Pretty Heady Stuff

Alexander Gallant & Joel Plaskett harmonize on concept albums & finding the lyrical in everyday life

Alexander Gallant and Joel Plaskett are songwriters based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They have both written extraordinary records that take genre and move it a few degrees to the left to make something unexpected. In this conversation, we talk about Plaskett's foundational relationship to the Halifax Pop Explosion of the 1990s, the music that made that scene, and the ways that sacred spaces for musicmaking and performance solidify a sense of place. Joel was a member of Thrush Hermit in the 1990s, but has written and produced albums solo and with The Emergency in the decades since. Alexander is a prolific folk songwriter with a remarkable new album called The Prince of Birchy Head that is replete with meditations on being pulled madly out in opposite directions: toward love, away from greed, but also toward struggle and away from beauty. We chat about where their inspiration comes from, the pitfalls of social media, the power of working collectively to build and protect vitality at the local level, and how their paths converge at 45 Portland Street in gritty, gorgeous downtown Dartmouth. When you hear a song that speaks to you, listen again. If it stays with you, it pays to wonder why. #songwriting [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/songwriting] #writing [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/writing] #creativity [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/creativity] #inspiration [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/inspiration] #music [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/music] #musicians [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/musicians] #producing [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/producing] #sound [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/sound] #popculture [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/popculture] #art [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/art] #mcluhan [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/mcluhan] #novascotia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/novascotia] #dartmouth [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/dartmouth] #halifax [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/halifax] #livemusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/livemusic] #historyofmusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/historyofmusic] #localmusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/localmusic]

Steven Swarbrick conceives of a world where Palestine is free because none of us "belong"

What might the politics of masochism be able to do for the dangerously stagnant politics of liberation Is masochism more mobilizing than empathy? Empathy requires the Palestinian to be a "perfect victim," to use Mohammed El-Kurd's phrase. It says that the other must remain othered in its incomprehensible but familiar suffering. Masochism, on the other hand, insists that we are all Palestinian, or that we are not free until we are all free.It's too easy to forget that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The idea of building solidarity by engaging with the question of how solidarity is created and sustained feels relevant right now, as even ersatz or gestural solidarity fades from view. Even when it was front and center, that gestural solidarity clearly wasn't generating the systemic transformation needed to produce an end to Israeli apartheid, the Zionist regime's immiseration and domination of Gaza. The expanding solidarity the world has seen since 2023--with the erasure of thousands of Palestinian lives, the reduction of Gaza to rubble, the increased suffocation of life in the West Bank and the ramping up of Israel's imperial ambitions in the region more broadly--has done effectively nothing to stem the perpetrating of ethnonationalist violence. Dwelling with that fact leads us to talk about the encampments that spontaneously formed on university campuses as part of the global solidarity movement. At the core of the discussion is this question of how a movement that seems unstoppable can still be stopped, and what it means to try and keep going, especially at a time when ultra-right militarism and US-Israeli nationalism is becoming more explicitly fascistic in nature. As Swarbrick puts it in his book: the US state is now focused on what you call "maintenance." This is "maintenance of the idea that this is it, that there can be no other way of things, no other world but the world as we know it, a world devoid of the event, truth, equality, and freedom." I ask Steven, ultimately, whether there is any choice but the choice of division, the choice of opposing oneself against the fascist goons who talk openly about wanting to see the world burn. His response hinges on the inherent violence of "belonging," and the goal of embracing a different kind of radical love that isn't just invested in identification with a cause. ⁠#freegaza⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#don⁠⁠tstoptalkingaboutpalestine ⁠⁠#israel⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#zionism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#usempire⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#imperialism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#lebanon⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#iran⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#antioppression⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#anticolonialism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#antiimperialism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#psychoanalysis⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#liberation⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#leftpolitics⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#nationalism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#ethnonationalism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#genocide⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#gazagenocide⁠⁠

Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan want a world where "sustainability" isn't meaningless

Vijay Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth. The co-author, with Aaron Vansintjan, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he has been published in Al Jazeera, New Internationalist, Truthout, and The Conversation. He lives in Montreal.Aaron Vansintjan is the founder and co-editor of Uneven Earth and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth. He has been published in The Guardian, Truthout, openDemocracy, and The Ecologist. The co-author, with Vijay Kolinjivadi, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he lives in Montreal. The Sustainability Class is about those wealthy “progressive” urbanites convinced that we can save the planet through individual action, smart urbanism, green finance, and technological innovation. Kolinjivadi and Vansintjan challenge many of the popular ideas about environmentalism, showing that it is actually the sustainability class itself that is unsustainable. The solutions they propose work to safeguard an elite minority, exclude billions of people, and ultimately hasten ecological breakdown, not reverse it. A sustainability apartheid is emerging. More than ever, urban residents want to be green, yet to cater to their interests, a green-tech service economy has sprung up, co-opting well-intentioned concerns over sustainability to sell a resource-heavy and exclusive “lifestyle environmentalism.” This has made cities more unsustainable and inaccessible to the working class.#sustainability [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/sustainability] #cooptation [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/cooptation] #greencities [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/greencities] #lifestyleenvironmentalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/lifestyleenvironmentalism] #lifestyle [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/lifestyle] #climateaction [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateaction] #radicalpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/radicalpolitics] #anticapitalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticapitalism] #anticonsumerism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticonsumerism] #ecosocialism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/ecosocialism] #solidarityisaverb [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/solidarityisaverb]

Arang Keshavarzian examines the politics of modern Iran and devises an escape from perpetual war

Arang Keshavarzian is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He’s one of the most shrewd thinkers you’ll see on the politics of modern Iran and the Persian Gulf because he pays serious attention to how social and economic hierarchies constrain the formation of political solidarity. His most recent book is Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East. That text studies the history of the Persian Gulf both in terms of the politics of its naming, and the politics of geography. This idea, that geography is political, stands at the centre of our conversation here. With the world’s publics, news outlets and governments hyper-focused on the Strait of Hormuz, Keshavarzian is focused on helping others grasp the fact that while the strait is currently a chokepoint, it has historically been a gateway. What if international relations could be revolutionized to protect the strait with something other than drones and bombs? The weapon of multilateralism is underused, but Keshavarzian believes that it might be the most powerful way to open up new pathways to environmental protection, social vibrancy and a more inclusive model of prosperity. In his article “Iran Transformed,” he historicizes the rise of austerity economics and politics in Iran, and the ways that this funneled wealth to a ruling elite in a country already beset by sanctions and isolation. This shift to privatization and monopoly capitalism “entrenched and empowered” the ruling class “by halting the economic redistribution that had been underway prior to 2012.” Iran’s support for Palestinian liberation is a key focus here, too, as it has in many ways defined its relationships with other states in the region, especially the genocidal regime in Israel. Fundamentally, though, the interview gravitates to the question of orientalism and Islamophobia, and its geopolitical consequences. Keshavarzian insists that “depictions of the region” present it as “peripheral to world history, an endemic zone of conflict, an energy depot for expanding industrial capitalism elsewhere, or a bastion of traditional tribalism and petro-monarchies.” The world, though, is beginning to realize that it the so-called “Middle East” is a fulcrum of global politics, and a part of the Earth that much of the planet is still reliant upon, and not just for fossil energy.#straitofhormuz [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/straitofhormuz] #oilshock [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/oilshock] #economiccrisis [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/economiccrisis] #globalrecession [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/globalrecession] #iran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iran] #iranpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iranpolitics] #iranianrevolution [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iranianrevolution] #persiangulf [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/persiangulf] #anticolonialism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticolonialism] #palestine [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/palestine] #freepalestine [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freepalestine] #israel [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/israel] #uspolicy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/uspolicy] #usforeignpolicy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/usforeignpolicy] #neoliberalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/neoliberalism] #waroniran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/waroniran] #freeiran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freeiran] #islamophobia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/islamophobia] #orientalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/orientalism] #revolution [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/revolution]

Aaron Hagey-MacKay opines on satire as sensemaking, and scenarios where we 'bend but don't break'

Aaron Hagey-MacKay is a Canadian satirist as a longtime writer for The Beaverton and host of ‪The Goose Media on YouTube. In a piece for The Tyee, Aaron writes that "satirists, like journalists and academics, are targeted by authoritarian bullies because satire deals with hard truths." In this conversation, he insists that, while he's not a journalist, he's invested in satire as an "anti-dominant strategy" that allows folks who care about the people and the public to "bully up," assailng the coldness and rabid individualism that have become fixtures of the Second Gilded Age. He doesn't believe that climate communicators have fully internalized the fact that we respond more to messages of affordability and generosity than stories of loss and pain -- though, he acknowledges that miserable stories of collapse and catastrophe have a way of capturing our attention. This is why he wants to tell stories where we "bend, but don't break," using humour and humility to poke holes in the absurd myopia of our chaotic moment. We've seen campaigns against more comfortable, livable ways of being from powerful interests. Forms of narrative capture that condemn us to fossil fuel dependency. That means we need more outlets like The Goose and more communicators like Hagey-MacKay, who understand that if we can make clean energy a wise choice and address people's genuine anxiety, we can radically and rapidly make climate action unremarkable and everyday. #climateaction [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateaction] #climatechange [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climatechange] #climatecrisis [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climatecrisis] #environment [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/environment] #climate [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climate] #climatejustice [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climatejustice] #globalwarming [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/globalwarming] #climateemergency [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateemergency] #affordability [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/affordability] #climateactionnow [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateactionnow] #renewableenergy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/renewableenergy] #environmentalist [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/environmentalist] #cleanenergy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/cleanenergy] #ecology [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/ecology] #environmentaljustice [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/environmentaljustice] #greenenergy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/greenenergy] #satire [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/satire] #humour [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/humour] #comedy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/comedy]