mooncake @mooncake@ni.hil.ist

- onions + garlic + cumin + coriander cooking in oil
- lilac flowers + dirt
- buddha's hand
- peach skin
- gently crushed thai basil
- fresh sage frying in butter
- Zoologist's "Sloth" perfume
- redwood trees when you roll down the window and you're speeding up 101 through mendo county in CA
- joss sticks
- sweat + any fig-dominant perfume
- ozone post-thunderstorm
- pyrography

#nowplaying Loretta Lynn -- Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)

RIP

"The enduring lesson from AIDS activists wasn’t to individualize the epidemic, but to draw structural critiques and put pressure on those who could affect change: the pharmaceutical industry, politicians, and the federal government."

for me, the essay leans a little too much on the state as a largely benevolent yet sometimes mismanaged or ineffective entity, rather than an apparatus that creates antagonisms between groups of people, but, hey, its in the Boston Review. Can't look for perfect anarchist analysis there!

what I appreciate about this article is the presence of historians of HIV/AIDS and the particular analysis of how people were thinking of public health messaging about monkeypox in May 2022. I think this article also does a great job of pointing towards a preponderance of "sexually conservative gay men arguing that it is the responsibility of other gay men to end the outbreak." The critiques leveled in the article are good ones!

Here's another quote I liked:

"this [monkeypox] outbreak did not have to happen. And not just this outbreak, but a world in which there are monkeypox outbreaks, period. The virus has been endemic in Africa for decades, but due to colonial medical apartheid, African nations don’t have access to either vaccines or antiviral treatments. Lest it go without saying, the same is true for HIV: 25.7 million people in Africa have HIV, but in some parts of the continent, fewer than 11 percent of those living with it are able to access treatment. As Ngofeen Mputubwele and Joseph Osmundson recently argued in a paper on the colonial histories of HIV and monkeypox, 'the current [monkeypox] outbreak and the ongoing HIV pandemic proceed from the same flawed premise, in which we can separate the health of Black African individuals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Nigeria from the health of the communities we consider closer to home.' Viruses have no fidelity to borders, and the creation of a viral underclass in one place will ultimately lead to the creation of another elsewhere."

https://bostonreview.net/articles/what-the-aids-crisis-can-teach-us-about-monkeypox/

"To the extent that struggles actively refuse to validate, affirm, or strengthen the forms of subjectivity presently produced under capitalism, white supremacy and cis-sexist patriarchy, these struggles can be potentially aligned with – or at least, less likely to stomp all over – the Black struggle against its own objecthood. Self-abolition therefore constitutes the only possible horizon for a non-Black struggle that does not reinforce anti-Blackness. This leads to what might be characterised as a negative identity politics."

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/k-aarons-no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-and-the-end-of-the-world

blonde by Frank Ocean (2016)

Middle Cyclone by Neko Case (2009)

Dummy by Portishead (1994)

Still Bill by Bill Withers (1972)

Miss Colombia by Lido Pimienta (2020)

Dry by PJ Harvey (1992)

Folksy Nina by Nina Simone (1964)

Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (2007)

Los Ángeles by Rosalía (2017)

Metals by Feist (2011)

Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes (2011)

"Mohammed and Barakat’s photographs draw on this collaborative affective labor of the viewers so that we must confront and take seriously the unfamiliar. The black and white images create a temporal dilation, a lull, lengthening our experience of time and therefore allowing for the study of the photographs’ contents and embodied meanings to be possible. In such an attentive/analytical state, the photographs become a scene of encounter requiring more than the act of seeing, but of witnessing, feeling, and grappling with. These images do not allege a grand narrative, they are ripe for invention, speculation, and curiosity about the worlds that populate them. In this sense, they are also ripe for the cultivation of a politics of solidarity that is more authentic and enduring in that they enable us to rethink our relationships and connections to struggles and peoples beyond predictable, manufactured narratives of unrest."

https://tropicsofmeta.com/2020/12/19/the-visual-life-of-revolution-archival-and-counter-archival-narratives-of-revolt/

"CJ is more than a brand that Mayor Lumumba was permitted to ride to power with its vision of a new urban plan for the south that appeared a more democratic and ecological refurbishing of black power. It paved the way for Lumumba to show he could administer a successful police state and contain insurgent rebellion. At some point some Black cities and communities will be 'rewarded' with the resources to rebuild their electrical grids, water and sewer systems, etc. This will create jobs and bestow legitimacy on the degenerate Black political class, but certain cities in particular will be designated as showcases. These coming initiatives will make Black capitalists wealthier in the name of diversity in government contracts for businesses that provide services."

https://medium.com/@adofom1/they-are-a-myth-they-dont-exist-stop-talking-about-cooperatives-in-jackson-mississippi-812025b59c8c

https://medium.com/@adofom1/they-are-a-myth-they-dont-exist-stop-talking-about-cooperatives-in-jackson-mississippi-812025b59c8c

"During the time I lived in Jackson (2013–2020) there seemed to be efforts to establish a waste management and recycling cooperative, a security services cooperative, and landscaping cooperative. All of these initiatives are referred to as emerging cooperatives. Emerging meaning that they either don’t exist at all or they marginally exist as non-fully functioning entities...

There are no records or transcripts, or videos available of workers and farmers dialoging or debating who have been toiling together for months or years. There is no record of clashing views or healthy controversy as to what to produce, where to produce, how to produce. Equally important, there is no record of a cooperative laboring force mobilizing against Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s government or placing demands on it.

Is Mayor Lumumba for a solidarity economy? Perhaps. But he is also for Michael Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, the Kellog Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers, Disney."

"What these novels also force us to admit is that there is no racial belonging without the desire to belong, that the desire to reach, not without risk, across differences of physical appearance, personal history, and material circumstance is a necessary, even critical, component of race — not just for mixed-race people but perhaps for everyone" (Long Chu 2022)

"Both identification and object-relation require, after all, a powerful fantasmic and ideological investment on the part of the individual. Sexual satisfaction notwithstanding, we see that identification itself is also libidinally driven and certainly no less greedy. Indeed, both the act of falling in love and group identification require and acquire powerful fantasmic and ideological investment on the part of the individual" (Cheng 2001, 156)

from Long Chu:

"These novels are largely about unremarkable middle-class people without political or intellectual ambitions; what links these characters is not only a vague experience of racial non-belonging but also a gnawing uncertainty about how much this experience actually matters, even to themselves. Yet the mixed Asian novel has far more to teach us about Asian America today than Ng’s didacticism or Kang’s yawp does — precisely because it doesn’t have much to say about it at all. Asian America is not an idea for these authors but a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness; indeed, to read the mixed Asian novel will be to ask ourselves if Asian America can be anything but a kind of heartache."

from Anne Cheng:

"While psychoanalytic readings of melancholia have been mostly theorized in relation to gender formation, melancholia also presents a particularly apt paradigm for elucidating the activity and components of racialization. Racialization in America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others. The national topography of centrality and marginality legitimizes itself by retroactively positing the racial other as always Other and lost to the heart of the nation. Legal exclusion naturalizes the more complicated 'loss' of the unassimilable racial other" (Cheng 10)

the figure of the mixed-race asian (who always has one white parent and one asian parent) is the figure of the lack/loss of Asian America to both Progressive-Liberal writers like Kang and Ng, as well as to MRAzns mentioned in the above linked study

a fascinating update to Anne Cheng's 2001 book The Melancholy of Race

"How is it that the mixed Asian child can seem quintessentially Asian American — as Asian American as apple pie, as it were — while serving as living proof that Asian America does not exist? ... this is also true — perhaps even more true — at the level of historical feeling, where the mixed Asian transforms the slow crush of assimilation into a dynamic and emotive physical presence. Even the most racially secure Asian Americans have been known to discover in their mixed counterparts a whiter version of themselves. This creature is beautiful and terrible, striated with desires that feel hard or wrong to name, a literal assimilation of culture, custom, and language, not to mention skin, fat, and bone...

That is a lot to ask of a child. It is a strange thing for fully Asian writers to look to mixed Asian people for relief from their racial anxieties when actual mixed-race Asians, who, it turns out, can write their own books, have little reassurance to offer."

https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/the-mixed-asian-metaphor.html

"It is undoubtedly true that race in America is created and maintained through racist violence. It is, however, no contradiction to say that race, once people start living with it, can no longer be reduced to that violence for the staggeringly simple reason that people do live with it, every day, gradually patching together new, often temporary worlds of experience in which race may be felt as something other than a target on one’s back (or, for that matter, a gun in one’s hand). It’s worth noting that, at the end of the day, [Celeste] Ng and [Jay Caspian] Kang actually agree that racial identity can be bought only through racism; they are merely, to quote the old joke, haggling over the price. But what this assumption yields is a thin, abstract concept of Asian America, one that is so hostile to actual human beings that it recognizes them only when they are in pain. This is why the question 'Does Asian America exist?' is the wrong one; it is a bloodless logic game masquerading as a political problem."

https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/the-mixed-asian-metaphor.html

LWOP is a death sentence idgaf

"Every prison has their own politics and leadership. Figure out what works best at your prison and hold your prison down. And, if your prison is the first one on shutdown or at some point becomes the only one on shutdown, don’t worry about what is going on at other places. Maintain your discipline and stay focused. If you hold your prison down long enough, others will join. Do your part, do your best, and don’t allow anyone to deter you."

https://freealabamamovement.wordpress.com/2022/09/19/how-to-prepare-and-participate-in-the-shutdown/

"The strike organizers allege Eighth Amendment violations due to overcrowding. They're calling for lawmakers to make the following changes:

- Repeal the habitual offender law, which requires longer sentences for people convicted of multiple crimes, including life sentences for those convicted of a Class A felony after three previous felony convictions;
- Make the "presumptive standards" retroactive immediately;
- Repeal the drive-by shooting statute, which allows prosecutors to charge someone with capital murder if they are in a vehicle when they fatally shoot a victim;
- Create a statewide conviction integrity unit to investigate possible cases of wrongful incarceration;
- Create mandatory parole criteria that will guarantee parole to all eligible persons;
- Streamline the review processes for medical furloughs and early release of elderly inmates;
- Allow juvenile offenders to become eligible for parole after 15 years served, instead of the current 30-year requirement; and
- Get rid of life sentencing without the chance of parole."

https://www.waaytv.com/news/alabama-inmate-prison-protest-leads-to-more-security-measures-at-already-understaffed-facilities/article_4e975338-3db7-11ed-97ca-373860d8c555.html