The Agony of Eros was my first encounter with Han's philosophy, and I was especially struck by his argument that, despite being a trendy thing to say at dinner parties, capitalism is very much not a religion.
Every religion operates with both debt (guilt) and relief (pardon). But capitalism only works with debt and default. It offers no possibility for atonement, which would free the debtor from liability. The impossibility of mitigation and atonement also accounts for the achievement-subject's depression. Together with burnout, depression represent an unredeemable failure of ability—that is, it amounts to psychic insolvency.
Thank you, Marty, for introducing me to Han. And thank you, kind stranger who wedged my copy of this book into concrete so I could retrieve it after discovering it fell out of my pocket on an incredibly windy day.
Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird begins as an austere fable in the vein of Woman in the Dunes or Never Let Me Go before it unfurls into a uniquely strange creature. Centuries pass. New modes of consciousness emerge.
“My brothers, my father, my mother—they all wanted to be understood. But as soon as I truly understood them, they started to hate me for it. To them, being known was the same as being controlled.”
Better than any thinkpiece about the future, Kawakami conjures the horror and wonder of our species giving way to another as a genuinely felt experience that left me shaken. She might be writing from the year 9000 and telling us the news.
In January of 1995, I snuck out alone to St. Andrew’s Hall, where the militant thump of Phylyps Trak II drew me upstairs to the dark third floor. Club kids in overalls, drag queens in chartreuse wigs, a man in a three-piece suit—all lock-stepping in a grid, heads bowed before the bassbin like an altar, which I soon l discovered it was.
A fine-grained collision between existential anxiety and end-game capitalism—and a masterclass in dialogue. The first three minutes might be my favorite opening scene in cinema: cosmic horror soundtracks the ultramundane. More.
I fall asleep to an episode every night at 75% speed. The first hour or so is always delightful: This place is nice. Let's start a society. But wake up a few hours later for a sleepy pee, and everything's gone to hell. Usually because of the Assyrians.
Start with Carthage, but be warned: it’s a heartbreak.
Madeline Johnston’s voice sounds like it’s fighting its way through the static on a radio in the kitchen of a different decade. This is beautiful vapor, the afterimage of a flashbulb popping off after the encore of a band that littered the stage with only the finest reverb pedals.
Published in 1962, Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes offers a single image: a man trapped in a sandpit with a mysterious woman. Their survival depends upon shoveling the accumulating sand each night, a metaphor for the hard labor of existence. Does shoveling an endless pit of sand make him any less free than his former life of paperwork and obligations?
He contemplates the mind’s craving for routine: “It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.” But what else is there? This question becomes difficult to answer as he ponders the woman’s acceptance of their strange fate. Shoveling, she says, gives her life as much meaning as any other activity. Meanwhile, villagers peer into the pit to ensure his compliance. “More than iron doors, more than walls,” Abe writes, “it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.”
Abe's fable reads like an epitaph for the digital age: “Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion. And so one bit one’s nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one’s heart…one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one’s brain…one had the shakes, unable to find satisfaction in sex alone.”
This story has seeped into my dreams, grinding at my thoughts like sand in the teeth.
Because I don't drink stale water. Fact: the Topo Chico that comes in clear glass bottles tastes better than the green-tinted bottles. And don't even talk to me about plastic or metal.
Joan Pope’s music is hypnotic, even compulsive, and sounds like an incantation that threatens to summon something ominous, which might help us prepare for the days ahead.
Lately I find myself asking, “What’s the most comforting thing I know?” Last night I remembered the Electrifying Mojo.
His voice rumbled through Detroit’s airwaves from the 1970s into the 1990s as he announced b-sides from Parliament, Kraftwerk, Devo, and Cybotron, priming the pump for today’s music. He is a man without biographical detail but his fingerprints are everywhere. He is a concept that requires a definite article: The.
The Electrifying Mojo is a ghost, never photographed yet his spirit runs through almost everything we hear. Each night, he opened his show with a question: Will the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise?
And the theme from Star Wars would play.
I want you to show some solidarity tonight. If you’re in your car, flash your lights. If you’re sitting on the porch, blink your porch light. And if you’re in bed, then dance on your back. In Technicolor.
He was the first deejay to put Prince on the air. He rocked a twenty-minute version of “Flashlight.” He interrupted songs with social commentary from his “mental machine.” I stayed awake into the small hours with my hear cupped to the speaker, hunched over my cassette player and riding the pause/record buttons to make mixtapes culled from his show.
120-minute Maxell cassettes were best for this.
Every night he signed off with the same message, delivered in a baritone with a grin around the edges.
Whenever you feel like you’re nearing the end of your rope, don’t slide off. Tie a knot. Keep hanging. Keep remembering that ain’t nobody bad like you.
I was fourteen years old.
When I got my driver’s license, I would sneak out and drive down Woodward Avenue into the city.
If you’re in your car...
A white Cadillac in the opposite lane flashed its lights, and I did the same in my beat-to-shit Pontiac. Two strangers responding to a voice on the radio, drawing the city into a brotherhood of sound and light.
One of the formative songs that the Electrifying Mojo played. Forty years later, you can still see the steam rising from the street. Read more about Mojo here and you can hear his voice here.
Walking past the television to get a banana, I hear an expert say, “The worst is yet to come.” So many years of institutional rot are catching up to us. People make comparisons to Rome.
I remember gazing up at the oculus while families and lovers whipped me around as they snapped self-portraits. Soon I was dizzy and stupid because I could not comprehend how such a thing was constructed two thousand years ago. Such a place might never be created again. We no longer build to humble our pride.
