Eruditorum Press

It’s November 19^th, 2016. Clean Bandit has debuted at number one with “Rockabye,” while Rae Sremmurd, Bruno Mars, James Arthur, and the Weeknd also chart. In news, the British Medical Journal calls for the legalization of drugs while Donald Trump agrees to pay $25m in settlements over Trump University.

On television, meanwhile, Class does its bottle episode. As with “Nightvisiting,” there is a sense of “really, already?” to this. The bottle episode is a classic contrivance. And while better shows than Class have gotten to them as soon as their third stories, they are generally a sign that something has gone oddly somewhere else in the season. In this case the culprit is fairly obvious: this is a Quill-free episode done on the cheap. Next week we have a Quill-only episode that’s blatantly where the money has gone.

If this sounds familiar, it’s presumably because you’ve watched Doctor Who and remember Russell T Davies tossing David Tennant into a cheap bottle episode he wrote in basically two days so that he could have Catherine Tate and Billie Piper do a costly greatest hits tour of his era the week after. Indeed, the basic setup, with its incorporeal monster and ratcheting internal tensions, owes a pretty obvious debt to Midnight. And the other obvious source for an episode in which people are trapped somewhere and being made to confess is, of course, Heaven Sent, which lacks the budget motivations of a proper bottle episode but is still working in the same general mode.

A peculiarity of bottle episodes is that, despite generally being born of desperation, they’re also historically pretty good. This is easy enough to explain: countless artists across media have discovered the creatively liberating power of constraints. And so it is not a surprise that when Class both takes on this structure and starts pilfering the show it’s a spinoff of instead of deciding that its main peers are American shows that mostly air on the CW, things improve above the baseline.

This has a satisfyingly propulsive structure over its forty-five minutes. A weird disaster traps everyone in a classroom with a glowing rock that both compels the revelation of unpleasant truths and advances the plot when it’s picked up. One by one the characters pick it up. Wacky hijinks ensue. This is strong enough that a variety of small contrivances like “making everybody angry is an arbitrary and slightly hackish escalator,” “the explanation of what’s happening here only narrowly makes sense,” and “there’s not actually a clear reason why nobody can pick up the rock more than once” don’t really interfere with proceedings to any meaningful extent. This works, and does so with a breezy confidence that borders on swagger; something that Class generally comes nowhere near mustering.

At the heart of its success, and something that has consistently been rescuing Patrick Ness from peril, is that he really is quite good at writing adolescence. Characters fuck up in fundamentally understandable ways here.…

February 15, 2019

James and the Cold Gun

Christine Kelley Dreams of Orgonon, kate bush 0

James and the Cold Gun
Hammersmith Odeon

I’ve recently set up a Patreon, which has gotten off to a good start with 14 Patrons. If you enjoy my work, consider pitching me some money over there. My financial situation is strained to say the least, and every bit helps. Plus you might get to read some writing you’ll enjoy. In the meantime, here’s “James and the Cold Gun.”

A ragtag group of session musicians is enveloped in an infernal red backlight, which makes good on its promise to swallow the entire stage. A cowgirl from some dark dimension swaggers onstage, posing in a black and gold robe for the presumably dumbfounded audience. For close to nine minutes, the cowgirl sweeps across the stage, wailing over the cacophony of her band and illustrating her lyrics with suitably on-the-nose gestures. It culminates, as any Chekov-honoring song featuring “gun” in the title does, with a murder, as the cowgirl blasts the life out of an adversary, each gunshot met beat-for-beat by accompanying drums. Contorting her body in a freakish victory dance, the cowgirl ends the song lifting a rifle above her head in triumph, as her audience roars its approval.

“James and the Cold Gun” is The Kick Inside’s showstopping number, Bush’s rockiest song. It features American western imagery at length (“it’s not there in the GIN/that makes you laugh long and loud”), guitars dominating the band, and Duncan Mackay’s organ weeping like it’s in the mix on a Dylan record. This potential international crossover appeal is probably why it was EMI’s original pick for Bush’s debut single until Bush vetoed these plans. It’s easy to see the pop promise EMI found in “James”: it’s closer to the rock that was in the charts. The song was popular among the pub-frequenting audiences of the KT Bush Band. Energetically, it’s closer to chart-topping hard rock acts like Queen than Bush’s courtship of more intricately formalist rock such as Genesis.

We may as well talk about Genesis, who were accustomed to giving the sort of performances Bush would stage for “James and the Cold Gun.” Prog rock’s affinity for jams and playing a single track at great length would manifest in astonishingly long improvs onstage. Peter Gabriel would don make-up and extravagant costumes and give a literary voice to the mirage of sound. It comes as no surprise this approach bears similarities to Bush’s stageshow. While not directly name-checked as an influence on Bush’s tour, Gabriel would come to play a part in her career soon enough.

There is another distinctive element of Genesis that Bush’s work inherits: Englishness. While the predominant trend in British rock was to pluck from American music to make it big, Genesis came from a school of art that looked to its homeland for its stories. There’s a pastoral quality to much of their music that’s more at home in a tradition with As You Like It than The Great Gatsby. English land and politics come into Gabriel-era Genesis songs quite often, and Bush’s nurturing relationship with British mythos bears similarities to this approach (which will come to a crescendo in “O England My Lionheart”).…

February 13, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 6 – Christopher ‘the Crying Nazi’ Cantwell, Part 2

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 0

The second part of our discussion about the ‘Crying Nazi’

Download here.

Warnings apply, as always.

Reminder: we’re on iTunes and YouTube

Show Notes:

See last episode’s notes

Also…

Erik Striker on Gab

Cantwell posts Bowlcut meme

Antifa Hotline

Cantwell trying to get into selling cryptocurrency?

Cantwell dating website prank calls

Tucker Carlson: “The American Dream is Dying”

Audio from 13 year old who called RA

Cantwell plays Tucker than reads from Mein Kampf
…

February 11, 2019

Outside the Government: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart/Brave-ish Heart

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, class, outside the government 16

It’s November 5^th, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out To My Ex.” James Arthur, Clean Bandit, Bruno Mars, and Drake also chart. Everything is fine. The Chicago Cubs have won the World Series for the first time in over a century. US Presidential election is in three days and Hillary Clinton is obviously going to win. Then, three days later, she doesn’t. Clean Bandit seizes the number one spot, Maroon 5 and Kendrick Lamar enter the top ten, and the other half of Class’s only two-part story airs

Let’s start with the basic structural oddity: a midseason two-parter in an eight episode season. This means that there’s never really a sense of momentum in the show. Its apparent initial pattern of being a monster-of-the-week show that picks a focus character each week is discarded. The subsequent structure of the next two episodes, in which the cast is split to do a bottle episode and an expensive episode that takes place at the same time, is too singular to establish a new pattern. This could be a compelling gambit of a show that has no pattern and is constantly surprising the viewer, but as we’ve seen, Class just isn’t that show; its source material is all about the repetition of patterns, and indeed the ritualized reiteration of their basic structure is part and parcel of their fun. Class instead blows up its patterns before it’s really established them, and ends up feeling like a dilettante, flitting from structure to structure without ever honing one to the point where it shows off its full potential.

The obvious solution to this would have been to rethink the arc of this, either splitting the Shadow Kin plot over two prospective seasons so that the big two-parter comes at the end of the season or reducing this middle beat to a single episode. Certainly the underlying structure of this, with its parallel crises and perpetually escalating stakes, is well-suited to a finale. (Indeed, this is more coherently imagined finale than “The Lost” will end up being.) This would have forced the show to build and use its status quo for a few more episodes, and then allowed for enough of a shift following this as Quill is let off her leash. The biggest problem is that you’d lose the next episode in this structure, as it’s unimaginable as a season premiere, and of course that the show had flopped by its second episode and was never going to get a second season anyway. Well, that and it would (assuming the show continued to build to the same basic plot beats and just took longer to get there) involve spending two seasons on the Shadow Kin.

Indeed, this is the even larger problem with a midseason two-parter in the course of an eight episode season: it leaves the show stranded with four episodes about the fucking Shadow Kin. We talked back in “For Tonight We Might Die” about the basic pointlessness of creating a monster that’s “the Vashta Nerada only stompy.”…

February 8, 2019

L’Amour Looks Something Like You

Christine Kelley Dreams of Orgonon, kate bush 1

Demo
Album version
Tour of Life (Paris)

1978 was the year of Kate Bush both in terms of her career narrative and the press’s fixation on her. The fansite Gaffaweb records no less than 34 print interviews with Bush from that year alone. It was Bush’s most prolific year for press coverage: the press latched onto every detail they could find about her, as it does, and what couldn’t be directly evidenced was inferred. So Bush was treated like any other “eccentric” media sensation: an object of spectacle having more to do with her perceived ostentatiousness than her actual work.

There are strongly gendered dynamics at play in this. Read Bush’s press around the time and you’ll find all the standard tropes in journalism about women: comparisons to other female artists (Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, and Lyndsey de Paul are frequent points of nonsensical comparison), calling Bush a “hippie girl,” and the inevitable objectification of Bush herself (there’s more than one article in which Bush is made the target of a journalist’s foot fetish). The nadir of this fixation came when a promotional photo of Bush taken by rock photographer Gered Mankowitz achieved ubiquity. The infamous picture stages Kate Bush in a pink leotard, hands on hips and gazing soulfully into the camera. It’s a striking image. It also clearly shows one of Bush’s nipples. PR latched onto it, prioritizing it in Bush’s promotional campaign. The Mankowitz photo swiftly became an iconic Kate Bush image, appearing on billboards and public transport across London.

It’s far from a stretch to say nipples were the reason this picture showed up everywhere (the Super Bowl has certainly shown women’s nipples are more of a cultural obsession than men’s nipples). Bush was aware of this, and she was characteristically dismissive of the public’s voyeurism: “I suppose the poster is reasonably sexy just ‘cos you can see my tits, but I think the vibe from my face is there… I think that poster projects a mood.”

Bush’s music has a relationship with sexuality not fought on terms of the media. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to operate on any terms except her own. During her popular heyday, Bush separated herself from women’s lib movements, dismissing feminism as an unappealing “concept” which conjured up images of “butch lesbians” (she hasn’t apologized for this comment, although in recent years she’s finally accepted the feminist label with grace). It’s rare for Bush to explicitly address most arenas of politics in her songs: when she does, it’s either in the form of well-meaning but ultimately colonialist attempts at egalitarianism such as “The Dreaming” and “Pull Out the Pin,” or vapid joke songs like “Ken.” On the other hand, outings with gender politics abound in her songs, in both style and content.

“L’Amour Looks Something Like You” is more useful as an example of Bush’s tendencies in the early part of her career than a particularly good song in its own right. It’s an early song from the Kick Inside sessions which is closer to a standard love ballad than something like “Wuthering Heights” or “The Man with the Child in His Eyes.”…

February 6, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 5 – Christopher ‘The Crying Nazi’ Cantwell, Part 1

Jack Graham alt-right, fascism, i dont speak german, podcast, racism 0

In this episode, we make our first assault on the mountain of bullshit, bile, and batshittery that is Christopher ‘the Crying Nazi’ Cantwell, take a swing at the ‘libertarian-to-fascist’ pipeline, and rampant transphobia / transmisogyny.

As ever, warnings apply.

Download here.

Reminder: we’re on iTunes and YouTube

Show Notes:

Cantwell’s website

Radical Agenda

Outlaw Conservative

Random Cantwell audio clips

Cantwell stuff from A Voice For Men

Cantwell’s warning to Kricket Slick’s future boyfriends

Cantwell OkCupid profile, circa 2015

Ethan Glover on Cantwell’s long history

The Free State Project

Daily Beast on the Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline

Reason repudiates the libertarian to alt-right pipeline

Jack’s article on libertarianism as the ‘gateway drug’ to the alt-right

Jack’s article on the Koch Brothers and their funding of right-wing academia

Cantwell on “Free-er Talk Live, Jan 17 2019.”

Charlottesville Race and Terror

Vice checks in on Cantwell a year later

Cantwell arrest

Cantwell drunk in public

Cantwell pleads

Elmer Woodard, lawyer to Cantwell and the alt-right

Chris Cantwell pulls his gun, May 2015

Crying Nazi Raw Video

“The Free Keene Squad” on the Colbert Report

“Looking for Trouble With Strangers”

Local news story on the above

Right Wing Watch on Outlaw Conservative

Jack’s reference to Disraeli in context (from Richard Seymour’s The Liberal Defence of Murder):

…

February 4, 2019

Outside the Government: Nightvisiting

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, class, outside the government 10

It’s October 29^th, 2016. Little Mix remain at number one. Actually, the second, third, fourth, and fifth songs on the chart do too. The news is altogether more volatile; Parliament approves the long-gestating Heathrow third runway project, which isn’t that big. In the US, meanwhile, the far-right militiamen who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier in the year are all acquitted and FBI Director James Comey makes a stunning intervention into the US Presidential race less than two weeks before election day as he announces the re-opening of the investigation into Hilary Clinton’s e-mails due to e-mails found on a device during the investigation of Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a fifteen year old girl while continuing not to disclose that Trump Campaign was also being investigated over its links to Russia. This has consequences.

On Internet streaming platforms, “Nightvisiting.” It is here the cracks begin to show for Class. It’s not that “Nightvisiting” is bad. Its ending is slightly misjudged (having Tanya’s effort fail so that Miss Quill can get a hero moment driving a bus into a tentacle mostly serves to ostentatiously deny the black girl an earned hero moment so the femme fatale white woman can get an unearned one), but on the whole it’s a perfectly reasonably constructed thing. It’s an effective execution of “the cheap one,” getting most of its mileage out of human actors in rooms talking with a minimum of effects shots and scheduling hassles.

The problem is that this is episode three, and functionally episode two because of the (increasingly clearly bad) decision to bundle “For Tonight We Might Die” and “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” Plenty of shows have resorted to the “cast members are visited by their dead loved ones” episode. But it’s generally a late-series contrivance—something you throw out to put your longstanding characters in a new light. Doing it as episode three in order to substantially introduce and flesh out two of the characters, on the other hand, feels desperate. And indeed, it leads to mixed results. Quill’s scenes with her sister are shockingly devoid of content, adding exactly no depth to a character who risks being a cartoon. And Tanya does only slightly better. There’s some decent character beats for her, but they’re all origin story stuff, and generally don’t relate to the character as we see her. The origin of her “puddle” nickname is indicative. Not only is there something slightly unsettling about the fact that Tanya’s nickname is based in a story in which she dives into a puddle of horse piss, this never comes up outside of this story and doesn’t actually tell us anything about who she is.

A larger problem, though, comes in the form of Tanya’s basic arc in this episode. Last week Ram engaged with his grief and trauma and used an articulable lesson about it to defeat an enemy who was thematically adjacent and mirrored his previous inadequate response to the trauma. It was smart and well-structured.…

February 1, 2019

Moving

Christine Kelley Dreams of Orgonon, kate bush 3

Moving (demo)
Moving
BBC Saturday Nights at the Mill
Efteling
Tokyo Music Festival
Hammersmith Odeon

In our last two entries, we touched on Kate Bush’s affinity for dance. “Wuthering Heights” sports a video with choreography every Bush fan in the world has attempted to emulate, and “Kite” has its own aerial hyperdance. “Moving” foregrounds the act of dancing. If Bush had previously treated dance as a companion to her music, “Moving,” as its name implies, canonizes it as an integral part of how her songs work. “[Dancers are] beautiful, they’re so free and they’re just purely stating what they’re feeling and it’s so delightful…” said Bush in 1980. “And I think that’s what dance is about, the enjoyment of that feeling of movement and freedom, it’s like suddenly breaking through a barrier.”

From its opening moments, “Moving” has a sense of weight and motion, commencing with a fifteen-second sample of whale song from environmentalist Roger S. Payne’s LP Songs of the Humpback Whale (“whales say everything about ‘moving’…it weighs a ton and yet it’s so light it floats”). Then Bush’s vocals and piano greet the listener with “moving stranger, does it really matter?/ as long as you’re not afraid to feel.” Bush requests a stranger’s partnership in a no-string-attached arrangement — the ability to dance together is an adequately precious union. Dance a mediator, like a precisely choreographed one-night stand.

Bush has credited multiple instructors in the development of her dancing skills, including jazz-influenced instructor Robin Kovac and American mime Adam Darius. But her most influential teacher is one of the world’s most famous mimes, Lindsay Kemp. Kemp’s legacy is enormous, boasting experience teaching and working with David Bowie, maintaining a status as a gay icon, and his extravagant theatrical performances. One of these stage shows is particularly crucial for Kate Bush. In 1975, she saw Kemp for the first time in a performance in Bloomsbury. Flowers, an adaptation of Jean Genet’s proto-Beat debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, is an astonishing vision of decadence, material brutality, and bodily liberation. Presenting everything from masturbating prison inmates to literal angels onstage, Flowers is Kemp’s magnum opus, an outrageous exhibition of maximalism and sex. Flowers has command of several aesthetics at once, from ragtime to classical music to Luigi Russoli-an proto-noise music. It’s totally outrageous and works precisely because it has the flourishing courage of its convictions.

Naturally, Kate Bush was utterly compelled by Flowers. Its lack of restraint in aesthetics and public displays of sexuality are visible influences on huge swaths of Bush’s work. She was subsequently instructed by Kemp in his dance classes, and he’s remained an influence on her work. Years later, Bush was still praising Kemp in interviews, and of course she paid her respects upon Kemp’s death last year. It’s easy to feel she never really got over that first performance of Flowers. This display of eroticism, veneration of physical beauty, and dedication to surrealism would remain useful to Bush, staying visible all the way from The Kick Inside to 50 Words for Snow.…

January 30, 2019

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

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 2

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

————————————————————–

NOTES

Jason Kessler disrupted by his father.

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.”

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

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.” “

Cloudflare boots Daily Stormer August 16, 2017

Twitter bans Nazis December 18, 2017.

Major sites ban Alex Jones and Infowars September 2018.

Sines V. Kessler

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

Tom Brokaw “Brown Grandbabies.”

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

…