📡 – 2022-12-30
It’s not a very cool opinion, but one of my favorite artists is the late British sculptor Henry Moore. He’s most well known for his Reclining Figures – which are large, and cast in bronze:
Moore was, at one point, very famous and one of the best paid artists in the world. He might have been a Damien Hirst, or Anish Kapoor of his time: someone who, even if you weren’t interested in the arts, you might hear about occasionally.
His work was popular, and he was able to fulfill large scale commissions quickly, so he became sought after for public works and interventions expected to be impressive. Serra, but with less dick-swinging. As such, there is no shortage of Moore’s work around. That’s part of the fun: more than once have I unexpectedly stumbled upon a sculpture of his; it’s not unlike running into a friend.
Moore’s forms are usually abstractions of a vaguely-female figure, in repose. They’re somewhere between a human body, an alien carapace, and a rolling landscape. They are easily identifiable, and strike – I think – a meaningful balance between calm and threatening, ease and rigidity. They’re contorted, but content.
The thing I think most about Henry Moore is his focus. You can always (or, almost always) tell a Moore. Of course, he’s in good company here. You can always tell an Agnes Martin, a Cy Twombly, a Philip Glass, a Zaha Hadid. I think what I’m reacting to is a perceived “distance” between each of Moore’s sculptures. They feel close to one another, as though one acts as a starting point for another, like each is pinched, pulled, blurred and smoothed into the next. The catalog of Moore sculptures animates in my mind … they morph and deform into one another. They seem connected, but without lineage or narrative (which feels precious, honestly, these days).
This is a thought I’m trying to bring with me into 2023: a morphing kind of ‘connection without lineage’, a focus capable of being deformed without transforming into something fundamentally different. I think frequently (maybe too much) about what a “body of work” looks like for people doing (1) creative labor (2) on the internet (3) now. As in so many other aspects, we don’t have the luxuries of past generations; “focus” looks different. We are pinched, pulled, blurred and smoothed. We shape-shift from one distribution network to the next, attempting to retain our form and the forms of our work between posts and platforms and publishers. Each network is a new opportunity to remake the self, re-tailor the work, bend and shift one’s figure. The goal, then, is to do so with focus, and without transforming into something fundamentally different. To be contorted, perhaps… but content.
Anyway. Here’s some stuff I liked. I don’t generally do Last Year Roundups, but I did just restart this newsletter after some time off – so I’m straddling a line with this 📡
What follows is an unordered heap of things I liked from the last 02 weeks, and the last 52 weeks. If something here is on the older side, it means it stuck with me for one reason or another.
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I think about this release constantly. Every moment on this reissue set is incredible. Out earlier this year, the collected Xenakis Electroacoustic Works were remastered by Rashad Becker (an amazing electroacoustic composer in his own right) for Karl Records and brought to a state of remarkable clarity, and impact. I am biased (I studied at Xenakis’ studio in Paris) but I think this is one of the best releases of the year, and I feel good about it being a heavy hitter for the decade.
Every Lucretia Dalt record is amazing, this one doubly so. I wasn’t sure what to expect when she said she was working on a bolero record, but this delivers across the board. Geological puns about love and deep time in Spanish? Yes puhleeeeeease. An all-timer.
Church Andrews (solo, and with Matt Davies) has made some of my favorite … uhhh … techno? jazz? jazz-techno? of the last few years. I grab every one of these releases the moment they’re up. Great work music, great driving music, great music. Check out this release, and everything else on their bc.
Wild, moody gamelan-electronics from Jakarta. One of my most listened-to records of 2022. Should be on more end-of-years lists than it is, imo.
Limen is where things start to get loud. I’ll let the rest of these speak for themselves.
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Books
Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
David Graeber, David Wengrow
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power
By Larisa Kingston Mann
In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Larisa Kingston Mann—DJ, media law expert, and ethnographer—identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. In street dances, recording sessions, and global genres such as the riddim, notions of originality include reliance on shared knowledge and authorship as an interactive practice. In this context, musicians, music producers, and audiences are often resistant to conventional copyright practices. And this resistance, Mann shows, goes beyond cultural concerns.
Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor
by Kim Kelly
Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.
Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice
by Mark Fell
An amalgam of workbook and manifesto, featuring a collection of interleaved statements, diagrammatic scores, and instructional texts, Structure and Synthesis is a direct engagement with Fell's original thinking and his continual provocations in regard to "experimental" music. Alongside reflections on theory and practice, the volume includes exercises for dismantling musical expertise, habits, and intuitions, documenting Fell's explorations of the peripheries of rhythm, shape, and time in perception and performance.
Articles / Posts / Papers
How Private Equity Gave Rise to a New Power Elite
How Private Equity Gave Rise to a New Power Elite - In These Times
The dominance of predatory financial firms has allowed a class of super-rich investors to exert vast control over our economic and political lives.
In broad strokes, a PE fund is an unregulated pool of money operating outside of public markets that elite investors buy into. Given the size of the initial outlay, those investors tend to be classified as “high net worth” or are institutional investors, such as universities, insurance companies or pension funds. Enabled by low interest rates and a politically friendly climate, the pooled funds are used to invest in or buy a target company — toy stores, newspapers, hospitals, pretty much anything under the sun — and then load it up with debt (as much as 90% of the sticker price) to finance the purchase. The borrowed money is, theoretically, used as working capital to restructure the company and “unlock” its value, while paying large dividends and funneling profits back to investors. Then, the idea is, they sell the company at a profit.
The Automation Myth – Robots won’t build the classless society
The Automation Myth | Clinton Williamson
To what degree can we blame automation for deindustrialization and class decomposition?
Three more recent works of economic analysis provide a much-needed critical lens on the future of work, each arguing that not only is an impending future of laborlessness unlikely to arrive but also that the promise of automation (always doubling as a thinly veiled threat to workers) has been used to paper over the larger structural fault lines of a festering global regime of capital accumulation. Taken collectively, they portray a world economic system in long-term crisis and a global labor force increasingly stuck in low-wage service work while living under austerity regimes that have stripped both labor protections and social services to shreds. Automation’s acolytes often suggest that the hour of drudgery’s end is nigh, that a techno-utopian abundance, a land of milk and honey, is just around the corner if only we can have faith in technology’s promises just a little bit longer. Contrary to this assertion, these authors demonstrate that the work we do is in fact changing, just not in the ways we have so often been palliatively foretold by the carnival barkers of automation.
The “Just Say No to Drugs” Campaign Had Its Roots in Anti-Communist Propaganda
The “Just Say No to Drugs” Campaign Had Its Roots in Anti-Communist Propaganda
The “Just Say No” campaign is remembered today for the huge quantity of kitsch media it produced, like McGruff the Crime Dog. But the campaign was based on the psychological warfare techniques of the Cold War.
The Just Say No campaign was designed thanks to a public relations/mass psychology approach known as inoculation theory. Inoculation theory originated in the aftermath of the Korean War, when US defense officials and psychologists believed that American defectors to the Communist side of the conflict had been “brainwashed” by their Chinese captors. These widespread fears during the 1950s Red Scare — based on the premise that no “real” American could ever see the logic and reason of joining the Reds — led opinion makers and national security officials to look for a way to prevent “conversions” like these.
Platform drama: “Cancel culture,” celebrity, and the struggle for accountability on YouTube
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448221099235?journalCode=nmsaRecent years have witnessed debates about so-called “cancel culture” and more broadly about online accountability practices. Here we revisit this topic through a study of YouTube “drama,” a hybrid genre where creators provide commentary on the scandals, scams, and feuds between YouTube celebrities. Drawing on cultural studies scholarship, and based on qualitative interviews and content analysis, we argue that YouTube drama embodies a range of cultural and moral negotiations that take place on social media platforms. We conceptualize accountability practices on YouTube as an ongoing “platform drama” in which creators engage in perpetual and highly visible power struggles with celebrities, audiences, legacy media, other creators, and YouTube itself. Within the context of this “platform drama,” structural issues and interpersonal conflicts become blurred, as do accountability practices and monetized spectacles. We analyze “cancelation” on YouTube as a ritualistic practice in which structural tensions are publicly negotiated and performed, even as accountability itself remains largely elusive.
‘Too good for this world:’ Keanu Reeves, God of the Internet
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19392397.2022.2063395This essay examines the memefication of Keanu Reeves in 21st century digital remix culture, exploring the cultural investment in an idea of him as being ‘too good for this world’. To reflect on how Reeves, in the middle-aged period of his stardom, has become a receptacle for good will and positive affect, the essay situates his internet stardom in relation to the rise of the ‘sad man’ meme. Exploring the networked affective processes through which Reeves' star persona has taken on recharged cultural significance, the essay argues that the surge of internet memes surrounding the actor work to articulate cultural anxieties and desires surrounding male stardom in a post-cinematic, #MeToo era. While the essay explores how the cultural adulation of Reeves wards off deep-seated concerns about male stardom as a central site for the reproduction of toxic masculinity, it concludes by sounding a cautionary note about the risks and limitations of such worship.
The Cumulative Discretion of Police over Community Complaints
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/719682Many policing practices that scholars have identified as deeply flawed are precisely those demanded in police-community meetings. How do initiatives intended for police reform become dominated by demands for more policing? I analyze 1.5 years of ethnographic data on the New York Police Department’s neighborhood policing meetings. Amid highly publicized police violence, America’s largest police force is curating the public’s complaints—not ignoring them—from constituents strategically cultivated through community initiatives. Whereas existing studies conceptualize complaints as grievance tools or liability risks, this case reveals how police conceive community complaints as endorsements of services. This conception guides “cumulative discretion” or selective decision-making across multiple stages: police mobilize, record, internalize, and represent complaints demanding police services, while excluding those seeking reforms to over- and unequal policing. Gaps thus persist between the reforms that some residents seek and the services that police offer. This article offers insights into how organizational imperatives for legitimacy can undermine institutional reforms.
The Lovelace effect: Perceptions of creativity in machines
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448221077278This article proposes the notion of the ‘Lovelace Effect’ as an analytical tool to identify situations in which the behaviour of computing systems is perceived by users as original and creative. It contrasts the Lovelace Effect with the more commonly known ‘Lovelace objection’, which claims that computers cannot originate or create anything, but only do what their programmers instruct them to do. By analysing the case study of AICAN – an AI art-generating system – we argue for the need for approaches in computational creativity to shift focus from what computers are able to do in ontological terms to the perceptions of human users who enter into interactions with them. The case study illuminates how the Lovelace effect can be facilitated through technical but also through representational means, such as the situations and cultural contexts in which users are invited to interact with the AI.
Note: If you would like to read a paper that is not open access, there are ways to acquire it. Authors will almost always email PDFs to people who ask, but there are other methods as well. Ask your pals in academia! Or each other, in the comments below.📹
If you pay close attention, you might recognize someone in this last one.
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I know, for a lot of people, 2022 was The Year of the Elden Ring and … by the numbers it was for me, too. I played a few hundred hours over a huge chunk of the year, and it will remain something of a pillar game for me … something that provides context to certain ideas about what videogames are, and should be. It is truly an accomplishment; a beautiful game and singular experience.
But my heart … my heart is with Dwarf Fortress. DF was already one of my post played games. I’m talking an embarrassing number of hours (second only, perhaps, to Brogue). I had mostly managed to stay away the last couple years, knowing my schedule could not sustain additional Fortress Management but … on Dec 6th, the Kitfox published version hit Steam, and on Dec 25th … I got a Steam Deck 😬 ⏳🕊
Folks, it runs beautifully, and looks 😘👌 – I am just going to leave it at that, saving you and me the embarrassment over my gushing about how much I love this game. I will simply say: if you’ve been interested in playing DF, and haven’t yet… the Steam version is much friendlier looking, and the new tutorials are great, taking you through so much of the early stages of getting a Fortress up and running.
🤓
Here’s some stuff I made this year:
Videos
Fun City
https://fun-city.simplecast.com/episodes/house-meetingFun City continues its corporate-intrigue narrative arc - now with the first 5 episodes newly remastered! The talent of the folks I work with on this show is out of this world; if you’re not listening to it, you’re missing out. And we’re currently taking a little break, so now is a perfect time to catch up! That link up there is for the first episode.
RIP Corp
We got out two episodes of RIP Corp this year, one about the West Virginia Mine War, and one about people who collect Dead Company Merch.