howdy friends, going to be a bit of a slim affair today, as it turns out recommending new stuff everyday while trying to work on existing/more long term projects is pretty difficult. but continue i will, because much like the seismic cultural figure that is joe wicks, “i love putting out free content”.
main feature of today is this boiler room documentary on underground club culture in palestine, as recommended by the latest BOOKS newsletter. i can’t recommend this enough. it really reminds me of some old k-punk post where he talks about how the worst thing you can hear when interviewing a musician is that it’s “just about the music, man”; as this documentary shows, music is at its most powerful when its explicitly not “just about the music”, when it channels various other social, political and cultural flows - in this case, the everyday palestinian struggle against apartheid and the preservation of some kind of cultural identity. i’ve linked it above.
matt colquhoun, or xenogothic to go by his blogging persona, has a new essay out in stillpoint magazine on d h lawrence and the philosophy of community. it’s a good read, and has now very much made me want to read lady chatterly’s lover. particularly enjoyed this quote from the book, cited in the article:
It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions also are so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them. Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different yet equally-essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate: hate of the bourgeois!
if you enjoyed this, i’d also recommend checking out matt’s recent book egress on mark fisher, mourning, and the philosophy of community/friendship. i read it earlier this year and it was a great read.
my music rec of the day is meat puppets’ up on the sun, from 1985. hazy, stonery, folky, psychedelish post-punk. goes well with the weather we’re having.
that’s all for today folx. enjoy easter saturday, stay safe, send recs, and share this newsletter (button below) if you’re enjoying it thus far!
jake x