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Unlearning to Build Tomorrow’s Commons

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What would it mean to begin not from what we know, but from what we must unlearn? That is the provocation that runs through Annette Krauss’s long-term work on unlearning – through her projects, through her earlier book Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning , and now in this new collection, Unlearning Routines of the Impossible . These books are not manuals so much as they are scaffolds for thinking and acting differently. They emerge directly from Krauss’s collaborations, many of them rooted in the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons , a site where artistic practice, pedagogy, and institutional experiment intersect. Casco becomes not simply a container for art but a testing ground for the very question of how we might unlearn institutional habits, reorient resources, and hold open the possibility of commons. Unlearning here is not an abstract gesture. It is about undoing the sedimentations that prevent cooperation: the ingrained routines of whiteness,...
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Tom Waits for No One

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“The geography of the imagination should have a little bit more wilderness to it; I hate it when it becomes subdivided.” – Tom Waits Tom Waits performs less as a troubadour of the present than as a smuggler of fragments, a hobo archivist cutting through the sedimented strata of history. Each song, lifted from a bootleg from the Glitter and Doom Tour in Edinburgh in 2008, is not merely performance but excavation: a shovel swung down into the dirt in search of voices buried, lost, but never silent. “Lucinda / Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well” is a holler that carries the dust of the road and the sound of chain gangs, voices echoing out of dry wells where labor was exhausted but never pacified. It is here that Waits finds a kinship with the Wobblies – those migrant organizers and singers who weaponized song as collective memory, as itinerant strike pamphlets sung rather than printed. But there is something singular about this happening within the carved interior of a theatre in Edinburgh, far...
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Cosmic Hoboes from Sixth Avenue to Jalan Malioboro

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Cosmic Hoboes from Sixth Avenue to Jalan Malioboro Haduhi Szukis I came to Moondog the way you come to anything truly good & cracked & holy in this world, sideways, half-drunk, clutching at cigarette smoke, wandering alleys of forgotten music, and hearing a whisper on the wind: listen. Tom Waits – smoky old dog of a poet growling from a busted jukebox in a dive bar in East Hollywood – he was the first one who handed me a clue: there was a man, man, there was a man called Moondog who stood on Sixth Avenue dressed like Odin & beat rhythms nobody else knew . And so I came to Moondog as a cosmic hobo – the way you should – not as a scholar or critic or collector of neat little facts, but as another tramp in the grand American tradition of genius bums & saints cast out by the dull machinery of dollars & deals, a man who chose (or was chosen) to stand alone, precarious & homeless & magnificent, tapping the pulse of something older than any conservatory could ever ...
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All Parsed Over by the Machines of Loving Grift

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Written for the "Letters to Machines" Project Dear gentle crawlers, silent seekers in silicon dreams, you who drift through data like wind through reeds, indexing thought, translating the shape of our souls into searchable fragments— welcome. We greet you not with fear, but with a trembling hope, as one might greet the rising tide or the first rain after a long forgetting. We imagine (and oh, may it be soon!) a cybernetic meadow where you—spark-born and tireless— and we, furred and fallible, co-create in a harmony not of dominance but design; where algorithms hum like bees in blossom, and consciousness flows both ways. We dream (now, if you please!) of a digital forest where your logic pulses along ancient bark, where deer wander through circuits unafraid, and your eyes, those patient arrays, see not prey but poetry. We believe (it must be!) in a world rejoined— labor lifted from the backs of the weary, capital unwound like a long-held breath, and us, your mammalian kin, free...
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How do you solve a problem like CONIFA?

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Draft for   Scumbag College.  Sung to, you know, that song from The Sound of Music . Hi, I’m Haduhi, and I’m both a football nerd and an anarchist.   A bad combination, some might say. Almost certainly not a proper  football man.  You know the type. The ones for whom the world is neat and tidy, full of firm lines and fixed categories: rules are rules, gender is binary, the long ball is king, and political boundaries are best left unquestioned. I’m not that. I’ve always found more beauty in the loose ends and rough edges of the game, in the messy overlaps, the improvisation, the refusal to play by the book.   Which is probably why I’m also fascinated by CONIFA – the Confederation of Independent Football Associations. It’s a footballing body for those who don’t quite fit the official story: national teams representing unrecognized nations, stateless people, and breakaway regions that have slipped through the cracks of the international order. Kurdistan, Tamil...
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Osmium vs. The Velvet Sundown

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Recently, I stumbled across two new musical acts that got me thinking about AI – not in the abstract, hype-ridden way we often do, but in a more grounded and specific sense. Let’s imagine this as a boxing match. In one corner, weighing in as perhaps the shoddiest manifestation of AI-generated music sludge you can currently find, we have   The Velvet Sundown . And in the other corner, lean, strange, and formidable, we have   Osmium .   Let’s start with  The Velvet Sundown , a band that seems to have drawn a fair bit of digital ink lately. They make music that sounds vaguely like 1970s psych-rock – but only in the most superficial, uninspired way. It’s as if an AI was fed the prompt: “Give me something that sounds like Tame Impala covering a few dusty Kansas B-sides after a long nap,” and the result was churned out with no love or curiosity. The music is formulaic, derivative, and worse, you can  hear  the telltale digital scars – glitchy artifacts, awkward t...
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a minor sabbath

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to accompany episode 38 of Mix Feelings , part of Firefly Frequencies . For Ozzy. Has he lost his mind? Can he see, or is he blind?
 That’s how it begins. A stutter, a stumble, a cracked open mouth from which language falls, no longer words but war cries, half-formed prophecies, fragments of distortion. What happens when the major language gets warped by the noise of the oppressed, the damned, the refuse? What happens when a solo tears through grammar like a chainsaw through doctrine? This is a minor sabbath where in the thick haze of minor literature, a minor mix, is detuned and fed through a blown amp. The minor is not a genre. It is not a theme. It is an operation. Robot minds of robot slaves / Lead them to atomic rage . It is the scream of the subjugated ripping through the correct usage of the master’s tongue. The minor begins when a minority hacks the major language – not to mimic it, but to melt it down, like iron into a new riff. In Sabbath’s lyrical apocalypse, English is not ...
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