Eruditorum Press

Post-Geek

Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

Posts by Jack Graham:

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 4 – Unite the Right, the Aftermath

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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.

Download here.

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, or any item whose purpose is to inflict bodily harm to any demonstration, rally, protest, or march,” on threat of court-ordered punishment.”

Jacob Goodwin and Alex Ramos sentenced for attack on Deandre Harris.

Daniel Borden sentenced for attack on Deandre Harris

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Jason Kessler tweets about Heather Heyer
“”Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist,” stated the tweet on an account belonging to Jason Kessler. “Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.” “

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Cloudflare boots Daily Stormer August 16, 2017

Twitter bans Nazis December 18, 2017.

Major sites ban Alex Jones and Infowars September 2018.

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Sines V. Kessler

“Rise Above Movement” (RAM) members arrested. October 2018.

Tom Brokaw “Brown Grandbabies.”

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Also, here’s the famous Vice documentary ‘Charlottesville: Race and Terror‘, which we refer to.

Right Wing Watch

Angry White Men blog

@EyesOnTheRight

Jared Holt

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 3 – Unite the Right, Charlottesville 2017

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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 Jason Kessler (UtR organiser), Richard Spencer, other UtR participants:
SPLC/Hatewatch
Document at DocumentCloud

Unite the Right poster

Enoch and The Right Stuff crew photo with Taylor Wilson and James Alex Fields (tweet from Sandi Bachom):

Jason Kessler tweets about Heather Heyer after Charlottesville

Hunter Wallace (Brad Griffin) smears Heather Heyer.

White Boner’s conspiracy theory video

Alex McNabb, the ‘Nazi EMT’

Daniel has curated a selection of clips relating to the subjects touched on in this episode.  Beware, some of these clips feature people like Jason Kessler and Mike Enoch being vile.  Here.

David Futrelle‘s blog We Hunted the Mammoth, is a good source for lots of information about the far-right in its many forms.  The blog originally tracked the ‘Manosphere’ (i.e. MRAs, Incels, etc) but has increasingly tracked online hate more generally as the Manosphere joined up with and fed into the so-called ‘alt-right’, Trumpism, etc.

Here’s his post on nazis mocking the murder of Heather Heyer in their memes…

…and here’s his post on the Daily Caller’s call for people to run over protestors. 

And here is the video we refer to in the episode, ‘Charlottesville: The True Alt-Right‘ by Shaun – excellent stuff.

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Timeline of Rallies 2017:

Feb. 1: Berkeley. Milo rally cancelled.

April 15: Berkeley. “Free Speech Event,” Nathan Damigo punches “Moldylocks.”

April 27: Berkeley. Ann Coulter speech cancelled, “Based Stickman,” Lauren Southern, et al.

April 29: Pikeville, KY. TWP/NSM rally. Village Voice article.

May 13: Cville. Richard Spencer torch rally. Charlottesville 1.0.

—–June 2017—- UtR announced.

July 8. Cville. Ku Klux Klan rally.

—–July 11—— Kessler appears at town hall in Cville, publicizing UtR and distancing from Klan.

August 11. Cville. UVA torch march, “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” assault on Emily Gorcenski and Kristopher Goad. Emily Livestream.

August 12. Cville. Unite the Right.

State of Emergency declared at 11:00AM.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 2

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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.

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New Podcast: I Don’t Speak German

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As many of you will know, our very own Daniel Harper has been researching the so-called ‘alt-right’ (really the far-right) for more tha two years now, listening to their podcasts and YouTube shows, documenting what they say to each other in their own spaces. 

This new podcast series – entitled (very cleverly, I think) I Don’t Speak German – will be me in conversation with Daniel, giving him an opportunity to tell us what he heard.

We’re discussing fascism and racism, so this podcast comes with big warnings.

Here’s the first episode, on perhaps the best-known representative of the ‘alt-right’, Richard Spencer, his career, style, and ideology. The episode also touches on the origins of the term ‘alt-right’, the infamous ‘heilgate’ occurance after Trump’s election, etc.

Our episodes will cover one ‘topic’ per show. We plan to keep the episodes as short as possible, and crank them out regularly (in direct defiance of our usual operating methods).

The next episode will be on a more old-school fascist, David Duke, former Klan ‘Grand Wizard’ who spoke at Charlottesville.

Please consider spreading the news about this new show.

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In other news, I’m going to be taking a bit of a sabbatical from posting so I can work on the Shabgraff book I promised Elizabeth about 100 years ago.  It’s planned to be a compilation of the best of the blog, but expanded and rewritten, and with new material.  So I’ll be absent from Fridays for the forseeable future, though I’ll still be able to post podcast updates – and the occasional piece of writing, I hope – on Wednesdays.  (I’m still planning to do the Dracula movie series.)

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If you feel like helping me with these projects, here’s my Patreon.  And here’s Daniel’s, if you feel like you want to help him with his important project.…

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These Podcasts Were Made for Listenin’

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Hi, everyone. 

I don’t have anything for you today, though I am currently tinkering with a couple of things that might end up being postable. 

But neither of those are ready yet, so or today I’ll have to just point you towards a new episode of Consider the Ray Gun, the strand of WWA in which Daniel chats with someone about a book. 

This week it’s Kit rejoining Daniel for a conversation about the early Richard Bachman (Stephen King) novel The Long Walk.  Listen/download here. 

It’s every bit as good as their recent episode on Ender’s Game.

CtRG started as part of Oi! Spaceman, so previous episodes can be found here.

Happy New Year all.

 

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The Marvel(ous) X-Man and the Fantastic (Meta)phor/s

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Thoughts on Series 1 of Legion

(NB – I haven’t seen Series 2 yet, and was distressed to see El saying it had become disqualifyingly “rapey”.  Why do they ruin everything?)

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SPOILERS

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Legion might be the first show since Hannibal to genuinely achieve substance through style.  Of course, I haven’t seen every show since Hannibal, but I know Westworld didn’t manage it.

Legion takes place in a corner of the X-Men universe, in which (as per the concept) some humans are being born as ‘mutants’ with special powers.  In line with how these things usually go, the most powerful mutant so far discovered turns out to be David, a mediocre white guy with a Harry Potter-esque backstory.  He and his fellow mutants are, naturally, being hunted by a sinister government agency.  

So far, so clichéd.  But Legion does some genuinely interesting things with these concepts.  

It is deeply divergent from almost all TV/movie genre SF/Fantasy now, especially the Marvelverse, with which it is obviously most likely to be compared. Its style is light years away from the Marvel shows (Daredevil, etc) and from the movies. The nearest Marvel movie to Legion in terms of style is Doctor Strange, but that seems tame by comparison. There’s a deep 70s-genre-TV-ness about it, and especially about the effects sequences.  It goes with the 60s/70sness of the production design generally. The quiddity of this aesthetic is more than just ‘cheapness’; it’s rooted in a particular approach to the fantastic which Legion seems to want to resurrect.

There is a peculiar and distinct aesthetic to the effects sequences in Legion. They seem to have deliberately gone for a kind of visible… ‘effectyness’.  They want you to notice the effects, and notice that they are effects.  This is what they want you to do instead of playing the usual game of accepting effects as if you don’t realise they’re mock-ups of unreal and impossible things while simultaneously enjoying their rendering of unreality and impossibility, via a kind of mental game of pocket billiards whereby you pretend to accept (and thus do accept) those ideological notions about what is or isn’t convincing.

Against the odds, it works.  Especially in those sequences where ‘effecty’ things – particularly in the form of the surreal intrusions – interact with real environments. The show repeatedly creates tableaux in which very obviously ‘unreal’ things are obtrusively mapped into real settings.  Like the ice cube which descends through the ceiling into Cary’s bedroom in the imaginary mental hospital.

It could just be my influences showing, but it looks to me as if they have deliberately attempted to create something of the accidental TV-version of the ‘alienation effect’ that occurs in 1970s British television SF/Fantasy, most notably via the use of Colour Separation Overlay (CSO).  Legion does not of course use that creaky old tech, but it seems enamoured of it, and of the strange byproducts it had.

There is something very Sapphire and Steel about Legion.…

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Jack Considers a Christmas Reagan

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Owing to a decided – and entirely understandable – lack of enthusiasm for the project from anyone else, I embarked on a solo commentary on the 1984 movie version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring George C. Scott as Scrooge.  Luckily, I’m quite capable of wittering on for 90 minutes unassisted. 
 
So, here it is… a Christmas… treat for you?  I guess?
 
The movie is on YouTube should you want to watchalong with me.
 
Obviously, a commentary isn’t an ideal way to analyse a text, so I left a lot of things out that I wanted to talk about.  So you may be getting more on this.  I’ve already written about it in passing here.
 
WWA did another CtR on a Christmas movie (though I understand this is a vexed question now) here.
 
Meanwhile, thanks everyone for reading my stuff this year.  And thanks for being such a great community.  And thanks to all those who’ve promoted my stuff by tweeting, retweeting, etc.  And special thanks to my lovely patrons.  They got advance access to this podcast.  If that seems like a reward to you, you might consider joining their number.
 
 
 
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Epics and Monsters

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Parts of the below were developed in conversation with Niki Haringsma, whose Black Archive on ‘Love & Monsters’ is forthcoming, and who was recently heard in conversation with El.  Again, I alone am to blame for the faults of what follows.

 

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So, contrary to those who feel it’s become ‘too PC’ (a misprision that is interesting by itself), Doctor Who these days looks increasingly like it is taking a reactionary turn – albeit one of a complex kind – as it seems to drift from being an “accidental critique of milquetoast liberalism” (as Kit Power put it) into an outright accomodation with the systems it has found itself unable to effectively struggle against.  This makes Chibnall’s show, in its own way, a mirror to Moffat’s, which was also deeply concerned with the limits of resistance to systems.  

This is a space for analysing the political attitude found in the content.  But there is also reason to look at what the form tells us, what it assumes, what it permits, etc.  As we’ve already talked about elsewhere, the form and content are actually inextricable.

Let’s take a detour into Brechtian ‘Epic Theatre’.    

Brecht’s theatre doesn’t aim to ‘resolve’ political questions even when it is morally and politically clear because – at least in his mind, and one is free to disagree with him – its moral and political project is an invitation to the audience to contemplate profound contradictions and problems in society.

The problem with bourgeois theatre, for Brecht (and he sees Lukacs as doing the same thing) is that it is “afraid of production”, i.e. it hides it.  Realist theatre (Ibsen, Strindberg, etc) tries to create an illusion of realism, an empathic connection with the characters, which not only smooths over social contradictions but also masks production itself.  (Modern TV, which strives to look cinematic, arguably does this same thing far more than old-school TV, which was often more-or-less televised theatre.)  Brecht dislikes this as a Marxist, and one with a particular emphasis on production as fundamental to social existence (an emphasis which I personally think is quite proper for a Marxist, but which is sadly lacking from much actual Marxism). 

It is this masking of production which, perhaps more than anything else for Brecht, creates the bourgeois illusion of fixity which he aims to dispel.  Epic Theatre concentrates on production both in terms of how people actually produce history and in terms of how theatre itself is produced.  This coherence is, paradoxically, a key way in which it aims to reveal social contradictions.

The irony is that modern Doctor Who is arguably a lot less like Epic Theatre in this sense than most classic Who manages to be by accident!  Classic Who is arguably far more concerned with political issues (re society and history) than New Who.  But it also accidentally estranges the audience by highlighting its own processes of production, simply by virtue of its production values being so shoddy that it inadvertently showcases them!

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Orson Audio

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Nice new bit of audio content for you today, mainly on the subject of guys called Orson. 

From the Wrong With Authority stable, a commentary track for Orson Welles’ undervalued late masterpiece F for Fake, featuring myself and Daniel Harper.  Download or listen HERE. 

This commentary is basically a spin-off from an episode of They Must Be Destroyed on Sight in which I guested to chat about the same film – here.  TMBDOS also recently did an episode on Welles’ finally-completed final film, The Other Side of the Wind, here.

Plus, we recently released a podcast in which Daniel and Kit chatted about Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and somehow managed to find new angles on it, despite it being one of the most discussed texts on the internet.  Download or listen HERE.

Also, if you haven’t listened to the Wrong With Authority’s third ‘Trumpism’ episode, recorded after the mid-terms, but feel like subjecting yourself to five hours of our self-therapy, that’s here. 

On the subject of Wrong With Authority, we still have two great new episodes in the can, being edited, and slated to be released soon (hopefully).  There’s our next proper full WWA episode, hosted by Daniel this time, which will tackle D. W. Griffiths’ racist alleged-masterpiece of early American silent cinema Birth of a Nation, and a Consider the Reagan commentary on James Cameron’s The Terminator.  Holly joins the team for both.  Look out for those.

Speaking of Holly, people should definitely check out her new seasonal podcast series So Here It Is, in which she is joined by a succession of guests to chat with her about the tracks in the British Christmas music canon.  One of the guests who has already been on is our friend Andrew Hickey, whose own new podcast series, A History of Pop Music in 500 Songs, is another absolute must.

(Oh, and I haven’t forgotten that I was meant to be reposting the Doctor Who commentary tracks I recorded with El.  I’ll get back to that, probably in the new year.)

In other me-news, I’ve recently had something of a posting spurt over at my Patreon, and people who sponsor me for as miniscule a goddamn pittance as one measley dollar a month goddammit can exclusively access forthcoming posts of mine (fucking looooong ones too) on things like the TV show Legion (which I’ve perversely decided to find fascinating), Doctor Who and Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’, and Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis… as well as an audio snippet from the WWA episode we did on Anonymous in which me and the gang get drawn into a little chat about the ‘New Atheists’.

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Fascistic Beasts and Why You Shouldn’t Fight Them

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SPOILERS / TRIGGERS

I’m going to generally assume you’ve seen this film and the previous one.

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It is entirely apt that the poster for The Crimes of Grindelwald features a crowd of people wandering about looking confused; it’s both an apt depiction of the film and of the audience on their way out of the cinema.

An even better encapsulation: the sinking of the Titanic features, briefly, as a throwaway and perfunctory period reference, in a flashback scene in the middle of an infodump, part of the resolution of a pointless subplot… and nobody asks why the wizards on board didn’t stop it sinking.

Bluntly, this film is a mess.  The plot flaps around, bifurcating into dead end after dead end.  Things are set up and not paid off.  When the payoffs do arrive they are sudden, arbitrary, and unsatisfying.  There are lots of events but nothing really happens.  Nothing is achieved.  Every time you think progress might be made you find yourself stuck in a new subplot surrounded by characters who are multiplying around you like those cursed goblets in the final Potter film.   

The first Fantastic Beasts movie had a more than incipient case of this, with the subplot about a plutocrat Jon Voight and his two sons, on top of the subplot about witch-hunters, and the plot about Grindelwald in disguise hunting a powerful cursed child… all on top of the stuff about Newt getting entangled with new friends and local magical authorities in 20s New York while trying to recapture the magical creatures that escaped from his case.  This last would’ve made a perfectly entertaining little movie all by itself.  

The main attraction of the first film – the likeable main characters; played by a uniformly charming cast – is squandered.  The core cast do their best but they get very little time together, and even less in which they can have fun.  The mood is dour compared to the first film.  These stories about people with magic wands who conjure bats made of bogeys at each other are getting Dark and Serious again.

The colour pallette has been drained correspondingly.  The first film allowed us a bit of sunlit sepia in 20s New York; this gives us 20s Paris almost in monochrome.  Just as everyone is starting to snap out of that trend for washed-out colours and oppressive shadows, David Yates is digging his heels in and making Wizarding World movies the same murky way he shot Half-Blood Prince.  Some of the production design is nice, especially the art nouveau interior of the French Ministry of Magic – even if it’s always a bit too evident in advance which era cliches the production designers will give a perfunctory magic twist.

But the overall grey uniformity of the film – also mirrored in the poster – is fitting for such a lifeless experience.  A lot of effort is expended seemingly just to get new characters in place ready for future installments.  They’ve tried to cram lots of set-up for the next movies into this film, almost as if they realised they came perilously close to telling a self-contained tale last time.…

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