“But perhaps the most striking and frightening aspect of the German flight from reality is the habit of treating facts as though they were mere opinions.” Hannah Arendt The Aftermath of Nazi Rule – Report from Germany. (1950) Hannah Arendt was born today in 1906. These days, her theories and commentary feels all too relevant.
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You’re So Pretty When You Hate
Punk is really at its best when its angry and abrasive – and Deutsche Laichen, a decidedly queer feminist punk band from Göttingen, Germany, are really, really abrasive. Their self-titled debut LP is almost physical in its rejection of toxic masculinity, homophobia and (cis)sexism. Case in point: “Du bist so schön, wenn du hasst”, the …
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) The above quote is from her 1993 Nobel Lecture, which I can only recommend. Of all her novels and essays, the lecture is perhaps my favorite piece of writing of hers, the one I return to most often, and not just because I quoted it in my master’s thesis.
“Trust Love All the Way”: Go See If Beale Street Could Talk
If Beale Street Could Talk, the Barry Jenkins movie based on the James Baldwin novel of the same name, is a fantastic, beautiful, political, loving movie. Trish Rivers and Fonny Hunt are a young Black couple in love and expecting a baby when Fonny is arrested for a rape he didn’t commit. https://youtu.be/N4m3t3G3Zqc Barry Jenkins …
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Post-Everything: My Favorite Songs of 2018
I’ve stopped attempting to make a top 5 list of my favorite songs of the year quite some time ago. Instead, I have a running list of songs I’ve loved every year on Spotify. Here is the 2018 list. I don’t think I’ve listened to this much punk and angry pop music in years. Must …
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My Instagram #2018BestNine
My 9 most-liked images on Instagram of 2018. Seems about right, my year was pretty much dominated by (working next to) Lindau harbor, trips to Kleinwalsertal, Brandnertal, books, and her. Happy holidays, my friends, may 2019 bring more peace, health, and blog posts.
“Do You Favor the Country Becoming More Politically Correct?” Is Not a Neutral Question
A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll and the connected article results in what they call a “warning for Democrats: Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.” The question in the poll, like the framing of the article, is.. odd.The full question is: “In general, are you in favor of the United States becoming …
“In trying to see and hear what professional critics never see and hear, I felt as though I was attending one endless block party. In New York City, Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction has clearly become Baudrillard’s cybernetic apocalyptic ecstasy of communication, in which everything is repeated to the point of meaninglessness. Or is it rather that …
John Kelly and Convenient Cultural Amnesia
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer, comments about John Kelley’s remarks on immigrants: Convenient amnesia about one’s origins is an all-American trait, since we believe ourselves to be the country in which everyone gets a new beginning. What some of us also forget is that at nearly every stage of our country’s …
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“I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow. “
So far the most surprising, beautiful sentence in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power. It’s about his wife and part of one of the meta-essays that introduce his previously published essays in this collection. Some have aged better than others, but the meta-essays alone are worth the read alone. Man, that guy can write.
CLARITY AND CHAOS 