I Could Not Believe It (2023) Before Sean DeLear was an icon of the “Silver Lake scene”—one of the few Black musicians in a predominantly white punk world, lead singer in Glue, one of Vaginal Davis’s frequent collaborators—they were Tony, a horny fifteen-year-old growing up in predominantly white Simi Valley, who thought glory holes, Donna Summer and roller skates were “bitchen.” Water beds were also bitchen. So were cocks. As for school… “Oh well.” While queer coming of age stories often mean overcoming internalized shame, Sean is––impressively, delectably—shameless. This is, in part, because I Could Not Believe Itis a diary, published posthumously after DeLear’s unexpected 2017 death by Semiotext(e). But this attitude is of its era, too. In 1979, pre-AIDS, gay sex is abundant, even in buttoned-up Simi: the bowling alley is a cruising ground, and so is the roller… Read More...

I Didn't See You There (2022) When you spend time with someone, you see the surrounding world with them, but not as they see it. In his documentary feature I Didn't See You There (2022), Reid Davenport overcomes the rarity of a shared horizon by keeping the camera in his lap. And, at the speed of his wheelchair rattling across the Oakland sidewalk, viewers are invited along. When able-bodied people gain access to disabled peoples’ company, they usually consider it an ennobling event. It's a condescending position Reid disallows by committing to sharing nothing more or less than some time with him and his thoughts. The realism is grounding, and the lack of parable or even priority to what an able-bodied person could gain from the film allows it to feel fresh and bracing. It's as satisfying and pleasant an encounter as… Read More...

2013 comic from The Knife: End Extreme Wealth  In 2013, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez wrote that income inequality in the United States was the highest it had been since the Great Depression, and due to the modest policy response, “it seems unlikely that US income concentration will fall much in the coming years.”  Swedish electronic music group The Knife echoed the same sentiment in a companion comic to their 4th studio album, Shaking the Habitual. To shake up the habitual rhetoric of patronizing, top-down NGO-ified “global poverty” initiatives, the duo worked with artist Liv Stömquist to produce “End Extreme Wealth.” The comic treats extreme wealth as what it is: an increasingly confused symptom of a deeply sick system. In reversing the thematic considerations of an institution like the UN, “End Extreme Wealth” lambasts the unipolar focus of such bodies on… Read More...

“The Limits of David Foster Wallace” by Isabel Pabán Freed The shape of depression is often hedging. Writers are asked not to hedge; being sure of oneself is necessary to get from point A to point B, we’re told. In Isabel’s essay, she mobilizes her own hedging to a syntactically innovative end. In the piece, she cannot confront David Foster Wallace’s limits without first tackling her own; and she knows she hasn’t achieved the epic treatise she envisioned. Our articles rarely become our treatises, and yet they have value––but this can be increasingly difficult to believe as writers must desperately compete for a shrinking pool of resources. In the same way, this essay on David Foster Wallace is tender, well-researched and written, and valuable. Regardless of your feelings about David Foster Wallace, this essay is worth a read and reread. “The… Read More...

Doom Generation 4k Restoration An uncensored director’s cut of Doom Generation, a “heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki” shot “on location in hell,” premiered at Sundance for the first time since 1995 in April, and has just begun a theatrical run in Chicago and NYC. The second installment of Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse series follows a Bonnie and Clyde-like ménage a trois between Jordan (James Duval), Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan, pre dating Marilyn Manson and Me Too) as they murder and fuck their way through the convenience stores of America. Flooded with blood red lights and interiors, Doom Generation takes place in a post-war world where the wrong side won. Which it had: released in the wake of AIDS, you can barely hear the sounds of “victory” over the noise of the dead. Critics panned Doom Generation for… Read More...

This Sunday, we've curated a selection of reading around the theme of motherhood. “Rather than being universal, motherhood is always figured within a necropolitical, racializing logic that constructs the appropriately maternal as white, as is the nation it reproduces and resurrects,” writes JB Brager in “Bad Mothers” (2011). The piece analyzes Ruby C. Tapia’s American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal (2011) alongside “the public spectacle that is the Casey Anthony murder trial, playing simultaneously on two televisions, volume on, at my doctor’s office.” Instead of zooming in on the albeit horrible details of the case––Anthony was accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee––Brager looks at how dichotomous visions of motherhood (saintly, evil) are socially manufactured, and to what effect. “While teen pregnancy is stereotyped as a racialized epidemic of burgeoning inner-city welfare queens in public service and political campaigns,… Read More...

Many years ago, when the internet was far less corporate, a group of readers curated a reading list of the pieces they found most worth their time. It eventually became a regular feature at TNI, and it is in that same spirit of sharing motivated purely out of a desire to connect over some common impulse, interest, or learning, that we’d like to introduce the latest iteration of Sunday Reading––a biweekly newsletter from the editors at TNI. Consider it a dispatch from our open tabs. We invite you to read with us: editors Ayesha, Charlie, and Anna. My thanks goes to the original Sunday Reading curators (2011-2017), for lending their name to what we hope will be a similarly enriching endeavor: Aaron Bady, Queen Arsem-O'Malley, Kerim Friedman, Jacob Remes, Elizabeth Angell, bint battuta, Frank A Pasquale, Aishwarya Subramanian, Reclaim UC, Javier Arbona, Sridala… Read More...