Esoteric Brezhnevism

[Originally published July 20, 2017] A reader expressed some interest in hearing about my trip to Morocco. It isn’t a pleasant memory. Back in the darkness of the late George W. Bush years, I was busily sleep-digging myself into a debt-grave, buying myself things I didn’t need in order to compensate for the meaninglessness of my life. I felt I had to do something radical to break out of the coffin-confines of my cubicle routine and so I decided, without telling anybody, to fly to Morocco and treat myself to an African adventure. Tangier was supposed to be where cool, weird people like Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, “Alfred Chester”, and Paul Bowles went to create and to become themselves. I was still naïve and sheltered enough that the idea of expatriate cosmopolitan degeneracy somehow still seemed exciting and interesting. Back in those days I was wasting a lot of my time with nihilistic rubbish like that and J.G. Ballard. On the way to Madrid, where I had to change plan...

[Originally published February 24, 2019] Brandon Adamson’s third major poetry collection, Skytrain to Nowhere , results from the author’s “meditative, recreational” rides on the Sky Train rail system at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport, and is a sleeker, stronger effort than his previous book, the entertaining BeatnikFascism . Accompanying most of the poems are Adamson’s photographs, some of which relate in obvious ways to the themes in the text, thus enhancing the reader’s experience of joining the poet on his circuit through space, daydreams, and stops at various cherished terminals in time. Surely a high watermark of the verbal and visual Adamsonian – just look at the colors on that cover! – the book is a retrofuturistic little near-masterpiece that belongs in the library of every twenty-first-century aesthetic dissident and anybody who has ever enjoyed Adamson’s AltLeft and Jostle articles, tweets, and distinctively detached but humorously deadpan approach to exist...

[Originally published February 15, 2018] Not counting high school and college reading assignments of several of William Shakespeare’s plays, I could probably count the books of poetry I’ve read with the digits on one of my hands. I made an exception this week, though, and broke with my usual routine of mundane and informational counter-Semitic prose to read Brandon Adamson’s Beatnik Fascism . I’ve owned this book for a while, but don’t usually feel sufficiently tranquil for literary appreciation, so it took me a while to get around to it.  What is “beatnik fascism”? “Just as the beats didn’t conform to the post world war II societal workforce uniformity and ‘square’ culture of the 1950s and 60s, it seems that young racialists and other thought criminals now find themselves […] cast as the unassimilated actors in the politically correct, multicultural, global capitalist theatrics of today,” Adamson writes in his introduction. “We find ourselves keeping our true opinion...