Begging your pardon for a delay of several weeks between posts--and throwing myself on thy mercy for what is likely to be a continuing stretch of decidedly un-weekly updating (I have a small child who is always, at best, pretty hungry)--I’ve anyways managed to throw together the following writeup on past and future musical goings-on.1

First, recent news you can use:

✰ When last we spoke, I had just finished working up the onesheet for the new Wolf Eyes record, Self Embalmed. That record, which is really good, is available now, along with my expert analysis, over on the Psychic Sounds website.

✰ ✰ I also alluded last time to having written an essay that was soon to be released by my friends at . The piece--a longish guest post on Chris Marker, Goya, and the phenomenon of “going down to the base”--has since been published, and is linked below. I’m very proud of it!!

2020 Music Group

Guest Post: Mark Iosifescu

For our second 2020MG guest issue, we’re excited to share a post from our friend, Mark Iosifescu. Enjoy…

Read more

a month ago · 3 likes · 2020 Music Group

But OK, the real reason for the season: next week ’s and my band Angels in America plays the And Always Forever festival in Los Angeles. It’s our first show in more than a year (and the first since the release of our album) and comes as part of a bill that’s stacked with friends, with once and future frenemies, even with several total strangers. The Angels set will feature several theoretically pleasant surprises. If you are in LA on November 7 then probably you should come out.

And so: to prep for the live Angels experience and situate us amid nigh on twenty years of anxious gigging, I dug up the recordings of our first-ever live show, which took place on February 5, 2009 at Montréal’s Casa del Popolo,2 when Esra and I were nineteen. I also included a short excerpt from a more recent, long-gestating essay about my early years playing music (the full version of which will see daylight someday), as well as--buckle up!!--some minorly mortifying YouTube documentation of the gig in question. Find it all below, and thank you, and let’s never speak of this again.

Our debut show was at Casa del Popolo, or just “Casa,” the venue on St. Laurent in the Mile End whose name our Anglo-Canadian friends pronounced with a short vowel, the same “a-” sound that’s in “apple” or “cat.” While we were mildly scandalized by this underreported feature of the Canadian accent (which also shows up in the way they say “pæsta” and, unforgivably, “Nirvæna”), we felt grateful for the booking, and maybe, as usual, deployed some volume and dumb jokes to cover for how scared we actually were.

We also did our best to hide behind Nader and Marcus, whom Esra had recruited to fill out the sound, a second guitarist and drummer, though they could both basically play whatever needed to be played. Emphasis here on ‘basically’: like, I’d call them “ringers,” but neither of them were that good. Still, they’d been in bands long enough they knew what to tell the engineer at sound check, plus Marcus had a driver’s license. I met them both the morning of the show, which was also our only rehearsal: Nader, a wild-haired chatterbox, equal parts fun and exhausting, prone to prankster behavior and strident leftist ranting (this was the moment when everyone was excited about the new U.S. president, but he—who’d been born in Jordan—wasn’t buying it, and he was right); and Marcus, a sweet, comparatively soft-spoken dude about ten years older than we were, who’d grown up on Lake Huron in a city that was well-known for having the most contaminated air in the country due to the pollution from the American factories across the river in Michigan. I remember walking them through the setlist, which was rudimentary enough it didn’t take much doing, and clocking for myself the coziness of the whole arrangement, the instant camaraderie flowing in the practice space, up beside the highway in Parc-Ex, further north than I’d yet been in town. The no-wave freakout opener, the Dead Boys cover (“All This and More”), the weird Jandek-style extended breakdown, then the sappy closing number. Cool? My bandmates nodded. Cool. They understood.

1. Mike Hunt’s Hard Lemonade

2. All This and More

3. The Accursed Share

4. Your Wings (Spreadem)

But honestly?? Enough. The plan for this week is to offer up some recapping on the recent writing I’ve been doing for friends’ and peers’ music releases, a glamorous gig tradition of one-sheets, bios, liners, press copy etc etc that I’ve plied previously. It’s a genre that aligns well with my writing’s natural tendencies, namely a propensity for lists, pileups of subcultural signifiers, and rhapsodic descriptions of abstract states. It is also a basic and lucky consequence of the fact that all my friends make music, and that they sometimes work with labels who are willing to pay small but meaningful amounts for phrases like “diamond-dense instrumentals” and “grainy dustings of digital distortion.” It’s like I said: here be glamor.

Anyway, please find brief accounts below of the music-writing highlights of the last couple of months, along with the links and associated imagery I’m entering into evidence. Look it over, check out the tunes, and reflect--above all--on whether you’d like to hire me to do more of this.

Lastly lastly, and speaking of music writing: many of you are familiar with 2020 Music Group, the “music recommendations initiative” overseen by the eminent braintrust of Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo, and Alec Sturgis. Some new writing from me will be appearing there this week.

Boy Harsher — GET MEAN (Atlantic)

I met Gus from Boy Harsher in 2011 when Esra and I were on tour, sort of (by which I mean: we had had to miss the first few shows after I crashed the Subaru on the turnpike in Elizabeth and we were desperately trying to catch up to our itinerary of bookings in the insurance-rental Hyundai before the entire trip sped away from us for good). We ended up in Savannah with nowhere to stay, but we called Kylie, who called Zagers, who called Gus, who wasted no time being like “Yeah they can stay with me.” We hung out, had a sick time, loved him forever—not least because a few years later we reencountered Gus at Savage Weekend, and met Jae, and saw the pair’s new band rip a masterful set. Boy Harsher has been family ever since: we shared some bills, collaborated on a music video, and watched as the project leveled up, dropped certified classics, and became a phenomenon. GET MEAN is out now, its singles are hurting people as we speak, and I was deeply psyched to get to write for it.

Norma Tanega and Aida Pavletich — Saturday Dancer / Ways Away / Run Runner (Freedom to Spend)

In 2022, I edited Try to Tell a Fish About Water, Anthology Editions’ monograph on the life and art of Norma Tanega, released in conjunction with a really great compilation of her tunes. Tanega is best known for her sole hit, 1966’s “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog”—an important reference point among folk heads on account of its absolute, irreducible weirdness, but not an especially useful one for describing Tanega’s career and life practice, which went way broader and way deeper. Over the decades, Tanega painted, taught and nurtured the arts community in her home base of Claremont CA, and worked up a trio of experimental percussion albums in the 1980s with the author Aida Pavletich, gratifyingly bizarro tape experiments soon to be reissued via Freedom to Spend. Check out the Saturday Dancer title track to catch the vibe: it’s part home-recording cassette-deck melee, part coffeehouse storyslam, all free and easy sonic expression between friends. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of music.

Wolf Eyes – Self Embalmed (Psychic Sounds)

Per Nate, the record comes out next week on Maine’s crucial Psychic Sounds label, so I won’t say too much here except to note that if you know me or anything about the American noise swamps in which my artistic sensibilities and those of my friends were steeped across years, friendships, and approximately one hundred thousand humid basement shows, then you know how glad I am to get to write about Wolf Eyes. I can and someday probably will go on about their impact on this thing of ours—hearing Esra talk about their set at No Fun 2004 (pretty sure I was too scared to go, straight up); learning from a Burned Mind track that noise music was also punk music, and pop music; playing an Ypsilanti houseshow with CF and an Olson side project where everyone took turns riding around in a wheelchair because the Michigan medical weed was too vast for tiny northeast minds; blah blah blah dude. Wolf Eyes has been the best band in the world thirty years running, is the point, and the one-sheet copy I wrote about “avalanching helljazz from the noise zone’s trashmen-in-chief” spells it out about as clearly as I possibly can.

Ryley Walker — forthcoming full-length (AD93)

I was waiting on the announcement to drop this post, but now it can be revealed: Ryley—whom I’ve likewise known since 2011, when Angels played Voice of the Valley and he was the only one who didn’t call our set “witchhouse”—finally has new tunes on the way, via AD93. The mighty “Carrier” is all anyone gets for now, but I’ll be posting more about the forthcoming material as the larger release approaches. For now it’s a “more questions than answers” sort of deal, the main one being, of course: will it be as good as the Modest Mouse cover band Ryley and I did a couple of Halloweens ago?? Watch this space.

I wrote about the origins of this essay back in June, when the piece first appeared in print. I also tried then to unpack some of what was tricky and sticky about my longtime WTV fandom, so I’ll skip all that this time except to note that--in spite of any number of bumps in my readerly experience across the >3,000 pages of A Table for Fortune, and also because of them--I still just love the guy. I will always be stoked on the man-hours I have gotten to spend in the textual catacombs of William the Blind, and treasure what his work taught me about writing as vocation: real writing, in all its stubbornness and seul contre tous ungovernability. It’s an outlook and an oeuvre that’s not for everybody, and maybe sometimes not really for anybody, but when the thing lines up just right, there is nothing in the world of fiction to compare it to.

This is very much the rap on the four-volume A Table for Fortune, the longest and most ambitious novel in a career riddled with works of length and ambition, now set--after several delays--to be released next month by a deeply gross publisher (circumstances that are themselves an important and sad part of the story, the origins of which recounted here more than a year ago). The book, in other words, contains more that needs discussing than could be thoughtfully written up in a review of any length, whether we’re talking about its actual content or the tortuous and straight-up tragic means by which it is due to finally appear on bookshelves. Meaning I expect I’ll be writing more about A Table for Fortune down the line, or at least doing some yakking about it with whoever decides to take it on.

In the meantime, here’s a first attempt to tackle the untackleable. Note that--while I was careful not to lay out any plot points that aren’t also accounted for in the family trees and timelines that make up the novel’s front matter--it is still technically the case that the review contains a handful of minor spoilers. If you really want to go into A Table for Fortune blind, go ahead and take some responsibility for your happiness. If you don’t, then let the eagle soar.

Among the real-life figures whose historical exploits are cited in A Table for Fortune--a full list of which would have to include Thucydides, Victor Serge, Ayn Rand, Bobby Fischer, Solzhenitsyn, and White House reporter Helen Thomas--the most impactful are 1) the SS-man-turned-Mossad-assassin Otto Skorzeny, and 2) the Canadian engineer and arms dealer Gerald Bull.

Above, a scene from Skorzeny’s Nazi-infested funeral in 1975 Madrid. The man holding Skorzeny’s medals is Reinhard Gehlen, himself a spy for the Reich who immediately went to work for his anti-communist bedfellows in the CIA upon Hitler’s defeat. Gehlen also figures frequently in A Table for Fortune.

Admit it, reader: You love the CIA. And honestly, why shouldn’t you? For decades now, the supposedly invisible agency has been loudly figuring in our novels as a kind of infinitely scalable objective correlative for the USA’s broken promises, a literary shorthand for the ludicrously deceitful, compulsively murderous bureaucratic malignancies that have enabled generations of Americans to delude themselves about how their country operates in the world. As an all-too-real administrative contrivance, the Central Intelligence Agency is a moral sinkhole; as a crucible for fictional characters, a big-box store of dramatic plot devices, and a delivery system for intrigue, outrage, and bitter comedy, it is straight-up irresistible. And where authors like Didion, Mathews, Matthiessen (who would know), and Rush have all availed themselves of various sly narrative conceits involving the organization, others have opted to make still grander statements. For this there’s the “big CIA novel,” in which the agency itself exists as a central symbolic container for large-scale political or historical judgments, not to mention all kinds of writerly obsessions and thematic hobbyhorses smuggled in under cover of the lofty literary staging. Think Libra (DeLillo’s spectacular violence coolly abstracted), Tree of Smoke (Johnson’s boozy sinners in a fallen world), and, especially, Norman Mailer’s floridly psychotic 1991 meganovel Harlot’s Ghost—a rigorously sourced account of the CIA’s first two decades which doubles as a 1,300-page alibi for Mailer’s perennial outsider anxieties about class / race / (especially) sexuality.1

And then there’s A Table for Fortune, William T. Vollmann’s new entry in the late-career-CIA-epic genre and an encyclopedic >3,000-page novel comprising nothing less than a month-by-month accounting of the entirety of American foreign policy between 1968 and 2019.2 Like his ambitious forebears, Vollmann has spent decades building an oeuvre of heroic historical swings and authorial preoccupations, all of which he brings to bear in the new book’s four volumes, which are replete with his usual themes (state violence and the costs of moral courage), favored settings (urban underworlds and vice corridors), and exhaustively woodshedded idiosyncratic style (multi-font mock jargon and metafictional inserts of archival documents and personal photos). As with any durational performance, however, A Table for Fortune’s effect is not so much cumulative as gestural; no matter how many details and flourishes the book packs in, the reader who makes it through the author’s half-century death march for empire will be left thinking mostly of the enormity of its dispiriting whole.

Which is not to say that there aren’t specific, meaningful takeaways in Vollmann’s account of the lives of Elliott and Matthew Stevens, the shattered father-son unit at the center of A Table for Fortune’s wilderness of mirrors. Elliott (or DAVE, as he is cheekily code-named throughout) is recruited into the CIA as a Cold War-era whiz kid, but his initial successes outfoxing the Soviets3 give way to an enervating career in war crime banalization that eventually spits him up, alone and unwell, on the War on Terror’s shores; his son Matthew, an unintellectual addict traumatized by Abu Ghraib torture revelations, meanwhile cuts hard the other way, renouncing his father and hitting the road in pursuit of a bleakly idealistic American oblivion. But despite the equal billing (Elliott stars in volumes one and two, Matthew in three and four), it’s the portrait of DAVE and his coworkers—jaded middle managers terrified of their families, constantly thwarted by incompetent higher-ups, and desperately horny for fresh intelligence / the Berlin Wall / each other—that feels like the key to Vollmann’s project.4

In fact, the book’s insistence on immersing the reader in such unendingly tedious bureaucracy will, to my mind, stand as its essential contribution to CIA literature. Here is an espionage epic whose “spies” never leave the agency’s Langley, Virginia headquarters; much of A Table for Fortune, in fact, operates like an office novel, tracing the year in, year out generation of deliberately slanted intelligence reports (aptly nicknamed “product”) that DAVE writes up for his bosses (or “customers”). If you’re eager to watch in real time as the stooges and yes-men manipulate the intel to justify disastrous US interventions—in Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan again, Iraq again, etc., etc., etc.—then rest assured, Vollmann will lay it out for you, punctuating the account every so often with death tolls, atrocity anecdotes, and other gut punches while we read (some 250 times, by my imperfect count) that “DAVE drove to work and drove home from work.” A rather grinding experience, that is to say, and often gratuitously so; but the perverse repetition is the point, and if you aren’t sure you’re up for this dynamic, a glimpse at today’s headlines should suffice to make clear it’s all you deserve.5 As our author himself once put it (riffing lovingly on Céline in his afterword to a Journey to the End of the Night reedition): “Reader, fuck you!”

One can admire Vollmann’s project—and even take real pleasure in its hardheaded, radical unwieldiness—without, however, making excuses for what is ultimately a thoroughly frustrating reading experience. The list of things I’d change about A Table for Fortune is both too long to enumerate and too prescriptive to apply to a work this willfully weird, but some features that bear mentioning on the level of story include the book’s handling of Matthew (who becomes a kind of holy fool, his project of “looking for America” often tipping an already less-than-subtle critique into schlock) as well as its insistence on a stultifying chronology (which a little ping-ponging between eras and protagonists would have remedied). I also had no end of stylistic gripes, primarily the book’s tendency to indulge in loud moments of dramatic irony (“It’s called waterboarding, explained her brother. Reds love it”), heavy-handed expository dialogue (“Dad, what’s a Geneva Convention?”), and a more general appetite for low-hanging discursive fruit (lots of jokes about Rumsfeld and “known unknowns,” but also references to, like, metrosexuals and avocado toast).6

A Table for Fortune, in other words, is both less carefully calibrated and more obstinately punishing than previous Vollmanns, which is certainly not saying nothing. Indeed, the book’s tortuous path to its present publication (a rift with the author’s longtime publisher, worsened by a succession of tragic personal events) also helps explain in no small part the work we’ve ended up with: a would-be swan song, titanic and tin-eared, insistent past the point of cruelty on calling out our damning complicity in historical nightmares past, present, and future. If its justly legendary author seems to be more out of touch than ever before, he’s also more resolutely himself. Someday, reader, you’ll miss him.

Gerald Bull beside one of his long-range artillery “superguns,” a version of which he was hired in 1988 to provide to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. One of the primary gripes of DAVE, A Table for Fortune’s CIA-man protagonist, is his agency’s continuing failure to recognize Bull’s potential value as an intelligence asset before it’s too late. You will read all about it, and him, and a thousand other contemptible imperial toadies.

Among the several tasks for which I’m currently trying to make time is a tedious little snatch of video work--specifically, the finishing touches on a music video for a long-sidelined project I’m presently getting in shape to finally release. I don’t plan on talking too much about it yet, except to note that it is constructed using the same “collaged internet video footage” technique that I’ve been iMovieing my way through for years now, including in stuff I’ve previously posted here. The new work has necessitated a dive into some of those prior efforts, and if, like me, you are the ambivalent leaseholder on a Vimeo Pro account, you know what that means: that’s right, watching a music video you made in 2013 and being like, “Welp, probably gonna post this to the Substack.”

The video in question is for the song “Scumbag,” which I released under the Farewell My Concubine solo moniker on a 2013 split with Horsebladder (more about that collabo here) on the eternal Hot Releases label out of Carrboro NC. Hot Releases’ proprietor Ryan Martin was the true patron of my Farewell My Concubine stuff and the best friend the project ever had, and I have a distinct memory of finishing up this song in advance of heading down to Carrboro to debut the jams at a Meadows of Dan houseshow (where I also remember introducing a song by saying, “This is about weed”).

Anyway, the video: like I said, it’s a collaged-YouTube sort of deal, comprising mostly material from the not-entirely-regrettable Peking opera obsession I was nursing at the time, as well as footage from a flashily staged Witkacy play I found (I cannot believe I haven’t written about him here yet!!), and what looks like some home vids from a European tour my band had gone on in 2012. So, basically, it’s a random mess, but one befitting the kinda arbitrarily weighty statement certain loudmouths might try and make at 24. You can’t spell “newsletter” without “ew”!!

Meanwhile, the main synthline still sounds pretty good. Video + full release audio below.

But if I have until now avoided disturbing that project’s cozy sorta lacuna, I’ve still managed to make its writing my friends’ problem, laying dozens of drafts and emails and texts and phone calls on them to the extent that some folks know it well--and know, what’s more, that I’m liable to get really fired up over other work that takes on similar subject matter, however divergently.

Which is the long way of saying that in early 2025, when hipped me to the imminent publication of ’s Precarious Lease--a nonfiction literary account of the author’s years spent in the Parisian squat scene of the early 2010s--I was assiduously psyched. I read the book, which turned out to be both far more rigorous and far more dreamy than I could have anticipated, reviewed it in issue #6 of , and soon after struck up a correspondence with its author.

Here, then, is where I drop another lacuna, which is to say that my conversation with Feldman has, since kicking off early this year, developed into a larger-scale collaboration, one that’s profoundly altered my understanding of the book itself. That collaboration’s full form isn’t ready to unveil itself quite yet, but for now I’ll say it’s been exciting, and reciprocally generative, and a reminder that, amid all the elaborately self-conscious Content Creator Blues I like to publicly indulge in on here, there are some real individual and communal upsides to getting one’s variously piddling literary thoughts into the world and seeing what happens.

In that spirit, below is the full text of the piece on Precarious Lease, which you are allowed to read only if you promise to buy and subscribe to the Review. Thanks, as before and again, to for giving the writing a place to hang out.

Lastly, one specific contextual note that feels important: at the time the essay was written last summer--amid front-of-mind memories of desperately loserish industrialists miming along with toy weapons--the sight of Zohran tacking center for the general election reminded me enough of the pandery energy of prior (disastrous) political campaigns that I got spooked and went for a pretty cheapo snipe at the dude in the first paragraph. Amazingly, though, November 2025 came, the better candidate won, and the new administration’s housing reform efforts have been mostly inspiring, even if they haven’t all hit. Still more reason, I think, to work at getting one’s head around a central political question I found in Precarious Lease: namely, what should struggle look like under comparatively friendly (if imperfect) rule? It’s not something with which the American left has much experience, but here’s to gaining some.

Le Bloc. Photo courtesy Jacqueline Feldman.

So far, 2025 has unsurprisingly been a banner year for the criminalization of poverty. A global handwringing over “liberalism versus authoritarianism” has monopolized attentions while pushing inequality across an unnoticed event horizon, the stateside regime is performatively hacking at the threadbare last strands of the safety net, and even the scantiest encouraging developments on the question of housing are threatened by dilution if not straight-up reversal: In New York, the democratic socialist mayoral favorite is pivoting to the center to enthuse about deregulation and “the role of the private market in housing construction;” in California, longstanding progressive lip service on homelessness is on the cusp of giving way to outright persecution; even in Paris, a socialist-communist local administration that has managed to build public housing stock and tenant protections has also been constrained and disempowered by its national government at every turn, and every election carries increasing risk of a far-right takeover.

Small wonder, then, that we’re also witnessing a flowering of new books and artworks concerned with radical reconceptions of housing, including tenant unions and land seizures. Not to mention the most culturally rich, drama-plagued setups of all: squats and communes—they’re back, baby! And lately they’re showing up across medium and genre, from the Big Five blockbuster (Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake) to speculative fiction (Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone; Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or the End) to documentary and theory (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s film Direct Action; Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form) to the manifesto/tactical manual (Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class; Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’s Abolish Rent). While I don’t have the sales data or trend reports or whatever, I know a psychic wavelength when I see it, plus (and this just anecdotally) January’s marathon screening of Peter Watkins’s La Commune at Anthology was notably lit. Electoral hopes aside, it’s clear something is in the air.

Precarious Lease, Jacqueline Feldman’s second book and first work of nonfiction (following 2024’s lushly experimental, genre-agnostic novel-translation On Your Feet), thus lands at a heavy moment. The book, whose full title is Precarious Lease: The Paris Document, is the author’s account of her years spent embedded in that city’s squatter community, but its primary locus is “Le Bloc,” a massive squat in the 19th Arrondissement (the house’s name itself a backronym for the nonstandard bâtiment libre occupé citoyennement, “free building occupied citizenly”). Though Le Bloc’s lifespan was brief—it opened its doors in the last days of 2012 and saw its ~200 residents evicted by the city in December 2013—its existence provides Feldman ample opportunity to observe and taxonomize the unique lifeforms and densely overgrown social formations that thrive in such unlit spaces: the de facto squat bosses, known here as tontons; the building’s graffiti and street art cohort, the quality of whose work Feldman diplomatically characterizes as mostly beside the point; the unhoused people, organizers and idealists, travelers, and tourists whose trajectories intersect in an illegal project that prides itself on providing the basic services the country’s ballyhooed administrative state cannot. “The squat,” Feldman quotes Bloc tenants as saying, “picked up where the world left off.”

This conception of squatting as both a symptom of and remedy for the glaring inadequacies of the liberal consensus underlies Feldman’s account, but the book is otherwise dreamy, memoiristic, episodic, the furthest thing from strident. It is also hugely instructive, especially for readers interested in what the lived reality of radicalism under social democracy might look like—namely, that it’s super fucking complicated, studded with unromantic realizations and humiliating compromises. Foremost among these is the “precarious lease” of the book’s title, a legal contrivance offered by the city of Paris to occupants of “abandoned” buildings wherein the threat of eviction is dropped in exchange for the reclassification of the space as a kind of public gallery/showroom. In signing a bail précaire, squatters promised to sleep offsite and to throw their doors open to tourists, effectively trading away their claim to housing in favor of the cultural cachet of squatting as an artistic gesture. It’s hard to imagine a better single illustration of the way that today’s nominally progressive regimes prey on their activist base, baiting and co-opting the revolutionary impulse through manipulation, flattery, and shitty bargains.

Le Bloc’s tenants ultimately decline the use of the bail précaire, but its flavor of insidious accommodation carries over, permeating the building’s operations and the lives of its inhabitants. Which is how you end up with scenes like the ones Feldman relates, in which radicals construct new and legitimately visionary sociopolitical orders while also making bad art, eating gnarly stuff like “hamburger pizza,” and booking tours of their squat on Facebook. These people are no less heroic for their weaknesses, and if they seem worthy of mockery, it’s an impulse we indulge at our own peril. After all, Le Bloc’s reality—its temporary, meager, messy countervailing moment—is a future to which we can only aspire.

The Paris catacombs, 2014. Photo courtesy Jacqueline Feldman.

So OK, a weird idea, admittedly, this last bit, and one further complicated by the bookstore’s audio setup, which turned out to be--incredibly--one of those mid-2000s CD players with the iPod dock and a pair of computer speakers whose max volume brought us scarcely a dB above the weather and ambient chitchat. First of all: making someone perform out of an iHome is such a good prank, which is important. But while I would like to be whiny about it, it is also worth acknowledging that it kinda worked: in its trustworthy DIYishness, in its jankily sub-rosa emotional nudging, in getting its self-seriousness shot through with what was essentially silly, the absurd sonic conditions for the performance felt about as on-point as any I’ve dealt with across many years playing “actual” shows. It was classically weird, and I’m grateful to everyone involved, and I mean it.

Being, however, that it was also a lot of work and that we made a bunch of people take time out to help us, I also do want the music to successfully reach human ears. As a first step, I’m attaching the track and its follow-on playlist below, along with a short writeup. Hören Sie unten.

But first, from the “incoming nutty gig” file: Angels in America was just announced as part of the lineup of this year’s And Always Forever festival, November 6–8 in LA at the Echo + Echoplex. More details soon, but the full lineup and ticket link are here now.

The playlist kicks off with the Angels track, of which I posted an excerpt last week. This time it’s the full thing, albeit in a similarly raggedly unmastered and scarcely-mixed state. Plans are in the offing for a fuller release, so I’ll save some of the more detailed context for then, but for now maybe I’ll just highlight the fact that the composition includes numerous nods and references to Gass’s text, a hasty Scott Walker sample, a fair amount of screaming baby, and a guest saxophone spot by Jake Tobin.

The rest of the playlist is an attempt to leverage some noteworthy/occasionally entertaining tunes in the service of illuminating the character of William Frederick Kohler, the congenitally cantankerous protagonist of Gass’s novel. A history professor who dreams of having been an obedient Fascist toady but was actually too much of a smartass, Kohler’s real relationship to Nazism is complex enough to make room for wishful overstatements of affiliation, mealymouthed excusemaking over obvious monstrousness, and Night Porter-ish debasements of a typically tortured masculinity. It’s a grand romance whose contours include the joys of submission (as in DAF’s “Der Mussolini,” with its command to “Geh’ in die Knie!”), lushly recalled lost love (Neubauten’s “Stella Maris” and Alvarius B.’s “Missy Undertaker,” both of which I imagine Kohler dedicating to the lounge singer Susu), and the fascistoid dimensions of middlebrow sentimentality (the Beach Boys doing Germanized Americana and classic schlager jams like Heino’s “Blau blüht der Enzian”). In the novel’s present, meanwhile, Kohler is a domesticated, aging failure (Sports’ cover of the legendary Leather Nun track), a passive and cursed eyewitness to the century’s historical and generational dramas (I like the Magik Markers track’s critique of the radical daughter of Kohler’s colleague Tommaso Governali) with nothing to show for it but a boundless solitude, troubling parent issues, and a famous chair (those first two per “Alone Again (Naturally)”’s mawkish jazzchord diagnosis).

Sounds fun, right??

1. Angels in America and friends — Tunnel

2. Deutsch Amerikanischer Freundschaft — Der Mussolini

3. Magik Markers — The Lighter Side of. . . Hippies

4. The Beach Boys — Ganz allein

5. Einstürzende Neubauten w/ Meret Becker — Stella Maris

6. Royal Trux — Jet Pet (Dante’s Vendetta version)

7. Sports — Slow Death

8. Jeanne Moreau — Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves

9. Kites — Dirt

10. Bernard Parmegiani — Matière induite

11. Heino — Blau blüht der Enzian

12. Mammal — Drifter in the City

13. Alvarius B. — Missy Undertaker

14. Sightings — Through the Panama

15. Gilbert O’Sullivan — Alone Again (Naturally)

First Typed Draft of The Tunnel. From Washington University’s William H. Gass: The Soul Inside the Sentence online archive.

You should come and hang out and get me chatting about the book, but in case you can’t or won’t, I wrote up some Tunnel talk--some of what I’ve been puzzling over, anyway, as I worked on the music. Speaking of, I also bounced a world-exclusive preview of the not-entirely-mixed, not-remotely-mastered Angels track, retrievable below. Get to digging.

Magus Gass in 1979.

I’ve written lots by now about my early days as a fanatical meganovel reader, the ways in which my routes into experimental writing/art/music (and, crucially, my own creative practices thereof) got tangled up in varieties of facile auteur worship, the difficult-art-as-identity-signifier trap, and other, like, proto-litbro habits. It’s a story that’s not finished, to be sure, but it’s also a story I’m a little sick of telling/feigning certainty about, so I’ll mostly avoid the personal exegesis here in favor of laying down some very quick thoughts about Gass’s The Tunnel—a book that flatters and frustrates those old tendencies in equal measure.

Though I’m quite aware of the Faustian bargain you make—as regards good writing or rhetorical subtlety—every time you post a glib take, I feel like I’ve fought in the meganovel wars long enough by now to say the following: at some point in one’s literary self-education, a hard-to-banish thought begins to crystallize that says, roughly, that the history of canonical maximalist fiction is also a history of male grievance. And sure, there are plenty of complexly irreducible, glibness-resistant features in even the works on which it might seem easiest to dunk in this way (not to mention some obvious exceptions). But it is also not some statistical fluke or historical accident that led Gass—a really interesting writer, a kind custodian of the novelist’s (and short story writer’s) craft, and an advocate for its innovators—to hitch his most ambitious, longest-gestating work of maximalist fiction to his most bitterly emasculated, performatively resentful, deludedly male protagonist. To post a glib take: You don’t have to have read The Tunnel to be repulsed by dudes, but it helps.

Which is maybe part of why I’ve always felt a little unsure about the thing, especially as compared to Gass’s only prior novel, Omensetter’s Luck, which rippps. I remember being nineteen, snagging a library-binding Tunnel at the Strand Annex on Fulton Street, tearing into it excitedly on the train, though even then I wasn’t sure how I felt about the nineties serifs and self-seriously anarchic QuarkXPress design. Ultimately, I didn’t finish it, something that—and I cannot stress this enough—just did not happen in those days. I always, but always, finished my meganovels. I finished Giles Goat-Boy. I did get through The Tunnel, though, on a second pass a few years on, and lately I’ve been revisiting it extensively, using the intervening span to try and get a clearer eye on how the work actually sits relative to—on the one hand—my youthful enthusiasm and its (initial) disappointment, and—on the other—the many cultural and discursive trends into which the work has been swept for thirty years, hype and outrage cycles it has variously weathered, prefigured, and fallen victim to.

The most contentious of these discursive frames, the most ostensibly scandalous, has to do with how to read the book’s engagement with Nazism. It’s a feature of the text which struck me, on this recent flipthrough, as doubly frustrating: undoubtedly overstated from the outside, and strangely undercooked within. The Tunnel’s (or, really, its protagonist William Frederick Kohler’s) purported Nazism is superficial, totemic, short on specifics—as in his (possibly invented) participation in Kristallnacht, during which he (maybe) threw a brick but swears to have done no damage (and may have been looting the wrong store). It’s all diaphanous, dreamy, ahistorical, and the book’s vaunted “fascism of the heart” conception is as much an inquiry into varieties of exceedingly mundane domestic disappointment and Greatest Generation malt shop nostalgia as anything else.1

Kohler, in fact, wishes he had an affiliation as gratifyingly and sexily cursed by history, since his actual condition is that of an exhausted Iowan incel (avant la lettre but who’s counting). His historical nightmare is the one in which he’s out of step, left behind by the political movements on the right and the left that appeared, at the close of the century, to have defined the contemporary American mass society in their negative space (itself a kind of apolitical delusion). Kohler is too smart to see Hitler as anything but a paper-thin avatar for thuggery but also too old and jaded to overlook the hypocrisies of sixties leftism, too inept to steal candy effectively, too pathetic (or fat, as he reminds us) to successfully cheat on his wife, or be a poet, or participate in a pogrom without accidentally attacking a non-Jewish business. This is a guy who can’t even be a Nazi right. And that, my friends, is real historical tragedy.

I’ll let Kohler tell it. Here he is at the deathbed of his mentor, the conspicuously Heideggerian nationalist philosopher Magus Tabor. Take us out, Kohl.

I knew I should say something, and so I finally did. I said hello. I said I suspected he was surprised to see me. Not enough people knew where he was, I said, if they did he would have more visitors. . . . I said that my work was almost over; that I would be returning to Boston soon (which was a lie because Harvard had not renewed my fellowship); that I admired the New Germany; that my experience in his class had been the most important of my life; that I hoped to emulate his dedication, if I could not match his genius; that I felt, as I felt he felt, alone with my unmentionable ideas; that I certainly could not join the political right, it was made of intellectual thugs and drones, nor the left, of course, either, since liberals were humanists at heart and humanists were vain about the value of man, foolish about his so-called higher, better, nature, and hypocrites about their equalitarian causes.
I told him I hoped never to marry. I hoped to teach as he had the truth no matter what, namely that the truth was a snare. I said I hated the Reds; I said that my melancholy had brought me to the edge.

Angels in America - “Tunnel” (excerpt)

The author, in a hole.

 ___
 \_/
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 __|__
 |  ^  |
 |     |
 \ \_/ /
 ‘._.’

This week, kicking off a short series of posts on translated literature and, in particular, on capital-T Translation itself: as a vocation, as a practical hustle, as a transcultural headspace, as a machine for endlessly complicating meaning. A lot to cover, but what no doubt helps is that we’re starting with a deep dive on a book that’s as much of a blast as Superstars: Ann Scott’s 2000 novel of the French techno scene, published in April by Astra House in its first English translation courtesy of Jonathan Woollen.

I’ve known Jonathan since bygone days spent cruising through through the Chapel Hill noise scene (where he was music director of WXYC and I was basically an occasional visitor doing poppers during Savage Weekend), but it was the NYC literary constellation that really facilitated our reconnecting. In the last few years--across several readings and the odd karaoke night--I became aware not just of Jonathan’s general proficiency as a French translator, but of this very particular, very fun novel translation he was working on. When Superstars finally appeared this spring, its relevance to the overlapping considerations that fuel this newsletter (roughly stated: artists and musicians and the scene politics that trip them up like Home Alone boobytraps) was too great to be ignored. We had to talk about the book.

Our conversation--which touches on the undergrounder’s narcissism of small differences, McDonald’s’ international menu, and something called “the Naze to Dumbass pipeline”--follows below.

First, though, some broader updates from the “new and notable” file:

✶ My band Angels in America recorded a mix for Sex magazine featuring alternate/unreleased/rare materials from a decade of releases. Come for the “skizz graft mix” of “Angels Online,” stay for our version of that Chips Ahoy song.

✶ ✶ We also compiled a mix for odyxxey that’s as much an unveiler of Asphalt Green’s riffrock sourcecode as a reflection of Esra’s and my shared condition of new parenthood--lots of sweet numbers, even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sample of my baby yakking on a phone recording of a Tompkins busker singing “Alone Again (Naturally).” There’s also an excerpt of a new Angels composition tentatively titled “Tunnel,” which was written and recorded specifically for ⟶

✶ ✶ ✶ The Brooklyn launch event for Dalkey Archive Essentials’ new reissue of William Gass’s The Tunnel, to be held at Unnameable Books on Thursday, 7/30. I’ll be there, participating in a series of readings from the novel alongside Stephanie LaCava, Walt John Pierce, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, and A.V. Maraccini, and yeah, debuting a new (recorded) Angels composition to serve as a kind of event score. Here’s the appropriately begrimed flyer.

Frances DiGiovanni’s cover art for Astra House’s 2026 translation of Superstars.

I have a lot of questions about the way that musical subculture is depicted in Superstars--which in turn speaks to the book’s relevance in a super literal/personal way, since I know you, and know that you’re a music obsessive, and you and I talk about music all the damn time. But first, I wanted do a little proper interview exposition. Can you talk a little about your background with translation and how or when you first encountered this book?

Doing translation, period, I kind of trace back to being a bookseller. My experience as a bookseller was that, whether you intend to or not, everybody kind of ends up in their little niche in the bookstore, and I ended up as, like, the “small press international fiction” guy. I read Suite for Barbara Loden, the Nathalie Léger book. Do you know that one? It’s a Dorothy Project book, a kind of fiction/non-fiction/whatever, a hundred-page book about the actress and director Barbara Loden. I loved it, and I gave it to my girlfriend, and she loved it, and then, just as like a birthday or a Christmas present for her, I thought I’d find another one of that author’s books that hadn’t been translated—because this was the only one that had been at that point—and translate it myself. Because I took French growing up, but never pursued it past high school, and so I also just wanted to get better at it again; I thought I’d try doing it this way. And so I did this whole other book of Léger’s, and it was like a hundred pages as well, so it was very, very short and manageable. And when I got to the end of it, although I’d been intending to just do it for me and my girlfriend, I was like, “I guess I should try to see if I can do something with this.” So I contacted Dorothy Project, and was like, “Hey, I really loved this other book. I loved it so much that I did this whole thing.” And they were like, “Oh, that’s so cool. It’s also not how you go about approaching translations.” (Laughs.) “You’ve got to check the rights and stuff. Also, we have somebody who is on contract to do this for us anyway. So you can’t really do anything with this, but, like, it’s really cool that you’re interested.”

From there, I just tried to keep doing it, you know? I grabbed a bunch of books from a couple of bookstores around the country, including Politics and Prose in DC, where I worked at the time. Some of them have a deal with Albertine, the French-language bookstore in New York, to curate a French selection for the store. So they’d get a shipment of French-language books every couple months, and I’d just raid that shipment every time to be like, “What looks cool from here?” I’d grab anything that hadn’t been translated and looked interesting.

For a while I just kept bulking up the list of things that I was working on, and never having any success with pitching anything—which is kind of like its own thing; I just hate pitching so much. But I would go through periods where I was like, “I know I shouldn’t be translating an entire book right now. I should just be doing a sample, or looking for stories and not novels or, you know, trying some different ways of going about it where I wouldn’t be putting so much work into finishing all these massive projects.” But I really just wanted to do that part, instead of actually getting stuff out there, because I hated the process of putting it out there.

Do you have a sense of how many projects you either completed or put a ton of work into?

Well the big one—and I’m still working on this—is this writer Régis Jauffret, who’s mostly a novelist but he’s most known now for these three different thousand-page collections of two-page short stories that are all alphabetized by title.

Yeah, I’ve seen you read from those.

Yeah. I did the entire first collection before submitting anything. I was like, “I just want to do it. I want to, like, get to the end of it.” I was also translating it as I was reading it for the first time, but I’ve kind of stopped doing that. For a while, because I was still using it as like a way to get better at French again, I wouldn’t really have been able to just read it straight through easily and then go back. But now I feel like I don’t have to do that quite as much, and I’m going back through those stories, going back to that massive project.

But Superstars I came to this book because I had been advised to start thinking more about books that were winning prizes, instead of just browsing through publisher catalogs and finding things that actually looked appealing to me. And I saw that recently this writer who I had not heard of before named Ann Scott had won the Prix Renaudot, which is one of the big prizes in France, for her most recent book. But all the press around that win was just talking about her as the author of “the cult sensation Superstars.” So I looked that up, and I was like, “This book sounds right up my alley.” I ordered myself a copy of it, and read enough of it to know that I really liked it before I had this reading series that I had been invited to read at, at this queer bar in Bushwick—which is, like, the exact vibe of the book. I was like, “Nothing else I work on is as Bushwick as this book is.” I decided, last-minute, to just do a sample of the prologue, really quickly, and to read that. At the reading, an agent was there, who wanted to talk about it, and wanted more. And so now I had an agent, and within a couple months, the book was picked up. So, I mean, the main thing for me was that I just hated pitching so much, and then I weirdly lucked into this crazy scenario where I didn’t have to do quite as much of it anymore.

It sounds like it was also the weird sort of Goldilocks project where it was good enough to satisfy the, like, various marketing requirements, while also being the correct book for you.

Right, it’s also a book that really does work for me.

One of the great pleasures of Superstars specifically is that it’s as much a musical document as it is a literary one. Maybe you can give some background on those sort of twin context--both the French literary culture that Ann Scott was writing in, and the underground music world that she’s representing in the book?

I mean, it’s interesting, because the book takes place within the French techno scene in the ’90s, but when you talk to Scott about the book, she’s very upfront about the fact that while she was adjacent to that world, she wasn’t really in it. She was dating somebody for a while who was like a big DJ in that scene, until that person died in the early 2000s. And this book is kind of about the world around that person. But it’s also about somebody who doesn’t totally fit into that world trying to figure out if there’s a place for her in it, and feeling like her time has kind of passed her by, because she’s too attached to rock music at this point. And I don’t know—as somebody who feels pretty attached to anything he’s ever been interested in at any point in his life, I feel like I totally get that. I really responded to that element specifically.

But yeah, Ann Scott had lived in London, or in the UK at least, throughout the ’80s and was in punk bands there, and then moved back to France and kind of fell in with this other group of techno heads. In the book, it’s clear that she knows that world, but one of the things I like about it is I don’t think you would necessarily know, reading the book, that she was not actually that interested in the techno underground as a scene.

I had no idea. Yeah, it gets the scene stuff so right, in a way that I think is really hard to achieve. It’s that rare thing where the story functions as a general entertainment in all these very seductive ways, but the writing also has the distinct feeling of one of these tight-knit, tiny, lived-in scenes where everyone’s in each other’s shit, which definitely includes the rock/techno attachments you mention, and feels really emblematic of all the sort of in-group/microgenerational resentments that crop up in those spaces: “I’m older than that crew by a few years, so there’s this weird tension around our preferences”; “I’m still into the thing that they think is passé now”; whatever it is. That sort of narcissism of small differences that predominates in the underground--the book just has it down. I was gonna ask how Scott did it, what her access point was.

I think the access point really was that she was dating this person, DJ Sextoy, who I had never heard of before reading this book, but she was a big deal in France at the time. She’s buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, in the same plot as Pierre Bourdieu, apparently at the express request of the mayor of Paris at the time.

Dude, Père Lachaise is so crazy. Definitely, pound-for-pound, the most stacked cemetery in the world.

When I was looking her up, I got linked to a TikTok thing like somebody doing an explainer about this one grave in Père Lachaise that just says “Sextoy.” “What’s the story there?” And the story was, yeah, she was a queer techno DJ in Paris in the late ’90s. She was successful at that time, and then Superstars came out and kind of put her on a whole other level, and then she died within, I think, the next two years.

The grave of Sextoy, née Delphine Palatsi, at Père Lachaise.

But as you mentioned, in addition to constituting this kind of deep dive into the queer techno scene, the book also levels up the context by including this very detailed, very real juxtaposition with the older, more traditional rock scene.

It’s funny, because I feel like the book is also of a very specific era, and has a specifically French way of looking at rock music. Like, it’s this certain period where the coolest people are still Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders, Syd Barrett… there’s a wider range, and I guess Syd Barrett is kind of different, but it’s all these very—I don’t know—dissolute, drugged-out, skinny, very classically louche rock people. And even though Ann Scott came through the punk world, it’s less of a question of the character in the book being into punk versus her being into techno. The divide is really just between techno and, like, good old-fashioned rock music.

It’s also this kind of continental rock culture thing that feels quintessentially European--a lingering idea of Rock Culture, in capital letters.

Right, where rock just kind of means “not French.” That’s another thing that stands out to me, this idea that the French don’t really do that effectively, or as effectively as these, you know, Anglophone gods. There’s the whole plotline in the book about the protagonist’s relationship with her ex, who is a French rock guy, but he’s just doing like a very American or like British rock thing.

All of this leads me to a more complicated question, one which I’m a little daunted to ask, about this very specific moment in which Superstars is set. It’s Western Europe, obviously, at the turn of the millennium--kind of the zenith of a certain flavor of neoliberal, cross-border, first-world project. And while this incredibly tacky international monoculture is at its peak, we embed down with a bunch of characters who--yes, they exist in this ornately subcultural space, in which slight differences in musical taste carry really heavy social consequences, but they are also swept up in the larger globalist commercial forces in this very interesting way. Like, most of the characters are totally broke, but they’re also relatively cosmopolitan and travel all the time. They also eat at McDonald’s, watch Ally McBeal, watch MTV--and when they talk about MTV, they’re all pissed because it’s “just showing French stuff,” which is what they’re trying to avoid by watching MTV. It goes beyond a French fetishization of the US or the Anglo world; it seems to be about busting out of this kind of stultifying national context by any means necessary.

Right, there are all these anime fixations, too. The character is also drinking Coke all the fucking time, which I really loved. Just nonstop—Coke bottles everywhere.

Oh yeah, that was on my list for sure: McDonald’s, Coke, Ally McBeal…

Britney Spears.

A lot of Britney Spears, a lot of Mechanical Animals–era Marilyn Manson--

Yeah, and Marilyn Manson is perfect for this era. It’s industrial music at a time when it was sort of the cutting edge of pop music, but also a little bit of electronica, too; it’s kind of the perfect melding of what the character wants.

Yes, totally, I had forgotten that. So the characters are sitting at this absolutely uncanny moment in music, for sure, but also history and culture and technology, and it dictates the shape of their lives to an incredible extent. Of course, the book also has a lot of fun with the contradictions of that moment: for instance, some but not all of the characters have cell phones, so the book can also, say, leverage the perfect trope of “the missed phone call,” which yields all kinds of juicy plot possibilities.

Right, people are just starting to get cell phones, and some people in the book have them and others don’t. This is also making me think about it in terms of like just aesthetics: like, what makes the combination of all of these things into something that feels like a uniquely ’90s aesthetic? Because I also feel like I hear so much about how “that ’90s aesthetic is coming back,” or how that kind of thing is so in right now. But it also feels like what everybody was trying to say ten years ago about vaporwave aesthetics: you know, this global lounge culture where everything is a touch away, but everything also feels a little bit exoticized.

That’s right, I think; part of what feels uncanny and like kind of itchy about it is that it’s this extremely contemporary feeling, obviously. And yes, plenty of people in France today are maybe eating the same McDonald’s “McMorning” meals the characters eat in Superstars, while in the meantime, for my part, many of the hours I pass on these kind of eerie contemporary social networks is spent looking at content in French and Romanian--ostensibly as a means of passive language practice, but really as a reminder and reinforcement of this vast and instantly accessible world of cross-cultural knowledge that’s all been, like, quantified and served up for me.

I did try to do some deep research, by the way, on what was in the McMorning.

I did too. That one was so fascinating to me—the character’s obsession with McDonald’s. Because McMornings, specifically, were not a thing in the US, right?

No way, we never had them. But I was really intrigued, because in the book the narrator is like, “I really wanted to get the sweet McMorning,” which kind of shook me; like, you could choose between sweet or salty?

McMorning ad, 1996.

I’d have to look back at it, but I actually think that was something that, in translating the book, I kept on weighing over and over again: that specific thing, whether I should translate it as something different, like a US variation. I don’t think I bowdlerized it at all in the end; I just left it as is, but there are definitely other references where I wasn’t sure whether I should domesticate them or not.

Right, and this is always a question for a translator: how much to leave in the source language, or “source culture” or whatever, and how much to try to find an equivalent for. But when you’re talking about a subcultural scene, it gets still more complicated, because the world inhabited by the characters is so insular and so based on shared signifiers and reference points and knowing about, like, musical gear and bands, and on and on into this kind of universe of shared trivia… Obviously, it’s a world you and I have inhabited ourselves, and so it’s definitely not unfamiliar, but from the standpoint of translation, there’s just so much data to parse.

Right, but in a way it’s easier, since for something like gear—that gear Scott wrote about is just that gear; it’s just, you know, what was there. And if I’m coming from the music world and seeing these names for things, I’ll take it at face value, like, “That’s a real thing and I know what that is,” and if I’m coming from outside of that world, I’m sure I would think, “OK, I’m sure that gear must exist and the author knows what she’s doing.” With something like the McMorning, it’s a different set of familiarities: maybe everybody over there knows what this is, whereas I’ve never heard of it before, but it’s also so banal that it feels much more universal. So much so that it’s almost, like, some Mandela effect thing: did we have McMornings in the US?

Yeah, totally. It’s also in this incredibly banal international English that epitomizes the globalist moment we were talking about earlier. So I think, if the US reader does feel a little insane reading it, that’s the exact right response, because the uncannily cross-language, flattening condition it describes is mildly insanity-inducing. I think you made the exact right choice.

I’d have to look it up again, but there were so many experiences of this sort of meaningless, endless research. Well actually, here’s one: the second chapter in the book is a rave, and a lot of the people at the rave were names that I knew. But there were also enough who I wasn’t sure about that I ended up in these very complex research entanglements: like, OK, it says three of them are DJing, and two of them are easy to map because we’ve already heard one person’s DJ name and the other is DJing under her own name. But then there’s this third one, whom we never hear anything about again, and you haven’t heard what their name is—so I’m just going down this roster, like, “OK, it’s not that person; it’s not that person…” I think, if I remember correctly, the name ended up being Trash 2000, which I had had to research so deeply.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly where you have to go.

Did a lot of Discogs dives.

Right, of course. Always a great day when you can just really hang out with Discogs people, who are famously reasonable and well-adjusted.

OK, I have one other translation question, or an example from the book I wanted to point to. It’s kind of a gotcha question, but also not at all, about when a character’s dog is revealed to be named “Dumbass.” That just, like, crushed me, it was so good. And so I wanted to check what the dog’s name was in the original French, and I checked it out, and it’s “Naze.” And my French friend only taught me “naze” recently, but it seems like you nailed it. So I want to know about the “Naze” to “Dumbass” pipeline. What’s the process for a rendering that’s that, like, slangy and contemporary?

I actually don’t remember too much for that specific one.

So you are dodging my gotcha question.

Well, I can tell you about something similar that came up recently, when I was doing the edits for the book—which is that throughout the book, people are called “conne” or “connasse,” a fair amount. And initially, based on a variety of decisions—whether it was just about keeping it consistent or just like matching the tone of the writing, or just the sound of it—I translated it in the gnarly way you’d expect, if you’re purely going by the sonic elements of those words. And that was one of the things that the French editor requested to be changed, so I went back and, in each case—there are maybe six or seven instances—I went with something different. The first time I think it’s “dipshit,” and then “moron,” and “dumbfuck,” and so on, just totally context-dependent, whatever fit with the sentence or paragraph that I was working in at any given time.

You’re describing a pretty intuitive process, which I think makes a lot of sense. But still, it’s hard to get these calibrations of slang exactly right, even if you’re willing to be sort of free and unconstrained about it.

When I first started translating, well before this book, I tried to do the Lydia Davis thing where you map everything, and stick super-close to the syntax, and use words that sound the same, and over time, I’ve completely done away with that approach. I think Lydia Davis is great, but I either can’t trust myself to do that, or it just doesn’t sound good to me when I do it, to the point that when I’m translating stuff now, most of the time I completely change around the words and syntax. Part of it is that I love to read aloud, when I can, and I just want to, like, truly believe that I would be saying the stuff. The consideration is how it sounds for somebody to actually say these words in English. And I know there are so many arguments about whether or not that’s, like, fucking with the original, but I want people to actually engage with it as something that they can read and believe. So, you know, in the context of whatever sentence, “Naze” came up, and I was like, “Oh yeah: Dumbass: That’s what you would call that dog.”

Yeah, I mean, when you’re right you’re right.

The next pandemic is sure to be a real treat in lots of ways, but one thing that it will almost definitely not have going for it?? A lockdown, of course, at last one worthy of the name--long and complicated and risible enough to surface some real solid existential destabilization, to say nothing of the widespread fear, crushing boredom, and wildly dysregulated political processes. You and I both know that all that--at least in the kinds of insaniac formations we saw in 2020–2021--was a lifetime one-and-done.

Sadder still: the loss of the weird, necessary, unfailingly hopeful but irreducibly tech-ed out social contrivances folks developed to hang out with each other, go to shows, and approximate the operations of a functioning artistic universe. Obviously--to take the “empire never ended” line for a sec--everyone still streams everything and people’s funny Zoom backgrounds are more sharply satirical than ever, but the urgent and awkward and desperately communal qualities have likewise left these platforms, which were never meant for that sort of thing and never cared to be, especially once they got their literal captive audience locked in. So OK, yes, while it’s a good thing that we can go to real shows again (among other notable benefits to not being at the top of a mortality curve), there is something sweet--and itchy, and mournful--about checking in with a prime COVID-era underground music experience.

My favorite was Everything I Touch I Enjoy, which starred my friends and was created and hosted by Jeremy, both features which fulfilled the “completely unexpected but super gratifying” criteria I’m talking about. I think the first episode I watched had Mickey interviewing Frank Hurricane--whose perspective in a global crisis had already proven personally crucial to me a few years earlier--so when Jeremy asked me to do something for Episode 4 alongside a featured interview with the Florida crew, I was very psyched. I pitched a “piano lounge” segment, in which I’d take live requests and let the rudiments rip on the sick Steinway upright I’d had the luck to live with for most of that year. The tech setup, which was a cellphone on speakerphone taped to the micstand, worked well enough for a whole bunch of celeb calls, including Woodhall and Kudler and several from a guy named Kenny Basil. I nailed “Sistinas” and Eagle Eye Cherry, but whiffed hard on Nilsson and entirely ducked the requests for the Beatles and Mozart. I only know certain stuff, I kept telling you people.

Anyway, watch below; the piano lounge segment starts at 36:30. I recommend it particularly if you’re ever tempted to think stuff like, “You know what, the winter of 2020–2021 can’t have been as dicked up as I remember.” Au con-absolument-traire!!

Also: we recorded a segment for Montez Press Radio’s latest series “The Walk,” in which and I bopped around the neighborhood with our tiny babies and talked about the album’s genesis. If you’re interested in, say, doubly embedded Blue Öyster Cult references or the truth about whether we crashed our grandma’s car on our first tour, the segment is streamable on the Montez site.

But OK, while I like a hype cycle as much as the next guy, I’m pretty sure there’s only so much yakking you can do about a record in mediums aural, textual, and IRL. Still, today I test the hypothesis one more time by offering a few words on the origins and purpose of each of Asphalt Green’s tracks. In other words, we’re kinda in heads-only territory--and even then, you might have something better to do. But since that’s the kind of thing no one can ever know for sure, you might as well read on.

Album art by Chloé Maratta.

1. “No Bluff”

We played a rudimentary iteration of this one on tour with Odwalla1221 in 2018—that version was all softsynths, loud bangs, digital artifacts, but we knew this song was actually another in a long line of releases whose genre can best be described as “defeated power-chord.” Once around 2014 I was sitting around at Red Light District reading the late-period issue of Cometbus in which he goes back on tour with Green Day in China, and Brian Narwhalz said something like, “Hey, Green Day in China; that’s like your music, Mark.” And while I wouldn’t know how to make a legitimately pentatonic decision, I flash on it every so often. But OK, anyways: we recorded “No Bluff” in 2020 with the genius Emil, who engineered and co-produced and added several brilliant textural details including but not limited to the moments of aux percussion on the highly celebrated line “My nurse is wet,” and of course the big whooosh when Esra says “passenger pigeon, Park Ave Armory.” Thank you Emil!

2. “Doubtful Realm”

This song—which is named after Esra’s dad’s WiFi network I think??—was originally conceived as a musically illiterate investigation of the loping guitar figures on the third VU album, which is why we have the gall to quote “Pale Blue Eyes” in it. Kinda stressful when I write it out in plain English. But the end result is its own thing and it’s good as hell and I won’t apologize. One other thing I remember: Esra telling me not to distort the little “solo” lead bit (around 2:40), that sometimes it’s nice to just kinda hang out without getting into a whole volume arms race with yourself for the sake of a cheap crescendo. Goodass call!!

3. “VFW pt. 1”

Nobody knows why, but for a long stretch of this album’s even longer drafting phase, we thought it would be funny or interesting or something to include a couple of “skits” whose theme would be… the Vietnam War?? Like: battle soundscapes, walkie-talkie chatter, helicopter samples. Again, no single person could tell you why this seemed like an OK idea, but eventually we wised up enough to mostly bail (although there is still a little bit of walkie later). Instead, “VFW” became a collaged guitar noise situation, chopped together from a much longer recording. When Jack was mixing, I told him I wanted it to sound like Ride a Dove.

4. “MDF”

This track arrived pretty much fully written from Esra, and while I couldn’t spill too much about her process if I wanted to, I will say there was definitely some One Foot in the Grave–type stuff happening over at her place. We entrapped Daren into talking on the recording, which is the sort of extractive, ethically dubious move we’ve done a lot over the years but have mostly stopped doing. Mostly I remember being really proud of how accurately I played the riff relative to the version I sang in the voice memo that’s played at the beginning on the track, down to key and tempo. Also: the obviously pitch-shifted guitar in the bridge is at least partially my rip of the kazooey lead sound on Accelerator.

5–6. “Pre-K” + “K-Swiss”

I wrote all about “K-Swiss” when the single was released in May, though I’m glad full album listeners now get to hear the short lead-in. Since I already talked about Modest Mouse and the “dickish rocksteady outro,” I’ll just say that for me these tracks hit an ideal of Angels in America guitar tone, namely that it still sounds like we plugged directly into our iBook headphone jack (which used to handle input also, look it up). Light as a feather, stiff as a board. May it always be.

7. “VFW pts 2 + 3”

One extra unfortunate side effect of the already dubious “Vietnam War soundscape” idea was that, when I randomly found a voice memo of myself playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on a child’s harmonica (playing it haltingly, too, like I was scared to mess up), I was like “Oh, that could probably go in ‘VFW.’” Again, I can’t stress enough how happy I am that we went ahead and jettisoned this whole conceit, but it’s somehow not surprising that something as goofy as a “When the Saints Go Marching In” needledrop carried over. Last summer, one afternoon during my cross-country road trip (this was in the Billings Public Library), I bogarted a computer break I could have using to search for paying work to instead fuck around with a MIDI file until I felt I’d sufficiently detuned the song’s second line stylings. Weird idea.

8. “Time Goes”

In demo form, this was named “Lana,” since I thought the tidy box-step of the vocal melody had a certain “Mariner’s Apartment” vibe to it, I dunno. Luckily we messed it up enough—with Ric Flair and sampled recordings of me sloppily drumming on the practice space kit—so as to smear the reference points a bit (which also, for me, include a half-remembered garage revival number and a Jandek song). I also want to publicly thank Jack for being like, “Wait, should I tune the kick drums to the bassline?”

9. “Angels Online”

The most important song on the record and the one that took the longest. There are maybe a hundred versions of this guy from across five or six years, but some constants: a piano arrangement whose arpeggiated construction I borrowed from the most impressive song I learned to play in 7th grade (after which I never got any better at piano), the line “Peggy only fans get pushed around,” and a world-historical pileup of lyrical references to textbook conspiracies, Montréal punk clubs, and the third BÖC record. Chloé apparently said this is “a song about everything that has ever happened,” which I’m also cool with.

Art by Madeleine Kunkle.

As I mentioned once and no doubt will again, Asphalt Green, the new album by my important and basically irreformable band Angels in America, is out now on Halcyon Veil and cleared for procurement via streamers or Bandcamp, all in advance of a forthcoming physical release on the usual antiquated format. And while OK, yes, I definitely have more than a little to say about the feeling of kicking the tires on a nearly two-decade-old music project in the service of releasing, distributing, and drawing attention to still another in a long and more-than-halfway-thankless succession of tiny noisy albums, the actual important thing to say right now is that I really like this record, and think of it as an achievement, and encourage you to listen in any way you’d like.

I’ll post a fuller set of notes on the material soon (to supplement prior deepdives), but in the meanwhile let’s go ahead and let this serve as notice that the label has put together a sick album launch event for next Tuesday, June 23 at--where else??--Night Club 101. Asphalt Green will play in its entirety, then $quib will rip a proper live performance, then a Patch+ DJ set will close out the night. As incorrigible merchants, we’ll also have Asphalt Green posters by Madeleine Kunkle available.

NYers, come through!! This session won’t listen to itself.

 #########\                                                      #########\
 #(=====)# |                           ///                       #(=====)# |
 ######### |                         _(oo)_                      ######### |
 #-------# |                        // \/ //                     #-------# |
 #|  -  |# |          -- __________//____//__________--          #|  -  |# |
 #|( O )|# |    --  --  /-/\-  -+/ -+- -+- /-/\-  -+/| --  --    #|( O )|# |
 #|  -  |# |  --  --   / /( o ) / ^^^ /// / /( o ) / /   --  --  #|  -  |# |
 #|-----|# |--        / &   - o/ ^^^ /// / &   - o/ /          --#|-----|# |
 #########/          |#########|#########|########|/             #########/

✰ First: Asphalt Green, the new album by my band Angels in America, is out now on Halcyon Veil. A physical release is forthcoming; meanwhile, listen via DSPs or buy on Bandcamp or check out now nice Boomkat was about it. NYCers, keep your eyes peeled for an event in June which, naturally I’ll be writing about here too. Peggy onlyfans get pushed around.

✰✰ Second: I was too tied up last week to note that I’d be reading on the evening of Thursday, 5/27 at St. Dymphna’s for Kelly Karivalis’s “Limitless Hangout” series, but I did and it was great and all kinds of old friends came out. Thanks to them, to for suggesting me for the bill (and reading a ripper of a story), and to Kelly for letting me hop on.

✰✰✰ Third, and of most direct relevance: issue 7 of The Whitney Review is out, and in it--among the analyses from voices across ’s typically glittering contributor vanguard including and --there is another writeup of mine. This one is on William T. Vollmann’s forthcoming A Table for Fortune, which I read over the first stretch of 2026 to the tune of four PDF volumes, totaling 3,557 pages, in which I made 2,092 marginal notes all while racing against: a review deadline (a generous one, but still); the onrushing birth of a human child; and the ever-present, altogether Damoclean threat of my waking up one day and realizing I didn’t, strictly speaking, actually need to do any of it.

Because OK, to back up: after a 2024–2025 writing season largely spent working up longish-form pieces on Rachel Kushner, Peter Weiss, and Thomas Pynchon, I’d intended to cool out on book reviews, especially ones that required as much in the way of copious research and reading. But also, let’s be the remotest bit real: I’ve known that A Table for Fortune was coming since it was announced in March 2025, and I’ve followed along over the years as the book’s complex and tragic professional and personal contexts have been enumerated. Also, crucially: I’ve been a Vollmaniac since I was a kid, as well as a compulsive achiever with poor time management, as well as one of these maximalist masochists. There was, in other words, no way I was gonna survive the historical accident of my shambolic freelance book reviewer era coinciding with the release of WTV×CIA without at least, like, sending an inquiry or two. Having thus set my own Table for Fortune--albeit this one via a cold-call email to a “publicity@” publisher account--I was, wouldn’t you know it, invited to dine.

My thoughts on the book itself? Those are thankfully complicated enough they don’t lend themselves to pithy one-liner takes, so I’ll refrain from summarizing. I’m happy with the way I got them across in the printed piece, which I’ll likely post here when the book is released in August, though fwiw the text is also reasonably scrutable in the picture I posted. But really you should just order the issue.

Meanwhile, in the vein of prior “DIARY” entries on here, please find some deep background below: notes and contexts and loose-end attempts to account for a small fraction of the many years and man-hours I’ve spent variously reading, deeply admiring, and bristling against the work of thee titan William T. Vollmann.

Time for some home truths.

To the extent I’ve thought about it, I’d always assumed that the first Vollmann I read must have been Europe Central, whose April 2005 release lined up neatly with my first cruises into meganovel fandom—about whose mixture of aesthetic thrills and handy identity-crystallizing capacities (I was sixteen) I’ve written before. It turns out, however, that this was a false adolescent memory, similar to the one in which I swear I saw a billboard for Blue Streak 2 (a sequel which, in spite of my certainty, later research has confirmed was never shot, or even greenlit!!). What I’m saying is that I didn’t tackle Europe Central until 2008, a fact attested to in turn by the signed and dated back-page inscription I scrawled in my paperback copy (another story, but at the time I thought this was a cool thing to do). Anyway, my actual first WTV was The Ice-Shirt, and it was revelatory.

It stands to reason that Vollmann’s Seven Dreams books (of which The Ice-Shirt is the first) would’ve been the ones to force open my conception of, among other features, the kinds of narrative experiments and broad political inquiries that were admissible in otherwise straight-faced historical fiction. I was, at the time, writing what I thought was my own transhistorical opus, and I clung to Vollmann’s notion of “symbolic history” and cited it often over the years, sometimes as justification for my own superficial reading or insufficient experience. I’m telling you, this stuff is dangerous for kids!! Because while sure, the “symbolic history” conception is slippery—prone to moral posturing, post-facto wish fulfillment, and a strained sort of circular logic (these unrecorded facts are truer than the recorded ones, because they’re offered in the service of a larger truth, for which you’ll have to take my word)—it also doesn’t function successfully in the absence of the sort of rigorous research and committed participation that underlie WTV’s work. Vollmann, in other words, could take the biggest of thematic swings, tempt clunkiness and preachiness and extreme pagecount indulgences, and get away with most all of it because it was clear he was a lifer: an author demonstrably all in, on every level, and—by way of contrast with my blustery, bluffing youthful example—unwilling or unable to disguise it.

Vollmann ably channeling Céline in the opening of his afterword to the 2006 New Directions reedition of Journey to the End of the Night. Don’t hurt em WTV!!

This would have been an easy enough identification to make on the page, since even WTV’s most strenuously stylized historical excursions contained revealing first-person/fourth-wall-collapsing authorial asides or interludes, decidedly unguarded lists of notes and sources (including plainspoken admissions of whatever was made up), and other markers of an uncommon—if now somewhat ’90s-postmodern-fiction–feeling—forthrightness. The actual means, though, by which I came to understand this crucial aspect of the Vollmann project was in its social implications. As I grew up a bit and began moving into music and art and general freak scenes, I was struck over and over by how the folks I was increasingly mixing with—people whose worldviews were marked by a devotion to marginal culture and a concomitant distrust of consensus reality—seemed to know and love Vollmann: whatever their level of interest in WTV’s grimier gonzo sex and drug excursions, radicals and activists easily spotted him for his fullthroated devotion to the global underclass and commitment to transhistorical justice; whatever their familiarity with his fictional doorstoppers, traveler kids and noisers idolized him for a fellow trainhopping devotee of the extremes of human experience. In the “real recognize real” sense of things, it was abundantly obvious: WTV was one of us, and more.

And so, being some kind of aspiring “real one”—if one necessarily crippled by an adolescent self-consciousness comparable to, say, WTV’s own in his delightful Deep Springs essay—I mainlined the books, lots and lots of them (though not all, which for some reason feels characteristic too). I sought out rare Vollmannabula and got overdue notices for the full Rising Up and Rising Down set (shouts out Smith College Library). I named a song after his book on gender and desire in Noh theater. And I logged and stashed away favorite bits of the body of work, vivid and affecting sections to which I often return: the “Catacomb Thoughts” opening of Rising Up and Rising Down; the treacherous Alaskan river crossing in An Afghanistan Picture Show; the Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya chapter of Europe Central; the death of Looking-Glass in The Dying Grass (and that book’s all-timer onomatopoeia “shlak,” denoting the cries of the Nez Perce babies).

I also grew, over time, into a state of real discomfort with other, less mythologized aspects of the WTV legend. There are the easy layups for cultural/sexual exploitation and poverty tourism; the queasymaking GenXer provocation games (so much to choose from, but let’s just go with the Captain Subzero stuff in The Rifles as representative); and, on the level of writing, such compulsions as the endless metaphorizing of the female body as a stand-in for good and ill, a sometimes strikingly willful inelegance, and a general moralizing streak that’s perhaps unavoidable when you’re making, like, multi-volume inventories of human failings, but still. Like I said, easy accusations—and ones complicated by the Vollmann voice’s blend of semifictional experiments and warts-and-all journalistic candor—but they’re there, and they’re increasingly unignorable, and you don’t need to be a scold or some stooge of kneejerk cultural ostracism to acknowledge that they merit more discussion than they’ve gotten.

In 2014, when I was working up what would become the final edition of our zine PLEASURE—an issue dedicated to the maximalist impulse that eventually featured contributions by (or on) James McCourt, Steven Moore, Baron Corvo, and Marguerite Young—I was lucky and crafty enough to trade on a former high school frenemy’s internship at Viking and get an inquiry out to Vollmann via his agent: specifically, a package sent to her office and forwarded on to WTV in Sacramento. Did he want to contribute something? I laid it on thick, I’m sure, as we did in those days when we were courting our heroes (hey, it worked on Costes).

A month or so later, I got a charming rejection letter, likewise blind-forwarded via the agency. “At the moment,” Bill wrote, “I am struggling a bit for both money and time (the latter a natural result of approaching my physical expiration date—I am 55).” He signed it, “In haste.” I folded the letter and tucked it into my copy of the abridged Rising Up and Rising Down, which I’ve been known to pull down every once in a while. And though we never interacted again, I feel the furthest thing from disappointed about WTV’s demurral. He was busy, surely, and probably even more earnest about the mortal dimension than I gave him credit for at the time, when I’d just assumed he was joking. He would, after all, have already been working on A Table for Fortune.

Anyway, there’s a lot I’d be psyched to get into about this new record: it’s our first since 2019, and a couple of its tracks originated still earlier than that, which is to say it’s been an exceedingly long time coming and stands as the rare example in my creative life of a crushingly long-lead project that actually sees completion and the light of day. Auspicious, like I said, but rather than get too sweeping with the takeaways, I thought I’d drill down and give the people what they want, namely: cellphone voice memos.

Below, exclusive and unvarnished access into the compositional process of what I’m positive is the only song to misuse a bunch of golf references while also featuring the word “garrote” and quoting the Rancid song from when we were six. We’re obnoxious clowns!! Buy the record!!

“K-Swiss” single art featuring the legendary “cathedral of asphalt” astride the FDR.

I’d been psyched on the idea of a song called “K-Swiss” for a while (although I thought it was a golf brand, which is my bad). At some point, though, I’d excavated the dumb old tagline out of my landfill of a brain, and it all felt like something that could be productively juxtaposed—in the longtime style of this band—with other, like, opaquely upsetting lyrics.1 Still, nothing really got cooking until I worked up an appropriately petty first line: I met you at the sample sale.

Let’s commence with the first documentary evidence of what would become “K-Swiss,” then: a voice memo from June 17, 2023 entitled “sample sale,” in which, after the first line, I start singing obvious nonsense words.

This condition would seem to have persisted for the better part of a year, although by the time I recorded the “sample sale piano” memo on June 12, 2024, it seems there were enough word-like sounds on the table that we’d blocked out a reasonable syllabic approximation of the final track. Obviously, the rudimentary/portentous piano was not gonna be the final move, so just needed to figure something out there, and we’d be good to go.

The eventual finalizing of the song’s instrumental had, if I’m honest, more to do with my participation in a Modest Mouse cover band over Halloween 2024 than I’ll be revealing here (really it all comes down to single note bends), but the other big innovation was a guitar lick for the verse, which I seem to have thought of around the time I trilled this into my phone on November 19, 2024.

After that, the trail goes tragically cold. I do, however, remember recording the bones of the final instrumental at the practice space before heading down to the Phill Niblock six-hour drone, which would have made it the afternoon of December 21, 2024. Which leaves a mere eighteen months of rerecording, tinkering, mixing etc. to get us to our present, desperately happy condition: a finished song, with a few lines I still mess with, some actual space in the mix (thanks Jack), and a dickish rocksteady outro. As we say sometimes: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣴⣶⣶⣦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣤⣶⣶⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣰⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣤⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⣰⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⢠⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⣰⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡆⠀⠀⠀
⢠⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⣀⣀⣤⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀⠀⠀
⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠘⠿⠿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠉⠛⠛⠛⠋⠉⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡄⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⠈⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠘⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣿⣿⣿⣿⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⠁⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠸⢿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠻⣿⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠛⠛⠟⠛

This week, the first of a run of music-related posts, beginning with the sort of classic show announcement you might--if you’re of my mid-internet-gerontocratic micro-generation, anyway--have once mounted via a coyly loudmouthed Facebook event, or a self-consciously jokey email blast or, if you’re a true legend, an obnoxious open-cc text chain. But OK, the announcement? It’s that the new band I play in, 𝔖𝔠𝔯𝔢𝔴𝔰1, will be performing this Friday at Bootleg Bar, opening up for storied noiser entities Knife Mall, Daughn Gibson, and Matt Franco.

The band, which comprises me, Emil Bognar-Nasdor, Daniel DiMaggio, Christopher Forgues, and Jake Tobin, came together last fall as the altogether exceptional real-life manifestation of the altogether unexceptional--indeed, perennial--“Hey, we should play together sometime” conversation. After a robustly woodsheddy autumn, we broke for the New Year, got completely sidelined for months, and then forced the hand of chance by hopping on this great show. What will happen?? How will we sound?? When reached for comment, band members had the following to say: “Baxery.”

At any rate, a few relevant show-prep goodies are below. Come to the gig if you want, cuz man, I’ve got questions.

P.S.: Also on Friday, a big announcement regarding the other band I play in.

𝔗𝔥𝔞𝔫𝔨 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔤𝔬𝔬𝔡𝔟𝔶𝔢!

A non-representative recording of a non-representative track. “Door Should Be Open” demo, as heard on CKUT last New Year’s Eve.2

Flyer by CF.

Y8b Y8b Y888P 8888 8888 Y8b Y8P 88P’888’Y88 888 88e  Y88b Y8P
 Y8b Y8b Y8P  8888 8888  Y8b Y  P’  888  ‘Y 888 888D  Y88b Y 
  Y8b Y8b Y   8888 8888   Y8b       888     888 88”    Y88b  
   Y8b Y8b    8888 8888  e Y8b      888     888 b,      888  
    Y8P Y     ‘Y88 88P’ d8b Y8b     888     888 88b,    888  

Y8b Y8b Y888P 8888 8888 Y8b Y8P 88P'888'Y88 888 88e  Y88b Y8P
 Y8b Y8b Y8P  8888 8888  Y8b Y  P'  888  'Y 888 888D  Y88b Y 
  Y8b Y8b Y   8888 8888   Y8b       888     888 88"    Y88b  
   Y8b Y8b    8888 8888  e Y8b      888     888 b,      888  
    Y8P Y     'Y88 88P' d8b Y8b     888     888 88b,    888  

There are stories I can imagine telling about the experiences/observations/feelings sustained over the month or so since: the powerfully gnarly overnight spent watching the partner endure the process called (incredibly) “labor”; postpartum temporal illusions including but not limited to scifi dilation, all-too-brief appearances of an enthralling, ephemeral Present, and sad tokens of irreversibility; also the predictably bummer family scandal over religion (but, really, ritual circumcision) and politics (but, really, murderous ethnostates) that culminated in a sweet and stressful Jewish naming ceremony in which, being insufferable, I still quoted Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.

But since it’s already too easy to get real glib about this stuff, I’m gonna hold off. Obviously, elements of the above will start mixing into my writing before long, as will numerous other features of the gestational walkabout and its somehow unforeseeable result--an inestimable human life in the shape of several potatoes stuck together in the shape of a baby boy we named Sasha. In the meantime, though, I’m gonna make like the b-side says and let time do its thing.

Lastly: because I still had to have something for Writing Group this month, I figured I’d kick the tires on “Brinkmann 2000,” a story cycle I drafted a few years ago (and of which I’ve posted excerpts before) since, being about a father who’s mortifyingly afraid of his child, it’s fun and thematically potent. A tiny excerpt follows below.

A macabre but uncannily well-composed scene from the midpoint of an overnight labor.

Detail.

???

Rudi. Nothing else for it, Brinkmann slung the wet, soup-sopped napkin over his shoulder and walked into her room. He found his daughter under the bed carrying on one end of a conversation, gangly limbs spilling out like a drawer of broken pencils. The truth was, he often came home to her like this—chatting, presumably, with some varmint or other from off the street—and, though he couldn’t explain it, at such moments he usually elected to step back outside, moving as gingerly as he could to avoid startling her. Today, though, he experienced what he could only characterize as a moment of total fatherly clarity, and cleared his throat.

“Are you talking to one of your pets, dragă?” He made to sit on the bed but hesitated, arrested by a mental image of the structure collapsing on and crushing her.

“No daddy, no pets here.” Her tone was even, almost bubbly.

“Then to whom are you speaking?”

“Well…” little legs bopping around. “Actually I’m not supposed to say.”

He inhaled. “Your mother tells me you are claiming to have met a ghost.”

She didn’t reply, but he thought he saw a shift in the movement of a leg. A small jerk, maybe, at being caught out.

He knew he should push her on it, but he was feeling gracious. “Please understand, puișor, your mother and I are not angry. We just want to understand.”

“I know, tată.” This awful grownness, a kind of low tone and disinterested plainspokenness, as if to imply a kind of social parity between them.

He hardened his tone. “And does the ghost know why you weren’t in school last week?”

“They canceled school because… the school was invaded.”

On the low table beside the mattress, Brinkmann could see the in-progress class project Rudi had collaged from dozens of glossy magazine cutouts: the Spanish boy singer lounging on a beach, dancing in a marionette costume, riding a white horse over the edge of a waterfall. Bits from film posters and flimsy cardboard record inserts. Joselito Vagabundo. Joselito in New York. Above this display, though, she’d tacked something else into the wall: a picture of her uncle, sunkissed in field dress, smiling and flashing a victory sign. Brinkmann approached, fingering the print distractedly. He caught himself wondering, for just a second, if it were a new photo. Though of course that was impossible.

“They did not cancel school, my love. I don’t believe it.”

“Yuh huh,” her tone all sweetness again, “the army invaded. I think the Chinese army? They came pouring in off the canal, and made an announcement: if we come to school, they’ll kill us. Kill us and drink our blood. So they canceled.”

Brinkmann couldn’t keep himself from chuckling. Growing up far away, he’d been told these exact rumors, pretty much, and repeated them readily: a Chinese detachment, say, swarming Bucharest. He and his brother had riled each other up with accounts of Kuomintang patrolmen going house to house, which had yielded in him what felt to this day like a real memory—though of course it had to have been a dream—of a face, the kind of fierce face Brinkmann had only ever seen in the newspaper, pressed up against their bedroom window and peering in. How was it that all kids, regardless of time and place of birth, always seemed to hear the same stories?

“Darling,” he said, his gaze tending back to the photo on the wall, “there’s a ceasefire in the canal zone.”

This was the wrong tack, and he detected no response.

“Listen to me,” he began again. “You have to go to school. You have to keep off the dunes, please, and go where you’re told. We cannot keep hearing from people that you’ve, you know, wandered off. We aren’t at the absorption center anymore, understand? This is the city,” he said, proud of the assertion’s pedagogical clarity. “It’s dangerous.”

A strange, minor-key sound issued from below him, a kind of gargle or guttural trill.

“Hey, I’m serious,” he said, hazarding another moderate raising of his voice. He bent over, laid a clammy palm on her leg, somewhere between her knee and the anklehigh bunch-up of her patterned schoolgirl sock. “Are you listening?”

He felt her little calf muscles tense in response to the question and his hand jumped. Brinkmann thought of the phase some years ago when his daughter, who’d then just begun to walk, became enamored of the idea of tripping him underfoot. It had started as an accident, he was pretty sure, the time he hadn’t noticed her toddling past and took a ridiculous, vaudevillian spill into the settee. But she’d caught the flash of panic on his face before he fell and—after a moment of vacant indecision—uncorked for some reason a loud giggle which had, naturally, delighted Kitty. This reinforcement, in turn, fixed the behavior and made it appear desirable, and then it was weeks of hooks and leg sweeps, cheap bullying that didn’t stop until he’d exploded at them both.

With a swish of fabric, Rudi slid out from under the bed. Sure enough, the lizard, leathery and protuberant, was coiled into his daughter’s tightly braided bun, the dull dappling of its skin detectable through strands of black hair before it tapered into alternating yellowish stripes marking the nibs of muscle, meaty shoulders and thighs that hung across her forehead. Its tail poked rigid through her yellow hair-tie and down the back of her blouse as if it were a connective line between their bodies. He jerked back as if to shake off the image of the hateful animal clinging coldly to his girl as she turned and regarded her father with one of her impassive stares.

“I’m listening tată.”

“Good,” he said, and smiled. “Now will you promise to stop sneaking away?”

When she replied, her voice came out low.

“Will you?”

            lllllll_______
           _,_  llllllllllll\
___       /    \  llllllllllll\
  \       | @ @ |  llllllllllll\
    \-----oOO---Ooo-------------/
     \lllllllllllllllllllllllll/
      \lllllllllllllllllllllll/
       \lllllllllllllllllllll/
            //            \
           ||             ||
           OO             OO

First, a program note: as eagle-eyed superfans of this website are no doubt already aware, I’ve been posting on a more or less biweekly basis lately (the every-two-weeks form of ‘biweekly’), on account of some good old fashioned personal business. This, alas, is probably gonna be the pace for the time being. And although I may pick back up with the weekly writing before too long, I may also disappear for longer stretches here and there. Nobody knows! There is good news, though, which is that you will all be completely fine either way.

That said, I figured I’d stave off any and all approaching hibernation stretches with one more lengthy essay on the art-historical heroes and bugbears that have populated this page since its inception. Below, please find a classic run-on pontificator piece, one I previously titled “The Failure of Internationalism: The avant-garde co-option and abandonment of eastern Europe, 1970–1989,” in which I attempt a survey of Eastern Bloc avant-gardists and strategies, zooming in specifically on artists in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I will say, off the bat, that the account is almost definitely a woefully underrepresentative one: it’s the product of research into contexts I don’t share, featuring artists whose languages I don’t speak. So n.b.: it’s even more of a grain of salt situation this week than usual--even when I’m getting into some comparatively cozy Fluxus drama and, like, calling George Maciunas an influence peddler. Still, there are discoveries I made in writing this that I continue to find really meaningful, and think of as lodestars. I also hope to take the work farther someday, so if anybody out there has a whole bunch of info on, say, Łódź-Kaliska, do not be shy. Hit me up, proszę i dziękuję!!

Joseph Beuys and Ryszard Stanisławski, the Muzeum Sztuki’s director, on the occasion of the 1981 Polentransport action.

I. “KUNST = MENSCH = KREATIVITÄT = FREIHEIT”

In summer 1981, a few months before the imposition of martial law in communist Poland, the Museum Sztuki in the town of Łódź was treated to an unannounced appearance by the West German artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys, by then an eminent international avant-gardist, entrusted some 700 objects—drawings, lithographs, photos and writings—to the collection of the museum as part of an impromptu exhibition known as Polentransport ’81. Leaving texts praising the incipient rise of the Solidarity trade union and instructions that the collection should be shown in Hungary after its appearance in Poland, Beuys made the underlying political message of his donation clear: the work was meant to help bridge the gaps separating east and west and, having been deposited at the esteemed though marginalized Museum Sztuki, to proudly advocate for the history of European modern art and the continuing cause of artistic unity in the face of regime oppression.

Polentransport was the first of several actions spearheaded by Beuys aimed at weakening the schismatic character of the Iron Curtain during its later years. In 1983 Beuys, along with the East Berliner artists Eugen Blume and Erhard Monden, organized an action entitled Sender-Empfänger (Sender-Receiver), consisting of a telephone call from Düsseldorf to Berlin. Beuys, Blume and Monden exchanged and recorded their ideas and artistic intentions, momentarily bridging the tensely guarded border, if only in conversation. The next year, a planned personal visit by the artist to East Berlin was stymied by immigration officials, and a visit to Hungary to supervise the exhibition of the Polentransport materials similarly broke down.

Clearly, Beuys’s commitment to the cause of cross-border unity was genuine, and his interest was appreciated by his eastern European collaborators, who otherwise had little access to contemporary art or ideas from the west. But it was also a passion predicated on a set of attitudes stemming from the artist’s idiosyncratic political and cultural obsessions (including an enduring focus around now on eastern shamanism and esoteric thought-systems) and his controversial history of avant-garde theatrics (such as his 1967 action Eurasienstab and his repeated references thereafter to an imagined utopian Eurasian state).1 These concerns, needless to say, had little to do with the on-the-ground political reality in Łódź, and even less with a Solidarity movement that, far from being a direct ally of the Polish avant-garde, actually offered it no end of complications through its affiliation with the hard-line Catholic Church. Instead, they are best thought of as inimitably Beuysian enumerations of the artistic and political theory of the “alternative of the third path,” Beuys’s twofold rejection of capitalism and communism both in favor of an integrated system of collective governance, epitomized in the notion of an imagined cross-border Eurasian fantasy. The Museum Sztuki, with its storied history and its eastern location, figured in Beuys’s narrative as a possible birthplace for this new order, with the Polentransport ’81 and its militarily-tinged name functioning as a Berlin Airlift-style direct cultural infusion: a magnanimous donation of Western art into an underserved target zone in the victimized, woefully isolated east. With a display of artistic virtuosity, Beuys—who had once advertised a 1976 action with the slogan “KUNST = MENSCH = KREATIVITÄT = FREIHEIT” (“ART = HUMAN = CREATIVITY = FREEDOM”)—was effectively foisting his fanciful, idealistic politics onto Poland’s very real regime nightmare.2

The complicated Beuys / Łódź relation is typical of those which existed between the eastern European communist states and most members of the western avant-garde at large. In spite of spending the better part of the Cold War years mired in their own politicking, rivalries, and bids for notoriety, western European avant-gardists managed to find occasional cause to invoke the Eastern Bloc in the service of a kind of leftist co-option: as means by which their revolutionary causes could gain legitimacy or exposure, or as staging grounds (as in Beuys’s Eurasia) for idealistic, ahistorical fantasies. And this, of course, was in the rare cases when the very real oppression of eastern Europeans was not being ignored outright in favor of the myopic concerns of western radicals, oppressive measures and political dramas which were, to a one, less harsh by comparison, less violent, and certainly lower-stakes.

In the face of this predicament, eastern European artists and would-be counterculturalists affected a variety of strategies to—variously—attract the attention and prestige of the western cultural firmament, create what meager networks of exchange were possible, publish and disseminate their works and, most often, to merely persist in what were by any western standards altogether intolerable conditions. The sheer scale and patent multifariousness of the Eastern Bloc states and their specific contexts, histories and cultures makes any overarching diagnosis of a prevailing trend among artists a tremendous oversimplification. Still, there were certain observable commonalities in the myriad strategies and tactics used by avant-gardists in these countries, from the careful utilization of samizdat publishing and underground distribution to the stoking of cross-border relationships and the judicious organization of increasingly international exhibitions. There were even forays into “direct action,” that great shibboleth of the western avant-garde. But for every measure whose motivation was the bridging of international divisions, artists also employed tactics that focused narrowly inward, zooming in on their nation’s specialized, hugely complex individual context, idiosyncratic characteristics and maddeningly thorny political situation in ways that no idealistic outsider—even a famous western European artist—could ever manage to do.

Examples abound. Two years before Beuys showed up at the Museum Sztuki, the artist group known as Łódź-Kaliska, born from a collective expulsion from their school’s young artists coalition, had undertaken their own program of exploration into the Polish situation and its manifold, absurd intricacies. In 1983, while the nation was still under Jaruzelski’s martial law, they undertook the clandestine publication of a subversive magazine, Tango, which attacked their regime’s hard-line advocacy of state-sanctioned socialist realism just as it did the Solidarity-approved patriotic art of the reformers—which had itself been tacitly endorsed by Beuys—all via a mélange of manifestos, photos and reproduced artworks whose transgressive vitriol is comparable with few western European works (though the Spur journal comes to mind). The group displayed its wit, indignation and gall at every turn: they named their publication in ironic reference to the tango’s “one step forward and two steps back” dance structure; they stapled condoms to an issue’s cover; they published pictures of Bruce Lee, the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu, and maps and instructions on exhuming the corpses of famous Polish artistic forebears. They were willfully and unapologetically Polish, and thus uninterested in inclusion in any “internationals”; not by coincidence, the group remains almost entirely unknown in the west to this day. For the members of Łódź-Kaliska were also—at least outwardly—uninterested the self-satisfied advocacy of foreign interlopers, or the approaching market capitalism on the horizon, which they saw not as a third path utopian transformation but for the new political imposition it was. In 1988, with the re-allowed Solidarity movement in negotiations with the government and regime change a year away, they released a film with the unmistakably provocative German title Freiheit? Nein, danke! (“Freedom? No thank you!”); though undoubtedly another in a long line of shots leveled at the powers that be, they may as well have been speaking directly to Beuys.

Tango 1’s gleefully subversive cover.

II. “Renegades and imposters”

For all their implicit condescension and attendant whiffs of appropriation, the Polentransport and Sender-Receiver actions were still among the least exploitative of the western avant-garde’s impositions behind the Iron Curtain, themselves having become something of a tradition among the members of Fluxus, the international art movement of which Beuys was a sometime-affiliate. Contrary to, say, the Situationist International, which reported on revolutionary action around the world in its periodical Internationale Situationniste but otherwise stuck close to home, Fluxus artists—whose radical “anti-art” platform and confrontational agitprop techniques belied a willful lack of theoretical backing—actively sought exposure, at least for a time, in the Eastern Bloc.3

George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-born Fluxus founder, had even gone so far in the early 1960s as to court the attentions of Kruschev and the U.S.S.R., believing his movement (a “concretist” art to suit the “concretist” Soviet state) to be a perfect means by which international unity might be achieved. But as we’ve seen, even gestures ostensibly meant to prompt communal development between west and east had more to do with the narrow preoccupations of western artists than with any real international spirit: the approval of the Soviet Union was the leverage with which Maciunas thought Fluxus might gain meaning and legitimacy, a fact underscored by the degree to which Maciunas was willing to compromise his art for the sake of popular appeal: “Must be very careful and delicate to achieve maximum audience acceptance and least criticism for the press,” as he wrote in a letter discussing strategies for exposure in the U.S.S.R. “In such case Fluxus had to be planned as a vaudeville, amusement, satire, etc., rather than a vulgar shock.”4 Far from the relatively high-minded goals of exposing culture-starved eastern artists to his group’s striking new experimental forms or facilitating a genuine political exchange, Maciunas’s efforts were directed at securing the endorsement of a communist regime purely for its value as a signifier, as cultural capital—even hoping that his “anti-art” platform could meld with Eastern Bloc aims to the extent that he might persuade the Soviet leadership to issue a decree banning its very practice, turning “anti-art” from idle theory into regime policy in the largest country on earth.

Mind-boggling though this attempted imposition may be, the debt it owes to run-of-the-mill avant-garde group politicking is evidenced by the fallout from an earlier Fluxus incursion into the east. A 1964 tour of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Russia by Eric Andersen featured performances in small-scale nightclubs and (as if further evidence of cultural repression was needed) private homes, where they attracted mere handfuls of attendees. Knowing Fluxus’s chief coordinator to be concerned about the group’s acceptance in the communist bloc, however, Anderson wrote a letter to Maciunas tricking him into believing that the tour’s events were attracting thousands of outraged spectators, creating a “succès de scandale” on a massive scale, and forcing the Soviet press to bar all mention of the tour. A furious Maciunas responded by expelling Andersen and his tourmates from Fluxus and writing a press release (“Statement from Fluxus Committee Regarding So-Called Fluxus Concerts Recently Presented... by 4 Fluxus Renegades and Imposters”) claiming “full agreement with the denunciation and criticism of [Andersen’s] activities in the Soviet press,” which naturally hadn’t written one word about the tour.5 The hoax precipitated the expulsion by Maciunas of Fluxus artists who were less amenable to the group’s quasi-political aims, a by-now-familiar purge-as-leadership dynamic not uncommon among the era’s avant-garde influence peddlers.

Cover of a 1987 Tvrdohlaví catalog.

III. Private movements

Amidst the willfully narrow, center-privileging narrative of countercultural resistance that dominated the western European cultural and political discourse, the would-be radical figures and cultural vanguardists of the east constructed their own avant-garde conceptions, furnished with what evidence could be gathered from political developments of the day (the highly variable relations among Warsaw Pact nations, the cycle of “thaws” and “chills” that regulated the rollback or reimplementation of repressive social measures), as well as certain inherited cultural perceptions. One such persistent and—at least when it came to the path toward self-determination—rather unhelpful cultural legacy was an unflagging, almost obsessive veneration on the part of eastern Europe with the grand western cultural tradition, especially that of France. Indeed, the notion of France as a mythological paragon of culture had long been a truism for eastern Europe, caught as it was between the west’s dominant artistic influence and the perceived provincialism of the Slavic culture to its east. But this was especially true in the realm of art, and of particular self-defeating import during the Cold War. For all the pronounced lack of cross-border identification practiced by leftist French radicals like the Situationists, so too did the east’s blindly Francophilic idolization prevent it from understanding the complexities and seriousness of the tensions within that country, and by extension, the west at large. To artists from the east, criticisms of French culture, especially ones leveled by Frenchmen, simply read as confusing—as was the case when André Breton venomously attacked his home country and praised homegrown resistance in a speech provided for a 1959 exhibition in Kraków to widespread hesitation in the Polish audience. The aggressive language of the western counterculture—its rhetorical bombast, its practiced referencing of an avant-garde lineage, its monomaniacal drive to destroy what had come before—had become somehow untranslatable in the context of an eastern Europe so culturally bereft that it was determined to hold onto whatever touchstones it could.

Though their reticence to kill their western idols may have prevented Eastern Bloc artists from imbuing their practices with the kind of cultural stridency found among other avant-garde groups, they still made use of numerous tactics common to their peers across the curtain. By contrast, however, the use of these familiar techniques (collective demonstration of artistic beliefs, public provocation, intergroup and intergenerational dispute) was, for easterners, mediated to a far greater extent by the specific political reality of the moment at hand, and the practical possibilities provided therefrom. Though one could assume a gratifyingly incensed and scandalized response to an avant-garde provocation in France or Germany (even, as in the extreme case of the Gruppe Spur, an obscenity trial or two), avant-gardists in those countries could be reasonably certain that their antics would be assimilated into a developing context of experimental art and culture and tolerated, more or less, by the political authorities. Needless to say, this was not the case in Poland or Czechoslovakia, where even proclaiming oneself as belonging to an organized group of artists and exhibiting as a group was a fraught and potentially dangerous step, and therefore one which had to be carefully timed to a period of regime weakness. Thus did artist groups like the Czech Tvrdohlaví, or “The Stubborn Ones,” practice several tried-and-true, potently avant-garde tactics, but in a selective, savvy way. Tvrdohlaví, which named itself in ironic echo of their country’s “stubborn” hard-line communists, criticized the artists of the normalization era for going underground and boldly demanded recognition as a collective within the official Czech art establishment, but it only did so when the repressive, “normalized” political atmosphere had subsided and the coast was clear.

This push-and-pull, between a sort of nascent implementation of brash avant-garde conceits and the plainly practical concerns of living under regime oppression, would seem to be the closest thing to an overall trend in the development of the eastern European art vanguard, such as it was. The tense quality of this relation was typified in the importance of those techniques which were not imported over from the western model, but were instead unique to art practitioners in the Eastern Bloc: the cultivation of private networks, the circumvention of official channels in the rise of mail-art, and the growth of the samizdat model of self-publishing and dissemination via smuggling.

Relying as it did on the participation of western European artists (a fraught condition as we’ve seen), the development of private networks of correspondence and travel across the Iron Curtain was a tentative and fitful affair—a truth exemplified by Eric Andersen’s “Fluxus East” tour of Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian living rooms, and its undoing as a result of that group’s cliquish shenanigans—but nonetheless, these exchanges had lasting and formative effects. After Andersen’s visit, a healthy correspondence between the Polish artists Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski was struck up with Fluxus members in New York, eventually resulting in the “Fluxus Festival” in Poznań in 1977, the largest and most comprehensive showing of a western avant-garde group on eastern European territory during the era. Mail-art, another Fluxus import, served not only to create an extra-institutional mode of communication and to develop underground eastern European art as a grassroots “private movement,” it also constituted a tacit criticism of the communist regimes’ censorship apparatuses, since it was frequently targeted by state authorities and secret police, and often included references and jokes about its semi-legal status.

Finally, one cannot consider the development of a late-twentieth-century avant-garde without engaging with “direct action,” the tactic whose specter hung so fatefully over the rise and fall of radical movements in the West since it had become the watchword of the Lettrist International; although, to be sure, the climate of ironclad social suppression that characterized communist rule in eastern Europe (not to mention the actual brushes with violent revolt and subsequent brutal crackdowns) make the concept itself hazy and difficult to apply here. Like “scandal,” “direct action” in the western radical sense presupposes an outwardly placid political environment where resistance is diverted or sublimated—an indirect action that needs correcting. In Czechoslovakia under normalization or Poland under martial law, there was no climate of passive resistance for which direct action might have functioned as a criticism or a corrective—only the stillness of total suppression and the fearful conformism that was its response.

Still, eastern avant-gardists did find ways, here and there, to apply the techniques of political provocation in ways that at least flirted with the west’s much-ballyhooed direct action tactics—and only, as noted above, when conditions on the ground were right. Most notably, there was the 1980s Polish collective known as the Orange Alternative, which modeled itself (in an uncharacteristically direct way) on the 1970s Dutch Kabouters. The group’s street actions and happenings—which included the distribution of scarce staple items like toilet paper in ironic celebration of communist holidays as well as a Christmastime happening wherein participants dressed as Santa Claus flooded into local supermarkets—subverted and problematized the obvious but unaddressed absurdities of the Polish regime: their ritualized adherence to communist history, their chronic failure to provide basic necessities, their anxious relationship with the country’s Catholic tradition.6

Tellingly, the Orange Alternative appears to have been one of very few artists’ groups to attack eastern European state strictures via the sort of Western-inflected avant-garde prank tradition practiced by groups like Spur, albeit with a less violent, more gently satirical tone. The lack of evidence for more widespread avant-garde scandal-stoking in the Eastern Bloc at large (albeit one mediated by my own lacks of access and the broader language skills necessary to conduct the research in greater depth) suggests a climate whose relation to the western European radical tradition was limited to generalities, like the aforementioned romanticization of French cultural openness so thoroughly tied to the eastern cultural identity. This lack is borne out in the appearance of groups like the Orange Alternative in the late 1980s, near the very end of the Eastern Bloc experiment: though they may have been viewed then and are remembered now as forces with real political power, that power was mediated as ever by directly observable trends, by the way the wind was blowing. The group may have had transgressive power, but the lion’s share of that power came from the widespread but inexpressible awareness that the regime was, just maybe, on its way out.

Teodor Graur performing “Speaking to Europe from Europe,” 1993.

IV. Speaking to Europe

The Western-European avant-garde—with its history of overindulgent, navel-gazing contemplation, its self-defeating weakness for petty squabbles, its gratingly emphatic trumpeting of its own virtue—could hardly have been the great ally for which avant-garde artists observing from the rapidly-darkening Eastern Bloc might have hoped. And indeed, just as it was the lot of all the citizens of Europe’s communist regimes to find a way to persist through decades of hardship, so too did the artists of those nations have to fashion their own responses to the political situation at hand—as there was no modern analogue for life in communist eastern Europe anywhere else in the world, no set of techniques gleaned from the outside could speak to that reality. As a result, researchers on the art side of the art-political equation have been left with a plethora of miniature movements, trends, and occasionally groups to position against dominant and monolithic state-approved art forms (most often, the socialist realism of the Soviet state). Bids to link these groups into larger constellations, tentative practitioners of a Western sort of cross-border avant-garde unification, would seem to be the products of wishful retrospective thinking. Whatever idiosyncratic tangle of contextual conditions might be responsible, I don’t know of any grand artistic resistance during the years of communist occupation; circumstances just did not allow it.

But even in full view and acceptance of the fundamentally singular quality of the decades-long tragedy that befell the region, the relation between artists of the west and those of the east during the latter half of the twentieth century must come in for special disapproval. Whether it’s the purposeful distancing of the deeply troubled, danger-replete lives of easterners from the minds and political programs of western radicals, or the brazen courting of status and exposure through the selective cooption of foreign cachet, the artists and radicals of the west did their eastern compatriots no favors. And while, as noted above, there was no special onus on the western avant-garde to aid that of the east, the fact that this same era also saw unprecedented levels of leftist revolutionary struggle in western Europe—as well as the concomitant spills into interpersonal drama and wanton violence—renders the westerners’ lack of identification with the population beyond the wall especially egregious.

Where the avant-garde program in western Europe was defined by constant provocation and a relentless push for publicity, the best the groups’ eastern counterparts could hope for was the establishment of “private movements” and small, tentatively-built networks of likeminded artists. The degree of isolation necessarily conveyed by such a practice is impossible to overstate, a fate made all the more troubling by a present-day art establishment which has canonized many western avant-gardists while leaving easterners to obscurity. A 1993 performance piece by the Romanian artist Teodor Graur, conducted in the tentative, reflective early days of the post-communist era, tells it best. Entitled “Speaking to Europe from Europe,” the piece consists of an artist repeating the following English phrase into a microphone: “Hello, I am speaking to you, can you hear me?” The microphone is plugged into a radio, tuned to a western station. As we might well expect, no response ever comes.

In September 2011, a few years into our home-recording “career” but really just months into our incarnation as a semifunctional performing duo, Esra and I got the opportunity to play a live set on the great Scott Williams’s likewise great WFMU show. I’ve attested before to my early devotion to WFMU (which, incidentally, is in the midst of its yearly funding drive now--DONATE), so I won’t belabor this intro except to say that it meant a lot to me to get to play on the legendary freeform station.

I also mention our relative inexperience because it’s directly relevant to assumptions I always retained about the quality of this performance: namely, that my squarewaves are way too loud, and that we’re playing the songs so slowly they’re practically going backwards, and that basically we didn’t have any idea what we were doing (not that we’re much more knowledgeable now, fifteen years later, and I’m not being falsely modest when I say so). But--the belabored point is--I just listened back for the first time in who knows how long and you know what, I’m basically down. The cover of our favorite Legendary Pink Dots song has something, at least, and Esra’s set intro is an unmitigated ripper.

The set is archived on Scott’s playlist, but a mildly remixed/remastered versions of it was eventually put out by Tokyo’s Crooked Tapes as Pigs in a Bucket Hat, still the best name for a cassette release ever (Cameron came up with it). Those remastered tracks are also posted below.

1. Intro

2. Free Galaxy

3. Your Wings (Spreadem)

4. Tooth Hound Sand

5. The Blessing (Legendary Pink Dots)

6. My Lucky Day

7. Phalliform

8. Maria Bellow

9. In Spades

Anyway, amid last December’s windfall of dropped balls and missed promotional opportunities I somehow neglected to mention the release of issue #5 of Fool Tide, the unreasonably sick Copenhagen-based newsprint zine masterminded by immortal beloved Chris Shields. The issue features, in addition to several very delightful features, a “History Zone” column written by me which takes as its topic the present-day relevance of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just’s historical example and--more saliently--whether it’s true or not that the boy wore earrings.

Since the disputed historiography of the French Revolution is exactly the kind of subject best settled by a 500-word blog post, I’m posting a lightly spruced and linked-up version of my text below.

Order your copy of Fool Tide, for the very rimelig price of 50dkk, here.

Amadeus Amadeus! Bogusław Linda as Saint-Just in Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, 1983.

Although the accepted French term for “time machine” (machine à voyager dans les temps) is not necessarily the wieldiest out there, we had better go ahead and pile into ours, keep an eye out for Timecops, and fire up le starter, because our destination is 9 Thermidor, Year II of the French Revolutionary Calendar, otherwise known as July 26, 1794, and the Jacobins—the grouping of hard-left autocrats clustered around Maximilien Robespierre—are about to fall from power and face the guillotine. It’s a heavy moment, a real brake failure on the escalator of history, but I wanna zoom us in on one doomed dude in particular, namely: Robespierre’s chief orator and Montagnard right-handiste Louis Antoine de Saint-Just.

Saint-Just was many things: a genius rhetorician and court philosopher of the Revolution, an impressive realpolitik praktiker, and—being 26 years old at the time of his execution—a lasting emblem of iconoclastic youth culture, albeit one just shy of official 27-club membership. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel the pull of something resembling the youngster’s revolutionary spirit when one reads Saint-Just’s words (“I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you… but I defy you to rob me of that independent life I have given myself down through the ages and in heaven”) or looks at depictions of the guy (he was hot, and he may have worn earrings!?). This is before we even get into the scandalous poetry S-J wrote before his rise to power, as well as the one-act play Arlequin Diogène, which combined the tropes of the era’s commedia dell’arte with the philosophy of Diogenes the Cynic, who famously lived in a barrel, took shits in the street, and told Alexander the Great to move cuz he was blocking the sun.

It’s all very seductive, is the point, and those of us who value anti-authoritarianism or radical politics as they are contemporarily conceived—and who, still more crucially, rely on history to provide some guidance as to how they might function in the present—are, I think, well within our rights to vibe on elements of Saint-Just’s uncompromising example. But it’s worth contending, also, with that example’s gnarlier subdivisions: the Revolutionary Tribunal over which the Jacobins presided before their fall on 9 Thermidor, the 20,000+ executions in the space of a single year, the slip-slidey dérapage of foreign and civil wars, and the group’s conspiratorially annihilationist “emergency powers” dictatorship. Saint-Just is deeply fascinating, and it’s a testament to his symbolic power that he’s been cited over the years by everyone from Marx to Debord to Hannah Arendt to Greil Marcus to today’s most abysmally pathetic far-right online flimflam monarchists (not linking). But no amount of rhetorical brilliance or swoony deathrock allure (those earrings!!!) can paper over the intrinsic paradoxes, and any earnest approach to revolution as anything resembling a cohesive concept requires an understanding of how its goals can be warped to unrecognizability by, for one thing, the consolidation and jealous guarding of centralized power. For this key lesson, you can do no better than our boy Saint-Just; he even told us so, when, in one of his characteristically high-flown speeches to the National Convention, he dropped an inarguable all-timer: “No one can reign in innocence.”

Merci Loulou!

Issue #5 of Fool Tide, in which a version of the above text appears. Order!

Through a series of bureaucratic hiccups and code-red blizzard alerts, the trip ended up getting downgraded from a five-day affair to something in the neighborhood of 36 hours, but I still had a very sick time hitting lots of anticariate, self-consciously trying out my (quite janky) spoken Romanian, and managing a couple of auspicious meetings. I’ll be recapping things more extensively soon, but for the moment I can just let this meme page I found do the talking.

Meanwhile, the trip got me thinking about the following piece of writing, another chunk from the old-ish novel manuscript I’ve excerpted before. This section--which ostensibly deals with Soviet automobiles, the post–Cold-War phenomenon of “Ostalgisch” fetishisms, and contemporary German soda pop innovations--maybe also dives a bit into the kind of historically-layered, cross-lingual dreamspace zone I got to visit last week, albeit just for a second.

P.S.: When I first wrote and published this piece (as part of a long-ago zine), the protagonist was named “Crazy Radu.” But now that I know a couple of Radus, it felt kinda weird, so I swapped it.

The wreck out back—a custom agglomerate most economically described as an upgraded Moskvich 412, though that hardly begins to cover it—has had a long and fruitful second life, and we needn’t mourn too hard on its behalf. Once an exceedingly rusty old number from the early seventies found tagless and fancy free in a rainlogged salvage yard in East Berlin, it bounced around scrap movers for a few years, narrowly avoided the crusher more than once, and eventually turned up in “Der Verrückte Mechaniker,” a repair shop in Halensee whose name and slogan—“Ein bisschen verrückt muss man schon sein, um ein Auto zu lieben,”—underscored its general business strategy, which was to distinguish itself by cultivating a reputation for mental illness. This meant enthusiastically undertaking outwardly impossible repair jobs, resuscitating wheezing old clunkers, rigging up workarounds to cheat government inspections and emissions standards, stealing rare parts from other garages, and so on. The shop was run by a large Romanian family whose members maintained an especially frenzied air when on the clock—the better to befit their establishment’s branding tack—and were always shouting at each other in front of customers, flying into rages, and publicly smashing things. The owner and lead Verrückter was a bug-eyed and wild-haired mechanic called Crazy Relu whose five sons worked on intakes, spot repairs and scrap runs while he kept an eye on the business end, delegated projects and, once in a while, dove headlong into the sort of repair which, despite baldly defying logical and financial sense, would occasionally pay off huge dividends on some other, less quantifiable level.

Relu really did love cars, and having owned the shop in the early years after reunification, he’d grown used to servicing the different sorts of eastern bloc makes that had come streaming, in the early nineties, over the newly-opened border: janky Czechoslovakian Škodas, Romanian Dacias and, most especially, Trabant 601s, those ubiquitous East German heaps whose finicky two-cycle engines basically made them fume-belching, breakdown-prone four-wheeled motorbikes, or, maybe more charitably, lawnmowers with doors. In fact, one of the shop’s early breakthroughs had been its policy of pinching Trabbi parts from all competing sources (cornering the market on repairs in the unified capital and jacking the prices as supply dwindled), though a recent €2,500 government scrapping bonus offered on the egregious pollutant vehicles had sort of put a pin in that. Another Trabant scheme had consisted of stripping the cars’ plastic body panels which, being made of Micarta (aka Duroplast, cotton fabrics impregnated with phenolic resins from Soviet factories), were actually considerably stronger than steel and impervious to dents and rust. More importantly, though, these Leukoplast-bombe bodies had become fetish objects for nostalgic East Berliners, in whose memories the cars were transformed from maddening junkheaps—markers of lives spent among unwashed concrete and industrial runoff—into fun, scrappy cult commodities. It is now mostly remembered as a joke, but at the time most everyone really did think those body panels were made of some kind of cardboard, and worry that exposing them to too much heat would cause them to go up in flames; they really did spend hours removing air filters and blowing on spark plugs when the carburetor reliably flooded, or push-starting stalled cars downhill and running themselves over; they even sat on waiting lists, often for years, for the privilege of puttering around in a new, rattling 601. Still and all, the wall fell, the so-called Ostalgie held, and today, little white Trabants dot the Berlin streets, inspiring countless whistles of recognition even as they dependably spew their black smoke, often enough in a mechanic’s face.

And to be clear, Crazy Relu himself could be prone to making the same sorts of logical allowances for the sake of wistful reminiscence. Cars just worked on him that way, as portals to vast universes of involuntary memory as directly effective as any tea-sopped spongecake. He experienced certain models via intoxicating synesthetic flashes—snatches of music, specific tastes and smells, unexplainable fireworks of color when he heard a given engine rev, even noticeable physical effects that we need not go into here. But there was a deeper layer. Years in the conditioning lab of the garage combined with a lifetime spent among vehicles of every stripe had by now lent his work such a deeply idiosyncratic dimension that even he couldn’t explain why he made the repairs he did. Though the shop’s customer base loved it, Relu’s kids weren’t sure to what degree the “crazy mechanic” vibes were a put-on, theorizing instead that they provided a useful cover for what was in fact a genuinely deranged streak in their father’s behavior. Relu whispered lovingly to Renault engine blocks in halting, decades-removed liceu French. He busted out laughing at what he claimed were hysterically funny engineering jokes intentionally hidden in certain brakepad designs. He insisted that particular cars “wanted” specific work done for which there was no mechanical evidence. He regularly slept in the shop, often on his creeper cart wheeled all the way beneath one or another rusty jalopy; his sons, who’d long ago resigned themselves to this as to his other antics, just wheeled him out when it was time to open, steeling themselves for another day of acting as sick as this old man seemed actually to’ve become.

And though he often loudly insisted that such direct or obvious linkages played no role whatsoever in his process, it was plain to see that Crazy Relu had particular emotional ties to the cars of his youth. On the morning that Dragoș, his youngest, wheeled the broken-down Moskvich into the lot, he woke with a start beneath a decommissioned Wartburg 353 police wagon—he even dinged his forehead on the front bumper and sent the creeper cart careening into a rack of jack stands—and immediately ran outside, in a grease-stained A-frame and tighty-whities, tears already forming at the corners of his groggy-eyed gaze as, in front of a rapidly-forming queue of morning customers, he actually fell to his knees in exaltation.

He had, at the age of twenty-five, watched as his own Moskvich 412 was smashed to pieces in the big 1977 Vrancea earthquake that decimated Bucharest, and while he had ever since retained, sure, something of a soft spot for the old compacts, he had never before noted the searing feeling of recognition coursing through him now, an all-over bodily effect, some field resonating harmonically with a deep-seated and long-disregarded store of memories suddenly kicked into frantic activity, all abuzz, scores of tiny voices telling him this was it, not the same model, not a comparable specimen, but it: in some real, undefinable way, this was his car. He immediately called off every other job, sent his sons home for the day, and shuttered the storefront. In a wholly unprecedented move, he referred his backlog of work to rival garages, which bizarre gesture, combined with his uncharacteristically calm demeanor over the phone, made Andreas Unger at “Automania” across town assume he’d been the victim of a prank call. When the garage was clear, Relu got to work.

The whole thing took two weeks of manic, round-the-clock activity. Relu transplanted a Mazda Z-engine under the hood, which he also replaced along with the fenders, doors and body panels themselves (none of that Trabbi Bakelite either; old Moskvichs were loaded down with steel, and that’s the way this one would stay). Painted the whole thing in factory “ivory,” really just beige, reinforced the subframe and replaced all shocks and springs, snaked a tube and rudder from a similar model off of a crosstown competitor, and fashioned the instrument panel from various trashed odo-, tach- and speedometers. When everything ran well and looked alright, he made with a showy unveiling for the benefit of his poor kids—who’d been on indefinite leave from work this whole time—and their wives and children.

“Cool,” from his cellphone-toting ten-year-old granddaughter Hanna as Relu dramatically whipped the tarp off of the gleaming, waxed machine, “aber hat es auch einen MP3-Player?”

Relu’s sons had bigger concerns. The shop’s finances had never exactly been the picture of stability, and private questioning on the wisdom of closing up for a period of weeks to work on a single car of dubious resale value had given way, these last few days, to more decisive action. If the car wasn’t sold in the next month—was the gist of their ultimatum—they were all quitting.

Garage fumes or else something else lending a certain teary-eyed gleam to his expression, Crazy Relu made with a sober nod, clocked firmly the real concern on the faces of the five sons who had followed him into this foolish business. He offered them a grease-stained palm.

“Hand drauf,” he told them, meaning ‘Let’s shake on it.’

But wouldn’t you know it? Relu’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. In fact, that the car should be resold quickly and lucratively—not a month but just a day or two later—could have been, looking back on it, the only logical conclusion to the manic Moskvich quest. A confirmation, maybe, that his recent behavior was outwardly ordained, dictated by an external intelligence, set in motion with an agenda unknowable and all its own. Best explanation, anyway, for how the sudden and desperate desire to refurbish this vehicle was met, one or two days after its completion, by a mysterious buyer whose go-between had said just enough to ensure that the Moskvich was the car being sought. It hadn’t even hit the showroom; how could the buyer have known about it? Had someone at the garage been talking? Was another party snooping around? More sinister yet, could the car have been sent to Relu with just this result in mind? Or was all this second-guessing, heh, just a touch of the old Verrücktheit? No matter; point is, when the call came in, Relu wasn’t surprised.

“My client is an American, a collector of Communist-era automobiles,” breathy reed-thin voice on the line, ‘UNKNOWN NUMBER’ on the caller ID readout, natch.

Relu’s English was good, but a momentary fluster came over him just the same. He took a breath. “Well, we see many luxury models from that time”—dangling some alternatives though, feeling at this negotiation’s unspoken contours, he swore he could already tell where it was going—“a Tatra for example? Or we could find you perhaps a Volga GAZ?”

The voice let out a tight, clipped laugh. “My client would prefer something more working-class.”

Relu grinned at the confirmation, though there was a sour undertaste in it. “I have maybe a Soviet model or two in stock.”

“We intend for the car to be exported to and driven in the United States. We can secure the necessary paperwork. A representative will be sent to your establishment. The vehicle must be fully functional.”

A beat. “Something restored?”

“Exactly.”

They made an appointment for late that night, after regular hours. The shop’s mysterious closure and reopening having stoked widespread curiosity in the neighborhood, business had been booming the last few days, so there were loads of cars on the premises again, whether in for repairs, quick salvage jobs or restorations. Most everything was covered up with tarpaulins when, stepping through the Mechaniker’s front door into full fluorescent radiance of the overnight wall lamps, the point man finally showed up.

Relu, having detected a certain mustache-twirling lilt to things on the phone, was expecting some kind of spy movie villain or Dr. Mabuse type; a tuxedoed, vampire-caped deal, or at least a trenchcoat, mysterious briefcase, something. Looking over the “representative” who’d actually appeared before him, then, Relu tried not to let his disappointment show. It was a sweatshirted, baseball-cap-wearing, utterly generic youth of about twenty-five, toting a university-branded backpack and a bottle of orange Schwip Schwap. He could’ve been one of any of the untold hordes of collegiate arrivals down from London or Canada or the States, the thrilled new Berliners that now clogged late night U-Bahn platforms, techno clubs and wine bars, just as often, Relu’s shop, gratingly insisting on repairs to perfect vehicles for which they had neither intuitive feeling nor mechanical knowledge and, thus, no right to drive. Service employees of every stripe had been dealing with such entitled shits since Berlin’s reputation for baby-leicht party-oriented living had lent the poor old capital enough glamorous cachet to put it squarely in the path of massive tourist and gentrification waves, meaning this aspect of life in the new Germany was by now more than fully old news. So when the clincher came—as the young man cleared his throat and, in a polite Midwest American register, asked for “Rad-oo”—the deflation of spirit that seized our humble mechanic was practically audible.

“Yes I Relu, how I can help you.” He sometimes put on this no-English act for the tourists, dialing up the Slavic resonants, bit of code-switching he found helpful for getting out of tedious explanations or nipping disadvantageous haggles in the bud.

The stranger didn’t miss a beat. “Ați prefera să vorbim românește??”

Okay, so here was a wrinkle. “You speak Romanian?”

He knew cars, too, as it turned out. Introduced himself as Lindh Steinberg, “Outreach Officer”—as this thick black business card had it—for Opal Artists LLC, a media shingle based in New York that represented publishers, galleries, record labels. ‘Outreach’ being a worldwide effort these days and languages having always come easy to him, Lindh explained, he’d managed to build up a decent command of the major and minor Romance tongues as well as a slew of Germanics. A little bit of Russian, too, but they had a different guy onsite for that.

“But what this has to do with the Moskvich,” Relu blurted out, regretting that last word immediately. Why mention a specific make? They had kept things suitably vague on the phone; the identity of the vehicle was the only leverage he’d had. Now he’d never know how much they’d known beforehand.

But if the info was new or surprising to Lindh, he had a funny way of showing it. “One of our musicians, a band actually, wants it,” he shrugged, leveling—or appearing to level—with Relu in a way that, in spite of lingering suspicions, had its disarming effect.

Before Relu knew it, the tarp had been lifted and he’d proceeded, in full salesman mode, to lovingly show off the vehicle’s rebuilt engine and modern features. Lindh’s questions—had Relu swapped out the oil filter for something leak-proof? Had he reinforced the axels after the engine rebuild?—betrayed what was either a carefully-studied or honestly-arrived-at knowledge of Soviet automobile design. But which was it? And why should some American kid know, or care, about this stuff in the first place?

“But the man on the phone,” Relu’s eyes locked on the camshaft so as not to betray any emotion besides the usual vehicular ardor, “he said the car was for a collector, not musician.”

“The buyer is the band’s manager,” Lindh nodding, affect flat, “or rather, it’s Opal, making the purchase on the manager’s behalf.” The musicians in question, he explained, wanted the car for photoshoots, record covers, music videos, after which it’d belong to this manager figure, who was a collector and archivist, and who’d probably been the one to plant the idea in the musicians’ heads to begin with.

“Who was the man on the phone?”

“My boss. One of our directors back in the States.” That shrug again, as if it were all uninteresting, impertinent detail.

A clock hung over the window. It was an old BMW novelty gift someone’d managed to snap up in a city junk shop and present to the family at the Mechaniker, a promotion for the aborted 507 convertible. The long hand ended in a cardboard cutout of the little sportscar, and watching it glide the circumference of the clock’s face had long figured as a a solid way to make any auto-manipulator in the area fall into a light trance. Now Relu chanced a quick look. It was midnight. “Why this group wants a Moskvich?”

Lindh smiled and took off his large black Jansport, which he’d been wearing, absurdly, since he’d come in. Unzipped it and pulled out a large flat object at which Crazy Relu, carefully studying the gleaming carburetor to fight off an emergent, improbable case of nerves, only permitted himself the subtlest peripheral glance.

“Hey, psst,” Lindh picking up on the energy. “It won’t bite.”

Relu didn’t want to look, but at some length and effort, feeling stupid, he did. It was an old LP cover, weathered, scuffed at the corners and, most notably, layered with a few generations of handwritten pen markings, notes, scribblings, symbols, extending across the top in black marker. Nothing he recognized, but the LP itself was another story.

“It’s their favorite,” Lindh explained. “They wanted to recreate the cover, original thinkers that they are.”

The first and only album by a group called Kustom Kar Kommandos, this self-titled number here had been one of those one-copy-per-city, breathlessly-traded records that sometimes managed to sweep the Bucharest of Relu’s youth, thanks to some intrepid soul who’d manage to smuggle them in—in this case, himself. The country hadn’t exactly been known for its rock’n’roll pedigree, and Western tunes were scarcely heard on the radio or seen in stores, but every so often, something managed to slip by, become an object of feverish whispering, spend a few days on every turntable in town and then vanish as quickly as it had come. Relu hadn’t seen the album, whose sun-bleached cover image depicted the wreck of a beige Moskvich 412 in an anonymous Central European field, since he’d handed his copy over to his brother three decades earlier.

“So what do you think?” While Relu had been gawking at the record, Lindh had scribbled his offer on the backside of a promotional oil change flier and slid it over. “Deal?”

Relu, in a kind of daze, noted blankly to himself that the sum was enough to pay a year of overhead for the entire garage. “How... does this American band sound like?”

Lindh thought for a second. “Do you like Sabbath?”

      ____                      _____________          _____________
 ____//_]|________         ____//__][__][___|     ____//__][______||
(o _ |  -|   _  o|        (o  _|  -|     _ o|    (o _ |  -|   _   o|
 `(_)-------(_)--'         `-(_)--------(_)-'     `(_)-------(_)---'
    ______________      ________________         __________________
   //__][__\\____\\    //__][__\\___\\__\       |[_][_][_][_][_][_]|
  (o _-|         o|   <o  _||  -|   _  o|       |o _         _  _  |
   `(_)-------(_)-'    `-(_)-------(_)--'        `(_)-------(_)(_)-"
   ____________              ______               ______
 ____//__][__\\___\        ____//__][_\       ______//__][_\__
(o _ |  -|   _   o|       [o _ |  -| _ \     /o _   |  -| _   \
 `(_)-------(_)---'        `(_)-----(_)-'    `-(_)-------(_)---'
________               _____                   _
    ____//__][__\\___      ____//__]|               ___//]    ____
   (o _ |  -|   _  o|     (o _ |   -|_________     |o_   '---' _ |
    `(_)-------(_)--'      `(_)-------(_)(_)--'    `(_)-------(_)''
      _               ______________                _
 ____//]_________       ____//__]|        |         ______//________
(o _ |  -|  _  o|      (o _ |   -|  _  _  |        /o _   |  -| _   \
 `(_)------(_)--'       `(_)-----'-(_)(_)-'        `-(_)-------(_)---'

This week I’m coming to you from the knotty, overleveraged central cordage of a tangle of ongoing research/writing/hanging out/life projects, including but by no means limited to:

⤅ January’s “Lettrist Film” series at Anthology Film Archives, comprising screenings of four works from the Romanian-French avant-gardiac Isidore Isou and his crew of willfully jerky scandalmonger legends, of whom I’m on the record as being a, let’s call it “conflicted obsessive”;

⤅ the accompanying exhibition on Isou and Lettrist books and printed matter, on view now through May 2 at NY’s Center for Book Arts;

⤅ last night’s New York University–sponsored film screening and discussion of the life and legacy of Alexander Trocchi--he of the post-Lettrist formation the Situationist International among a million other things (an event which I’m only pretending has already happened as I write this); and

⤅ my visit to Bucharest next week, which will cap a year of madcap language study, familial archival exploration, and notarized signatures on government forms (we’ll talk about this one later).

Anyway, some common features: youthful bluster and bullshitting, rank hooliganism (or, if you’re a post-Eliade Romanian youth, huliganism) as both symptom of and remedy for long-term statelessness, onetime outsider cachet shading into states more detectibly pathetic... and yes, OK, a bunch of crucial art moves. A nice feature, that last part, of what is otherwise a lowkey stressful time. See below.

Orb bros, stand and be counted.

I missed the second half of Anthology’s program (though Chad forewarned that Saturday’s event would feature lots of audience bullying, which obviously has a certain Dick’sian je ne sais quoi), but I did manage to hit the screenings of Isou’s all-time great cinematic essay/noise set Traité de bave et d’eternité and, what’s even sicker, Gil Wolman’s L’Anticoncept, the ballyhooed early masterpiece by the right-hand-man of Guy Debord’s schismatic Lettrist International group. I have wanted to check L’Anticoncept out via a non-Ubuweb delivery system for a long time now, and it’s a testament to how reliably Anthology hooks it up (it’s my favorite place in NYC, no contest) that their screening—which featured the requisite weather balloon orb in place of a projector screen—was a packed house affair, though I did hear tell of walkouts, which is honestly equally laudable. Audience members got printed copies of Wolman’s monologue soundtrack, though the evening’s strobelit character meant there was no point trying to follow along. And honestly why bother, when it’s at least 75% about the varispeeded tape FX and maybe another 5% about the untranscribable puking sounds? Anyway, thanks to AFA, thanks to Gil, and thanks to the lifepath that’s got me entertaining stuff like this as a valid Thursday night outing. More on Monsieur Wolman before too long.

Guy Debord’s Métagraphie (Portrait de Gil J Wolman), 1954.

Meanwhile, some very quick Trocchi talk before—to drop the pretext that I’m not schedule-sending this post from last night—I pack up and head to the event in his honor:

While I can’t reliably say where and when I first encountered Trocchi’s work, it was definitely via his writing, well before I had gotten oversteeped enough in this countercultural lineage stuff to think of him as a sui generis / mostly tragic figure whose life bridged several otherwise far-flung postwar undergrounds. In my case, I read Young Adam, and probably must have known something about Trocchi’s collaborations with Girodias’s Olympia Press, which in turn I would’ve stumbled on via a heavy adolescent repping of all things Burroughs; obviously, reader, you know how this works from whatever analogous routes you’ve taken to reach your cozy redoubts of art obsession. Mostly it feels worth reconstructing the paper trail, though, because of how this conception changed later on, when I discovered—via a series of odd jobs on the margins of archival preservation and the rare book world—that Trocchi in particular had become a bankable signifier for traders and collectors of avant-garde cultural detritus. I worked jobs, in other words, in which Trocchi’s works served as fetish objects, artifacts coveted mostly (or entirely) because of their drug content and shelved alongside stuff like De Quincey, Baudelaire, and the Ace Double paperback of Junky. A bummer, somehow—in spite of the fact that, duh, we all know this materialist tendency is a part of the deal—but also a valuably unromantic object lesson in the means by which countercultural history is agreed on, and the relative estimations in which we place its creators. Which is all just to say that these days, I don’t quite know how to feel about big Alex Trocchi; here’s hoping tonight complicates the picture that much further. Stay tuned.

 ,_______________________________________,
/   HHH*                          *HHH   /.
`---------------------------------------" :
| +              XLII  90             + | :
|             .____________.            | :
|       .++.  |######\  /##|  .++.      | :
|       +  +  |######/  \##|  +  +      | :
|       '++'  '------------'  '++'      | :
|                                       | :
|                                       | :
|      /'''''''''''''''''''''''''\      I :
|     /     o       0         o   \     I :
|+   / O                         O \   +|,'
`---------------------------------------`