Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • Solnit’s hope vs. Arendt’s natality

    Rebecca Solnit’s definition of hope is so succinct a summary of my own definition that I assume I must have picked it up from her (and from others who got it from the same source). This version is from a new interview at LARB, which I’m stashing here so I can cite it properly going…

  • music doesn’t matter so much (and that’s ok)

    [ Editorial note: this is an essay I wrote in 2014 for the last weeks of sadly defunct rock’n’metal blog Demon Pigeon. I’m repubbing it here today in response to this piece at Louder Than War, which not unreasonably laments the disappearance of a sort of music fandom which, even in my own personal golden…

  • the n-word

    Storing this one away here against the next time some wise-arse starts going on about how some people bandy the term around without anyone being able to define it: ganked from yer man Phil Burton-Cartledge, here’s Wendy Brown’s (2015) definition of neoliberalism from Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution: … as a normative order of…

  • How to map nothing: Shannon Mattern on geographies of suspension

    Back on 27th January, the UCL faculty of the Built Environment (virtually) hosted a seminar talk by the mighty mighty Shannon Mattern; a little more than a week ago, they uploaded a recording of said talk to A Popular Video-sharing Platform. This is that video, and I commend it to you wholeheartedly; I will not…

  • elements of that necessary magic

    Well, I sure as shit picked a great week to start using the birdsite again, didn’t I? Man, you should have been here for the Game of Thrones' finale. Now *THAT* was a night. — Martin McGrath (@martinmcgrath) January 6, 2021 I don’t have much to say about it all, really—which isn’t to say I…