Nihilist Optimism

The first time I met Tomislav he was running a stall in the Brick Lane Sunday market stocked full of Balkan gypsy music and art and political theory books. Instantly I could sense that this was no ordinary marketplace operation – and that it posed a grave danger to attempts to limit my budget for acquiring new books and music. Who was this strange man and how had he managed to bring together such a combination of ideas, arts, and cultures into the format of a market stall? And what was he trying to accomplish, since despite the alleged love of hipsters and the creative class for all that is new, unique, or exotic, it hardly seemed that the artistic workers of the Brick Lane market were making off with anything like a livable amount of sales?   Immediately I could tell that Tomislav’s practice was much more about hawking ideas, histories, myths, and stories – woven fragments in a world that seemed yet to awake – more so then anything close to a typical commercial operation. He ...

Recently I interviewed legendary free jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee  at Café Oto  for the first issue of Cesura // Acceso . McPhee has been recording and performing for over forty-five years, playing both as a solo artist and in an impressive number of collaborative units including Peter Brötzmann’s Tentet and The Thing. In particular I wanted to ask him about his approach to collaboration and the politics of music and improvisation. Here are some excerpts from that interview Survival Unit III @ Cafe Oto … § HS: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is collaboration. How do you approach collaboration, not just in terms of particular projects, but in the way projects affect your approach to music more generally? HS: I really like a lot of what different people do, people whose music I really appreciate. But collaboration, it starts with a real personal kind of relationship. For example I’ve played for long time with a guitarist in France, Raymond Boni. I ...

The worst of Italy! Not just merely slightly disreputable, but truly the worst of Italy… These words are, of course, not mine. They were spoken by the Italian Minister of Public Administration on July 14, 2011 at a “Young Innovators” convention during which he was asked some questions about precarious workers, questions that apparently rubbed him the wrong way. This really struck me when I read it at the beginning of Alice Mattoni’s excellent book Media Practices and Protest Politics: How Precarious Workers Mobilise in which she examines a number of recent mobilizations of precarious workers. Mattoni does a quite good job mapping out the various dynamics shaping movements like the Euro MayDay, campaigns of direct action against austerity measures, protests against university reforms, labor organizing in call centres, and spectacular media actions staged to highlight precarity in the fashion industry. Mattoni draws from communication and media studies to come up with a us...

Recently I’ve gotten back to reading through The Worker Photography Movement (1926–1939): Essays and Documents , which is the publication that accompanied the exhibition “A Hard, Merciless Light” held by Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2011. It’s one of those rare moments where actually having too much information presented about a really interesting topic actually makes it harder to start, which is strange to say because the rise of the worker photographer movement until this point has been something that has been quite underexplored. But there is something about sitting down with 400+ page catalogue that is somewhat intimidating, at least if one was thinking of reading it anywhere else then sitting in your own living room. But I digress (and so quickly!). The overall emphasis here is charting the rise of worker photography as a movement in its multiple iterations and versions across Russia, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, the US, France, and Spain (during the Civil War). An...

These are some notes I made after attending a gathering of comrades discussing the thirtieth anniversary (or perhaps birthday) of the Midnight Notes Collective . In other words they are from 2008. This meeting led eventually to the Promissory Notes  pamphlet.  I’m posting them here not so much as a response to that but in the sense the overall point I was trying to make, that a greater comparative focus on class decomposition and the forms of political recomposition that are made possible by it, still strikes me as a compelling point. And it’s one that I’d like to revisit and expand in a more substantive. Or something like that anyways… First off let me apologize again for taking so long to write this, which is especially lame given as I wrote down these notes in June. Sigh… lame excuses aside, here we go: I have to admit being a bit surprised to encounter the framing of discussion at the gathering in June in terms of crisis theory, or more particularly the framing of ...

1. Zerowork Training? “One the problems,” Ben said, “is that while we’ve been quite good at celebrating the refusal of work, we never had anything like zerowork training.” When I heard this statement it struck me as quite strange, and not because of the context, which was odd enough in itself. My friend and comrade Ben made this during a meeting of the editorial collective for Autonomedia , a long running Brooklyn-based autonomist publisher. He said this in a context of discussing what he learned and experience in the everyday operations of publishing. More particularly Ben, after being involved with the project for a decade, had decided that it was time for him to move on. In other words this was the autonomist equivalent of an ‘exit meeting,’ a moment to declare his exit from a collective whose state goal was to exit from work as well, to “substruct the planetary work machine” in the words of p.m. When I heard this at first it seemed a bit amusing and absurd. What exactly wou...

or that's how I'm going to frame it... Feels a bit strange to finally be catching up with a technology curve a mere 15 years or so late... Nevertheless, got there eventually... anyways, bad jokes aside, will be using this space to post bits of writing in development, malformed ideas, and other ephemeral bits of text that I wish to make public... in many cases more for the function of making put some thoughts down into writing more regularly, but without necessarily expecting them to be fully worked out and polished. Or something like that... will see how it goes...