The Antisocial Socialist

 I still listen to more podcasts than music but I did land on some cool stuff. It's hard for me to pick an album of the year so I'm mainly going in chronological order of things that stand out to me.

BIG|BRAVE: "Vital" and "nature morte." I dunno how to describe this band. iTunes says "unknown genre," which fits. Kind of dreamy, atmospheric, dark alt rock with folk characteristics. I could find very little about them online beyond that they opened for A Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, which is one of my all-time favourite bands. They sound nothing like that but have similar vibes.

Depeche Mode: "Memento Mori." You know who Depeche Mode are. I haven't been keeping up with their new releases for years but this latest one is really good—heartfelt and haunting and much like their old stuff except different.

Bridge City Sinners: Yeah I heard one song by them and immediately bought tickets to see them and downloaded all of their albums. Kind of cabaret/klezmer/bluegrass with a deep self-destructive streak and lots of lyrics about Satan. They were even more brilliant live. Honourable mention goes to Yes Ma'am, who opened for them.

VNV Nation: "Electric Sun." VNV Nation only have one song and it's great. I could listen to it forever. I will not be taking questions at this time.

Orville Peck: "Bronco." A worthy followup to "Pony," which blew me away in 2019. I guess this came out in 2022 but iTunes sucks so it only showed up in my library this year. Sadly, Orville Peck is taking a break from music for what sounds like mental health reasons. More croony, extremely gay country from one of the best voices in music.

The Ocean: "Holocene." Moody, dark electronic music about the end of the world. My friend said it reminded her of my writing, which is a huge compliment as I really love this album.

Sabaoth: "Windjourney." This is an old album but new to me. Gloomy, goth-infused black metal.

Jeremy Dutcher: "Motewolonuwok." Beautiful followup to his groundbreaking debut. No one else is doing this. Apparently it contains the first bilingual song in English and Wolastoqey, which is cool enough even without his stunning voice and compositions.

Uh so my most exciting album of the year technically isn't coming out until next year but anyway if you haven't heard, Einstürzende Neubauten have a new double album coming out, which I think is called "Rampen," based on their live improvisations on their 2022 tour. Not to brag or anything but I got to be one of the first hundred or so people who heard it start to finish in a Zoom listening party with the band. So I can't link to it yet but I can tell you that it whips. 

Honourable mention goes to "Women Of Noise For Palestine." Tbh I have not listened to this whole thing yet. Someone on the Neubauten Discord had a track on it so she linked to it and I bought it to support Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and because everyone involved in it is pretty obscure, a lot of the tracks aren't in English, and that tends to mean that the music will at least be interesting. I'm enjoying what I've heard so far.

 Well, this will be quick and easy, as I only saw three new films this year, and one of them sucked. I don't know why I can mainline a million TV shows and not watch a single movie, but I think it's because I can only really sit still for an hour at a time. Anyway, the three whole movies I saw were:

El Conde: This is the one that sucked, unfortunately. You would think the premise was bulletproof: Pinochet is actually a vampire and gets dragged out of retirement even though he wants to die. That's ripe for political satire. This film has two problems. First, the characterization is muddled and so the satire is muddled. I think it wants to show some nuance and complexity and how fascism can appeal to even those who oppose it, plus the obvious vampirism = capitalism, but it ended up mired in pointless nihilism. Sometimes you have to be blatant in your satire. The other problem is that it's told almost entirely in voiceover narration. It's a stupid choice that's not justified once you realize who the voiceover is, which is also not a big twist. In some alternate timeline there is a good version of this.

Nimona: I liked this one quite a lot! I'm not a big cartoon fan, and I'm particularly not a fan of this particular cartoon style, but the story is good enough to overcome my aesthetic dislike. It's good for all the same reasons why the comic is good—it's a cute, subversive, queer fairy tale with memorable characters. My only issues were that I would prefer it if it were animated more like ND Stevenson's drawing style, because I like that more, and that I don't think the changes at the beginning work as well as the comic does. It's far more fun to discover Ballister Blackheart's backstory as Nimona does—this is one case where I think the story benefits from doing an obvious twist. It ends up softening the story quite a lot by not depicting any of Blackheart's villainy, though I guess that makes it more appropriate for the kiddies. I guess.

Cocaine Bear: Okay I can't believe I'm saying this but this ended up being the best movie I saw in 2023 because unlike the other two, it didn't have any flaws. It made us a promise—you get to see a bear on cocaine that kills a lot of people—and delivered exactly that. It's a massively self-aware film. It's hilarious. Sometimes all you want is to watch a bear that is higher than any living thing has ever gotten in existence eat a bunch of people and then try to get more cocaine. Unlike the other two it is an improvement over reality/the source material, as the actual story behind this is sad rather than funny.

I'll try to watch more movies next year. The key word is "try."

In the interstitial period between Christmas and New Years, I traditionally do lists of things that I read, watched, and listened to. But since covid it's been increasingly a problem. What aired in 2023? What even is time? Do I even remember all the things I watched?

Okay here are the things I liked the most, in no particular order except for the last two.

Atlanta
I think this ended in 2022, but I only saw it this year. What starts as a kind of cool slice-of-life show starring the guy from Community and that "This Is America" song ends up being...not that. I heard it described as "Twin Peaks with rappers" and that's essentially it. Not that the first season is bad per se—it's got a real "city-as-character" vibe and really compelling writing, but as the show spirals into further levels of surreality, it gets brilliant. It's like Black Mirror if Black Mirror had kept the quality of its first season instead of turning into "what if cell phones were your mom." The less you know about it going in, the better. But truly one of the most inventive, incisive TV shows I've seen. 

Doctor Who
I'm as surprised as you are to see this back on my list. It was only specials this year, but after several years of the show being really bad, I am pleased to announce that it is good again. Like I am actively looking forward to each new episode instead of it being something to slog through in hopes that it will change back to the thing that I liked. It has now changed back to the thing that I like. (Obligatory note that this has nothing to do with 13 being a woman and everything to do with Chris Chibnall being the showrunner and turning the Doctor into a neoliberal cop.)

The Bear
A show about a chef who tries to save his dead brother's neighbourhood restaurant with the help of an ambitious sous chef. I had no idea what this show was about when I started watching it—someone just said that I'd like it, and I did. It's like those baking shows that I watch, except it has an actual plot. It's very low-stakes drama that makes you feel how huge the stakes are for the characters. And it involves a lot of competence porn, which is a thing I adore.

What We Do In the Shadows/Our Flag Means Death/Good Omens
These are all the same show and I like it a lot. I would say that WWITS did the best job of continuing from strong earlier seasons and GO did the worst, but they were all very fun to watch. Middle-aged slow burn queer longing is kind of my favourite thing and I like that there are three shows that give me what I want in that regard, even if they are determined to torture every other viewer who doesn't want that. Too bad. They can have all the other shows that have nonproblematic gays who have healthy relationships in them.

Andor
This was not a show I expected to like, since it was Star Wars, which has worn out its welcome for me, and on Disney+, which is not exactly the home of radical politics. But instead it was Leftist Infighting Simulator: The TV Show, and actually amazing??? to the point where I kept asking if anyone at Disney was checking, because I don't think they were. I think someone who had read a lot of Marxist and anarchist theory (and has possibly spent time in radical organizations) somehow ended up in the writing room and just got away with putting all of that in the scripts. Even if you don't like Star Wars this is very much worth your time.

Weirdly it is also the most true to the initial themes of Star Wars, which included a Viet Cong-inspired anti-imperialist teddy bear uprising, but the franchise has kind of lost the plot since then.

Succession
My other favourite thing are shows where absolutely no one is a good person and they all do terrible things that you don't want them to do, and yet you still end up feeling sympathy and attachment to the characters. American shows tend not to do this, whereas British shows do it splendidly, so I was not surprised when the showrunner turned out to be the guy from The Thick Of It who wasn't Armando Iannucci. This is just one of the most well-written character dramas I've ever seen and takes a sharp scalpel to the bloated corpse of the American ruling class. Everyone is hateful and compelling, and I couldn't look away. The way the show plays with your sympathies, focusing on one sibling as the Least Bad Person Who You're Kind of Liking only to turn it around on you and reminding you what little billionaires are made of is just masterful. The election episode was probably in my top five episodes of TV ever, where every character has a chance to do the right thing and fails to do so in exactly the way you'd expect, while paying off every bit of characterization established in the rest of the series. Capitalism is bad, actually, and inevitably leads to fascism. God this is good, and would have ranked as my favourite TV show of 2023 were it not for...

Reservation Dogs
Obviously this takes the #1 spot for a third year in a row as it's one of the best things on TV ever. It came to a close this year, which I think everyone was a little sad about, but look. You can have three perfect seasons or you can drag it on forever until it sucks, and they made the right choice here. And it really was perfect—a story that in the end is about the bonds and responsibilities of community, and what we owe to generations to come. I was sobbing through multiple episodes but in a good way. It does the thing that great literature does where the themes are universal but the characters and setting are so highly specific that their world and inner lives are immersive. I'm glad it ended where it did because I don't think they could top the final arc. I do hope that everyone involved goes on to be in a million other things that I can watch, as the level of talent involved at every level, from writing to cinematography to music to of course acting, is just off the charts.

How about you? What are your telly thoughts?

Just finished: Sacrifice: Themes, Theories, and Controversies by Margo Kitts. This was good and useful. I was hoping it'd go more into the parallels between historical/mythological human sacrifice and contemporary warfare, but that is more of a me problem and not really within the scope of the book.

Currently reading: Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. I don't remember who recommended this to me, but it's really good. It's a gendercide novel by someone I think is a cis woman, so I wouldn't normally seek it out, but it's in space and the mechanism that kills off all the men seems messy enough that it doesn't feel gender essentialist. It makes for a cool setting: a remote planet colonized by humans several centuries before the story takes place, but a virus has killed off all the male colonists and many of the female ones, and they've been out of contact with the rest of humanity. The planet, Jeep, is now under quarantine and no one who goes there is allowed to leave. Marghe, an anthropologist, is sent there to study the "natives" and test out a vaccine to the virus, while being acutely aware that the company she works for wants to recolonize or exploit the planet. It's very well-written and the look into cultures that have diverged, because of distance and minimal resources, from known human cultures, is cool.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Two chapters this week! The first was just harrowing—I knew what was coming, and ended up reading it while doing the equivalent of watching a scary movie while holding my hands over my eyes. The Pequod finds a pod of whales, including calves, and murders and maims its way through it, including a mother whale and her nursing calf. It is incredibly upsetting—the bonds of love and play in the pod are deftly depicted. These are intelligent beings who care for each other, and the crew even pet the calves, who don't know what the boat is here to do, like dogs. But they're ultimately resources to be exploited. It's horrific.

The other chapter is a weirdly racist aside about whale harems and slutty male whales, which would be kind of funny if I wasn't still reeling from the previous one.

Just finished: Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

This one's been on my list for awhile and it was So. Much. Fun. It's about what Ruthnum dubs "currybooks," fiction and memoirs about the South Asian diaspora, which often include a scene harkening back to a mother making curry, a second- or third-generation child's struggle to get the recipe right, a wistful nostalgia for an imagined old country, and so on. It's not, as I expected, a scathing deconstruction of these books and how they appeal to a white book club audience (though, of course, there is a bit of that). It's rather a thoughtful meditation on culture and authenticity. What does it mean, for example, to talk about "authentic" Indian food when, for example, the chili spice in curry is not indigenous to the Indian subcontinent (never mind that no one can actually agree on how to define curry in the first place)? Also, Ruthnum's aside that he didn't struggle to recreate recipes because his mom actually taught him how to cook because he was expected to one day be a grownup made me grin. This one's short and highly enjoyable.

Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan. Imagine you took the brilliant insights of educational theorists like Paulo Freire and bell hooks and fed them to a highly paid educational consultant, and that person chewed them up, vomited them back into your mouth, and that vomit was somehow a book? This would be that book. My issue is not that I disagree with the fundamental thrust of the argument, which is that schools are an example of institutional racism, standardized tests are bad, actually, and quite a lot of the system needs to be dismantled and reimagined. But that has actually been the mainstream position of teacher education where I live for the entire time I've been a teacher. The problem is that the solutions offered here are things like "pound the pavement," "centre the margins," and "flip the table," empty bureaucratic-speak that conceals any tangible advice towards decolonization or anti-racist education that the book is ostensibly trying to promote. It's also very top-down (do they think that I wouldn't abolish standardized testing in a hot second if I had that power?) and some of the suggestions they give are actually illegal. The hardheaded refusal to engage in actual statistical analysis means that there are obvious blindspots, like parent consultation will always favour the most involved—i.e., the most privileged—parents, and present a skewed image of the broader population. Give this one a pass unless you are one of those people who like flowcharts with a lot of shapes and arrows on them.

Currently reading: Sacrifice: Themes, Theories, and Controversies by Margo Kitts. This is about why cultures engage in ritual sacrifice (of both other humans and animals), which I am reading for background research into a mostly undisclosed project. It's pretty interesting? Essentially just an analysis of different theories as to why we do this. I have a slight obsession with the idea that the sacrifice of the young is a commonality amongst many cultures (I won't universalize and say all) and expressed in different ways if it's not channeled more productively, and there exists a contradiction in Western society between the rhetoric of "think of the children" and our public comfort with actual children dying. Does this book explain that contradiction? Nah, it's just background reading, but pretty thorough background reading.

Just finished: Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice. Moon of the Crusted Snow is probably my favourite post-apocalyptic novel and I try to make everyone read it. Does it need a sequel? Ehhh, it's perfect. Did I absolutely lose my shit when a sequel was announced? You bet. Hilariously, radiantfracture saw me lose my shit and immediately sent me a copy (when I was halfway through reading the library's, lol).

Anyway it does not disappoint. Twelve years after a mysterious power and communications outage turns the cities into chaos, Evan Whitesky's small band of rez refugees has a new problem: they are tapping out the resources in their new settlement. There's also the probability that they are too small to sustain their population. They have to journey south, to their ancestral homeland, to find other survivors and a new home. Between them are a militia of white supremacists and the landscape itself, dangerous and mercurial and possibly even worse than that.

What I love about this is multifold, but one of the big ones is that Rice knows the land, and makes you feel every hard-fought mile of the journey. He also just does the apocalypse realistically—with such a huge and isolating geography, people still don't know what caused the original disaster. Resources are scarce and the old ways, while they've kept the community alive, mean that everything our heroes make or do comes with tremendous effort. 

If I have any critique, it's that we don't see a lot from Nicole, who I loved in the first book. And of course, it's not going to land with the kind of "holyshitthisissogood" shock I felt reading the first book, because I expected it to be great and it was. So, read that one first and then go read this.

A Day At the Dragon Shelter, edited by Chris 'Fox' Wallace. Full disclosure, Tate Hallaway is a good friend so I backed the Kickstarter, also her story is the best and I say this with bias but it's true. There are a number of other talented authors in here, including Jane Yolan and Steven Brust, and some I've never heard of, like Joyce Chng, but very much enjoyed. As with any anthology, some of the stories are better than others.

Anyway, it is a shared universe anthology where dragons have returned, centring around a shelter for homeless dragons in Minnesota. Can I just say I loved the Midwestern setting? Dragons are mostly intelligent and choose their people, so sometimes you end up with a 900-pound behemoth that eats all your food and will kill and die for you. Most of the stories centre around dragons and people finding each other, with a host of interesting characters ranging from a noir detective, punk teenagers in a dead mall, a rural hunter, and [redacted because you'll see it coming but it's still sweet and funny]. Tate's is about an emotional support dragon at a library, and it goes to the exact place you'd want it to go, with extremely delightful results.

A note of warning that the tone varies wildly: most of the stories are in the sweet and fun range, but there's still quite a lot of pet death, and one particularly nasty one, and I know that's an issue for many folks.

Currently reading: Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Good news: Ishmael is back on his homoerotic rhapsodies. Bad news: He's talking about whale tails. There, I said it. Literary analysis!

Just finished: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher. I don't have a lot to add—this is Fisher's most well-known and influential work for a reason. It's influential in the sense that there wasn't really much new here, but that's because he framed things in a clear, concise way that many of the writers I'm interested in use this framing in their work. And it's very accessible, which I think is something that too many Marxist writers forget about.

The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island by Kent Monkman. Not sure if this belongs in Fiction, Non-Fiction, or Books With Pictures In 'Em. It's quite an extraordinary work. Monkman is one of my favourite artists. If you're not familiar with him, give him a Google. He paints massive, neoclassical-inspired paintings excoriating and reimagining the history of so-called Canada. He's collected these paintings in an illustrated story that weaves a narrative about them through the eyes of his shapeshifting, genderfucking alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Part erotic fantasy, part ridiculously well-researched history (there are a lot of footnotes, which I'm still working my way through), part gorgeously illustrated art book, and part primer on Cree vocabulary and ways of knowing and being, it's a masterful piece of...something. I mean it's not without precedent—Monkman wears his influences on his sleeve (and among the many historical figures that Miss Chief has dalliances with is Eugene Delacroix, though I'm most reminded of Marcel Duchamp's Rrose Selavy)—but it's a strange, glorious fusion and I can't wait for volume 2.

Currently reading: Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Ishmael infodumps about whale spouts, and I'm pretty sure he's wrong about it.

 Just finished: Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché. One of those books I read and immediately wished I wrote (positive). I don't have a lot to add after last week—basically I loved the main characters, loved the concept and the sci-fi conceit, could not put it down, and found myself with a weird compulsion to do fanart because there's only one piece on Tumblr. (Obviously I don't have time to do this but I hope someone does.) It completely lived up to the hype, even with that one weird bit halfway through.

Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law by China Miéville. As I've said, not the most entertaining thing he's ever written, but a really fascinating economic and philosophical look at the whole concept of international law. The conclusion could very easily be, well, it's useless, because powerful countries do as they wish and there's no actual means to enforce penalties (which is true), except of course it's more nuanced than this. He still falls on the side of "appeals to international law are basically useless, grassroots power is more effective" but he approaches it with a generous amount of non-sectarianism.

Currently reading: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher. After Miéville's book I thought I'd read some easier Marxist theory, and this one was free and I honestly meant to read it ages ago. It's very good. I know Fisher had his issues but ehhhh I like him, politically and aesthetically (there are of course aesthetics to political writing, and gloomy post-punk is maybe my favourite one). Lots of overlap with Graeber, particularly Bullshit Jobs, but I feel like he hits the emotive aspects of the "end of history" in the 80s and 90s really well. I've been thinking (and planning a talk) on the politics of what we consider possible, and this is one of those books where I'm screenshotting passages for future reference. To wit:


Good stuff.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Well, they killed another whale. Don't you have enough whales?

Just finished: Don't shame me, Goodreads.

Currently reading: Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law by China Miéville. I'm like, two-thirds done this? But I took a break because a hold came in at the library and that book is 600 pages so I gotta go fast. The latest chapter I read was about the history of international law, and in particular the relationship between modern international law, marine law, and nation formation.

(A digression: It is hard for people to believe how modern the conception of nationhood is. I say this because I cannot feel nationalism or national pride and it baffles me that people do.)

Anyway, I have a bit left to go of this and will get back to it when I'm done the other one.

Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché. The aforementioned 600-page novel. Y'all knew I'd love this one and Rao in particular. A mysterious American-style diner appears in an English field, as do a collection of strange objects. These are all linked to a substance that causes desires linked to nostalgia to manifest. Also this particular nostalgia is fatal. Rao, who can discern truth from lies, and Adam, his partner (espionage, not romantic, though also romantic?? maybe??) are sent to investigate. The novel flashes back and forth between the investigation and their traumatic backstories. It's a page-turner but also smart and genre-bending and basically a bunch of my favourite things.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. After assuring us that everything in mythology ever was actually a whale, Ishmael informs us that the story of Jonah and the whale can't possibly be accurate, for reasons. Okay Ishmael.

 Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law by China Miéville. This is dense and academic and like, I understand maybe 70% of it? But! It is excruciatingly relevant unfortunately. It is mainly focused around the work of Soviet legal theorist Pashukanis around what makes international law law exactly, if it's not really enforceable, and what its aims are. There are tensions between the utopian aims of international law and its practical realities of, as domestic law does, its reinforcement of existing patterns of force and domination. The first half of the book is really abstract, focusing on the philosophy of form vs. content, but I think in the next chapter, which I will start tonight, he gets more into actual applications.

By a startling coincidence, Jack Graham of "I Don't Speak German" wrote on his Patreon about the book a day after I started it. His post, "Force Decides; on Israel-Palestine, bourgeois law & order, and a Marxist morality" was written five years ago and, as he says, is "depressingly relevant." That's worth your attention if you're interested in the subject and are unlikely to wade through a book on Marxist legal theory.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Oh, we're back to Ishmael's "everything is a whale" meanderings, which now includes "the dragon that St. George killed was a whale, actually, and to fight it he rode either some kind of seal or giant seahorse." This is an image that will live rent-free in my head forever. Look. The old white men of yore were right to force everyone to read this book. They didn't know why but they were correct about it.