In a moment when the voices of the oppressed are ringing out across the world, Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance brings us toward the literary beginnings of modernism so that we can learn to listen for difference, which … Continue reading “On Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance“
Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse observes that “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle” (72). This, in short, … Continue reading “The Politics of Aesthetics in Anticolonial Thought: A Review of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz”
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: Hold Your Breath”
Jazz, declared saxophonist Archie Shepp in 1966, “is anti-war; it is opposed to [the war in] Vietnam; it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That is the nature of jazz. That’s not far fetched. Why … Continue reading “On Free Jazz Communism“
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”
