[A version of this paper was presented on Friday, April 14 at  All of This is Temporary: A Conference on Class Consciousness and Popular Culture , held at Bowling Green State University, April 14-15, 2023]. "As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems . . . . Capital follows you when you dream." Consciousness Deflation We started our conference with the words of a keen critic of contemporary culture, the late Mark Fisher, who in his 2016 talk which gives our little gathering its name, explores consciousness in the age of capitalist realism. Capitalist realism, the title of Fisher’s best selling 2009 book, is described by him as “a form of  . . . consciousness deflation” which creates the sense that “capitalist social relations, capitalist conceptions, capitalist forms of subjectivity [are] calcified, inevitable, and impossible to eradicate.” These structures—both social and psychic—are seen as fixed and permanent, and without alternative. Higher e

  "Dear Mother, Just a line to say I left my shoes and Pipe there and can not do without them, so will you do them up and Express them to me. Everything pretty good here as ever. Harry"

Further to yesterday's post about early-'90s northwest Ohio drone band Mindpower, here's the scissors-and-glue collaged cover of their one and only single, on green vinyl no less. Discogs has a copy for $6 ! 

Twenty three years ago I started a blog, Art of BG Noise, to showcase the collection of local rock and punk flyers I'd amassed from my involvement in the local Crystal City music scene. That blog folded relatively quickly but I've decided to re-up the old posts, to document the ephemera produced by the small, unheralded, but vibrant community of underground musicians and fellow travelers. Their stories are important. They created the moments in which we once lived.  This was Art of BG Noise's first uploaded flyer, and now this blog's too, a nice hand-drawn invite to see Hezekia Storm (yes, the flyer is misspelled) open for Mindpower--or was it the other way around?--on Saturday  May 23, 1992 at Good Tymes Pub.  Hezekia Storm were a Lima, Ohio metal band (Michelle Lee on vocals and Richard "Storm" Spradlin on guitar). Mindpower was one of the many side projects of Scott Cramer who occupied a unique musical niche in the Crystal City in the late-'80s and earl

Speaking of love, my dad died two years ago today.  He was 91. Cloth cap dilettante born into corridors of class and circumstance, working life—draftee, decorator, copper , courier—half-disguised secret dream self—poet, memoirist, local historian, cricket lover, hillwalker, herpetologist, hankerer after high, wild places. . . . He'd fallen at home a couple of weeks before but, in the way these things often seem to go, he’d rallied and was doing better. The end, when it came, was quick. He was holding my mother's hand and died on his own bed, in his own house, on his own terms. Change was a horror. “Time is the enemy” he once wrote. “It plucks you back when you would run; it hurries you when you would pause to reflect.” I remember the family joke about Time's great black oxen, their galloping hooves trampling all before them. We laughed then, but we knew all along that those oxen are real. And now he's two years gone.  On my last trip back, in 2019, we talked about Edwar

Sunspots August, 1988: The intersection of Wooster and Prospect Streets, Crystal City, Ohio. Hot and humid. A lanky white boy in a black leather jacket and Beatle boots is feeling the heat as he walks downtown. He's taking in the sights and the whole crazy adventure of America, a place imagined through the fictions of Jack Kerouac, Jim Rockford, Theo Kojak, wide eyed with possibilities only imagined back there in the narrow grey valleys of Yorkshire. Now here he is in Crystal City, USA, and the sky is wide and bright--there are stop signs!--and despite his studied nonchalance he feels a lot conspicuous, a lot out of place.  He sweats his way across the incandescent intersection in his heavy black jacket and pointy boots. Suddenly there's a forest green 1968 Ford Fairlane, heading South on Prospect, and a ruddy face, topped by a disheveled mop of blond hair, framed in the glassless square of the open car window.  "Are you a drummer?" the face asks.  "No, I'm n