Some sentences from my past year

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The technology and narrative we call “money” transforms the finite number of things a person can claim to possess into a seemingly infinite number of things and possibilities. In this way it also transforms finite possibilities for injustice into endless possibilities for injustice, which more and more we are realizing will soon reach some catastrophic limit if we let it.


I feel like the algorithms are gently corralling me toward more and more capitalist music.


Over the years I’ve gradually come to the perspective that useful activism is much more about what you’re for and not nearly as much about what you’re against. (But it is still absolutely necessary to clearly name the things you’re fighting against.)


The people who want change don’t have power and the people who have power don’t want change.


Activism isn’t about what’s possible but about what’s impossible. About taking something we’re repeatedly told is impossible and bringing it into reality.


There is one part of me that doesn’t want to write and just wants to be completely aware and painfully alive to everything that’s happening right now. And there’s another part of me that’s losing my mind because I seem unable to write.


When you’re a careerist, everything looks like a career opportunity.


When you see an argument, you don’t view it in isolation. You also look at the source. What they’ve said in the past. Whether or not you trust them. A solid argument from an untrustworthy source can at times be even more suspicious.


To be honest, I write because I want to change the world. But the evidence that I’m succeeding is not very convincing.


Alongside my madness, there also something about me that is almost too sane.


As things continue to get worse, paradoxically, there might be greater opportunities for change, as everywhere people begin to truly feel the severity of the situation and respond accordingly.


I spent my formative years reading about Latin American dictatorships - disappearances, torture, etc. - all perpetrated by individuals trained at the School of the Americas. And every moment of that reading was spent thinking: sooner or later this will all happen here as well.


I’ve always imagined an ongoing game where the purpose is to try to invent an art movement.


Every road and highway ever built was a subsidy to the automotive industry.


I don’t especially like people. I don’t especially dislike them either. I don’t know… people aren’t really my people.


Working on a book and also, every ten minutes, staring off into space wondering if the world will still be here when I finish it, or if it will be in any state that one can actually publish a book.


We are drowning in a very specific form of propaganda called advertising.


the world is ending / the world is unending


Well… I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But since I’m my own worst enemy I guess it’s all right.


We all have blood on our hands. But definitely not in equal amounts.


I’ve never really understood why there always seems to be so much infighting amongst the left. Or even if it’s really true.


Why are there so many songs on the internet and why do I feel compelled to attempt to listen to every last one?


It’s my nature to be dissatisfied.


As an artist these days, I feel I’ve only got a few arrows left in my quiver. And I’ve got to make every last one count.


Being an artist is often about the feeling that other artists are getting something that you’re not.


I don’t really know what the right strategy is. My mind is the mind of an artist. It’s not really a mind of strategy and tactics. But whatever the strategy, we’ve got to keep pushing things to the left.


The people / divided / will always be derided.


Honesty without cruelty.


The romantic myth of the artist who struggles an entire lifetime only to be met with an astonishing rush of posthumous fame.


So many people are disappointing. But not all of them.


You finish reading a book and immediately pass it along to a friend.


I always feel better when I’m writing. But when I’m not writing it never really works to force it.


Money isn’t real. It’s a fiction, a story. But money can do things that nothing else can do. So in that sense – at the level of power – it has some sort of greater reality.


Today on the radio I heard the host say “what a frustrating time to be alive” and I felt that.


Watching some online performances this past year has made me realize something I already knew. The thing I like most about live performance is the fact that you’re there in person and it’s live.


desire and doubt


I decided to try to read some of the books I already have instead of buying any new books for awhile. And even though many of the books I already have are really brilliant and compelling, for some reason whenever I make this decision it always leaves me slightly depressed.


2020 was really the year I learned the degree to which I’m actually an introvert.


After nine months of greatly reduced work schedule during the pandemic, and an enormous amount of self-reflection, I have come to the conclusion that I have absolutely no idea what I want out of life.


Instead of trying to be more successful, which has never really worked for me, I have decided to actively attempt to become less successful with the hope that this will also backfire.


Selling Out Is Hard To Do (to the tune of Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.)


The sweet spot between finished and unfinished.



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Every two years versus every four years...

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I've been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks. I had been complaining - mostly to myself but also occasionally online - that I was putting out too many books. I published books in 2014, 2016 and 2018. Every two years felt like far too often. (Complaining is never a good idea. Complaining online is even worse. And complaining about complaining, and doing so online - as I'm doing here - must be the very worst of the worst.) I felt I should give myself more time between books to think about them and to reinvent what I was working on. However, now I finished another book at the very beginning of this year, and (somewhat due to the pandemic) I'm still not exactly sure when it will come out or with who. If it had come out now it would have been two years after the last one, exactly what I was telling myself I no longer wanted to do. Most likely, it will come out in 2022, four years after the last one, which is what I was telling myself would be a much preferable schedule: every four years. I'm now working on yet another book, and I'm considering making it longer, and working on it more slowly, in order that it won't be finished until 2026 at the very earliest, to stay on this imagined, ideal every four year schedule. And yet I can't stop worrying about when the book that's already finished will come out. And what people will think about it. How will it be received. Before I was obsessively worrying that I was putting out books too frequently. And now I'm obsessively worrying that the book I've already finished won't come out soon enough. How does one become this neurotic and this not consequent? And does it have anything to do with the exact same impulses that made me a writer in the first place? At any rate, I genuinely feel there's a lesson for me to learn in all of this. As I often say: it's my nature to be dissatisfied. The object of my dissatisfaction seems almost to be beside the point.



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Six quotations on pessimism

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No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general.

[…]

Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts…)
– Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism



Pessimists shouldn’t be committed to pessimism. On the contrary, they should always be glad to be surprised when good things occur against the odds. It can thus precisely be pessimism that allows joy. Pessimism is not invested nihilism. It is the considered result of an analysis that suggests that the odds are not good. That what is faced is incomparable difficulty, and unless it is faced in the knowledge of how unlikely triumph will be, there is no chance at all.
– Rosie Warren, Some Last Words on Pessimism



Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.
– William James



Pessimism is an inner love for life. The pessimist is one who cannot enjoy the joys of life and is very conscious that he has the passion of the unsatisfied and of the unsatisfiable.
– Kiki Dimoula



it’s too late for pessimism and despair, they’re too popular
– Chris Cutler (in 1975)



I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad.
– Fernando Pessoa



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2020-2030 (There's something I like about it being a calendar decade.)

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Last night I was lying awake. I couldn't sleep. And I realized something that might be kind of stupid but felt like a revelation to me in the moment. I'm conceiving the book I'm currently writing - the telepathic kittens book - as the middle book in a trilogy. And I realized that if everything goes as planned the trilogy will take me approximately ten years to write and publish: 2020-2030. (There's something I like about it being a calendar decade.) And that each book in the trilogy might have been called Desire Without Expectation. I was originally thinking that Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim might be called Desire Without Expectation but then changed my mind (it's now the title of the first chapter.) And then Amateur Kittens Dreaming Solar Energy was also - for a while - going to be called Desire Without Expectation, but I again changed my mind. And now I'm thinking of calling the third book in the trilogy Desire Without Expectation, but of course might also change my mind. (Third time's a charm.) And each book of the trilogy is about some kind of utopia. The question of can we imagine something better, what would it be, and what does it mean to try. Of course I might die before I finish, or not finish for some other reason, and that would be another kind of utopia.



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Some favourite things from my 2020

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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 list is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. Normally there would be at least a few performances, but it seems I didn't really get to see any performances this year. What a strange thing that is.]


Music
Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari – Grounation
Damon Locks/Black Monument Ensemble – Where Future Unfolds
Mourning [A] BLKstar – The Cycle
Yves Tumor – Heaven to a Tortured Mind
Locate S,1 – Personalia
Thanya Iyer – KIND
US Girls – Heavy Light
Ben Reed – Station Masters
Nappy Nina - Dumb Doubt
Sandro Perri – Soft Landing
Destroyer - Have We Met
이날치 LEENALCHI - Sugungga
Stuart Moxham & Louis Philippe – The Devil Laughs
Carrie Cleveland – Looking Up: The Complete Works
NSRD – The Workshop For The Restoration Of Unfelt Feelings
Jody Glenham - Mood Rock
Vritra Burd – Wilma
Farai – Rebirth


Books
Beyond Survival – Edited by Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet – Edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan & Nils Bubandt
I Hotel – Karen Tei Yamashita
Dominoes at the Crossroads – Kaie Kellough
M Archive – Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Employees – Olga Ravn
Indelicacy – Amina Cain
Pew – Catherine Lacey
Trust Exercise – Susan Choi
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. – Sheung-King
Tender – Sofia Samatar
The Salt Roads – Nalo Hopkinson
Ferguson Interview Project – Ama Birch
The Lonely Letters – Ashon T. Crawley
Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara
We're On: A June Jordan Reader
Theory of Bastards – Audrey Schulman
Listening for Jupiter - Pierre-Luc Landry (Translated by Arielle Aaronson and Madeleine Stratford)


Stories and Poems read online
In the Beginning, Sometimes I Left Messages in the Street – Lisa Chen
Stranger Kinships – Fathima Cader
Three Finals – Orit Gat
53 Acts of Living – Canisia Lubrin
Heal Her – Ariana Reines


Film and Video:
Auxiliary Mirrors – Sanaz Sohrabi
Vases communicants – Edith Brunette & François Lemieux



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Songs Between Works

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[A edited version of this text appears in the exhibition catalogue for La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux.]



1.
I am reminded of something I wrote many years ago, that “maybe all works of art are some kind of polyamorous love songs, offerings sent out into the world in order to get everyone to love you. Works of art and literature are not directed towards one person but towards many. Songs in the sense of birdsong, messages thrown out into the world.” I’m not sure I still agree with this sentiment.


2.
There’s that lyric in the old Jane’s Addiction song that I misremember as:

I’ve never been in love / I don't know what it is / I only knows if someone wants me

Except in my version I think I might change it to:

I’ve never been in love / I don't know what it is / don’t even know if someone wants me

And I wonder if this is also something about making art. To make something you don’t know if anyone will want. And even after you’ve made it you might still not know. But these things, these makings, can sing to each other. Since artworks are in dialog with the viewer, and they may or may not be in dialog with history, but they are definitely also in dialog with each other. Such conversations are both seen and unseen, forming and reforming in space, over time, and in memory.


3.
I once read that solo exhibitions hewed too closely to the logic of the market and therefore only in a group exhibition does art have the potential to think against capital. I don’t know if I agree with this argument but, at the time, it certainly provoked me. Can one framework really be said to be more commercial or subversive than another regardless of the works within it?


4.
I have not yet seen La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux and therefore I am definitely not writing about it. Perhaps I am writing parallel to it. Or perhaps only parallel to my own thoughts and assumptions about art and the world. I know there is still something I love about art but often don’t know exactly what it is. It is something about love, about song, about sending something out into the unknown where it may or may not connect with a viewer or with other works. Where it may or may not become political or be seen as such. Where something might happen, but you have to have faith because there are no guarantees and it is not even completely clear just exactly what you must have faith in.

It is of course anthropomorphic to speak of birdsong as I first did. The birds clearly know what they are doing when they sing their songs: who the songs are for, who they are trying to attract. But even though the songs are not for us (unless you are a bird of the same species currently reading this), we have listened to them, and given them meaning, since the beginning of time. So I do sometimes like to think of art in the same way, beyond the artists intentions, artworks speaking to each other, singing to each other, clear across so many rooms. They don’t even know when someone wants them. But also they do.



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Douglas A. Martin Quote

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We will go on from here, in this essayistic work, of which Acker’s fantastic, crudely philosophical letters are only one part of what will be revealed, to arrive at an injunction to “Define to love.” She underscores in her original. Acker begins to do this by exploiting, and upsetting, comfortable rhetorical models of logic. For example, after the opposition “love of knowledge” versus “love of sex” is established to mirror – Acker’s word – the mind : body opposition, Acker decides such a separation is resolved by the logical progression of her next sentence, that: The lovers of knowledge and the lovers of sex both love cats. Other oppositions, and their resolutions through third terms, follow. Acker does what she says she will do here: “Define to love by increasing complexity.”

– Douglas A. Martin, Acker



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Three Trilogies

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Unrehearsed Beauty (1998)
Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007)
Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010)

Polyamorous Love Song (2014)
Rich and Poor (2016)
Authenticity Is A Feeling (2018)

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
The World Ends in Our Desires (2027)
Desire Without Expectation (2030)






(Man makes plans, God laughs.)



[Also, I'm gradually realizing that the current still-in-progress trilogy - Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, The World Ends in Our Desires, Desire Without Expectation - is all loosely based around questions concerning the desire for utopia.]



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Michael Eddy Quote

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One could argue, like Maus above, that the antidote to irony is actually authenticity. If the self-reflexivity I called for above meant authentic presence, maybe we could indeed eliminate the risk of artificiality in the vague appropriation? In a performance of Jacob Wren’s recent book Authenticity Is A Feeling, which recounts the history of PME-ART, the performance group he has headed for twenty years, Wren explained that his ultimate goal and what keeps him going is work that strips away the baroque theatricality of most performance art (like scripts, affectations, etc.). It may be odd to finish this essay on an example that seems to eschew the scaled plating of appropriation for some type of biographical vulnerability. But while I found Wren’s performance affecting, I also could not help finding it affected. “In a way this echoed something that had followed us since the beginning of the show: when you are being yourself, when you are trying to bring more of this reality into the performance situation, so many people think that because it is still theatre, taking place onstage everything you’re saying must not be true. Or at least they come expecting fiction, and when it’s so unclear how the things you’re saying match or don’t match this expectation, they can easily become suspicious.” In my suspicions of Wren’s call to “being yourself in a performance situation,” I display the ironic symptoms of so many people. But a few pages later, I get a sense of why I enjoy this suspicion, these symptoms: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.” Authenticity always also has a kernel of irony, not least when representation is involved. If we hope to find a more productive and just form of appropriation based on authenticity and sincerity, I have a hunch that scenes of self abuse would be necessary to make us feel possessed of our identities; or that dedication to a principle of opacity would firewall errant interpretation; or that it may not be appropriation after all.

- Michael Eddy, Vague Appropriation



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Karen Tei Yamashita Quote

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By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup – KDP, IWK, WMS, KSW, IHTA, CPA, CCA, EBS. On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed. We threw ourselves into the concerted work of myriad social and political projects, and we worked our butts off. Our commitment and our passion were irreproachable. We were in these years full-time revolutionaries, and we only thought about the revolution we were building, the fierce resistance to a system that served the few and propertied and wealthy, a social system that had failed our immigrant parents and grandparents, had denied their human rights because of their class and color. We learned to educate ourselves in a literature and culture of resistance, and finding ourselves gathered together at the very center of our Asian communities, we also began to educate ourselves in the practice of that resistance. And that practice gave us experience and power. We were young and powerful, and we were the future.

Well, that was the face of it, because over time, despite our agreed ideals, we came to hate each other. For some strange reason, once we entered one of those four inviting radical doors of the I-Hotel and gave our lives to any one of the projects within, our lives were transformed. Our transformation from individuals into collectives was precisely the thing that gave us power, but power has many sides to it, especially the power of a group. Feeling power, wielding power, demonstrating power. A group could act as a single fist or as an open handshake. Well, handshakes were not the tenor of our times. Perhaps it could be said that four mighty fists emerged from four doors to confront a common enemy, to fight in concert the foes of the I-Hotel, but we admit that very often the left fists did not follow the right fists, the punches did not follow the hooks and jabs; we could not agree on our tactics and strategies, and outside the safety of our doors, we avoided or passed each other in hostility, rushing off to our separate tactics and strategies.

We could blame this all on Lenin and Mao, the two leaders whose theory and practice had led to real revolutions, to the overturning of old social structures, and we were avid readers and interpreters of their theories and practices. They were our heroes. We thought they had realized our dreams. Thus we may have followed their principles of democratic-centralism, meaning in theory that we should all participate in our arguments but finally follow in the fierce unity of our majority decision. And we also believed that our arguments were necessary to our collective struggle, that each group was pursuing a line of thinking that would eventually be proven or disproven in practice, that at the end of our struggle, we would finally unite in common unity. Our struggles would make us stronger, more powerful. But we were young and inexperienced, and our fighting was very real, our ideas held just under the tender surface of our new skin and flared in our nostrils. We wanted to be right. We wanted to win.

After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods, and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting about if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we found and spent our youth.

– Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel



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Six Paul Valéry Quotes

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The path that leads from a confused idea to a clear idea is not made of ideas.



God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.



The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.



Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.



Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.



At times I think, and at times I am.



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Some passages from M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Some passages from M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs:



*


it hurt to move. it hurt to breathe. the food decline plateaued because it hurt so much to eat. and we were thick in our clothes for swelling. and when our eyes swole shut we couldn’t see. and then we finally saw. we saw it.

we hadn’t told the truth is so damn long.


*


at some point the work of pretending we weren’t going to die, that our children weren’t going to die, that our deaths and lives weren’t going to be forgotten, became unsustainable. it was hard enough to just breathe and metabolize. to find something to metabolize. to find people to metabolize near. now some people call it the true end of whiteness, when the world could finally operate based on something other than fear of blackness, of being, of death. but at the time all we knew was the story had run out. all the stories. of staying young to cheat death. of thinking young people wouldn’t die. of immortality via “making a difference.” of genetic imprint as stability. of stacking money and etching names on buildings. people used to do those things before. not to mention that they would not mention death and would hide the dying away and strive to protect the eyes of the children who already knew everything.

at some point. all the dead being here anyway and all of us here being obviously doomed, we let go of that particular game. and started breathing. and saw our hands.

we let go.

i felt like i could fly.


*


what we wanted was to want to. not to have to do anything. and the problem was we forgot after all these years of force what wanting was.

want was not getting, nor was it having. wanting was not needing. wanting was not having to have or needing not to need. it was not. and there was a wideness in wanting that didn’t quite fold in on itself. it deepened and rose up and radiated out and touched softly to itself with warm warning.


*


not knowing when made them reckless in their trust and irresponsible in their love attempts.


*


we questioned the end point of evolution when we noticed it wasn’t us.


*


so she happened to remember the time of the surface people who had hated and manipulated depth in their vain attempt to accept death. how they had blown the peaks off of mountains like this to dig out the darkness they couldn’t find in themselves. how they had blasted into the ground threatening all the underneath water to frack out the darkness they couldn’t trust in themselves. the surface people, she inhaled and exhaled, who blew a hole in the sky as big as what they were unwilling to know.


*


that was the challenge. to create oneself anew on a regular basis. it started with every seven years (also called the new cell cycle) and accelerated for the talented. to every three years, every year, every season, every month, every day until the prestige came from re-creating a self unrecognizable (to both your former self and the expectations of others) multiple times in any given day. they said it was towards the evolution of the community. a community that could not depend on previous expectations would have to evolve new needs. their individual shapeshifting was towards less collective dependence on a former world. let the new world meet us faster where we are! the people sometimes said to affirm a particularly brave invention.

they went from mostly not knowing their neighbors to perpetually not knowing themselves. which seemed more useful. and like the rare urban neighbor with the time to watch their transforming neighbors walk in and out their doors differently every day, the social media applications were even more useful for creating narrative out of the random moments of self-documentation offered by the digitally literate.

maybe that’s where they went wrong. the watching. because at some point the point changed from transforming need and evolving skills to performing further and further newness. as if novelty itself was the measure and the outcome and the point again. and eventually it distilled down to the same people looking different every day and going to the same places they always went just to provoke contrast and doing the same things they always did (eventually just the work of looking for and financing new costumes). so the challenge was called off around the time when it got most boring.

it wasn’t worth the use of fossil fuels.



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Dana Inkster Quote

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I disagreed with the producers’ throughout the production process. I disagreed with the producers’ often reiterated belief that the audience will not understand unless everything is spelled out. This impulse quashes the very power of what art brings to the expression. Art is in the multiplicity of reading. I am aware of my marginalized cultural perspective in relation to the vast majority of Canadian broadcast media I have consumed. My hypothesis in all contexts is: in the face of confusion, articulated questions can create meaning. Consensus about and agreement on meaning does not equate creation of knowledge. Consensus does not reflect a new way of seeing – which is my priority. Consensus reflects a whittling down of ideas.

– Dana Inkster, Blackness in the Atmosphere



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Authenticity Was A Feeling: A conversation between Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren

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Authenticity Was A Feeling:
A conversation between Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren
Monday August 24th, 8:30 Berlin Time
Online at Tanz im August




And you can of course still order the book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART here. 

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Richard Beck Quote

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The great historian Ellen Meiksins Wood has described America’s odd investment in what she calls “surplus” imperialism, the belief among America’s foreign policy establishment that it is not enough for America to be the most powerful country in the world — it must be the most powerful country by such a disproportionate margin that the very idea of anyone else overtaking it is unthinkable. In the words of Colin Powell in 1992, the US needs to be powerful enough “to deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage” (emphasis added). Or, in the words of George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy, “strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States” (again, emphasis added).

This may sound like the mindset of a comic-book villain, but America’s investment in surplus imperialism has a concrete, material basis. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been not only the world’s most powerful capitalist nation but the global custodian of capitalism itself. (That task had previously fallen to the system of European colonialism, which at its height occupied some 80 percent of the world.) In exchange for the privilege of enjoying the highest rates of consumption on earth, the United States also invests more than any other country in the direction, supervision, and maintenance of global capital flows. These investments take many forms, including the spearheading of free-trade agreements, the establishment of financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), support for governments that adhere to the capitalist consensus and the undermining of those that don’t, and the use of military force to pry open markets in cases where diplomacy and economic pressure aren’t enough. The “surplus” aspect of America’s imperialism is crucial, because capitalism requires stability and predictability through time in order to function smoothly. Investments need months, years, or decades to produce their returns, and people are only willing to invest their capital if they feel confident that the future is going to unfold in the way they expect. You don’t start producing almonds until you’re confident that almond milk isn’t just a passing fad, and you don’t move one of your factories to a new country if there’s a chance a leftist government will come to power and expropriate the factory. Financial markets move every day in response to changes in these ephemeral moods, and the financial press has names for them: uncertainty, consumer confidence, business expectations.

Surplus imperialism is an effort to keep uncertainty to a minimum. It’s good to be strong enough to defeat a country that attempts a military land grab against one of its neighbors (as with Saddam Hussein and Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War). But from the perspective of capital markets, it’s much better for the US to be so strong that nobody even thinks about attempting the land grab in the first place. And in a sense, the surplus imperialist mindset isn’t only or even primarily aimed at America’s enemies. Countries like Venezuela and North Korea are already perfectly aware that they have no hope of equaling American power. Rather, the psychological force of surplus imperialism is aimed squarely at America’s friends — countries on the make, like Turkey, India, and Brazil, which are discouraged from getting any big ideas about creative new alliances even as the brute facts of America’s declining power unfold in full view, year after year — and frenemies like Russia and China, regional powers with whom a full-scale military confrontation remains unimaginable, but only so long as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping agree there’s no upside to imagining it.

American imperialism is not a recent development, and neither are American military interventions in pursuit of imperialist goals. But the kind of surplus imperialism to which the US is now committed, accounting for nearly 40 percent of global military spending on its own, is new. It dates roughly from the end of the cold war, and it has produced a doctrine under which the US can take military action anywhere in the world whenever it wants, with no explanation required. The tradition of “just war,” which previously dominated political rhetoric about military action, was flexible to the point of near incoherence, but at the very least it demanded that war be declared with a specific goal in mind, that it be declared by an appropriate authority, and that the destruction inflicted be proportionate to the aims one hoped to achieve. All of that went out the door with George W. Bush and the global war on terror. The country’s new rationale for military action became a part of American law when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in September 2001. As Wood puts it, “military action now requires no specific aim at all.”

- Richard Beck, We Used to Run This Country



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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Quote

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We can’t win with the idea that only black people can fight for black people, white people should fight for working class white people, Latinos should only fight for themselves. We can’t win that way. And we have a lifetime of experience over the previous century that is proof of that. And I like to think of myself as an Afro optimist. I think that the black struggle in this country has been a source of inspiration for people around the world, because this is the most exploitative, the most oppressive country, just simply because it has the resources to be different. You know, this is not a struggling republic that has no money and resorts to brute force in order to eke out an existence. This is the richest country in the history of the world, where its ruling class deliberately sets poor and working class people in opposition to each other, to maintain wealth at the top of our society. And we acquiesce to that politically by reinforcing the lines of division that they have drawn in the first place. And so we have to think about solidarity as not an exercise in finding the least contentious issue around which to organise, so that’s not what we’re arguing for. We’re arguing for an informed solidarity based on an understanding of the oppression of black people and a rejection of it, an understanding of the oppression and exploitation of immigrant labour in the United States and a rejection of it. And that’s hard. It is hard. But there’s no other way. There’s no shortcut. There’s no way to circumvent the need for what Combahee talked about as coalition-building and the need for what is actually playing out in the streets right now, which is a multiracial rebellion against capitalism and the excesses of it. And so people want to be in a movement. People want to be a part of an effort to transform this country. And no one should be told that you can’t be a part of it, you know? And so to me, that’s part of what it means to democratise our movements, to open them up and to struggle. You know, we have to struggle with each other. And we can’t have this kind of sacrosanct approach to politics where you don’t get to say the wrong thing. You don’t get to make a mistake. And if you do, then you’re banished from organising. Because the reality is if that is the standard that we are creating, then we’ll never have a mass movement of ordinary people who’d make those mistakes and say those things all the time. And so if it’s you and your 12 friends who had your American studies seminar and your women’s studies seminar, and you figured out what all the language is, then that’s great, and good luck. But if we’re actually going to build a movement of the masses who are affected by this, then we have to have some grace, then we have to listen to people. We have to understand what their struggles are. And we have to find a way to knit ourselves together into a force that can actually fight for the world that we want. And that’s hard. And it’s much harder than just saying ‘you people go to the back because you haven’t experienced what it’s like to be called the N word’. We’re not going to get anywhere with that. And we have to have a different vision of politics to fight for the kind of world that we want.

- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, from the interview How do you change things?



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Enters performing at Suoni Per Il Popolo

Enters [Alexei Perry Cox · Jacob Wren · Radwan Ghazi Moumneh] live at Montréal's Hotel2Tango on Wednesday, June 17, 2020 as part of the Suoni Per Il Popolo.



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Vulnerable Paradoxes / May 27-31

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We've been working on Vulnerable Paradoxes for so long and now it's finally going to happen. When we started it was a live event. And now, for obvious reasons, it will be online. So curious what everyone will say and do. So grateful that so many remarkable artists are participating: Aisha Sasha John + Dana Michel + Dayna Danger + Elena Stoodley + Kama La Mackerel + Kamissa Ma Koïta + Lara Kramer + Mai t̶h̶i Bach Ngoc Nguyen + Malik Nashad Sharpe + Milton Lim + nènè myriam konaté + Po B. K. Lomami + Sonia Hughes

You can find all the details here.



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A pushing into the mainstream of something that wasn't quite there before.

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Over the last week or two I've been listening to a lot of John Prine, Tony Allen, Kraftwerk and Little Richard. I'm not sure there's any other circumstances in which I'd find myself thinking of these artists together. But I find myself starting to think that they do all have something in common. A certain stubbornness and panache. A pushing into the mainstream of something that wasn't quite there before. There is also something along the lines of Prine being framed as a "songwriter's songwriter." (Which reminds me of this quote from Prine: "In my songs, I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.") These are all artists who have influenced and inspired so many other artists. I was especially struck by both Dylan and Jagger speaking about how much Little Richard has meant to them (which echoes the extent to which rock 'n' roll is just white artists ripping off black music.) And I can't think of Kraftwerk without also thinking of Afrika Bambaataa. Hip Hop is of course filled with Tony Allen samples and Allen was respected and admired by drummers of every stripe. I've never quite formulated this before, but maybe that's something I should consider more with artists. When they're admired by other artists it really seems to mean something about the breadth and depth of the work, the ways their influences radiate out in every direction.












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Ama Ata Aidoo Quote

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Do I think it must always be so? Certainly not. It can be changed. It can be better. Life on earth need not always be some humans being gods and others being sacrificial animals. Indeed, that can be changed. But it would take so much. No, not time. There has always been enough time for anything anyone ever really wanted to do. What it would take is a lot of thinking and a good deal of doing. But one wonders whether we are prepared to tire our minds and our bodies that much. Are we human beings even prepared to try?

– Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes



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the joy of using less

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I've been trying to come up with an environmental slogan along the lines of: the joy of using less. About how when we consume less resources, and instead focus on what's most important, our lives have the potential to become better rather than worse. I'm also searching for the anti-capitalist edge to it, since capitalism relies on so much overconsumption and waste. Something about how using less becomes joyous when it's a collective effort toward meaningful survival. But I don't feel I'm quite on the right track.



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Some Bandcamp Suggestions

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[As you may already know, today (May 1), as well as on June 5, and July 3 (the first Friday of each month), Bandcamp is waiving their revenue share for all sales on Bandcamp, from midnight to midnight PDT on each day in order to help artists and labels impacted by the pandemic. Since, as I frequently mention, I really love lists, I thought I would take this moment to share a few of my Bandcamp suggestions as follows.]


Spellling – Mazy Fly

SACRED//PAWS - Run Around The Sun

Tony Allen - Black Voices

Tony Allen - HomeCooking

Tony Allen - NEPA

The Lijadu Sisters - Sunshine

The Lijadu Sisters - Horizon Unlimited

Paradis Artificiel - Paradis Artificiel

Richard Dawson - 2020

Hélène Barbier - Have You Met Elliott?

Witch Prophet - DNA ACTIVATION

Farai - Rebirth

Irreversible Entanglements - Who Sent You?

Moor Mother - CLEPSYDRA

700 Bliss - Spa 700

dj haram - Grace

Mohamed Lamouri & Groupe Mostla - Underground Raï Love

Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari - Grounation

Nappy Nina - Dumb Doubt

Nappy Nina - 30 Bag

Wilma Vritra - Burd

Meara O'Reilly - Hockets for Two Voices (EP)

Idris Ackamoor and the Pyramids - Rhapsody in Berlin Pt. 1 & 2

Angel Bat Dawid - The Oracle

Angel Bat Dawid - Transition East

Ben Reed - Station Masters

Davis - Green Parakeet Suite

Fatima - And Yet It's All Love

Joe Maneri, Udi Hrant and Friends - The Cleopatra Record

KeiyaA - Forever- Ya Girl

Locate S-1 - Healing Contest

Malphino - Visit Malphino

Mourning [A] BLKstar - Reckoning

Mourning [A] BLKstar - The Cycle

NSRD - The Workshop For The Restoration Of Unfelt Feelings

Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978​-​1992

Outro Tempo II

Good God! Apocryphal Hymns

Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal

Good God! Born Again Funk

Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980​-​1991

Nextlife

Richenel - Perfect Stranger

その他の短編ズ / sonotanotanpenz - 31

Ivy Sole - Overgrown

Mammane Sani et son Orgue - La Musique Electronique du Niger

Nadah El Shazly - Ahwar

RP Boo - I'll Tell You What!

Sweet As Broken Dates Lost - Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa

The Sorority - Pledge

Zatua - Sin Existencia

Mega Bog - Gone Banana

Mega Bog - Happy Together

Mega Bog - Dolphine

Edwyn Collins - Understated

Robert Forster - Inferno

Peter Perrett - How The West Was Won

serpentwithfeet - blisters

Eucalyptus - Fascination In Sound

TOOLS YOU CAN TRUST - Working And Shopping

Marion Cousin & Kaumwald - Tu rabo par'abanico

Deena Abdelwahed - Dhakar

Main Attrakionz - 808s & Dark Grapes II

Sandro Perri - Soft Landing

Nicholas Krgovich - IN AN OPEN FIELD

Elysia Crampton - Elysia Crampton

Frank and His Sisters - Frank and His Sisters

The Mauskovic Dance Band - The Mauskovic Dance Band

Kelan Philip Cohran & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

MIKE - tears of joy

MIKE - War in my Pen

Ric Wilson, Terrace Martin - They Call Me Disco

Klein - ONLY

Klein - Tommy

Klein - Lifetime

Klein - Frozen

Lolina - Live in Paris

Lolina - The Smoke

Nyege Nyege Tapes - Sounds of Sisso

DJ Rashad - Double Cup

Tirzah - Devotion

Okkyung Lee - Yeo​-​Neun

Nancy Dupree - Ghetto Reality




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"so fierce that the phrase buggy-whip maker became a business simile for loser"

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I've been thinking about this quote regularly since I first read it in 2015:


"In 1915, as the American economy boomed, the huge supply chain that supported horse-drawn transport—harnesses and horseshoes, wagons and buggies makers (13,000 of them), farriers and blacksmiths, hay balers and feedmills—looked like a robust and vital segment for deploying capital. 1920 was the year of “Peak Horse” in the U.S.. By 1940 it was gone. This was not “low-cost”, incremental progress. It was an economic disruption so fierce that the phrase “buggy-whip maker” became a business simile for loser."


And I thought of it again the other day when I read the headline:


The day oil was worth less than $0 — and nobody wanted it


And then, a few days later, this headline:


Big Banks Pull Financing, Prepare To Seize Assets From Collapsing Oil and Gas Industry


If environmentalists, meaning (I believe or at least hope) the majority of us, find as many ways as possible to seize the moment, I don't see why this couldn't be the beginning of the end for the fossil fuel industry.




[The first quote is from Carl Pope's 2015 article Get Ready for Ugly as "Free Markets" Begin to Deal With Climate Crisis.]



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"Those are really my people."

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"I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes."

- an excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART



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And it's the exact same virus.

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There's something I've been thinking about a lot. In Germany the fatality rate is estimated to be around 1%. And in Italy the fatality rate is somewhere over 10%. And it's the exact same virus.

The virus is one thing, but political factors surrounding it - the ways governments and societies handle the situation - really seem to have a rather large role.

I might have known this before but I never quite understood it in such a visceral way.



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Last night I couldn't sleep...

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Last night I couldn't sleep. And I started thinking about how, in the early months of 2020, before the lockdown, I went to a series of cultural events that, each in their own way, completely blew me away. It felt like I was on a roll. There were four amazing Drawn & Quarterly book launches: Lisa Robertson, Kai Cheng Thom, Desmond Cole and Kaie Kellough. Each of these events was completely packed, almost too packed, and each of these writers said so many things, almost too many things, I found so thought-provoking and moving. And then there was Le Short & Sweet recyclé XXL, which also was an almost never-ending stream of artists and moments where it continuously felt like something was really happening. Then the last event I went to, the bilingual reading Épiques Voices, that also just had so much striking and performative work in both languages. And since then I have not been in a single over-crowded room. Already it all seems so long ago.



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Boycott

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Boycott Amazon.
They are pandemic profiteers.



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Ideas for Pandemic Short Stories

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A large number of healthy young people volunteer to contract the virus and live together in a luxury quarantine hotel in order to, over time, boost herd immunity.


In the early days of the pandemic, before many people know what it is, a young man contracts the virus and immediately decides to pay a visit to the now elderly priest who abused him as a child.


In a misguided suicide attempt, an elderly man tries, and fails, to contract the virus.


Waiting in line to get tested for the virus, two strangers meet and fall in love. When they receive their test results one of them has tested positive and the other negative.


People sit alone in their apartments wondering how long this will last.


A young, would-be dictator considers the possibility that “voluntary social distancing” might be the key to his future success.


For the first time in history a socialist is about to be elected president. And then the pandemic hits.


An activist group devises a means of protest in which every protester stands exactly six feet away from ever other protester.


A meeting at which everyone arrives, washes their hands, sits six feet away from each other, and talks.


A politician, having been told the pandemic is completely under control, takes a wrong turn and ends up in one of the poorest neighbourhoods, where he learns things aren’t under control at all.


A new couple meet and fall in love just as the pandemic strikes and spend three months locked in their apartment having sex in every possible way.


The virus rapidly spreads through the police force.


At the factory where they assemble the virus tests, the poorly paid workers contract the virus and spread it through the tests.


As he lies in bed dying of the virus, an elderly right-wing billionaire – who spent his entire life fighting against public services (especially against public healthcare) – reflects on the fact that if there had been more effective healthcare the virus might not have spread so rapidly and therefore he might not be dying now.


A mutual aid group acquire a ventilator and teach themselves how to use it by watching YouTube tutorials.


During a rent strike, the landlord comes over to meet the tenants as a group and, for the first time, they end up having a real discussion about all of their lives.


A vaccine is developed and the world rejoices. But soon scientists discover it is only effective in fifty percent of the population and no one can figure out why.


A woman recounts the life story of her parents, who tragically both passed away at the exact same time.


Two science aficionados are arguing on Twitter over whether the actual fatality rate is 1% or 0.8%, when one of them receives a text message that his childhood best friend has died.


The author recounts reading two different online articles about the virus, as each one presents a set of facts that are basically opposite to the other.


An anti-vaxxer has a deep crisis of faith.


A Hollywood screenwriter pitches a superhero film in which all the superheroes catch the virus. The pitch does not go well.




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Rob Horning Quote

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When Gene Simmons insists that he wants to “rock and roll all night and party everyday,” we should understand that as an admission that not only does he fail to do those things, but he is in dire need of convincing himself that he actually wants to.

- Rob Horning



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Bernadette Mayer Quote

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Something shifts and as Wittgenstein would say, and anybody else not normal, to take some pleasure in being obsessively careful, to quietly comb out the baby’s hair and take one’s time, to decorate the children with ribbons and whisper to them, to prepare special foods, secret inducements, to linger conversing about the dreams in bed, to encourage the counting of peanuts, these are the methods of the usual, inducements to the ordinary, to pass the time, to adduce pleasure, to encounter danger, to see silver spots before the eyes without fear, the safest form with which to take risks, the advertisement of the days of misery if I can still look up and see the man with the glove and a chance image of the accumulation of objects, the storehouse of pictures which will not work out in memory, there’s only one time when you can’t be doing this or that kind of work and have something like a drink make it easier than it is, and that’s when you’re giving birth to a baby but there’s nothing new about that.

– Bernadette Mayer, from The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters



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One of my first thoughts in the early days of the pandemic...

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One of my first thoughts in the early days of the pandemic was: social distancing and closing borders, those are things dictators like.

I knew I had to be careful how I said such things. These were also scientifically proven strategies to reduce exponentiality, contain the situation and reduce harm. Any hint of denying the science couldn’t help but remind me of climate change deniers, people only making the situation worse. Nonetheless, how science is interpreted is always political and metaphors of contagion have most often been used in politically heinous ways.

I have to admit, from a political standpoint, and from most other standpoints as well, nothing about it felt good. (But, of course, a pandemic isn’t supposed to “feel good.”) Already, for my entire lifetime, people were so isolated and alienated. Working together and solidarity were already so difficult to achieve and I couldn’t see many ways in which social distancing might make any of it easier. And obviously so many on the far right want nothing else but to close as many borders as they can find. Pandemic or not, closing borders seemed like little more than a band-aid solution and it felt extremely dangerous to think of it positively.

And yet, or so I told myself, as I always try to tell myself, in any situation there must be certain possibilities for emancipatory change. Beyond distancing and closing, there was some way for all of this to shine a brighter light on what is missing. To clarify the many ways we must continue to care for each other. To lead to greater openness in the long run. But I am extremely worried this will not be the case.



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Momus: Oblivion

Sometimes the speed at which Momus produces songs makes them really effective:

The Air Contains Honey residency at Ursa

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In 2018 Adam Kinner and Jacob Wren wanted to start an orchestra. They wrote a number of songs, each consisting of a one-sentence quote, and called it The Air Contains Honey. Now they are inviting an ever-shifting and significant number of their friends to join them on stage. For the first three Tuesdays in March, at URSA, the orchestra of professional and amateur musicians will gather in search of a warmth and community spirit that they may or may not find. For the audience, and for the musicians, too, it will be a chance to hear an orchestra that discovers its sound as it goes. 


Three Tuesdays in a row: March 3rd, 10th & 17th. 


This is only the beginning...

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the final footnote

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The final footnote in Georges Bataille's final unfinished book reads:


"I don't intend to deal in this work with the question of the means of acting effectively. However, I will set out the principles of such action elsewhere."


We're still waiting.



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star systems

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Thinking about all the ways art (in every discipline) is and isn't a star system, how at a certain point in some artists careers opportunities apparently continue to accrue because of their name and almost in spite of the work, and also how the search for new artists is connected to a fantasy that they too might some day find themselves in this confusing yet enviable position. And also all the artists who have had some but not that much success, where the appreciation seems to me to be more directly connected to the work they're making right now, but this also might be a kind of illusion. And how the many different ways I understand integrity in relation to making work has changed so much over the years to the point where I'm not exactly sure what I mean by it anymore but know it's something I still believe in even as my understanding of it continues to change.



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PME-ART in Vancouver

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PME-ART will be coming to Vancouver for PuSh with three different events:

February 5th & 6th: A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling
Facebook Event

February 7th: The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
Facebook Event

February 8th: Bring Your Own Record / Listening Party
Facebook Event

This is our first time ever performing in Vancouver, proving that anything is possible.



Bonus: PuShy Questions with Jacob Wren from The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information



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