Sarah

My friend Yng just recently opened an Art Gallery and Art Shop in Boston and I am thrilled for her!

I love the name of her company, Praise Shadows, which was apparently inspired by this book by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Today I was just perusing her online shop and yep, I am totally getting one of these baseball hats.

Good luck Yng. I am so excited for this new chapter in your life!

What were we obsessed with, invested in, and beset by in 2020? Hazlitt’s writers reflect on the issues, big and small. Keep up with this year’s series here.

Every afternoon, day after day after day after day, my husband and I set aside our work or, depending on what we read in the news, our failed intention to work. We put on our shoes, loop our face masks around our necks, and set off on an hour-long walk around our neighborhood.

The section of Portland where we live is so quiet many longtime Portlanders have never passed through. We often walk for blocks in the middle of the street. We settled here just seven months before the shutdown, and I barely started to explore my new city before it shrunk to the size of Arbor Lodge.

After a quarter-century in San Francisco and a two-decade-long career writing about food for newspapers, I quit both in the summer of 2019. My husband, a longtime Portlander himself before we met, and I moved back to the city he missed to buy a house. I was just emerging from my perennial disorientation when the March shutdown hit, and now I leave home so rarely I need Google Maps to drive across town. In Arbor Lodge, however, I am familiar with every block and every yard.

Portlanders, I’ve learned after hundreds of walks, are prodigious gardeners. For the last seven months Christian and I have traced the course of the year in blooms, each one ubiquitous for just a few days. A week when the giant purple irises unfurl. A week the white-flowered dogwoods erupt, and another when the coral-hued dogwoods join them. A week when the perfume from the giant lindens pools in the streets and seeps through our window screens.

Our new house has a scraggly lawn, half moss and half dandelions, and when I spot a flower I fantasize about planting, I snap a photo on my phone with the hope that I can one day ask a nursery worker to identify it.

Walking around Arbor Lodge, in our quarantine bubble of guilt and anxiety, can feel as much like a dissociative act as a coping strategy. Even on our strolls up Willamette Boulevard or east on Ainsworth we can’t stop talking about how American democracy is crumbling in the grip of a psychopathic narcissist, how COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of people, how the police have attacked protestors peacefully demanding racial justice, how hunger and homelessness have surged—not to mention the fires, the white supremacists, and the collapse of the restaurant industry I spent 20 years covering. We wave to neighbors whose names we don’t know from the middle of the street, unable to get over the sense that all of us are forced to endure these overlapping apocalypses alone, any fellow feeling thinned out as it is shared over phone lines and broadband cables. Every day makes me aware of how it is a luxury to have time to take a stroll, to have a house, to share that house 24 hours a day with a husband I love and a one-year-old cat who arrived at just the right time.

I have no idea what history will make of 2020, but the only record I have kept of this cursed year are blurry photos of shrubs.

 ***

In the early days of the shutdown, determined to cling to a sense of accomplishment, I began my mornings with Gay Zumba videos. I bought bread flour in 50-pound sacks. When my freelance assignments evaporated I started a pandemic email newsletter with a friend, brushed up on my Spanish, scheduled Zoom happy hours, and donated small amounts of money to stave off hopelessness. 

As the months passed all those aspirations ebbed away and the sense that we had left the Before Times for some permanent new era grew. Even if ambition didn’t return, new work came my way, and aspiring for anything beyond solvency while the world burned down felt self-indulgent. As the Before Times receded so did a sure sense of who I was back then—back in San Francisco, in my career, in my ties with my family and friends.

I often feel as if 2020 has remade me into a new person. I’ve come to call him Pandemic Self. His life is circumscribed in tiny, banal rituals.

Pandemic Self wakes up every morning when the furnace whooshes on at 6 a.m., measures out a few grams of tea into a tiny clay pot, and sets the water to boil. He does the New York Times crossword puzzle, then shuffles between four newspaper sites until the news makes the anxiety rise up his gullet. It takes Pandemic Self until 9 to start work, maybe 10. Then his cat marks the hours with her own rituals: from printer top to lap in the morning, from couch nap to playtime at the same time each night. Pandemic Self shuts down the lights in the house—the sunroom, then the living room, then the kitchen, always in the same order—at 9:30 p.m. while his husband checks the news on his phone one last time.

Even my pandemic thoughts seem to ricochet around the borders of Arbor Lodge, looping from tea to dinner, then laptop, flowers, and cat toys. I may tell myself this would be an amazing time to work on a new book, but Pandemic Self peers out at the world and retreats. Limbo has brought with it extremely low-stakes habits. Pandemic Self now reads science fiction for the first time since he was a teenager—the more escapist the better. He battles the dandelions in the yard. He’s currently on a break from refined carbs. When he checks in on his friends, they have the same conversation every time—how horrid the Orange Tyrant is, who’s safe or ill from the virus, which Netflix shows are soothing enough to watch right now.

Pandemic Self is oppressively dull.

Pandemic Self has surprised me in one way: by refusing to meditate. I have been practicing zazen for 15 years, some years tentatively, other years daily. I attended my first Saturday morning lecture at the San Francisco Zen Center in 2005, searching for some peace in the middle of a crisis, but I quickly learned there was nothing relaxing about facing a wall while I attempted to watch my breath rise and fall. The reason I keep coming back to the cushion is because sometimes, when some moment in my daily life provokes fear or anger, zazen gives me a split-second buffer. In that small space, if I’m paying attention, I can catch hold of my reaction and let it rise and fall instead of rushing out of my thoughts to infect my entire body.

You’d think that nothing would drive a man to meditate like a major life change, a pandemic, and a political crisis. But the Portland zen temple I sat with last winter closed to the public a few months later, and I got too twitchy to maneuver myself onto my cushion at home. Swirls of cat hair now cover its black cotton surface.

The momentum from those years of practice, however, is what has driven me to give Pandemic Self a name—to acknowledge he is a pattern of thoughts. It also prods me to question: If my sense of self now is circumscribed by my habits and confines, what does that say about the self of 18 months ago or 20 years from now?

In my teenage years, I loudly traced my own outline in bands and books, as if devotion to Meat Beat Manifesto or James Baldwin were personality traits. After eight months of being stuck in my house in a new city, with no fixed career, I’ve realized how much I let city and work define the story of who I was. That story was hardly static: The 25-year-old who shuttled between kitchens, clubs, and queer movies became the 35-year-old who spent his nights in restaurants and his days writing about his meals, who became the 45-year-old who had married a handsome researcher and tweeted every moment he wasn’t reporting.

So, does it mean anything I am now a person who drinks tea for two hours every morning and takes photos of flowers? Or would that be hanging a painting on the projection of a wall? This existence is so fleeting it reminds me there may someday be a New Job Self, a Retired Self, and a Nursing Home Self, each unable to see itself apart from the conditions that shape its days.

Returning to that sense of transience, day after day after day after day, seems to ease the claustrophobia of this limbo. It has helped me slough off some of the resentments and ambitions from the Before Times that I carried from San Francisco to Portland, and gives me a different buffer: a moment to listen for what the After Times may call me to do. This city may still be a labyrinth, but I know how to get from the Peninsula Park rose garden to the house with the giant sprays of red flowers I fell in love with last July. I have six months in 2021 to figure out their names.

Capture the Atlas has collected some of the best aurora borealis and aurora australis photos taken this year in their 2020 Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition. I’ve highlighted two photos from the competition above, by Ben Maze & Nico Rinaldi respectively. Maze’s photo, of the aurora australis in Tasmania, is stunning — one of the best astronomy photos I have ever seen. Here’s how he captured it:

Captured in this image is a trifecta of astronomical phenomena that made for some of the best astrophotography conditions one can witness in Australia, namely, the setting Milky Way galactic core, zodiacal light, and of course, the elusive Aurora Australis. On top of this, a sparkling display of oceanic bioluminescence adorned the crashing waves, adding the cherry on top to what was already a breathtaking experience.

Having been out of reception and civilization for over a day, fellow photographer Luke Tscharke and I had no idea the aurora would strike on this night. We’d just heard rumors of a potential solar storm. We could barely contain our excitement when the lights first showed up on our camera’s screens. We later realized we were in the best place on the entire continent to witness the rare show, with Lion Rock being on the southernmost cape of Tasmania and much more cloud-free than the rest of the state at the time.

The colors that our cameras picked up were incredible, too. Rather than the classic green, the display ranged from yellow and orange to pink and purple. When I’d captured enough frames that I was happy with, I simply stood by my camera with my head tilted towards the sky, occasionally swirling my hand around in the sparkling water by my feet. I’m forever grateful for moments in nature like this that show us the true wonders of our planet.

The aurora, the Milky Way, zodiacal light, and bioluminescence all in one image — what a magical conjunction. You can check out the rest of the winners here.

Tags: astronomy   best of   best of 2020   photography

“I’m very materialistic. Unfortunately, I am also very uninterested in money, so it’s a horrible combination. I have more Anderson & Sheppard suits and jackets than I should. More than I could really afford. Of course, you don’t actually need any of these things, and I have more than I need. That doesn’t mean that I have more than I want, since I seem to be the only American who knows the difference between desire and need. But I enjoy the whole process. There is nothing that I like more than to spend hours looking through swatches. I love deciding between 17 shades of grey.”

The inimitable writer, Fran Lebowitz talks about her Anderson & Sheppard fetish in How to Spend It.

WORDS: Disneyrollergirl / Navaz Batliwalla
IMAGE: Fran Lebowitz
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If you, like me, were a band kid during your school years, you probably hear the word “practice” and reflexively break into a sweat. I spent ten years of school avoiding practicing the saxophone, then the trombone, then the tuba, then the guitar. Performing was the fun part: getting together with friends while you were dressed in weird, itchy formalwear, tamping down nervous jitters before going on stage. Practice, on the other hand, was solitary and severe. Scales were boring. Hearing myself play one meager part abstracted from the bigger ensemble felt dumb. If practice made perfect, as my band teachers repeatedly told me, perfect wasn’t worth it.

This year, more than any year before it, I’ve been practicing. I’m an early riser, so usually by seven in the morning I’m at my butcher block, doing some sort of dough mixing and bread shaping. I used to think of this behavior as a compulsion—making bread was the way I chose to mitigate stress or anxiety. It was a productive distraction, during which time slowed down and anxious feelings were quieted. And a lot of things happened in 2020 that made me lean on that compulsion, not even considering the massive clusterfuck of [gestures everywhere]. We moved internationally for the second time in nine months. I experienced a stretch of immobilizing health issues. Then my grandmother, a woman I looked up to my entire life, passed away. Through it all, I made bread almost daily, as if I were practicing to get better at it for some year-end holiday performance. If only my band teacher could see me now.

Recently, in a moment of self-doubt, I looked back on those months and all the bread I had made and thought, “For what?” There was no year-end performance, no larger purpose to the act of creation. I wasn’t working toward anything and I certainly wasn’t practicing to make perfect. Making bread was a compulsion that helped me cope but it was the least permanent thing I could have done with these long months. I didn’t turn the challenges of this year into a gripping novel or a beautiful piece of artwork or even that much paid writing at all, which is my literal job. I just woke up every day and made bread. Then the bread would get eaten. And I’d start the cycle over again.

A few years after my failure to practice for band, I started to hear the word practice again, this time when it became chic for white people to discover yoga. Yoga instructors love the word practice, almost as much as they love the word delicious. I couldn’t stand either. I thought the point of yoga was that you weren’t supposed to get good at it, like you would hope to if you were training for a marathon. In yoga, I thought there was no perfection to be achieved and no metrics to meet. You just did yoga because, I don’t know, it was yoga.

At some point this year, I realized I’d been hearing this all wrong. The kind of practice yoga people talk about was different than the kind I’d been raised to dislike. It wasn’t in the accumulation of more skill with the aim of becoming the best at something. A practice, whether daily or weekly, is an unchanging, nonjudgmental act of living in the world. Your daily practice, as I came to understand through a suggestion from my friend Sultana, is something you do for yourself, to learn who you are, to connect you more solidly to the ground. To use another word I used to roll my eyes at, the daily practice of making bread feels like it centers me.

If all of this sounds a little woo-woo, you’re right, okay! It is. Just bear with me.

My friend Coco, who has an amazing novel coming out next year, brought this idea to me in a different form, by way of the writer and poet Ocean Vuong.

“A very small part of my life as a writer is spent writing,” Vuong said on a panel last year. “In America, there’s an inherent shame in not producing.” To gain a better understanding of his writing process, he started reaching for Eastern philosophies about creatitivity that weren’t so tied to production, and found himself connecting deeply to the ideas of yin and yang. Yin was about absorbing, yang was about acting. “Yin is seen as one of the most central modes of creativity because it’s the mode where you wait and accrue knowledge, propelled by curiosity,” he said. “In the West, we don’t use yin often. We have a great distrust for stillness in America.” But it was in this stillness that Vuong felt he was learning the most, so he allowed himself more time to be still in yin than to be productive in yang.

I think this time period has been hard on all of us for both individual and collective reasons, but one specific biproduct for me has been this growing fear that if I’m not working toward something that I’m failing somehow. I don’t need to tell you that we’re all living through a time period of incomparable grief and that productivity is a bullshit narrative. But I learned this year that sometimes the small consistent things that we do are more important and essential than we are taught to believe. That practice—when performed without judgment or aim—is in and of itself worth the effort and time, not because it helps us become the best at something, but because it fortifies us and teaches us about who we are. All that bread I made this year didn’t win me an award for World’s Best Home Baker Who Is Also Very Good Looking, but it kept me connected to myself.

As we stare down the next few months, we probably all know that they’re going to be even more isolating than the ones in the spring. (If you didn’t know that, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but [gestures everywhere].) I’m going into the next few months knowing that things are not going to be easy on the grand scale, but on a daily basis, I have something gluing me to reality. My practice, useless and unproductive as it can occasionally feel, is going to keep me focused on the day-to-day. And right now, getting through the day-to-day is more than enough.

“I'm wearing vintage euro slip-ons with added lace details, high socks, trousers I cropped, a light vintage cotton shirt by a Japanese designer and an old wool overcoat by a Japanese designer. What inspires my style the most is not thinking about dress on a personal level as calculated style - a look. I love throwing things together in a hurry and spontaneously: letting chance and the unconscious play a part. Other than that, I often find myself totally immersed in the atmosphere and images in a work of literature and through this characters and personalities I've never seen but somehow totally know and recognize their impact on how I dress.”

3 September 2020, Ruoholahdenranta

My birthday is November 3, 1979. This means that Election Day 2020 in the United States was also my 41st birthday. It was a very strange birthday. But I believe that anyone born in the first week of November who lives and/or votes in this country often finds themselves celebrating strange birthdays. Their memories and experiences of those days are different, more vivid, and more hopelessly entwine the political, civic, and personal.

I was very nearly born on November 2nd. That was my mother’s 28th birthday. She went into labor at lunch with my aunt and my grandmother. She was enjoying time away from my older brother and sister (then two and five) and didn’t want to change her plans. When she got home, she was well into labor but didn’t tell my father. My godmother, whom my whole family calls my Aunt Joette but who is not, strictly speaking, my aunt, and her husband, my Uncle Mike (same deal) came over to visit.

Uncle Mike somehow picked up that my mother was having contractions, timed them in his head, and told her when it was time to go to the hospital. He also offered to watch my siblings while my father drove her there. He even cleaned and vacuumed the house, with my brother clinging to his leg. Aunt Joette, who was 26 but already had three children of her own, hopped in the back seat of my parents’ Thunderbird. My mom, now seriously uncomfortable, told my dad to punch it. He drove through Detroit at over 100 mph to Hutzel Hospital, where I would be born. My godmother, always terrified of expressways and fast driving, has never ridden in a car with my father since. My dad still says he has never made such good time downtown.

But once they got to the hospital, everything stopped. My parents say it was the first sign of how stubborn I could be. (Frankly, this trait is overdetermined in my family.) My mother was in labor for more than 24 hours. Her doctors prepared for an emergency C-section before I arrived, about an hour and a half before the end of November 3. Since 1979 is an odd-numbered year, there wasn’t a federal election that week. But it would have been a good Election Day story if there had been one.

My mother’s father’s birthday was October 29th. In Detroit, October 30th is Devil’s Night. October 31st is Halloween. November 1st is All Saints’ Day and Dia de los Muertos; this holiday is a pretty big deal in southwest Detroit’s Mexicantown, where Uncle Mike, Aunt Joette, and my cousins Rachel, Nikki, and Miguel went to church at Holy Redeemer.

November 1st is also my mother’s brother’s birthday. My Uncle Chris is exactly fourteen years younger than my mother and fourteen years older than me. He turned 30 two days before I turned 16, and called my mother the day in between, and since my mom wasn’t home, he and I talked for about half an hour. With leap days included, he is just one day closer in age to my mother than he is to me. My mother’s birthday (and All Souls’ Day) is November 2nd, and mine is November 3rd. It’s a lot of birthdays and holidays in just a few days. My parents’ wedding anniversary is February 5th, which explains why I was born nine months later; the others in my family can plausibly be blamed on cold Michigan nights. This has always made the week of Election Day a pretty big deal in our family.

The first President elected in my lifetime was Ronald Reagan, on November 4, 1980. I don’t remember this very well, but I have seen pictures of my first birthday party the day before. My parents, like a surprisingly large number of Americans, both voted for independent candidate John Anderson, supposedly moved that he might be driven to bankruptcy by his campaign debts if he didn’t receive enough of the vote. Either they’re misremembering or are suckers, because in September, Anderson had already qualified for matching funds. Anyways, they both worked multiple jobs and had three small children, and ready access to reliable political information was not very good 40 years ago either.

I remember Reagan as President, but do not especially remember his reelection on November 6, 1984. I do remember my 5th birthday party extremely well. It was at McDonald’s, and my friends from kindergarten Andrew and Norman were invited. Ronald McDonald was there, I ate at least six Chicken McNuggets (which I still love), and Andrew gave me the He-Man action figure Jitsu, a bad guy with a golden hand that did a karate chop. He was kind of an evil knockoff of Fisto. Another of my uncles also gave me a copy of Jitsu, and I was excited about returning it and picking out a different He-Man character, but my younger brother took the second Jitsu out of its box, so we had two Jitsus, which is at least one too many. My brother was only three, but I was very upset with him.

In 1988, my mom and I were pulling for Jesse Jackson, and both of us were pissed off when he didn’t win the nomination. (I’m still mad about this, actually.) This is when I start to remember Phil Hartman’s Ronald Reagan, Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush, and Jon Lovitz’s undersung Michael Dukakis (“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”).

My parents were not around very much—my sister is really the one who raised me while the two of them worked, and I’ve always thought of her as an equal parent as well as a beloved sibling—but they indulged my watching late night television and asking questions about the conventions at a young age. George H.W. Bush was elected on November 8th. (See, it’s not really always the first Tuesday in November, because for whatever reason, November 1st doesn’t count.)

In 2000, I turned 21. Four days later, I voted for the first time. I did not vote in the 1998 midterms, even though Michigan’s governor was on the ballot, because my college town made it difficult for students to register to vote, and because, having just turned 19, I briefly did not believe electoral politics could create genuine change. I was also lazy, and foolish, and preoccupied with many other things.

But by 2000, I’d had a change of heart, and voted for Al Gore. I now think Gore would have been a better President than I believed then, partly because of the incredibly guarded, talking-out-both-sides-of-his-mouth campaign that he ran, but also because I did not foresee the disaster of the Bush years. I thought things would carry on mostly like they had, and that Bush, while dim and disengaged, would be a relatively benign conservative like I thought his father had been. I also thought he wouldn’t win anyways. I was a real putz. I had studied so much history but had no idea of what history had in store for us.

That year, my senior year in college, I lived in a big co-op house with fourteen other people. The house was right around the corner from my favorite bar, where I’d rung in my 21st birthday at midnight. We all watched the election results on CBS—I don’t know who chose that network, but Dan Rather had a lot of homespun idioms he used to introduce all the tosses and turns.

After the news came in that Florida had been called for Gore, then moved to toss-up, then called for Bush, then nobody was sure, my worst roommate, the one who let her dog shit all over the living room carpet, who installed her own private air conditioner even though we all split the utility bills, who everyone hated and nobody could figure out how she’d moved into the house or how to get her to leave, was openly celebrating a Bush win and taunting the rest of us (pretty even split Gore/Nader). I had one thought: I need a drink.

Bush won again, defeating John Kerry after Election Day on November 2, 2004. For me, this was the biggest gut-punch election of my life. I followed it closely, I watched all the debates, I participated in antiwar, anti-Bush, and anti-Cheney demonstrations, and met up with other young people involved in politics in Philadelphia, where I’d moved in 2002. I had thought Gore would win, but was convinced Kerry would—even after the midterm losses in 2002, even after the bombs fell on Iraq the day after my first son was born.

The next day, my 25th birthday, I walked around the city in a haze. I had to get groceries. The new Trader Joe’s on Market St had opened, right across the street from Center City’s small but lively porno district. I talked to my parents and each of my siblings on the phone, but I don’t remember what any of us said. Ohio was close, and there would be recounts, but it was over. Maybe Kerry would have been a good President, maybe he wouldn’t have, but at that moment, every possibility felt foreclosed upon. This is what they want, I thought. It wasn’t for the first time and certainly would not be the last.

For years, I thought Barack Obama was elected on my birthday in 2008. I even told people in the run-up to the 2020 election, just weeks ago, no, it’s OK, it’s actually good luck: Barack Obama won on my birthday. It’s not true. He was elected on Tuesday, November 4th, the day after.

But those few days all feel like one day, in the best sense. Now, my younger son had just turned one year old in September, had been walking (for some value of “walking”) since August, and his mother and I hadn’t properly slept yet. On November 3rd, my friends Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan celebrated the fifth anniversary of their blog Snarkmarket by asking me to join them as the site’s third author. I was scrambling to finish my doctoral dissertation in comparative literature, and to send out applications for Assistant Professor and Visiting Fellow jobs that were rapidly disappearing thanks to the economic collapse. (More jobs I applied to cancelled their searches than gave me outright Nos.)

It was total disaster. And yet somehow, the best thing had happened. Obama was the only Presidential candidate I’d supported in the primary who’d ever made it to the general election (that’s still true, by the way). He was the first Presidential candidate I’d voted for who’d won, and I had a young, multiracial family living in the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence who were counting on him. Health care for everyone, an end to the war in Iraq, real progress for Black and Latinx (we didn’t use the X then, but I will now) and Middle Eastern and South and Central Asian people seemed imminent. I was now 29, and even though I professed to know better, to have made myself properly jaded, properly paranoid, properly realistic about the limits of elected officials, the military, corporations, and the American people… I found myself quite carried away, like so many others. Meanwhile, the slaughterhouse continued its work.

By November 2012, I was separated. I was living in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, but still registered to vote in Philadelphia. I had completely bounced out of academia, but somehow wound up with a series of very good jobs writing for technology magazines and websites. My son and his mom had just moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta after Philly’s public schools fell apart, making it much harder for me to take the train to see them.

My 33rd birthday was nevertheless my favorite ever. I was visiting Washington, DC for a few days, and all my friends in the area gathered to have brunch. Some of them knew each other, and some of them didn’t. We swapped stories about our “formative nerd texts,” the book that shaped our obsessions at an early age. (My answer: Calvin and Hobbes.) I had a crush on someone again, one of the first since my wife, and I didn’t know what to do with it. On the way back to New York, I stopped in Philadelphia to vote for Barack Obama again. (He won.) The city I’d lived in for a decade began to feel less and less like home. When I finally got from Penn Station to my apartment, I felt twin waves of longing and relief.

I turned 37 on November 3, 2016. My mother had just turned 65. My uncle, whom I remember as eternally 30, turned 51. By then, all of my grandparents had died. I had moved back in with my parents in metro Detroit the year before, partly to help my parents after my father’s heart attack, and partly because I had no place else to go.

I did not want to celebrate my birthday. I did not want to see or be seen by anyone. I closed off my wall on Facebook well before November. I stopped posting on Twitter a month before Election Day. Even though all the polls and polling averages, which had been so successful in 2008 and 2012 by controlling for known problems, had predicted until shortly before the end that Hillary Clinton would likely sail to an easy victory, I could feel what was coming.

I felt it in the part of my brain that can recognize a rattlesnake in the grass. There was nothing statistical about it at all, nothing deductive, just pure anticipation. Certain other primates have a word that means “snake,” and everyone in their band knows what it means. When they hear that word, the monkeys run for the trees. My brain was screaming that word, and it was running for the trees.

I thought, I will vote. And if she wins and he loses, then I will have helped stop this. And then I can kill myself.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

This Election Day and my 41st birthday have been even more unusual. It was my first birthday without my sister, Kelly. She had also been living with my parents after many years in New York, and died suddenly in April from a pulmonary embolism caused by COVID-19. My sister Kelly was 45 years old.

She would have been so good at figuring out how to celebrate my birthday and my mom’s, to keep us all safe and still have fun. She would have been so happy to vote to turn Michigan blue again. She would have had my nieces and nephews rolling with laughter at the funeral she didn’t have. She was my parent, and she was my sister. And she had a whole life to live that had nothing to do with me, but still shared with me, that she would tell me about on long telephone calls and late-night talks. And if she loved you, family or friend, she loved every part of you: she loved your parents and partners and children. She was the only person in my family who could befriend every generation, who could tell the third cousins apart, who knew what your second cousins’ kids wanted for Christmas without having to ask.

I feel like I lost all three people she was: sister, parent, protagonist. I still have so much I want to ask her about. I think I know, but I will never know.

We couldn’t celebrate my or my mother’s birthday with my brothers and their families, so my mother, my father, and I tried to make an even bigger celebration ourselves. Her birthday bled into mine, as it always does. We bought a Grand Traverse Baking Company cherry crumb pie, which was delicious. We had all already dropped off our ballots in October, so on Election Day (my birthday), we ordered carry-out from my favorite Lebanese restaurant. I bought a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey, but didn’t drink any of it. I was in a good mood all night (the pie definitely helped), even as Michigan and Pennsylvania remained uncounted, as Georgia remained uncertain, as the blue mirage turned into a red mirage and back again.

Even now, although nearly all the votes have been counted (and Georgia’s, my son’s adopted home state, have been counted twice), Election Day is somehow not yet over. We knew it would be Election Week; few of us knew it would be Election Month.

Yet that means somehow my birthday is not yet over; it has metastasized to become all of Scorpio season, perhaps to Thanksgiving and after. And that means I am still only on the verge of turning 41, still 40, still waiting for the clock to turn over to start this next part of my life, a second half if I am lucky, a final third if everything goes chalk. I wasn’t born until late in the night on November 3, 1979, and I proved even before I was here that I can wait a very long time.

Still, I would like this to end, and end properly, even if I have to march on the state house in Michigan’s capitol building with the family I have left to see it out. Everyone is dying again; they have never stopped dying, and I would like to end that too.

I have no fantasies about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. I don’t see them as avatars of hope like I saw Barack Obama, or as neoliberal schemers determined to betray their base. But I cannot survive (too many of us cannot survive) the petty fascist death cult of the Republican party under Trump. It has been building to this for generations, but now achieved its worst form yet. I will use every tool at my disposal, including the Democratic party, to crush them and drive them from power, like St. Patrick did Ireland’s snakes in legend.

They let New Orleans drown; they poisoned Flint; they let the police and bigots fashioning themselves as police murder Black people throughout the country, and then said it was the victims’ fault. They let my sister die and called it a rounding error. They have always been my enemies, ever since I was a little boy watching Ronald Reagan on television and realized what he was, even though I didn’t know the words for it. This was a man who would let us all die and (if he said anything at all) call our deaths noble and brave and necessary, if it would suit his vision of his own power, and perhaps enrich people I would never know.

Snake. The word I was looking for, that I already knew at four years old, was snake.

My father is terrified of snakes: he says that this is because in Ireland, where his parents were born, they have none. Snake is also what my mother’s people, the Ojibwe or Lake Superior Chippewa, called the Dakota and Lakota peoples when they fought them in what’s now Wisconsin: Sioux is a Chippewa word. (Literally, nadouessioux, or more properly natowessiwak, means “little snakes.”)

I know that if we want elections worth the name in 2022 or 2024 or any year afterwards, we have to win. The GOP, despite their hold on state legislatures, the courts, and at worst a 50/50 split in the US Senate, are fighting like they will never win a fairly counted, fairly administered, unsuppressed election again. And they might be right. But Democrats have to fight too. For once, Democrats have to forget that they’ve won and continue to fight.

I would like back everything that I have lost. But until the end of time and the return of the Messiah (and yes, I do mean Gritty), none of us can ever have that. All we can look forward to are more birthdays, more yahrzeits, and—I hope—more Election Days.

Maybe they will even become a holiday. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?

Tags: history   politics   Tim Carmody

 

Fangophilia is a Japanese label who create silver jewellery, often of the unsettling kind - such as silver teeth overlays and fangs.

Designed by Taro Hanabusa, who graduating from Tohoku University School of Dentistry, obtained a dentistry license. While working as a dentist, he started making silver accessories by making use of the molding and metal processing techniques used in dental treatment.

The teeth stuff give me the heebee-jeebees but his silver articulated rings are incredibly beautiful. Remember in 2010 articulated rings were a big deal? Well, they were. But these are actually the most beautiful versions I have seen since then. They can be layered to create a full silver finger effect. Like Robocop fingers.

 

Sure, 2020 may go down in history as one of the worst years on record, but beginning in November, it will also officially be the year in which $5 Byredo candles became A Thing. So, it's not all bad!  Ben Gorham, the founder of the and creative director of the cool-kid beloved fragrance company ...

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Indi Samarajiva lived through the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka that killed an estimated 80,000-100,000 people over 30 years. He cautions that societal collapse can feel quite normal for many people — but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.

I lived through the end of a civil war. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.

If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

Tags: Indi Samarajiva   politics   USA

“I'm wearing an oversized dress shirt, an old sleeveless cardigan, a faux leather jacket, and a Tom of Finland bag. Most of this outfit and my clothes overall are secondhand. I try to never look boring to myself and my outfits to be free from boundaries such as gender.”

3 August 2020, Eerikinkatu

Christian Cowan's digital contribution to the New York Fashion Week Spring 2021 season is a creative collaboration with his good pal, rapper Lil Nas X. The creative duo originally linked up last August, when Cowan dressed the artist in a custom, western-inspired sequin suit for the 2019 MTV VMAs. ...

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For the past decade, Oliver Burkeman has written an advice column for The Guardian on how to change your life. In his final column, he shares eight things that he’s learned while on the job. I especially appreciated these two:

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth.

The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control — the seasoned worriers among us, anyway — is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)

It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.

(via @legalnomads)

Tags: lists   Oliver Burkeman

These are the stories making headlines in fashion on Wednesday. How Paloma Elsesser found her voiceOver the past few years, Paloma Elsesser has established herself not only as an incredible model, but also as a force for change and an advocate inside the fashion industry for those who haven't ...

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“I´m wearing a two piece suit from Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, neck key holder from Yohji Yamamoto and my shoes are from Maison Margiela. I was inspired by uniforms, guess this is my summer´s go to uniform.”

7 July 2020, Bulevardi

MoMA has published a two-minute film from 1902 of a German suspended railway called the Wuppertal Schwebebahn. It presents an almost drone-like view of a German city at the beginning of the 20th century, in contrast to the ground-based and stationary films that were far more common in that era. The film is also extremely crisp and clear because it was shot in 68mm:

The Flying Train depicts a ride on a suspended railway. The footage is almost as impressive as the feat of engineering it captures. For many years our curators believed our Mutoscope rolls were slightly shrunken 70mm film, but they were actually shot on Biograph’s proprietary 68mm stock. Formats like Biograph’s 68mm and Fox’s 70mm Grandeur are of particular interest to researchers visiting the Film Study Center because the large image area affords stunning visual clarity and quality, especially compared to the more standard 35mm or 16mm stocks.

My favorite bit is the kid on the swing at about the 25 second mark — a casual unstaged moment that allows the viewer to imagine themselves in that place and time, almost 120 years ago.

And as the latest instance in a trend that I am increasingly irritated by, this film was immediately run through an AI program to upscale it to 4K, stabilize it, and colorize it. The result is….. I don’t know, cheesy? It just looks worse than the original, which is so vivid to begin with. And the added sound is distracting. But the worst thing is that this “restored” video has almost twice the views as the original. *shakes fist at cloud*

Tags: trains   video

Harry James Hanson and Devin Antheus are capturing queer icons in their ongoing photo series, Legends of Drag, accompanied by short biographies of each Queen on Harper’s Bazaar.

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Lady Red Couture, Los Angeles // Gemini // co-host of Hey Queen! Passed away on July 25 of this year.

“I always tell them: Don’t live in muck and mire, because it’s unnecessary. The devil is on his job, so why shouldn’t we be?”

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Darcelle XV, Portland // Scorpio // the oldest working Drag Queen in the world, aged 89, and the author of two books

“Don’t build a fence around me. I’m not one person, none of us are. We fought to do away with labels; now there is a label for everything.”

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Dolly Levi, Los Angeles // Virgo

“Stop. Look. Listen. Live. Respect it. Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.”

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Donna Personna, San Francisco // Leo // 73, star of Beautiful Night, a documentary about the Hot Box Girls, elder drag queens still performing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

“Trans women in particular want to talk to me and tell me their story, and help them with their challenges. Sometimes it feels like a lot of responsibility. But if seeing me succeed inspires them, that’s a wonderful thing. Look, I’m in my 70s, and I’m still here. Not only am I still here, but I’m a playwright, I’m a grand marshal, I’m happy. Life is wonderful.”

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Juanita More, San Francisco // Virgo

Much of her work focuses on memorializing and preserving the legacy of queer spaces in a city where they are increasingly endangered.

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Love Connie, Los Angeles // Sagittarus

More than anything to come in “that whole new world thing,” she’s looking forward to the reopening of glory holes, perhaps well-stocked with hand sanitizer.

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Psycadella Facade, Los Angeles // Cancer

Psycadella’s charity extends beyond her drag family, including a long-running show at AltaMed Health Services, which she cites as a highlight of her drag career.  “We had no budget, we bought our own microphone, we performed outside in the courtyard, and people could come get tested and access information about their community programs.”

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The Goddess Bunny, Los Angeles // Capricorn

It’s nearly impossible to provide an account of The Goddess’s life that doesn’t sound sensationalized, because her life has been sensational in every aspect.

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“I'm wearing a vintage housecoat, horrific synthetic, knock-off Pleats Please pants, Aliexpress sandals, and estate foraged treats pouch. Getting dressed usually involves something so gross it’s good, something too much, and practicing giving no fucks about what anyone might think.”

2 July 2020, Senate Square

20 Black dancers performing an impressive choreography by Tomeography to Chloe x Halle’s “Baby Girl” on Zoom.

(via Popsugar)

“It’s a shame this wall may be on its way to being demolished once building is bought and redeveloped like much of the surrounding areas. And that always seems to be the case … our work is disposable instead of being cherished,” Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez told me in 2016 about the iconic “Mandela (Roxbury Love)” mural that he and Thomas “Kwest” Burns spraypainted at Warren Street at Clifford Street in Boston in 2014.

Videos and a photo I’ve seen posted to Facebook today show the mural being knocked down by an excavator:

“I’m saddened by the news,” Gomez emails me today. “This piece meant a lot to me. I’m a working artist. My work can be found on storefronts and in commercial properties and are products of my clients’ vision that I’ve brought to life. However, this mural was mine. I’d originally envisioned it for Grove Hall and when the Warren Street opportunity came, it was a chance to give a piece of myself to a community that has embraced my family for years. It gave me a chance to collaborate with artists I love and respect. And I hope it gave the Roxbury community a beautiful reminder of its place in the history of Boston.”

“The demolition is part of Cruz Development Corp.’s start of a project to put up a two-building, 99-unit apartment complex that will also include enough space for the company, now based in John Eliot Square, to move into,” Adam Gaffin reports at Universal Hub. “The mural went up in 2014. Its fate was actually sealed in 2016, when the BPDA [Boston Planning & Development Agency] approved Cruz’s plans for the Dr. Michael E. Haynes Arms, named after Roxbury state representative and minister, for land that had been occupied by a church and several vacant buildings.”

The 100-foot-long mural was a statement of pride by and for Roxbury’s African-American community with its black and white portrait of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s anti-segregation and anti-apartheid leader who died in 2013, flanked by the slogan “Roxbury Love.”

“The ‘Mandela (Roxbury Love)’ wall was a message to the community to think before they act. To love instead of hate,” Gomez told me by email in 2016. “At the same time reaching a world audience and complementing Gary Rickson’s ‘Africa is the Beginning’ mural two blocks away on the left side of the Roxbury YMCA. The hand to the temple is a gesture to think but also a homage to Malcom-X as he was a Roxbury native that once lived at the other end of the street that meets with the mural.”

“This mural was a way to give back to the community, one that I live in and one that also inspires my creativity,” Gomez wrote in 2016. “This mural means a great deal. It was a project I believed in and one that allowed me to work alongside a trusted friend and talented artist (Thomas Burns), who helped me knock out that massive wall. Also of note, is the way it was received by the community – to not be defaced or damaged shows that it is respected and how much love truly exists in Roxbury.”

The two artists have said that, in part, the mural commemorates the visit Mandela made to Boston on June 23, 1990, just months after he was released after 27 years in prison. The international civil rights icon had come for a one-day stop to thank Boston for its support (Massachusetts was the first state to withdraw its pension funds from companies doing business in South Africa; the city of Boston soon followed) and as part of an eight-city U.S. tour to gather backing and raise money for a political campaign that would ultimately get him elected president of South Africa in 1994.

The mural also brought to mind the 1986 Boston ballot referendum question (ultimately defeated) that proposed that Roxbury secede from the city to become an independent, 12-square-mile, African-American majority city called Mandela.

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.

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All content © copyright by Greg Cook or its original creators.

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Dozens of people participated in the “Independence Day March” against injustice, a July 4 protest at Gloucester’s waterfront, organized by a group of college and high school students called Demilitarize Gloucester.

The event began with speeches at the Stage Fort Park gazebo, then marched down the Boulevard to the Cut Bridge, where the group lay silently on the ground for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in memorial to George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis police on May 25.

“On July 4th at 5:00pm (Independence Day) we will be coming together in Stage Fort Park, Gloucester MA (at the gazebo) to engage in a protest/march to show the people of Gloucester and other communities that we will not celebrate a holiday that celebrates an oppressive country,” organizers wrote on Instagram. “As long as there is racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and all other kinds of discrimination and oppression in America, we will not celebrate this country.”

In an online petition, the group says:

• “We are demanding reform for the curriculum of the Gloucester Public Schools education system to include the important teachings of racial injustice that is found in both the law enforcement system and in America as a whole. We also demand that students be more properly educated on the truths of American society, both the good and the bad. Finally, we demand that Glouceter Public Schools be granted a larger budget in order to facilitate a healthy and impactful learning environment. Together, we can create change, and although any change we make as individuals seems small, it becomes much bigger when we all put the effort in together.”

• “We demand the initiative to create safe spaces for Black and Brown people in public and private schools, as well as other public domains.”

• “We demand that all teachers or people in positions of leadership are required to take racial education training, de-escalation training, mediation training.”

• “We demand all teachers educating students about Black history, Native American history, or any subjects that necessitate a non-white lense be taught by Black, Indigenous, or other Non-Black people of color.”

• “We demand consequences for acts of bigotry in Gloucester so inappropriate behaviors can be corrected in instances of discrimination concerning race, gender, sexuality, and disability. We will not tolerate discrimination and prejudice.”

• “We demand that American symbols of racism and colonialism be prohibited and replaced with true heroes of America.”

• “We demand that we replace all 4th of July festivities with events for mourning, critical thought such as educational workshops, a celebration of black, indigenous, and other Non-Black people of color’s culture, and initiatives for supporting BIPOC mental health.”

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.

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All content © copyright by Greg Cook or its original creators.

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Optical Arts conceived this video as a “live action musical animation” of cups, plates, and glasses smashing and un-smashing accompanied by the toccata section of Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous organ piece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I thought it was fully CGI at first (as The Morning News reported), but then I found the making of video on the project page and it’s not — they filmed all the glasses and dished smashing at extremely high speeds between 1000 and 5000 frames/second on Phantom cameras.

I don’t know about you, but this video is what it looks like inside my head lately. Smash smash smash! (via the morning news)

Tags: Johann Sebastian Bach   music   slow motion   video

“Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability,” the New York Times critic Jack Gould fumed in 1956. “His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway.” In their new book Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, the slyer critic Sasha Geffen notes that he could’ve just called Elvis a male bimbo. Geffen scours a century of music for these glinting crystals, from 1920s blues singers to early synth experiments, Beatlemania to grunge, with Prince as a genre unto himself. Even the most harmonic among them carried notes of dissonance, rupturing the carefully gendered voice.

Geffen invokes canonical artists with wan mischief—“Titless, he struts like he’s got his tits out for all to see,” they write of Iggy Pop—and keeps finding curious historical details, like how Klaus Nomi settled on his abstracted outfit because a full costume would’ve been too expensive. They also hit on the ways capitalism tries to recuperate each moment of subversion: “If it can’t get rid of them, patriarchy tends to devour its threats.” But that process never moves in only one direction, and Glitter Up the Dark lovingly describes the affinities drawn together by the act of listening. “Inside a song,” Geffen writes, “every singer is exactly who she says she is in the moment her voice passes through her throat.”

Chris Randle: After the prologue where you talk about early modern American music, like, the blues, Harlem Renaissance people, why did you decide to start the book with the Beatles, and specifically their first pop covers? Were you looking to invert the canon?

Sasha Geffen: I don’t know if it’s an inversion, necessarily, but I wanted to point to a moment that I saw as the beginning of pop culture and fandom as I think it still is now. This gathering of attention around a band on a mass scale, with heavy consumerism involved too. And I thought the Beatles were a pretty reliable starting point when it comes to pop as a mass cultural phenomenon, because even though pop is 50, 60, 70 years old, depending on when you want to mark it, that’s the first time that someone makes dolls out of a band that I could find. Action figures, wigs, merch. And it also seemed to be a sea change in the way that fans oriented themselves around bands, taking bands as these objects that generated identity. So it wasn’t that I see the Beatles as the beginning of pop music, because they’re not, but they did seem to mark a shift that made a good starting point for this discussion.

Yeah, my sense is that, at least before World War Two, stardom didn’t work in quite the same way. Like, more often the songs would become famous and the stars would be Artie Shaw, or whoever.

Right, it feels like the song was more the defining unit of liking pop music. And the Beatles came along in a decade where the teenager had just been established as a post-war phenomenon, where there was all this money concentrated in the hands of young white people, and a lot of capitalists were eager to draw it away from them by any means possible [laughs]. And Elvis kind of started with that too, but I think the Beatles really raised the stakes to another level, the level of urgency around Beatles fandom was unparalleled at the time.

Even just, like, the hair. I actually love how much attention you lavish on that [laughs].

It’s more interesting than the music, I think. Just the way they looked is so fascinating, it’s so specific.

There’s an old Hannah Black tweet that went, “Gender is 50% hair.”

It’s true. It’s the first thing that people notice when they see you.

Do you remember a moment earlier in your own life when you saw a music video, or heard a song on the radio, and sensed everything turning liquid in that way?

Yeah, I can tell you my Savage Garden origin story! That was my first experience with fandom, and it’s really dorky. When I was maybe nine or ten years old, I was really into being online, and went to all these different goofy fandom things, games, virtual pets. That whole ’90s culture of having your own colorful home page: “Here’s this GIF of a cartoon cat that I adopted from someone else’s website.” And one of the sites I went to had this auto-playing MIDI rendition of the Savage Garden song “Truly Madly Deeply.” I would hear it every single day, and I didn’t know what it was, and it was just a melody without lyrics so you couldn’t look it up. Then I was on a plane, listening to the looping airplane radio, and that song came on, and I was like, holy shit, it’s the song from the cat website that I visit all the time.

There was a pre-recorded announcer who identified the band as Savage Garden, so I went home—I think one of their newer songs was playing on the radio too, from the second album. So I convinced my parents to buy me both albums, and I had this ritual of putting in the first self-titled record, the little orange CD, into my mom’s computer right before I would go online, and go into my chat rooms pretending to be this gender-morphing fantasy creature. I think that voice triggered something in me for sure, because Darren Hayes’s voice is so effeminate and so androgynous, so interestingly coarse. It’s very high, and he uses his falsetto, but it also feels kind of crimped and faltering at points. There’s a lot of failure hard-coded into it.

In retrospect I could see that speaking to my own bodily situation, of being about to go through puberty not really knowing what I was in for, and excited to become a sexual being but also obviously not doing it the right way, according to the feedback I got from my peers [laughs]. Being told that my relationship to myself was weird or wrong or gross, all that fun baby gay shit where you don’t know what’s happening yet, but everyone’s like, “You’re disgusting.” And you’re like, “I’m just here trying to be a person, I don’t know what’s happening.” So that band was like a sanctuary for me at 11 or 12, I was obsessed to the point where it was my schtick. When you’re in middle school and no one knows what to do with you, they just assign you a schtick.

I had a VHS and a DVD of their music videos, and I just watched them obsessively. The “I Want You” music video, I think I write about it in the book, because that was a big one for me. He’s got that gross chin-length stringy hair, looks really young and androgynous, he’s in this cool cyberpunk environment. I actually got my hair cut like that, or tried to, it didn’t really work because I’ve got Jewish hair. I had printed out this black-and-white photo of Darren Hayes at his most androgynous, and I brought it to the person who cut my hair at the time like, turn me into this please. That’s kind of the root of my whole desire to see the gender in music, I guess, because they were both so intricately bound up for me from a young age.

Was there anything that turned up from research that really surprised you? I love the detail about Wendy Carlos, that she had to do her first publicity appearances in male drag.

Yeah! That was a fun one. I guess I didn’t know a lot about Alice Cooper, especially his early work and early appearances, how he was spouting lines that sound very much like Tumblr-queer jargon now. “Everybody has a little male and female in them, it’s a biological fact.” Which sounds like an infographic you’d see among social justice communities, but he was saying it to be provocative, because in the early ’70s you couldn’t just do media interviews and say that shit without making some people upset. And of course his whole getup was designed to be freakish, it wasn’t like Alice Cooper was wearing makeup to be pretty, it was to look garish. What also surprised me, kind of from that same era, is how you see the young proto-punks like the Stooges being really into the Beatles, because they’re so frightening to their surroundings. Like being into Nazi imagery and being into Beatles imagery were equally provocative.

It’s mind-boggling to me, because the Beatles seem so tame and anodyne now, it’s like dad culture. But people would get catcalled, you’d get called “Beatle” on the street if you had long hair with the venom of a slur. That shifted my preconceptions around these eras I was studying. I feel like you don’t always know the norms of a particular musical era, even if you know the music pretty well, so reading a bunch of contemporary interviews was really interesting, because you could see the shock happening in real time [laughs]. Seeing very square, very straight music journalists getting up in arms over what Lou Reed or Alice Cooper were doing was funny and revealing.

You spend a lot of this book writing about the ambiguity of voices. Why do you think they’re so malleable in that way?

I think just the fact that they’re the one musical sound that comes directly from the body, and that the body by necessity has to be malleable and flexible. Humans are very adaptable, and at least in hearing communities we communicate primarily through voice—communication isn’t just done through actual words, it’s intonation, accents, all kinds of subtle variations in the way voice is used. I think that extends to music, maybe it’s even intensified in music, because music is this heightened dream-space. When you’re singing it’s not the same as speaking, it’s this gauzy detachment from linear reality, where the song is looping in perpetuity, if that makes sense. Especially since recording began, individual vocal takes are frozen in time forever, kind of in their own reality. So I see voice as an opportunity to try out ways of being, ways of expression, that don’t necessarily have to be rooted in the material conditions of your life. You can sing an alternate reality, an alternate mode of relations, and it doesn’t mean you have to be that person that you’re playing.

It’s almost embodied and disembodied at the same time. Like, an impression of the singer with no visual.

Totally. Yeah. And in many cases an impression of a singer who’s no longer alive, who no longer has a body to which that voice corresponds, but this ghostly after-impression of their voice still lives on. I think that makes it ripe for a lot of tension and conflict, and that’s where I see a lot of these themes of gender-weirdness coming out.

Early on you mention those wax-cylinder recordings of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, and it made me think of—do you know this book called Making Sex, by Thomas Laqueur?

I think you’ve mentioned it to me before, it’s on my list of things I should be reading but haven’t yet, because I’m a very bad procrastinator and a slow reader. I’ve gotten better, but I get disillusioned. Sadie Dupuis [guitarist/vocalist of Speedy Ortiz] just posted her April books pile, and it was like eight books, and I’m like, shut the fuck up [laughs]. I’ve been inching my way through Faulkner and Alice Walker right now, these classics that were on my bookshelf, but I’ve been doing it every day, which is progress.

It’s funny, because Making Sex is a book from the early ’90s by this middle-aged cis professor that doesn’t explicitly mention trans people at all ever, but it’s about the endlessly changing and contradictory “scientific” definitions of sex. Starting with the Aristotelian one, where he was like, “Women are cold and wet, which corresponds with the elements of…”

Right, women are like 3D printers for the male form.

Laqueur writes that all of these definitions of sex contain claims about gender. There’s a part on the Renaissance where he discusses various cases of intersex people, what became of them, the formal decision on their identity from the local duke or whomever. He says that, generally, “as long as sign matched status, all was well.” And in so much popular music sign does not match status.

It reminded me of that great essay you did about robotic voices—I actually have this giant quote from it pasted into my phone: “When grafted onto robots, alpha masculinity becomes distended and uncanny; Robocop and the Terminator supplant organic masculinity with a hilariously overwrought form of butch. Others present a beta masculinity ripe with pathos: the tragically named Alpha from Power Rangers, whose neuroses constantly short-circuit him, or Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Data…” I guess I’m wondering, how do you feel those cinematic robots relate to synth-pop and vocoders?

I think you see a lot of overlap in Laurie Anderson, who I write about in the book, who created a caricature of masculinity using vocoders and pitch-shifters, which was deployed to a subtle comedic effect. It’s a character that she uses a lot throughout the early ’80s to poke fun at the idea of competent masculinity, masculinity as the harbinger of the future and as the natural subject of America. The comic effect of roboticizing masculinity definitely appears there, like, how powerful can masculinity be if it’s so easily mimicked by something that’s not a man? And that’s true for failing robots like Data, it’s true for someone like Laurie Anderson, and I think more recently you see Dorian Electra working in a similar vein, where they’re doing office drag and singing through vocoder about being a “career boy.” Performing all these stereotypical male roles … The idea that masculinity is kind of inherently comic, because it’s so stilted and brittle, comes into play there. And robots are a good excuse to magnify that, because they’re so easy to break, and ill-fitting in the role of human in a similar way that men are.

It’s interesting that Daft Punk, the other artists who had a Billboard hit while dressed as robots, have always been smoothly asexual in their persona. But not the camp C-3PO thing, or even that Data type, more like the Terminator if it were just making house jams … In the Prince chapter, you talk about him in these Sapphic terms, echoing Wendy & Lisa’s own description of him as a “fancy lesbian.” I was thinking about the inverse, divas with a homoerotic affect, like Madonna.

I couldn’t find a way to slot Madonna in. There were moments, but I couldn’t make them cohere into an argument, whereas Prince, the chapter could’ve been longer … He was so specific with such widespread appeal. I don’t know any other pop star who managed to be that consistently strange and opaque and elusive and still so massively popular. So insistent on his own displacement from his surroundings, in terms of gender, the way he produced his music, and his relationships with the rest of the band.

He’s my favourite musician, and I find “If I Was Your Girlfriend” so moving in the way that it takes this fantasy of perfect mastery—Prince writing and performing and producing every element of every song, shifting between genders effortlessly—and crushes it down into the narrow intimacies of heterosexuality.

Yeah, and I feel like there’s this longing for a feminized mastery within the lyrics, right? This caretaking that he doesn’t necessarily have access to in his male form, as a man who loves women. There’s this whole realm of mastery that he’s sealed off from, and the best he can do is use his mastery of music to simulate it, or try to find a way in to pantomime it.

In the chapters on dance music, you write a lot about these distended experiences of time: The improvised circuit of DJ and dancers, the stopped clock at the Loft. It feels very appropriate now that we’re living in this endless suspended present. What do you think distinguishes the two? Why is one of them euphoric and the other nightmarish?

There’s a point to the former, right? Being in a place where there’s a lot of sensory input, you’re hearing music that’s really loud, you’re surrounded by other people, maybe your end goal is just to dance, or maybe it’s to get high and peak at some point during the night, or to have sex or whatever. Even though the moment is extended, there’s direction within it, there’s narrative. And that narrative doesn’t necessarily conform to clock time, it’s on its own timeline, but it does have peaks and valleys, it does begin and eventually end. Whereas what we’re doing now, there’s no end to it, it seems so yawning and empty. And obviously we can’t be around other people, so all the sensory overload and the sensuality of the dance floor is drained out of the picture. It’s interesting how it’s even drained out of musical experiences that are happening.

I totally get that musicians have to do something to survive when they can’t tour, because for so many musicians that’s their only source of income, so playing Zoom shows makes sense, but I feel like it’s such a different experience from an actual concert. Where you feel the vibrations from the speakers in your body, and you’re near other people reacting at the same time. The lack of any sensory shift makes the moment impoverished, I think. It’s so weird, I had that thought of, wow, this really shows how time is conditional. The fact that March took 400 years and April didn’t really … happen? It doesn’t seem like April happened, there was no demarcation there. There’s no narrative to it because everything is just bad all the time and slowly getting worse … I thought that I would be fine through this, I kind of dug in my heels like, whatever, I’m in my house anyways so it doesn’t really matter that I have to stay inside my house. But the psychological effect of everyone I know being stuck and suffering for it…

The idea that something bad is happening and there’s nothing you can do about it except stay home is hard to swallow. All of that makes this hellish. But it’s a good example, or at least an effective example [laughs], of how time is conditional. I wish I could be on a dance floor. Ever since I moved to Denver I haven’t been to as many shows or dance nights as I once went to in Chicago, because I knew the environment, knew the layout of the city a little bit better. Here there’s a lot of—I don’t want to bad-talk Denver, but there’s a lot of EDM and jam bands, just not as much of an abundance of stuff I like. But I didn’t really miss it before all this, I was like, alright, that’s fine, I’ll get my few shows out, that scratches the itch as I’m getting older. And now I need to be in a shitty club with sticky floors and concrete walls, where I can’t hear anything but feedback, with a bunch of drunk people [laughs]. That’s something I miss that I didn’t think I would miss.

Your book made me return to that Octo Octa album from last year [Resonant Body], where she gestures towards ’90s rave anthems without just pastiching them or lapsing into melancholy. It feels like this intense solidarity.

Totally. She goes through those gestures with such a light touch, it feels like there’s room for forward motion.

Right, it feels purposeful. And I feel like that’s the challenge in a larger sense too, how to care for and remember all the people who are sick and dying.

It’s strange to try to be present without being present right now. It’s also troubling how conveniently dependent we are on internet technologies to communicate now and care for each other in whatever ways we can, like, with the refusal to bail out the postal service. Any non-corporate communication we have is being starved.

One of your recurring themes is how the gender expression of marginalized people gets eyed up and repackaged by capitalism. Have you read that Elijah Wald book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll?

No, I haven’t.

The title is very inflammatory [laughs], there’s only, like, one chapter about the Beatles. It’s more a secret history of American pop music, touching on some fantastically unfashionable artists like Pat Boone or Paul Whiteman, because people were listening to them. And one of his recurring themes is the way that music-making gets shaped by recording technology. He argues that a big influence behind the rise of the album in the ’60s was—I’m not really an audiophile, I forget exactly what changed to allow for longer LPs, but something did. Before music was a recorded commodity, people would take songs and adapt them and put their own twist on them—it’s a very human impulse, I think, to do that. But when the music industry comes along that becomes part of capitalism’s repertoire. How do you feel that’s all been accelerated and complicated by digital technology? I’m thinking of Arca sequencing her album to confound streaming services.

That whole phenomenon just has accelerated, right? As soon as something’s published online it can be devoured. A somewhat recent example is Rihanna’s Saturday Night Live performance [in 2012], where she or her creative design team borrowed elements from seapunk, which was this small semi-comedic vaporwave offshoot out of Chicago led by a trans girl and a cis girl, just making lots of ’90s-nostalgic synth music. Lots of Ecco the Dolphin visuals. Lots of digital replications of paradises, beaches and oceans and palm trees, that made it into this Rihanna performance. Very quickly things from the fringes were scooped up and repackaged around a mainstream pop star. I think maybe what you’re seeing is a new generation of artists kind of accepting that as inevitable? Making work so quickly that the swagger-jackers can’t keep up.

You see a lot of trans artists in particular putting out a ton of stuff, like Black Dresses and Ada Rook and that whole network, releasing three or four albums a year sometimes. Pouring out music at the rate that they’re making it, and not necessarily working through a label or thinking so much about marketing.

It’s interesting because that’s almost the speed at which the Beatles were releasing albums, back when an album didn’t have to have these high levels of production, you could have four cover songs and it wasn’t a big deal. You only have to write four to six songs, and then you record it all over two days. Before the album became this art object, when it was just a convenient package for songs by popular artists, you saw things happening a lot faster. Now that the internet is what it is, and has messed with many people’s ability to make a living making music, you see that same rate for different reasons. I think most of the albums that I’m talking about are considered as full-length narratives, it’s more about not needing a label to mediate between you and your listeners.

I love how you keep returning to that search for unlikely affinities. It’s the “Crush With Eyeliner” thing, two people swerving towards each other while conspicuously failing at gender. Where are you finding those affinities these days?

In music?

Anywhere! It’s the last question, it could be anything. That photo of Daniel Radcliffe walking all the dogs [laughs].

Oh boy. Honestly, the insane, powerful singing that my body used to do when I saw pictures of abject males has quieted a little bit since I got top surgery, so I don’t explode in longing when I see a picture of Daniel Radcliffe looking at his phone while tied to 17 dogs quite the way I used to. I used to go to Twenty One Pilots a lot for that, because there’s a lot of homoerotic play between the two of them. My fandom for them is like the adult version of my Savage Garden fandom … any kind of beta-male affinity. You mentioned R.E.M., and I’m actually researching for a potential book about Michael Stipe, a false hagiography or critical biography, because I feel like he’s going to write his own at some point, I can’t do that for him. That seems illegal. But I want to write something about his place in culture from the position of a fan.

I feel like I’m also getting it in Britney Spears’s communist reblogs. The idea that this person who was the one symbol of Y2K consumerism, everything wrong with the way capitalism has infiltrated music, is now like, “I was never a willing participant in my own exploitation.” Her working against her own interpretation has been really productive, not in the erotic sense that you were asking about, but in the sense that she was held up as this image of perfection and now she’s actively embracing her own failure … I get a lot of vibrations just from seeing other trans people on the internet, seeing what we’re all doing with ourselves in this weird time. The fact that people are looser with what they post, maybe, not necessarily in a lewd sense, just more casual. I wish I had a better answer to your question than Twenty One Pilots [laughs].

No, I love that answer!

It’s one point where I feel like I have no agreement from the rest of music-critic Twitter, that this is a good band. But I also just festooned them with my transmasculine hopes and dreams, and now I can’t get rid of them. They’re a comfort band for sure. I used to watch a lot of their music videos compulsively, in the same way that I would with Savage Garden. “What if I had that body? Wouldn’t that be cool?” What if I could look and move like that in this weird, failed rock stardom? Because that is a band that’s all about pushing against the bombast of their alt-rock predecessors … Imagine Dragons, Kings of Leon, those post-Arcade-Fire what if we ran away from this world together male survivalist fantasies of the post-apocalypse. And then Twenty One Pilots were like, what if we were dweebs in the post-apocalypse instead? What if we were just nervous, insecure, vaguely homoerotic bros in this world those alpha males are ruling?

I had never actually looked up a photo of Twenty One Pilots before. All their publicity shots look like they just got signed to an esports team.

Yeah, Tyler just stoops! He’s got the muscles and the big black tattoos but he just looks like a sad little boy. It’s such a contrast, and so relevant to my own interior experience of being a person.

So, if Elvis was a male bimbo, does that mean Savage Garden are catboys?

Yeah, they can be catboys! I like that. I was active on Savage Garden message boards and fanfic communities when I was, like, 12, and I feel like that was probably something that got written at some point. Darren Hayes got turned into a cat and fucking loves it.

“My sunglasses are from a charity shop in Whitechapel, London, jacket likely from Blitz Vintage in London, blouse Massimo Dutti, trousers secondhand, bag bought from a 7-year-old girl on Cleaning Day in Helsinki. The paper bag inside – from a magazine delivery – is two years old. It covers my laptop – or whatever needs censoring. Lately, I have been inspired by Mrs. America's costume design and mise-en-scènes, such as the office gear.”

1 June 2020, Eerikinkatu

WNYC editor and critic Rebecca Carroll on what she wants white people to do for Black Americans (besides stop killing them):

The other day, a childhood friend of mine who now lives abroad called me out of the blue in tears: “How can this be happening? I’m so sorry about what’s happening in America, but more so what’s happening to black people in America. I don’t know what to do. I just feel miserable and I can’t stop crying.”

“Lean into that,” I said. “That’s the appropriate response.” Miserable is exactly how the white people who want to help should be feeling right now, and then they should sit with that misery until something breaks in their brain, the narrative changes in their psyche, and the legacy of emotional paralysis lifts entirely. I don’t mean self-serving sadness or performative tears, but rather a bone-deep sense of agony and grief that forces the humanization of black people. We can’t matter unless we are seen as human beings first.

Tags: Rebecca Carroll

Calling it one of their most requested videos, PBS’s Frontline has uploaded to YouTube their 1985 program on schoolteacher Jane Elliott’s powerful lesson in discrimination. The video shows how, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Elliott divided her third-grade class into those with blue eyes and those with non-blue eyes and then instructed the non-blue-eyed group to treat the blue-eyed group as inferior. The resulting behavior is fascinating, upsetting, and illuminating.

Elliott went on to become a noted antiracism activist and has done blue eyes/brown eyes workshops with groups of adults and teens. And she goes hard at them — see this video and this video for instance.

I’m trying to get the people who participate in this exercise the opportunity to find out how it feels like to be something other than white in this society. ‘Alright people, I’m Jane Elliott and I’m your resident bitch for the day and make no mistake about that, that is exactly what this is about.’ I do this in a mean, nasty way because racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, ethnocentrism are mean and nasty.

I would also highly recommend watching this brief clip of a talk by Elliott. In less than a minute, she deftly skewers the idea that racial discrimination doesn’t exist in America and calls out White Americans’ complicity in allowing it to persist.

I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our black citizens — if you as a white person would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.

[Nobody stands.]

You didn’t understand the directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand. Nobody’s standing here. That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you. I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.

Freedom for some is not freedom.

Tags: education   Jane Elliott   racism   video