May 23, 2023
A project in continuum with The Fall
I have so much to say about this record that I don’t even know where to begin.
Made by members of The Fall who, over the years, Mark E. Smith fired or who quite due to his erratic and abusive behavior. Made by many of the musical architects of the classic Fall sound. And now that Mark E. Smith is gone they come together and make a record in continuum with the work of The Fall that’s almost as good as any Fall record and, for this reason, in some ways all that much better.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Living well is the best revenge.
How to take past resentments and turn them into gold. How to have a final, unexpected fourth act that turns everything on its head.
For some reason listening to this record gives me some small hope for my artistic future. (Even though I’m probably Mark E. Smith in this story, so the hope comes after I die.)
https://houseofall.bandcamp.com/album/house-of-all
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Labels:
HOUSE Of ALL,
The Fall
May 13, 2023
Three videos from The Air Contains Honey
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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes
“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.
Image and editing by Nina Vroemen
For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.
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“We shall define sexuality as that which can’t be satisfied and therefore as that which transforms the person.”
– Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
The Air Contains Honey - Sexuality
“I adore everything I don’t understand.”
– Angela Lopes, Bridge Retakes
The Air Contains Honey - Everything
“In my best moments I think ‘life has passed me by,’ and I’m content.”
– Agnes Martin
The Air Contains Honey - Best Moments
The Air Contains Honey is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.
In these three videos The Air Contains Honey is: Patrick Conan, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O'Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu, Jacob Wren.
Image and editing by Nina Vroemen
For more information, as it becomes available, you can find The Air Contains Honey Facebook page here.
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Labels:
The Air Contains Honey
May 11, 2023
Diachroneity Books: "What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre."
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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).
Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.
What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.
If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.
What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.
If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.
Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?
More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT
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Diachroneity Books seeks novels, short story collections, novels-in-flash, encyclopedias (lol), and fresh translations of the above. Currently, we’re working with prose only (no poetry (◕︵◕)).
Right now, we’re focusing on digital release.
What we want: Oddness. Stream of consciousness. Weird, but beautiful. Genre, but literary. Just a liiiiittle left of centre. Biting humour, biting commentary, and biting humour-as-commentary. Eighteen layers of sorta confusing metaphor. Make us (and you) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Or astound us. Ideally both.
If you think other places would publish your manuscript and sell mad stacks, it’s probably not for Diachro.
What we don’t want: The mainstream. -isms or -phobias. Easy reading. Cool kids.
If you’ve been knocked back for being “too much,” hi.
Also, we aim to be, like, nice and thoughtful and understanding human beings. So if we’re thinking about doing this thing together (i.e., literary birthing), we kindly request that you be nice and thoughtful and understanding too.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, y’know?
More information here: https://diachroneitybooks.com/SUBMIT
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May 6, 2023
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe:
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I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.
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There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.
*
Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.
Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.
Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.
*
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
*
*
I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.
*
There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.
*
Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.
Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.
Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.
*
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
*
Labels:
Christina Sharpe,
Quotes,
Some passages from
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