how carelessly it's sung

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"We do however like drunken singing and hearing the melodies wobble. There is something in the melody that possibly goes against the politics. Or perhaps something in how carelessly it's sung."

(I’ve decided to serialize my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on my Patreon. The above lines are from the third instalment. For the indefinite future all posts will be free, so there's no reason not to follow it here.)



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addictive entertainment

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There’s been a lot of talk about whether AI can make art, and I think this is beside the point. The people dumping in money to create AI don’t care about art. The question is whether AI can make cheap, addictive entertainment. And, it seems to me, there’s evidence that AI is very good at making things addictive.


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Rum Music

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I've been listening to a lot of music end of the year lists and, so far, Rum Music: The Best of 2025 Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan is my hands down favourite.


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just finished / just starting

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The perfect holiday gifts: Rich and Poor & Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Some favourite things from my 2025

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[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. (However, it seems I do rearrange the list a little to make it look nice.) This years list is also a little bit longer then some previous years, and I believe one of the reasons is that this year I did two mid-year lists, so I felt I had to add more things to make this end of the year list different.]


Music
Moses Sumney – Sophcore
Adrián de Alfonso – Viator
Qur’an Shaheed – Pulse
keiyaA – hooke’s law
Destroyer – Dan’s Boogie
Quinton Barnes – Code Noir
Quinton Barnes – Black Noise
Elle Barbara’s Black Space – Word on the Street
Nourished By Time – The Passionate Ones
Eddie Marcon – Carpet of Fallen Leaves
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like The Sky
Fievel Is Glauque – Rong Weicknes
Katy Pinke – Strange Behaviour
CV Vision – Release The Beast
DJ K – Radio Libertadora !
Pink Siifu – BLACK’!ANTIQUE
MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
Frog Eyes – The Open Up

As well, as previously mentioned, for much of the past year or two, I’ve been listening a lot to the same four exceptional records by Jeff Parker: The New Breed, Suite for Max Brown, Forfolks and The Way Out of Easy.


Books
Vivian Blaxell – Worthy of the Event: An Essay
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Touching the Art
Cody Caetano – Half-Bads in White Regalia
Saeed Teebi – You Will Not Kill Our Imagination
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Noopiming
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Water
Sarah Schulman – The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi – Everything for Everyone
Raja Shehadeh – We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
Fabio Morábito – The Shadow of the Mammoth (Translated by Curtis Bauer)
Lawrence Burney – No Sense in Wishing
Anna Swanson – The Garbage Poems
Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony
Emily Witt – Health and Safety
Nathanael Jones – Aqueous
Sasha Frere-Jones – Earlier
Caren Beilin – Sea, Poison


Performances
Martine Delvaux + Bureau de l’APA – Pompières et pyromanes
Dorothée Munyaneza – Toi, moi, Tituba…
Jo Fong, Sonia Hughes, Marilou Craft & Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé – Nettles: How to disagree?
Anne-Marie Ouellet, Thomas Sinou, Jeanne Sinou, Inès Sinou – Refaire la Marguerite
Sasha Kleinplatz – MAKING TIME
Public Recordings – The Chains
Su PinWen 蘇品文 – Leftover Market 剩女經濟


Plus:
Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert
Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell
Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman
Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore


Also:
I haven’t done this previously, but a few other things from my year I want to mention:
– I wrote about the twentieth anniversary of A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality
– I made an Inventory of novels I recently started but couldn't finish
– I was part of an exceptional lineup at the Montreal edition of Oral Method where, in response to the prompt EXCUSEZ-MOI, I wrote a short text I think turned out quite well called I Make and Watch Performances



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A World Without Money

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Idea for a novel about two friends who both decide to become counterfeiters, one of whom decides to make counterfeit art while the other decides to make counterfeit money.

Working title: A World Without Money



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a month left to go

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I'm starting to work on my 2025 list. So, with a month left to go, I thought I would post my 2024 list one last time: Some favourite things from my 2024.

As well, the last Bandcamp Friday of the year is this Friday (Dec 5th) so I thought I would once again share my mid-year list of favourite records, in case you want to support some of these amazing artists: Some favourite records of my 2025 (so far).


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Two Mariame Kaba Quotes

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“But most of us remain just ordinary humans. Not everyone is rising to the occasion because the times you live in do not immediately shape who you are and what you do. The other truth, I believe, is that you rise to the level of your training and practice, not to the level of your imagined self.”

– Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…


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“Looking out at the current landscape, visionary leaders or guides are in short supply. Who are the people in our current moment who are focusing on the transformed worlds we could have? Those who are not settling for shrunken horizons under the guise of so-called realism and pragmatism. Who in public life regularly says: “Be realistic - demand the impossible?” The world as currently constituted can be changed. I don’t think enough people truly believe this though and we really need people who help us to see past the current moment towards something different and better.

My father often encouraged me to fail big because it was a guarantee that I would fail at certain things that I tried. And he said that since failure was built into living, it was best to do so boldly and audaciously. And by taking big risks, I would increase the likelihood that I might also sometimes exceed what I thought were my limits. Right now, I think we need public figures we respect telling us not to settle for crumbs and not to allow ourselves to be convinced that what’s on offer is the best that can be done. It isn’t.

We need leaders calling us to a standard in excess of the prescribed pragmatism of these times. We need to be encouraged to take some big swings with others, and that means we will make mistakes. The current construct seeks to limit our imaginations. Who will remind us to shoot for a place beyond the moon? The status quo is unrealistic and impractical. In fact, for most of the planet, it is oppressive and death-making. We want life; we want livingness for all.”

- Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…


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quotations on failure

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I’ve been gathering quotations on failure since 2014 and I’ve finally made it to thirty (a kind of success). You can find them here.


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It began with wandering...

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“It began with wandering. We rejected the idea of a destination. We thought of such wandering as equivalent to having a light touch. Yet there was also another aspect: we were not prepared.”

(I’ve decided to serialize my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on my Patreon. The above lines are from the second instalment. For the indefinite future all posts will be free, so there's no reason not to follow it here.)



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Metonymy Press anthologies and fundraiser

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Metonymy Press is one of my all time favourite publishers. You can preorder their two new anthologies Sharp Pink Claws and at the same time help support them! Find out more here: https://gogetfunding.com/metonymy-press-needs-your-support/


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