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 ...

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...