Date Archives → March 2024

How 2024 Came To Pass: Grading Joe Biden’s Presidency

A slightly blurred, noisy photo of the New York Times depicting a smiling Joe Biden on its cover, wrapped with an orange rubber band.

[This article first appeared under a different title in 2021, in my literary magazine, AUTOMACHINATION. Its core prediction has come to pass: Joe Biden, for structural reasons, has been unable to enact the reforms voters might consider ‘good enough’, even as crises pile up. COVID measures went from punitive to laissez faire; inflation has suppressed real wages, leaving Americans feeling worse-off than in 2019; lobbyist spending has led to political and humanitarian disaster with unqualified, bipartisan support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza; nonwhite voters have continued to leave the Democratic Party; the militarization of police has accelerated; any promise to reverse Trump’s tax cuts was dead from the beginning. I argued that Joe Biden would be more superficially ‘progressive’ than Barack Obama, but that it wouldn’t be enough to really be felt. The response to Trump’s 2024 campaign has been to disqualify and/or imprison him, largely due to the fact that the Biden administration was paralyzed from the beginning. These are sentiments echoed by Benjamin Studebaker in our discussion of American democracy.]

In the last few decades, the term forever war has come to denote an unpleasant fact for imperial ambition- namely, that superpowers have ceased to exist, dislodged by regional actors limited to their own spheres of influence, while influence itself grows narrower and more abstract. Thirty years after America failed to take Vietnam, it would fail for much the same reason in Afghanistan and Iraq: lately, empire cannot explain its purpose even to itself, much … Continue reading →

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TRAILER: “From There to There – Bruce Ario, the Minneapolis Poet” (2024)

Alex Sheremet's nighttime photo of Minneapolis, showing a field of lights against a black backdrop, with the title of Bruce Ario's film across it.

Bruce Ario (1955 – 2022) was a poet and novelist from Minneapolis. A car accident and traumatic brain injury in his mid-20s forced Bruce to drop out of law school, which was followed by a period of homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness. His health began to improve with a religious awakening, therapy, volunteer work (which included time in Haiti), and, most importantly to Bruce and his legacy, a lifelong interest in writing.

From There to There: Bruce Ario, the Minneapolis Poet is an upcoming (2024) documentary film on Bruce’s life and work. It will be shot in Minneapolis, where Bruce Ario spent his life, and will include footage of scenes described in Bruce’s writing. It will also feature interviews with artists and those who knew him. Our GoFundMe fundraiser will help cover some costs associated with the project: video equipment, travel expenses, advertising, labor and production. Any additional money raised will be used to fund the publication of Bruce Ario’s books.

The trailer can be found here.

Another trailer can be found here.

You can contribute to the fundraiser here.

A poet first, Bruce Ario created the “ario” poetic form, which includes 3 stanzas of 3 lines each, followed by a final line. His poems tap plain speech and startling juxtapositions of image and thought, giving his poetry an “everyman” feel that many readers have come to prefer. Bruce is also author of the coming-of-age novel, Cityboy, which his literary executor, Dan Schneider, has painstakingly reconstructed to its … Continue reading →

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White Guilt, White Fragility: Robin DiAngelo Doesn’t Understand Race

A shirtless black man with a snake around his neck, from Juvenile's "Ha" video in New Orleans. Robin DiAngelo denied the city's problems in her book, "White Fragility".

[This is the transcript for Alex Sheremet’s video essay, White Guilt, White Fragility: Why Robin DiAngelo Doesn’t Understand Race. It first appeared in the AUTOMACHINATION literary magazine.]

In 2011, an academic named Robin DiAngelo coined the phrase “white fragility” in reference to white people’s perceived defensiveness over questions of race. It didn’t explain this defensiveness—it only gave it a name. And it named only a small part of a more general condition. We’ll get to the condition of the white race in a bit, but for now, suffice to say that there are many types of white person. Some are just as fragile, yet break in a less predictable direction. Under the right circumstances, they could pressure themselves into joining a revolution. In more stagnant periods, they reach out to anyone willing to touch them. This is still fragility because it is unstable, because it is easy to recruit, because it is so common. Yet Robin DiAngelo—who is technically a scholar of ‘whiteness studies’—has little space for it. This means that ‘whiteness’ itself is not really being examined, and in failing to explain whiteness, or to give a credible story of what it means to be white, she cannot properly deal with race. Her work alludes to her own racial anxiety, but will not make sense of it. Her theory of racism is a theory of rugged individualism—and this is why it’s popular. The individual is tasked with the burdens of racism. So the individual, as under all … Continue reading →

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Russian Bard, Soviet Poet: Inverting A Century Of Tradition

A photo of Russian/Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky, who is among the most well-known and talented of the Russian bards.

[This article first appeared in the AUTOMACHINATION literary magazine. To hear our translated playlist of songs spanning the Russian bard tradition, click here.]

Of all the art-objects I had consumed as a child, only a few made it with me into adulthood. At 4, I was given a tape-player, a pair of headphones, and several cassettes of Soviet music—luxury items, by any metric, in the Belarusian summer of 1991, just as they would be for the kids I’d soon meet in New York. The tapes were of varying quality, often veering into bad pop and propaganda, though even these had a level of craftiness and fun missing from most pop. Sometimes, however, I’d come across an artist or a song I’d (much later) recognize as great. This would usually happen as I sat on a park bench alone with my music and a loaf of keks. Because I was rarely at school or had my time accounted for by anyone, there were opportunities to wander, all on my own schedule. My life of absenteeism—that is, my wish to be in my own little corner, of my own construct—probably arose in this period. In retrospect, it helped that the music I was unwittingly feeding my tape-player so often celebrated a rich inner life. This might surprise Western readers, but the advent of Russian bard music brought forth a level of creative disobedience not seen in decades. The effect of musical agitprop—most obvious via Alexander Alexandrov’s “The Sacred War”… Continue reading →

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Like The Last Words Of A House Cat (Lord’s Story)

The author Alex Sheremet sleeping with and holding his cat, Lord.

[This is a transcript for Alex Sheremet’s video essay about Lord, a Scottish Fold cat who recently passed. It originally appeared on the AUTOMACHINATION literary website.]

After Lord had made his decision, he wished to see the world a little. One might as well, he thought. Ever since the arrival of Cookie, he felt agitated, if only with himself. Lord had never been a jealous cat, but watching King—his older brother—groom Cookie, and chase her, and beat her up, he suddenly missed the rough of King’s tongue. He missed the sound of Dad cleaning loosened hair. He missed how Mom would separate them, for he never took this as a punishment. After all, Lord loved to think, and right now, the season was pensive. Yes, summer was ongoing, but the longest day was long behind, and each sunrise felt a little colder. It would soon be Grandmother’s birthday. Had it really been that long? A cat uses up its days so quickly, though there is still so much to do. Lord understood he would not have time to start anything new, but why, he wondered, is everyone obsessed only with beginnings? His mind was of one project—one map—and he intended to complete it.

No time is the right time to leave home. Once Lord accepted this, his definition of home enlarged a little. His map, which marked out a garden, or a tree, now had fences to contend with. He was too old to jump past them, but … Continue reading →

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