A few months in the wilderness at below deck. First it was searching for work, then I managed to secure a job outside of academia (goodbye universities, you suck and the entire edifice of universal education has been pulverised by the Tories — I’ll address that in another post soon). After that, I spent a couple of wild weeks in Mexico, mostly travelling on my own and meeting a series of very strange, beautiful people (another post on that soon). The last month has been finding my feet in said new-job, and making space for anything not-new-job.
(Yours truly with my incredible guide Armando at the pyramids of Teotihuacan).
After about four years of balancing various freelance work, I’m now a 9-5 guy, walking the mean streets of concrete (and, luckily, WFH four days a week). Adjusting to the new rhythms, and when not basking in the brief spells of the much needed sunshine, I’ve started managing to find time to write again and I plan to start sharing work on here.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share a spread of online and magazine writing to keep you busy while you eagerly await the new and fresh blogs that drop from the tree branches of boredom and desperation:
For Plinth Magazine, I interviewed the artist Danielle Dean about her great installation Amazon at Tate Britain, and we had a great natter about history from below, the work being itself founded in the principles of workers’ inquiry. I also reviewed Mike Nelson’s The Book of Spells, a small but expansive exhibition that was on at Matt’s Gallery back in February and March. Thanks to Sammi Gale for asking me to write these pieces, and check out Sammi’s wicked substack project, too.
I really enjoyed going deep into Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi for Jacobin Magazine, a book that I absolutely hated at first but eventually found pretty interesting. I actually think that one of the most engaging things about the novel is quite how irritating it is, even at the level of style. The review also allowed me to get some thoughts off my chest about the pervasive moral dogmatism of our times, too (plenty more on that too, I’m sure). JB at Jacobin is very open to book review pitches, and was a wonderful editor.
Since Yeezus first came out way back in 2013, I have wanted to write something about the stylistic expressivity at the heart of Kanye West, the way he is driven to extremes: from arrogance of a biblical scale to contrition and earnest exposure in the space of seconds. Under the pretences of a review of the Netflix documentary, jeen-yuhs, I finally had the chance to get some of these thoughts out for Plinth. It felt like a great starting point to think about Kanye’s music in a formalised way and I’d love to write more about his work in the future.
And finally, for Elephant Magazine, I wrote about the trend of artists selling their expertise in trend prediction and cultural analysis. Shout out to one of the people mentioned (fairly favourably) in the piece who sent me a series of pissy DMs explaining the lengths to which I had not properly understood a variety of things — I’m guessing I must have got close to something, a nerve perhaps.
Intermezzo finito. More soon. Kisses.