A certain gentleness that Tender Ones require takes time; it requires a circuity, a circling around trauma. But here, images will surge forward because the earth’s hourglass has shattered. It was only belatedly that we committed to a strategy akin to a gentle fisting—in other words, engaging in a process that requires patience and slowness, and a desire to reimagine the limit. Me and you both, Baby—we hope we have not exceeded the possibilities of a gradual and peaceful return to sinuous anarchisms, local and mutual. Moreover, this text will unfurl without trigger warnings, because the United States of America is always giving head to its own gun barrel; its pistol suck includes old phantom cells and official armed forces, militarized police, right-wing militias, campus public safety officers, private security guards, self-deputized wing nuts, and even, legislatively speaking, mass shooters. Obvi, the Capitalist State is so turned on by its own crisis that it doesn’t taste the endings, the materials, their motion. So let the contaminating images fly forward … as some of them might allow for unspeakable resistance.
Longing for a fictional compendium, The Philosophy of Spit, which would include “Let’s Spit on Hegel” by Rivolta Femminile, and also a tract that references Tefnut, the Egyptian goddess of moisture, who was spat out like saliva by Ra. According to spells carved into the interior surfaces of Unis’ pyramid, she is lion-headed and human-bodied, and pure waters drip from her vulva. Splosh.
While living briefly in Vietnam in the ’90s, I quickly realized that the war initiated by the US (1954–1972) was referred to as the American War. Kháng chiến chống Mỹ translates to “Resistance War Against America,” another designation.
See →. For decades, my research included forensic remains in relation to femicide. These sneakers and their feet disrupt a repeated narrative of intimate dismemberment and insist on an analysis that imbrocates global states as animated by capitalism. Sally sells single sneakers at the seashore.
For more detail on the Parent Tide, see →.
It is a trick to not be intoxicated by the material patterning and to remain focused on ascertaining the scope of global supply chains; their connection to necropolitics and the ways to cease their machinations. Phil A. Neel does a worthy job of that here: →.
On March 28, 1941, Woolf, loaded her coat pockets with rocks, not to be a floater, and walked into the River Ouse.
It was a privilege because this type of person killing themselves circulates in a realm where no one else, kith or kin, neighbor or conspirator, materially or spiritually depends on them to exist. The people they surround themselves with all live within equal economic security and political confidence.
The violent joke and/or laughing at violence is a tactic practiced by the miscreants in my family. Filthy, angry, heartbreaking humor is incubated in the home. It helps me, my aunts, nieces, cousins … survive the bad jobs, incarceration, sickness, drug addiction, evictions, and so on … of our family members. When my aunt kicks a knife from my cousin’s hand, we laugh and marvel at my aunt’s skill … we smirk-cry when a cousin born in jail is named “Liberty” … we guffaw when a neighbor plants cannabis in the sheriff's yard, in a state where it remains illegal.
See →.
Allbirds receives high marks on its carbon footprint but not on its labor conduct. “There is no evidence it has a Code of Conduct. It sources its final stage of production from countries with extreme risk of labour abuse. There is no evidence it ensures payment of a living wage in its supply” →.
I also choose strawberries as they will still be late-harvested when this text is published. I choose strawberries because my grandmother and her siblings and my great grandparents and their siblings worked in Salinas and Visalia fields as migrant workers where strawberries are also cultivated. My family was harvesting cotton, not berries. My mother was born in Salinas. There are no stories of their dissent; no boot in the face of the landowner. No joke.
See this authoritative text on California strawberry industry workers: Miriam J. Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture (Cornell University Press, 1996).
In the 1980s, one of the few plastic-molded action figure lines marketed towards young girls produced the Strawberry Shortcake Series by Kenner. The dolls contain a spectrum of gender and racial affronts. Yet is hard to resist an attempt at imagining an alternate universe where the membership of the United Farm Workers of America does not shrink in the 1980s; and in this moderately improved universe, instead of cartoon parades and housewarmings, Blueberry Muffin, Orange Blossom, Strawberry Shortcake, Apple Dumplin, Plum Puddin, Raspberry Tart, Almond Teacake and their animal familiars take on agricultural union grievances and crush villainous corporate henchmen … like … Purple Pie Man and Sour Grapes. Yes, Purple Pie Man communicates a kind of pansexual, mediterranean-by-way-of-Burning Man vibe in very tight pants. He has a moustache insert that is easily misplaced. Yes, Sour Grapes, a tall, black, blue-and-purple tressed, high Femme villain with a snake side kick is nothing short of an age-old sexist reprisal of Medusa operating on the interlaced seam of race and gender. How does an ideologically careless child play hard with the dolls who straddle the seam? I don’t know. The surviving figurines are very susceptible to mold.
In early October 2020, in Salinas, California, stronger Covid measures were required, as workers were felled by Covid and smoke from the fires.
In a scattered, dissociative way, I recall a never-worn souvenir T-shirt in the giveaway bin … It read: I GOT STONED IN GAZA. It included a cartoon drawing of a wall—the wall of apartheid. The gifted T-shirt operates within a contagion heuristic. It’s implicit violence contaminates even an ocean apart from what the Israeli government refers to as a security barrier. Who wears this?
Define data lake. Online? You are in it; your wake, your waste, your piss in the pool, collected and monetized.
Thanks to Ramón Miranda Beltrán here. In conversation at a studio visit at Beta-Local, I was speaking of Social Practice as missionary work and Beltrán was clear that one must go further in that qualification of Social Practice as part of Colonialism’s unfinished violences. Later, online, I located a newspaper clipping reporting the shark attack and subsequent death of a US missionary in early twentieth century San Juan.
Roiling turbulent flows of gas, ash, and rock can reach a speed of 700 km per hour.
Fanon returned to Martinique shortly before accepting the appointment in Algeria. Reportedly, he no longer felt at ease there. Can a part of him be or not be the girl expelled from home by forces beyond her control?
In Kiowa, this butte or latholithic is named Daxpitcheeaasáao. In Lakota, it is called Matȟó Thípila. Kiowa, Lakota, Crow, and Cheyenne nations have requested that its name be restored and that rock climbers cease scaling a holy site. It is currently operated as a monument by the National Park services under the name Devil’s Tower. Nearly 5,000 rock climbers ascend the site each year.
This is the name of the mountain in Lakota. It is also called Mount Rushmore.
The price of tea in England, managed by the EIC, also known as “The Company,” exceeded the domestic budget of local worker households. These workers were just becoming incorporated into an expanded colonial economic structure that included the liquidation of land held in common. Smuggling operations that studded remote coastlines provided tea at a lower cost, allowing disadvantaged laborers access to a new energy drink that enhanced their ability to work in worsening conditions. “The Company” was not a purveyor of tea and spices alone. Its own imbrication in both the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean chattel slave trades began in 1621, when EIC transported 22 enslaved people from India to Batavia. This was six years prior to what’s generally recorded as “the first English slaving voyage across the Atlantic.” After destroying indigenous systems of governance, the European company states engineered a flow of labor and goods that resulted in enslaved peoples producing, for example, cloves, nutmeg and tea sold in the UK.
After reading the draft of this essay, S. writes that she actually did pocket and plant the cocoa. My fantasy was in fact a reality.
Utilizing this term as coined by Tosquelles.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Diane Prince Herndl and Robyn R. Warhol (Rutgers University Press, 1997), 355.
Made spacious by dementia, Silvia Campos haltingly wrote La Promesa; it is a slender, purple novella. When the libraries were closed down in the beginning of the pandemic, it was next to my bed. There was no returning it. In La Promesa, the protagonist, crossing the Atlantic eastward by cruise ship, is accidentally hurled overboard. As she swims eastward, she attempts to remember everything. Is she wearing running shoes? Her brand is extinct. But ultimately, I don’t remember the book … only the feel of drowning in my lungs. I can’t verify the plot or the details. The book is now back in the library, circulating. I want to check if the floater is apolitical. Is that a dealbreaker these days? Still, after all of this, I will see the vague lines of our erasing selves in her stroke.
I don’t imagine you believe them when the various corporation-states (not so different from colonial era trading companies) announce that they would stop extraction of rare earths at 1% of total lunar mass.