Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020) is (a) concise, necessarily unsettling, Black anarchist work. Here, the propinquity between “Black” and “anarchist” may confuse the reader, as the Black radical tradition and anarchist politics are not … Continue reading “On Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness“
When director Richard Williams set out to make Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in 1988, no one had really attempted anything like it before. Although, of course, people had. If you’re anything like me, for example, you remember the several extraneous … Continue reading “Eyelines”
My shoulders stiffen the first time I watch Southern Comfort (2001), the film Kate Davis made documenting the last year of Robert Eads’s life. I am aware of the eyes and bodies in attendance, late 2018. I notice my companions … Continue reading “A Love Story”
The year is 1974, the place is Central Park. The jazz musician and iconoclast Sun Ra appears in the park’s band shell “with a hundred musicians, including six drummers, ten bass players, ten trumpets, ten trombones, and three French horns.” … Continue reading “Utopia in Black”
How can a short, single, stable text account for a set of interpersonal, collective, cinematically ephemeral experiences? In mathematics, a fractal is a geometrical figure in which each part has the same statistical character as the whole. The Black Aesthetic, … Continue reading “On The Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors“
This excerpt is from a short novel, “Dudeboy,” included in The Life & Times of Steve Orth, a collection of fiction and poetry forthcoming in October 2020 from Dogpark Collective. Chapter 1 I’m at my apartment and I’m just chilling … Continue reading “from “Dudeboy””
In Germany, you can see trashy signs all over that summarize the commodity fetish with such acuity that describing them feels indulgent and derivative. I could never come up with anything so apt so who am I to try and … Continue reading “Ova und Mehr”
Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: Brazil’s Necropolitical Melodrama”
Follow Me trauma’d palm trees listening with the crawl space rat’s path toward ashes sniffing the home depot stones & methane drains to contain our watery sex & shit from flooding vice against the vined wire bordering where our pending … Continue reading “Three Poems”
Anthropocene The end of the world is so basic. Oh hey there’s Eugene. Hey Eugene! Recently she’s obsessed with death, she says. One death she studies is in manuscript template: Crowbar belle lettrist in a suite of marjoram. I’m sorry … Continue reading “Three Poems”
At the beginning of the crisis, we decided we wanted to create records of daily life and its ephemera. The following selection of entries documents the indoor crisis of March into mid-May in the merged and anonymized diaries of three … Continue reading “COVID Diary”
Pindar carving horses out of instituted soap “Storm-swift” horses clocking rhomboid contour into the afterworld— song’s demi-glaze encasing moneyed sky, custard blush. Heracles made pillars being tubes that siphoned cash all the way into the … Continue reading “Nemean 1 the Starrrrrrs are out”
The funeral parlor, body on slab, is the archetype of more than one branch of transsexual horror. Frankenstein is probably the most immediate resonance: a corpse, laid out prone, then meddled with by a deranged doctor, rises from the plinth … Continue reading “Blood Pink”
We opened our exchange at the beginning of May–almost two months after New York has issued a shelter in place order. We end just before the 4th of July (or “the 4th you lie” as it’s known in some Black … Continue reading “Letters”
“We step into another world when the smiling face of Miss. Savage welcomes us into her sanctuary of industry and dreams …….. !” In 1934, Linden LaRue Perrine wrote a report of a visit to the basement studio of the … Continue reading “Augusta Savage’s Invitation to Study”
