Pals,
I’m finding that the weirdness comes in waves, peppered between bouts of manic energy & pure rage. See if you can guess which of these three mindsets I’m in each day based on the recommendations lol.
Following the link in the first of these to Mike Davis’ piece in the Nation I listened to him talk about the same stuff (the connection between pandemics & the development of globalisation, how a health crisis exposes the inequalities in society & the left response, etc) on The Dig podcast. It’s two hours which is way too long but I would recommend skipping the first ten mins cos the host has a really fucking annoying voice and speaks very slowly. Thanks 2 Gabriel for flagging this on insta.
I also watched To Be or Not To Be, which is a v fun film from 1942 set during the Nazi occupation of Poland. It’s about a group of actors who get caught up in a plot involving a spy delivering information on the polish underground to the gestapo but it is actually jokes and not as bleak as that sounds. Thanks to Andrew Key for talking about it on twitter the other week.
I managed to finally spend a bit of time rooting around Leftove.rs which is an amazing resource of digitised radical papers, publications & zines from the archive at Mayday Rooms and a few other places. Will probably link to some specific stuff in the future but the 2 images in this are both from issues of Gutter Press and I consider them Very Relevant.
I listened to this Kali Malone mix on NTS, recommended by everyone - and also this song by Yaeji about a hundred times while reading a story by William Vollmann about being completely lost which felt v apt.
A couple other music bits, this by Hailu Mergia is mad and amazing and I doubt would have ever crossed my path if not for Chris Little so thank u Chris. Also v into this Empty Front cassette that came out in 2015 but was just uploaded to Harakiri Diat the best post-Jimmy youtube channel. Cities Through Windows eh???? Tell me about it mate!
Anyway that’s all - again I didn’t read anything that took my head off but tomorrow is another day. Please keep sending me stuff either here or the BOOKS email or instagram or deadtreesanddye@hotmail.com. Also legally obliged to mention if you hate your landlord and inexplicably have some money atm and want to buy the BOOKS Snot Yr Landlord shirt, theres like 5 day left.
Love & Solidarity always
P