The missing link between music and noise

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Caren Kaplan (1996, 66) argues that “mystified versions of the ‘romance of the desert’ remain with us in postmodernity, often in the supposed service of a ‘postcolonial’ critical practice. The desire to become like or merge with the periphery or margin that one’s own power has established demonstrates the pitfalls of theoretical ‘tourism.’” Those who read the desert as a blank slate for imaginative experimentation and liberation from the status quo can slide dangerously close to, and sometimes merge with, the agents of mastery and exploitation. Indeed, […] the very idea that the desert offers such freedom is embedded in the notions of emptiness that serve to legitimize colonization and exploitation in the first place. […] For a nation concerned with agricultural expansion as the primary civilizing force, hitting arid lands meant that “the project of mastering the continent seemed to have reached a non-negotiable limit.” […] Nevertheless, even as the idea of the desert as ordeal […], the hardship the arid lands imposed on those who ventured into them served to confirm other aspects of Protestant America’s [disk horse] of spiritual mission […]. The well-off, educated middle classes made the deserts inviting as a purgative space of romantic sublimity and aesthetic purity. […] [A]esthetes like Rutgers art historian John C. Van Dyke were writing about the visual splendor of a land that should remain untouched by base economic interests. […] The conflict between contesting impulses toward either exploitation [”conservative”] or conservation [”progressive”] of the land is, then, present from the beginning of U.S. interest in its desert dominion, yet both positions derive at least part of their authority from the imposition of ideas of vacancy onto the terrain. Both read the  space as empty and see this emptiness as its source of value, whether it be to extract from, build upon, or contemplate as evidence of some cosmic truth. Yet this notional vacancy functions also as a form of selective blindness that eliminates consideration of native inhabitants, indigenous traditions, and other, alternative spiritual and utilitarian values that may have prior claim to the land. Speculators and aesthetes alike need the tropes of emptiness and uselessness in order to validate their construction of the landscape as available space. Do the Pueblo Indians, for example, see the terrain they have inhabited for thousands of years as a gap, a vacancy, a howling wilderness?

Text by: John Beck. “Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain.” Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2001, pages 63-83.

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Desert landscapes have played an extraordinary role in the project of settler colonialism in the United States. As Traci Brynne Voyles argues in Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, deserts are sites where settler colonialism has superseded its logical  extremes. […] [S]ettler colonialism has gone a step further in the deserts of the US Southwest by rendering these landscapes barren “wastelands.” […] Viewed as desolate, lifeless, and worthless places, desert wastelands extend the settler-colonial project by obscuring present Indigenous inhabitance, justifying state-sanctioned extractivist practices, and naturalizing the presence of the settler state. […] Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) observes that Indigenous places, in particular, are conceptualized by the settler state as barren, deserted regions: “Indigenous places are often imagined as isolated empty places, disposable, or usable places subordinate to national need. Indigenous peoples are not isolated, in a past […].“

Text by: Nathaniel Otjen. “Indigenous radical resurgence and multispecies landscapes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turqoise Ledge.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 31, Numbers 3-4, Fall-Winter 2019, pages 135-157.

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Entitled “Deserts Will Bloom Through Atomic Power,” this 1947 ad pictures a terraformed desert valley with a farm that runs on atomic power. […] The ad copy explains, “New ‘BREAD BASKETS’ of the world can grow where only sand and scrub had been. Harnessed atomic energy will transform deserts into rich fruit and grain country.” […] While these wasteland-to-farmland hopes appear in different circumstances with varying intents, […] they are instances of the Edenic recovery narrative that historian Carolyn Merchant identified in Western environmental discourse. […] [T]he promise of a renewed Edenic paradise has historically masked programs of conquest, exploitation, and destruction. Visions such as those from Seagram’s and General Electric offer idyllic, bucolic landscapes, but as with other pastoral art and writing, much is obscured. They mask possible or actual legacies of land seizure and other dispossessions, contamination, and pollution. Of course, there is also the fundamental assumption that these lands are no more than “waste” and only valuable when cultivated in designated ways. […] In his 1909 collected lectures, […] British chemist [F.S.] predicted that […] humans “could transform a desert continent … and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.”

Text by: Natalie Koch. “Double Exposure.” Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia. 2022.

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The social construction of the high, arid landscapes of the Southwest as “more or less worthless” has been a fundamental component of colonization of the Diné, as well as other southwestern and Great Basin tribes. In fact, the inhabitation of dry, arid landscapes by Native nations was used as evidence of their low status on the Western hierarchy of civilization […]. The “wasteland” is a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. […] [W]hile we find radioactive tailings piles in the desert, we also find leaking barrels of Agent Orange on Bahamian beaches, dioxin-releasing copper mines near the shores of the Great Lakes, and strip mines in the rainforests of South America. […] [T]herefore, […] colonial epistemologies do not just look on deserts as wastelands but that wastelands of many kinds are constituted through racial and spatial politics that render certain bodies and landscapes pollutable. […] This very pollution results in the common designation of wastelanded spaces, including those of the uranium industry on Diné land, as “sacrifice” zones. […] Wastelanding reifies - it makes real, material, lived - what might otherwise be only discursive. […] Race and space are connected through a social construction of difference that becomes spatialized through segregation and unequal distribution of resources. […] Wastelanding is a primary of of these “feat[s] of ontological magic,” wherein racialized lands are made to seem uninhabited or unimportantly inhabtied, represented as worthless, and then […] systematically stripped of their material and ideological worth. […] It means to wasteland, to render pollutable, the lungs, the cells, and the respiratory tracts of everyone involved in the nuclear cycle. It also means to wasteland Navajo worldviews, epistemology, history […].

Obsessed with how frequently Bertie gets in a specific “I’m not into kissing girls or any of that BUT I’m in a knight in shining armor mood.”

i am kind

i am in control of my emotions

it does not bother me when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

everyone in the house has the right to be in the kitchen

i am kind

i am in control of my emotions

it does not bother me when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

everyone in the house has the right to be in the kitchen

The owner of the bookstore was this grand old dame of 76 who had been in the business for 40 years. She'd had three kids with a husband who was extremely gay, and as soon as those were old enough, they split up. She read on an epic scale, was an avid follower of the opera, sang in several choirs, and scheduled arts programming for a private club. She had gentleman callers (so they styled themselves) at the store continuously the entire fifteen years I worked there--yah, into her NINETIES. She never took up seriously with any of them, because they couldn't keep up. She was impeccably dressed and put together every single day of her life, drank regularly, and said they would pry her estrogen supplements out of her cold, dead hands. She had a gang of elderly single lady friends, though, and they went out every night of the week. They knew everything and everyone, collectively. She got her first smart phone in her mid-80s and became extremely Online. I bet she's on Tumblr now. She is 96.

This blew my mind. Life didn't have to be over...ever.

We worship youth in our culture. Only the young have futures, and the aged exist to enable the lives of the young. We act as if by the time you hit forty, you've had your chance. You are now expected to step aside and scede life to others.

FUCK THAT. I have a lot of life ahead of me. I have places to go and books to read and people to fuck and food to eat and music to dance to and emotions to feel and nazis to punch and stories to tell and hearts to break and ventures to capitalize and empires to conquer. I am going to be doing this for the next fifty years, minimum.