Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

Fundraising Update

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The Patreon hit $600 this morning. Which means that I’m posting this after informing my boss that I’ll be stepping down at the end of the semester and not, as previously discussed, applying for a promotion. I’ve got four weeks to serve out because obviously I’m not going to be a complete asshole about this, but in less than a month I am going to be a full-time writer again.

Which… holy shit guys. When I set up that $200 a week goal, I thought it was a longshot. Not something we were going to blow through in thirty-six hours. I’m stunned and, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words. There are a lot of things I love about this job, but the feeling of support that you all give me is by far the thing that most often stuns me into a humbled and grateful silence.

That said, I noted in comments on my last post that I was not in any sort of immediate financial insecurity. This fact just changed. The Patreon is currently at $601, just a dollar a week above the threshold at which this adventure is affordable. Patreons go down over time. So while we’ve made an absolutely massive accomplishment that I’m so, so thankful for, we also need to keep going. I’ve set up two more Patreon goals. One at $650 a week, which marks the point where I can breathe a sigh of relief. If I’d had any idea that $200 was a 36 hour goal and not, as I assumed, a really hard slog that I optimistically might make before a job offer came through, this is where I actually would have set the “quit my job” line. It means that I can lose a big patron and not immediately be plunged into a crisis. It means that I can go decent chunks of time without raising alarms about the Patreon level. Above $600 is “not a crisis.” Above $650 is comfortable.

There’s also a $700 goal, which marks the point where the Patreon is 100% replacing the day job income and I’m not relying on Kickstarter money to make the math work. This means that I can avoid situations like what happened with the Eruditorum 7 Kickstarter where to fulfill it I’m going to have to run the Volume 8 Kickstarter, and that I can use any profit that’s remaining after a Kickstarter goes through for long-term savings projects like a house or a vacation or a vagina.

These are both really important thresholds too, even if they aren’t as flashy as quitting my job. And so to help us get to them, I’ve created two new Patreon tiers. For $10 a post, you can join in on quarterly voice chat hangouts. Who knows what these will be? I’ll do Q&As, I’m sure, but I might also drag in special guests, or look at all playing a game together, or maybe live-watching something. We’ll see, but it’ll be fun.

And then, at $25 a post, comes the really fun one: custom books.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Broadchurch

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I want to start with an update to yesterday’s appeal. When I made the appeal for boosting the Patreon by $200, I kind of doubted it could be done. Actually, not even kind of. It felt like the longest of long shots—a desperate appeal to avoid having to give up writing despite the fact that it obviously made the most sense for my financial security. Instead, we’ve blown past 2/3 of the goal in a single day. As I queue this up before dinner, we only have $61 to go, and what felt like an impossible dream is looking like it very well might happen. I am humbled and stunned and above all grateful to be so widely and deeply supported, and so, so thrilled that I really might get to continue on this mad ride. But we’re not there yet, and if you clicked away yesterday because it felt like a pipe dream, well… it’s not. But I still need your help. The Patreon link is right here. And with that said, let’s get on to dragging Chris Chibnall.

Act I: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

The most impressive thing about Broadchurch is the unbridled, even cynical efficiency of its conception. Chibnall has suggested he had the idea for it going back to 2003, but from his account of the process this idea did not include characters, the plot, or a location so much as a vague idea to do a child murder story that would focus on the killing’s impact on the broader community. It wasn’t until 2011 that he started developing the program as a spec script after his time working on Camelot for Starz came to an end that was about as unpleasant as the series itself.

In 2011, however, the show’s influence is unmistakable: by that time Danish import The Killing, a brooding and meticulous crime drama, had made its bow on BBC Four, where it was a surprising hit, at least on the scale that BBC Four has those. The Killing, along with the late Stieg Larsson’s hit series of novels starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, jumpstarted the genre known as Scandi-noir. As a television genre at least, these involve making grimly serious crime dramas with a focus on place, both in their fascination with the lush desolation of their landscape and in their interest in in looking at community and social structure, and the way in which a traumatic incident like a major crime leaves a wound that traverses social strata. Think From Hell if it was actually a mystery, or, if you’re hell bent on staying in television, The Wire if it were.

So Chibnall gets to the deeply obvious idea that Britain has remote and desolate landscapes too and that there’s no reason they have to import difficult subtitled Scandinavian series when they can make this stuff on their own. And when I call that obvious, I mean it as a compliment. It’s a ruthlessly well-judged move, born of recognizing a growing trend and getting on board quickly and decisively.…

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The Future of This Site

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Hey all. It’s not the Broadchurch post. Sorry. That’ll go up tomorrow. I need to use the big Monday post for something else this week. Because there’s a chance that when the Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum ends I’m going to retire as a blogger. I don’t really want to do this, but there’s some things that have to happen for me to be confident that I can avoid it. Most of them involve the Patreon going significantly higher than it currently is. Like, to around $600 a post. I’ll explain the details below.

Three years ago, when Jill and I moved to Ithaca, she took a significant pay cut to do it, and in order to make the finances work I had to take up a part time job. I haven’t made a big fuss out of this because I enjoy some measure of privacy, but it’s been the big reason why my output over the last few years has been a bit sporadic. It’s why I’ve struggled at getting new Eruditoroum volumes out (or indeed revisions of the old ones), writing new Last War in Albion, or really doing anything that isn’t the weekly blog: because I literally have about 30 hours less a week to do it all in. I had hoped that I could make that balance work better, but I clearly can’t. And I’m coming towards a point where I might have to choose between trying to go back to writing full time and getting my output back towards where I can do weird projects like Neoreaction a Basilisk and get more books out or taking a full-time position somewhere and dramatically paring back my writing. As in, I’ve put an application for a full-time position at the place I’m working, and as it stands if I get it would give serious thought to taking it.

If that hapened, I would probably choose to focus on the weird side projects. I’d put books out occasionally and step back from blogging. The weekly grind makes money and is fun, but if I can only do one sort of thing it’s going to be the big ambitious stuff that takes more than a week to write. But I really don’t want to do that. I have ADHD (wow, this post is just full of confessions I’ve avoided making), and frankly a 9-5 job is really bad for my mental health. Writing is good for my mental health, and more fulfilling to boot. I really want to make wriitng work as a career. But to do that, it needs to pay more. About $15,000 a year more, specifically. Some of that can be achieved through book sales and Kickstarters. If I went back to writing full time I could commit to a book a year, and with it a Kickstarter a year. But the easiest route to that is via the Patreon, hence the $600 goal, which would make about $10k a year more for me and leave me confident I could get the rest from other sources and thus disinclined to take an a different job.…

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In Search of Peter Pan

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In Search of Peter Pan
Tour of Life

In recent entries, we’ve addressed that Lionheart is a heavily recycled album. Pressed for time to read an album after months of promoting The Kick Inside, Bush did the sane thing and salvaged songs she’d already written. The result is largely to the album’s detriment, with the overall sound being a step backwards from The Kick Inside’s iconoclasm. Yet the overall retro feel makes Lionheart an interesting album in its own right, with a relative lack of confidence which in some ways makes it more compelling than its predecessor. Lionheart retreats often to the recesses of childhood and theater in the face of worldly adult duties. It’s an album constructed from a terror of being thrust onto the world stage and working in narrower confines than one was allowed in adolescence. Worse, it’s being asked to fall back to keep yourself afloat. Imagine if you had to submit your associate’s degree essays for an undergraduate program, and you have something akin to this album.

Resultingly, Lionheart is apprehensive and often lyrically tense. “In Search of Peter Pan,” an odd track loved more by Björk than the general public, is rife with tension. It’s one of the more shapeless songs on Lionheart, starting the verse with a Bushian piano sweep, and moving into a clunky “they took the GAME/right out of it” section underscored by David Paton’s thudding bass, which awkwardly segues into Bush’s ebullient declaration of “I will be/AN ASTRONAUT and find Peter Pan.” It’s an awkward song that consists more of segments of melody than a consistently hummable piece of music. Yet it’s hard to say this isn’t a compelling piece of work. The creeping synthy parts under “she makes me sad” are hair-raising, and Bush’s harmonic vocals on “second star on the right/straight on ‘til morning” are genuinely beautiful. Whatever musical stage “In Search of Peter Pan” places its story on, it’s one with a sense of dramatic juxtaposition, however flawed it is.

Of course we have to talk about the song’s titular character. Peter Pan is effectively popular culture’s favorite anthropomorphization of adolescence. As he will never grow up, he embodies childhood as an endless state which actively revolts against growing up. Given that Bush had been writing fairly adolescent songs not too far back, it’s clear to see why she’d use Pan as a touchstone. Yet her path differs from Pan’s: in the chorus, she declares her desire to grow up and “find Peter Pan” (perhaps as some kind of star sailor) and escape from the trap of adult life. The departure from Peter Pan is that Bush states that she will become an adult instead of just flying to Neverland. Part of being an adult to Bush is being able to enjoy childlike things. More pertinently, as a child you believe you will hold onto childish things forever, and as an adult she holds onto this belief. The culture of children is an important part of Bush’s ethos — it presents an alternative to the tedium of adulthood.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 14 – The Red Pill and YouTube

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This week, Jack returns and Daniel tells him all about the infamous Red Pill and YouTube as a pipeline into right-wing extremism.  A wide-ranging chat that gets into issues like platforming, debating the right, etc.

Warnings apply, as ever.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG at iTunes

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Show Notes:

Austrian authorities raid far-right group over alleged links to Christchurch shooter

Kushner, Inc

White Nationalists Adopt Clowns as Their Next Racist Symbol

The Matrix, Red Pill or Blue Pill

2 Dads TV: Take Back Our Future

Faraday Speaks: My Descent into the Alt-Right Pipeline

YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes

Trainswreckstv debate, Destiny, Nick Fuentes, Hasanabi, Sargon of Akkad

Welcome to Youtube “Bloodsports.”

Sargon of Akkad Can’t Read (Sean video)

Sargon’s Petition: A Measured Response (Hbomberguy video)

The Red Pill is a CULT (NonCompete video)

The Red Pill: The Strange Art of Men’s Rights Activism, Part1, Part 2 (Big Joel video)

 …

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Outside the Government: The Final Problem

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It’s January 15th, 2017. Clean Bandit have been knocked off of number one by the dawn of the Sheeraning, as Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and “Castle on the Hill” debut at number one and two respectively, heralds of his forthcoming album that will, on its release in mid-March, lead to Sheeran occupying 14 of the top 15 slots in an absolutely unprecedented (and before the streaming era impossible ) turn of events. JP Cooper, Starley, and Jax Jones featuring Raye also chart.

In news, the Justice Department concludes its lengthy investigation of the Chicago Police Department and concludes that, yeah, they’re really bad. Trump gives his first post-election press conference and mostly attacks the press. Much of the London Underground is shut down due to a strike. Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, resigns, sparking the collapse of the power-sharing government. And the Playboy Mansion goes up for sale.

On television, meanwhile, Sherlock reaches its presumptive end with The Final Problem. The central and defining mechanic of Sherlock is as it has always been: a sense of unrelenting, propulsive motion. It’s just that with The Final Problem this motion is not aimed anywhere. The result is like a rocket pointed sideways—undoubtedly spectacular, but still just an exploded mess. Nothing follows from this. How could it? The manic enthusiasm and gusto with which The Final Problem runs in circles does not change the fact that it remains essentially stationary. The sheer quantity of nothing that happens here does not magically transmute into something. 

And so one is left with little to do but that laziest of cheap thrills in criticism: the brutal inventory of faults and failures in a crappy piece of media. Call it a craven attempt to someday get Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to call me while I’m playing video games, but The Final Problem is garbage and here’s why.

The first and biggest problem, from which most though by no means all of the others extend, is Eurus. Or, rather, it’s the degree to which all of the emotional weight that Eurus supposed to conjure is unearned, existing more as an assertion of importance than as anything substantive. Eurus is one of the most over the top premises the show has ever tried to sell—that Sherlock Holmes not only has a previously unmentioned sibling, but that he completely blocked her out of his memory. And yet the effort that’s put into that sales job is frightfully minimal. 

More to the point, however, the premise undermines what the story is trying to do. The script requires that the Sherlock/Eurus confrontations at the top of act two and the climax of act three carry emphatic emotional weight. But by loudly insisting on the total lack of existing emotional connection with Eurus that Sherlock can draw upon, Moffat and Gatiss keep her at arm’s length, creating a sense of distance at the precise moment when the story needs intimacy. It’s supposed to feel big and important, but the only thing the script can figure out to do to make it feel that way is to tell us how big and important it is.…

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Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake

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Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake (demo)
Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake
Leo Sayer Show
Tour of Life
Xmas special

Following her six months of promotional excursions through Europe, Kate Bush had four weeks to write songs for a new album. This time crunch put great restraint on Bush, and as a result she only wrote three truly brand new songs. Shortly afterwards, Bush spent ten weeks at Superbear Studios in Nice, France, recording her only album to feel like it was made under time constraints. Accordingly, Lionheart is inferior to The Kick Inside: it lacks the “new artist” thrill of that album and the preparedness that is a trademark of Bush’s other albums. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating collection of ten songs in its own right, and deserves more attention than the critical consensus has given to it.

As we’ve mentioned, Lionheart is mostly leftovers, scraps of The Kick Inside and the Phoenix demos reheated in a French studio. Yet for all that gets made of its leftovers status, Lionheart showcases a drastic tonal shift from The Kick Inside. It’s a much queasier album, with less assurance that the power of youth and precociousness will save the day. If The Kick Inside is Bush’s world-conquering single, Lionheart is opening night. It’s an album full of anxiety and stage fright, a fear of being seen and retreating into the dark. Yet it’s also full of compromises, with songs unsure of whether they want to be on The Kick Inside or Lionheart. The ridiculously titled “Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake” is one such song, initially recorded for The Kick Inside and rightfully set aside.

It’s hard to imagine The Kick Inside functioning with “Heartbrake,” which is more blatantly goofy than anything on that album. In the first verse, Bush has a mental breakdown on a motorway expressed through a series of car puns: “breaking down,” “stuck in low gear,” “fears of the skidding wheels.” It’s a vague emotional spiral, construed as a barrage of automotive verbiage. A character called Emma has been left high and dry by someone called Georgie, and responds to this loss by losing her shit on the road. Fittingly enough for this premise, “Heartbrake” is a melodically bizarre machine, moving from a tingling piano-led intro to kookiness, eventually landing on a bawdy, brass-accompanied shoutfest of a chorus (“don’t put your BLUES where your SHOES should be!”). Yet “Heartbrake” is so noisy it obscures whatever point it attempts to make. Additionally, it’s too undisciplined for its volume to even work, becoming white noise rather than grabbing attention with spectacle. The thematic dubiousness of Lionheart extends to the album’s quality, and the it suffers as a result.

Already we have a mediocre song on Lionheart. This isn’t particularly indicative of anything — The Kick Inside works in spite of “Room for the Life.” But Kate Bush recording a song that’s straightforwardly not very good isn’t an especially interesting event in itself. It’s more interesting to ask what Bush fails at.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 13 – Gavin McInnes and The Proud Boys (with guest Samantha Kutner)

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Special episode this week. Daniel has a special guest, Samantha Kutner, self-described ‘Proud Boy whisperer’ to talk about Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys.  (Jack gets out of the way to let the grown-ups talk.)

Warnings apply, as always.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG at iTunes

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Show Notes:

Things Gavin McInnes has Written for Taki Mag

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_west_is_history_gavin_mcinnes/

Pretending to Care About Nazis

A Dozen Unlikely Assholes

The Importance of Hatred

The Importance of Hatred

Storm Troopers

Wonder Woman Makes You Wonder About Women

Gavin McInnes citing the ’14 words’ (with “western” replacing “white”)

 

Proud Boys as a Radicalization Vector (His Threats are echoed in articles below)

https://officialproudboys.com/proud-boys/fighting-media-academics/  

https://notvice.com/gavin-white-supremacy-article-agreement-page-160a4b5c9037  

Islamberg Conspiracy Theory
https://twitter.com/jjmacnab/status/1105884338174881792  

Proud Boys Articles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/inside-miami-alt-right-and-proud-boys-chapter-10945821

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-proud-boys-became-roger-stones-personal-army-6

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What You Can Do

Get Involved With Light Upon Light & CTRL-ALT-DEL-HATE Campaign
https://www.gofundme.com/light-upon-light

Support the Development of the Proud Boys Incident Map and Dashboard https://www.patreon.com/ashkenaz89

Proud Boys Incident Map
https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1051237360338259969

Defector Narrative Project
https://www.patreon.com/posts/proud-of-your-on-25219991

Fash Fatigue Resources

https://medium.com/@ashkenaz89/introducing-the-fash-fatigue-chronicles-34b80c679698

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Samantha Kutner Patreon

SK Medium article on Roger Stone / Proud Boys

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Twitter handles of people doing the work

@askenaz89

@notcolloquial

@_Shan_Martinez_

@_JesseMorton

@lighttuponlight

 …

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Outside the Government: The Lying Detective

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CW: Discussions of Jimmy Savile and sexual assault.

It’s January 8th, 2017. Clean Bandit remain at number one, while Zara Larsson, Little Mix, Neiked, and Louis Tomlinson & Steve Aoki also chart. In news, the British Red Cross declares there to be a humanitarian crisis in England’s NHS hospitals, and the US Intelligence Community releases the results of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. On television, meanwhile, Sherlock’s fourth and potentially final season reaches its hump episode, which this time around is the one written by Steven Moffat.

Faced with an impossible task, Moffat took the obvious approach and failed. The Lying Detective does not fix the stumbling fourth season of Sherlock. Indeed, its efforts to do so are by and large its biggest problems, a point we will get to in good time. But I’m still coming off of two months of talking about why Class failed every week, and my next two posts are the finale and Broadchurch, so let’s put off that perspective for as long as we can and see what else we can do here.

After all, this is the first time Moffat has opted to give himself the middle episode. These have always vexed Sherlock to an extent, featuring so far their single worst episode, a low-stakes adaptation of a Doyle classic, and an ostentatious bit of comedy fluff. We’ve even talked, albeit a long time ago, about the way in which the three episode seasons of Sherlock and its own tendency towards constant event means that the middle episode, the only one not to be a premiere or a finale, is an inherent challenge. And so finally they think to have Moffat do one in the manner of Listen, a lower stakes “prove he can write” episode.

Well, for Sherlock at least. Sherlock never quite goes low budget, but this one largely avoids action scenes and elaborate set pieces. Mostly it functions by putting Toby Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch in a room and letting them do stuff. And there’s no time for an episode that doesn’t have at least some big arc responsibilities, and so this has to repair John and Sherlock’s relationship off the back of Mary’s death, give John a satisfying grieving arc, and do the Eurus reveal. Then again, the “prove he can write” pieces include Heaven Sent as well as Listen, so it’s not quite that these inherently have to be the quiet ones.

Nevertheless, at its heart what we have here is the long overdue return of Moffat writing out of anger. Last time we saw this was, fittingly, His Last Vow, where Moffat relished creating a truly nasty villain out of the detritus of current events and then saying exactly what he thought should be done with him. Here he repeats the trick. Ultimately, The Lying Detective is an exercise in monster design. Except instead of child-friendly creepiness, Moffat is depicting moral depravity. For this, unsurprisingly, he turns to Jimmy Savile.…

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The Japan Trip (She’s Leaving Home, The Long & Winding Road, Let It Be)

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Following the release of The Kick Inside, Kate Bush undertook an astonishingly busy 6-month promotional campaign. In addition to topping charts and appearing on what seemed like every TV program in the UK, Bush did an extensive amount of traveling, visiting West Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, France, the United States, Canada, and Japan. One could unpack any one of these tips individually, but they mostly consist of Bush performing songs from The Kick Inside. As Dreams of Orgonon is a song-by-song blog, we analyze episodes in Kate Bush’s career through the lenses of new songs as they come. Bush’s promotional visit to Japan in June of 1978 not only offers a couple songs we haven’t heard her sing before, even if they are covers, but it gives a chance to see what Kate Bush does when she’s not doing Kate Bush things.

You see, Kate Bush wasn’t in control of her environment. She didn’t have her own band, gigs she planned, and she was undertaking activities she wouldn’t do again until the Eighties and Nineties (we will cover Let It Be on this blog again). But even more paramount to the uniqueness of Bush’s Japan trip is the firsts it uncovers: it is the first time Bush performs to a major audience.

On the 18th of June, 1978, Kate Bush performed “Moving” to an audience of 11,000 people at the Nippon Budokan for the 7th Tokyo Music Festival. This is just the number of people watching who were present, however. About 33 million people watched Bush on TV, a staggeringly large number. Japan and its huge physical music market had its eyes on Bush, and she was suitably terrified. For all that the lead track status of “Moving” makes it a fitting opening number for a performance, Bush is visibly terrified while singing this song, her voice wavering as a band she’s never met before coming to Japan played her music.

The entirety of the trip consists of Bush doing not-very-Kate-Bush things, and she’s visibly ill at ease with this. A studio artist with no tour experience was going to be out of sorts performing to thousands of people 9 and a half thousand kilometers away from home. Yet Bush was clearly set on getting as much done in a short period of time as she could. She respected Japanese cultural norms, attending a Shinto shrine and (apparently) conducting herself with characteristic etiquette. Sadly few details about the shrine visit are known, as history has generally not recorded Bush’s time in Japan well.

Bush’s relationship with Japan is slightly vexed. She’s… well, Bush is a bit rough on the issue of cultural appropriation. The cover of The Kick Inside is famously orientalist, and we’ll have lots to talk about when we talk about The Dreaming. Bush certainly has respect for other cultures, but takes the European artist’s path of lifting cultural touchstones rather than delicately conversing with their creators — indeed, she slightly flubs her one English TV interview discussing Japan when she refers to Japanese people as “not saying how they feel.”…

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