✰ First: Asphalt Green, the new album by my band Angels in America, is out now on Halcyon Veil. A physical release is forthcoming; meanwhile, listen via DSPs or buy on Bandcamp or check out now nice Boomkat was about it. NYCers, keep your eyes peeled for an event in June which, naturally I’ll be writing about here too. Peggy onlyfans get pushed around.

✰✰ Second: I was too tied up last week to note that I’d be reading on the evening of Thursday, 5/27 at St. Dymphna’s for Kelly Karivalis’s “Limitless Hangout” series, but I did and it was great and all kinds of old friends came out. Thanks to them, to for suggesting me for the bill (and reading a ripper of a story), and to Kelly for letting me hop on.

✰✰✰ Third, and of most direct relevance: issue 7 of The Whitney Review is out, and in it--among the analyses from voices across ’s typically glittering contributor vanguard including and --there is another writeup of mine. This one is on William T. Vollmann’s forthcoming A Table for Fortune, which I read over the first stretch of 2026 to the tune of four PDF volumes, totaling 3,557 pages, in which I made 2,092 marginal notes all while racing against: a review deadline (a generous one, but still); the onrushing birth of a human child; and the ever-present, altogether Damoclean threat of my waking up one day and realizing I didn’t, strictly speaking, actually need to do any of it.

Because OK, to back up: after a 2024–2025 writing season largely spent working up longish-form pieces on Rachel Kushner, Peter Weiss, and Thomas Pynchon, I’d intended to cool out on book reviews, especially ones that required as much in the way of copious research and reading. But also, let’s be the remotest bit real: I’ve known that A Table for Fortune was coming since it was announced in March 2025, and I’ve followed along over the years as the book’s complex and tragic professional and personal contexts have been enumerated. Also, crucially: I’ve been a Vollmaniac since I was a kid, as well as a compulsive achiever with poor time management, as well as one of these maximalist masochists. There was, in other words, no way I was gonna survive the historical accident of my shambolic freelance book reviewer era coinciding with the release of WTV×CIA without at least, like, sending an inquiry or two. Having thus set my own Table for Fortune--albeit this one via a cold-call email to a “publicity@” publisher account--I was, wouldn’t you know it, invited to dine.

My thoughts on the book itself? Those are thankfully complicated enough they don’t lend themselves to pithy one-liner takes, so I’ll refrain from summarizing. I’m happy with the way I got them across in the printed piece, which I’ll likely post here when the book is released in August, though fwiw the text is also reasonably scrutable in the picture I posted. But really you should just order the issue.

Meanwhile, in the vein of prior “DIARY” entries on here, please find some deep background below: notes and contexts and loose-end attempts to account for a small fraction of the many years and man-hours I’ve spent variously reading, deeply admiring, and bristling against the work of thee titan William T. Vollmann.

Time for some home truths.

To the extent I’ve thought about it, I’d always assumed that the first Vollmann I read must have been Europe Central, whose April 2005 release lined up neatly with my first cruises into meganovel fandom—about whose mixture of aesthetic thrills and handy identity-crystallizing capacities (I was sixteen) I’ve written before. It turns out, however, that this was a false adolescent memory, similar to the one in which I swear I saw a billboard for Blue Streak 2 (a sequel which, in spite of my certainty, later research has confirmed was never shot, or even greenlit!!). What I’m saying is that I didn’t tackle Europe Central until 2008, a fact attested to in turn by the signed and dated back-page inscription I scrawled in my paperback copy (another story, but at the time I thought this was a cool thing to do). Anyway, my actual first WTV was The Ice-Shirt, and it was revelatory.

It stands to reason that Vollmann’s Seven Dreams books (of which The Ice-Shirt is the first) would’ve been the ones to force open my conception of, among other features, the kinds of narrative experiments and broad political inquiries that were admissible in otherwise straight-faced historical fiction. I was, at the time, writing what I thought was my own transhistorical opus, and I clung to Vollmann’s notion of “symbolic history” and cited it often over the years, sometimes as justification for my own superficial reading or insufficient experience. I’m telling you, this stuff is dangerous for kids!! Because while sure, the “symbolic history” conception is slippery—prone to moral posturing, post-facto wish fulfillment, and a strained sort of circular logic (these unrecorded facts are truer than the recorded ones, because they’re offered in the service of a larger truth, for which you’ll have to take my word)—it also doesn’t function successfully in the absence of the sort of rigorous research and committed participation that underlie WTV’s work. Vollmann, in other words, could take the biggest of thematic swings, tempt clunkiness and preachiness and extreme pagecount indulgences, and get away with most all of it because it was clear he was a lifer: an author demonstrably all in, on every level, and—by way of contrast with my blustery, bluffing youthful example—unwilling or unable to disguise it.

Vollmann ably channeling Céline in the opening of his afterword to the 2006 New Directions reedition of Journey to the End of the Night. Don’t hurt em WTV!!

This would have been an easy enough identification to make on the page, since even WTV’s most strenuously stylized historical excursions contained revealing first-person/fourth-wall-collapsing authorial asides or interludes, decidedly unguarded lists of notes and sources (including plainspoken admissions of whatever was made up), and other markers of an uncommon—if now somewhat ’90s-postmodern-fiction–feeling—forthrightness. The actual means, though, by which I came to understand this crucial aspect of the Vollmann project was in its social implications. As I grew up a bit and began moving into music and art and general freak scenes, I was struck over and over by how the folks I was increasingly mixing with—people whose worldviews were marked by a devotion to marginal culture and a concomitant distrust of consensus reality—seemed to know and love Vollmann: whatever their level of interest in WTV’s grimier gonzo sex and drug excursions, radicals and activists easily spotted him for his fullthroated devotion to the global underclass and commitment to transhistorical justice; whatever their familiarity with his fictional doorstoppers, traveler kids and noisers idolized him for a fellow trainhopping devotee of the extremes of human experience. In the “real recognize real” sense of things, it was abundantly obvious: WTV was one of us, and more.

And so, being some kind of aspiring “real one”—if one necessarily crippled by an adolescent self-consciousness comparable to, say, WTV’s own in his delightful Deep Springs essay—I mainlined the books, lots and lots of them (though not all, which for some reason feels characteristic too). I sought out rare Vollmannabula and got overdue notices for the full Rising Up and Rising Down set (shouts out Smith College Library). I named a song after his book on gender and desire in Noh theater. And I logged and stashed away favorite bits of the body of work, vivid and affecting sections to which I often return: the “Catacomb Thoughts” opening of Rising Up and Rising Down; the treacherous Alaskan river crossing in An Afghanistan Picture Show; the Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya chapter of Europe Central; the death of Looking-Glass in The Dying Grass (and that book’s all-timer onomatopoeia “shlak,” denoting the cries of the Nez Perce babies).

I also grew, over time, into a state of real discomfort with other, less mythologized aspects of the WTV legend. There are the easy layups for cultural/sexual exploitation and poverty tourism; the queasymaking GenXer provocation games (so much to choose from, but let’s just go with the Captain Subzero stuff in The Rifles as representative); and, on the level of writing, such compulsions as the endless metaphorizing of the female body as a stand-in for good and ill, a sometimes strikingly willful inelegance, and a general moralizing streak that’s perhaps unavoidable when you’re making, like, multi-volume inventories of human failings, but still. Like I said, easy accusations—and ones complicated by the Vollmann voice’s blend of semifictional experiments and warts-and-all journalistic candor—but they’re there, and they’re increasingly unignorable, and you don’t need to be a scold or some stooge of kneejerk cultural ostracism to acknowledge that they merit more discussion than they’ve gotten.

In 2014, when I was working up what would become the final edition of our zine PLEASURE—an issue dedicated to the maximalist impulse that eventually featured contributions by (or on) James McCourt, Steven Moore, Baron Corvo, and Marguerite Young—I was lucky and crafty enough to trade on a former high school frenemy’s internship at Viking and get an inquiry out to Vollmann via his agent: specifically, a package sent to her office and forwarded on to WTV in Sacramento. Did he want to contribute something? I laid it on thick, I’m sure, as we did in those days when we were courting our heroes (hey, it worked on Costes).

A month or so later, I got a charming rejection letter, likewise blind-forwarded via the agency. “At the moment,” Bill wrote, “I am struggling a bit for both money and time (the latter a natural result of approaching my physical expiration date—I am 55).” He signed it, “In haste.” I folded the letter and tucked it into my copy of the abridged Rising Up and Rising Down, which I’ve been known to pull down every once in a while. And though we never interacted again, I feel the furthest thing from disappointed about WTV’s demurral. He was busy, surely, and probably even more earnest about the mortal dimension than I gave him credit for at the time, when I’d just assumed he was joking. He would, after all, have already been working on A Table for Fortune.

Anyway, there’s a lot I’d be psyched to get into about this new record: it’s our first since 2019, and a couple of its tracks originated still earlier than that, which is to say it’s been an exceedingly long time coming and stands as the rare example in my creative life of a crushingly long-lead project that actually sees completion and the light of day. Auspicious, like I said, but rather than get too sweeping with the takeaways, I thought I’d drill down and give the people what they want, namely: cellphone voice memos.

Below, exclusive and unvarnished access into the compositional process of what I’m positive is the only song to misuse a bunch of golf references while also featuring the word “garrote” and quoting the Rancid song from when we were six. We’re obnoxious clowns!! Buy the record!!

“K-Swiss” single art featuring the legendary “cathedral of asphalt” astride the FDR.

I’d been psyched on the idea of a song called “K-Swiss” for a while (although I thought it was a golf brand, which is my bad). At some point, though, I’d excavated the dumb old tagline out of my landfill of a brain, and it all felt like something that could be productively juxtaposed—in the longtime style of this band—with other, like, opaquely upsetting lyrics.1 Still, nothing really got cooking until I worked up an appropriately petty first line: I met you at the sample sale.

Let’s commence with the first documentary evidence of what would become “K-Swiss,” then: a voice memo from June 17, 2023 entitled “sample sale,” in which, after the first line, I start singing obvious nonsense words.

This condition would seem to have persisted for the better part of a year, although by the time I recorded the “sample sale piano” memo on June 12, 2024, it seems there were enough word-like sounds on the table that we’d blocked out a reasonable syllabic approximation of the final track. Obviously, the rudimentary/portentous piano was not gonna be the final move, so just needed to figure something out there, and we’d be good to go.

The eventual finalizing of the song’s instrumental had, if I’m honest, more to do with my participation in a Modest Mouse cover band over Halloween 2024 than I’ll be revealing here (really it all comes down to single note bends), but the other big innovation was a guitar lick for the verse, which I seem to have thought of around the time I trilled this into my phone on November 19, 2024.

After that, the trail goes tragically cold. I do, however, remember recording the bones of the final instrumental at the practice space before heading down to the Phill Niblock six-hour drone, which would have made it the afternoon of December 21, 2024. Which leaves a mere eighteen months of rerecording, tinkering, mixing etc. to get us to our present, desperately happy condition: a finished song, with a few lines I still mess with, some actual space in the mix (thanks Jack), and a dickish rocksteady outro. As we say sometimes: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣴⣶⣶⣦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣤⣶⣶⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣰⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣤⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⣰⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⢠⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⣰⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡆⠀⠀⠀
⢠⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⣀⣀⣤⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀⠀⠀
⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠘⠿⠿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠉⠛⠛⠛⠋⠉⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡄⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⠈⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠘⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠸⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣿⣿⣿⣿⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣿⠁⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⣇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠸⢿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠻⣿⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠛⠛⠟⠛

This week, the first of a run of music-related posts, beginning with the sort of classic show announcement you might--if you’re of my mid-internet-gerontocratic micro-generation, anyway--have once mounted via a coyly loudmouthed Facebook event, or a self-consciously jokey email blast or, if you’re a true legend, an obnoxious open-cc text chain. But OK, the announcement? It’s that the new band I play in, 𝔖𝔠𝔯𝔢𝔴𝔰1, will be performing this Friday at Bootleg Bar, opening up for storied noiser entities Knife Mall, Daughn Gibson, and Matt Franco.

The band, which comprises me, Emil Bognar-Nasdor, Daniel DiMaggio, Christopher Forgues, and Jake Tobin, came together last fall as the altogether exceptional real-life manifestation of the altogether unexceptional--indeed, perennial--“Hey, we should play together sometime” conversation. After a robustly woodsheddy autumn, we broke for the New Year, got completely sidelined for months, and then forced the hand of chance by hopping on this great show. What will happen?? How will we sound?? When reached for comment, band members had the following to say: “Baxery.”

At any rate, a few relevant show-prep goodies are below. Come to the gig if you want, cuz man, I’ve got questions.

P.S.: Also on Friday, a big announcement regarding the other band I play in.

𝔗𝔥𝔞𝔫𝔨 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔤𝔬𝔬𝔡𝔟𝔶𝔢!

A non-representative recording of a non-representative track. “Door Should Be Open” demo, as heard on CKUT last New Year’s Eve.2

Flyer by CF.

Y8b Y8b Y888P 8888 8888 Y8b Y8P 88P’888’Y88 888 88e  Y88b Y8P
 Y8b Y8b Y8P  8888 8888  Y8b Y  P’  888  ‘Y 888 888D  Y88b Y 
  Y8b Y8b Y   8888 8888   Y8b       888     888 88”    Y88b  
   Y8b Y8b    8888 8888  e Y8b      888     888 b,      888  
    Y8P Y     ‘Y88 88P’ d8b Y8b     888     888 88b,    888  

Y8b Y8b Y888P 8888 8888 Y8b Y8P 88P'888'Y88 888 88e  Y88b Y8P
 Y8b Y8b Y8P  8888 8888  Y8b Y  P'  888  'Y 888 888D  Y88b Y 
  Y8b Y8b Y   8888 8888   Y8b       888     888 88"    Y88b  
   Y8b Y8b    8888 8888  e Y8b      888     888 b,      888  
    Y8P Y     'Y88 88P' d8b Y8b     888     888 88b,    888  

There are stories I can imagine telling about the experiences/observations/feelings sustained over the month or so since: the powerfully gnarly overnight spent watching the partner endure the process called (incredibly) “labor”; postpartum temporal illusions including but not limited to scifi dilation, all-too-brief appearances of an enthralling, ephemeral Present, and sad tokens of irreversibility; also the predictably bummer family scandal over religion (but, really, ritual circumcision) and politics (but, really, murderous ethnostates) that culminated in a sweet and stressful Jewish naming ceremony in which, being insufferable, I still quoted Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.

But since it’s already too easy to get real glib about this stuff, I’m gonna hold off. Obviously, elements of the above will start mixing into my writing before long, as will numerous other features of the gestational walkabout and its somehow unforeseeable result--an inestimable human life in the shape of several potatoes stuck together in the shape of a baby boy we named Sasha. In the meantime, though, I’m gonna make like the b-side says and let time do its thing.

Lastly: because I still had to have something for Writing Group this month, I figured I’d kick the tires on “Brinkmann 2000,” a story cycle I drafted a few years ago (and of which I’ve posted excerpts before) since, being about a father who’s mortifyingly afraid of his child, it’s fun and thematically potent. A tiny excerpt follows below.

A macabre but uncannily well-composed scene from the midpoint of an overnight labor.

Detail.

???

Rudi. Nothing else for it, Brinkmann slung the wet, soup-sopped napkin over his shoulder and walked into her room. He found his daughter under the bed carrying on one end of a conversation, gangly limbs spilling out like a drawer of broken pencils. The truth was, he often came home to her like this—chatting, presumably, with some varmint or other from off the street—and, though he couldn’t explain it, at such moments he usually elected to step back outside, moving as gingerly as he could to avoid startling her. Today, though, he experienced what he could only characterize as a moment of total fatherly clarity, and cleared his throat.

“Are you talking to one of your pets, dragă?” He made to sit on the bed but hesitated, arrested by a mental image of the structure collapsing on and crushing her.

“No daddy, no pets here.” Her tone was even, almost bubbly.

“Then to whom are you speaking?”

“Well…” little legs bopping around. “Actually I’m not supposed to say.”

He inhaled. “Your mother tells me you are claiming to have met a ghost.”

She didn’t reply, but he thought he saw a shift in the movement of a leg. A small jerk, maybe, at being caught out.

He knew he should push her on it, but he was feeling gracious. “Please understand, puișor, your mother and I are not angry. We just want to understand.”

“I know, tată.” This awful grownness, a kind of low tone and disinterested plainspokenness, as if to imply a kind of social parity between them.

He hardened his tone. “And does the ghost know why you weren’t in school last week?”

“They canceled school because… the school was invaded.”

On the low table beside the mattress, Brinkmann could see the in-progress class project Rudi had collaged from dozens of glossy magazine cutouts: the Spanish boy singer lounging on a beach, dancing in a marionette costume, riding a white horse over the edge of a waterfall. Bits from film posters and flimsy cardboard record inserts. Joselito Vagabundo. Joselito in New York. Above this display, though, she’d tacked something else into the wall: a picture of her uncle, sunkissed in field dress, smiling and flashing a victory sign. Brinkmann approached, fingering the print distractedly. He caught himself wondering, for just a second, if it were a new photo. Though of course that was impossible.

“They did not cancel school, my love. I don’t believe it.”

“Yuh huh,” her tone all sweetness again, “the army invaded. I think the Chinese army? They came pouring in off the canal, and made an announcement: if we come to school, they’ll kill us. Kill us and drink our blood. So they canceled.”

Brinkmann couldn’t keep himself from chuckling. Growing up far away, he’d been told these exact rumors, pretty much, and repeated them readily: a Chinese detachment, say, swarming Bucharest. He and his brother had riled each other up with accounts of Kuomintang patrolmen going house to house, which had yielded in him what felt to this day like a real memory—though of course it had to have been a dream—of a face, the kind of fierce face Brinkmann had only ever seen in the newspaper, pressed up against their bedroom window and peering in. How was it that all kids, regardless of time and place of birth, always seemed to hear the same stories?

“Darling,” he said, his gaze tending back to the photo on the wall, “there’s a ceasefire in the canal zone.”

This was the wrong tack, and he detected no response.

“Listen to me,” he began again. “You have to go to school. You have to keep off the dunes, please, and go where you’re told. We cannot keep hearing from people that you’ve, you know, wandered off. We aren’t at the absorption center anymore, understand? This is the city,” he said, proud of the assertion’s pedagogical clarity. “It’s dangerous.”

A strange, minor-key sound issued from below him, a kind of gargle or guttural trill.

“Hey, I’m serious,” he said, hazarding another moderate raising of his voice. He bent over, laid a clammy palm on her leg, somewhere between her knee and the anklehigh bunch-up of her patterned schoolgirl sock. “Are you listening?”

He felt her little calf muscles tense in response to the question and his hand jumped. Brinkmann thought of the phase some years ago when his daughter, who’d then just begun to walk, became enamored of the idea of tripping him underfoot. It had started as an accident, he was pretty sure, the time he hadn’t noticed her toddling past and took a ridiculous, vaudevillian spill into the settee. But she’d caught the flash of panic on his face before he fell and—after a moment of vacant indecision—uncorked for some reason a loud giggle which had, naturally, delighted Kitty. This reinforcement, in turn, fixed the behavior and made it appear desirable, and then it was weeks of hooks and leg sweeps, cheap bullying that didn’t stop until he’d exploded at them both.

With a swish of fabric, Rudi slid out from under the bed. Sure enough, the lizard, leathery and protuberant, was coiled into his daughter’s tightly braided bun, the dull dappling of its skin detectable through strands of black hair before it tapered into alternating yellowish stripes marking the nibs of muscle, meaty shoulders and thighs that hung across her forehead. Its tail poked rigid through her yellow hair-tie and down the back of her blouse as if it were a connective line between their bodies. He jerked back as if to shake off the image of the hateful animal clinging coldly to his girl as she turned and regarded her father with one of her impassive stares.

“I’m listening tată.”

“Good,” he said, and smiled. “Now will you promise to stop sneaking away?”

When she replied, her voice came out low.

“Will you?”

            lllllll_______
           _,_  llllllllllll\
___       /    \  llllllllllll\
  \       | @ @ |  llllllllllll\
    \-----oOO---Ooo-------------/
     \lllllllllllllllllllllllll/
      \lllllllllllllllllllllll/
       \lllllllllllllllllllll/
            //            \
           ||             ||
           OO             OO

First, a program note: as eagle-eyed superfans of this website are no doubt already aware, I’ve been posting on a more or less biweekly basis lately (the every-two-weeks form of ‘biweekly’), on account of some good old fashioned personal business. This, alas, is probably gonna be the pace for the time being. And although I may pick back up with the weekly writing before too long, I may also disappear for longer stretches here and there. Nobody knows! There is good news, though, which is that you will all be completely fine either way.

That said, I figured I’d stave off any and all approaching hibernation stretches with one more lengthy essay on the art-historical heroes and bugbears that have populated this page since its inception. Below, please find a classic run-on pontificator piece, one I previously titled “The Failure of Internationalism: The avant-garde co-option and abandonment of eastern Europe, 1970–1989,” in which I attempt a survey of Eastern Bloc avant-gardists and strategies, zooming in specifically on artists in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I will say, off the bat, that the account is almost definitely a woefully underrepresentative one: it’s the product of research into contexts I don’t share, featuring artists whose languages I don’t speak. So n.b.: it’s even more of a grain of salt situation this week than usual--even when I’m getting into some comparatively cozy Fluxus drama and, like, calling George Maciunas an influence peddler. Still, there are discoveries I made in writing this that I continue to find really meaningful, and think of as lodestars. I also hope to take the work farther someday, so if anybody out there has a whole bunch of info on, say, Łódź-Kaliska, do not be shy. Hit me up, proszę i dziękuję!!

Joseph Beuys and Ryszard Stanisławski, the Muzeum Sztuki’s director, on the occasion of the 1981 Polentransport action.

I. “KUNST = MENSCH = KREATIVITÄT = FREIHEIT”

In summer 1981, a few months before the imposition of martial law in communist Poland, the Museum Sztuki in the town of Łódź was treated to an unannounced appearance by the West German artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys, by then an eminent international avant-gardist, entrusted some 700 objects—drawings, lithographs, photos and writings—to the collection of the museum as part of an impromptu exhibition known as Polentransport ’81. Leaving texts praising the incipient rise of the Solidarity trade union and instructions that the collection should be shown in Hungary after its appearance in Poland, Beuys made the underlying political message of his donation clear: the work was meant to help bridge the gaps separating east and west and, having been deposited at the esteemed though marginalized Museum Sztuki, to proudly advocate for the history of European modern art and the continuing cause of artistic unity in the face of regime oppression.

Polentransport was the first of several actions spearheaded by Beuys aimed at weakening the schismatic character of the Iron Curtain during its later years. In 1983 Beuys, along with the East Berliner artists Eugen Blume and Erhard Monden, organized an action entitled Sender-Empfänger (Sender-Receiver), consisting of a telephone call from Düsseldorf to Berlin. Beuys, Blume and Monden exchanged and recorded their ideas and artistic intentions, momentarily bridging the tensely guarded border, if only in conversation. The next year, a planned personal visit by the artist to East Berlin was stymied by immigration officials, and a visit to Hungary to supervise the exhibition of the Polentransport materials similarly broke down.

Clearly, Beuys’s commitment to the cause of cross-border unity was genuine, and his interest was appreciated by his eastern European collaborators, who otherwise had little access to contemporary art or ideas from the west. But it was also a passion predicated on a set of attitudes stemming from the artist’s idiosyncratic political and cultural obsessions (including an enduring focus around now on eastern shamanism and esoteric thought-systems) and his controversial history of avant-garde theatrics (such as his 1967 action Eurasienstab and his repeated references thereafter to an imagined utopian Eurasian state).1 These concerns, needless to say, had little to do with the on-the-ground political reality in Łódź, and even less with a Solidarity movement that, far from being a direct ally of the Polish avant-garde, actually offered it no end of complications through its affiliation with the hard-line Catholic Church. Instead, they are best thought of as inimitably Beuysian enumerations of the artistic and political theory of the “alternative of the third path,” Beuys’s twofold rejection of capitalism and communism both in favor of an integrated system of collective governance, epitomized in the notion of an imagined cross-border Eurasian fantasy. The Museum Sztuki, with its storied history and its eastern location, figured in Beuys’s narrative as a possible birthplace for this new order, with the Polentransport ’81 and its militarily-tinged name functioning as a Berlin Airlift-style direct cultural infusion: a magnanimous donation of Western art into an underserved target zone in the victimized, woefully isolated east. With a display of artistic virtuosity, Beuys—who had once advertised a 1976 action with the slogan “KUNST = MENSCH = KREATIVITÄT = FREIHEIT” (“ART = HUMAN = CREATIVITY = FREEDOM”)—was effectively foisting his fanciful, idealistic politics onto Poland’s very real regime nightmare.2

The complicated Beuys / Łódź relation is typical of those which existed between the eastern European communist states and most members of the western avant-garde at large. In spite of spending the better part of the Cold War years mired in their own politicking, rivalries, and bids for notoriety, western European avant-gardists managed to find occasional cause to invoke the Eastern Bloc in the service of a kind of leftist co-option: as means by which their revolutionary causes could gain legitimacy or exposure, or as staging grounds (as in Beuys’s Eurasia) for idealistic, ahistorical fantasies. And this, of course, was in the rare cases when the very real oppression of eastern Europeans was not being ignored outright in favor of the myopic concerns of western radicals, oppressive measures and political dramas which were, to a one, less harsh by comparison, less violent, and certainly lower-stakes.

In the face of this predicament, eastern European artists and would-be counterculturalists affected a variety of strategies to—variously—attract the attention and prestige of the western cultural firmament, create what meager networks of exchange were possible, publish and disseminate their works and, most often, to merely persist in what were by any western standards altogether intolerable conditions. The sheer scale and patent multifariousness of the Eastern Bloc states and their specific contexts, histories and cultures makes any overarching diagnosis of a prevailing trend among artists a tremendous oversimplification. Still, there were certain observable commonalities in the myriad strategies and tactics used by avant-gardists in these countries, from the careful utilization of samizdat publishing and underground distribution to the stoking of cross-border relationships and the judicious organization of increasingly international exhibitions. There were even forays into “direct action,” that great shibboleth of the western avant-garde. But for every measure whose motivation was the bridging of international divisions, artists also employed tactics that focused narrowly inward, zooming in on their nation’s specialized, hugely complex individual context, idiosyncratic characteristics and maddeningly thorny political situation in ways that no idealistic outsider—even a famous western European artist—could ever manage to do.

Examples abound. Two years before Beuys showed up at the Museum Sztuki, the artist group known as Łódź-Kaliska, born from a collective expulsion from their school’s young artists coalition, had undertaken their own program of exploration into the Polish situation and its manifold, absurd intricacies. In 1983, while the nation was still under Jaruzelski’s martial law, they undertook the clandestine publication of a subversive magazine, Tango, which attacked their regime’s hard-line advocacy of state-sanctioned socialist realism just as it did the Solidarity-approved patriotic art of the reformers—which had itself been tacitly endorsed by Beuys—all via a mélange of manifestos, photos and reproduced artworks whose transgressive vitriol is comparable with few western European works (though the Spur journal comes to mind). The group displayed its wit, indignation and gall at every turn: they named their publication in ironic reference to the tango’s “one step forward and two steps back” dance structure; they stapled condoms to an issue’s cover; they published pictures of Bruce Lee, the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu, and maps and instructions on exhuming the corpses of famous Polish artistic forebears. They were willfully and unapologetically Polish, and thus uninterested in inclusion in any “internationals”; not by coincidence, the group remains almost entirely unknown in the west to this day. For the members of Łódź-Kaliska were also—at least outwardly—uninterested the self-satisfied advocacy of foreign interlopers, or the approaching market capitalism on the horizon, which they saw not as a third path utopian transformation but for the new political imposition it was. In 1988, with the re-allowed Solidarity movement in negotiations with the government and regime change a year away, they released a film with the unmistakably provocative German title Freiheit? Nein, danke! (“Freedom? No thank you!”); though undoubtedly another in a long line of shots leveled at the powers that be, they may as well have been speaking directly to Beuys.

Tango 1’s gleefully subversive cover.

II. “Renegades and imposters”

For all their implicit condescension and attendant whiffs of appropriation, the Polentransport and Sender-Receiver actions were still among the least exploitative of the western avant-garde’s impositions behind the Iron Curtain, themselves having become something of a tradition among the members of Fluxus, the international art movement of which Beuys was a sometime-affiliate. Contrary to, say, the Situationist International, which reported on revolutionary action around the world in its periodical Internationale Situationniste but otherwise stuck close to home, Fluxus artists—whose radical “anti-art” platform and confrontational agitprop techniques belied a willful lack of theoretical backing—actively sought exposure, at least for a time, in the Eastern Bloc.3

George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-born Fluxus founder, had even gone so far in the early 1960s as to court the attentions of Kruschev and the U.S.S.R., believing his movement (a “concretist” art to suit the “concretist” Soviet state) to be a perfect means by which international unity might be achieved. But as we’ve seen, even gestures ostensibly meant to prompt communal development between west and east had more to do with the narrow preoccupations of western artists than with any real international spirit: the approval of the Soviet Union was the leverage with which Maciunas thought Fluxus might gain meaning and legitimacy, a fact underscored by the degree to which Maciunas was willing to compromise his art for the sake of popular appeal: “Must be very careful and delicate to achieve maximum audience acceptance and least criticism for the press,” as he wrote in a letter discussing strategies for exposure in the U.S.S.R. “In such case Fluxus had to be planned as a vaudeville, amusement, satire, etc., rather than a vulgar shock.”4 Far from the relatively high-minded goals of exposing culture-starved eastern artists to his group’s striking new experimental forms or facilitating a genuine political exchange, Maciunas’s efforts were directed at securing the endorsement of a communist regime purely for its value as a signifier, as cultural capital—even hoping that his “anti-art” platform could meld with Eastern Bloc aims to the extent that he might persuade the Soviet leadership to issue a decree banning its very practice, turning “anti-art” from idle theory into regime policy in the largest country on earth.

Mind-boggling though this attempted imposition may be, the debt it owes to run-of-the-mill avant-garde group politicking is evidenced by the fallout from an earlier Fluxus incursion into the east. A 1964 tour of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Russia by Eric Andersen featured performances in small-scale nightclubs and (as if further evidence of cultural repression was needed) private homes, where they attracted mere handfuls of attendees. Knowing Fluxus’s chief coordinator to be concerned about the group’s acceptance in the communist bloc, however, Anderson wrote a letter to Maciunas tricking him into believing that the tour’s events were attracting thousands of outraged spectators, creating a “succès de scandale” on a massive scale, and forcing the Soviet press to bar all mention of the tour. A furious Maciunas responded by expelling Andersen and his tourmates from Fluxus and writing a press release (“Statement from Fluxus Committee Regarding So-Called Fluxus Concerts Recently Presented... by 4 Fluxus Renegades and Imposters”) claiming “full agreement with the denunciation and criticism of [Andersen’s] activities in the Soviet press,” which naturally hadn’t written one word about the tour.5 The hoax precipitated the expulsion by Maciunas of Fluxus artists who were less amenable to the group’s quasi-political aims, a by-now-familiar purge-as-leadership dynamic not uncommon among the era’s avant-garde influence peddlers.

Cover of a 1987 Tvrdohlaví catalog.

III. Private movements

Amidst the willfully narrow, center-privileging narrative of countercultural resistance that dominated the western European cultural and political discourse, the would-be radical figures and cultural vanguardists of the east constructed their own avant-garde conceptions, furnished with what evidence could be gathered from political developments of the day (the highly variable relations among Warsaw Pact nations, the cycle of “thaws” and “chills” that regulated the rollback or reimplementation of repressive social measures), as well as certain inherited cultural perceptions. One such persistent and—at least when it came to the path toward self-determination—rather unhelpful cultural legacy was an unflagging, almost obsessive veneration on the part of eastern Europe with the grand western cultural tradition, especially that of France. Indeed, the notion of France as a mythological paragon of culture had long been a truism for eastern Europe, caught as it was between the west’s dominant artistic influence and the perceived provincialism of the Slavic culture to its east. But this was especially true in the realm of art, and of particular self-defeating import during the Cold War. For all the pronounced lack of cross-border identification practiced by leftist French radicals like the Situationists, so too did the east’s blindly Francophilic idolization prevent it from understanding the complexities and seriousness of the tensions within that country, and by extension, the west at large. To artists from the east, criticisms of French culture, especially ones leveled by Frenchmen, simply read as confusing—as was the case when André Breton venomously attacked his home country and praised homegrown resistance in a speech provided for a 1959 exhibition in Kraków to widespread hesitation in the Polish audience. The aggressive language of the western counterculture—its rhetorical bombast, its practiced referencing of an avant-garde lineage, its monomaniacal drive to destroy what had come before—had become somehow untranslatable in the context of an eastern Europe so culturally bereft that it was determined to hold onto whatever touchstones it could.

Though their reticence to kill their western idols may have prevented Eastern Bloc artists from imbuing their practices with the kind of cultural stridency found among other avant-garde groups, they still made use of numerous tactics common to their peers across the curtain. By contrast, however, the use of these familiar techniques (collective demonstration of artistic beliefs, public provocation, intergroup and intergenerational dispute) was, for easterners, mediated to a far greater extent by the specific political reality of the moment at hand, and the practical possibilities provided therefrom. Though one could assume a gratifyingly incensed and scandalized response to an avant-garde provocation in France or Germany (even, as in the extreme case of the Gruppe Spur, an obscenity trial or two), avant-gardists in those countries could be reasonably certain that their antics would be assimilated into a developing context of experimental art and culture and tolerated, more or less, by the political authorities. Needless to say, this was not the case in Poland or Czechoslovakia, where even proclaiming oneself as belonging to an organized group of artists and exhibiting as a group was a fraught and potentially dangerous step, and therefore one which had to be carefully timed to a period of regime weakness. Thus did artist groups like the Czech Tvrdohlaví, or “The Stubborn Ones,” practice several tried-and-true, potently avant-garde tactics, but in a selective, savvy way. Tvrdohlaví, which named itself in ironic echo of their country’s “stubborn” hard-line communists, criticized the artists of the normalization era for going underground and boldly demanded recognition as a collective within the official Czech art establishment, but it only did so when the repressive, “normalized” political atmosphere had subsided and the coast was clear.

This push-and-pull, between a sort of nascent implementation of brash avant-garde conceits and the plainly practical concerns of living under regime oppression, would seem to be the closest thing to an overall trend in the development of the eastern European art vanguard, such as it was. The tense quality of this relation was typified in the importance of those techniques which were not imported over from the western model, but were instead unique to art practitioners in the Eastern Bloc: the cultivation of private networks, the circumvention of official channels in the rise of mail-art, and the growth of the samizdat model of self-publishing and dissemination via smuggling.

Relying as it did on the participation of western European artists (a fraught condition as we’ve seen), the development of private networks of correspondence and travel across the Iron Curtain was a tentative and fitful affair—a truth exemplified by Eric Andersen’s “Fluxus East” tour of Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian living rooms, and its undoing as a result of that group’s cliquish shenanigans—but nonetheless, these exchanges had lasting and formative effects. After Andersen’s visit, a healthy correspondence between the Polish artists Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski was struck up with Fluxus members in New York, eventually resulting in the “Fluxus Festival” in Poznań in 1977, the largest and most comprehensive showing of a western avant-garde group on eastern European territory during the era. Mail-art, another Fluxus import, served not only to create an extra-institutional mode of communication and to develop underground eastern European art as a grassroots “private movement,” it also constituted a tacit criticism of the communist regimes’ censorship apparatuses, since it was frequently targeted by state authorities and secret police, and often included references and jokes about its semi-legal status.

Finally, one cannot consider the development of a late-twentieth-century avant-garde without engaging with “direct action,” the tactic whose specter hung so fatefully over the rise and fall of radical movements in the West since it had become the watchword of the Lettrist International; although, to be sure, the climate of ironclad social suppression that characterized communist rule in eastern Europe (not to mention the actual brushes with violent revolt and subsequent brutal crackdowns) make the concept itself hazy and difficult to apply here. Like “scandal,” “direct action” in the western radical sense presupposes an outwardly placid political environment where resistance is diverted or sublimated—an indirect action that needs correcting. In Czechoslovakia under normalization or Poland under martial law, there was no climate of passive resistance for which direct action might have functioned as a criticism or a corrective—only the stillness of total suppression and the fearful conformism that was its response.

Still, eastern avant-gardists did find ways, here and there, to apply the techniques of political provocation in ways that at least flirted with the west’s much-ballyhooed direct action tactics—and only, as noted above, when conditions on the ground were right. Most notably, there was the 1980s Polish collective known as the Orange Alternative, which modeled itself (in an uncharacteristically direct way) on the 1970s Dutch Kabouters. The group’s street actions and happenings—which included the distribution of scarce staple items like toilet paper in ironic celebration of communist holidays as well as a Christmastime happening wherein participants dressed as Santa Claus flooded into local supermarkets—subverted and problematized the obvious but unaddressed absurdities of the Polish regime: their ritualized adherence to communist history, their chronic failure to provide basic necessities, their anxious relationship with the country’s Catholic tradition.6

Tellingly, the Orange Alternative appears to have been one of very few artists’ groups to attack eastern European state strictures via the sort of Western-inflected avant-garde prank tradition practiced by groups like Spur, albeit with a less violent, more gently satirical tone. The lack of evidence for more widespread avant-garde scandal-stoking in the Eastern Bloc at large (albeit one mediated by my own lacks of access and the broader language skills necessary to conduct the research in greater depth) suggests a climate whose relation to the western European radical tradition was limited to generalities, like the aforementioned romanticization of French cultural openness so thoroughly tied to the eastern cultural identity. This lack is borne out in the appearance of groups like the Orange Alternative in the late 1980s, near the very end of the Eastern Bloc experiment: though they may have been viewed then and are remembered now as forces with real political power, that power was mediated as ever by directly observable trends, by the way the wind was blowing. The group may have had transgressive power, but the lion’s share of that power came from the widespread but inexpressible awareness that the regime was, just maybe, on its way out.

Teodor Graur performing “Speaking to Europe from Europe,” 1993.

IV. Speaking to Europe

The Western-European avant-garde—with its history of overindulgent, navel-gazing contemplation, its self-defeating weakness for petty squabbles, its gratingly emphatic trumpeting of its own virtue—could hardly have been the great ally for which avant-garde artists observing from the rapidly-darkening Eastern Bloc might have hoped. And indeed, just as it was the lot of all the citizens of Europe’s communist regimes to find a way to persist through decades of hardship, so too did the artists of those nations have to fashion their own responses to the political situation at hand—as there was no modern analogue for life in communist eastern Europe anywhere else in the world, no set of techniques gleaned from the outside could speak to that reality. As a result, researchers on the art side of the art-political equation have been left with a plethora of miniature movements, trends, and occasionally groups to position against dominant and monolithic state-approved art forms (most often, the socialist realism of the Soviet state). Bids to link these groups into larger constellations, tentative practitioners of a Western sort of cross-border avant-garde unification, would seem to be the products of wishful retrospective thinking. Whatever idiosyncratic tangle of contextual conditions might be responsible, I don’t know of any grand artistic resistance during the years of communist occupation; circumstances just did not allow it.

But even in full view and acceptance of the fundamentally singular quality of the decades-long tragedy that befell the region, the relation between artists of the west and those of the east during the latter half of the twentieth century must come in for special disapproval. Whether it’s the purposeful distancing of the deeply troubled, danger-replete lives of easterners from the minds and political programs of western radicals, or the brazen courting of status and exposure through the selective cooption of foreign cachet, the artists and radicals of the west did their eastern compatriots no favors. And while, as noted above, there was no special onus on the western avant-garde to aid that of the east, the fact that this same era also saw unprecedented levels of leftist revolutionary struggle in western Europe—as well as the concomitant spills into interpersonal drama and wanton violence—renders the westerners’ lack of identification with the population beyond the wall especially egregious.

Where the avant-garde program in western Europe was defined by constant provocation and a relentless push for publicity, the best the groups’ eastern counterparts could hope for was the establishment of “private movements” and small, tentatively-built networks of likeminded artists. The degree of isolation necessarily conveyed by such a practice is impossible to overstate, a fate made all the more troubling by a present-day art establishment which has canonized many western avant-gardists while leaving easterners to obscurity. A 1993 performance piece by the Romanian artist Teodor Graur, conducted in the tentative, reflective early days of the post-communist era, tells it best. Entitled “Speaking to Europe from Europe,” the piece consists of an artist repeating the following English phrase into a microphone: “Hello, I am speaking to you, can you hear me?” The microphone is plugged into a radio, tuned to a western station. As we might well expect, no response ever comes.

In September 2011, a few years into our home-recording “career” but really just months into our incarnation as a semifunctional performing duo, Esra and I got the opportunity to play a live set on the great Scott Williams’s likewise great WFMU show. I’ve attested before to my early devotion to WFMU (which, incidentally, is in the midst of its yearly funding drive now--DONATE), so I won’t belabor this intro except to say that it meant a lot to me to get to play on the legendary freeform station.

I also mention our relative inexperience because it’s directly relevant to assumptions I always retained about the quality of this performance: namely, that my squarewaves are way too loud, and that we’re playing the songs so slowly they’re practically going backwards, and that basically we didn’t have any idea what we were doing (not that we’re much more knowledgeable now, fifteen years later, and I’m not being falsely modest when I say so). But--the belabored point is--I just listened back for the first time in who knows how long and you know what, I’m basically down. The cover of our favorite Legendary Pink Dots song has something, at least, and Esra’s set intro is an unmitigated ripper.

The set is archived on Scott’s playlist, but a mildly remixed/remastered versions of it was eventually put out by Tokyo’s Crooked Tapes as Pigs in a Bucket Hat, still the best name for a cassette release ever (Cameron came up with it). Those remastered tracks are also posted below.

1. Intro

2. Free Galaxy

3. Your Wings (Spreadem)

4. Tooth Hound Sand

5. The Blessing (Legendary Pink Dots)

6. My Lucky Day

7. Phalliform

8. Maria Bellow

9. In Spades

Anyway, amid last December’s windfall of dropped balls and missed promotional opportunities I somehow neglected to mention the release of issue #5 of Fool Tide, the unreasonably sick Copenhagen-based newsprint zine masterminded by immortal beloved Chris Shields. The issue features, in addition to several very delightful features, a “History Zone” column written by me which takes as its topic the present-day relevance of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just’s historical example and--more saliently--whether it’s true or not that the boy wore earrings.

Since the disputed historiography of the French Revolution is exactly the kind of subject best settled by a 500-word blog post, I’m posting a lightly spruced and linked-up version of my text below.

Order your copy of Fool Tide, for the very rimelig price of 50dkk, here.

Amadeus Amadeus! Bogusław Linda as Saint-Just in Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, 1983.

Although the accepted French term for “time machine” (machine à voyager dans les temps) is not necessarily the wieldiest out there, we had better go ahead and pile into ours, keep an eye out for Timecops, and fire up le starter, because our destination is 9 Thermidor, Year II of the French Revolutionary Calendar, otherwise known as July 26, 1794, and the Jacobins—the grouping of hard-left autocrats clustered around Maximilien Robespierre—are about to fall from power and face the guillotine. It’s a heavy moment, a real brake failure on the escalator of history, but I wanna zoom us in on one doomed dude in particular, namely: Robespierre’s chief orator and Montagnard right-handiste Louis Antoine de Saint-Just.

Saint-Just was many things: a genius rhetorician and court philosopher of the Revolution, an impressive realpolitik praktiker, and—being 26 years old at the time of his execution—a lasting emblem of iconoclastic youth culture, albeit one just shy of official 27-club membership. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel the pull of something resembling the youngster’s revolutionary spirit when one reads Saint-Just’s words (“I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you… but I defy you to rob me of that independent life I have given myself down through the ages and in heaven”) or looks at depictions of the guy (he was hot, and he may have worn earrings!?). This is before we even get into the scandalous poetry S-J wrote before his rise to power, as well as the one-act play Arlequin Diogène, which combined the tropes of the era’s commedia dell’arte with the philosophy of Diogenes the Cynic, who famously lived in a barrel, took shits in the street, and told Alexander the Great to move cuz he was blocking the sun.

It’s all very seductive, is the point, and those of us who value anti-authoritarianism or radical politics as they are contemporarily conceived—and who, still more crucially, rely on history to provide some guidance as to how they might function in the present—are, I think, well within our rights to vibe on elements of Saint-Just’s uncompromising example. But it’s worth contending, also, with that example’s gnarlier subdivisions: the Revolutionary Tribunal over which the Jacobins presided before their fall on 9 Thermidor, the 20,000+ executions in the space of a single year, the slip-slidey dérapage of foreign and civil wars, and the group’s conspiratorially annihilationist “emergency powers” dictatorship. Saint-Just is deeply fascinating, and it’s a testament to his symbolic power that he’s been cited over the years by everyone from Marx to Debord to Hannah Arendt to Greil Marcus to today’s most abysmally pathetic far-right online flimflam monarchists (not linking). But no amount of rhetorical brilliance or swoony deathrock allure (those earrings!!!) can paper over the intrinsic paradoxes, and any earnest approach to revolution as anything resembling a cohesive concept requires an understanding of how its goals can be warped to unrecognizability by, for one thing, the consolidation and jealous guarding of centralized power. For this key lesson, you can do no better than our boy Saint-Just; he even told us so, when, in one of his characteristically high-flown speeches to the National Convention, he dropped an inarguable all-timer: “No one can reign in innocence.”

Merci Loulou!

Issue #5 of Fool Tide, in which a version of the above text appears. Order!

Through a series of bureaucratic hiccups and code-red blizzard alerts, the trip ended up getting downgraded from a five-day affair to something in the neighborhood of 36 hours, but I still had a very sick time hitting lots of anticariate, self-consciously trying out my (quite janky) spoken Romanian, and managing a couple of auspicious meetings. I’ll be recapping things more extensively soon, but for the moment I can just let this meme page I found do the talking.

Meanwhile, the trip got me thinking about the following piece of writing, another chunk from the old-ish novel manuscript I’ve excerpted before. This section--which ostensibly deals with Soviet automobiles, the post–Cold-War phenomenon of “Ostalgisch” fetishisms, and contemporary German soda pop innovations--maybe also dives a bit into the kind of historically-layered, cross-lingual dreamspace zone I got to visit last week, albeit just for a second.

P.S.: When I first wrote and published this piece (as part of a long-ago zine), the protagonist was named “Crazy Radu.” But now that I know a couple of Radus, it felt kinda weird, so I swapped it.

The wreck out back—a custom agglomerate most economically described as an upgraded Moskvich 412, though that hardly begins to cover it—has had a long and fruitful second life, and we needn’t mourn too hard on its behalf. Once an exceedingly rusty old number from the early seventies found tagless and fancy free in a rainlogged salvage yard in East Berlin, it bounced around scrap movers for a few years, narrowly avoided the crusher more than once, and eventually turned up in “Der Verrückte Mechaniker,” a repair shop in Halensee whose name and slogan—“Ein bisschen verrückt muss man schon sein, um ein Auto zu lieben,”—underscored its general business strategy, which was to distinguish itself by cultivating a reputation for mental illness. This meant enthusiastically undertaking outwardly impossible repair jobs, resuscitating wheezing old clunkers, rigging up workarounds to cheat government inspections and emissions standards, stealing rare parts from other garages, and so on. The shop was run by a large Romanian family whose members maintained an especially frenzied air when on the clock—the better to befit their establishment’s branding tack—and were always shouting at each other in front of customers, flying into rages, and publicly smashing things. The owner and lead Verrückter was a bug-eyed and wild-haired mechanic called Crazy Relu whose five sons worked on intakes, spot repairs and scrap runs while he kept an eye on the business end, delegated projects and, once in a while, dove headlong into the sort of repair which, despite baldly defying logical and financial sense, would occasionally pay off huge dividends on some other, less quantifiable level.

Relu really did love cars, and having owned the shop in the early years after reunification, he’d grown used to servicing the different sorts of eastern bloc makes that had come streaming, in the early nineties, over the newly-opened border: janky Czechoslovakian Škodas, Romanian Dacias and, most especially, Trabant 601s, those ubiquitous East German heaps whose finicky two-cycle engines basically made them fume-belching, breakdown-prone four-wheeled motorbikes, or, maybe more charitably, lawnmowers with doors. In fact, one of the shop’s early breakthroughs had been its policy of pinching Trabbi parts from all competing sources (cornering the market on repairs in the unified capital and jacking the prices as supply dwindled), though a recent €2,500 government scrapping bonus offered on the egregious pollutant vehicles had sort of put a pin in that. Another Trabant scheme had consisted of stripping the cars’ plastic body panels which, being made of Micarta (aka Duroplast, cotton fabrics impregnated with phenolic resins from Soviet factories), were actually considerably stronger than steel and impervious to dents and rust. More importantly, though, these Leukoplast-bombe bodies had become fetish objects for nostalgic East Berliners, in whose memories the cars were transformed from maddening junkheaps—markers of lives spent among unwashed concrete and industrial runoff—into fun, scrappy cult commodities. It is now mostly remembered as a joke, but at the time most everyone really did think those body panels were made of some kind of cardboard, and worry that exposing them to too much heat would cause them to go up in flames; they really did spend hours removing air filters and blowing on spark plugs when the carburetor reliably flooded, or push-starting stalled cars downhill and running themselves over; they even sat on waiting lists, often for years, for the privilege of puttering around in a new, rattling 601. Still and all, the wall fell, the so-called Ostalgie held, and today, little white Trabants dot the Berlin streets, inspiring countless whistles of recognition even as they dependably spew their black smoke, often enough in a mechanic’s face.

And to be clear, Crazy Relu himself could be prone to making the same sorts of logical allowances for the sake of wistful reminiscence. Cars just worked on him that way, as portals to vast universes of involuntary memory as directly effective as any tea-sopped spongecake. He experienced certain models via intoxicating synesthetic flashes—snatches of music, specific tastes and smells, unexplainable fireworks of color when he heard a given engine rev, even noticeable physical effects that we need not go into here. But there was a deeper layer. Years in the conditioning lab of the garage combined with a lifetime spent among vehicles of every stripe had by now lent his work such a deeply idiosyncratic dimension that even he couldn’t explain why he made the repairs he did. Though the shop’s customer base loved it, Relu’s kids weren’t sure to what degree the “crazy mechanic” vibes were a put-on, theorizing instead that they provided a useful cover for what was in fact a genuinely deranged streak in their father’s behavior. Relu whispered lovingly to Renault engine blocks in halting, decades-removed liceu French. He busted out laughing at what he claimed were hysterically funny engineering jokes intentionally hidden in certain brakepad designs. He insisted that particular cars “wanted” specific work done for which there was no mechanical evidence. He regularly slept in the shop, often on his creeper cart wheeled all the way beneath one or another rusty jalopy; his sons, who’d long ago resigned themselves to this as to his other antics, just wheeled him out when it was time to open, steeling themselves for another day of acting as sick as this old man seemed actually to’ve become.

And though he often loudly insisted that such direct or obvious linkages played no role whatsoever in his process, it was plain to see that Crazy Relu had particular emotional ties to the cars of his youth. On the morning that Dragoș, his youngest, wheeled the broken-down Moskvich into the lot, he woke with a start beneath a decommissioned Wartburg 353 police wagon—he even dinged his forehead on the front bumper and sent the creeper cart careening into a rack of jack stands—and immediately ran outside, in a grease-stained A-frame and tighty-whities, tears already forming at the corners of his groggy-eyed gaze as, in front of a rapidly-forming queue of morning customers, he actually fell to his knees in exaltation.

He had, at the age of twenty-five, watched as his own Moskvich 412 was smashed to pieces in the big 1977 Vrancea earthquake that decimated Bucharest, and while he had ever since retained, sure, something of a soft spot for the old compacts, he had never before noted the searing feeling of recognition coursing through him now, an all-over bodily effect, some field resonating harmonically with a deep-seated and long-disregarded store of memories suddenly kicked into frantic activity, all abuzz, scores of tiny voices telling him this was it, not the same model, not a comparable specimen, but it: in some real, undefinable way, this was his car. He immediately called off every other job, sent his sons home for the day, and shuttered the storefront. In a wholly unprecedented move, he referred his backlog of work to rival garages, which bizarre gesture, combined with his uncharacteristically calm demeanor over the phone, made Andreas Unger at “Automania” across town assume he’d been the victim of a prank call. When the garage was clear, Relu got to work.

The whole thing took two weeks of manic, round-the-clock activity. Relu transplanted a Mazda Z-engine under the hood, which he also replaced along with the fenders, doors and body panels themselves (none of that Trabbi Bakelite either; old Moskvichs were loaded down with steel, and that’s the way this one would stay). Painted the whole thing in factory “ivory,” really just beige, reinforced the subframe and replaced all shocks and springs, snaked a tube and rudder from a similar model off of a crosstown competitor, and fashioned the instrument panel from various trashed odo-, tach- and speedometers. When everything ran well and looked alright, he made with a showy unveiling for the benefit of his poor kids—who’d been on indefinite leave from work this whole time—and their wives and children.

“Cool,” from his cellphone-toting ten-year-old granddaughter Hanna as Relu dramatically whipped the tarp off of the gleaming, waxed machine, “aber hat es auch einen MP3-Player?”

Relu’s sons had bigger concerns. The shop’s finances had never exactly been the picture of stability, and private questioning on the wisdom of closing up for a period of weeks to work on a single car of dubious resale value had given way, these last few days, to more decisive action. If the car wasn’t sold in the next month—was the gist of their ultimatum—they were all quitting.

Garage fumes or else something else lending a certain teary-eyed gleam to his expression, Crazy Relu made with a sober nod, clocked firmly the real concern on the faces of the five sons who had followed him into this foolish business. He offered them a grease-stained palm.

“Hand drauf,” he told them, meaning ‘Let’s shake on it.’

But wouldn’t you know it? Relu’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. In fact, that the car should be resold quickly and lucratively—not a month but just a day or two later—could have been, looking back on it, the only logical conclusion to the manic Moskvich quest. A confirmation, maybe, that his recent behavior was outwardly ordained, dictated by an external intelligence, set in motion with an agenda unknowable and all its own. Best explanation, anyway, for how the sudden and desperate desire to refurbish this vehicle was met, one or two days after its completion, by a mysterious buyer whose go-between had said just enough to ensure that the Moskvich was the car being sought. It hadn’t even hit the showroom; how could the buyer have known about it? Had someone at the garage been talking? Was another party snooping around? More sinister yet, could the car have been sent to Relu with just this result in mind? Or was all this second-guessing, heh, just a touch of the old Verrücktheit? No matter; point is, when the call came in, Relu wasn’t surprised.

“My client is an American, a collector of Communist-era automobiles,” breathy reed-thin voice on the line, ‘UNKNOWN NUMBER’ on the caller ID readout, natch.

Relu’s English was good, but a momentary fluster came over him just the same. He took a breath. “Well, we see many luxury models from that time”—dangling some alternatives though, feeling at this negotiation’s unspoken contours, he swore he could already tell where it was going—“a Tatra for example? Or we could find you perhaps a Volga GAZ?”

The voice let out a tight, clipped laugh. “My client would prefer something more working-class.”

Relu grinned at the confirmation, though there was a sour undertaste in it. “I have maybe a Soviet model or two in stock.”

“We intend for the car to be exported to and driven in the United States. We can secure the necessary paperwork. A representative will be sent to your establishment. The vehicle must be fully functional.”

A beat. “Something restored?”

“Exactly.”

They made an appointment for late that night, after regular hours. The shop’s mysterious closure and reopening having stoked widespread curiosity in the neighborhood, business had been booming the last few days, so there were loads of cars on the premises again, whether in for repairs, quick salvage jobs or restorations. Most everything was covered up with tarpaulins when, stepping through the Mechaniker’s front door into full fluorescent radiance of the overnight wall lamps, the point man finally showed up.

Relu, having detected a certain mustache-twirling lilt to things on the phone, was expecting some kind of spy movie villain or Dr. Mabuse type; a tuxedoed, vampire-caped deal, or at least a trenchcoat, mysterious briefcase, something. Looking over the “representative” who’d actually appeared before him, then, Relu tried not to let his disappointment show. It was a sweatshirted, baseball-cap-wearing, utterly generic youth of about twenty-five, toting a university-branded backpack and a bottle of orange Schwip Schwap. He could’ve been one of any of the untold hordes of collegiate arrivals down from London or Canada or the States, the thrilled new Berliners that now clogged late night U-Bahn platforms, techno clubs and wine bars, just as often, Relu’s shop, gratingly insisting on repairs to perfect vehicles for which they had neither intuitive feeling nor mechanical knowledge and, thus, no right to drive. Service employees of every stripe had been dealing with such entitled shits since Berlin’s reputation for baby-leicht party-oriented living had lent the poor old capital enough glamorous cachet to put it squarely in the path of massive tourist and gentrification waves, meaning this aspect of life in the new Germany was by now more than fully old news. So when the clincher came—as the young man cleared his throat and, in a polite Midwest American register, asked for “Rad-oo”—the deflation of spirit that seized our humble mechanic was practically audible.

“Yes I Relu, how I can help you.” He sometimes put on this no-English act for the tourists, dialing up the Slavic resonants, bit of code-switching he found helpful for getting out of tedious explanations or nipping disadvantageous haggles in the bud.

The stranger didn’t miss a beat. “Ați prefera să vorbim românește??”

Okay, so here was a wrinkle. “You speak Romanian?”

He knew cars, too, as it turned out. Introduced himself as Lindh Steinberg, “Outreach Officer”—as this thick black business card had it—for Opal Artists LLC, a media shingle based in New York that represented publishers, galleries, record labels. ‘Outreach’ being a worldwide effort these days and languages having always come easy to him, Lindh explained, he’d managed to build up a decent command of the major and minor Romance tongues as well as a slew of Germanics. A little bit of Russian, too, but they had a different guy onsite for that.

“But what this has to do with the Moskvich,” Relu blurted out, regretting that last word immediately. Why mention a specific make? They had kept things suitably vague on the phone; the identity of the vehicle was the only leverage he’d had. Now he’d never know how much they’d known beforehand.

But if the info was new or surprising to Lindh, he had a funny way of showing it. “One of our musicians, a band actually, wants it,” he shrugged, leveling—or appearing to level—with Relu in a way that, in spite of lingering suspicions, had its disarming effect.

Before Relu knew it, the tarp had been lifted and he’d proceeded, in full salesman mode, to lovingly show off the vehicle’s rebuilt engine and modern features. Lindh’s questions—had Relu swapped out the oil filter for something leak-proof? Had he reinforced the axels after the engine rebuild?—betrayed what was either a carefully-studied or honestly-arrived-at knowledge of Soviet automobile design. But which was it? And why should some American kid know, or care, about this stuff in the first place?

“But the man on the phone,” Relu’s eyes locked on the camshaft so as not to betray any emotion besides the usual vehicular ardor, “he said the car was for a collector, not musician.”

“The buyer is the band’s manager,” Lindh nodding, affect flat, “or rather, it’s Opal, making the purchase on the manager’s behalf.” The musicians in question, he explained, wanted the car for photoshoots, record covers, music videos, after which it’d belong to this manager figure, who was a collector and archivist, and who’d probably been the one to plant the idea in the musicians’ heads to begin with.

“Who was the man on the phone?”

“My boss. One of our directors back in the States.” That shrug again, as if it were all uninteresting, impertinent detail.

A clock hung over the window. It was an old BMW novelty gift someone’d managed to snap up in a city junk shop and present to the family at the Mechaniker, a promotion for the aborted 507 convertible. The long hand ended in a cardboard cutout of the little sportscar, and watching it glide the circumference of the clock’s face had long figured as a a solid way to make any auto-manipulator in the area fall into a light trance. Now Relu chanced a quick look. It was midnight. “Why this group wants a Moskvich?”

Lindh smiled and took off his large black Jansport, which he’d been wearing, absurdly, since he’d come in. Unzipped it and pulled out a large flat object at which Crazy Relu, carefully studying the gleaming carburetor to fight off an emergent, improbable case of nerves, only permitted himself the subtlest peripheral glance.

“Hey, psst,” Lindh picking up on the energy. “It won’t bite.”

Relu didn’t want to look, but at some length and effort, feeling stupid, he did. It was an old LP cover, weathered, scuffed at the corners and, most notably, layered with a few generations of handwritten pen markings, notes, scribblings, symbols, extending across the top in black marker. Nothing he recognized, but the LP itself was another story.

“It’s their favorite,” Lindh explained. “They wanted to recreate the cover, original thinkers that they are.”

The first and only album by a group called Kustom Kar Kommandos, this self-titled number here had been one of those one-copy-per-city, breathlessly-traded records that sometimes managed to sweep the Bucharest of Relu’s youth, thanks to some intrepid soul who’d manage to smuggle them in—in this case, himself. The country hadn’t exactly been known for its rock’n’roll pedigree, and Western tunes were scarcely heard on the radio or seen in stores, but every so often, something managed to slip by, become an object of feverish whispering, spend a few days on every turntable in town and then vanish as quickly as it had come. Relu hadn’t seen the album, whose sun-bleached cover image depicted the wreck of a beige Moskvich 412 in an anonymous Central European field, since he’d handed his copy over to his brother three decades earlier.

“So what do you think?” While Relu had been gawking at the record, Lindh had scribbled his offer on the backside of a promotional oil change flier and slid it over. “Deal?”

Relu, in a kind of daze, noted blankly to himself that the sum was enough to pay a year of overhead for the entire garage. “How... does this American band sound like?”

Lindh thought for a second. “Do you like Sabbath?”

      ____                      _____________          _____________
 ____//_]|________         ____//__][__][___|     ____//__][______||
(o _ |  -|   _  o|        (o  _|  -|     _ o|    (o _ |  -|   _   o|
 `(_)-------(_)--'         `-(_)--------(_)-'     `(_)-------(_)---'
    ______________      ________________         __________________
   //__][__\\____\\    //__][__\\___\\__\       |[_][_][_][_][_][_]|
  (o _-|         o|   <o  _||  -|   _  o|       |o _         _  _  |
   `(_)-------(_)-'    `-(_)-------(_)--'        `(_)-------(_)(_)-"
   ____________              ______               ______
 ____//__][__\\___\        ____//__][_\       ______//__][_\__
(o _ |  -|   _   o|       [o _ |  -| _ \     /o _   |  -| _   \
 `(_)-------(_)---'        `(_)-----(_)-'    `-(_)-------(_)---'
________               _____                   _
    ____//__][__\\___      ____//__]|               ___//]    ____
   (o _ |  -|   _  o|     (o _ |   -|_________     |o_   '---' _ |
    `(_)-------(_)--'      `(_)-------(_)(_)--'    `(_)-------(_)''
      _               ______________                _
 ____//]_________       ____//__]|        |         ______//________
(o _ |  -|  _  o|      (o _ |   -|  _  _  |        /o _   |  -| _   \
 `(_)------(_)--'       `(_)-----'-(_)(_)-'        `-(_)-------(_)---'

This week I’m coming to you from the knotty, overleveraged central cordage of a tangle of ongoing research/writing/hanging out/life projects, including but by no means limited to:

⤅ January’s “Lettrist Film” series at Anthology Film Archives, comprising screenings of four works from the Romanian-French avant-gardiac Isidore Isou and his crew of willfully jerky scandalmonger legends, of whom I’m on the record as being a, let’s call it “conflicted obsessive”;

⤅ the accompanying exhibition on Isou and Lettrist books and printed matter, on view now through May 2 at NY’s Center for Book Arts;

⤅ last night’s New York University–sponsored film screening and discussion of the life and legacy of Alexander Trocchi--he of the post-Lettrist formation the Situationist International among a million other things (an event which I’m only pretending has already happened as I write this); and

⤅ my visit to Bucharest next week, which will cap a year of madcap language study, familial archival exploration, and notarized signatures on government forms (we’ll talk about this one later).

Anyway, some common features: youthful bluster and bullshitting, rank hooliganism (or, if you’re a post-Eliade Romanian youth, huliganism) as both symptom of and remedy for long-term statelessness, onetime outsider cachet shading into states more detectibly pathetic... and yes, OK, a bunch of crucial art moves. A nice feature, that last part, of what is otherwise a lowkey stressful time. See below.

Orb bros, stand and be counted.

I missed the second half of Anthology’s program (though Chad forewarned that Saturday’s event would feature lots of audience bullying, which obviously has a certain Dick’sian je ne sais quoi), but I did manage to hit the screenings of Isou’s all-time great cinematic essay/noise set Traité de bave et d’eternité and, what’s even sicker, Gil Wolman’s L’Anticoncept, the ballyhooed early masterpiece by the right-hand-man of Guy Debord’s schismatic Lettrist International group. I have wanted to check L’Anticoncept out via a non-Ubuweb delivery system for a long time now, and it’s a testament to how reliably Anthology hooks it up (it’s my favorite place in NYC, no contest) that their screening—which featured the requisite weather balloon orb in place of a projector screen—was a packed house affair, though I did hear tell of walkouts, which is honestly equally laudable. Audience members got printed copies of Wolman’s monologue soundtrack, though the evening’s strobelit character meant there was no point trying to follow along. And honestly why bother, when it’s at least 75% about the varispeeded tape FX and maybe another 5% about the untranscribable puking sounds? Anyway, thanks to AFA, thanks to Gil, and thanks to the lifepath that’s got me entertaining stuff like this as a valid Thursday night outing. More on Monsieur Wolman before too long.

Guy Debord’s Métagraphie (Portrait de Gil J Wolman), 1954.

Meanwhile, some very quick Trocchi talk before—to drop the pretext that I’m not schedule-sending this post from last night—I pack up and head to the event in his honor:

While I can’t reliably say where and when I first encountered Trocchi’s work, it was definitely via his writing, well before I had gotten oversteeped enough in this countercultural lineage stuff to think of him as a sui generis / mostly tragic figure whose life bridged several otherwise far-flung postwar undergrounds. In my case, I read Young Adam, and probably must have known something about Trocchi’s collaborations with Girodias’s Olympia Press, which in turn I would’ve stumbled on via a heavy adolescent repping of all things Burroughs; obviously, reader, you know how this works from whatever analogous routes you’ve taken to reach your cozy redoubts of art obsession. Mostly it feels worth reconstructing the paper trail, though, because of how this conception changed later on, when I discovered—via a series of odd jobs on the margins of archival preservation and the rare book world—that Trocchi in particular had become a bankable signifier for traders and collectors of avant-garde cultural detritus. I worked jobs, in other words, in which Trocchi’s works served as fetish objects, artifacts coveted mostly (or entirely) because of their drug content and shelved alongside stuff like De Quincey, Baudelaire, and the Ace Double paperback of Junky. A bummer, somehow—in spite of the fact that, duh, we all know this materialist tendency is a part of the deal—but also a valuably unromantic object lesson in the means by which countercultural history is agreed on, and the relative estimations in which we place its creators. Which is all just to say that these days, I don’t quite know how to feel about big Alex Trocchi; here’s hoping tonight complicates the picture that much further. Stay tuned.

 ,_______________________________________,
/   HHH*                          *HHH   /.
`---------------------------------------" :
| +              XLII  90             + | :
|             .____________.            | :
|       .++.  |######\  /##|  .++.      | :
|       +  +  |######/  \##|  +  +      | :
|       '++'  '------------'  '++'      | :
|                                       | :
|                                       | :
|      /'''''''''''''''''''''''''\      I :
|     /     o       0         o   \     I :
|+   / O                         O \   +|,'
`---------------------------------------`

Last week, we took an initial swing through Know Me to Be Your Superior in Everything: Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, Sam Kunkel’s new book-length exploration of the venerated composer’s high-key gnarly “esoteric period.” Specifically, the book tracks the nearly decade-long stretch (1892 to 1900) when Satie, beset by personal and professional woes and working out of his one-room Montmartre hovel, went ahead and declared himself the supreme leader of an esoteric Christian order, issuing a series of public denunciations under his Church’s mystical auspices and calling down holy judgment on perceived and reliably puzzled enemies.

As the post details, Satie’s is a rollicking story, with more than a little relevance for our present moment: a time in which artists and writers seem to once again feel no particular shame about giving in to a) a goofily revanchist, religiously-flavored traditionalism and b) a culture of abject, sour-grapes-y public trolling. Satie, at least, was legitimately funny about it, which is just one reason why Know Me to Be Your Superior is so crucial; at least do your research, folks.

The book is also a miracle of archival sourcing, translation, and layout, featuring numerous newly surfaced fin-de-siècle research finds as well as no shortage of primary documents appearing in English facsimile form for the first time (for which we doff our weird priest hats, naturally, to the book’s intrepid designer Bryan Cipolla and the First to Knock braintrust).

Meanwhile--my reading experience having been characterized by no end of wondering just how all this great material was unearthed and made accessible--I emailed author Sam Kunkel a grip of lengthy questions on the book’s genesis and development, which he was kind enough to answer. Our conversation is là-bas.

Erik Satie in his Montmartre apartment, the Metropolitan Church’s “Abbatial Palace,” in Santiago Rusiñol’s 1891 painting The Bohemian. As reproduced in Know Me to Be Your Superior in All Things.

I thought we could begin by talking a bit about your background with this story, and with its historical period more broadly. How did your work on Symbolist and fin-de-siècle literature first come about, and what drew you from there to the saga of Satie and his church?

So, I have been working on Symbolist and fin-de-siècle literature since I was in college. I took a class where we read Against Nature (À rebours) and it was pretty mind-blowing for me. I suppose that I was really drawn in by the strange and often excessive language; I was finishing a French major and was already comfortable reading more “normal” novels in French (Balzac, Zola, etc.), and I decided that I should make it a point of being able to read Huysmans in French. That decision caused me to spend a lot of time sifting through the text, and thinking about how he was using language and why, and I got hooked. With that as an entrance point, I began wading into the fin-de-siècle mire.

The literature from that period is comprised of a fairly small community of strange people who were all very much wrapped up in their own idiosyncratic projects. It was a period defined by a group of writers who were all working alone, together. Because of this, it still happens that I learn about new authors, or strange, one-off projects that different writers did—a single play that was written by a novelist, or something like that. When I learned that Satie had (briefly) engaged upon this writing project, I was surprised, but pleasantly so. I was given a collection of his “religious” letters by a friend who knew that I am very interested in the period and was curious if I knew about them. There, as well, it was the language that Satie was using that really drew me in: it was so rich, and so funny that I was immediately won over and wanted to do something with it.

In engaging with these historical topics, of course, you’re also engaging with their historiographies. In the book, you talk about some of the ways Satie has and has not been studied across different eras and contexts: as regards the Metropolitan Church, you point to the work of previous historians like Ornella Volta, as well as the more recent availability of new digital resources. I wonder if you can describe the process of taking up this work via the archival record, trying to uncover new material out of what must have been a serious textual deep dive. What did the research process entail?

The research process for this book was fairly elaborate. The bulk of Satie’s Church writings had already been collected by other people who came before me (Volta being chief among them), and were easily found. Nevertheless, there were lots of things that were written about Satie that I was able to find for the first time; that was where a lot of the archival work that I did came into play.

The National Library of France has done extensive digitization of the works that they hold in their collection—this includes books, of course, but also newspapers and periodicals. I spent a lot of time going through that database to find articles that mentioned Satie and his Church antics. Slowly I was able to compile a selection of different articles and interviews where he featured, and which I felt were pertinent to the story that I was trying to tell with the book.

Additionally, I was able to visit the Erik Satie archives in Normandy, which are located at a site called the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine), built on the site of a former abbey near Caen, to go through some of the documents that they have in their collection. That was markedly easier, since they have an established catalogue where dates and descriptions are provided. That was a fantastic experience, though, because not only was I able to hold Satie’s original publications in my hands, but also things like the original woodblock stamps that he used for his letters. It was also there that I was able to take measurements of the documents that were later reproduced to scale within the pages of Know Me to Be Your Superior in All Things.

Archival research like what I did is always an exercise in masochism, though, because there is no fixed end to it—it kind of stops when you decide that it’s time for it to stop, that is to say once you feel like you have adequately plumbed the depths of the archives for material and are only churning up the same things.

What about the work of rendering all of that archival churn into English? Like, I assume your research must have brought you into contact with no shortage of translation woes over the years, but still, I can only imagine what challenges Satie’s texts--with their wildly overblown tonal register and idiosyncratic, super-arcane diction--must have posed. Was the effort of bringing it across to English a total nightmare, a distinct pleasure, or something messily in between?

That’s an interesting question. I would say that by and large, it was a pleasure. Satie’s language is so precise and the tone is so specific that there wasn’t a lot of room for poetic interpretation. It was a binary sort of translation work, where it either felt right, or didn’t—like fitting a key into a lock. That being said, there was, as you say, a very technical element to it, where I had to find the correct English equivalent for these archaic Church terms which Satie had clearly extracted from some musty tome he found somewhere.1 But once I had those in place, it was actually a lot of fun to do.

A page of Medieval ars nova–style organ music, included in Satie’s 1895 pamphlet Intende votis supplicum, or “Heed the Prayer.”

I wonder if it’s worth spending a moment on Satie’s musical innovations, which you identify as kind of forerunners of various twentieth-century avant-garde movements. Satie came from a context in which the dominant compositional trends were tied up in a lot of post-Wagnerian bombast, which he seems to be on record as having hated (although he wrote a few wagnéries in his time too), but how did the more minimalist, proto-ambient style for which he’d eventually become known start to express itself?

I think that there are several possible answers to this question. But before offering my personal opinion, I should say that I am not a musicologist, so I cannot speak in any technical way to Satie’s compositions or their structures. But I think that the reasons behind Satie’s proto-ambient style are twofold, and stem from his mentality as well as his technical abilities.

On the one hand, as I say in the book, he was fiercely independent and iconoclastic, and was interested in spending his time and talent almost exclusively on the things that he liked, or felt had value. As you say, Wagnerian-style compositions were not on this list. He was, however, profoundly interested in the art and aesthetics of the Middle Ages, and I think that the stark, minimal compositions of that era served as a great inspiration to him in his own work. I also think that there was a lack of technical ability which played a role. Because Satie dropped out of the Paris Conservatory, it has been argued by others (more qualified than myself) that he was operating (at first, at least) with a very limited set of compositional skills. Perhaps this was also a reason why he tended to stray more towards a simpler, more minimalistic form of expression in his early years.

And beyond the music, of course, we have the mystical side of things, and the cultural milieu that produced Satie’s church. You’ve devoted lots of research to Joséphin Péladan, Satie’s first real patron and a key figure in the occult/esoteric dabbling that was so prevalent in fin-de-siècle culture, whether we’re talking about French Rosicrucianism, the Golden Dawn in Britain, and any number of other movements and cliques.

I’m curious how you see these spiritualist practices: were they a simple cultural phenomenon, a genuine engagement with mystical teachings, or something else entirely? What about their broader artistic effects via the Decadents, the Symbolists, and the works of numerous other artists, obviously including Satie himself?

I think that there isn’t an easy answer to this question, because, in brief, there is some of everything at this time. There are people who were true believers, and there were people who just sort of dabbled, and others who were interested purely in the aesthetics of esotericism or Christian mysticism. What I think is undeniable is that it’s at that time that Christianity really starts to slide in terms of its prestige and the place that it occupies in society—and this faltering would have been felt by everyone. As the prestige of the Church began to wane (and without any institution in line to take its place), many people looked around for alternative ways to satisfy that same need for spiritual fulfillment.

The spiritual vacuum, so to speak, led people to reconsider older texts or sources of wisdom which had been previously overlooked or set to the side. When you look at works of art by Decadent or Symbolist artists (painters, authors, etc.) you see that there’s a heavy and deliberate use of uncommon mythological stories or texts, and that is a result of the spiritual decline taking place at the time. So whether people are genuinely dismayed by this climate of decay, or simply acting as spectators to these artistic productions, they are engaging with this atmosphere—directly, or indirectly. Satie, too, in his way, is engaging with the discourse of his era too, albeit in a way that is perhaps more parodic than sincere.

Satie’s “Secular and Sumptuous Verse.” Composed in Arcueil on August 5th, 1900.

Another way--perhaps the main way--in which Satie and the Metropolitan Church seemed to prefigure later avant-gardes was, of course, in how his “movement” functioned socially and culturally, which is to say: through provocation, public feuding and scandal-mongering, countless other bids for notoriety. I read and write a lot about folks like Isidore Isou and Guy Debord, etc., avant-gardists who come on the scene and immediately launch a vicious, often patricidal takedown of a formerly idolized avant-garde figure, and in many ways, of course, their stories resemble Satie’s as you relate it.

But there are also some differences: for one thing, Satie seems not to have aimed for the era’s big sacred cows as much as other artists and writers on the Parisian scene; for another, it’s all very Christian, which is a wacky and intriguing aspect. Ultimately, the key thing that I think separates Satie is that it’s kinda an open question to what extent he may have been joking, or doing something analogous to performance art, or just being what we’d now call “a troll.” What do you make of Satie’s particular instinct for scandal?

The Metropolitan Church strikes me as something that resists a blanket statement one way or another: even if certain elements of it, such as Satie’s excommunication letters, are ludicrous (and deliberately so at that), I think that what is motivating him to do all of this is a sincere and genuine frustration with the artistic institutions of the day and their conventions.

In many ways, I agree that his actions can be compared to those of someone like Isou, or different avant-garde actors who followed him, such as Filippo Marinetti and the other Futurists. The common reaction among groups like the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Vorticists, etc. was one of irreverence. I think that Satie took stock of the situation as it existed at the time, and decided that none of it was worth taking seriously. And, being an individual who was entirely unknown by the people who held the power (even if he is very famous today, at that time, he was a conservatory drop-out who was playing piano in a cabaret at night), he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by launching his campaign against them. Because he had essentially no other sort of leverage over these institutions, the one thing he could do to undermine them was to not take them seriously—and he excelled in that endeavor.

Lastly: without indulging in too much armchair analysis, I couldn’t help but think how much Satie’s artistic (and self-) conception seemed to rest on the concept of persona, in what is frankly a really relatable, very human way. In the course of the story you relate, he goes from a scrappy cabaret pianist to a gymnopédiste; from Sâr Péladan’s courtly composer to the mystic Parcener (with a densely hermetic pseudoreligious mythology that rivals that of any so-called “outsider artist” to come); from the Parcener to (my favorite) “Le Velvet Gentleman”; etc etc. I guess I’m wondering if, having spent so much time with Satie, you’ve thought much about these quests for identity: how they might have underlain his life and artistic output, up to and including his most provocative shenanigans. To put it way too bluntly: beneath all the vitriol, what are your feelings on the man himself?

I like Satie quite a bit. I think he is extremely intelligent and extremely funny. One of the most direct ways to my heart is through humor, and Satie has secured his place there. It is perhaps a pedestrian observation, but I think that if he had existed in our era, he would undoubtedly be antagonizing people in the comments sections of YouTube videos or in Reddit threads, but, for lack of such an outlet, he had to channel that desire into other outlets. I feel like he’s someone who, during the period in his life where he was acting as the Parcener, perhaps had a bit too much time on his hands—and we are all better for it. Satie has, of course, secured a space for himself in the history of music through his compositions, but I think he also deserves to be remembered for his writing as well.

In summer 1896, Satie’s money woes had compounded such that he was forced to vacate his already small lodgings in Montmartre and move into a tiny basement room he called “the closet.” He marked the occasion, naturally, with a letter--this one addressed to himself and reading, per Sam’s translation: “It shall occur tomorrow, Milord.”

                  .---.
                 /.'"'.\
                 \\   ||
         /^\    ,_),-','
       .'_|_'.     ()`
      <   |   >    ||
       \_____/     ||
       {/a a\}     ||
      {/-.^.-\}   (_|
     .'{  `  }'-._/|;\
    /  {     }  /; || |
   /`'-{     }-';  || |
  ; `'=|{   }|=' _/|| |
  |   \| |~| |  |/ || |
  |\   \ | | |  ;  || |
  | \   ||=| |=<\  || |
  | /\_/\| | |  \`-||_/
  '-| `;'| | |  |  ||
jgs |  |+| |+|  |  ||
    |  | | | |  |  ||
    |  """ """  |  ||
    |           |  ||
    |_ _ _ _ _ _|  ||
    |,;,;,;,;,;,|  ||
    `|||||||||||`  ||
     |||||||||||   ||
     `"""""""""`   ""

Eagle-eyed readers will recall that FTK’s publishing operations have come up once or twice on this site (to the extent that it’d be reasonable to infer that they’re my buddies). But for all my admiration for and occasional involvement in their previous projects, Know Me to Be Your Superior is a real leap forward for the press: a clear-eyed, comprehensive, and altogether accessible nonfictional account of a cozily arcane moment in artistic history, furnished with no end of dug-up archival goodies and housed in a truly Olympian design job. The book is a real pleasure, on numerous levels, and you should--that’s right--buy it.

Meanwhile, in the interest of merest-surface-scratching, a few brief reflections on the book follow below.

By order of the Definitory,

Mark

A photographic portrait of Satie taken in the 1890s, around the time when he was active with the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. From Know Me to Be Your Superior in Everything.

If the inherently messy contradictions in Satie’s legacy—in which he’s, alternately, a proto-avant-gardist claimed by John Cage and later minimalists, a composer of bourgeois-intelligentsia–flattering piano jaunts, and the basis for a devastatingly perfect Janet Jackson sample—weren’t enough to enshrine him in this site’s hall of heroes, the obnoxious lunatic highly idiosyncratic behavior recounted in Know Me to Be Your Superior would put him solidly over the top. Like several of the freakscene dauphins we’ve looked at before (Isou, Debord, and Kunzelmann come to mind), Satie was an artist who forced his way into the cultural circles of his time and place by way of scandal, public feuding, and a relentless drive for provocation. And while sure, none of the rest of those guys began their careers as the protegé of a Rosicrucian “Sâr” before splitting to create their own esoteric Christian religious order (all the while viciously attacking perceived enemies in open letters and print-on-demand pamphlets), I say patati patata, those are just details. Indeed, while the specific contexts and parameters of Satie’s saga are fascinatingly his own, they also serve to do what a close look at these super singular lives always do, which is illuminate their era’s sociocultural currents, in this case: elaborately aestheticized decadence, lots and lots of spiritual promiscuity, and that heady fin-de-siècle admixture of pageantry and abjection.

Above: Sâr Joséphin Péladan, Satie’s first benefactor, as he appears in his 1891 book Comment on Devient Mage (How to Become a Mage).

Below: Page from the program for the March 1892 Soirée de la Rose + Croix, an evening salon organized and sponsored by Péladan for which Satie contributed three preludes.

Know Me to Be Your Superior in All Things kicks off with Satie’s “Rosicrucian Adventure” before commencing a deep dive into the composer’s “esoteric period” of 1892 to 1900 (during which, we read, a friend rechristened him “Esotérik Satie”). It was during this stretch that Satie proclaimed himself the “Parcener” of a new church whose basis seemed to be a combination of Péladanian Rosicrucianism’s Christian occultism, a revanchist/hypertraditionalist Catholic streak, and a kind of hermetic mythological worldbuilding that rivals that of any so-called “outsider artist.”

As the Parcener, Satie launched repeated failed candidacies for empty chairs on France’s Academie des Beaux-Arts and published semireligious musical tracts, but a solid proportion of his efforts were also given over to his incendiary letter-writing, with which he wasted no time excommunicating his enemies from a church that they’d never heard of. Among Satie’s targets were the theater director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, the writer/critic/society rake Willy, and Failures of the Avant-Garde favorite Octave Mirbeau, who’d had the temerity to mock Satie in a story.

Depiction of a magical Satie that accompanied the news of his candidacy to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the Le Triboulet newspaper. The getup is cool and mysterious and all, but as Kunkel points out in the book, the newspaper artist most likely took this route because he’d have had no idea what the solidly unknown Satie actually looked like.

Though Satie’s “esoteric period” as detailed in Know Me to Be Your Superior in All Things was rather short-lived, its importance is evident on many fronts: there’s the legend of Satie himself, whose compositional career did in fact begin to solidify itself as a result of dude’s more provocative shenanigans; there’s the aforementioned window that the story of the Metropolitan Church opens onto the culture of fin-de-siècle Paris, with its mystic cranks and grimy aesthetes; and there’s the legacy of the elaborate gamesmanship of Satie’s persona, an early example of the willful, gratuitous trollishness that would animate no end of avant-garde loudmouths in the century to come. It’s a doozy of a story, and anybody with the unfortunate affliction of an abiding interest in these types would do well to check it out.

A rare moment of mercy from one of the Parcener’s tracts, as translated and retypeset in Know Me to Be Your Superior.

.-=====-.
| .""". |
| |   | |
| |   | |
| '---' |
|       |
|       |
 .-================-'       '-================-.
j|  _                                          |
g|.'o\                                    __   |
s| '-.'.                                .'o.`  |
 '-==='.'.=========-.       .-========.'.-'===-'
'.`'._     .===,     |     _.-' /
  '._ '-./  ,//\   _| _.-'  _.'
  '-.| ,//'  \-'  `   .-'
    `//'_`--;    ;.-'
`\._ ;|    |
   \`-'  . |
   |_.-'-._|
   \  _'_  /
   |; -:- | 
   || -.- \ 
   |;     .\
     / `'\'`\-;
     ;`   '. `_/
     |,`-._;  .;
     `;\  `.-'-;
    | \   \  |
    |  `\  \ |
    |   )  | |
    |  /  /` /
    | |  /|  |
   | | / | /
   | / |/ /|
   | \ / / |
   |  /o | |
   |  |_/  |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   '-=====-'

I wrote these pieces early last summer in advance of my participation in Wesley Stokes’s “One Hundred Sense” reading series at Unnameable, and having done the “put the work aside for a few months and then come back to it with fresh eyes” test, I’ve determined that yup, I was right: they are, in fact, stressful enough to justify posting on here.

In addition to featuring several dumb zingers and easy nostalgia layups for me and like three other people worldwide, both poems make attempts to observe the quantum state known as tour life, a longtime obsession and frequent topic of conversation on this page, a condition whose time dilations and circadian torquings offer a handy onramp for broader, more shamelessly existential considerations. Meaning, basically, I’ll let myself get super earnest and heavy in a written piece if I can also talk about playing “the drowning game” after the Iowa City show.

Some names have been changed to protect the innocent, but some haven’t and anyway, if you’re actually a) reading this and b) doing so with an eye toward making positive IDs, then there’s a decent chance you’re the dustbowl townie or energy-drink-street-team-member in question. In which case: tag yourself!!

Love,

Mark

1.

i don’t always fuck with the nightswims
but since staying in the car’s how you actually die
i go ahead and slip under, midwest quarryholing my first time on the circuit and rubbled enough myself to pucker the membrane,
cold stellate spraypaint on roofbeam rise
limestone lemming ’cross thou gulf eternal

the show tonight was a basement classic:
tween roomclearers at the house next to campus 
female shoegaze duo called “the cockatoo twins”
mallpunk guitarstraps swung dainty into cheapo practice amps
plus over-the-counter strobe and fog juice aromas, they’re spencer’s gift
to man, and the prayer, she just comes natural

myself i can’t even remember if i was on the bill at all
and though in those days we intoned well the “if you’re not playing you’re paying” tour catechism
we all pull from the same beat-up envelope when it’s time to grip gas
oohing someone‘s tour steed econoline with the dashboard in metal-pierced rhinestone leatherette
“studded bulletbelt” trim level at mike watt toyota

so ritualized nightswim camaraderie’s fair enough
my filthy clothes piled up play-pretend rugged at the edge of the ballpit
out in whose far reaches the crew treads, playing
“the drowning game,” the freaks here somehow realer, dustbowl townie scourge tumbleweeding frathouse row and tazzing into YIMBY lawnsigns
while I do stolen valor coziness, clutch at occult talismans and tongue words like “privilege” and “punker”
though no one ever asked me to account for my palate’s having been bound by the facts of history

2.

“you can’t choose when it is you’re young”
someone’s formulation, once when cornered on the subject of
an art school career spent slaving in the rainbow rock mines of
baltimore city, two thousand and nine
floor toms and tie-dye headbands and eyebrow bleach
guitars technically still around but last-legs-style while the kids
fumbled sd cards and labeled their sampler pads
and i ducked eye contact and made little cracks to work up my nerve

more jokes at the show, tonight at the legendary
west side showspace with the scene vets, most of us decades behind and
trying to jam extreme up there with no plan, just smugness and incoherence
to the extent that when the cops do get called it’s mostly to take in
the gentrifier spectacle and make wisecracks about getting contact highs
honestly whatever, a fine joke for a cop to make, and basically appropriate
in the way a dentist gets rhetorically psyched to cluck at you through the facemask
and say “ignore your teeth and they’ll go away”

like the first noisefest after my own wisdom impaction, twenty-two and the
dude let me keep the vivisected third molars in the front pocket of my threadbare 
jansport next to the storebrand earplugs so that midway through the harshest set I 
reach in and pull out a pair of warprooted human bones
obviously making some kind of calculation having to do with flashy look-at-me clowning and the gratifications of safely transgressive behavior as
i decide to take advantage of the strobelit moment and
stuff ears one apiece with my own gnarled teeth
cracked ends burning off the passage and making sure enough people see it they can 
prompt me over the move later to which i can be like
“honestly they work just as good, long as you encourage the seal”

all sorts of routines and acting out, always ready with a half a story, trying for
this persona whose solidification turns out to be really fucking easy, actually, on 
account I’d been laying groundwork since forever
walking home making fake calls on a razr, soft friends and
hard ditching imaginary obligations, scared of the punks
but cozy enough with pothead dan whose older brother drives the red bull car
mini cooper college crews, doomed with the giant can on top and
the free samples at stops along coney island avenue
our generational demo’s messianic charge measured in hype stickers, street team 
promo codes and pony bottles of skunked energy drink whose contents
when chugged go cozily inert but would, if you chanced to spill them, reliably
dye the actual sidewalk yellow

a dance of rogue planet signifiers, smooth orbiting across years spent jamming 
kazaa’d files on winamp with the custom jay and silent bob skin
kid layabouts of the great powers wishing for minor al-qaeda attacks so as to
get the half-day, easy incarnating the customary poses of a culture whose legacies 
would turn out to be expanded real estate tax exemptions and streaming video
not that it has ever been clear whether real atonement is on the table,
or proportionality, or lossless audio
pretty solidly aware as we all were of this endtimes defenselessness
this aperture irising out to choke off our canted necklines in
the valedictory, “that’s all folks” sense of the shape
stomping out a parade or tripping on a turnstile
kettling friends and tabletopping fanemies
we arrested each other over and over and over while nightfall
sundialed, uneven, over the cube

also why we loved the mayan death day, treasured its rare coherence
the way it seemed to jibe, reassuring, with long-held imperialist exhaustions
the wind off the minidrone flyover and the english teacher
abandoning the av cart mid-hallway
earplugging war drums uptown and pit vipers in the noiseboy wading pool until
yes, one anemic research chemical experience and a castaneda paperback and
it was like shuttle the whole calendar and call this shit, man, like
what are we waiting for??
yelling over the embarrassment and cooption the way the timing was right
to set us all up for the tattoo, or really all the kids in providence got it
and then I copied them, needle threaded on the end of a pilot g2 gelly roll but
when it happened to me it was in a dorm floor rec-room
digits drooping as the design approached the pitched geometries of the armpit
but you can just take a sip of evan and finish up later

with time they’d undergo secondary mutations, a lot of these stick-and-poked sloganeerings, augments feeling natural enough once years pass or seem to so that
2012 becomes 42012, then 42012 becomes 42012 with a pynchon post-horn
before the whole axis gets weighed down into the mouth of the fineline pyramid and 
nowadays a lot of shoulders are blacked out anyway
predictable enough upshot, I guess, to treating your young body like
a fucking moleskine, like a trapperkeeper with a nirvana sticker and
our apocalypse as bogus as anything else,
when it is even recalled,
though there were times, I believe
when we meant it

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░      
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░            ░░    
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░            ░░    
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░            ░░    
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░              ░░  
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░              ░░  
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░              ░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░████████░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░████░░░░████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░████░░░░████░░░░░░
      ██░░████░░██                              ██░░████░░██      
      ██░░████░░██                              ██░░████░░██      
      ████░░░░████                              ████░░░░████      
        ████████                                  ████████        

January 2026 marks ten years since the cassette release of XILF: Stikklemuzick, the radioplay Esra and I and a bunch of friends recorded between 2013 and 2015 under the alterna-bandname Angels USA. It’s almost definitely the most widely enjoyed thing with which I’ve ever been involved, and probably the actual best one, too; at any rate, it’s the release that I still hear the most about when people wanna pay a compliment (rare enough but it happens!!). Meanwhile, if you and I have met more recently--meaning, I guess, within the last decade--and you don’t know me as a trafficker in fried half-/non-puns like “Nat King Cobra” and “snitches get pickles,” let me state unequivocally and for the record: this has always been the real me.

Album art by CF.

XILF: Stikklemuzick began life as the second in a projected trilogy of radioplay releases following 2012’s Angels USA VH1 Drunk, which itself was an exercise in building out the sort of nascent genre of dumbass audio skits that Esra and I had been working up alongside our main-vein band output, a couple of examples of which had seen the light of day via Bin Series, CF’s podcast from back in ye olde 2011e. But while OK, there’s some good stuff in those prior releases (I like VH1 Drunk’s jingles for various technologically-induced/psychoactive potato chip flavors), XILF was way sicker.

Ostensibly a parody of the hyper-produced/stunningly condescending NPR-style podcasts we were then a few years into jamming on tour drives, the tape was mostly an excuse to string together a bunch of jokes we liked, including:

• a diet fad that centers on chugging brackish water;

• two robots that smoke mad weed;

• and a text-to-speech voice calling someone a “tinker tailor shrimp peddler.”

We also enlisted a few friends as auxiliary voice talent, each of whom turned in a straightup revelatory performance (don’t sleep on “Brad Blomerth” as Ricky del Fuego; YouTube hasn’t). When the gratuitously long recording process was completed, CF hooked up the killer album art, rendering such beloved XILF characters as Pup USA, Dunston (the suicidal ape and star of Dunston Checks Out) and, of course, the mysterious Chaos Clown. The homie Simone from Hundebiss put the tape out, which--in addition to meaning that it would feature the label’s classically sick cassette packaging--was also gratifying for its guarantee that our crucially stupid work would find its way to a discerning international listener base who would have no choice but to just deal with it.

Like I said up top, people have been kind about XILF over the years, and it’s had more of an afterlife than any other Angels release. In 2020, it aired as an actual radio play (albeit as a bleep-laden, safe-for-air edit) on LA’s Lookout FM, and Esra and I and the extended crew put some time into the recording of a sequel (to be titled--as prophesied on the XILF album insert—Tartufo’s Nation). And while OK, it hasn’t happened yet, I feel like it probably will someday. Meanwhile, you can always get cozy with Yearnin’ Ernie.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣠⣤⣀⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡾⠋⠁⠀⠉⠻⣦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡾⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢹⡄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⣀⣤⣤⣤⣤⣤⣤⣄⣸⣇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣰⠞⠋⠉⠀⠀⢀⣀⣀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠙⠳⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⣠⡴⢶⣤⣀⣤⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣠⡴⠾⠛⠛⠉⠉⠉⠉⠛⠓⠶⣦⣄⣽⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⢸⡏⠀⠀⠈⠉⠀⠙⠛⠛⠳⣆⣠⠾⠋⠁⣀⢤⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡤⣀⠉⠛⢶⣄⠀⠀⣼⠛⠻⣶⠞⠛⢶⡄⠀⠀
⠀⣠⣼⣷⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⡿⠁⠀⢠⠞⠁⠘⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⠁⠈⢳⡀⠀⠙⣷⡶⠟⠀⠀⠈⠀⠀⢠⡟⠀⠀
⣸⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠰⣿⠁⠀⠀⠘⠂⣄⣚⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢓⣤⠔⠛⠀⢰⣏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⠛⠻⣦
⠹⣦⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣤⣤⠟⠀⠀⠀⣰⣿⣿⠉⣱⡄⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⢾⣿⡏⠙⣆⠀⠀⢹⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣽
⠀⣼⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⣷⠀⢀⠤⢄⣻⡙⠿⠟⣩⠇⢀⣀⣀⠀⠸⣜⠻⠿⢋⣟⡠⠄⡘⢷⣤⡄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⣴⠟
⠀⠹⢦⣴⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠠⣶⡟⢰⠁⠀⠀⢹⠉⠓⠛⣡⠞⠛⠉⠉⠛⢷⣌⠙⠚⠉⡏⠀⠀⠈⣿⡁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⡅⠀
⠀⠀⠀⢿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⠇⠈⠢⣀⣠⠜⠀⠀⣸⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⡆⠀⠀⠳⡄⠀⠜⠙⢳⡆⠀⠀⣀⣀⣀⣼⠃⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠈⠙⠛⠷⣤⡴⢾⣏⠀⠀⠀⡞⠉⠉⠓⠦⣿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣷⠖⠉⠉⠙⡆⠀⠀⠀⣿⣤⡾⠋⠉⠁⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⣿⡀⠀⠀⣇⠀⠰⡀⠀⠈⢷⣄⠀⠀⠀⢀⣠⡟⠁⠀⡰⠃⠀⡎⠀⠀⢠⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⢷⡀⠀⠸⡄⠀⠙⢦⡀⠀⠉⠛⠳⠚⠛⠁⠀⢀⠜⠁⠀⡼⠁⠀⢠⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢳⣄⠀⠘⢦⡀⠀⠙⠲⢤⣀⣀⣀⣀⡤⠖⠁⠀⣠⠞⠁⠀⣴⠟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⢷⣄⡀⠙⠲⢄⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⡤⠚⠁⢀⣤⠞⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠛⠶⣤⣀⣈⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⣀⣀⣤⠾⠛⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠙⠛⠛⠛⠛⠋⠉⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

I’ve written before about CKUT, the community radio station out of Montreal on whose airwaves I first popped a plosive back when I was a McGill freshman trying to cheat the CanCon requirements and suss out the Celsius/Fahrenheit conversions on my micbreak weather reports. The program I sometimes hosted in those days was If You Got Ears, the station’s rotating experimental/noise/generalized-outré music show, a natural enough fit even though at the time I was an infant who scarcely knew the difference between, for example, Subhumans and Subhumans.

Much later, I came to find out that the show been created by Alex Moskos, the musician behind the venerable Drainolith, as a station intern in 2003. When I interviewed Alex a couple of months ago for this site, we got to talking about CKUT--where he now works as music coordinator--and he was kind enough to extend an offer for a return visit. I recorded the show remotely in NYC and it aired last Wednesday, 12/31 as an utterly accidental New Year’s Eve special.

The show is available for listening/downloading here, and its playlist is reproduced below: tunes by friends (including two unreleased jammers from bands in which I participate), misc. Providence / MTL / California freaks, and some crucial archival inspirations. Solo nostalgia; tanta nostalgia.

Buon divertimento!!

Key video evidence for “Μια Άσκηση Φυσικής Άλυτη” (“An Unsolved Exercise in Physics”) by the heroic Λένα.

1. Sonic Youth - The Jim Years: Live 2000–2005 - Improv > Four6 (June 14 2001, Sonar Festival, Barcelona)

2. Star Bit - Door Should Be Open (unreleased)

3. Russian Tsarlag - Open Casket - Open Casket - 2009

4. Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux - Music Canada: Vol. XIII - Electronic Music In Canada - Trakadie

5. Michel Longtin - La Trilogie de la montagne - De Cristal, d’angoisses et de montagne (excerpt)

6. Bruno Menny - Cosmographie - Orbite autour de la planète 3 (excerpt)

7. 秋川早友 (Tomo Akikawabaya) - The Castle - Dizziness

8. Demsyl - For Niagara (unreleased)

9. Intersystems - Number One - Lately

10. Robert Daigneault - Electronic Music by Canadian Composers, Vols. 1 and 2 - Flute Collage No. 2 (excerpt)

11. great area - light decline - the laws of physics

12. Grand Trine - Free All Psychic Centers - Saturn (excerpt)

13. 楽しい音楽 (Tanoshii Ongaku) - ひょっこり (Hyokkori) - 金魚の行進 (March of Goldfish)

14. Syko Friend - The Code - Star’s Fight Many

15. Grim - Message - Heritage

16. Daily Life - Past / Impossible / Other - Oh, Leatherface

17. Robin McKenzie - A Sound Work to Accompany - Side A (excerpt)

18. VVAQRT - Detainee - Open Paean

19. Λένα Πλάτωνος (Lena Platonos) - Γκάλοπ (Galop) - Μια Άσκηση Φυσικής Άλυτη (An Unsolved Exercise in Physics)

20. Canadian Music Ensemble - David Jaeger: Portrait Musical - Star Song (excerpt)

21. Gashrat - Downs - Angels

22. F.G.S. - Tinker Bell’s Cough - Beth’s Deth

23. Corpusse - Delusions - Delusions

24. Ennio Morricone feat Christy - Comandamenti per un gangster - Solo Nostalgia

    ---

Bruno Menny’s blog-legendary Cosmographie, an oscillator romance space choir classic. God bless Creel Pone / Alpha State for the reissue (and for selling me an original pressing in 2020). I have an unreasonable love for this record.

                                        _
                                      /   )
                                     @| ?\
     ._-_.    _____________________@| ?\\
    +|\G/|+  | ____________________@| ?\\\
     +|\./|+  || O  o o o  =|=  |  =@| ?\\\\
      +|\./|+  || O  o o o   |  =|=  | -- ====
       `|H|'   ||______________________||\ \\\
         |a|    |________________________| \ \\\
          |H|    ||MM88MM<<<?<<<XHHHHMMMM||  \ \\\
           |a|    ||M88MM<<<?<<<XHHHMMMMMM||   \ \\\
            |H|    ||88MM<<<?<<<XHHHMMMMMMM||    \ \\\
             |a|    ||8MM<<<?<<<XHHHHMMMMMMM||     \ \\\
              |H|    ||MM<<<?<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMM||      \ \\\
               |H|    ||M<<<?<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMM||       \ \\\
          _-_   |H|   _-_<<<?<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMM||        \ \\\
          /   \  |H|  /   \<?<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMMM||         \ \\\
           |    \_|a|_/    |?<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMM||          \ \\\
            \      |H|      /<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMR||    =_     \ \\\             \              \     |H|     /<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMRMM||   || |     \ \\\  
            |    '"'    |<<<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMRMM8||   | | \   // 
            /     ===     \<XHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMRMM8R||    | |  \-    
             /      ===   !  \HHHHMMMMMMMMMMMRMM8RM||     \ \       \\
             |             | o |HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM988MM||        \\       \
         |      +---+ /  o |MMMMMMMMMMMMMM988MM<||          \\  
          \       ___ /  o  /M/MMMMMRMMMRMM88MM<<||           \ \
               \     |HHH|    l/MMMMMMMRMMMRMM88MM<<<||           | \\\\
                `-_   \_/   _-MMRMMMMMRMMMRMM88MM<<<?||           | |       

First off, a quick programming note:

⮑ If you’re a fan of experimental CanCon, rejoice in the holy knowledge that I will be guest-hosting this week’s Christmas Eve episode of If You Got Ears, the long-running noise show on Montréal’s CKUT radio station which has come in for multiple mentions on this site. I love CKUT and freeform radio and the idea of ripping a two hour show for the first time in like fifteen years. Thank you Moskos! Anyway, if you’re into it, maybe tune in Wednesday, 12/24 at 12:00 noon eastern on ckut.ca, but don’t tune in too hard cuz the thing’ll also be archived.

Now:

Earlier this month, in advance of an upcoming project, I spent one of those really sick archival days at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library working through selections from its world-class collection of postwar counterculture holdings. Though I requested and checked out materials from across a wide swath of geographic and historical zones (you can too), most of what I gripped bore some relation to the themes and research proclivities already well in evidence on this site: Italian student protest, factionalisms and dickishness in the French avant-garde, and the German opposition’s turn from pranky careerism to political violence.

This week--and as a cozy auf Wiedersehen to our continuing coverage of the year that was--I’m highlighting a few really choice finds from that last category. Below, several of my fave selections from the Beinecke’s German counterculture archives, including another visit from our pals at Kommune I: a downpayment on future research, a useful reminder of just how fucking similar the story was last time, and maybe even some useful stuff for you to yell at your family this holiday season.

Enjoy, and catch you in January.

A page from 1973’s AF Comix, purportedly Germany’s first underground comix mag. Sez our hero holding the copy of Anarcho Comik-Book: “Ugly images and idiotic text!! Utopian objectives... Open terror! Cheap sex! Moronic, miserable plots... Filth!”

A page from the anarchist underground newspaper Hundert Blumen. One ass-kicked protester to the other: “I’m more revolutionary than you are!!!”

A page from Charlie Kaputt, featuring Daniel Cohn-Bendit as the superhero “Dany Marxman.” Here, our hero crashes the West German Parliament session to make a big speech on behalf of the East German–aligned Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin, turns the Siemens corporation’s Betriebsrat (a shop floor Social Democratic–style “works council”) into a council communist Arbeiterrat (“Worker’s Council”), and sends the cops hightailing at West Berlin’s May Day parade. Equal goes it loose, baby!!

Fragment from a June 21, 1968 letter, purportedly from the Kommune I residents, tucked into an old issue of Charlie Kaputt. The text appears to be a tongue-in-cheek attack on the student movement’s capitulations to authorities in the days of the restrictive Emergency Acts--one of the results of which was Kommunard Fritz Teufel’s being thrown in Moabit prison, a development which itself prompted widespread hunger strikes.

Get in touch if you know more of the specifics here! Meantime, translation below.

[…] Where they belong. Today they’re still at the criminal police station—but tomorrow they’ll be back in the university offices.

At last, semester certificates, discounted airfare applications, and other documents important for the term break are available again.

How did this happen?

We kept hearing from the AStA1 and APO2 that the average student couldn’t understand why they should have to suffer because of our political ambitions.

Just because we had something against bureaucracy, they couldn’t go on vacation. And that was difficult for the AStA and APO, since they represent the interests of the students.

This made us think, and we had to admit that we couldn’t simply sell out those people who just wanted to go on term break.

Therefore, we helped the police with the search.

To our delight, they are now back—and just in time!

Wishing you happy holidays and a relaxing vacation from the hot summer of 1968,

Your

Kommune I (June 21, 1968)

P.S. Summer jobs available at the Kommune Factory, Moabit, Stephanstraße 60, backyard.3

     _  _  ____ ____  ____  _  _
     |,\/,| |[_' |[_]) |[_]) \\//
    ||\/|| |[_, ||'\, ||'\,  ||

            ___ __ __ ____  __  __  ____  _  _    __    __
           // ' |[_]| |[_]) || ((_' '||' |,\/,|  //\\  ((_'
           \\_, |[']| ||'\, || ,_))  ||  ||\/|| //``\\ ,_))
                                                               
                                         ,;7,
                                       _ ||:|,
                     _,---,_           )\'  '|
                   .'_.-.,_ '.         ',')  j
                  /,'   ___}  \        _/   /
      .,         ,1  .''  =\ _.''.   ,`';_ |
    .'  \        (.'T ~, (' ) ',.'  /     ';',
    \   .\(\O/)_. \ (    _Z-'`>--, .'',      ;
     \  |   I  _|._>;--'`,-j-'    ;    ',  .'
    __\_|   _.'.-7 ) `'-' "       (      ;'
  .'.'_.'|.' .'   \ ',_           .'\   /
  | |  |.'  /      \   \          l  \ /
  | _.-'   /        '. ('._   _ ,.'   \i
,--' ---' / k  _.-,.-|__L, '-' ' ()    ;
 '._     (   ';   (    _-}             |
  / '     \   ;    ',.__;         ()   /
 /         |   ;    ; ___._._____.: :-j
|           \,__',-' ____: :_____.: :-\
|               F :   .  ' '        ,  L
',             J  |   ;             j  |
  \            |  |    L            |  J
   ;         .-F  |    ;           J    L
    \___,---' J'--:    j,---,___   |_   |
              |   |'--' L       '--| '-'|
               '.,L     |----.__   j.__.'
                | '----'   |,   '-'  }
                j         / ('-----';
               { "---'--;'  }       |
               |        |   '.----,.'
               ',.__.__.'    |=, _/
                |     /      |    '.
                |'= -x       L___   '--,
                 L   __\          '-----'
                 '.____)

I’ve got another DIARY entry coming next week, after which I’ll probably go dark so I can focus all my energy on riding out the really psychically destabilizing week between Christmas and New Years. We’ll resume new programming in January.

Also, one announcement:

❄❄❄ I was lucky enough to contribute a pair of top ten lists to Screen Slate’s Best Movies of 2025 feature, which compiled the “New Releases” and “First Viewings/Discoveries” entries of 100+ contributors, many of whom really, really know their shit. Find my picks here.

But OK, recap time:

Puccio by CF.

The first post I published here, on—for some reason—Election Day 2024, was an older piece about Glenn Gould’s “The Prospects of Recording,” one which used Gould’s 1966 essay on studio trickery and tape splices to do some thinking about authenticity and referentiality via detours to some all-time touchstones, namely The Recognitions and Pussy Galore’s full album cover of Exile on Main St. It’s a writeup I’ve always liked, and I’m glad the first post on the site made equal reference to literature, history, and music, since I knew those were gonna be my primary beats here. But the real reason I led with the Gould post was because I was still working on what I knew would be my first real essay for the site, namely a piece on Rachel Kusher’s Creation Lake, which I finished and posted at the end of January:

failures of the avant-garde

ESSAY // creation lake

When I started tinkering with the idea of starting a Substack last fall, it was solely for the purposes of writing the following piece: a long essay on Rachel Kushner’s new novel Creation Lake, threaded with lengthy digressions on the author’s previous work, the book’s historical/political contexts, and lots and lots of minutiae on the Situationist Inte…

Read more

a year ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · mark iosifescu

I’ve done a lot of writing this year, much of it under the kinda generalized umbrella of the “book review”/”literary essay” market stall, to the extent that it’s hard to remember that prior to this period I had never seriously considered writing about the books I read (and, in fact, I entertained a lot of obnoxious gripes and preconceived notions about that kind of writing, but like who’s counting). The Creation Lake piece—which gave me permission to spread out across 6k+ words, dig into Kushner’s whole oeuvre, and bring in a whole mess of counterculture history via my eternal crushes in the Situationist International—allowed me a totally new perspective on the form, and served as a solid object lesson in what I could do with this page. I’m still pretty psyched on it.

The piece also set the tone for the other bigger-ticket essays I’ve posted, which tended to run decently deep along the “literature” + “counterculture” axes. I wrote about the Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca; picked up the Situationist thread in posts on Isidore Isou and Guy Debord, on the Gruppe Spur, and on the all-time nightmare avant-gardist Dieter Kunzelmann; and continued to stress-test the literary essay form for myself with lengthy textual walkabouts on Peter Weiss’s multivolume epic The Aesthetics of Resistance and, most recently, Shadow Ticket.

The fact of my getting to place those latter two relatively ambitious pieces in truly sick outlets—The Whitney Review and n+1, respectively—is also a huge part of the story of this year for me, along with other output and “new releases” that I sometimes catalogued here under the “PSA” header. For now, suffice it to say that this page—the demands of maintaining it, and the momentum I felt it accrue in my writing practice—is why some, or most, or all of that stuff happened.

Also, while we’re here, worth re-noting that The Aesthetics of Resistance—and the attendant dive into Weiss on which I spent last winter—was, unquestionably, one of the great reading experiences of my life. Here, again, is the piece on it:

failures of the avant-garde

ESSAY // the aesthetics of resistance

Hi folks…

Read more

a year ago · 7 likes · 6 comments · mark iosifescu

In addition to the essays, I was very psyched when this page began functioning as a workable means of sending excerpts of my fiction to readers, some of whom were actually into it. Historically, this is not an altogether rich area for me, so obviously it felt like a dopamine ice luge when I posted short stories about, like, stableboys and comic strips and Italian spies and got nice notes back from readers. Ditto for the excerpts of ancient novel manuscripts—which I’ve been stripmining for weekly content all damn year—as well as some translations of heroes like the aforementioned Luca, Octave Mirbeau, and um, Jean-Louis Costes.

But for all the the features of my 2025 Blogaissance on which I’m now looking back and feeling a certain tender December tug, none is sweeter than the fact that I was able to use this page—which is ostensibly about the history of counterculture, I guess?—to account for work and relationships from inside my own underground community, the set of interlocking crews of genius artists and musicians I’ve rolled with since I was like 18 years old, when they saved me from a life of being an actual pretentious idiot. In recognition of this auspicious development but also of my lingering self-centeredness, this year I posted a bunch of my own music on here, but I also stumbled on yet another form in which—before this Substack showed up, anyway—I didn’t think I had much to offer: the shaggy, deeply informal but hopefully not-that-podcasty interview. Getting to talk to dear old friends about both the insanely sick work they make and their path through this unsettled, altogether nebulous iteration of counterculture is, I’m pretty sure, the only way in which this page might constitute an actual resource.

It is for me, anyway, and it’s thanks to the below conversations, which is why I’ll use them as a signoff—also, I’ve officially triggered the Substack “Post too long for e-mail” popup alert, which has been another steady feature of this heady lifestyle.

Thanks for reading this year. More to come.

failures of the avant-garde

INTERVIEW // bela shayevich

Happy New Year (a formulation I really like even though it’s predicated on a holiday/organizational principle that completely stresses me out)!! This week, a banger interview with Bela Shayevich that originally appeared in the second issue of The Writer’s Foundry Review…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · mark iosifescu

failures of the avant-garde

INTERVIEW // v manuscript

I don’t remember exactly when I first met Eli Milholland/V Manuscript, but I can trace our friendship’s wobbly far edge by tracking my yearslong obsession with Humanbeast, his and Maralie Armstrong-Rial’s august noise/electronics/performance/songs/genreless free-expression band project. My initial exposure to Humanbeast’s recordings came in the waning d…

Read more

a year ago · 9 likes · mark iosifescu

failures of the avant-garde

INTERVIEW // syko friend

I last pontificated on here about Syko Friend, Sophie Weil’s solo-ish guitar noise project, in a Christmas Eve post reproducing my liner notes to her 2017 12" Angel’s Ride. In addition to hopefully nudging folks toward the tunes themselves, the writeup is evidence of the way Weil’s woozily haunting guitar music points listeners toward some of the headie…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · mark iosifescu

failures of the avant-garde

INTERVIEW // MSHR

This week, it’s a good one: a lengthy-but-lively, heady-but-loose conversation with MSHR, the long-running art collective/performance and installation project/killer electronic music outfit founded and embodied by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper…

Read more

9 months ago · 1 like · mark iosifescu

failures of the avant-garde

INTERVIEW // drainolith

This week, at long last, another barnburner roundup of recent DIY subhistories, accomplished via the time-honored medium of musician interview. But first, some very quick housekeeping…

Read more

7 months ago · 4 likes · mark iosifescu

 ____  _   _ ____ ____   ____ ____  ___ ____  _____ 
/ ___|| | | | __ ) ___| / ___|  _ \|_ _| __ )| ____|
\___ \| | | |  _ \___ \| |   | |_) || ||  _ \|  _|  
 ___) | |_| | |_) |__) | |___|  _ < | || |_) | |___ 
|____/ \___/|____/____/ \____|_| \_\___|____/|_____|

In September, as part of an ongoing series attempting to account for shifts and pivot points in the history of the counterculture, I wrote about the Gruppe SPUR, the crew of German painter-provocateurs whose artistic panache and talent for obscenity got them drafted into--then kicked out of--the Situationist International, a saga whose short timeframe (three years, from 1959 to 1962) belied the profound implications it’d have for the route of the postwar European avant-garde. I also mentioned that I had more writing coming on one such Spurist in particular: namely, the layabout and scandal-monger Dieter Kunzelmann, a onetime Spurist who parlayed an early association with the S.I. into a position near the center of West Germany’s late-1960s student movement and its subsequent spill into militant violence.

Today, it’s Failures of the Avant-Garde: The Kunzelmann Years, in which topless protesters, “pudding assassinations,” and breathless media coverage yield to bombs, easy government entrapment lay-ups, and unchallenged reassertions of state control. As a wise man once said: “No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

𝔗𝔰𝔠𝔥𝔲̈ß𝔦𝔨𝔬𝔴𝔰𝔨𝔦!

The so-called Busenattentat (or “Breasts Attack”) launched against Adorno by attendees of his “Introduction to Dialectical Thinking” lecture at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, April 22, 1969.

I. “A dram of madness”

A February 14, 1969 letter, sent by Theodor Adorno, Extraordinary Chair in the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University, to his old Frankfurt School peer Herbert Marcuse, eminent professor at the University of California at San Diego, gives some indication of the darkening atmosphere at the two scholars’ initial home university. “Things have been terrible again here,” begins Adorno after two paragraphs of niceties, before continuing:

An SDS group led by [Hans-Jürgen] Krahl occupied a room at the Institute and refused to leave, despite three requests. We had to call the police... the propaganda is presenting things entirely back to front, as if it were we who grasped at repressive measures, and not the students who yelled at us that we should shut our traps and say nothing about what happened.

It was neither the first nor the last time Adorno’s lectures would be disrupted by members of Germany’s rising student movement. A July 1967 guest talk at Berlin’s Freie Universität had been upstaged by a group of protesters waving a banner that read (in ironic reference to a previous spat), “Berlin’s Left-wing Fascists Greet Teddy the Classicist.”1 The whole of 1968 saw lectures shouted down and challenged. The first session of his summer 1969 course on dialectical thinking devolved into chaos after interrupting students demanded Adorno apologize for calling the police on Krahl’s contingent, shouting “Down with the informer,” while another hijacked the blackboard to write “If Adorno is left in peace capitalism will never cease,” and three female students, baring their breasts in performance of an “erotic pantomime,” scattered rose and tulip petals over the head of the plainly shocked professor. Adorno fled the scene, solidifying his perceived refusal to respond and, soon after, members of the “Grassroots Sociology Group” printed and distributed leaflets proclaiming that “Adorno as an Institution is dead.”2

Marcuse, six thousand miles away and in the midst of his new homeland’s own civic unrest (and its authoritarian suppression), disapproved of his old colleague’s antagonistic response to the self-styled student revolutionaries. But Adorno was hardly the only member of the leftist old guard to look on the aggressive tactics and growing popularity of the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund or “Socialist German Student League”) with shock and abhorrence. The neoconservative Hermann Lübbe called the movement “a worldwide student-intellectual partisan cult” and “a flight from reality.” Günter Grass, condemning the protesters for using tactics that mirrored those of the oppressor, wrote that “the slogans ‘ban the SDS’ and ‘Expropriate Springer’ are written in the same authoritarian ink.” German scholars with all-too-fresh memories of the Third Reich decried the “pogrom atmosphere” of the protests and readily equated the student movement with Nazism, while the West German public, comfortable with its stable liberal-democratic government and its relative economic prosperity and abetted by an increasingly powerful news media, ignored repeated student appeals for widespread solidarity.

While the divides widened between the radicals and both the old left and the political mainstream, the members of the student movement (the SDS and the larger catch-all of splinter groups known as the Außerparlamentarische Opposition / “Extra-Parliamentary Opposition” or “APO”) opened themselves up to new extremisms, which meant an attendant hardening of tactics and the widening of the possibilities for the application of an ever more aggressive revolutionary strategy. As the movement weathered power struggles, ambitious interlopers and the attentions of reporters, the theretofore-rhetorical attacks on media monopolization (the “Expropriate Springer” slogan to which Grass alludes) turned into breathlessly reported bomb plots and the storming of press offices. Hoaxes, stunts, erotic pantomimes and all the rest turned into arsons, bombings and assassinations. Bolstered by a heady brew of countercultural ardor, a media establishment and mass culture simultaneously disturbed and transfixed by their behavior, and the fateful application of direct action tactics to transforming cultural and social spheres, the radical German left of the 1960s and ‘70s brought the notion of revolution in Western Europe—previously the concern of eminent though marginal leftist theoreticians and a small cultural avant-garde—to its most chaotic of realizations.

Adorno—speaking of leftist theoreticians—didn’t live to see whether his dire predictions for the student movement would come to pass: his status as ‘institution’ having already been declared dead, the man himself would succumb only four months later, in August 1969.3 But his correspondence with Marcuse illuminates the antagonistic situation faced by the intellectual old guard—backed into a corner by their theoretical descendants—and goes some way toward demonstrating the possibilities still open to them. Marcuse, for his part, is as conciliatory as one in the crosshairs can be expected to be, reasoning that the activities of the student movement constitute a push for revolutionary praxis that may yet have a positive impact on theory. “We cannot abolish from the world the fact that these students are influenced by us (and certainly not least by you),” he told his old friend in April. “I am proud of that and am willing to come to terms with patricide, even though it hurts sometimes.”

Marcuse had reason to cite praxis as a means of furthering theory; the protesters frequently alluded to Frankfurt School theory even while they shunned the theorist, and their advocacy of its teachings was cited as a prime driver of their direct action. As Dieter Kunzelmann—the misbegotten Situationist, sometime SDS member, and founder of the groups Subversive Aktion and Kommune-I—had written in 1966: “Our relationship with praxis and direct action should be characterized according to Marcuse’s dictum that ‘oppressed and overpowered minorities have a natural right to resistance, should legal means prove inadequate.’”4 But for Adorno, an admission of support for the wanton praxis of protesters like Kunzelmann amounted to doing away with theory altogether. He refused to budge: “I am not a masochist,” he wrote, “not when it comes to theory.” In that same letter to Marcuse (his final one, actually typed and sent by his secretary on the very day of his death), Adorno summed up his tentative though no less critical perspective on the unfolding youth revolt that so troubled his last days: “I am the last to underestimate the merits of the student movement: it has interrupted the smooth transition to the totally administered world,” he conceded. “But it is mixed with a dram of madness, in which the totalitarian resides teleologically...”

Dieter Kunzelmann in the dock of Berlin’s Moabit District Court, 1971.

II. “The suspicious German manifesto”

Let’s zoom out. The student protest movement in West Germany owed its uniquely virulent and violent expression to a dizzying confluence of historical and circumstantial factors, not least: the political complications and lasting psychological scars of the Third Reich, the postwar context of a divided country and its attendant Cold War significance, and the staunchly market capitalism, growth-privileging policies of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship. The BRD of the 1960s constituted a truly singular specimen: a nation whose Wirtschaftswunder (or postwar “economic miracle”) had resulted in economic unification with Western Europe and one of the strongest economies in the world, a capitalist success story that was forced to exist in the unavoidable twin shadows of, on the own hand, Soviet-sponsored communist control over much of its territory and, on the other, an undeniably catastrophic fascist past. Reminders of this contextual tangle littered the socioeconomic landscape—wages and consumer quality of life were high, but early recovery had been mitigated by the payment of postwar reparations and the dismantling of industry, and immigrants crossed over from dictatorial East Germany by the millions while at home, the German Communist Party was banned.

But if there was much to set the West German counterculture apart, there were also key linkages that bound it to larger international issues and tendencies. The pushback against the U.S.-led war in Vietnam and other perceived acts of global imperialism may have manifested itself especially intensely in West Germany (which, as a leading capitalist power, was seen as a prime beneficiary of western economic imperialism), but the protest movement and trend of civic unrest from which it arose was worldwide, and international points of reference abounded. In addition to finding resonance in events in the United States, Mexico, England, Ireland, and Italy (to say nothing of the violent state suppressions of popular uprisings in “communist” China, Poland, and Czechoslovakia), the German protest movement saw its closest analogue take shape in France, where student demonstrations merged with a sympathetic labor movement to force a series of general strikes and occupations that temporarily brought the country to a standstill and—not accidentally—created a cultural aura of revolutionary cachet around the tag “May ’68” that persists to this day.5

Those protests, subject though their relative successes were to the peculiarities of the French case, owed much to both the broadly-stated conceptual influence and the direct involvement of the Situationist International. As I’ve written about previously, the group had spent much of the 1960s locked in doctrinal squabbles and exclusion votes, and as a result its ranks had winnowed considerably by 1968; nonetheless, once and future members of the S.I. were omnipresent during the events in France, lending theoretical and sloganeering support to protesters, reporting on and critiquing the organizational approaches of demonstrations and occupations, and printing and distributing posters and subversive materials. Situationist texts, namely Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, were seen as inextricably linked to the philosophical origins of the uprisings, just as Debord’s “Ne travaillez jamais” slogan is bound up with the unrest’s labor component.

As noted, however, the S.I. of 1968 was not the same S.I. that had been formed in 1957 from the Lettrist International (itself the direct action-oriented offshoot of Isou’s Lettrists);6 rather, it comprised the core of theoreticians clustered around Debord, who had forced out the members of the group’s “artist wing” in a series of internal clashes from 1960 to 1962. The most momentous and damaging internecine scandal had attended the exclusion of the Gruppe Spur, a band of brash artist-provocateurs from Munich whom Asger Jorn had invited into the S.I.’s ranks in 1959 to Debord’s immediate and unceasing displeasure.7 Spur’s core had consisted of Lothar Fischer, Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm, Hans-Peter Zimmer and Dieter Kunzelmann, the sole non-artist. Kunzelmann, a self-styled Gammler (a sort of bohemian “layabout”) who’d spent half a year in Paris before returning to Munich to begin a career as an activist, had the sort of baldly contradictory persona (a revolutionary who lived on an allowance from his father) and preternatural talent for button-pushing and scandal that made him a safe bet for avant-garde celebrity in the era.8 Indeed, as I wrote about in September, Kunzelmann and the Spurists had, over the span of their three-year S.I. membership, courted controversy in the practiced avant-garde manner: namely, via the distribution of slanderous tracts, the public humiliation of targeted establishment figures (in Spur’s case, the philosopher Max Bense) and the publication of incendiary anti-religious and willfully obscene artworks in the pages of their self-titled journal. Die Zeitschrift Spur positively drips with blustery attitude and obsessive art vanguardism, all of which the group’s members tagged with the name, and thus the implied authorization, of the Situationist International. However we read this tendency—as a simple desire on the Spurists’ part to align themselves with a powerful international movement or, perhaps, a more purposeful (and more Debordian) effort to hijack and repurpose that name—there can be no doubt that the aestheticized theatrics constituted a significant thorn in the side of Debord’s S.I. Central Committee, which had turned its attention from the Isouian theatrics of its early days to revolutionary theory and plans for direct action.

But Debord’s disapproval wasn’t the only factor in Spur’s ousting and ensuing dissolution. Complaints over the blasphemous content of the group’s journal (a bit harder to get away with, as it turned out, in Catholic-traditionalist Bavaria) resulted in police raids, the seizure of all extant copies of the offending Spur editions and two obscenity trials beginning in May 1962. The court proceedings, coming on the heels of a protracted showdown with the S.I. (from which they’d been formally excluded via open letter that February), would ultimately result in the acrimonious breakup of the group. But in spite of their seriousness, the trials also provided Kunzelmann with a long-sought after public spotlight, and he made ready use of his newfound fame. Via a mélange of plainly transgressive, sexually-tinged protest language and political speechifying shot through with avant-garde braggadocio, Kunzelmann impugned the outmoded court system and the religious authorities at every opportunity, even issuing a series of public statements baiting the German press, which covered the proceedings with a mixture of bemusement and disdain. He gleefully repeated anti-religious sentiment in the courtroom itself, plainly acknowledging his guilt and inculpating his (none too pleased) peers Prem and Sturm. His antics even forced the resignation of the group’s defense attorney. “Yes, Your Honor of the District Court Counsel,” as Kunzelmann put it to the presiding judge with typically provocative verve, “I acknowledge writing pornographic texts and blaspheming God with pleasure. What is the crime here?”

The Kommune-I roomies, 1967, including Kunzelmann (far left), Rainer Langhans (second from left), Ulrich Enzensberger (third from left), Dorothea Ridder (fourth from left), and Fritz Teufel (fifth from left).

III. Anschlag

Although their expulsion was the direct catalyst for a series of major splits within the S.I., we might yet look on Spur’s failure to gain dominance within the group as a reflection of their inability to adhere to the changing tone of the avant-garde revolutionary struggle (at least as dictated by Debord, who, for better or worse, was a key tone-setter): namely, a pivot from aesthetics to direct action.9 But if the other members of Spur were hamstrung by their desire to make art and eschew elaborate theory, Kunzelmann’s decidedly non-aesthetic predilections were more adaptable to the new actionist context, and he quickly made good on this potential.

Kunzelmann began a dedicated post-Spur activist existence in Munich, establishing the group Subversive Aktion with Rodolfe Gasché and Rudolf May. Gasché, a sociology student, contributed a pronounced interest in Frankfurt School critical theory, primarily that of Marcuse. After a series of inflammatory pamphlets and disruptive protests (sometimes hinging, in stubborn Spurist fashion, on the art world, as in the planned protest of the commercialization of Kassel’s documenta art fair), Subversive Aktion managed to establish a Berlin wing in 1963 and attract the attentions of the Free University students Bernd Rabehl and Rudi Dutschke, who joined the following year. Both students, East German emigrants keen on applying critical theory to the practical socialism they knew, had been involved with the growing SDS, and with their Subversive Aktion allegiances in place, they undertook a concerted plan to take over the group’s Berlin chapter and reorient it along actionist lines, while Kunzelmann (looking every bit the group-jockeying Situationist) did the same within the ranks of the SDS’s Munich wing. With these components accounted for, it wouldn’t be long before BRD-style direct action made its bold debut: in December 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moise Tshombe’s visit to Munich was met by stink bombs, while his subsequent reception in West Berlin was punctuated by thrown tomatoes, barricade storming and the brief occupation of City Hall—all courtesy of Subversive Aktion. In demonstrating an unprecedented willingness to transcend the norms of protest and adopt illegal and even violent methods, the action shocked both the public and the theretofore-moderate activist community, and began the radical student movement in earnest.

But the socially-transgressive side of Kunzelmann’s revolutionary project didn’t limit itself to stink bombs. As part of the next phase of Subversive Aktion (whose Berlin wing had renamed itself Anschlag Gruppe, “attack group”), a proposal for the establishment of Freiräume—collective “free spaces” in which to undertake the revolutionary project—led to an initiative by Kunzelmann and Dutschke to found a commune. Though couched in Marcusian theoretical terminology, Kunzelmann distinguished himself in the commune discussions by relentlessly emphasizing sexual freedoms, a pursuit which many in the group found—to put it mildly—limited in ambition. Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, Dutschke’s American wife, warned her husband that Kunzelmann “would destroy everything,” and indeed, by the time plans went ahead on what became known as Kommune-I in January 1967, Dutschke and a number of other activists—now acknowledged SDS spokespersons and leaders—had backed out. By spring, Kunzelmann and his communards were ejected from the Berlin SDS altogether.

What Kommune-I members (the best-known of whom were Kunzelmann, Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel) had lost in direct revolutionary involvement, they made up for in notoriety and radical posturing. Indeed, it was during the heady early days of the commune that the aggressive rhetoric demonstrated by Kunzelmann at the Munich trial—somewhat tempered, since then, by the strategic practical influence of Dutschke—found its most extreme expression: communards trumpeted their free love credentials and bragged about promiscuity, claiming that “whoever sleeps twice with the same woman is already part of the establishment;” they staged sexually-tinged happenings and distributed nude photographs of themselves; they sold Maoist cultural revolution propaganda and demonstrated an altogether mercurial political policy, with even the war in Vietnam, by then the primary driver for the protest movement, coming in for transgressive subversion—as when Der Spiegel asked about his feelings on the matter and Kunzelmann answered, “What do I care about Vietnam, when I have orgasm difficulties?”

Unsurprising though Kommune-I’s subversive tack may be—in light of Kunzelmann’s history and his successful establishment of a radical free space along his own idiosyncratic intentions—what’s less shocking still is the fact that the provocative tactics were hugely successful when it came to creating a media frenzy and establishing a cult of celebrity around the communards. Newspapers published scandalous photos and reported ceaselessly on the “hippie” phenomenon. Fritz Teufel became a particular cause célèbre after an imprisonment led to widespread attention and agitation for his release. Langhans even became one-half of a celebrity couple with the model/actress/Ur-rock-groupie Uschi Obermaier, who was soon appearing nude on the cover of the magazine Twen beside a headline touting a pictorial with “Miss Kommune.” And if the media attention was overblown, this was in no way ill-matched to public interest: in fact, readers were ravenous for every detail, and fan mail poured into Kommune-I from all over West Germany.

Kunzelmann leaving prison on a seven-day-furlough in January 1975. From the British Pathé B-roll description: “A 35-year-old man jailed for arson in West Berlin has been allowed seven days’ liberty--before completing his sentence--to campaign in a local election as a Maoist Communist party candidate.”

IV. Wars on all fronts

Kunzelmann’s revolution, muddled though it had become by the controversies surrounding the commune, was still an ongoing factor in a German protest movement increasingly punctuated by the aggressive tactics inherited from Subversive Aktion. Escalating violent demonstrations had led to brutal police suppression—most fatefully, in the June 2, 1967 killing of Benno Ohnesorg, a non-SDS student who’d been attending a protest during the Shah of Iran’s visit to West Berlin—further emboldening radical elements in the SDS and, in turn, stirring a deeper reactionary hatred in the left-distrusting West German public. On April 11, 1968, the 23-year old anti-communist Josef Bachmann attempted to assassinate Rudi Dutschke, shooting the protest leader in the head and setting off a still-greater convulsion of protests and the accompanying re-evaluation of a rapidly radicalizing strategy. The precedent set for greater violence, a new watchword—guerrilla, inspired by countervailing militias in the Americas and its use in Marcuse’s theory—characterized the tactical conversation of this new phase. And once again, it was Kunzelmann who put theory into praxis.

On November 9, 1969, an unexploded bomb was discovered in the Berlin Jewish Community Center, and four days later a statement was published in the radical journal Agit 883 claiming responsibility on behalf of a group—Kunzelmann’s newest—calling itself “Tupamaros-West Berlin.” Entitled “Shalom and Napalm,” the piece constituted twin attacks on American aggression in Vietnam and the Israeli oppression of Palestinian Arabs, promising to spark “Vietnam wars on all fronts” via the importation of American war methods (i.e., napalm) to the West. Kunzelmann, whose commune had been falsely implicated in arson plots and a mock attempt on the life of U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey (referred to as, no joke, the “Pudding Assassination”), had now transitioned to the real thing, even doing so in a fashion that bore a trace of his prior, impossibly provocative tendencies: the date chosen for the attack, November 9, was the anniversary of Kristallnacht.10

The Tupamaros bomb may not have gone off, but many would, and indeed, the next decade of the German radical protest movement would be characterized by violent actions undertaken by a constellation of guerrilla groups too numerous to treat here: among their ranks numbered the “2 June Movement,” named for the date of Ohnesorg’s killing; the “Revolutionary Cells,” best known for their participation in the hijacking of an Air France flight from Israel in 1976; and the RAF or “Rote Armee Fraktion,” the organization led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof now known to have killed 34 people between 1971 and 1993.

If we need not dive into detailed accounts of these groups’ undertakings in the post-1960s era, it’s because such histories (and that of the RAF in particular) have been the subject of endless research, numerous books, even a slick 2008 film. As has been the case with the French introspection on May ’68, the interest in the German paramilitary era runs the gamut from apologetic to condemnatory but maintains—via sheer aggregation of focus if nothing else—a certain salacious idealization of the events and their inherent drama. But amidst all this focus, little has been made of these groups’ origins in Subversive Aktion’s importation of aggressive and willfully shocking revolutionary techniques into the student movement—techniques which were themselves inherited in large part from the playbook of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.

To be sure, the assimilation of direct action aims from the Subversive Aktion group into the German student movement at large (and their eventual infamous results) was not the simple result of Dieter Kunzelmann’s involvement any more than it was the sole working of Gasché, Deutschke, or Marcuse, for that matter. But in binding its advocacy for revolutionary praxis with the Debordian calculus that privileged power rivalries and manipulation of groups, in following the S.I.’s cliquish emphasis on personality through to its logical conclusion in the tastelessness of empty fame-seeking, and in resolutely shaping a sloganeering, superficial brand of leftist global solidarity into a committed do-or-die political agenda with real consequences, Subversive Aktion and Kunzelmann helped usher forth a version of revolution more muddled in its aims, more extreme in its practice, and more fraught and dubious in its ultimate legacy than anything seen in the era.

The West German “revolution” was also the least successful of the day, its calls for solidarity having fallen on deaf ears among all but those already on the fringe: tellingly (and by way of distinction with the French case), no workers ever joined up with Germany’s student protesters and, as we’ve seen, the violence and severity of protesters’ methods also made short work of any support they might have received from leftist academics and intellectuals. And to be fair, Kunzelmann was far from the only practitioner of these methods, hardly the best-known nor the most violent (nor, even, the only one to take up a post-radicalism career in electoral politics). Nevertheless—however skeptical we may feel regarding the possibilities for revolutionary change in the Western liberal context, however loath we ought to be to indict any one person for their role in a complex historical process—it does feel hard to disagree with the opinion offered in 1967 by Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz: Kunzelmann, along with his dizzying lineage of strident avant-gardist forebears turned celebrity provocateurs turned institutional political figures, did, by some measure, destroy everything.

+------------------------------------------------------------+
| .----------------.  .----------------.  .----------------. |
|| .--------------. || .--------------. || .--------------. ||
|| |    _______   | || | _____  _____ | || |   ______     | ||
|| |   /  ___  |  | || ||_   _||_   _|| || |  |_   _ \    | ||
|| |  |  (__ \_|  | || |  | |    | |  | || |    | |_) |   | ||
|| |   ‘.___`-.   | || |  | ‘    ‘ |  | || |    |  __’.   | ||
|| |  |`\____) |  | || |   \ `--’ /   | || |   _| |__) |  | ||
|| |  |_______.’  | || |    `.__.’    | || |  |_______/   | ||
|| |              | || |              | || |              | ||
|| ‘--------------’ || ‘--------------’ || ‘--------------’ ||
| ‘----------------’  ‘----------------’  ‘----------------’ |
| .----------------.  .----------------.  .----------------. |
|| .--------------. || .--------------. || .--------------. ||
|| |    _______   | || |     ______   | || |  _______     | ||
|| |   /  ___  |  | || |   .’ ___  |  | || | |_   __ \    | ||
|| |  |  (__ \_|  | || |  / .’   \_|  | || |   | |__) |   | ||
|| |   ‘.___`-.   | || |  | |         | || |   |  __ /    | ||
|| |  |`\____) |  | || |  \ `.___.’\  | || |  _| |  \ \_  | ||
|| |  |_______.’  | || |   `._____.’  | || | |____| |___| | ||
|| |              | || |              | || |              | ||
|| ‘--------------’ || ‘--------------’ || ‘--------------’ ||
| ‘----------------’  ‘----------------’  ‘----------------’ |
| .----------------.  .----------------.  .----------------. |
|| .--------------. || .--------------. || .--------------. ||
|| |     _____    | || |   ______     | || |  _________   | ||
|| |    |_   _|   | || |  |_   _ \    | || | |_   ___  |  | ||
|| |      | |     | || |    | |_) |   | || |   | |_  \_|  | ||
|| |      | |     | || |    |  __’.   | || |   |  _|  _   | ||
|| |     _| |_    | || |   _| |__) |  | || |  _| |___/ |  | ||
|| |    |_____|   | || |  |_______/   | || | |_________|  | ||
|| |              | || |              | || |              | ||
|| ‘--------------’ || ‘--------------’ || ‘--------------’ ||
| ‘----------------’  ‘----------------’  ‘----------------’ |
+------------------------------------------------------------+

When, last month, I marked the release of Shadow Ticket with a brief attempt at a kinda moral inventory of litbro fandom and said I’d “been working on some writing about the book,” this new essay is what I was talking about: a review, for sure, of the new novel, but also a deeper dive into Pynchon’s oeuvre, his readership and critical standing, and the associated myths and misreadings that have calcified across the 60-some-odd years since the dude hit the scene. A big swing, I know, but--as the earlier post, which detailed my maximalist showoff pedigree, sought to delineate--also one for which I’ve been prepping for a really long time.

It’s a dream to have gotten to write this thing, is the bottom line, and I’m endlessly grateful to Lisa and Mark at n+1--who looked kindly on an unsolicited pitch, encouraged its full and not-un-lengthy expression, and edited the piece with a thoughtfulness and rigor that was only matched by, like, how chill and fun the process actually was. When Lisa suggested, for instance, that I change every word in a clause mentioning T.C. Boyle to also contain an acronym or abbreviation, yielding “T.C. Boyle re M&D in the NYTBR”? That’s a damn edit right there.

Anyway, the full ~5k word essay is over at n+1, but an excerpt is below.

First, though, what say we housekeep??

▷▷ Speaking of n+1: last Thursday, I hosted a conversation with Ilya Gridneff at the mag’s Greenpoint offices. The event marked the release of Your Name Here, Gridneff’s decades-in-the-making collaborative novel with Helen DeWitt. We talked about airport thrillers and email as an artform, I shoehorned in some talk about StuffIt Expander, and Ilya bravely asked the real question, namely whether Cărtărescu was my father. It was fun and illuminating.

▷▷ Last week, which was busy as shit, also saw the release of the sixth issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing, for which I wrote a review of Jacqueline Feldman’s fascinating non-fiction book Precarious Lease. The piece doubles, I hope, as something of a roundup of the many recent literary works, films, and cultural products concerned with the politics of squatting and communes--a juicily dramatic countercultural subject and, amid the ongoing disaster of today’s housing crisis, a relevant one. I’ll be posting more about this soon, but in the meantime: subscribe to the Review!!

For now, though, onto Shadow Ticket.

A representative scene in Shadow Ticket, the ninth novel by Thomas Pynchon, sees Hicks McTaggart—a Milwaukee private eye newly marooned in a stylized noir fantasia of 1932 Central Europe—receive a theory of political economy by way of a stranger’s account of the workings of a multinational cheese cartel. “Most civilians,” asserts this customer (a coked-up Viennese Interpol operative of dubious allegiance named Egon Praediger), don’t have “the least idea how difficult the International Cheese Syndicate can become. The Roquefort police, the Gorgonzola squadri, even Switzerland—harmless by comparison.” OK, seems at first to be your basic deployment of Pynchon’s canonical “shady conglomerates with cheeky names” schtick. (This being a novel that also features the law enforcement classifications SMEGMA (Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area) and BAGEL (Bureau Administering Golems Employed Locally).) But then Praediger downshifts into a more somber mode:

This is the ball bearing on which everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential, prairie drifted over the horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever . . .

As our gumshoe Hicks might say: “Howzat?” In the span of a few sentences, the conversation has gone from a pun-drunk riff on Europe’s draconian food labeling standards into a harsh-toke diagnosis of continentwide death drive, gesturing, variously, at the Bataillean notion of war as orgiastic release, the history of settler-colonialism from Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum, and imminent atrocity rendered nightmarishly euphemistic. But quick as they’ve gathered, the storm clouds pass: two pages and a few schnupfs of cocaine later, the characters have moved on to psychic smuggling rings and swing tunes, and Praediger has presented Hicks with a new Walther PPK (aka James Bond’s gun, fresh off its ’31 debut). We’re back in pulp fiction wonderland, in other words, the fleeting apocalyptic allusions having been yoinked offstage by a vaudeville hook from the wings.

Such moments flow freely through the endearingly weird Shadow Ticket, which doesn’t so much reprise the 88-year-old Pynchon’s longstanding writerly proclivities as condense them, squishing a lifetime’s worth of narrative moves into his lowest pagecount since The Crying of Lot 49. Maybe you know the drill: metahistorical intrigue and antiauthoritarian politics; several deep benches’ worth of quirky characters toting loudly emblematic affectations and not-strictly-probable names; song-and-dance numbers with rhythmically typeset lyrics and toy instrument arrangements, plus screwball wordplay and cartoon pratfalls and gags, gags, gags. Shadow Ticket hits each beat, surfacing the dependable tropes of its settings (Prohibition-era Milwaukee, interwar Budapest, and the densely folkloric borderlands of Eastern Europe) and marshaling them into a grand pastiche that any Pynchhead in good standing will find happily familiar.

For my money, though, the book is most interesting for those aforementioned moments of tonal whiplash, scenes wherein big shifts of register or reference point are undertaken with remarkably little in the way of narrative scaffolding. Shadow Ticket, in addition to being extremely fun and almost indecently readable, is also replete with edges left conspicuously unsanded, a combination that might go some way toward frustrating or at least reframing the prevailing misconception of Pynchon as a willfully difficult, high-maximalist, paranoid outsider-recluse. It’s a reputation that has obscured a clear view of the author’s work in one form or another for the entirety of a long career, alternately burnishing the image of an enigmatic hipster sage or offering up a strawman for the excesses and overreaches of the showoff tradition he supposedly epitomizes. It’s made the name “Thomas Pynchon” into a byword for inaccessible genius, the Trystero horn into an enduring stall-wall Sharpie tag, and Gravity’s Rainbow into a punchline on The O.C., but, meanwhile, the, you know, actual books? Those have drifted considerably from these mythic calcifications, gradually resolving into a scope and style more characterized by shaggy plotting, political generosity, and out-and-out sweetness than anything resembling the lit-bro hazing rituals that some contemporary readers have been conditioned to expect. While this divergence isn’t new—to my ear the texts started Watusi-ing decisively away from the legend sometime around the publication of Vineland (1990)—it’s taken the most recent novels to really drive the point home. Through Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006) and, especially, in the detective trilogy of Inherent Vice (2009), Bleeding Edge (2013), and now Shadow Ticket, Pynchon has relaxed into a late style that, beyond its superficial accessibility and in spite if not because of more than a few imperfections and clunkers, is clarifying on the level of mission. In the ease with which he wields genre and technique to make good on the countervailing populisms he’s been expressing for decades, the Pynchon of Shadow Ticket—inviting, avuncular, and confidently economical, though no less footloose—has much to teach us about what the larger project has always been. Cue the kazoos.

For the rest of the essay, softshoe on over to the n+1 site. While you’re there, donate, take their world-famous Bookmatch quiz, and subscribe to the magazine.

.------..------..------.
|S.--. ||U.--. ||B.--. |
| :/\: || (\/) || :(): |
| :\/: || :\/: || ()() |
| ‘--’S|| ‘--’U|| ‘--’B|
`------’`------’`------’
.------..------..------.
|S.--. ||C.--. ||R.--. |
| :/\: || :/\: || :(): |
| :\/: || :\/: || ()() |
| ‘--’S|| ‘--’C|| ‘--’R|
`------’`------’`------’
.------..------..------.
|I.--. ||B.--. ||E.--. |
| (\/) || :(): || (\/) |
| :\/: || ()() || :\/: |
| ‘--’I|| ‘--’B|| ‘--’E|
`------’`------’`------’

⊳ I have a piece in the sixth issue of The Whitney Review, which launches this week at two NY-area events--Wednesday 11/12 at Surrender Dorothy, and Saturday 11/15 at Performa Hub. Something to think about if you’re in New York and, as the hep people once (weirdly) said, “you want to fall by.”

But OK, the main event:

Alex Moskos has been using cubist agglomerations in guitar and electronics to craft whip-smart noiser missives from the wilds of Montréal for nigh on 25 years now: under the mostly-solo Drainolith guise and as a member of AIDS Wolf, The Unireverse, Dan’l Boone, SEF III, and many other deservedly beloved combos. I first got to know him when he toured the States and played Hampshire College in 2011, but I’d already encountered his work on multiple fronts during previous stints in Montréal (when I’d guest-hosted the experimental music show he created for CKUT, or hung around events at AIDS Wolf’s practice space, or just logged time as a mega-fan of that truly great band).

Still, nothing in the prior program logs could have predicted the singular Drainolith vibe: the slow demi-melodic lines and skronky free-jazz spasms, the laconic spoken-word vocals bisected by harsh instrumental passages, the feeling of drifting to sleep amid involuntary muscle jerks. It’s a zone that’s now tappable across a decade-and-a-half’s worth of great releases--the first two LPs, Fighting! and Hysteria, the 2020 cassette Electric Hearse and, most recently, the new full-length, Macbeth. It’s also a sound which has, to my lasting astonishment, been accompanied by an increasingly rigorous sociopolitical dimension, focused largely on the postindustrial shifts underway in urban Montréal. Which is just to say that, while there are lots of great musicians making important sonic discoveries right now, none of them also have a song whose lyrics provide as good an analysis of the artist → gentrifier bind as Electric Hearse’s “How to Wreck a Nice Neighborhood”:

How to wreck a nice neighborhood:

First, move in with a crew.

Soon, the bigger interests will move in too.

That’s all you gotta do.

Just, like, c’mon. It actually doesn’t get any better.

At any rate, I talked to Alex last month about the new record, the polyvalent currents of Montréal’s undergrounds, the 2008 “noise crash,” and his characteristically sick YouTube channel/archival reissue label.

C’est parti.

What’s up dude? Thanks for doing this interview.

Thanks for asking. No one has asked me to do something like this in a long time. Are you still in New York, or where are you at?

Yeah, I’m in New York. I feel like I’m just here, like that’s kind of it. What about you? Last time I saw you, you had moved, you weren’t in Saint-Henri. But I can’t remember where you’re at now.

I’m in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Kind of, like, the same distance from downtown that Saint-Henri is, but to the east instead of the west. It’s very awesome. It’s kind of its own little world: it’s enormous compared to most neighborhoods, and is a traditionally working class French community. It used to be the one of the many industrial parts of the city, and it still is, the further east you get, where it’s also right up against the actual functional port of Montréal, so that brings a certain dynamic as well. It’s great. But it’s also very, it’s very French Canadian, so you kinda just gotta rock it in French.

It feels fitting to start off talking about this neighborhood stuff, because among many other very memorable threads in your work, one that I have really hooked into is sort of exploration of the concept of the neighborhood; there’s often this sadness or ambivalence in your tunes about Montréal, and specifically about the city changing. Sometimes there’s even a more explicit kind of mea culpa relating to your role in that recent gentrification. On the new record, there’s a lot of Saint-Henri talk, but I’m also thinking of your song “How to Wreck a Nice Neighborhood,” from Electric Hearse. I saw you do a version of it back in 2019, and I honestly think about it all the time; it’s such a great encapsulation of a really complicated dynamic having to do with underground culture and gentrification, and then the fact that it also leverages this kind of foundational lore of electronic music, the “How to Recognize Speech”/”How to Wreck a Nice Beach” vocoder lore... It feels really crucial that it acknowledges, on the one hand, that experimental art is meaningful--that this shit is the stuff of our lives--but that, on the other hand, it is also very much an engine for our neighborhoods changing, often in really bleak ways.

You’re definitely right about it being a thread in my work, often to the point of it being kind of obnoxious; like, sometimes I feel like a one-trick-pony. But it’s something that I’m obsessed with, and in an alternate universe, I maybe would have gone and studied urbanism or urban planning or something. But I also am a big city person, I always have been. And I think Montréal is unique, in a way—Québec in general and Montréal in particular—because it was kind of late to the party with neoliberalism, and late on a lot of the developments that had already happened in a lot of other places in Canada, like Toronto and Vancouver. I arrived here around the time that the old Montréal was dying and the new Montréal was being born. It happened very quickly in Saint-Henri; in some cases, it felt like it happened overnight. I was ‘renovicted,’ as we call it here in Montréal, and it was a pretty extreme departure: I’d been in Saint-Henri for almost 15 years, and had completely fallen in love with it, and then we just had to leave on extremely short notice, and they started destroying the building that we were living in around us.

But then we also were seeing how gentrification differently impacts various social strata: working people’s lives are really negatively affected by it; and then at the top end, the land developers are making a ton of money; and then artists are kind of in the middle, feeling guilty about it but also loving the neighborhood. Just a very strange experience. Yeah, I wrote a lot about that—because I was feeling it, but also because I was obsessed with the neighborhood and obsessed with the history of Montréal. Since taking a long break from being super active musically, I’ve kind of taken up a new hobby, which is being an amateur historian. I love reading the history of the city, especially because it’s history where you can leave your house, and go across town, and see the corner that you’re reading about. I also got really into the history of biker gangs in the city, which led to a whole bunch of different things. There’s “No Name (Dany Kane’s Blues),” which is a song everyone really reacted positively to, and which is based on a bunch of pulpy drugstore true crime books that were written about Montréal in the ’90s.

Yeah, I remember feeling very undereducated in this topic, but it was definitely a feature of Montréal lore: the Hell’s Angels, the gang wars and firebombings and all that kind of stuff.

Hell’s Witness is a really good book about it. But yeah, part of it was also just being traumatized by the news as a kid, even in Ottawa, where I grew up. People don’t really understand that the Hell’s Angels waged a war using what we now call IEDs, which they were triggering with cell phones, back when no one even knew what a fucking cell phone was. They were really technologically advanced. And they were killing police officers, correctional officers, just waging this war against the justice system. For sleepy little Canada, where there’s not a big history of active, organized violence, a lot of crazy shit happened: there was the uprising in Oka, Québec came within a hair of separating from the country… like, the ’90s was insane here.

You mentioned growing up in Ottawa. I’ve been there, but I don’t know much at all about what it was like. What sort of sense did you have, when you were there as a kid, of these historical trends, or about counterculture more broadly?

Ottawa is interesting—a boring but beautiful place. Very conservative. It’s like DC, so everyone’s parents are bureaucrats. I grew up in a pretty suburban area, but by the time I was a teenager in the ’90s, Ottawa had a great punk scene. There was a band called Shotmaker, a post-hardcore band that went on to be on Troubleman Records, and I met a lot of great musicians when I was a teenager who I’m still friends with. My friend Michael Caffrey was in a band called the Beautifuzz Soundsystem, which was, like, an improvised hardware electronics band that was super psychedelic, super fucking far out. They made one record that was hugely inspirational for me and my buddies. And Chloe Lum, from AIDS Wolf, who I met in Ottawa as a teenager. So, yeah—I made friends for life there, but no one stays in Ottawa. Everyone either moves to Toronto or to Montréal.

When did you come to Montréal?

1999. I went to York University in Toronto for one year, but then for various reasons ended up in Montréal, mostly because my girlfriend at the time went to university at McGill and I kind of followed her. A couple of my buddies already lived here, and I just decided that I wanted to study communications at Concordia.

OK, got it. And I know you were doing a ton of stuff, but I knew the Unireverse a tiny bit when I got to Montréal. I think you guys were winding down by the time I showed up in 2007, but I remember, like, playing your record when I filled in on CKUT and stuff.

I think that was about the end of it. We were still gigging, but not as much. Michael Caffrey, who I was talking about, was in the Unireverse. And he still lived in Ottawa, where we traveled a lot, actually. But yeah, Brian Damage and I started the Unireverse in 2000. Brian had been in a legendary Canadian industrial band called Phÿcus, and that band was really foundational for me. Brian and Michael were both much older than me, and had a lot of experience in music: those guys taught me how to make records, how to sync MIDI, how to open up a piece of gear and fix a jack, all kinds of stuff.

This feels like a common thread in the conversations I’ve been having: somebody will have learned a lot of the kind of foundational DIY skills from a musician-mentor from a previous generation, and as it gets passed on, it gets sort of increasingly built out. It’s really kind of, like, sweet.

No, it’s a really important thing. It’s an informal apprenticeship, you know? It’s like Amp Fiddler and J Dilla or something. If you go into a trade, you have to do that sort of thing, but music is informal; there’s no infrastructure provided in a formal way, so you just kind of do it.

The epic video for “Hatz,” from this year’s Macbeth.

When did you join AIDS Wolf?

2008. Pretty late in the game for AIDS Wolf. But they’d been around for long enough that there were so many connections. I was playing in a group called Thames with my friend Blake Hargreaves, and we were making more “traditional” noise, for lack of a better term—just improvised electronics—and Blake had been one of the founding members of AIDS Wolf. And then they had a number of guitar players, and in 2008, Andre Guerette, who was one of the original guys at the Electric Tractor DIY space, left the band to pursue a career as a booking agent. AIDS Wolf was looking for a guitarist, and I was looking for something more rigorous—like, I wanted to be in a band that played compositions that were the same every time. I wanted to get my guitar chops back up. And so, I got the gig.

“Rigorous” is the word; you guys played so much.

Oh my God, yeah. It was insane. I mean, I can’t even really believe it now. Six week tours, pre-GPS, you know, Rand McNally, driving away… just hugely influential on my life.

Is all that travel how you ended up getting a little bit more in the mix with some of the US scenes at the time, in Ohio and Michigan and all those places?

No, it was Blake Hargreaves who introduced me to all of that stuff. I’d kind of moved away from noise music and harsh music, and Blake introduced me to Mat Brinkman, Mouthus, Wolf Eyes, Nautical Almanac… so initially I was traveling down there with him and his bandmate in Dreamcatcher, Katherine Kline, and I just met everyone that way. And then in 2009, when I started doing Drainolith, I used a lot of those connections to just book gigs, and that’s how I met John Elliott from Emeralds and the Cleveland crew, and John Olson, whose house I’d play at in Lansing. But AIDS Wolf was interesting: we used a booking agent, and the booking agent was good for some stuff and not great for other stuff, so to make the tours work, we kind of used a mix of agent and DIY connections.

That was also such a volatile moment in time for this kind of music: it was post-Fort Thunder, post–Wolf Eyes on Sub Pop... and even though it was very much a situation where people were building their networks and their underground art practices and their “careers” on their own, it was also this small window of viability for noise and noise rock in, like, a slightly more “professional” sense. I think of it as a few years where you could maybe be in a band like that, and tour, and have it viably function as your job. Did it feel that way at all in AIDS Wolf, or was it already over?

Well, I came into AIDS Wolf at a really interesting and somewhat depressing moment. My first tour with AIDS Wolf was fall 2008, and it was right after the financial crash, which was followed by what we used to call the “noise crash.” There were a lot of upset bookers on those tours, because we were locked in on the old fees that had been representative of the pre-crash economy. We were also just seeing people hurting, out on the road in post-crash America, you know? Staying with a kid whose mom had just lost her home and had everything repossessed, stuff like that. It was just really bleak.

This definitely makes sense, and doesn’t seem incidental, in that in your work as Drainolith, there’s this kind of--not to put it too loftily--class analysis component to the music. How conscious was that, and how did it develop?

I don’t think I had the language to call it that at the time, but yeah, that’s there. I wouldn’t say it was unconscious, but I certainly wasn’t openly calling it a ‘class analysis.’ I was also making all of that music at the time when the contradictions were extremely exposed and heightened, and sort of unavoidable. I do buy into the idea of reportage, or just describing what you’re seeing as a basis for your art. Like a kind of street poetry—whether it’s Lou Reed, or old blues guys, or whoever—where the song, or the lyrics, or the poem is just like: “I’m walking down the street, and this is what I’m seeing.”

That certainly fits with the thing that I was initially super excited to talk to you about, which was your archival and reissue work via your channel/label Unknown Province, and the more direct engagement with DIY history that that represents.

Yeah. There’s a time machine element to it, you know? What the fuck is that video game where it’s, like, set in historically accurate Renaissance Italy or whatever?

Assassin’s Creed.

Yeah. Assassin’s Creed: Montréal 1990. That would be my game. But yeah, I’m not a real historian yet, but there’s something about following the archive and doing real archival work that fascinates me. I read a really amazing book called C’était du spectacle!, about sex workers in the Red Light District in Montréal in the ’50s and ’60s, a lot of them trans or transvestite performers. And the author, Viviane Namaste, used police records. She just got into the Montréal Police archive, and of course, these people were completely surveilled and dealt with by the police in all kinds of ways, so the material is all there.

It leaves traces in the straight world.

Yeah, and traces in the archive. You know, Québec was founded by the Jesuits, who are super obsessive documenters and archivers, and another part of that legacy is that Montréal is the so-called “Boston of Canada,” in terms of number of students and universities here per capita. There are really deep archives here because of all that, which really helps.

Yeah, and while there are obviously some major differences in way that underground or unofficial history works or gets recorded, that’s a lineage that has its own archives, right? With Unknown Province, for instance, you’re very explicitly drawing from actual physical detritus: tapes, art, posters, whatever. So even if there’s a shift to digitized material taking place, you’re still scraping the archive in a very real way when you highlight those releases.

There’s a book that I just read called Breaks in the Air, about the glory days of rap radio in New York City; I work in radio, so it was particularly interesting to me. The author, John Klaess, talks a lot about the lack of a formal archive, but the existence of an informal one, which was created by kids. The market that early rap radio was aimed at was kids, like nine to fifteen years old, which blew my mind. Those kids would stay up late, recording their radios, and apparently, there was a trick where you’d put the tape in the tape deck and put your hands on the controls, so that if you fell asleep, when the tape popped up at the end of side A, it would wake you up, and you’d flip the tape and keep recording. But anyway, this guy’s writing his academic book, on Duke University Press, but he’s like, “I’m relying heavily on YouTube,” you know? These tapes, they’re all there.

It seems like the format allows for these kinds of overlaps--this sorta grassroots or semi-grassroots sourcing, but then also a framing that’s potentially very thoughtful and context-heavy. With Unknown Province, for example, I don’t know how you guys develop your metadata and writeups, but they’re amazing. They’re not scholarly, necessarily, but they’re totally comprehensive.

Yeah, that is a really great project. I wish Félix and I had more time for that. I definitely want to give credit to my collaborator on that, Félix Morel, who’s a great old friend of mine, an amazing musician, and an amazing collage artist. Félix has been doing the brunt of the work on that, in terms of writing, and he does a really great job. He just interviews people, and we keep it to the facts. But there has to be a physical object, that’s one thing. We need to be able to hold on to something. People have been really good about sending us stuff or lending us copies if we don’t have them, and we try and do really nice scans of everything, which is why we encourage people to watch the videos in HD. It’s starting to paint this really interesting picture of a time.

Félix and I had always talked about running a record label, even at the time, in the early 2000s—like, “There’s so much going on in Montréal, and this stuff needs a central place.” In 2015, I was approached by Ted Lee and Byron Coley to do a sub-label of Feeding Tube that would do Canadian stuff—it was actually Byron who came up with the name “Unknown Province.” We’ve only done one record, but we’re about to do our second. And if some more of these things get a nice physical LP release down the line, that’s fine, but meanwhile Félix and I are just doing this on YouTube. It’s the most accessible platform—the joke was, like, “My mom knows how to use YouTube,” and sure enough, the first video we posted, Félix’s mom was one of the first commenters.

Fuck yeah.

The all-time classic “You Paid for It,” from Fighting!

To come back to Drainolith: what about the new record? I’m curious how it fits into this lineage of influences, and into the musical trajectory of the project as a whole.

I’d say I took a lot of risks on this record. Also, it took me ten years to make it, but then a lot of the work happened in a couple of months, because I wanted to get it out before I went on tour in the UK, which I did earlier this year, and I was forced to make a lot of aesthetic decisions in a very quick period of time. I really wanted it to be a double album. I have this very cheesy obsession with the first three Beastie Boys records and the first three Public Enemy records, and I’ve always thought of those series of records as being kind of perfect: they start off sparse, and then they both get into sampledelia in a really over the top way—which I kind of tried to do with Hysteria—and then the third ones, Check Your Head and Fear of a Black Planet, are these very expansive records, double LPs, postmodern masterpieces. And so I wanted this third record to be like that, but I had a lot of material that was like started and it kind of whittled down into what Macbeth is.

What about the title, and the specific Macbeth references, for instance in the “Weird Sisters Strange Intelligence” track?

It’s a ridiculous naming convention, but the Drainolith records are all named after British hard rock albums. Fighting! is named after a Thin Lizzy album. Hysteria is stolen from Def Leppard’s 1987 masterpiece (laughs).

Wow, I never knew this. OK, great.

And these records kind of provide templates, in a way. And I was looking for another one to inspire the third album, and I’ve been listening a lot to a band called Hell, who made a really hilarious and also awesome single called “Macbeth,” which has a beautiful little electro-acoustic, shitty dungeon synth kind of intro, with the backing chants of the witches… and I was like, “That could be great.” My father was a big Shakespeare guy, and he passed away in 2023. I had some very awkward conversations with him about Shakespeare on his deathbed and the record just got super suffused with a lot of things. The song that’s actually about Macbeth... it’s actually about battling graffiti writers in Montréal, and it very loosely touches on themes from the play—some of the bang-for-bang dramatic points, and the delirium, and fate—but there’s nothing too direct.

The record came about through working with a bunch of different people. My friend Jaime, who goes by the Collections Crew, moved back to Montréal, and he’s an incredibly talented drummer, producer, all-around great musician. He produced two of the tracks, which I never thought in a million years would happen. He did such an amazing job, and brought a vibe that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. “Hatz”, for example, the song with saxophone—I wasn’t like, “Yeah, let’s get a sax on here!” I just showed up one day, and Jaime was like, “Yeah, I brought in this guy to play sax—now there’s sax on the track.” (Laughs.) On “The Signifying Drift,” he brought in these archived radio recordings that are, like, superimposed overtop—radio broadcasts, about the “Disco Demolition Night” in Chicago, and a recording of a Mets game during the power outage in New York City, and then also a broadcast about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.

That song, “The Signifying Drift,” is a really old one, but I re-recorded it with Dom Alexander, who’s a close friend, and one of my favorite musicians. She has one of my favorite voices. Also Nate from Wolf Eyes, who was one of the producers on Hysteria—there’s a bunch of stuff that he and Olson and I were working on for a record that didn’t get used, so I used some of those tracks and put vocals on top of them, which was also not in the plan… There’s a track recorded by Viki Mettler aka Kee Avil, and that was with my friends Brian Seeger and Jon Shapiro—they had been part of the Canadian version of the live Draino band when I was touring Hysteria. In the States, I toured with Max Eilbacher and Duncan Moore, and I really wanted to get a recording of them.

Speaking of Max and Duncan, you also did the SEF III project with them: two records, and a tour, I think? It’s definitely one of my favorite things I’ve seen any of you guys do, and also those are my good friends, and so that collaboration is unavoidable in this conversation (laughs).

That collaboration started because I asked Max, “Are you interested in playing bass in a full-band version of Drainolith on this tour?” And he said yes, but we still needed to find a drummer. He was like, “My friend Duncan,” who I’d met when their old band Needle Gun played Montréal. So I went down to Baltimore to rehearse and we played a gig at their house, just improvising on some poems Duncan had. “Hey, that was great. Let’s do a record.” It happened very easily. I loved working with those guys, and I love that project, and it was a great project to get into the writing and to have fun with narrative.

Those records are so special. Even in our noise scene, this world that’s, like, self-consciously full of people doing “weird” shit, the SEF III project is weird in a real, embodied kind of way, a way that fucking delivers. I don’t know. It feels like an Intersystems record or something--just a total alien artifact.

I love Intersystems. I don’t know if I ever played it for Max and Duncan, but that’s a perfect reference point. I interviewed John Mills-Cockell, one of the main guys from that band, and he—I should really check in to see where he’s at with this, because this was pre-Covid, when I interviewed him—but we were talking about all his old analog projects from back in the day, and I was like, “So what’s up now?” And he was like, “Oh, I’m writing an opera about climate change, and it’s all set to EDM, because EDM is the global music.” And I was like, “OK, can’t wait to hear it, man!” I remember a close friend of mine came over and was like, “Dude, I brought this huge joint, let’s smoke it and listen to records.” And we got high, and I put on some Intersystems, and he was just absolutely mortified by the vibe (laughs). He was like, “I’ve got to go home, man.”

My heroes in SEF III, doing their thing in Baltimore, 2016.

 ______  ______  ______  ______  ______ 
| |__| || |__| || |__| || |__| || |__| |
|  ()  ||  ()  ||  ()  ||  ()  ||  ()  |
|______||______||______||______||______|
 ______    eeeee e   e eeeee     ______ 
| |__| |   8   “ 8   8 8   8    | |__| |
|  ()  |   8eeee 8e  8 8eee8e   |  ()  |
|______|      88 88  8 88   8   |______|
 ______    8ee88 88ee8 88eee8    ______ 
| |__| |                        | |__| |
|  ()  |                        |  ()  |
|______|   eeeee eeee eeeee     |______|
 ______    8   “ 8  8 8   8      ______ 
| |__| |   8eeee 8e   8eee8e    | |__| |
|  ()  |      88 88   88   8    |  ()  |
|______|   8ee88 88e8 88   8    |______|
 ______                          ______ 
| |__| |                        | |__| |
|  ()  |     e  eeeee  eeee     |  ()  |
|______|     8  8   8  8        |______|
 ______      8e 8eee8e 8eee      ______ 
| |__| |     88 88   8 88       | |__| |
|  ()  |     88 88eee8 88ee     |  ()  |
|______|                        |______|
 ______  ______  ______  ______  ______ 
| |__| || |__| || |__| || |__| || |__| |
|  ()  ||  ()  ||  ()  ||  ()  ||  ()  |
|______||______||______||______||______|

It was understood, in other words, that some irreducible connection existed between my parents’ place of birth and the bloody, semi-mythical Dracula/Vlad figure who featured on just about every representation of the country I encountered stateside. Later, I’d learn this was also true back in Romania, it was just way more complicated: there the real, repulsive Vlad had long been lionized as a national hero and Dracula tourism was, after a communist-era policy of suppression, now in fully privatized swing. And so, when I began working to get my head around some of the paradoxes and pathologies inherent in questions of national identity, the Dracula thing--locked in, as it were, by those childhood visits to ancestral Sunnyside--came increasingly to figure as a useful and rich object lesson.

Part of this identification was fueled by a precipitously growing appreciation for the work of Radu Jude, who is just the fucking best. Jude’s films are exceptionally well-attuned to what feel like some of Romania’s signal absurdities--its facile accommodations of historical trauma, its honed reflex for self-denigration, and its profound affinity with meaninglessness, woodshedded across many lifetimes spent making gallows-humor jokes under interchangeably ugly power structures. But for all the local specificity, it’s also impossible to watch a Jude joint and fail to clock the funniest gag of all: the brutal, stupid regime we see onscreen is, has always been, our own.

Last week, I had the absurdly good fortune to interview Jude for Screen Slate on the occasion of the release of his wondrous new film Dracula, which you’re hereby commanded to go see immediately. Part of my pitch for the piece was to cite this AI video of Ceaușescu hanging out with XXXTentacion--maybe my favorite internet video ever, and one which tells you something valuable about the type of movie this Dracula turns out to be. At any rate, the conversation with Jude was really delightful and I urge you to read it over at Screen Slate.

Below, meanwhile, please find an extended version of the interview’s introduction, which doubles as a writeup on the film. Vă mulțumesc.

At Sammy’s Roumanian, 1993. That’s me stressing in the right foreground.

In 2001, just over a decade into Romania’s post-communist rebrand, the country’s nominally Social Democratic regime announced plans for a Dracula-themed amusement park in Sighișoara, the Transylvanian hometown of Vlad Țepeș—15th-century warlord of the principality of Wallachia, brutal “impaler” of regional renown, and purported basis for Bram Stoker’s fictional count. The project (which was roundly condemned in Romania for, among other reasons, linking the country’s ostensibly noble warrior past to an invented character seen by many as a national embarrassment) soon became mired in financial scandal and was abandoned, but not before some 5,000 investment shares were shadily sold to the public on the basis of the backers’ fanciful projections, plus an almost spiteful assertion of pro-Romanian native right. After all, as Sighișoara’s mayor had been quoted as saying: “Everyone else makes money from Dracula. Why shouldn’t we?”

A bone-deep understanding of this national pathology (and the profound opportunities such inferiority complexes present to scammers and opportunists) underlies Radu Jude’s Dracula, a 170-minute fever dream of gleefully heretical takes on Romania’s best-known and least-sought celebrity export. Packaged, revue-style, as 14 fragments offering different variations on the vampiric theme, Jude’s second feature of 2025 (following the no less incisive, if way quieter Kontinental ’25) further dramatizes the complicated local conditions of its own creation via an intentionally crude frame story, in which a frustrated film director (Adonis Tanța) seeks to improve his own Dracula movie’s popular/international appeal by use of a bespoke but very janky AI system, voiced by Jude himself and named, naturally, Dr. AI JUDEX 0.0. And sure, the AI-as-vampire metaphor—besides just being irresistibly on point—is good for reliably provocative riffs on Romania’s mythohistorical rationalizations (a section in which a reincarnated Vlad stumbles into a Dracula historical tour), its self-conscious position as a source of globalized horror IP (Dracula gets a toothache, so he has to go see Dr. Caligari), even its current economic status as remote-gig labor pool for the West (Vlad and his robot enforcer run a video game company whose underpaid employees build up in-game achievements to sell to lazy Americans). Still, for the film’s many wacky digressions, the most potent application of Jude’s AI schtick is in the tech-mediated nationalisms that have come to dominate his country’s political life, not to mention—as if we need the reminder—our own.

Last year, Romania’s presidential election was annulled after its first round winner (the far-right nationalist Călin Georgescu, nicknamed “the TikTok Messiah” for his massive online following) was discovered to be the beneficiary of a coordinated social media influence campaign, one which allegedly used 25,000 bot accounts and countless fake videos to situate his frenzied antiglobalism in a rhetorical sinkhole of compensatory historical signifiers—chief among them, the hallowed image of a certain impaler. Indeed, Vlad Țepeș has become a kind of mascot for a new generation of banally illiberal yet tech-friendly Romanian nativists, to the extent that when Jude’s Dracula director asks his AI to imagine the medieval warlord’s TikTok account, the half-dopey, half-alarming result (a short face-to-camera vid of the actor Șerban Pavlu in Vlad cosplay, taking selfies and shrieking a jingoistic poem by Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s 19th-century poet laureate) has the feeling of several chickens coming home to roost. In its reminder of the durability of national myths and provincial grievances, and the object lesson it provides in the economic and technocratic forces that stand ready to parasitize them, Jude’s film does what the proposed “Dracula Park” could not: it commandeers an irreducibly Romanian story, leverages it for its own warped ends, and shows the world—however momentarily, however messily—what it’s actually about.

  .-’)               .-. .-’)  
 ( OO ).             \  ( OO ) 
(_)---\_) ,--. ,--.   ;-----.\ 
/    _ |  |  | |  |   | .-.  | 
\  :` `.  |  | | .-’) | ‘-’ /_)
 ‘..`’‘.) |  |_|( OO )| .-. `. 
.-._)   \ |  | | `-’ /| |  \  |
\       /(’  ‘-’(_.-’ | ‘--’  /
 `-----’   `-----’    `------’ 
  .-’)              _  .-’)    
 ( OO ).           ( \( -O )   
(_)---\_)   .-----. ,------.   
/    _ |   ‘  .--./ |   /`. ‘  
\  :` `.   |  |(’-. |  /  | |  
 ‘..`’‘.) /_) |OO  )|  |_.’ |  
.-._)   \ ||  |`-’| |  .  ‘.’  
\       /(_’  ‘--’\ |  |\  \   
 `-----’    `-----’ `--’ ‘--’  
        .-. .-’)    (’-.       
        \  ( OO ) _(  OO)      
  ,-.-’) ;-----.\(,------.     
  |  |OO)| .-.  | |  .---’     
  |  |  \| ‘-’ /_)|  |         
  |  |(_/| .-. `.(|  ‘--.      
 ,|  |_.’| |  \  ||  .--’      
(_|  |   | ‘--’  /|  `---.     
  `--’   `------’ `------’