bevedog

Thanks to your generosity, I was able to send Arianna $300 on Monday—half of that from my parents, who of course also know Arianna, and half of that from the rest of us—to help offset the costs of setting up her new classroom at Steele Elementary. I have received another donation since then, so I’ll be sending her money again sometime very soon if anyone is feeling left out and wants to join in. As some of you pointed out, hooray for mutual aid, boo for the failure of civil society! (FWIW, I’m going to remove the previous post asking for donations from the website.)

Colorado Springs scene report

Other Steve (I’m gonna start bold-ing the names of people I mention here who are part of this little bevedog newsletter community) and I went to a metal show last week. We went because Steve’s friend’s death metal band Crotalus was playing. Let me tell you, it’s so nice when your friend’s friend’s metal band is actually good. We saw them play before and both times they had a really solid set and fun performance.

The headliner was Victim of Fire, celebrating their new album, The Old Lie. You know I’m going to like a band who drops Wilfred Owen references in their album titles. This video of the show (below) is really funny. At the 8:00 mark you can see Steve and me in the foreground, I’m in the Palestine jersey. The music subsides, we throw up the devil horns (ironic or just GenX?) and then the singer says “I want to see a circle pit; everyone fucking spin it!” Then the two of us back away very quickly!

Stage patter included “Build community, talk to your neighbors, fuck the police.” So I bought a t-shirt.

Photos and zine

In June, I took street portraits of people at the No Kings protest and the Pride parade. Here are a few examples:

If you want to see more, send me a message with your mailing address and I’ll send you a mini-zine.

Reading, watching, listening

Nick read War and Peace so I took that personally and also read War and Peace. It’s about Russia.

I have been reading a lot of books about books and reading in preparation for the January class I teach with Jessy on the history and future of the book. Bibliophobia is a memoir that I won’t be assigning to students because it deals extensively with self-harm and suicidality, but, because of that, it made a big impression on me. Chihaya writes about the books that “ruin” you and stay with you for various reasons, and about the feeling of being unmoored when she couldn’t read for extended periods of time due to mental illness, and medication.

Inspired by that book, I have been re-reading one my my life-ruiners, Madame Bovary. Many thanks to Professor Paul Edwards for giving me a lifelong love of that novel.

Now that I have been a fan of the Liverpool Football Club for a few years, I wanted to know more about the city, so I read Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, a very interesting accounting of postwar Liverpool and all the hardships it faced as global shipping practices changed radically and work disappeared. I have also been watching the 1996 BBC2 miniseries Our Friends in the North which engages with recent English history by following characters in Newcastle from 1964 to 1995. Might want to write more about that sometime.

I have been listening to Pigeon Pit nonstop the past few months. They play “folk punk” but it sounds like what would happen if a bunch of genderqueer gutterpunks formed a country band. Music is great, lyrics are greater, and I just love them.

Twin Peaks

Yes I still owe you, me, and the world a post about Twin Peaks. Soon, maybe. I mean, David Lynch took 25 years between seasons 2 and 3 so I don’t feel bad taking a few months.