chronological posts

Cold, Like Minnesota (2019)

This book (novel-length, cleanly DIY printed, no page numbers, bound in construction paper, inside cover said 30 copies were printed) was dropped in my mailbox sometime in 2019 while the author was in progress of moving out of town. I’d enjoyed some of his other fiction before and there was some low-stakes exchange happening among us. Somehow, the 6 years went by before I made the decision to read this one all the way through. (I’m reading a lot more quickly these days–got a built-in study hall while I wait for the school bus to retrieve M.)

It’s a story about a neighborhood in Minneapolis which functions as something like an enclave of mutual aid, surrounded by other (to varying degrees, hostile) paradigms, close to 100 years in the future; presumably, 100 years of domestic unrest and war. A traveler arrives and integrates into the enclave. The near-exclusive focus is the enclave residents’ relationships, the social field as the tangible reflection of messy political structures.

When I hit him up to ask, the author said he hadn’t been writing much since finishing this piece in 2019, partly due to “current events somewhat overtaking what used to seem ‘fictional’.”

It is just a tiny bit fuzzily organized–there are a couple unclear continuity breaks and plot holes. But none of this is too disruptive because of how tightly the book sticks to its strengths. The flow of the social imagination is mostly so competent, so smoothly believable, that it generates its own momentum, gravity, consistency, and sets the pace. (It’s not a given that this can be pulled off in fiction, especially a DIY production presumably without much or any editor input.) The story flows best when fully digging into the real meat: forms of political power and experimental structures, their materiality and weaknesses, circulated among and digested through social imagination, the interpersonal, the affective flows among the women of the enclave.

I say women because you can almost count all the male characters on one hand: most of them are unnamed murder victims, a series of expendable bystanders or easily-neutralized antagonists. The only named male character we meet is the brother of a protagonist; he too mostly functions as atmosphere.

‘…You act like a fucking boy, Dellamya, you know that?’

‘Tell me what you mean.’ Dellamya says.

‘Helpless.’ Salwa says. ‘Fucking helpless.’

I can’t say it was a bad choice to not saddle this glimpse into a future timeline with the burdensome need to ‘include everything,’ deal with everything, every type of person. This way, the focus stays neat and lucid.

For all the gun violence, it’s still technically a Mary Sue narrative. Gina arrives on the scene–literally a scene, of squats and gray-area squats, coordinated by neighborhood housing councils and slowly-illuminated soft-power systems–and integrates successfully. Because she is competent and careful, she is loved and supported without ever hitting any real conflicts. Because she is strategic, she prospers, and so do her new friends. Ambient tensions arise but never destroy anything we care about. Gina herself never does anything fucked up (with any real stakes).

There are plenty of murders but there’s no sexual violence of any kind, not even in reference. This is the only real aspect of this future landscape that stretches credulity for me. Otherwise, it was a beautifully spooky read in 2025. Its light (but not too light) framing of surrounding context (of recovery after acute militarism, jerryrigged commercial logistics and “generation lockdown”) were graceful without being flippant. Characters thought around, and interacted with, these superstructures with about as much uneasy incoherence as we ourselves do.

Cars, guns, dogs, money, property, anxious processes of sussing out other people’s motivations and impulses, clashing ideological paradigms and their destructive effects on habitable environments: all these are familiar parts of the texture of precarious life, interdependence with other people. They’re juggled with a lot of fluency. I believe this can only come from already living within pieces of this future.

I haven’t read very many fiction works that talk about the network needed to constitute the mutual-aid-enclave. I would have a hard time visualizing, depicting it in this much detail myself. Its presence in the story is at times so faint that it can barely be confirmed, but so indispensible. It’s a sort of invisible junglegym that only some are climbing through, without knowing exactly why, and without being able to justify it coherently or comfortably.

What are these distant but definite connections that can’t be effectively named, can be evaluated only within the terms of their ambiguity, must somehow be counted on but can never be clearly measured? They’re certainly not ‘fair’ but are they ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Does it matter, if you need them to survive? How far do the networks extend? Where does their power falter? Everyone wonders, everyone inhabits the nervous uncertainty, but nobody has much choice other than to accept the network’s existence on its own unsatisfying terms. In this aspect, the text gives an accurate depiction of an already-existing scenario.

It’s presented as neither okay nor damning or whatever, that in this fictional future, the existence of these networks is not anywhere close to enough to reshape the world, the country, or even the whole city; its bounty (nothing crazy–just a very, very tenuous material stability via the availability of a modest social field) is bounded to the enclave. The fascist or fascist-inflected post-american chaos that is arriving is too large to be taken on at scale. One can be ashamed of these limitations (or not), but the fact remains: without other people, without dealing with them (uneasily, but still somehow finding a way) there is not even survival, and survival is at a certain point the most that can be hoped for. This fictional calculation rings uncomfortably plausible in 2025.

Arguably the visible onset of this timeline publicly declared itself and signified itself in our world less than a year from this novel’s printing–in, of all places, Minneapolis. So I can understand wanting to stop writing fiction.

This morning I grabbed two plush toys, sat them next to each other, and asked my daughter: how is one different than the other?

Obviously she’s not willing to answer patronizing rhetorical questions like this, but we had a fun conversation. I made the following assertion: we live in a world run by people who cannot tell the difference between these two things. At least, they can’t do it without resorting to, ‘well, do they have a price tag? which one is more expensive?’ or, ‘well, do we have a factual backstory on where they were made?’ or ‘who owns them?’ or–at absolute most nuanced–‘oh, maybe they’re different colors? maybe they ‘depict’ different things?’

I argued that we are being held hostage by people that have to rely on a ‘factual’ or numerical basis to tell one thing from another. Entrenched in the power structures around us is a profound, vicious imperative to distrust one’s own eyes or ears, a need to rationalize every observation in some sort of quantifiable value system (or niche ideological dogma built of short-sighted rationalizations).

Worst of all, there’s an exponentially more intense enforcement of distrust of anything that could ever be contaminated with the slur ‘subjective’. For the powerful people and entities we are subject to, the very existence of qualities that cannot be reduced to the factual or numerical is, in this time and place, belligerently disavowed.

This is aesthetic illiteracy. I told her we are being held hostage by aesthetically illiterate people and entities.

She found this assertion hard to believe because, for one thing, the differences between things are so obvious to her. For another, we live in a highly aesthetically literate population, and nearly everybody we know or encounter out in public very visibly displays this literacy.

She asked me to give an example and it made me realize the extent of this baseline of tremendous, glorious, easy literacy. We take it for granted. The differences between something pretty or funny vs. something ugly is instantly visible to her, to me, to everyone we know.

When my daughter draws, she can tell immediately what is a success and what is a failure. She knows there is such a thing as failure, and that the complexity of the rules (and the fact that the rules can continue to change, unpredictably, endlessly–while still functioning as rules) cannot be summarized. She knows how to look honestly, see honestly, have integrity to unspoken and unspeakable yet absolutely undeniable rules.

“Long live the secret rules of the game that leads everything to disobey the symbolic order,” my bf Baudrillard says.

I first attempted the example of walmart: in its architecture it’s a temple to aesthetic illiteracy, of rational reduction to “savings,” the sheer bottom line–yet it runs on irrational and largely aesthetic impulses, and moreover, all the cashiers and most of the shoppers are highly aesthetically literate, razor sharp and sophisticated. Everyone in the normal population knows, in one way or another, without having to think, how to play with signs, how to break meaning, how to unravel and recombine the surfaces of things to create an effect, how to circulate effects among ourselves without resorting to narrative, symbolism or sheer quantification.

In walmart, despite the aesthetic field of walmart itself, there is, thank god, no aesthetic consensus: only a war of infinitely different sensibilities in which everyone and everything takes a side.

Everybody can and will find a way to play and to satisfy themselves, whether through fashion or the performance of conversation. For normal people, it’s the most regular thing in the world, as easy as breathing.

My second example: we can all tell the difference between the pixar movie cars (my daughter finds aesthetically baffling and horrible) and the miyazaki movie spirited away (a fave of hers). Yet, for people making money off media, they strive to reduce this difference to ‘well, which one makes more money? which is more marketable? which got a higher number of views? where’s the data?’

Or cocomelon, she added. I said, exactly! What’s the difference between cocomelon and spirited away? (I haven’t seen much cocomelon.)

Cocomelon, my daughter explained, is one of the most intense forms of aesthetic violence she’s ever encountered, just so viscerally horrible and grating. Apparently it’s her high water mark of aesthetically illiterate insanity.

We discussed how cocomelon being ‘for babies’ doesn’t justify its shrill, demonic qualities: actual babies will watch literally anything. A baby will watch you tie your shoes with just as much interest as anything else. Cocomelon, my daughter said (in so many words), being a product for the sake of having a product, is a regime. It’s an argument. She demonstrated: it’s a bludgeon: you like this! you like this! you like this! ONE TWO THREE, THERE’S AN APPLE IN A TREE!

The horrible irony I’ve found in the course of my life is that even people who most aggressively disavow the entire existence of the aesthetic dimension, who will die swearing that there’s no such thing as an aesthetic field, still navigate through their own worlds using an aesthetic compass, without knowing it or having any conscious relationship with it, or even hating and resenting it. Language itself, including gestural language, operates via aesthetic field. One cannot communicate whatsoever without engaging aesthetically.

There are people for whom music is essentially a product, a commodity that consumers use to ‘chill out’ or ‘get excited’ or to signal identity, a sort of fashion accessory or social token. In the minds of such people, just as you would use dental floss to floss your teeth, you use music to drown out sex sounds, or to fend off boredom. A party is supposed to have music in the background. A TV show is supposed to have a themesong. If only there were some way to just auto-complete these functions without having to get confused by all the possibilities, or run afoul of making the wrong choice by accident and getting mocked!

For the aesthetically illiterate people who run the world, music’s power to make an ‘atmosphere’ or to unite groups in the joy of a shared sensibility is undeniably profitable and even, at times, necessary–but, they reason, there must be some way to recreate this profitability without having to engage in the messy and confusing process of actual aesthetic navigation, without risking failure, alienation, embarassment. Or–ideally–without having to pay anybody who is capable of doing this navigation.

The ascent of AI currently underway is such a boring phenomenon I have no real interest in writing about it much, but I will mention this aspect of it: when I’ve talked to AI optimists, the number one thing these people want to see happen is the obliteration of the irrational, slippery power of aesthetic fields. AI optimists want it to go away. They categorically resent the existence of that entire dimension, which to me makes about as much sense as resenting that we exist in three dimensions rather than two. They seem really convinced that two dimensions would be so much neater.

I have limited patience talking to these people; it feels as if I’m locked in a cage and the prisoner next to me is going, “Wow, these bars are so solid! Isn’t it amazing? How did they make these? They’re so advanced, so functional! They’re so impressive! Aren’t you impressed?”

There’s also this deep suspicion of how confusing the aesthetic dimension is, and a desire for centralized aesthetic standards rather than a fray of heterogeneous aesthetic war. Ideological fascists in particular want there to be an aesthetic ‘consensus’ in the world; fascists politics have always hinged on (incredibly dumb but) undeniably aesthetic projects: the notion that people should be blonde, for instance. Liberals also want there to be a consensus–just a different type, revolving around affective qualities (i.e. ‘kindness’? ‘science’?) rather than necessarily visual appearances. This is one of the major lines of continuity between liberals and fascists: the shared discomfort with the world’s inherent aesthetic friction.

Tech-worshippers have always resented the fact that most other people on earth have some level of confidence doing aesthetic navigation, fucking around, sensibility-building, fighting with each other–and that most people already intuitively understand that the aesthetic dimension is not ethical. Your aesthetic choices will betray you at a moment’s notice. Tech dudes profoundly resent both this confidence and the fields’ complexity, and want to find a way to not just make money or cut corners but punish the entire realm of aesthetic literacy.

They want a collective abdication of the power of aesthetic navigation. They want to forcibly subordinate the aesthetic dimension to their one monolitically cool toy. It won’t work, it’s literally not possible, but that’s their dream.

Now: Woodeneye.

I joke that Cardiacs has “ruined music for me” because my relationship with the band has reordered my sensibility at such a profound level that there is actually something destructive about the change.

It cannot by any means possibly be reduced to, “hey, I found a cool band with music I like.” My entire relationship to music, to the creation process, and to what is, for me, the most fundamental dimension of all, and what I have built my life around (aesthetic sensibility and the aesthetic dimension of all things), underwent a tectonic shift. It continues to change me; all other music from that point on has been, in some way, existing in relation to Cardiacs.

Like anything involving the aesthetic dimension, this is not an entirely wholesome or positive process. It’s fucked up. One uncomfortable but critical aspect of this process has been the cringe.

When I first encountered Cardiacs, it made me cringe so hard that I rapidly x’d out of the window I was in, mumbling “no, no, no, god no.” I sat at my desk, still cringing. I thought for a while. Then, for some indistinct but absolutely undeniable reason, as if moved by an invisible law, like a pidgeon navigating the earth’s magnetic field via nameless pull from inside my brain, I reopened my browser and went back to it.

As if somebody had just taken a sheet of sandpaper and scraped it along my face, the first Cardiacs song I heard bothered me so much and made me so palpably embarassed that I couldn’t stand to move on from it. It had fascinated me, not in a positive way, but also not in the unthreateningly foreign way that everything is terrible! videos fascinate me. It was right on the line between uncomfortable and beautiful. It was not one thing or another. It couldn’t be parked safely in a genre I felt good about or solidly bad about. In the Baudrillardian sense, it was seductive.

Over the last five years, this cycle has played out over and over again, all within the Alphabet Business Concern garden. For instance, I have a profound allergy to ‘folk music,’ especially ‘psych folk,’ and deeply resented the Cardiacs side project, The Sea Nymphs, for existing. How could they do this to me? Why? Now, a few years down the line, those goddamn songs, what can only be called incredibly fruity, prissy, precious ‘eris shit,’ a style which normally has me running the other direction and gasping for air and breaking out in hives, are situated among the most important music of my entire life.

Baurdillard calls this phenomenon ‘reversibility’ and defines it as ‘the principle of evil’. “All things are ambiguous and reversible,” he insists. ‘Evil’ is the slippery, disloyal and amoral quality that exists as a field around things like music.

It’s the thing that allows you to tell one plush toy from another. What are they like? If you decide one is cool, there’s a totally unreasonable but still somehow inescapable probability that it will, for no apparent or particular reason, decide to change–and become cringe. Or vice-versa.

To read my first gushing account of this set of effects shortly after they hit me, read here (as always, the password is how many cowboys are out in the yard). There are even still a few Cardiacs songs I can’t listen to, that make me queasy or ashamed or annoyed… But I’m resigned to the fact that it’s a matter of time until I’m crying in my car and singing along. It’s that powerful, and I don’t think the power can be separated from the fact that I cannot say I “like” every one of the qualities or that they are all “good” or “cool”. I cannot give good reasons why they are good. None of us can, the fans, we can’t actually. Pleasure and aesthetic power often overlap but they are two different things.

The new single (allegedly the first of three), Woodeneye, was just released today, August 1 2025–along with the full tracklist of the mythologized final Cardiacs album, around 18 years in the making.

For those who don’t know, Cardiacs was formed in 1977 as ‘Cardiac Arrest,’ and their entire existence has beset audiences with Sediction Via Cringe. It is said that you either hate them or they’re your favorite band.

I resisted… “I don’t like stuff like this,” I told myself… But then they became my favorite band. Despite their undeniable ‘technical’ skill and effectively high-energy affect, through the 80s and 90s the band’s refusal to stay in a safely validate-able punk-adjacent realm, and willingness to dabble in dork shit (like prog rock, folk, ‘psychedelic rock’ and even some almost musical-theater-like shit) effectively explain their divisiveness. In 2008, front guy and main songwriter Tim Smith suffered a literal cardiac arrest that left him permanently disabled until he died in 2020. Fans feared the unfinished album would never be released. But today, along with the release of Woodeneye, the surviving band members have just given a release date for the album: September 17.

The title of the album is (and we knew this already)… LSD. The title itself made me cringe when I heard it and I’ve given all this context to say that I had a partial cringe reaction to the song.

When I saw the album art I blurted out, “oh jesus christ” and started laughing; I am also deeply allergic to hippie stuff and the crushing cornyness of “druuuuugs!” It must be my trauma from when in art classes I was surrounded, outnumbered 20 to 1, by college boy stoners painting a giant pot leaf with an eye in the middle, or a wizard/gnome next to a mushroom surrounded by rainbows or stuff like that.

It absolutely kills me. Why, why did they have to call the album LSD and have this image on the cover? Why? How could they do this to me? Why? Because I know it’s too powerful and I don’t stand a chance–I already know I’m going to be listening to this shit obsessively for possibly decades, the rest of my life maybe.

At first listen I resent that Woodeneye superficially sounds a little like one of the members’ other band (‘The Monsoon Bassoon’) which I’ve never yet managed to like (and to be quite honest as of right now I hate). There’s something very upsetting about it–very GenX mushroom man with a guitar, very very fucking corny; somehow, the “technically difficult” mathiness of it (usually candy for me) makes it worse, not better. The whiny british rock and roll voices. When I got in a crazy car accident a couple years ago, the moment I noticed I was still alive, that album (‘The Monsoon Bassoon– I dig your voodoo’ jfc) had somehow randomly begun playing in the car, and I can’t forgive them for that. In some cosmic way I suspect their corny rock and roll shit caused my car crash. Why, how is this me? Why am I connected to this shit? Why am I subject to this power from nowhere?

After about 900 more listens I would describe Woodeneye as being thrown into a dark storage unit full of strange textures and yes, I’m obsessed with it. Like most psychedelia, it demands a tactile rather than ‘identity signifying’ proximity for properly listening to the music. Herein lies the cringe. Like a metalhead with unwashed hair, the first-glance appearance, the surface, the pimply skin, is largely set aside–instead, one focuses on vibrations and structures.

As if openly declaring this, the cover art features a truly heinous sort of muscular kangaroo with inexplicably stringy hair. After decades of songs about dogs and horses, maybe the kangaroo fuses them? In any case he is framed by fuckin’ mushrooms. jfc.

Looking at the track list it seems that three of the other tracks on LSD are already known, from the beloved Ditzy Scene ep; among them, Made All Up... is one of my favorite songs on earth. It fills me with a bone-chilling coldness I rarely encounter. I recommend listening while half asleep.

Woodeneye is similar to Made All Up and Gen in the aspiration to a shrill inhuman hypnogogic euphoria. It describes beauty so intense that it takes you out of existence–either out of normal mundane existence in the sense of being “taken outside of yourself”, or, maybe, literally, mortally “takes you out”. Beautiful stuff is beautiful. It’s stupid, it’s tautology, but inescapable.

Initial cringe aside, this is one of the Cardiacs qualities I love best: the surreal choral anthem. The surreal choral anthem has a primary place in my music universe dating back to adolescence via J. A. Seazer who got me through high school. It gives collective grandiosity and overexposure of flavor. It quenches this successfully.

I find that grandiosity often scares people, especially the unapologetic, indulgent grandiosity of Cardiacs (who even have an anthem more grandiose than that of many national governments)–as if it’s always inherently fascistic in association. In my opinion people fail to recognize that even fash aesthetics have a disloyal tendency to invert themselves, escape their creators and become quite hilarious (material consequences notwithstanding). I would have thought that the U.S. gov proves this.

It had been rumored that the paralyzing, excruciatingly beautiful song Vermin Mangle was intended to be the last track of LSD, but according to the bandcamp page that’s not going to be true. Off the top of my head I wonder if it’s the fact that Vermin Mangle largely hinges on Tim Smith’s voice: so delicate, clear, singular. The 4 tracks from LSD that we’ve heard are all choral, group vocals (“gang vocals” as bff h.w. comically cited them). Faster than snakes with a ball and a chain, a song I really love, is not on the tracklist either, mysteriously.

Maybe it would be incongruous to spend 17 songs in a chorus and end with something so stylistically different? (I’m just guessing–who knows what the other 13 songs will be like, but I do sort of expect a heavy emphasis on surreal choral anthems, i.e. i’m hungry for them). Or maybe the fact that Vermin Mangle has become a funeral song made it necessary to keep it set apart from all the others.

It does hurt that Woodeneye doesn’t have Tim Smith’s voice. The pain of this is inescapable, because nobody wanted to lose him. But at least we’re compensated for this pain by the fact that he ventriloquizes the chorus: they sing the words he wrote, they deliver his excuses for dying. “I’m sorry that I’m not here, perhaps to be somewhere else or something else.”

It hurts to hear him say that through the surviving voices–but we do have to forgive him. After all, as he pointed out in Vermin Mangle, “there’s room for a big forgive, and a surprise, and adventures.”