Quentin's Weeknotes 11/17/18-11/23/118
This Week
- I read Cory Doctorow’s short, creepy story “Sole and Despotic Dominion” published on Reason.com. It’s quick and worth your time, as it focuses on the increasing atempts of companies to limit “interoperability to manufacturer approved items”.
- I read “Three Feet from God: An Oral History of Nirvana ‘Unplugged’". These kinds of oral histories are catnip for me, and particularly so since ‘Unplugged’ remains one of my favorite records of all time. That album did what Nirvana did best-siphon the most interesting and wonderful aspects of American independent music and underground culture into the brains of teenagers like me who would have otherwise never heard it. I still remember when Ryan Phelan, Ben Franklin and I sat around the television and watched a VHS copy of the performance that Phelan had taped off the TV. The gasp and wide-eyes at the final words of “Where did you sleep last night?" remains one of the most haunting and powerful things I have ever witnessed.
- I listened to Ana Marie Cox and Rebecca Traister’s searing post-election commentary on the With Friends Like These Podcast. They mainly take aim at the hedging by (mainly male) figures in the mainstream media that the recent election was not a “Blue Wave." They argue that this ignores the largely unpaid and unheralded labor of millions of women who worked to make it happen, the significant structural disadvantages that the Democratic party faced, and the ways in which such language will embolden an already regressive administration to become even moreso. They also put such hedging in the context of other attempts to diminish the productivity of women’s fury, a subject about which Traister has recently written a book.
- I read this reminder that one of the biggest barriers to the Democratic party enacting progressive policies is the head of the Democratic party in the US Senate.
- I read this amazing story documenting the life and career of Harry LaForme, the first Indigenous Appellate Judge in Canada. Judge LaForme’s life mirrors the moder history of Canadian First Nations people and other Indigenous people. He was born on a the Mississaugas of the New Credit reserve (where I used to work in the Consultation and Accommodation office, for his brother Mark, who is quoted in the story), but left at a young age due to economic opportunities and to avoid local racism. He figured out that law was a route in which contemporary Indigenous rights would be fought, and took every opportunity he could get to travel that route. And he discovered the limits to that route, when, despite every appearance that he would be appointed to Canada’s Supreme court, he was denied for a combination of political and unwritten reasons. It was a powerful and frustrating story of opportunity and the limits that long-term racism and colonization put even on brilliant and committed people.
