morning pals, welcome to another addition of the LOCKDOWNTIME recs newsletter. this one’s a bit bitty and all over the place because i found out i won’t have a job come september (lol) and i have been trying to find jobs and frantically googling alternative things i could do with my life that allow me to subsist while also giving me time to commit to theory and writing. spoiler alert: there’s not much!!! ! (if you hear of any jobs i could do, send them my way.)
(or, if anyone wants to start an independent project with me that could maybe be financially self-sufficient, let me know. current ideas off the top of my head: a weird sound-system, a book store, a diy printing press, a newsletter like this but physical (and beautifully, aesthetically designed) that we send out to people for a small fee, [blank??].)
this edition is also a bit disjointed because i was writing this new blog post, which builds upon some themes we discussed in newsletter #21, which is basically an extended meditation on why hippies do psychedelia badly and if you really wanna get psychedelic, you gotta embrace a frosty dose of Cold Rationalist reason. if you enjoyed #21, are interested in mark fisher (particularly his work on acid communism), or just like the sound of my lil pitch right there, check it out.
on to the recs.
first up, shannon reminded me of this lil podcast episode (hosted on nts) about mort garson’s infamous album plantasia (on youtube here). plantasia has recently taken off thanks to the youtube algorithm, but if you haven’t heard it before, it’s basically an entire album devised to harness the then-perceived utopian potential of synthesizers to help plants grow. it’s really remarkable music, and very therapeutic (which perhaps says a lot about why it’s taken off lately). the episode goes into how obsessed garson was with trying to communicate with plants and give a sonic expression to them, which is very interesting.
next up, great essay here by gavin walker about the (lack of necessary) political content of the current coronavirus crisis. walker basically challenges the idea that “everything is political”, because it logically leads to nothing being political - if everything is political, then nothing is, “because politics here would be indistinguishable from the situation of its emergence, eliminating entirely any element of contestation or novelty”. walker goes on from this to critique some discourses from the left about the “potential” of the coronavirus crisis, and how exactly we conceive its political dimension, which i think is really useful stuff.
also stumbled across this interview with michael pollan about the history and medical potential of psychedelics, through the ICA daily newsletter. generally, this new “psychedelic renaissance” stuff makes me cringe massively because it’s so obsessed with basically making psychedelics safe and cuddly: either they’re purely therapeutic and medicalised, or they’re “just for fun” (a release valve for some weirdness before you go back to work on monday morning). go back to texts from the 60s/70s counterculture and you’ll see a completely different framing of psychedelics as essentially tools for challenging the dominant culture, obviously drawing/stealing from various indigenous cultures’ ritual use of psychedelics for intense spiritual purposes. now, obviously drugs aren’t the answer - LSD isn’t going to bring down capitalism, ever. that’s an idiot hippy position. but i do somewhat mourn the fact that psychedelics have basically been completely co-opted by the mainstream now, and lost any sense of counter-cultural threat.
anyway, this interview does have an element of that, but nonetheless there are a lot of fun stories about pollan’s trips, and there’s some interesting science and history in there too. so if you’re interested in that stuff, check it out.
finally, ** desperately grabbing papers at desk searching for recs ** billie linked me to this thing that gives you MUBI free for 3 months (here), so if you want random arty and continental cinema at your fingertips, i daresay this newsletter has delivered.
apologies for the somewhat chaotic nature of today’s installment. regular programming with better recs resumes monday morning.
stay safe and keep sending in recs.
jake x