50 limited-run lathe cuts of “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” are available. They ran out fast last time, so if you want one get it here. Details below.
My friends at Bar/None and dreamsOfField and I produced another limited run of fifty 33.3-RPM lathe cuts for you.
This month’s offering is a weather-resistant, EMP-proof polycarbonate plate containing mono audio of my 2014 contribution to a 99 Percent Invisible episode on nuclear semiotics, “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty.)”
Each copy includes individually paw-printed art featuring the face of one of our family cats in the center of a radiation trefoil. (Her name is Trisha, she is a very proper lady, and I am happy to report that her eyes remain normal-colored and therefore that our current home is not located near a nuclear waste storage facility.)
As with all of these dub plate releases, I personally lathed each copy, signed each label, stamped and hand-numbered each jacket, and paw-printed each jacket back. We will not reprint this edition.
The most important component of this video is the interview section. Several local musicians were generous enough to share their thoughts with me about what it’s like to participate in a music community during wartime. Some also had messages for those of us on the outside — some cheerful and courageous, some requests for empathy and aid, and some warnings that none of us in North America and Western/Central Europe are immune to the tough circumstances they’re living through.
The first interview subject is Artur. He’s involved in the Lviv community as a performer, but he also has experience with cultural scenes in other smaller towns in Ukraine’s east, closer to the line of contact between the AFU and Russian Federation troops. He says that young people tend to cluster in hub cities with good air defense like Kyiv and Lviv where niche communities enjoy relative stability and protection. This leaves scenesters stuck in the smaller towns isolated. “They want to feel alive, but…in Mikolaiv, no one smiles.”
Artur
Next, Katja describes one benefit of the war: people now tend to show more interest in Ukrainian bands than previously. This is unfortunately offset by how difficult organizing concerts — and even rehearsals — can be, especially for her band as Re-read’s pre-war drummer is now participating in forward operations against the RF. “It’s not a government fighting another government…it is, but it’s also normal people — the people who we know, our fathers, our friends, they are fighting for what they love.”
(The drummer in a cat suit pictured above is currently with the AFU flying drones on missions against occupying Russian forces.)
Towards the end of the video you will see an interview from Timothy, a punk musician who expresses traditionalist values that might surprise some of us on the left. We discuss the artistic identity crisis he faced at the start of the war. Along with Katja, we then briefly discuss the tension between punk and traditionalism, and how that tension changes when one’s society and culture face existential threats. “Europe faces the same problem [as Ukraine],” Timothy says, “but on an even bigger scale.”
Later this week I’ll upload footage and interviews from Kharkiv, and also start to dip back into analysis. What’s going on here? Alternative music communities are playing strange new roles in the larger picture of Ukraine’s war effort, and that war effort is also changing the views and functions of a cultural avant-garde that used to map neatly onto the left-right divide. For better and for worse, Ukraine’s music scene might be a glimpse of our subcultural future in North America and Western/Central Europe. Ignoring developments here would be very comfortable, but also very inhumane to Ukrainians and very irresponsible to ourselves.
(If you’d rather listen to me read this instead of reading it yourself, click here.)
This is a postcard to you, left-adjacent underground music friends. I’m one of you, and I think we’re making some world-historical mistakes right now. If you’re open to hearing me out, read on.
14 minutes after arriving in Lviv, two off-duty soldiers, “Saint Nick” (the hand with blue paint) and “Volodymyr” (the happy man singing and playing my guitar) clocked that I was an unusual foreign guy with a guitar. They joyfully ran up to me and asked to jam, which we did. Then, babushka-style, they gave me Roshen candy (Choco Lapki for those who know what’s up), and invited me to a party at 11am.
Callsign “Saint Nick,” Callsign “Volodymyr,” and the Roshen candy they wouldn’t let me not eat.
After we goofed around playing music by the streetcar tracks in the city center, they asked me why I was here. I told them that mainly I’m here for the same reason I go anywhere; to meet and perform for the micro-communities who respond to niche music like mine with openness and generous curiosity.
But I am in Ukraine specifically right now because I set myself a goal of using an Emperor X tour to explicitly (rather than implicitly, like last time) challenge fatalism and pacifism in the left-adjacent music scenes of North America and Western/Central Europe. To make sure we’re on the same page about what I mean by fatalism and pacifism, here are some examples, with the gist in italics.
A fatalist take: “Liberal states can never make the world better, they just kick the can down the road at absolute best, and usually not even that. It is better to put energy into replacing them, rebuilding society from the ground up. Trump axing USAid seems sad on the surface, but who cares. USAid was really just a fig leaf to launder the CIA’s imperialist ambitions. Foreign aid can never do real good, because the whole liberal system it stems from is rotten. Trying to fix it, or save the so-called good parts, just wastes effort plugging a tiny leak in a sinking ship. I’d rather sink the ship faster so we can swim to shore and start fresh.”
A pacifist take: “State-level violence is always immoral, even when one state is defending itself from an invader. The US and EU arming Ukraine against Russia, or the SDF against Turkey, or anyone against anyone, is always at root an attempt by a global hegemon to dominate the periphery. Sending weapons and troops does nothing but pour gasoline on the fire and prolong human suffering. It would be far better to focus on diplomacy that opens the door to a constructive, nonviolent path out of conflict. The most effective way to use weapons is to abstain from using them at all — or better yet, to never have them in the first place.“
Here’s one last colorful example for you, photographed yesterday on the streets in Kreuzberg, just to drive the point home:
“You don’t have money for school field trips, but you do have money for weapons? F*ck you, Senate.”
If you run in the circles I do I’d wager you have seen many similar fatalistic or pacifistic sentiments, radically skeptical of liberal democratic capitalist society’s ability to use its industrial-strength power for good. You may agree with them, too. Or, maybe you hold what you see as a more moderate position, sympathetic to the terrible predicament Ukrainians are in but reluctant to add fuel that risks escalating an already-dangerous conflict with a nuclear-armed great power.
If so, you and I have so much in common, and you are the reason I am making a video blog series on the topic (the first of which you are reading now.) Maybe you’re a Christian; maybe you’re a socialist; maybe you loathe war and state violence and injustice against marginalized groups; maybe you are deeply suspicious of militaristic nationalism; maybe you are motivated by thrilling dreams of a humanist future without poverty, without war, without tanks and mines and thermonuclear ICMBs. I’m just like you in those ways, but I’d like to show you why I moved away from what I now regard as counter-productive reactionary anti-Westernism without shedding any of those commitments.
Towards that end, as I travel across Ukraine to sing this week, I will post a series of video blogs to present underground music scenes in Lviv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv which almost completely lack the fatalism and pacifism of Brooklyn and Berlin and Philadelphia and Portland, despite surviving nightly drone raids and the draft and losing hundreds of friends to missile strikes and artillery fire for three years and running. The art and music communities in these cities provide informal, organic examples of what I have come to think of as liberal civic mutualism, a uniquely-2020s hybrid sociopolitical position that blends some of the virtuous aspects of civic nationalism (self-sacrifice communitarian goals, belief in a meaningful collective narrative, neighborly social cohesion in response to pressure) with some of the virtuous aspects of liberalism (the primacy of individual rights, especially speech, concern for marginalized and/or disadvantaged groups) and progressivism (an intentionally optimistic belief in the possibility of a positively unpredictable future that is better than the present). I will say more about what I mean with the term liberal civic mutualism as the week goes on; for now it is enough to say that I think it, or something like it, can serve as an antidote to paralyzing fatalism and pacifism, and might even reinvigorate a sense of confidence on the left.
I doubt very much I will get all the political philosophy right; I dabble but I’m no scholar in the field. But getting things conceptually perfect is much less important than reasserting civic creativity during what increasingly seems to be a slow-motion but high-stakes global sociopolitical emergency. I’m a musician with first-hand experience playing all over Earth for many kinds of inventive people in many kinds of difficult circumstances. Liberal civic mutualism is a shape to pour thoughts into, and you can take it or leave it. All I want this blog series to convince you of is that we in Western Europe and North America have a lot to learn about creative resilience, hope, and moral agency from our music friends in Eastern Europe as they combat the explicitly patriarchal, hypercapitalist, antidemocratic Russian Federation. I also hope to convince you that our Eastern European friends might not be around to teach us anything at all if we, both as individuals and as citizens of powerful democracies, fail to help them rid their region of imperialism.
More from Lviv tomorrow — time to go sound check and sing.
I create in a lot of different ways, and get confused about what kind of work I’m doing. I write songs. I write philosophy. I write furtive polemical microposts on social media. I make music. I write lesson plans and slides. And I realized this morning that I don’t sufficiently distinguish between these drastically different modes of creation.
Aluminum came to mind. A 20 x 20 x 20 cm cube has 22 kg of mass. How we shape that raw cube depends on what its purpose will be. Some anchors are made out of aluminum; that 22 kg chunk ought to more than do the job for a small fishing boat if shaped well. Aircraft wings are also made out of aluminum, and the material in that anchor would be enough for the small stabilizer on the back of a Cessna. The same aluminum achieves opposite purposes through purposive shaping. A Cessna stabilizer need not — perhaps cannot — be a good anchor. Just so, a philosophical text need not — perhaps cannot — have the virtues of poetry, nor ought poetry justify itself as a legal argument would.
SURPRISE. Almost fourteen years later and ten years after their epoch-defining Rose, The Front Bottoms and I are on the road together again this May. I highly recommend you get tix FAST for these.
Get out the universal translator, captain. Platforma just posted a long read about the E.X shows last month in Lviv, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv, Kremenchuk, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv. Слава Україні!
Sat.14.Oct (Concert in Lviv) // U Travni is a warmly-lit three-story vegan cafe, each floor connected by a spiral staircase. Comfy but elegant, elegant but comfy. The opening act (the impossible-to-Google Misha a.k.a. 8:30) wore a voice-modulating mask and ran the signal through a tape cassette karaoke machine. His friend joined him for a solo on a very very long flute. It was alarming and beautiful, and the best start of a tour in recent memory. The second act Pilikayu, the solo project of U Travni’s owner, was similarly hypnotizing, somehow both more aggressive and and cleaner than the opening act; dope pop tracks, lyrics that went way past my vocabulary abilities but seemed to make all the locals laugh, and two songs dedicated to advertising vegan düner and falafel at the cafe. My set was my set; I just set up and played like I usually do. But I spoke a bit before and after with people about why I felt this tour was important to me, and some of them seemed to understand. A woman asked to use my synth; she learned the interface quickly and played us all a harsh noise set as the show wound down.
Sun.15.Oct (day off in Lviv and Ternopil) // Anyone coming to eastern Europe hoping to find commie blocks and brutalist parking garages is going to be severely let down. Lviv is a layer cake of history and architecture, Czech trams knit a patchwork of Austro-Hungarian facades and Kruschevkas and wide plazas together — a flatter, landlocked Porto. The war is visible as metal plates welded to protect valuable and delicate building elements like stained glass and keysontes and gargoyles; one quickly learns to overlooks these, because the city’s beauty asserts itself with confidence despite these hints of temporary fortress. It’s a lot like Ukrainians overall, actually; they never minimize the human tragedy of the war or disregard danger, but they are undominated by it, no hand-wringing, just carrying on with cautious determination. The cafes are busy, and I’d put the coffee on offer in Lviv’s uncountable coffee stands up against a fancy third wave spot in Berlin or L.A. any day. Lviv Coffee Gang 4 Ever (sorry Yaroslav, I’m with Katja for now). Another illustratino of this spirit is the ubiquitous floral rock launcher. These are spent tubes people get their hands on and repurpose as vases. They are everywhere.
Yaroslav and I took the train for Ternopil (platzkart, naturally), and our cabin mates were two women on their way back from a mini-holiday to celebrate a birthday. Their English was flawless and Ukrainian-flavored, and they introduced us to positive nihilism, a notion I will return to in later entries. I won’t talk about Galina and Helena anymore right now, but they’ll come up again later.
We met up with the venue owner at a comedy show (all of which was sadly lost on me but folks seemed to be having a great time) and were lead to a flat at the top of stairs with no guardrails. We were tired, so we went to bed early…until 3:45 a.m., when I heard for the first time the wail and the deep robotic instructions of the air raid warning system echo across the city.
We opened one of the Telegram channels folks here use like to keep track of such things like we people in not-being-invaded countries use weather forecasts. The channel told us that a group of twelve Iranian drones had breached the border, and at first seemed to be headed our way. There was no panic, simply alertness. Shaheeds moved slow, and we were only a five-minute walk from the bomb shelter. As they neared our oblast, the group split into two and headed for other cities. We heard the all-clear signal and went back to bed.
No big deal for Yaroslav. For me, it was a very new experience. I slept surprisingly well and woke up refreshed. I had time to explore Ternopil before the concert, and to meet up with Re-Read…
