – draped tackily in the stars and stripes and gaudy MAGA hats – loved it. Most of them probably didn’t care that they were dancing to songs written and made famous by liberals. And why should they? The point of a culture so glutted with itself is that it can be anything to anyone. Those with the resources and willpower can make any revelry into an instrument of repression. It sounds counterintuitive, but then again, the most pointed song in the orchestra’s setlist was Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” the song he recorded in the wake of 9/11 which promises “a boot in your ass” to America’s enemies, in this case clearly redirected at immigrants and the communists.

None of this is original. And that’s the point. Trump is incapable of originality. His simulated state fair needs to be Dollar Store cheap. His entertainment needs to be cribbed from elsewhere, crudely reappropriated into dunder-headed chest-thumping. His threats need to be tedious and stupid. Not because the people who follow him are stupid, but because they need to be stupefied. It’s either that or address what has them all (and the rest of us) so drunk on our own pain to begin with. And we can’t have that, can we?

The day after the “Salute to America,” Washington DC was reported to have the worst air quality of any city in the world. An estimated 850,000 fireworks were set off in ten locations. Previous 4th of July firework displays have used fewer than 20,000, but this needed to be more. Much more. That the display itself was relatively straightforward – no use of syncopation or simultaneity to create different shapes in the sky, not much of a variety in color – is irrelevant next to the fact that that quantity was the largest ever.

Come July 5th, the resulting smoke lingered in the summer heatwave, waiting to be breathed in by DC locals. And all while swingeing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency have hobbled community air quality detection and warning systems.

It’s a bleak reminder that the fascism still taking form in the US and abroad may not need to achieve the same level of militarized regimentation. Trump may not need to achieve the same level of stardom as Hitler. Methods of containment – the dreaded camps – may not be needed, not while so much of the planet becomes increasingly inhospitable to human life.

Most billionaires envision less keeping the poor and unwanted confined than keeping themselves fortressed in. Such a scenario will have good use for repetition, for the same phrases and words repeated as a distraction from life’s impoverishment, to representations of life recapitulated to the point of full-scale simulation.

Yes, the cyberpunk comparison has become trite by now, but it isn’t going anywhere. If anything we’re going to hear it more and more often, replaying in our heads, becoming ever more meaningless even as the world grows to resemble it.

Header image is of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) and of Donald Trump giving his speech on July 4th.