Hey, If you were looking for an explainer about this Enshittification meme going around, without having to read the whole book, this podcast might be a good place to start. I found it helpful, anyway. Includes lots of examples. Cory Doctorow, author of the concept, is a motor mouth but as funny as a standup and full of hot takes that ring true. Also, Organized Money, a podcast hosted by David Dayen and Matt Stoller, if I haven't plugged it before, is one of my regular podcasts and really good on anti-monopoly stuff. I love the theme, for one, a damning excerpt from FDR's 1936 re-election campaign, "Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob!" Amen! And when the two get together, like now, look out!
How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
Dark Disco: A Lament
"Dark disco was our fado, our flamenco, our blues; it spoke of things in a voice partly melancholic, partly bemused by life, and wholly sexual. Dark disco was the song you sang to yourself on the first night of winter in New York walking down one of those long, dark, deserted blocks in Chelsea, when you realized anew that New York is also a winter city, a city where for one long season life turns indoors and we pursue freely our darker desires."
"What I used to think was as wonderful and mysterious as the dancing madness of the Middle Ages or the rites of Dionysus was now a page in the annual corporate report of Gulf & Western."
"In those days, when you went out to dance, disco had no uniform sound. There was no one word to describe the variegated music we spent the night with. It was distinct enough for the discaire [DJ] to begin a set quietly, build gradually to a climax, then let you down to start all over again. Do you remember that vanished custom? It happened three or four times a night if you stayed long enough, and you could follow the tantalizing process by which the discaire laid a solid foundation of slow songs and then subtly (if he was good, as they all seemed to be in those days) built you up to the catharsis, say, of Deodato’s “2001.” One thing for sure: disco was different then. The music was darker, sexual, troubled. Today the dark has vanished and the light is everywhere."
Andrew Holleran, 1976
Grunge Era Drone Rock Emeritus
Middle age man and woman bang out slomo and stretched dinosaur Black Sabbath guitar rock, boiling it down to its epic minimalist essence of thick resonating and ringing metal guitar sludge: beautifully distorted electric guitar and drums; Dylan Carlson's workingman's guitar grandeur and Adrienne Davies' lumbering jazz on drums. Carlson calls his music "ambient metal," and credits La Monte Young, King Crimson, and Slayer as influences. So he's a sort of ambient metal, dark metal, drone metal aesthete, and the hypnotic grace of this performance feels humbly heroic. Carlson was also a friend of Kurt Cobain, and a close traumatized survivor of his suicide, and also a survivor of heroin addiction. I don't know a lot of Earth's ten albums going all the way back to 1993 but this abbreviated live performance from a couple years back, they joke about its brevity compared to their recording or concert performances, goes 21-22 minutes (and then the rest is an interview) but the music strikes me as instantly legendary in drone rock history. Budding drone rock enthusiasts take note.
Jan 6th: Eric's Birthday or Failed Coup?
On the principle it's better to laugh than cry, I like the way Colbert imitates Trump as this absurdly narcissistic geezer terminally bloviating his idiotically random numbskull opinions. He mocks his adventure in Venezuela. Trump gobbles up Greenland like a marshmallow, etc. He roasts RFK jr and his absurdly dangerous threat to public health. The silver lining ending shares new revelations that the McRib sandwich at McDonalds does not in fact contain any rib meat but is instead a combination of internal organ meats, heart, stomach, etc. The good news, he concludes, is at least the McRib does not include any anus. Trump's enshittification bubble is going global,
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