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As we embark on this new era of American apocalypse, I have found it helpful to look back at how artists have navigated the bowels of hell before. I find enduring inspiration in Diamanda Galás, especially her album Plague Mass (1991), a live recording of her performance at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a howl of anguish and rage at the indifference and hypocrisy of the church in the face of AIDS. Galás lost her brother, the experimental playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, to AIDS in 1986, and was herself a member of ACT-UP. In Plague Mass, while covered in blood, screeching, ululating, and speaking in tongues, Galás becomes a conduit for the voices of the dead, who in their suffering at the hands of their moralist torturers, remain defiant - “Give me sodomy, or give me death!”
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Impossible to pithily summarize the force of this artist (in which any isolated "scream" is merely another register of space across a VERY complex vocalic spectrum), but I like this one-liner from RYM: "The world isn't a pretty place and sometimes people don't want to hear the truth." Also, if you live in NYC and have *read* about the 80s/90s AIDS crisis but aren't sure you can *feel* it, listen to her work.
Mar 22, 2024
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it's good to read diane di prima, especially in times like these. it's also good to google this poem, and find this video of di prima reading it, and a few others, at the last waltz (!!!) of all places
Jan 9, 2024
her work focuses a lot on capturing rituals and masquerades around the world. the pics below are from ppl in Ayiti 🇭🇹 doing ritual baths to engage with Vodou deities. haven’t been able to get the first photo out of my mind, there’s just something about it. i highly recommend listening to vast comforts of sorrow on repeat as you engage with it.
Apr 10, 2025
Top Recs from @jordan-tannahill
6d ago
I’m far from alone in claiming Sebald as my favourite author. His deeply melancholic books are a blend of fiction, non-fiction, and travelogue, interspersed with these oblique, black and white photographs, meditating on time, exile, and the impact of historical events on collective and individual memory. Dig it! My suggestion is to read his work in chronological order, to follow the evolution of his thought and style, starting with Vertigo (1990), then The Emigrants (1992), and The Rings of Saturn (1995), and finally his masterpiece Austerlitz (2001), a work of staggering beauty.
6d ago
Every kink is, by nature, a little obnoxious and embarrassing, and either you have what it takes to push past that or you don’t. But let’s not lie to ourselves here, furries are fun. And I want to cuddle them. Their superpower is shamelessness. They don’t give a fuck what you think. I think my kink is other people really committing to their kink.
6d ago