Pinned
Get over the shame and the lack of confidence and the fear of failure and the imposter syndrome. Nobody cares. Some people are cruel and mean and love to watch others fail. So what? Do you really want to prove them right? Get the fuck up, we’re chasing our dreams like our lives depend on it because, in case you forgot, they do.
men will really be like i don’t give a shit about you but i’m never leaving you alone
a perfect allegory for the contradictory nature of our inner worlds, always conflicted, born and taught to be soulless, to feel nothing, but we still feel it all, deeply
Girl whatever
'he would not fucking say that' maybe he would if he knew he was starring in his very own porn fic for the sole purpose of delighting some freaks on archive of our own dot org. maybe he'd play it up for the cameras. ever consider that
SHYGIRL Schiaparelli x AnOther Magazine, SS23
eric lodwick, 2008
trouble by Matthew Dickman
Assumption: you dislike the pretentious restaurant type industries and primarily prefer a well executed street food type meal
i hated the menu (2022) actually
i guess the take here is that i believe in pretentious versus unpretentious dining as a useful gastronomic rubric the same way i believe in it as a useful literary rubric ie. pretty much not at all. what i think is constructive is thinking about how particular styles of food + service attract or detract from prestige and how the social currency of those styles is determined relative to the usual suspects of broader social formations ie. class, racism, colonialism.
which cuisines are allowed access to a 'pretentious' sphere in the first place? western european, undeniably. 'street food,' to me, is a racialised term; off the top of my head (& speaking from a specifically british metropolitan context), jamaican, indian, chinese, nigerian, southwest asian, greek cuisines, among others -- 'authentic' or otherwise -- are "street food" (found at food stalls or in cheap cafes and restaurants w/ a v. basic standard of service). paying the same prices for an upscale chinese or indian restaurant meal that you might for an upscale french or italian catches ire, often irrespective of the quality of the meal or service; there's a derision towards these spaces that i think gets caught in the net that 'pretentiousness' casts, and i don't like the assumption that western european countries get to dominate the upper echelons of culinary development whilst racialised cuisines in european settings are only ever cheap, accessible, low-fuss meals.
& similarly, what does it mean to 'elevate' a racialised cuisine to a higher price point & a more involved standard of service? i hate dishoom is a great piece about the british 'indian street food' restaurant phenomenon -- i worked in one of these places in central manchester, hated it, and used to say all the time that it attracted a crowd of white people who wanted to think of themselves as the sorts of people who ate "authentic" south asian food but were too racist to go to places like the curry mile. in conversation w/ a friend about these sorts of restaurants a few weeks ago, she described the discursive apparatus of one of them as a "noble savage"-type view of indian cuisine; the family recipe, passed down through generations, coming straight from the orient to yr doorstep. it's not at all uncommon for racialised cuisines to be picked up by predominantly-white ownership, predominantly-white FOH (and even BOH sometimes), and get sold back to a predominantly-white clientele in a neutered form, often pricing out people from the communities from which it originated. so you see the contradiction here -- i don't like the assumption that the food of racialised communities ought to be shut out from these higher-end settings (i do think higher-end settings have a lot to offer, i find as many of them to be interesting and unique and intellectually involved as i do pneumatic and unchallenging and overpriced, and i do think there exists w/ pretty much any dish you can think of a gradient of quality that comes into being to some extent relative to quality/expense of ingredients and expertise in craft), and nor do i like what often ends up done to those cuisines in order to break into those spaces, or at least mimic them.
& how do these more elevated spaces sustain themselves? dress codes, security guards, different codes of conduct for different guests. who gets to be a welcome and uncomplicated recipient of hospitality in fine dining/premium casual settings? i used to work at a fine dining-adj place where we were instructed to give far more careful + attentive service to the tables who were willing to spend £100+ on a bottle of wine. like, it's a classed space, and maintains itself the way any other classed space does.
i want culinary styles outside of the western european hegemon to emerge into the more 'elevated' spaces in hospitality on their own intellectual terms & through interaction w/ gastronomic science that allows for the development & elevation of a dish, but that feels like a tall order. i ask the same q's of restaurants relative to prestige or a lack thereof that i ask of texts relative to the literary canon; why do we attach value to this but not that, why do i like this, why do i dismiss that. what do i think it's saying about me as a person to enjoy or deride this or that, what assumptions have i let go unchallenged. what interests me, how do i follow up on this interest. what do i know about this, what don't i understand, do i want to understand, how do i go about understanding. how did this get here in this form. i like what i like w/ restaurants -- i like an elevated service, i like complexity, i like food and drink that tastes good -- i think the best i can do is discard this v. inchoate framework of 'pretentiousness' and simply try to consistently challenge myself & my assumptions along the way of developing my taste.
Forget about Habibi Funk (white guy owned reissue music label who have been buying up and repackaging retro MENA music for public consumption) and support Sudan Tape Archive instead
Also check out Majazz, a similar Palestinian-run project 🥰
Thank you for the recommendation ❤️
Did you know which pro-Palestine song that Habibi Funk removed from their release?
The song غيفارا غزة (Ghifara Ghazza) from Ferkat al-Ard's album Oghneya (one of their most famous reissues afaik). It's listed in the Discogs page for the original album:
https://www.discogs.com/master/889285-فرقة-الأرض-Ferkat-Al-Ard-أغنية
The actual song seems to have been removed from Youtube but here's a Reddit post that links to the deleted Youtube video:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialistmusic/comments/udcbur/ghfyara_ghaza_غيفارا_غزة_by_ferkat_al_ard_فرقة/?rdt=56774
they always stop the blood pressure cuff right before it gets to the good part
my christmas cookie decoration was the survivorship bias diagram
So hi, I know this is kind of a hot-button question so please bear with me. You cite Lenin a bunch and I know he's obviously pretty influential to the history of communist thought, but beyond State and Rev I'd been reluctant to look further into his writings, because his role in dismantling the soviets (contra his rhetorical support for them) gave me the impression he wasn't particularly serious about communism per se, beyond its rhetorical value for building a national movement around the Bolsheviks. Your perspective on him seems a bit less jaded - what's your thought process?
Yeah Lenin oversaw the consolidation of the state but he was the Bolshevik most realistic and conscious of it. In that way he was tragic, and split between being a revolutionary communist and the necessities of a statesman who knew he was becoming the personification of a “bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without a bourgeoisie!”
Even before the New Economic Policy, he had also predicted that a strategy dependent on state power would require a consolidation of state capitalism. I think his great error was to think that this could carry over into a specifically “proletarian” form of the state, which laid the basis theoretically for Stalin’s “mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed” and practically for the political state’s substitution for the republic of councils.
But even this he noticed to some degree, like in the 1920-1921 trade union debates when he called Trotsky’s advocacy for militarization of labor “bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions. .” He thought Trotsky conflated the class-as-state with the class’s organs of self-governance. Lenin thought the distinction was extremely important, because the role of the professional state could only be to prepare the way for its withering away by allocating the resources for workers and peasants to learn self-governance and self-planning.
Even though I think Lenin overestimated the positive content of the revolutionary political state by considering it already the class-as-state, I think he already understood many of the basic dynamics that would lead to the class and the party being collapsed into the administration of the “bourgeois state” and accumulation of the total national capital managed by the state. At one point he went as far as to say this:
“If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.”
This is why his final articles were almost entirely about how to prevent bureaucratization and total professionalization of governance. What he didn’t realize is that one of the things that led to the party dissolving into the administration of the state was that the party had already been constructed as a “state within a state” along Social-Democratic lines. So there was a built in justification for expediency in the name of the self-preservation and a substitutionist logic towards the class that was later transferred from party to state.
But the fact that he knew very clearly that there was a mortal problem is extremely historically significant. He was the model for very future head of state for the “socialist republics,” but unlike almost any of them apart from Mao, Che, Ben Bella etc he understood the difficulty of his position as a communist. This is how I think about Lenin’s own actions in Kronstadt and elsewhere. He didn’t gloat over Kronstadt, it was the first great tragedy of the revolution. But the logic of necessity and self-preservation of society that he had invoked as the statesman leading its repression ended up becoming an end in itself as the revolutionary content slowly withered. It became a question of the self-preservation of the political state and the national capital, which is what’s going on later in Stalin’s concept of overwhelming necessity.
The reason that I respect Lenin regardless but not so much Stalin and the other Bolsheviks is because Lenin knew he was a doomed man. I think a tragic figure who knows that he’s tragic has more to learn from critically than a tragic figure who has absolute faith in what they’re doing. This is also how Ronald Grigor Suny talks about Lenin in The Soviet Experiment, which I recommend as a general historical source on Soviet history. I also wrote an essay about Lenin as a tragic figure, showing that Adorno’s thought is “Leninist”
okay.
🌎is a cunt because of his upbringing within wealth SPECIFICALLY the lifestyle of wealth that allows you to stratify people into classes of importance. he is actively working to make a life for himself outside of this and has a love for the community he is now of but he’s also continuing to be a dick in many smaller mannerisms he hasn’t really cared to examine yet
🔧is a cunt because she compartmentalizes too well so there’s like 3 people who could get her to maybe begin introspecting and then otherwise (when it even happens because overall she’s very beloved but when she fucks up she fucks up Bad) if she does something thst hurts someone’s feelings or someone like a hookup CATCHES feelings not only is it not her problem (sometimes? valid?) she’ll also recline on this diluted-stoicism idea of ‘logic’ and how whatever those emotions are are clouding that person’s understanding. of course karma’s going to hit her like a boomerang don’t you worry about that. 🕸️ is my sweetie pie and can do no wrong but she has been known to start fights. she lashes out because her heart’s too big </3 she also is predisposed to judge first consider the value in others’ opinions later despite how surprisingly expansive and down to earth her rationale can be. and the reason this is surprising is because she doesn’t know how to fucking talk and always is on the defensive thinking from the outset that people will devalue her opinion. but then she creates those situations for herself by leading eith that. OUROBOROS of sorts. has a lot of love in her heart for others but assumed people are bound to hate her and so gets in these needlessly complicated social dances bc she wants to strike first
they do have names now actually so idk why i lean on the emoji code but it just feels better at least right now. might mean I’ll change some names in the future??? for now 🌎=nitesh 🔧=maite 🕸️=alia BUT im toying with angelica bc i’ve just heard it used more often it feels like an actual person from the area i’m writing
okay.
🌎is a cunt because of his upbringing within wealth SPECIFICALLY the lifestyle of wealth that allows you to stratify people into classes of importance. he is actively working to make a life for himself outside of this and has a love for the community he is now of but he’s also continuing to be a dick in many smaller mannerisms he hasn’t really cared to examine yet
🔧is a cunt because she compartmentalizes too well so there’s like 3 people who could get her to maybe begin introspecting and then otherwise (when it even happens because overall she’s very beloved but when she fucks up she fucks up Bad) if she does something thst hurts someone’s feelings or someone like a hookup CATCHES feelings not only is it not her problem (sometimes? valid?) she’ll also recline on this diluted-stoicism idea of ‘logic’ and how whatever those emotions are are clouding that person’s understanding. of course karma’s going to hit her like a boomerang don’t you worry about that. 🕸️ is my sweetie pie and can do no wrong but she has been known to start fights. she lashes out because her heart’s too big </3 she also is predisposed to judge first consider the value in others’ opinions later despite how surprisingly expansive and down to earth her rationale can be. and the reason this is surprising is because she doesn’t know how to fucking talk and always is on the defensive thinking from the outset that people will devalue her opinion. but then she creates those situations for herself by leading eith that. OUROBOROS of sorts. has a lot of love in her heart for others but assumed people are bound to hate her and so gets in these needlessly complicated social dances bc she wants to strike first
We haven’t had bread for days… The war on Gaza continues, the blockade is suffocating us, and bakeries have completely shut down. The situation is beyond tragic—children, families, everyone is starving. We need every voice, every bit of support, every share to make the world hear our cry. Please don’t ignore our suffering.
we’ve started regularly saying “Goose is on his wall”
men lose their masculinity (the social reward for correctly performed manhood) through advocating for, sympathizing with, or doing labor that is allocated to women.
(and I'm not talking about some innate, spiritual, or psychological masculinity. I mean social masculinity--being regarded by higher ranking men as masculine.)
you genuinely do lose your current standing if you meaningfully and consistently object to the economic, legal, and interpersonal status of women, especially in ways that implicate men around you.
many men believe that if they are willing to do this, occasionally, then they are owed a recuperation of their masculinity through some other means.
if they are sacrificing masculinity through advocating for women politically, then they expect to bolster their masculinity through receiving expressions of gratitude and adoration by women ("feminist men are so hot" "consent is sexy" "pro-choice men get laid more" etc.) or they expect to bolster their masculinity through emasculating other men by asserting the standards of masculinity they adhere to are the "real" masculinity ("real men support women" "sexists are immature boys, I'm a man" "I'm secure in my masculinity and they're insecure" etc.)
to dismantle patriarchy, you need to be able to advocate for women even when it means losing gendered status. other men mostly will not respect you, and many misogynist women will not respect you either. it might not get you laid or praised or validated. in fact, it will probably subject you to increased scrutiny and criticism (because feminized subjects are always subject to such, and if you lose social masculinity, you too will experience this to some degree).
will you still advocate for women even if there is no social benefit and only social cost? do you have principles, or do you just want the fantasy of being a benevolent ruler?
