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Carnivorous “Death-Ball” Sponge to Assist in Addressing University Financial Crisis

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BREAKING NEWS! Carnivorous “Death-Ball” Sponge to Assist in Addressing University Financial Crisis In a bold demonstration of Essex’s legendary rule-breaking spirit, the University is delighted to announce a breakthrough in both oceanic science and HR innovation. Amid the ongoing financial crisis that has made traditional redundancies regrettably unaffordable, researchers have instead discovered a more cost-effective— and far more carnivorous — solution: a newly identified “death-ball” sponge. This compact, spherical organism, bristling with hooks and an admirable appetite, will be repurposed as part of our revised staffing strategy. Employees previously marked for redundancy will now be “absorbed” into the University’s structural transformation in a more literal sense. While most universities timidly rely on consultations and severance packages, Essex is once again ahead of the curve, pioneering symbiotic approaches to workforce reduction. The discovery team, led by Essex scientist Dr...
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Must We Be Slaves to Our Footballing Passions?

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On 16 December 2023 the Marxist philosopher and militant Antonio Negri passed from this world. As someone who has been inspired by his work and ideas – particularly his ongoing emphasis never accepting defeat, always looking for new spaces and routes of class struggle – this really affected me. In the English speaking world he has always been the most visible face from the autonomous movements from the 1960s and 1970s. There is always sadness when a comrade departs, even if they have lived a full and vibrant life, especially one filled with more than enough epic moments and drama to fill more than a few blockbuster movies. For this essay I do not want to respond to Negri’s passing and life more generally, as there have been many tributes to him, not to mention an academic cottage industry devoted to responding to his writing and ideas. Rather I want to reflect upon a much less aspect of Negri’s life, namely his relationship with football. Negri was a lifelong supporter of AC Milan, so ...
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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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