The Malignant Melancholy
There are, broadly, two kinds of structural lonelinesses. One is the benign loneliness of the socially alienated, the other the malignant melancholy of the erstwhile master.
How to Destroy a Community
...of sustained low-level misery. “The trick is to find what the enemy hates the most and feed it to them nonstop. You listen to their discourse and find the core...
Miracle on 214th Street
...its wilder moments, elements of popular culture infused her apocalypse—UFOs, vampires, a “Soviet death ray.” While the content of Lueken’s visions troubled parish authorities, the crowds of pilgrims that gathered...
Paris/Maidan
Two Letters on the Uprising in France
The Science of Making CS Gas “Safe”
The idea that tear gas is "safe" was produced through violent experimentation on working-class colonial subjects
I see no better place
...He attempted to sing songs of resistance, his hands bloody stumps, only to be gunned down as people in the stands tried to join him in chorus. I didn't want...
A Union of Poets
An interview with organizers of the Union of Radical Workers and Writers, the Resist Retail Nihilism conference, and the Worker Writers School
Walking in L.A.
...disrupt the music. These voices question Andersen’s film and his motives. “You wanna see Los Angeles?” one man asks. “Go inside this bus and look at the people. All kinds...
gifts
...with. In this old lovers’ quarrel between liberty and community, Westerners are those who defend freedom and long for attachment. The tone of country-and-western music must be the American complement...
Loving Franko B
...like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner up the hill to his house, shadows of limes and roses blowing in the car window and music spraying...
Love Craft
...if The Stone Roses’s “I Wanna Be Adored” Of the Theban musician Ismenias, Atheas, King of the Scythians, declared he liked his music "better than the braying of an ass."...
Baghdad, Utopia
...forcefully through images, stories, music, and the physical presence of those people who bear its marks. As I grew up, Baghdad was in the kitchen, in huge jars filled with...
Some Blues but Not the Kind That’s Blue
In music and literature, Jay-Z and Percival Everett meditate on maturity, black masculinity, and the confessional drive of the artist’s life
Lil B The Based God @ The New Museum 4/12
...than five years, representing a new phase for both rap music and celebrity. Lil B is a published author and the architect of the “Based” lifestyle—a philosophy that encourages young...
Matchmaking
A good online-dating profile strategy, like a strong brand, turns a suspect into a prospect, and a prospect into a buyer
Novel Evil
The Holocaust is popularly narrativized through tropes that erase resistance efforts in favor of redemption arcs, redefining “never again” to the advantage of fascists.