words and ideas

[firstfullmoon]

Zadie Smith, On Shame, Rage and Writing

[iirulancorrino]

One way children hold on to the edge of the world is by believing that they’re at the center of it. Could be in California, could be anywhere. Inevitably, as one grows, one begins to see that the distance between where you stand on solid ground and falling off the edge of the world altogether is mighty narrow indeed, and that you and other people, not to mention your parents, are cracked and lonely because we all are.

Hilton Als, introduction to Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (via your-daughters-shall-prophesy)

[loukessler]

Interview With Sophie from Elektronauts:

E: One thing that strikes me when listening to Bipp is how everything is carefully tuned - from the drums to the bass and the lead and even the little metallic sprinkles - and twists and turns to the drive of the song. With electronic dance music, the different layers are usually very apparently there. You, on the other hand, seem to make it seamless, with just the right amount of interesting Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabilities between the layers. How do you do it? Do you have to bring it all together in your mind before you start fiddling with the instruments?

S: In terms of splitting/layers within music, absolutely. I’m rather fixated on this idea of a a monophonic, elastic, full frequency range morphing composition. The language of electronic music shouldn’t still be referencing obsolete instruments like kick drum or clap. No one’s kicking or clapping. They don’t have to! So it makes more sense in my mind to discard those ideas of polyphony and traditional roles of instrumentation. It seems wacky to me that most DAW software is still designed around having drums/bass/keyboard/vocal presets for production. That’s what I find liberating about the Monomachine. It’s just waveforms that can be pushed into shapes and materials and sequenced. Just like a sculpture machine. Not like a computer pretending to be a band form the 70’s or whatever.

E: When I say Swedish synths, what image pops into your head?

S: I have to say I’ve never thought of national characters of synthesizers but perhaps more characters of certain brands. I guess I’m really only interested in clean and powerful sound. Complete control rather than characterful instruments which basically means noisy and uncontrollable in a lot of people’s minds. You can be a lot more intentional with clean instruments because you have the autonomy to add artefacts such as distortion or random detuning if you desire but the difference is that those are your choices rather than the instrument’s automatic choices. The more choices you actively make, the more meaningful your end product is?

E: If you could wobble a real-world phenomenon (other than people) with a Monomachine parameter, what would that be (and which parameter)?

S: Okay, how about a wavetable style thing where one could adapt the materials or textures of everyday objects? One day my hairdryer would be black plastic then the next day chrome then glass. I guess I could also then make my clothes different materials everyday. Could also get some freaky new materials by morphing between them.

Full interview: http://www.elektronauts.com/talk/view/62

[steveyockey]

Sasha Geffen, “No Shape: How Tech Helped Musicians Melt the Gender Binary” from Glitter Up the Dark

[luthienne]

Nikki Giovanni, from “Mirrors”

[Text ID: … but It Cannot Be A Mistake to have cared … It Cannot Be An Error to have tried … It Cannot Be Incorrect to have loved]

[saintbeetle]

notes from today’s performance studies lecture on phenomenology.

[catcrumb]

[socialworker-rebecca]

If it’s too hard to think positive, think neutral.

I’m no better or worse than anyone else.

I deserve the same things in life as anyone else.

I’m a human being.

Right now, I am feeling ________(fill in the blank).

I don’t know how I’ll feel in 5 minutes, or tomorrow.

I can’t predict the future.

Life is full of painful, pleasurable, and boring moments.

The world is full of good, evil, and gray areas.

[ar-ie-s-ve-nu-s]

[juanulove]

2020 is the year ive felt most out of touch, like everything enrages me or bores me, no one agrees with me, everything i believe has become uncool because im none of the following:

- girlbossian libtard - cynical arthoe - ironypoisoned art bro - rabid canceller - internet-brained media personality  - theory-obsessed leftoid - reactionary antiwokeist - inflammatory postlefist - nationalist leftcom - regressive trad - pathetic groyper - benevolent ethnonarcissist - alarmist pro-masker - irresponsible anti-masker - unsolicited essayist - insufferable film buff - braindead fashionista - born again christian - neoliberal f-word - the kind of f-word who spends all day dunking on teenagers online - narcissistic weightlifter - elitist collector of obscure clothes - vapid autofiction writer - kpop stan - delicate tenderqueer - deathgripped incel - puritan social conservative

ok maybe IM the problem

[imrooting4us]

“Art is the bedrock of what makes us human. Our sense of reflection, of learning, happens through seeing and exploring the world and our stories through mediums other than politics and television. It allows us to see those stories in a more ancient way. The popular conception is that with each generation, we become more intelligent. Many ancient tribes, however, believe that with each generation we become less wise. We feel we’re more intelligent because of our immense access to information, but that’s not the same as knowledge. Knowledge is information that is fully embodied and experienced. There’s a huge difference between the two, and right now, we are in awe of information rather than wisdom. Dance carries our ancestors inside us like a living museum that’s constantly transforming. But dance is simultaneously carrying with it the future. The body is a means to explore and express how we’re feeling in a very sacred, spiritual way. It allows us to be in touch with our five senses again, to take us out of numbness. The body doesn’t lie. Especially on stage. When you see people lie in dance, you know it’s a lie.”

— Akram Khan: On the uneasy dance between knowledge and information  (via slangtasy)

[merrybitchmas91-deactivated2019]

Why "doing something relaxing” does not help your anxiety

A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.

This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.  

THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.

You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind. 

People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.

In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture. 

Therefore, I present to you: 

THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS

–Go on a walk

–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.

–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching

–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind

–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift 

–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:

–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.

–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see. 

–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in. 

–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.) 

–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety. 

–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel. 

–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless. 

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:

–List the capitals of all the U.S. states

–List the capitals of all the European countries

–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors. 

–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.

–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.  

Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself.  I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too. 

(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)

[lovelyplot]

This would’ve been great an hour ago

[h0lyhandgrenade]

This is good advice for anxious peeps and peeps with anxious friends. Seems obvious now but I hadn’t thought about it this way before.

[randomslasher]

oh heck this is…really really useful advice.I wonder if it would also help when my brain does that ‘too fast can’t settle’ thing and flips from activity to activity at ludicrous speeds.I think I’ll try it next time. <3

[notchainedtotrauma]

“Performance here is as a form of privacy shared between poet drummer and dancer and they are all one. The musicians start out as dancers who hear a music that doesn’t exist in the tangible world, they hear it with their bodies and go on to create that music so that they can move with it and become intangible themselves. The music gives them words to pull it together, to unify its maker with what he makes. In a city where the threat of death by the hands of a familiar is as familiar as your own fluctuating image, beauty is in a hurry, sped up, drugged, and sustained by radio frequencies that jar on purpose.”

— from DJ Rashad & The Body Electric Poetics Of The Chicago Footwork Scene by Harmony Holiday

[garadinervi]

Assata Shakur, To My People, in May 19th Communist Organization, To Free Assata Shakur and all African Prisoners of War is to Break the Chains of U.S. Imperialism, Madame Binh Graphics Collective (MBGC), Brooklyn, NY, March 1979, pp. 16-19

[gowns]

Black Feminism & Abolition

if you want to actually engage with intersectional feminism & what abolition really means, this is your homework:

Angela Davis - “Are Prisons Obsolete?”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore - “Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California”

Angela Davis - “Abolition Democracy”

Angela Davis - “Freedom is a Constant Struggle”

“If They Come in the Morning… Voices of Resistance”

Carole Boyce Davies - “Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones”

Safiya Bukhari - “The War Before”

Patrice Douglass - “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying”

Patrice Douglass & Frank B Wilderson - “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World”

“Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?”

Evelyn Hammond - “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality”

Sadiya Hartman - “Seduction and the Ruses of Power”

Sadiya Hartman - “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route”

Audre Lorde - “Sister Outsider”

Audre Lorde - “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

bell hooks - “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”

Michelle S Jacobs - “Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence”

Claudia Rankine - Citizen

Assata Shakur - “Women in Prison: How We Are”

Assata Shakur - “Assata: An Autobiography”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective”

Zoe Samudzi & William C Anderson - “As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation”

this is a curated list of texts that i find the most helpful for illustrating why we all should also be abolitionists. the bolded are the ones i’ve found the most helpful thus far. & reminder to buy the books when you can, preferably from independent / leftist / black-owned bookstores… and see what you can find at your local library! keep these works in circulation!

[flowerais-deactivated20211031]

what if things go well? that’s a possibility.

[podencos]