Howdy friends. It’s been a busy few weeks. Glue played a punk fest in Austin - our first show at home in about 5 years, I think. After that was South by Southwest, the worst couple weeks of the year in Austin. Luckily, a friend asked me to work door at his natural wine bar so I had an excuse to skip every show invite and just read, glance at IDs, and get paid. Not bad.
On Monday, I will be starting a full time job with the City of Austin’s Public Health Department as a data analyst for their program evaluation team. I’m nervous and excited. It’s certainly not my dream position, but it pays more than my dream position, they hired me quickly, and I’ll gain a bunch of contacts.
Other than that, it’s been a lot more of the same. Seeing friends (especially during the fests), working on the house, and picking my reading habit back up. I’m hoping that my new position and the daily schedule it will force me to create will help me carve out more intentional time for reading, as has often been the case with school.
Germinal by Emile Zola
Germinal is part 13 of Zola’s 20 volume naturalist cycle Les Rougon-Macquart and is the first one I’ve read. The cycle follows a single extended family across 18 year. Germinal, briefly, is about a coal mining town that decides to strike after the introduction of the protagonist in the late 1860s. It deals heavily with liberal capitalism and egoism in political action.
I read so much non-fiction these days that sometimes I wonder what I learn from novels. Germinal helped me sort out, in a more somatic and affectual way, the difference between liberalism and socialism, as both the capitalists and the workers act out of a similar proportion of good and bad intentions.
First, while I agree with the outlook of the book, I also think that naturalism/realism is a highly manipulative genre in the way it poses itself as a science. Each action has an associated cause and effect that reads as self-evident. In Germinal, the effects are always macabre.
I understand Germinal’s vaunted position in French literature. It’s a self-critical novel of the left, briming with metonymic strength and beautiful and devastating moments of transport that somehow still seem ‘scientific’. Maybe I'll read all 20 volumes.
A Few Personal Messages by Pierre Clementi
Pierre Clementi was a French and Italian actor and countercultural icon. I know him from his role in one of my favorite Pasolini films, Porcile. In the early 1970s, the police raided the house that Clementi was staying in, did or did not plant drugs, and arrested him for possession of marijuana and cocaine. He spent 17 months in prison and was eventually released due to insufficient evidence. After his release, he wrote this brief memoir which I picked up in a theater in NY while wandering around with Quinn and some friends.
The memoir is poetic and muses on justice, art as labor, theater, and perhaps most interestingly, although brief, the theater of justice. He declares that art must be daring, that the most noble thing to do is to create.
A couple quotes:
But I think about those who, comfortable in their little world, forget about the very existence of prisons. Of course, they are on the outside, and they don’t do anything that would make them go to jail, or so they believe. I’m telling you, it’s wrong to think of prison as simply the opposite of freedom, to understand imprisonment as “the taking away of freedom.” This is the legal definition of prison, but not the reality. To be locked up is not just to be deprived of one’s freedom of movement, relationships, and distractions. In prison, you can move (if just a little), you can have relationships, and even distractions. It’s not the limitations that are intolerable. Anyone who believes themselves to be free is in fact a prisoner of their own lifestyle and habits — their apartment, family, neighborhood, job, even their vacations. What’s intolerable is that prison makes everyone a dead man. Each day it makes corpses, empty heads, and dead weights out of living flesh and active minds. Prison produces only the useless, the negative.
Sometimes all you have to do is speak the truth to whomever is in front of you, even if he is in uniform, because this truth can undermine the architecture of false values…
The Jakarta Method by Jeremy Bevins
This book is a revelation or completely obvious. It’s readership has extended far past lefty circles though and even many of those politically aligned still remain historically uninformed. I don’t think most people know about the history of U.S. intervention in Guatemala, much less Indonesia. I didn’t know shit about Guatemala until my two months there, and despite spending a week in Indonesia on tour, I didn’t even scratch the surface.
The Jakarta Method is a genealogical approach to understanding US intervention (and the massacres they create or fund) in international leftist movements. Simply, it starts with Arbenz’s land reforms in Guatemala that were going to hurt the United Fruit Company. The Dulles brothers, one of who was getting paid by UFCO and the other the head of the CIA, had Arbenz overthrown and killed and installed a dictatorship protected by the US, initiating a 30 year genocide against the indigenous groups of Guatemala. The deposition of Arbenz and its resulting mass murder was eventually taken to Vietnam and honed there, and finally to Jakarta where the method was mastered, leading to a massacre of the second largest communist party in the world. The method of annihilation simply became known as Jakarta, and the word “Jakarta” was scrawled on the walls in Chile as Allende rose to power - a premonition of what was to come.
What the Jakarta method offers is a deep historical understanding of anti-communist sentiment and the violence inherent in capitalist hegemony. Likewise, it expands my understanding of US history and the present moment in Brazil (Brazil is so complicated, always looking for suggestions on books about Brazil - please). The majority of US history has not taken place in the US, despite that being the standard for education in this country. Not only is the book rich in complex analyses, it has an easily consumable journalistic approach that makes for compelling and urgent reading. Definitely read this book if you are interested in history, the left, genocide, or expanding your understanding of these concepts.
Next is some more Mike Davis, maybe a novel, maybe some Derrida, who knows. I’ve seen a lot of movies over the past couple weeks. I was sorely disappointed by How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It was A24 meets Verso in the laziest way. I wish people would stop using so much fucking music in movies. Riotsville, USA on the other hand used U.S. military and news media archives to tell the story of the Kerner Commission and it’s perhaps unintentional creation of fake cities for riot training in the 70s leading up to the current moment in Atlanta.
Music when its outside of movies is still good though. The Reencarnacion LP is new to me and absolutely insane, especially the last song with the fiddle. Ugly perhaps even beyond intention. The upcoming Los Yndeseables discography LP is blowing my mind as I explore it. I lucked into copies of the first Lustmord LP and the Heldon LP with the best album art and listen to those in the morning as I read. Listen if you’re cool.
Lastly, Substack is finally getting cool maybe. Lots of photographer friends are making Substacks that you might want to look at: Ryan Lowry, Damien Maloney.
Adding Jakarta method to my read list 😘