In this episode, Daniel tells me about the aftermath of the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville 2017 (which we talked about last time). We also get a tad more theoretical about some of the reasons for some of the behaviour of the so-called 'alt-right', and chat about some related issues such as the recent controversy concerning the Covington MAGA kids.
Reminder: we're on iTunes and YouTube
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NOTES
Jason Kessler disrupted by his father.
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Covington Catholic Students confrontation full video (confrontation starts at ~1:13:00)
Robby Soave at Reason on Covington Catholic Kids
Jason Wilson at the Guardian on Covington Catholic Kids
Laura Wagner at Deadspin on Covington Catholic Kids
GQ "Scared White Supremacist Takes Off His Uniform."
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Assault of Deandre Harris
League of the South signs consent decree, will not return to Charlottesville. March 2018.
"The decree specifically names the League of the South, its directors, officers, members and agents, national League of the South chairman Michael Tubbs and Kentucky chapter chairman Spencer Borum. These parties are blocked from “returning to Charlottesville, Virginia, as part of a unit of two or more persons acting in concert while armed with a firearm, weapon, shield ...
It’s about as long since the last post as it took anybody to select the next episode in the BBC Three menu system. I mean, unless it autoplays. I have no idea. Anyway, neither the music nor news have advanced much in that couple of seconds.
This gap, or lack thereof, does not do “The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo” any favors. In the course of a double release it largely disappears as “the one that isn’t the premiere” in terms of how Class made its first impression. Actually, it mostly just disappears in general—more than half the audience didn’t even bother playing the second episode, with only 300,000 people tuning in on BBC Three and 600,000 on BBC One a few months later. But taken as originally presented, as a singular item with “For Tonight We Might Die,” this was always doomed to be the smaller one, establishing what the show did in its default setting as opposed to setting the mission statement for it. The unfortunate thing is that this is only half wrong. This isn’t setting the mission statement, but it’s also not the default setting; if it were, Class would be a ...
Kite (demo)
Kite
Kite (Bios Bahnhof)
Kite (Tour of Life)
Kate Bush makes her television debut in a disused railway depot in Germany. Behind her stands the KT Bush Band, the musicians she chose to play her music, in front of a backdrop of green land and a volcano, apparently the German realization of a Yorkshire moor. Bush begins her idiosyncratic mime-shaped dance and the music follows her in a jumpy, facetious rendition of “Kite.” Bush uses her full body as an instrument, using shakes and poses to fill the stage.
It’s unsurprising “Kite” should be the runway Bush launches her television career on. The track is the B-side to “Wuthering Heights,” and a chirpy enough deep cut. “Kite” responds to “Wuthering Heights,” sharing its A-side’s fascination with stepping out of ordinary human experience; visualizing this process as a sort of skyborne anabasis.
“Kite” is a dance song in a different fashion from “Wuthering Heights”; whereas “Heights” is famous for the dance retroactively applied to it, “Kite” actually depicts a sort of radical bodily movement. “Kite” depicts an Icarus-type character: a person being drawn from the ground and towards the air. Over the course of Kite’s run ...
In this episode, which runs a bit longer than the first two, and which goes to some very dark places, Daniel tells me all about the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, 2017.
The episode features discussions of violence, and we try to signpost when we're getting into the painful details. But warnings definitely apply from the start. We're discussing virulent racism and bigotry.
Download here.
And here's the podcast's own website.
Please feel free to signal boost us.
(Also, we're on iTunes and YouTube now.)
Of necessity, we're only glancing at this incredibly big and complex subject, so we're going to be coming back to many of the issues, organisations, and persons mentioned.
And here are some notes, sources, and references.
(Oh, P.S. Fun fact... Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped into Hbomberguy's Donkey Kong charity Twitch stream as we recorded this.)
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NOTES
Firstly, everyone interested in this should follow and support Emily Gorcenski and Molly (Socialist Dog Mom) on Twitter.
Here's Emily's livestream of the tiki torch rally
Here's Molly's podcast The Trial of James Alex Fields
First Vigil - tracking fascist violence
Texts between ...
It’s October 22nd, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out to my Ex,” with James Arthur, the Weeknd, Sia, Ariana Grande, and Calvin Harris also charting. In news, most of 2016 has happened. The US Presidential election is in full swing, Theresa May is in 10 Downing street, Jeremy Corbyn has survived an attempt to replace him as head of the Labour Party, and UKIP is in its usual chaos.
While on television… well, actually, let’s start there. Class is on television in a sense that we’ve never really dealt with before. It’s a BBC Three show. But unlike Torchwood, which premiered ten years earlier to the day, BBC Three in 2016 is an online only channel following a round of budget cuts that resulted in the shuttering of BBC Three as a broadcast channel. This move contained a wealth of decisions about priorities and privilege. For instance, BBC Four, the more adult-oriented channel with a heavy focus on arts and entertainment programs, remained in place. Instead what was axed was the channel focused on the 16-34 age group and on experimenting with new programs and new talent.
As a hedge against the ...
I've been admiring Christine Kelley's Dreams of Orgonon since before either of them were called that. It's smart, insightful music criticism that lived up to its obvious debt to Chris O'Leary's Pushing Ahead of the Dame and was no small influence on my own decision to make a song by song Tori Amos blog my next project. So when I needed someone to fill in for a few months while Jack wrote his book, asking her to crosspost her work to our site was the obvious choice. And when it became evident that her first post for us would be Kate Bush's first big hit, well, that just seemed like destiny. It's my absolute pleasure to give Christine a bit of a boost and to have her on the site. If you want to read the story thus far, her blog archives are over here. But for now, welcome to the site, let's get on with it. -El
A misty morning
Begin with an instrumental call-and-response in the form of a spine-tingling arpeggio which is met by the same figure repeated an octave higher. Eight seconds in come the vocals, which sound ...
Nearly forgot I now have wednesdays to post whatever subsidiary stuff I have.
In our second episode, Daniel tells me all about former KKK Grand Wizard, "king of the angry Facebook grampas", and man who wrote an autobiography it took 42 hours for him to record himself reading, 'Dr' David Duke.
Download or listen here.
As ever, we're discussing fascism, racism and bigotry generally, so warnings apply.
Almost as soon as Doctor Who abandoned its post the world went to hell in a handbasket.
The first visible sign that 2016 would be a cacophonous disaster came ten days in when David Bowie died. Like Doctor Who, Bowie served as a sort of mass culture Lamed Wufnik; an enduring figure that lasted over countless cultural shifts steadfastly defending his corner, ensuring that the strange and wondrous had some quarter in any landscape. For a long time the two moved in sync—scrapping their way to the center of the culture over the 60s, co-founding glam in the early 70s, becoming shambling and gaudy wrecks in the mid-80s, and finding new, if niche life in the paranoid back alleys of the cyberpunk 90s. Then they began a period of effectively taking turns. Bowie held down the fort in the late 90s and early 00s with a respectable dotage that would have served as a perfectly acceptable final act, albeit one with the unsettled and partial ending of a minor album and a final world tour cut short by a heart attack. Then, as he pulled his great disappearing act, Doctor Who roared back to life. Finally, in 2013, they reconverged ...