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)
Desire Without Expectation (2027)
Faithful Unbeliever (2030)




(Man makes plans, God laughs.)

(I am gradually realizing that in the current still-in-progress trilogy - Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Desire Without Expectation, Faithful Unbeliever - all three books are based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.)

(Also, all of the published books have been, or are in the process of, being translated into French by Le Quartanier and Éditions Triptyque.)

(If you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.)





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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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