The new Tony Hawk game rules; it is my entertainment purchase for September! I could go on at excruciating length about how much I like the first few THPS games, but suffice to say this one feels pretty darn good to me. I love the younger skaters they added to the roster, and so far all of the new music I've heard has been great, too. The immediate standout for me is this song "Sedona" by JunkBunny. I will never get enough of a soaring, harmonized chorus. The video is pretty cute, too:

Do you like how many of my post subject lines are just simple statements and requests lately? I think it's funny, and also don't want to waste anyone's time if I can help it! Sometimes I can't help it.

If you have a Stadia (and who doesn't????? (lol)), you can play a game called Gunsport that is a neat 2v2 fun time! Several of my friends worked on it!!!

And whether you do or not, if you like cool beats and hot melodies and fresh but classic electronic sounds, you should listen to the soundtrack! Ice Choir (aka Kurt Feldman) made it, and he's one of my favorite songwriters!!! Here's a BIG PLAY BUTTON FOR YA

CHECK IT OUT FUCKERS!!!!!!

Also from this interview with David Graeber:

I’m increasingly convinced the system is only being held together by morality. A very odd, twisted morality. That’s why I wrote one book about the morality of debt, and another about the morality of work.

Even many people who know perfectly well our economic system is fundamentally stupid and unjust, also really seem to believe that anyone who doesn’t pay their debts is a bad person. Deadbeats are irresponsible and have only themselves to blame. Likewise, even people who hate their bosses seem to feel that skivers are even worse, that if you’re not working harder than you’d like at something you don’t much enjoy, preferably for someone you don’t like very much, then you’re a bad person, a parasite, and certainly, undeserving of public relief.

People really seem to believe in the sanctity of work. Not just work, jobs. Everyone should get a job. It doesn’t matter if the work is actually doing anyone any good or not. In fact at least a third of the working population appears to be personally convinced that if their job did not exist it would make no difference—or even, that the world would be a better place without it. The sanctity of work, the sanctity of debt, the sanctity of “the market”—all these things are deeply internalised and they are all extremely problematic.

Problematic as … Wrong?

Rich people do not believe in debt, at least not in their own debt. They certainly do not think that paying their debts is the matter of honour. Half of my former employers wouldn’t have paid me at all if they could figure out a way not to. But even more, if you’re in a position of weakness, debt is morality; if you’re in a position of strength, debt is power. That is why I started a book on Debt with an old proverb: if you owe a bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank of hundred million dollars, you own the bank.

...

But the moral trick is so bizarrely effective. Otherwise decent people think it’s totally justified to take food away from hungry children because their former dictator took out a bad loan.

David Graeber, in conversation with Lenart J. Kučić, earlier this year on a site I've never heard of called Disenz. This is a long excerpt, but I found the whole interview very interesting!

But why are China, South Korea, and Singapore so often presented as role models? Are they not supposed to have the best results in stopping the pandemic? Doesn’t that have something to do with social discipline?

I recently read a very interesting study comparing how authoritarian and non-authoritarian regimes have handled the pandemic. The authors concluded that more or less authoritarianism was irrelevant as a factor. What was important was people’s faith in government’s pronouncements: how much they trusted public institutions, the media, the scientific establishment.

There simply no systematic relation between what they are calling “democracy” and that sort of trust in institutions. Here in the UK we have one of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies but the politicians and the press lie to us so systematically, and so flagrantly, that we have, I think, the lowest trust in the media in Europe—next to Italy, then Spain, if I remember.

In the US, the right has figured out a way to turn that justifiable suspicion to their advantage. Everything is “fake news.” We’re in a hall of mirrors. Might as well vote for the guy (Donald Trump, Boris Johnson) who at least is honest enough to admit he’s lying; then you can become an accomplice, in effect, because the world is made up of con men and marks and that way at least you’ll be on the winning team.

But there’s something deeper. I think what we really need is a proper analysis of what’s called “centrism” which is in many ways a startlingly perverse political ideology.

Centrism?

What did middle class people—basically, members of the professional-managerial class, who are the core constituency of centrism—actually mean in the ’80s and ’90s when they started describing themselves as “life-style liberals, fiscal conservatives”?

It means they accepted a social order where the moderate left would be left in charge of the production of people, as it were, they’d run the hospitals and universities, while the moderate right would be left in charge of producing oil and clothes and highways. So just as leftist social movements attack CEOs and trade agreements, right wing social movements attack the authority of the people running the educational or the health system: teachers and scientists. Just think of creationism, global warming, or abortion.

But really it’s a hopeless war of position, as a Gramscian might say, neither side is going to win; the radical right is no more likely to put evangelical churches in charge of social reproduction than the radical left is of turning Bechtel or Microsoft or Monsanto into a self-managed collective. What the radical right can do is undermine faith in experts, and of course, the more they get into power, the more they can do that by placing actual incompetents in positions of authority. So the whole thing feeds off itself.

The result is an endless hall of mirrors where everything is or might be a lie. These are the places where the bodies are now piling up. Because they’ve gone furthest from Saint Simon’s fantasy. And you can’t exactly blame people for being suspicious when you have a country like the UK where we’re not supposed to know the names of the scientists on the board advising the government on what to do in a medical crisis, but somehow, we do know that two of the members of the board are Tory propagandists with no scientific training. It’s almost as if they want you to know they’re entirely unreliable.

And if unreliable governments also become more authoritarian…?

The idea is that it feeds off itself. There is a paradox here. People confuse anti-authoritarian politics with an opposition to any sort of intellectual authority, even, to any shared notion of truth, justice, even physical reality. As if insisting on any form of truth is tantamount to fascism. But of course if there’s no truth, why is fascism even a problem? What is your grounds for objecting to fascism, other than that you personally don’t like it, which doesn’t mean much if other people do. Well, that kind of absolute relativism is now fading on the left just as it’s being taken up aggressively on the right.

But if that’s the case, authoritarianism—at least of the populist variety—just took a major hit. It really is, as some people are saying, a death cult, a form of mass suicide.

For that very reason, though, I don’t think we should be limiting ourselves to debates on the nature of the future government – will it become more authoritarian, socialist, nationalist, emancipatory? What’s really striking is the degree to which people are self-organising like never before. The first thing that happened in the UK when the pandemic began was that every neighborhood began setting up its own mutual aid group identifying vulnerable people: individuals with no relatives or help, older people… They call them that, “mutual aid” groups, using the old anarchist expression. There are hundreds of them in London alone.

Does this prove the old saying that everybody becomes a socialist – or an anarchist – during the crisis?

In my neighborhood, and I live just a few away from Grenfell Tower, people are already aware that the government is basically useless in a crisis. When the fire happened two years ago, they completely dropped the ball. You’d imagine the government of a country with the world’s fifth largest economies wouldn’t have found it that difficult to find a place to live for a few hundred survivors, but in fact, church groups and spontaneous community groups operating out of squatted spaces ended up having to do everything.

So despite the more common perception that anarchism would push order into chaos it can actually help bring chaos into order?

I always find it slightly amusing that people always say “oh my God, we can’t get rid of the police, because if we get rid of police, everybody will just start killing each other!” Notice they never say “I would start killing people.” “Hmm, no police? I think I’ll get a gun and shoot someone.” Everyone assumes someone else will.

Actually as an anthropologist I know what happens when police disappear. I even lived in a place in rural Madagascar where the police had, effectively, disappeared some years before I arrived. It made almost no difference whatsoever. Well, property crime did increase, if people were very rich, they sometimes got pilfered. Murder if anything decreased. When police vanish in the middle of a big city, where property differences are much more extremely, burglary increases, definitely, but violent crime is entirely unaffected.

But when it comes to organization – well, what we need to ask ourselves is why we think it’s necessary to threaten to hit people over the head, or shoot them, or lock them in a dingy room for years, in order to maintain any form of organization. People who think that really don’t have much faith in organization, do they?

Interview with musician (and author of my proposed new national anthem) Jeff Rosenstock on Last Donut of the Night:

I feel like the grieving process is starting to kick in for me with everything.
Which fucking grieving process? [Laughs] There’s, like, five terrible things happening right now.

Life on earth as I knew it? The things I want to see change? Some days I forget there’s a pandemic because there’s so many things happening lately.
I said out loud to my wife last night for the first time, “It’s not ever gonna go back to how it was.” That’s some scary shit. It’s very weird as a musician—and I don’t mean this in any spiritual way—but as musicians, our purposes on this fucking world are gone now. That communication between people, even if it’s five people in a basement, is something we’ve all based our lives on.

It’s really strange to not really have any end in sight right now. You can play a fuckin’ Zoom show and record stuff at home, but it’s not the same thing. It’s devastating, and I don’t know how to come to terms with it beyond knowing that spiralling down into the depths of how dark that is won’t help anything. I try to push the thought back down into the ocean until it washes up again.

You’ve always been politically outspoken. What’s your mindset lately?
It’s not incredibly positive, to be honest with you. I’m not trying to say this in a condescending way, because I want everyone to be on the right team—but anyone who’s just opening their eyes over the last four or five months to police brutality against Black people or BIPOC, it’s fucking crazy that they haven’t been paying attention. This isn’t new. We put out Worry before Trump got elected, and afterwards people were like, “Wow, it predicted the future!” No, that album was about the present. This is something that’s been happening.

Maybe this is my own ignorance, but I don’t think we’ve ever been witness to the truth that the police are actually a gang, and that there are no repercussion—as we have watching an endless feed of videos where the police violently retaliate against demonstrators. There’s wide-scale protests across the country where police have been given a free license to try and hurt and kill people. Seeing footage of protesters a few months ago of protestors getting kettled and tear gassed on the Manhattan Bridge—that’s evil shit. It’s good that more people are opening their eyes to it, but [the police] are saying, “We’ll still fucking kill you. There is no Constitution, you don’t have rights. Whaddya gonna do about it?”

I’m not a violent person. The thought that they are going to push it to that level really, really scares me. While I’m not a violent person, I’ll fuckin’ fight for my fellow human beings, you know? I really wish they would just stop killing unarmed Black people and shooting people in the back in front of their children. And when it happens, all they have to do is hold the cops accountable as you would any other murderer! That would be something. But not only are they not willing to give us anything like that, they’re doubling down so hard. “We’re gonna fucking brutalize you. Fuck you.” It’s scary shit. I don’t know what’s gonna come of it.

Right now has been another big wave of how enormously fucked up everything is, after that Blue Lives Matter kid killed those two protestors with an AR-15. Protesters who just care about their fellow humans! I can’t wrap my head around how so many people got tricked into thinking that there’s anything you can gain from not loving each other.

Let's say it again:

"Protesters who just care about their fellow humans! I can’t wrap my head around how so many people got tricked into thinking that there’s anything you can gain from not loving each other."

Neither can I, Jeff!!!!!!!!

Since it's Bandcamp Friday and all money spent goes to the artists, here are some great albums I've been listening to lately. They're all really different, so fuck around and find out (which songs are for you)!!!

Thank you!!!!!!!

The premise is simple: FUCK NOPE

Five Iron Frenzy's last album, Engine of a Million Plots, (Spotify) is an extremely good, mature rock album, the best yet after a 10-year hiatus. Their singer has one of my favorite voices. It feels like it came out last week, and I've listened to it hundreds of times. They're making another album, and here's the kickstarter.

I've also returned again and again to Lo Tom's first album (Spotify); it moves steadily forward the whole time, unassuming but intent, and loops easily. They're also kickstarting their next album.

I try to link to Bandcamp when I can, but neither of these earlier records is on there. Oh well!

New story from one of my all-time favorite authors! YEAH HE DOES GRAPHICAL STUFF; THAT DOESN'T MEAN HIS STORIES ARE "JUST GIMMICKS". The Familiar is deeply beautiful, and I still have detailed plans to write a hell of a thing about the relationship between House of Leaves and Only Revolutions because these stories have had a tremendous effect on me over the last almost-twenty years! I always feel defensive about this but I refuse to be defensive! Even though I'm still being defensive! They rule!

At the start of this year, I wrote a short story called “There’s a Place for You.” I designed it for The New Yorker. The New Yorker passed. As I’m now in the midst of a new novel, rather than redesign the story for another publication — something I’m not entirely convinced is possible — I’ve decided to release it online.

So here’s that New Yorker story you’ll never read in The New Yorker.

Find your columns, grow your hair, the light you sought was never in your eyes.

Tear your temples down.

GET THAT SHIIIIIIT

And if you've read House of Leaves but missed the very interesting teleplays from last year, get those, too!

Nilüfer Yanya — Heavyweight Champion of the Year