A quick addendum to yesterday’s post made necessary because I am really out of practice at this so I forgot the main thing I wanted to share about Wu Fei.

Around three weeks ago, Wu Fei announced that she would present a piece of music every day through a subscription service. There are two options: You can pay a little bit per month to receive a piece every day, or you can take the unpaid option that brings you a piece every Monday and Friday. read more

I danced around this piece all last week. With everything so upheaved, I felt obligated to deliver something with heft, depth, and consequence. To offer something that might offset the grim reality that plagues our everyday.

Writing essays about how the world is fucked up and bullshit are easy enough in normal times. Now it’s just shooting fish in a barrel. And really, what’s the point?¹Don’t even get me started on the futility of coming up with something fictional when we are living inside some Mary Shelley/Camus/Kafka fever dream. We are all sharing the same streams of information, more or less, and unless you are gamboling around the fringier fringes of the internet machine, the news is stark: This shit is real and it is not going away quickly. That first rush of “I can ride this out standing on my head” bravado has withered and died. The long haul, we are in it, and sorry y’all, but it feels like so much nothingness I could just fucking scream. read more

“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

A few days ago, our more-or-less president paid a visit to an Arizona factory where they manufacture Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), in this case the N95 masks that are essential for health care workers and are pretty damn great for the rest of us who are trying not to die of the COVID monster. As the Great Pumpkin toured the site – without wearing a mask himself, at one point spraying his putrid drool directly onto a bin of newly-made product – a curious song blared over the loudspeakers. read more

As part of “Operation America Strong,” the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds announced they will fly joint operations over Washington, Baltimore, New York, Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Austin, sources told USA TODAY.

It was inevitable that vocabulary and concepts around COVID19 would come to lean heavily on militarized bafflegab. We are “at war” with an “Invisible Enemy” that threatens to “destroy the economy and the lives of millions of Americans.” We “deploy strike forces” to conduct tests in elder living facilities.¹Perhaps the term ‘care team’ was deemed too twee and weak for the National Guard carrying out the “mission.” Screw it; let’s scare Granny to death. We are exhorted to “activate the arsenal of democracy” to defeat this threat. read more