Dream on

Last week, I found it very hard to get down to the work I was supposed to be doing. Writing about music felt trivial, absurd.  That feeling has passed - for now at least. Not because the trauma and dread has receded. But protecting the mental space to be excited and obsessed and amused by music, ideas, art, etc - life's essential inessentials - feels like something worth doing. Allowing one's consciousness to be completely monopolized, fixed in a flinch - that really would be defeat. 

So here's something I wrote a few weeks before the election: a cover story for The Wire on A.R. Kane.  As is the magazine's wise way, it's a print-only piece, so hie thee thither to the newsagent's or record shop. 

I think this is the fifth time I have interviewed Rudy Tambala - and still there were so many new things I learned about the A.R. Kane story.  

Also interviewed: sister Maggie Tambala, backing vocalist back in the day but now the newly active (concerts,  recordings) group's lead singer; Stephen "Budgie" Benjamin, whose clarinet flickered through the grotto of 69's "The Sun Falls Into The Sea" and who's now a fixture of the group's line-up;  Amos Childs and Jas Butt of Jabu, the excellent Bristol outfit (check out their just-out album) with whom A.R. Kane are collaborating on an EP; and Vinita Joshi of Rocket Girl, who put out A.R. Kive last year and the recent Up Home Collected. 

There are also some "ghost quotes" from Alex Ayuli, taken from unpublished parts of an interview I did with the Kane boys in 1989.  

It's not the economy, stupid

Just over two weeks to go now...   How strange it feels to be waiting, in hideous suspense, to see if you're going to be living in a flawed but functioning democracy or a fascist state reigned over by a moral and cognitive degenerate.  

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One of the most surprising things about the times we live in is that that people are not voting in their economic interest. 

By any objective measure, the US economy is roaring. 401(k)s soaring. Jobs plentiful, inflation plummeting. Interest rates cut.  Prospects rosy for the future.  Economy envy of the world. All the traditional bellwethers favor the incumbent party. 

But people are ignoring the rosy economic outlook - pretending not to see it, disbelieving the official metrics, the expert opinions, the punditocracy.

They are instead voting on the basis of their values - and on what they prefer to believe is the other tribe's incompetence and malevolence, their America-hatred. 

Voting for your principles, not pocket book issues or self-interest: I suppose that would be admirable, if the values weren't so ghastly and evil, so cruel. 

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The USA is like conjoined twins. One twin has its issues but is basically sane and pragmatic. The other twin is mentally ill, living in delusion... opposed, with a Tourettic frenzy and ferocity, to whatever its other half says or does...  so consumed with resentment against the other twin, it seeks to thwart and injure its symbiotic other half, even at the cost of its own survival. 

This is why I have thought for some while now that the only future for this country would involve either Reconstruction or Partition. Yet neither is practical. The former would involve a mass program of cult deprogramming. The second - the surgical option -  would involve the transplanting of entire cities - islands of blue or red within red or blue states - to other parts of the country. 

Perhaps, in time, internal migration will incrementally bring about the partition scenario. But really the two countries live side by side - there's hardly any place where there are no MAGAs at all, hardly any place where there aren't isolated progressives keeping their heads down. It's actually not unlike The City and The City - people sharing the same physical space but living in different realities. 

Even if Harris wins, this fever will not subside soon, perhaps not in my lifetime. There is an economy built around its furtherance, its escalation.  An economy of stupidity.

laughing gas - but this is no laughing matter

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a fascinating story  for GQ about Galaxy Gas, a flavored nitrous oxide product that's all the rage and whose cute packaging recalls Alco-Pops in its kiddy appeal

Oooh and talking about giddy pop thrills - quick update, they come so thick and so fast these days, here's another KPR piece, a tribute / memorial to the "lost promise of hyperpop". For Pitchfork.

where the post title comes from, but you knew that, right?