Nihilist Optimism

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,...

“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...

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 ...