A Different (Hot) Take on Kon-Mari and the Working Classes

January 28, 2019 Megan Kinch

The internet has caught the Kon-Mari virus. While the book was already a huge best-seller, nothing is really big these days until it hits Netflix, and the TV series of the Mari Kondo getting people to carefully curate their possessions has got everyone talking, and her name has become a verb: kon-mari. Is it reactionary garbage? While Kondo’s brand of de-hoarding is super specific and not even necessarily minimalist, its certainly caught up in the same trends of #minimalism, tiny houses, and getting rid of all your material possessions so you can put them in a backpack, travel the world and work on your laptop trends. Is this stuff actually a bunch of reactionary nonsense? Is it the aesthetic of the condominium industry? Can poor and working class people afford to get rid of their stuff?

Sword Swallower (somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic)

January 18, 2019 Crystal Stella Becerril

Sol Niger by Leonora Carrington, 1975. — *Sol Niger* by Leonora Carrington, 1975.

I spent a year as a sword swallower
Moaned your name through the scar tissue
Closed my eyes and imagined the crows
Feet that form around your eyes when you
Smile (Achilles heel turned broken ankle).

I wanted you to tell me more about G*****
(You were impressed that I could find it on a map)

The Poverty of Descriptivism

January 1, 2019 Jordy Cummings

Jackie Shane, transgender soul vocalist of the 1960s Toronto Yonge Street music scene.

Karl Marx never assumed what needed to be explained.

Karl Marx writes in Estranged Labour* that, accepting the presuppositions underlying political economy as it existed at the time of writing, one can see that there is a hell of a lot missing. There is something to it – but it is insufficient. As Marx writes, political economy “expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws – i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property.”

One can say the same thing about the dominant form of writing about popular music. It can provide you with consumer knowledge with perhaps a tad more (but only a tad) than an algorithm.

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