Here’s an assembly of songs somehow reflective of the past year and a half or so.

Here’s another mix (mostly music I’ve danced to alone in my apartment.)

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

From Chapter 4, “Stopping Male Violence”:

“Male violence in general has intensified not because feminist gains offer women greater freedom but rather because men who endorse patriarchy discovered along the way that the patriarchal promise of power and domination is not easy to fulfill, and in those rare cases where it is fulfilled, men find themselves emotionally bereft. The patriarchal manhood that was supposed to satisfy does not. And by the time this awareness emerges, most patriarchal men are isolated and alienated; they cannot go back and reclaim a past happiness or joy, nor can they forward. To go forward they would need to repudiate the patriarchal thinking that their identity has been based on. Rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling. It can serve as the perfect cover, masking feelings of fear and failure.”

This one is dated 11/25/20 (possibly made after watching the movie Cellular):

“The narrative trope of the dirty cops (the “bad apples”) being caught out in the end, thus leaving only good and noble cops remaining on the police force.”

I’m developing probably too many projects at once, with some amount of overlap between them. Amidst the notes I’ve made for these projects are ideas that may never be fully realized. Instead of lamenting that likelihood, I’ve decided to start posting excerpts here. This first one is dated 11/4/20:

“Dramatizing, in somewhat condensed/accelerated form, the entire process of just offhand, without even thinking about it, saying ‘no, it’s not’ and then thinking it through a split second later and becoming more consciously defensive and then really starting to think about it, reflexively building a counternarrative, and every time you think of a new way in which it could be true, your defensiveness surges and you kind of argue with yourself, and it’s an argument you make without trying (this part of the process can loop for a long time, perhaps eventually slowing down, but you can fall back in even if you’ve progressed) and then approaching a place of acceptance that it could be true, and you acknowledge that possibility out loud, but still with a dismissive undertone, with a reluctance to making a full-throated  concession of the possibility (and even probability) and apologizing for being so resistant before.

“Different layers of your body processing, as you get closer to the core.

“A kind of metabolization.”