Eruditorum Press

March 22, 2019

In “Strange Phenomena,” we have another statement of intent from Kate Bush. Unlike most of Bush’s songs, it’s a purely conceptual rather than narrative work. “Strange Phenomena” is populated by the esoteric and the inconclusive, dwelling in the liminal spaces of everyday life and exploring its unexplained coincidences. It nods to the physical and the supernatural in equal turn, suggesting the two aren’t separate entities but different compartments of life, in league with one another, conspiring to make life exciting. In short, it’s everything The Kick Inside takes stock in and values.

“Strange Phenomena” famously begins with an arpeggiating (A/F) ode to menstruation, “the phase of the moon when people tune in.” In her typical fashion, Kate Bush refers to menstruation as “the punctual blues,” suggesting both a musical quality and a natural rhythm to this particular bodily function (she also refers to it as something “every girl” knows about, but in her defense trans issues were not a topic of national conversation in 1978). Throughout The Kick Inside, Bush has made a case that all functions of the body are a thing of beauty, whether those be love-making or flying. With the opening of “Strange Phenomena,” Bush has extended her invitation of bodily functions into the fold beyond the pleasurable or fanciful and to parts of life women and other menstruating individuals aren’t encouraged to discuss in everyday life. Even more intriguing is how Bush frames menstruation as an almost musical act. In addition to her quasi-musical coinage of “the punctual blues,” she calls a period the phase “where people tune in.” To be sure, menstruating a subject people discuss in private, bringing discomfort to cisgender women and often triggering severe bouts of dysphoria in transgender men. It’s an aspect of life that unites lots of people in their unease by widespread patterns and, more importantly, rhythms of nature. Bush dignifies menstruating by making it a musical process. If there’s a central idea to The Kick Inside, it’s that everything is music.

This exercise of defining musicality as a unifying force isn’t confined to physical planes in “Strange Phenomena.” Bush described the song as being “about the coincidences that happen to all of us all of the time. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a friend who — totally unprompted — will begin talking about that person.” She more or less paraphrases this in the song, referring to “a day of coincidence with the radio.” Texts are a source of coincidence as well, such as when “you pick up a paper/you read a name/you go out/it turns up again and again.” There’s a sense Bush is being haunted by text, that the spoken word will accompany her wherever she goes. This is where Bush differs most radically from, say, Burroughs or Foucault, in that this constant presence of language and strangeness is a comfort to her, something to tip her hat to.…

March 20, 2019

TARDIS Data Core Needs to Cut the Transphobic Bullshit

Elizabeth Sandifer 43

The TARDIS Data Core has never been a great site. This ranges from its extraordinarily dubious content decisions such as individually listing every floor of the spaceship in World Enough and TIme to be mentioned in the episode to its outright pernicious decisions like having pages for “rape” and for individual racial slurs that exist to document every single case across all of Doctor Who where they have come up. And this badness has been known to take an overtly queerphobic tinge, such as the decision to jettison categories listing LGBTQ characters in Doctor Who because, and I quote, “We write articles in the past tense from an ‘end of the universe’ POV. The Category:LGBT individuals, makes no sense for me as it’s a very 20th to early 21st century view point” and “If the concept of LGBT existed in the DW universe we’d have a page for it, and we don’t, cause it’s really not something that’s given a lot of thought as a defined concept.” (It’s not clear why categories such as “human secretaries,” “victims of the bubonic plague,” and of course “gamers” are more relevant at the end of the universe.) And of course there’s the incredible epic saga of the Zygon penis.

Nevertheless, recent events are bad even by their standards. An editor has recently been doing the very good and useful work of cleaning up mentions of trans people’s deadnames across the project. Although there are a handful of cases where it is necessary to disclose a trans person’s deadname, it’s an exceptionally short list. Deadnames are both deeply inessential information and information that it does harm to disclose. This is even true, to be clear, for cases where the deadname is widely and publicly known. I’m under no illusions that mine is remotely a secret; it’s still distressing to hear it. There re a few cases where the information might be necessary. But even in those, slowing down and applying some creative thinking can usually find an adequate alternative. (For instance, in the most justifiable case—an academic citation to something published under a deadname—one can easily just use the correct name and append a parenthetical note “published under a different name,” indicating that whoever wants to go looking for this article might want to search by title instead of author.)

Anyway. Because there is absolutely no reason for a public wiki to be using people’s deadnames, an editor went through and did the sensible thing, namely removing them all. These edits got reverted, and then, for good measure, the editor who reverted them, Shambala108, blocked the editor who made the changes for a stunningly long six months, despite the fact that the feud had not yet risen to the definition of an edit war and the fact that Shambala108 had been involved in the feud. Then, for good measure, all of their edits were reverted and all pages involving trans people were locked so that nobody could remove the deadnames anywhere on the wiki.

When another editor attempted to follow up on this decision, they got the reply shown to the right here.…

March 20, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 11 – The Christchurch Massacre and Leaderless Resistance

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 4

In this episode we touch on the promised topic of the mainstreamers vs the vanguardists in the far-right movement, but only in the course of covering topical events.

These include the firing of the ‘Nazi EMT’ Alex McNabb, and the recently released tapes of disgusting comments by Fox News’s pet white nationalist con-man Tucker Carlson.

But, most particularly, of course, we talk about the recent ghastly massacre at Christchurch, New Zealand.

Daniel provides really vital insights in this episode into the way such murderous terrorist attacks by fascists – of which the Christchurch attack is just the latest of many – stem from a conscious organisational strategy within the far right called ‘leaderless resistance’. Daniel explains this and where it comes from, its meaning within the movement, etc, going into the infamous racist novel The Turner Diaries and ‘The Order’, and so on. He also goes into the murderer’s ‘manifesto’, the meme-drenched nature of his chan board-based fascism, and describes the contents of his livestream broadcast. We touch on the killer’s ‘Balkan Nationalism’ and his ostensible ecological concerns.

Needless to say, some of this is upsetting listening.

Download here.

(Sorry for the delay but, to be honest, this one was a bit distressing to edit.)

Catch us on iTunes.

We recently got mentioned in a web article by David Gerard for Foreign Policy magazine about the far-right and crypto currency, for which Daniel was interviewed. We were also recommended on the AV Club, thanks to Anthony Herrera.

Show Notes:

Bring the War Home

Blood and Politics

McNabb fired

“In Unearthed Audio, Tucker Carlson Makes Numerous Misogynistic and Perverted Comments”

Madeline Peltz profile at Washington Post

Chip Berlet “When Hate Went Online.” Documents white supremacist BBS networks in 1984 or 1985.

Louis Beam at the SPLC

Louis Beam: Leaderless Resistance. (His site.)

Robert Jay Mathews at Wikipedia

‘The Order’ at Wikipedia

Robert Evans at Bellingcat: “Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre”

“In Brenton Harrison Tarrant’s Australian hometown, his relatives remember violent video games, trouble with women”

“‘You Are Safe Now’: Moments of Heroism in Christchurch Massacre”

“New Zealand Mosque Gunman Inspired by Balkan Nationalists.”

On the Moynihan Report

Part 3 of Behind the Bastards podcast series on George Lincoln Rockwell, the father of modern American fascism, focusing on his legacy. Good stuff. Intersects with our topics this week.

Excellent new video from Some More News on Tucker Carlson, covering his recent “How is Diversity Our Strength?” rhetoric.

Sean debunks Lauren Southern and her puffing of the ‘Great Replacement’ racist conspiracy theory

…

March 18, 2019

It Could Be The End of the World, But One Thing At a Time (The Return of Doctor Mysterio)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 42

Sure, yes, you feel pain, but tell me… do you bleed?

It’s December 25th, 2016. Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye” remains at number one, while Rag ‘n Bone Man, Little Mix, Zara Larsson, and the annual re-charting of Mariah Carey also chart. In news since Class got lost, the CIA reported to Congress that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, which President-elect Trump described as “ridiculous,” the Obama administration allowed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory to pass, and a riot broke out in a Birmingham prison, the worst British prison riot since the Thatcher era.

On television, meanwhile, for the first time in a year, Doctor Who. When this aired at the brutal end of 2016, suspended between Carrie Fisher’s heart attack and her death and in the immediate wake of George Michael’s, it felt like a baffling way to bring the show back after its longest gap between episodes since Rose. Two years and change later, it feels like a baffling artifact from another world. At its heart, it features Moffat making a well-earned return to autopilot. He will not phone it in for the entirety of Series 10, mercifully, but he is manifestly out of the weird, frenzied renaissance that launched with The Day of the Doctor. The ambitions of The Return of Doctor Mysterio are set firmly at “be an entertaining piece of fluff for an hour and then air a trailer for the upcoming series.” This is accomplished, inasmuch as that matters to us.

What is interesting is the utter batshit craziness of the method by which this relatively banal task is accomplished. On paper, the underlying concept of “Doctor Who does superheroes” is straightforward. They’d been the dominant genre of filmmaking for years, and were a genre Doctor Who had not meaningfully engaged with on television in forty-eight years. What that description of the concept fails to account for, however, is that Steven Moffat does not actually have the slightest interest in just dropping the Doctor into a superhero film.

There is a standard plot structure that animates most superhero films (and indeed most contemporary films in general, in the same way that Campbell provided a satisfying straitjacket to another generation) derived from Blake Snyder’s screenwriting guide Save the Cat. Extensive breakdowns of it are easy enough to find, but the basic idea is a three act structure where act one consists of a statement of theme and a main character whose life undergoes some upheaval. Act two is the main character living through this upheaval and the story relishing in its premise, ending in things going wrong for the main character. Act three is the main character successfully integrating the theme into their psyche and triumphing against the odds.

Here is what the Save the Cat beats are not. Act one: Flashback setup of one main character’s origin at the hands of the other, followed up by their reuniting later in life to face a common enemy. Act two: Extended farce about secret identities and child rearing.…

March 16, 2019

The Wasted Daughter of the Moon: The Trans Genius of Dave Carter

Elizabeth Sandifer best of el 18

I promised myself I wasn’t going to be the trans girl who wrote some stupid fucking essay about being trans in her first year of public transition. So happy anniversary to me.

The Butterfly Conservatory is very probably the greatest band never to actually play a single note. Instead it exists in hypothetical and implication; an almost that never quite resolves into being. A band under that name played a pair of songs at the 2012 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival—a folk supergroup consisting of Tracy Grammer and a phalanx of other musicians to honor the ten year anniversary of the sudden passing of her musical partner, Dave Carter. But this is not The Butterfly Conservatory—merely a marker of what could have been. The real Butterfly Conservatory would have been Grammer along with a woman who’s never going to have a name—the woman Dave Carter was in the act of becoming when she died.

Of course, this divide is complex and problematic. Transition does not straightforwardly make you a different person. And yet at times the divide between before and after is at times a stark chasm. An honest accounting of transition requires that we embrace a both/and approach. For instance, when I remember my adolescence I can both remember the leering and toxic sense of sexual entitlement of a sixteen-year-old boy and the sense of rapturous and uncanny possibility of a sixteen-year-old girl listening to Ani DiFranco’s “Untouchable Face” for the first time and getting to the chorus. I am both—a boy named Phil who was, but is no longer (even as a person who is self-evidently the same person as him exists) and a girl named Elizabeth who always was, but only just became. The trans scholar Grace Lavery has written movingly about this on Twitter, describing how “trans narratology teaches us that neither a singular narrative of becoming, nor the laying out of life as a causal sequence, will do justice to the complexity of trans identification. Trans lives slip and slide, forward and backward in time.”

So instead of The Butterfly Conservatory we have the career of Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, who worked together for five years starting with the release of When I Go (credited as Dave Carter with Tracy Grammer) in 1998 and ending with Carter’s fatal heart attack in 2002, a few months after she started hormones. By this time they had released two further albums, Tanglewood Tree and Drum Hat Buddha. The canon has posthumously swelled with two further albums, one recorded prior to Carter’s death, one created by Grammer taking some vocal demos and expanding on them, and two EPs, one a collection of holiday songs recorded across their career, the other releasing a couple more expanded demos. Adding to this body of work is a solo album by Grammer, Flower of Avalon, which consists of her takes on songs that Carter had written but that the duo had not recorded prior to her death.

That Carter and Grammer would have recorded as an entirely new band instead of simply rebranding as _______ Carter and Tracy Grammer speaks to the degree to which Carter, at least, saw this as a disjunct.…

March 14, 2019

Scares Me Silly

Christine Kelley 2

Scares Me Silly

Throughout her career, Kate Bush has retained an unusual level of creative security. Outside of her demo era, there’s not a large number of Bush bootlegs in circulation. There’s no empire of lost Bush songs like there are lost Bob Dylan or Beatles tracks. Fans are mostly left to speculate on tidbits of information one gets about lost Bush songs, such as the Cathy demos’ “Go Now While You Can” and the title track of Never for Ever. Following the arc of Bush’s career entails sticking almost entirely to her studio work.

Bush retains a huge amount of creative control over her work. One of the reasons she releases music so slowly is her need to hone her work to be exactly how she wants it. Losing control over her circumstances certainly hasn’t led to her finest albums being created. Perhaps setting her own parameters is an active terror to Bush.

The Kick Inside sessions seem to only have one outtake: “Scares Me Silly,” a bootleg rather than a bonus track from some official release. Listening to it in 2019, it’s not hard to understand why it was never released. “Scares Me Silly” is loopy, particularly in its calypso-esque It’s a ridiculous track, something Elton John might have cut on a drunk night at the Château d’Hérouville. “Scares Me Silly” is loopy, beginning with frantic up-tempo glam rock, moving into a wordy calypso of a pre-chorus (“they try to put me on the tapes begin to spin/I feel a little sick and hope my notes are in”), and slowing down for a poppy chorus, repeatedly declaring “it scares me silly, but it gets me gooooiiiiin’!” There’s no sense Bush is disciplining herself, and the result is firmly outtakes material.

Curiously, the lyrics of “Scares Me Silly” are a pretty straightforward reflection of what kind of song it is. Bush describes a character working in a recording studio for the first time, feeling the anxiety that comes with pop music and how it separates the artist from themselves (“I lick my lips to start the first line/how can this girl be me?”). The prevailing mood is one of giddiness and dizzy nausea, with Bush singing energetically of “vertigo, the need to lose.” Music is a force which carries her away — “I feel a little sick and I hope my notes are in” — to some other place. In “Scares Me Silly” the journey is the focus, and it’s more of a speed trip than an odyssey. Terror and exhilaration often go hand-in-hand for Kate Bush — go back and read my favorite post “Hammer Horror” to see more of that on display. Bush’s melodic experiments, off-beat songwriting, and idiosyncratic vocals all unite to create one major statement: that pushing your limits is fun and worthwhile.

Yet “Scares Me Silly” feels incomplete as an iteration of this thesis. It makes a lot of noise, but it’s not particularly clever, fun, or interesting. It’s too rock ‘n’ roll: all about making the biggest ruckus in the studio, which Bush was never going to do.…

March 13, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 10 – James Allsup and Nick Fuentes

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, Podcasts 1

This time, in a change to our advertised programme, we look at James Allsup and Nick Fuentes.

Warnings Apply, as always

Download here.

And we’re on iTunes.

Show Notes:

Kevin Logan’s video about James Allsup

James Allsup on Youtube

Nick Fuentes on Youtube

SPLC profile James Allsup

Nationalist Review (defunct)

Nationalist Review (even more defunct)

America First Media (defunct but somehow not)

Nick Fuentes

Nick Fuentes/James Allsup split

James Allsup elected Precinct Committee Officer

James Allsup probably no longer a PCO

“Once Allsup’s true political motives became known, some local Republicans distanced themselves from him and sought to remove him from his PCO role. However, one local GOP leader, the chair of a neighboring county’s Republican committee, said Allsup had been “label lynched,” and looked to rehabilitate him in the eyes of locals.

“A compromise was eventually reached by those oppsed to the alt-right activist to effectively render him toothless within the Washington State GOP establishment. In a meeting Saturday, the Whitman County Republican Central Committee ruled it could not remove the Charlottesville marcher’s title because he had been elected to the post. However, the group unanimously voted to end his membership and privileges. Allsup will remain in his PCO post until the body’s next election but without proper affiliation, he has no meaningful power in the committee.”

Nick Fuentes and James Allsup bicker on The Ralph Retort Killstream

Nick Fuentes Clips

Nick Fuentes STUFF LABCOAT IN LOCKER WITH FACTS

James Allsup speaks at Trump Rally

Nick Fuentes CPAC 2019

Nick Fuentes CPAC 2019 (outside)

Nick Fuentes AmRen 2018

Nick Fuentes Speech at Iowa State

Nick Fuentes Epic Thot Patrol

Identity Evropa Discord Leak

James Allsup: “Gender Must Be DESTROYED”

James Allsup: “I was Kicked Out of the GOP?!”

Angrywhitemen.org: “White Nationalists Have Been Quietly Collecting Donations Through a A Livestreaming Site

Metro.us: “Right-wing BU teen won’t return to Boston after attending Charlottesville rally”

2019 Amren speakers lineup

…

March 11, 2019

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Mr. Robot

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, pop between realities 4

A thing we will inevitably have to address is what it looks like for Doctor Who to respond to Trump. Or, in the UK context, Brexit, but let’s go ahead and just use Trump as a metonym for the catastrophic politics that form the backdrop of the Moffat-Chibnall handover. This is, of course, something it is not fair to ask Class to do. It’s not fair to ask most of Series 10 to do it either—Trump’s election happened late in the block where they shot Oxygen and The Eaters of Light, which was in time to work the “too orange” gag into The Pyramid at the End of the World (although more on Trump and that episode when the time comes) but nowhere near early enough for anything in this season to be conceptualized as an intentional response to his Presidency. (His campaign is a different matter.) Even with Brexit, the vote took place four days after filming started—enough to have some impact (we know that Gatiss was considering an explicitly Brexit-themed script), but still fundamentally after the series was well underway. On the whole, Series 10 emerged from the midst of 2016’s turmoil; it is the Chibnall era that exists wholly and cleanly as a post-Trump work.

But of course, cultural response has never been as simple as mere causality. Production dates don’t matter to how something is received in context. As soon as Trump was elected or the Brexit vote was called, popular culture began existing in their wake without any regard for intentionality. And if you want further proof that intentionality is not the be-all and end-all of this, just consider the show we’re looking at today, which immediately seized the crown of the most essental post-Trump television show despite the fact that it’s not until late 2017 that it finally gets around to airing any post-election episodes.

Indeed, it’s worth flashing back to how we began the Capaldi era—with Moffat hemmed in on all sides, his best tricks routinely being incorporated into the larger popular culture. As we’ve discussed, Moffat rose to the occasion, honing himself a late style that wedded his gifts at flash and glitter to a new sense of substance and weight. But no gambit lasts forever. In 2015 you could claim Doctor Who as the best show on television with a reasonably straight face, although Hannibal’s swansong season offered ferocious competition. Still, the high point of Moffat’s career could plausibly fight off any given comer.

In 2016, however, with Doctor Who off the air, a new king was able to emerge. Mr. Robot had been a fresh-faced debut in 2015, but for all its clever trickery it was ultimately bogged down trying to sell a stolen from Fight Club twist in which Mr. Robot, eponymous the revolutionary leader, turns out to be a hallucination on the part of Elliot, the main character. This still led to the most gobsmackingly audacious moment of television that year, when at the end of the episode in which this is revealed (the big twist having been burnt off in a cut to commercial) the show uses a chintzy piano version of The Pixies’ “Where is My Mind” as its exit music.…

March 8, 2019

Feel It

Christine Kelley Dreams of Orgonon, kate bush 4

Feel It
Tour of Life (Stockholm)
Tour of Life (London)

Out of the 13 songs on The Kick Inside, 12 are fairly maximalist in their productions, sporting a few musicians on each track. Even the quieter piano ballads like “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” and “The Kick Inside” are accompanied by orchestras. The result is an album that, while not necessarily carried by its production, measures itself by a standard of heavily produced and instrumentation-based albums.

It’s long been remarked that Kate Bush’s primary instrument is her voice. Even when her melodies are idiosyncratic and sprawling and her albums’ productions demand an audience’s ear, listeners always talk about her voice first. Even an instrumental track like “Night Scented Stock” is guided by Bush’s vocals. Her most recent collection of new songs, 50 Words for Snow, takes a back-to-basics approach of voice-and-piano that Bush started her career with. While the Fairlight will guide Bush towards her best work, there’s hardly a more powerful duo in popular music than Bush and her piano.

“Feel It” is an exceedingly intimate affair, the only song on The Kick Inside to have no session musicians. It’s Bush alone at her piano, saying “no props this time, just hear me play.” “Feel It” is one of the more realist tracks on the album — rather than teaming with mysticism or high concepts, it has a fairly common down-to-earth situation: a one-night stand between two people who don’t know each other very well. “Well, it could be love/or it could be just lust/but it will be fun/it will be wonderful,” sings Bush. It’s a song of pure hedonism, consequence-free and absorbed in the moment.

Notable is how “Feel It” takes The Kick Inside’s approach of youthful attitudes to adult subjects to its zenith. Its tone is secretive, subtextually whispering “be quiet — this is a sacred moment.” It’s relatively low tempo, with the piano guiding the song in a lugubrious, creeping G minor (with unexpected appearances of F minor and B diminished), almost laughing anxiously with an upward turn on “a little nervous laughter.” To hear a young female British singer to sing so frankly about matters like this in the Seventies must have been astonishing at the time. There’s a sense Bush is as nervous as she is giddy to be writing a song like this and putting it out on a major label.

As Zoey Peresman points out, “[Bush] stretches out the word ‘more’ with her inimitable voice for as long as she can, mimicking the sound of a woman in ecstasy.” Bush stresses the sexual nature of the song, punctuating the calls of “feel it” with sharp “ohs,” making it clear how far she’s taking this exercise.

For a Seventies song about love-making, “Feel It” is unusually explicit. Bush equates sex with music, using phrases like “synchronizing rhythm” and “keep on a-tunin’ in.” She marries her skill at crafting melodies to her love of the sensuous with remarkable ease, but adds an extra factor to the mix: bluntness.…

March 6, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 9 – Mike Enoch and ‘TDS’

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 0

This week we delve into the dark pit of deeply pathetic depravity that is Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff and his ‘Daily Shoah’ podcast. Big deals within the ‘alt-right’.

This episode comes with strong content warnings. We relay racial slurs and “unironic exterminationism”. Daniel has been less sparing than usual and Jack has decided not to bleep anything.

Download here.

Here’s IDGS at iTunes and YouTube

TRANSCRIPT

Show Notes:

From last week – NSM taken over by James Stern

The Right Stuff

Andrew Marantz’s New Yorker profile of Enoch, Birth of a White Supremacist

Enoch and David Duke in Charlottesville Unite the Right

TRS on Youtube

Mike Enoch and Sven doxxed

The Pool Party is Closed – Timeline of Alt-Right Meltdown

Genocide: The Inescapable Conclusion