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koganbotEvery now and then I write a "Days Of Future Posts" post, giving you a collection of stubs, hints, feints at what I hope to write someday, and then I rarely write them. For some reason I want to get these out before the election returns are in, so here goes.
(1) "Politics"
15 months ago I wrote to several friends:
Fwiw, I still don't think the general public has a good idea of the danger we're in from Trump and MAGA. Yes, things don't look as dire now for non-immigrants like me, not as dire as 15 months ago; that's partly because the rank-and-file judiciary refuses to capitulate to Trump or MAGA, even without much support from a half-assed Supreme Court or the business class. But if the Dems don't win a majority of the Senate - for us to take the Senate, given the biased U.S. system, means getting some states that lean right to vote for us - the Trump administration will be able to corrupt the judiciary much as it's corrupting the Armed Forces and the Justice Department (the Senate is the body that confirms or rejects nominees to the federal judiciary). And even if the Dems do narrowly take Congress, the administration is still going to try to rule by decree, while the Congressional Democrats have few ways of countering other than by holding hearings.
This is just background, or my feelings or something. Little of it is going to be what my Imaginary Blogpost is about. No more than 30 people are going to read it anyway. So what I have to say to you isn't going to be about reaching out to the electorate - anyway, I'd be the worst person in the world to try that, would be no better than I would be at going house-to-house selling aluminum siding.
My post will be more about how to imagine what diversity really is. (So an Imaginary Blogpost about imagining things.) What if affirmative action had included the so-called working class? You know, the hoods, the grits, the greasers, as they were called back in my day? And whatever their younger counterparts are called now? So I don't mean people from the working class[FOOTNOTE 2] being given the opportunity to join the cultural middle class. I mean, what if intellectual communities contained the working class as is? This would probably be impossible 'cos a mark of high-school working-class pride is to reject school success, but nonetheless let's conceive of it. (So my Imaginary Post won't have much to do with swing voters, will it? Or bread and butter issues? I just don't want whole sets of people to simply be given to Trump.) This Imaginary Post will have more to do with the Elvis part of my old Corina piece (that's 35 years ago!) than with any of my recent 2025 "political" posts.
Corina "Temptation"
(2) "Dead Lester Three. Communities."
The post everyone is waiting for. Here's my link to Dead Lester One. And an excerpt:
I don't take a word of this back - it's fucking OBVIOUS (to me, anyway) - except I'd delete the word "unshakable," which is too pessimistic. But I do want to expand on this, clarify, be less scolding, more analytic. But first off, I mean this across-the-board, from the rock-critic get-go to the present. All of it. I mean the smart people. It's a breakdown that afflicts the whole endeavor. I was imagining a future Lester, had he lived, being an exception, but I wasn't pretending the actual Lester had been one. But I don't think music critics are worse than most other intellectuals. I'm just not writing about the others. The core problem is an inability to take in each other's ideas and to (therefore) follow through on our own. But I've got a solution! My buzzword here is "community." No individuals are going to be able to comprehend all or many of their colleagues. Everybody misreads a lot. This is universal. And everyone is short of time, or feels that way, or gets bored and frustrated. But communities - lots of people, many minds, this person having time to reread what that person doesn't, this different way of reading or hearing countering that one - can do what individuals can't. But the communities have to value this: Conversation. Attention. [FOOTNOTE 3]
(3) "It's hypothetically possible to have a sane conversation about 'poptimism.'"
Which means stupid bigoted politics types who critique us so-called "poptimists" aren't a lost cause, but we and they need to come to grips with how insane they're acting and how much of the conversation (ours as well as theirs) is utter gibberish. I don't mean "insane" literally, but I don't mean it as hyperbole either. Making stuff up about people and attacking them on the basis of what you make up is kinda what arguing writers do, but if you acted that way in day-to-day life towards the people around you, you would be insane, and people would tell you so, as they keep bumping into your delusions.
But here, too, there's a solution. There's no accepted definition of "poptimism" but I'm gong to provide one, a truncated one but also it's the only one that will ever be any good, though it's more of "poptimists" than of "poptimism" (there is no ism here):
Definition: "Poptimists" are loosely related sets of actual human beings who hang around each other, mostly online, one set being people who hang around Tom Ewing etc., his sites like Popular and the People's Pop Polls, but also other people's sites like The Singles Jukebox, various conversations at I Love Music, in the old days some people in the Village Voice's music section under Chuck Eddy, and so forth; another set being people hanging around Ann Powers and Jody Rosen etc. (I've lost touch with how much of a set or sets this is; I don't think Ann deliberately fosters communities in the way Tom does, but that doesn't mean communities aren't there, and Eric Weisbard and others have created conferences and such), another set or sets would be academics whom I don't know much about. Anyway, what these people say and do is "poptimism." And, contrary to that, if there are things such people don’t say or do, those things that they’re not doing or saying are not poptimism. So if you're not talking about what these actual people, particular people (as opposed to, say, other people, or no people), actually say and do, and instead you're just guessing or making something up, you're not talking about poptimism. HINT: Such "poptimists" don't all say and do the same thing, and they build a lot of their conversations and activities around disagreements, some of those disagreements being deliberately fostered (for instance, over whether certain songs and artists are good or not; a lot of this takes the form of games and contests, orgafun ("organized fun"), but nonetheless there have been bitter and even friendship-ending interchanges among poptimist types over, for instance, Taylor Swift and Ashlee Simpson). [FOOTNOTE 4]
(4) "The Past Is A Wild Frontier"
I've already written stubs for these in response to Brad Luen's 1996 poll, but I would like to explore more of (i) NZ punk and postpunk, my thesis about some of it being that I "think Garageland and some of their NZ compatriots do something well that thousands upon thousands of postpunk bands do poorly, making the voice go sour and off and strained and homely in a way that's touching or brain-scraping or repellent rather than mediocre"; (ii) Korea in the '90s, how open and unexpected the music was, the sense one could go anywhere, as astonishing as rock in 1966 or British variants on rave, hip-hop, acid house in 1990, a past that could provide more stimulus for the future than some of the present does. "The wildest thing in '아자' is the bass pulling you down like a boat sinking under you."
Garageland "Fingerpops"
(5) "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's DJ Joecel"
In 1979 or so my former college teacher Bill Routt wrote me from Australia that the Sex Pistols had made everybody else sound sick in comparison. [FOOTNOTE 5] This shuddered home when I read it as a truth that I'd actually known but hadn't wanted to admit. I'd sent him a list of my favorite latter-day punks. I had the Sex Pistols in my top tier but I'd put them number four, after the Clash, the Contortions, I forget whom I had number three: the Slits? PiL? All three represented the future, new ideas, open direction, new sonic space, new social space. While the Pistols were the same old wall of rock. And Johnny Rotten did come on as something of a bully, and that seemed part of the strength. But I had to admit that the pummeling wall (can walls pummel? this one did) was still my strongest truth. Or my strongest sound, at any rate.
Joecel is not that kind of new/old revelation. But for now - well, for 2025, anyway - he [FOOTNOTE 6] is/was my reliable, go to noise machine, of all the budots DJs, the one who knows how to ramp up the sound by hitting the right wrong note, the dissonance that jars you without losing you.
DJ Joecel "Aray Ko Budots Dance"
I made a playlist called "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's DJ Joecel (Frank's Eardrums (May 2026)"; like all my Eardrums playlists it's pulled from the mess and mass of music that was hitting my ears at the time, put together so as to flow, contrast, converse, disrupt like a good cassette mix of old - so it's not all budots much less all Joecel. But it is budots-heavy, as I'm just discovering the music. So are the playlist before it (November 2025) and the playlist after it (June 2026, the most recent). (Here's my YouTube page if you want to explore all my playlists.) "Bollocks" includes budots from the ferocious early '10s to mid '20s modern buoyancy, Joecel in the modern day is intensely both.
This entry was also posted on my Dreamwidth. I'll add the link later.
FOOTNOTE 1: Actually, if they do vote with us it probably won't be by standing at odds with their milieu so much as their milieus shifting their voting preferences in a lump.
FOOTNOTE 2: I actually don't think it works to simply call the hoods, greasers, grits "working class." The term "working class" is too vague to describe people in actual social spaces. But for the sake of this post, I'm using the term.
FOOTNOTE 3: Well, the fact that, say, Tom, Mark, Dave, Kat, etc. (and I) continue gabbing about music to one another is sustaining something, and I won't say we haven't gotten anywhere - we've developed good ways of uncovering music new and old, music that's new to us. And how we hear what we thought we knew changes, as songs chafe against other songs, writers chafe against other writers, writers accompanied by songs and songs accompanied by writers, swimming with and against one another and finding new people to talk to, and the music they bring.
But ideas, social understandings, not as much.
FOOTNOTE 4: There're no poptimist manifestos either, but if you'd like one you can try the final paragraph of the Dylan blurb I wrote for Paste in 2006. (Here's that paragraph, but read the whole thing.)
FOOTNOTE 5: I recall back in 1976 one of the rock mags, I think it was Rolling Stone, had a small picture of Johnny Rotten on the sidebar of their front page with the caption “Rock is sick and living in London.” So the Pistols were the loud sickness that made everybody else sound sick in comparison.
FOOTNOTE 6: I don't actually know Joecel's gender; the visuals on Joecel's YouTube mixes will sometimes depict a donkey or some other creature as DJ, some of the creatures female, some of the creatures male. But there was a Website where I did once see a picture of a bearded guy who I thought was Joecel.
(1) "Politics"
15 months ago I wrote to several friends:
We in America on what I'll loosely call the Liberal-Left are facing an attempt by Trump-MAGA people to create a dictatorship, and by "dictatorship" I mean a situation where people like me who oppose Trump-MAGA policies will be imprisoned, tortured, murdered, denied income, denied health care etc. because of our opposition. We will not be able to stop the dictatorship unless we reach out and get the help of people who are fairly mainstream or even conservative, and this will mean asking these people to do something that most of us are not willing to do ourselves: to judge issues on the merits and come to conclusions that put them at odds with their friends and their social milieu. [FOOTNOTE 1]
Liberals and Lefties (at least those who show up on comment threads, and I understand such people are not necessarily the best or the most typical of actual politically engaged leftists) put patrolling and controlling their own spaces ahead of understanding the world or engaging the broader world. (Not that controlling in sane ways, e.g. putting in place sane comment moderators, might not facilitate rather than undermine understanding and so forth.)
Fwiw, I still don't think the general public has a good idea of the danger we're in from Trump and MAGA. Yes, things don't look as dire now for non-immigrants like me, not as dire as 15 months ago; that's partly because the rank-and-file judiciary refuses to capitulate to Trump or MAGA, even without much support from a half-assed Supreme Court or the business class. But if the Dems don't win a majority of the Senate - for us to take the Senate, given the biased U.S. system, means getting some states that lean right to vote for us - the Trump administration will be able to corrupt the judiciary much as it's corrupting the Armed Forces and the Justice Department (the Senate is the body that confirms or rejects nominees to the federal judiciary). And even if the Dems do narrowly take Congress, the administration is still going to try to rule by decree, while the Congressional Democrats have few ways of countering other than by holding hearings.
This is just background, or my feelings or something. Little of it is going to be what my Imaginary Blogpost is about. No more than 30 people are going to read it anyway. So what I have to say to you isn't going to be about reaching out to the electorate - anyway, I'd be the worst person in the world to try that, would be no better than I would be at going house-to-house selling aluminum siding.
My post will be more about how to imagine what diversity really is. (So an Imaginary Blogpost about imagining things.) What if affirmative action had included the so-called working class? You know, the hoods, the grits, the greasers, as they were called back in my day? And whatever their younger counterparts are called now? So I don't mean people from the working class[FOOTNOTE 2] being given the opportunity to join the cultural middle class. I mean, what if intellectual communities contained the working class as is? This would probably be impossible 'cos a mark of high-school working-class pride is to reject school success, but nonetheless let's conceive of it. (So my Imaginary Post won't have much to do with swing voters, will it? Or bread and butter issues? I just don't want whole sets of people to simply be given to Trump.) This Imaginary Post will have more to do with the Elvis part of my old Corina piece (that's 35 years ago!) than with any of my recent 2025 "political" posts.
Disco managed to be audacious without being upscale in the usual sense, so it could incorporate cabaret, opera, kung fu, anything, and still not be "culture." It could be ambitious without leaving anything behind, without shedding its down-home mannerisms. "Down-home" is probably the wrong phrase here. It's like Elvis: Elvis never stopped being a truck driver with dreams; the point is, he dressed himself in the dreams, not in overalls.
Corina "Temptation"
(2) "Dead Lester Three. Communities."
The post everyone is waiting for. Here's my link to Dead Lester One. And an excerpt:
I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing - this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.
I don't take a word of this back - it's fucking OBVIOUS (to me, anyway) - except I'd delete the word "unshakable," which is too pessimistic. But I do want to expand on this, clarify, be less scolding, more analytic. But first off, I mean this across-the-board, from the rock-critic get-go to the present. All of it. I mean the smart people. It's a breakdown that afflicts the whole endeavor. I was imagining a future Lester, had he lived, being an exception, but I wasn't pretending the actual Lester had been one. But I don't think music critics are worse than most other intellectuals. I'm just not writing about the others. The core problem is an inability to take in each other's ideas and to (therefore) follow through on our own. But I've got a solution! My buzzword here is "community." No individuals are going to be able to comprehend all or many of their colleagues. Everybody misreads a lot. This is universal. And everyone is short of time, or feels that way, or gets bored and frustrated. But communities - lots of people, many minds, this person having time to reread what that person doesn't, this different way of reading or hearing countering that one - can do what individuals can't. But the communities have to value this: Conversation. Attention. [FOOTNOTE 3]
(3) "It's hypothetically possible to have a sane conversation about 'poptimism.'"
Which means stupid bigoted politics types who critique us so-called "poptimists" aren't a lost cause, but we and they need to come to grips with how insane they're acting and how much of the conversation (ours as well as theirs) is utter gibberish. I don't mean "insane" literally, but I don't mean it as hyperbole either. Making stuff up about people and attacking them on the basis of what you make up is kinda what arguing writers do, but if you acted that way in day-to-day life towards the people around you, you would be insane, and people would tell you so, as they keep bumping into your delusions.
But here, too, there's a solution. There's no accepted definition of "poptimism" but I'm gong to provide one, a truncated one but also it's the only one that will ever be any good, though it's more of "poptimists" than of "poptimism" (there is no ism here):
Definition: "Poptimists" are loosely related sets of actual human beings who hang around each other, mostly online, one set being people who hang around Tom Ewing etc., his sites like Popular and the People's Pop Polls, but also other people's sites like The Singles Jukebox, various conversations at I Love Music, in the old days some people in the Village Voice's music section under Chuck Eddy, and so forth; another set being people hanging around Ann Powers and Jody Rosen etc. (I've lost touch with how much of a set or sets this is; I don't think Ann deliberately fosters communities in the way Tom does, but that doesn't mean communities aren't there, and Eric Weisbard and others have created conferences and such), another set or sets would be academics whom I don't know much about. Anyway, what these people say and do is "poptimism." And, contrary to that, if there are things such people don’t say or do, those things that they’re not doing or saying are not poptimism. So if you're not talking about what these actual people, particular people (as opposed to, say, other people, or no people), actually say and do, and instead you're just guessing or making something up, you're not talking about poptimism. HINT: Such "poptimists" don't all say and do the same thing, and they build a lot of their conversations and activities around disagreements, some of those disagreements being deliberately fostered (for instance, over whether certain songs and artists are good or not; a lot of this takes the form of games and contests, orgafun ("organized fun"), but nonetheless there have been bitter and even friendship-ending interchanges among poptimist types over, for instance, Taylor Swift and Ashlee Simpson). [FOOTNOTE 4]
(4) "The Past Is A Wild Frontier"
I've already written stubs for these in response to Brad Luen's 1996 poll, but I would like to explore more of (i) NZ punk and postpunk, my thesis about some of it being that I "think Garageland and some of their NZ compatriots do something well that thousands upon thousands of postpunk bands do poorly, making the voice go sour and off and strained and homely in a way that's touching or brain-scraping or repellent rather than mediocre"; (ii) Korea in the '90s, how open and unexpected the music was, the sense one could go anywhere, as astonishing as rock in 1966 or British variants on rave, hip-hop, acid house in 1990, a past that could provide more stimulus for the future than some of the present does. "The wildest thing in '아자' is the bass pulling you down like a boat sinking under you."
Garageland "Fingerpops"
(5) "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's DJ Joecel"
In 1979 or so my former college teacher Bill Routt wrote me from Australia that the Sex Pistols had made everybody else sound sick in comparison. [FOOTNOTE 5] This shuddered home when I read it as a truth that I'd actually known but hadn't wanted to admit. I'd sent him a list of my favorite latter-day punks. I had the Sex Pistols in my top tier but I'd put them number four, after the Clash, the Contortions, I forget whom I had number three: the Slits? PiL? All three represented the future, new ideas, open direction, new sonic space, new social space. While the Pistols were the same old wall of rock. And Johnny Rotten did come on as something of a bully, and that seemed part of the strength. But I had to admit that the pummeling wall (can walls pummel? this one did) was still my strongest truth. Or my strongest sound, at any rate.
Joecel is not that kind of new/old revelation. But for now - well, for 2025, anyway - he [FOOTNOTE 6] is/was my reliable, go to noise machine, of all the budots DJs, the one who knows how to ramp up the sound by hitting the right wrong note, the dissonance that jars you without losing you.
DJ Joecel "Aray Ko Budots Dance"
I made a playlist called "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's DJ Joecel (Frank's Eardrums (May 2026)"; like all my Eardrums playlists it's pulled from the mess and mass of music that was hitting my ears at the time, put together so as to flow, contrast, converse, disrupt like a good cassette mix of old - so it's not all budots much less all Joecel. But it is budots-heavy, as I'm just discovering the music. So are the playlist before it (November 2025) and the playlist after it (June 2026, the most recent). (Here's my YouTube page if you want to explore all my playlists.) "Bollocks" includes budots from the ferocious early '10s to mid '20s modern buoyancy, Joecel in the modern day is intensely both.
This entry was also posted on my Dreamwidth. I'll add the link later.
FOOTNOTE 1: Actually, if they do vote with us it probably won't be by standing at odds with their milieu so much as their milieus shifting their voting preferences in a lump.
FOOTNOTE 2: I actually don't think it works to simply call the hoods, greasers, grits "working class." The term "working class" is too vague to describe people in actual social spaces. But for the sake of this post, I'm using the term.
FOOTNOTE 3: Well, the fact that, say, Tom, Mark, Dave, Kat, etc. (and I) continue gabbing about music to one another is sustaining something, and I won't say we haven't gotten anywhere - we've developed good ways of uncovering music new and old, music that's new to us. And how we hear what we thought we knew changes, as songs chafe against other songs, writers chafe against other writers, writers accompanied by songs and songs accompanied by writers, swimming with and against one another and finding new people to talk to, and the music they bring.
But ideas, social understandings, not as much.
FOOTNOTE 4: There're no poptimist manifestos either, but if you'd like one you can try the final paragraph of the Dylan blurb I wrote for Paste in 2006. (Here's that paragraph, but read the whole thing.)
Like Elvis before him, like Ashlee Simpson now, Dylan simply did not know his place - meaning both that he was uppity ("How much do I know / To talk out of turn / You might say that I'm young / You might say I'm unlearned") and that he was lost, that he had no place. He stretched and he twisted every song form he touched. This is because no form felt like home, and he had to expand them so that he could pile in content that hadn't previously been welcome. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" elongates to 18 bars and for practical purposes feels like one long vamp, a never-ending groove. It contains a critique and contains a party. The album notes say, "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine." Dylan pulled together worlds that want to remain separate but mustn't be allowed to: carney trash hucksters, self-serious ruminators, glamour pusses, street scrappers. And since Dylan didn't know who he was, he became all of them.
FOOTNOTE 5: I recall back in 1976 one of the rock mags, I think it was Rolling Stone, had a small picture of Johnny Rotten on the sidebar of their front page with the caption “Rock is sick and living in London.” So the Pistols were the loud sickness that made everybody else sound sick in comparison.
FOOTNOTE 6: I don't actually know Joecel's gender; the visuals on Joecel's YouTube mixes will sometimes depict a donkey or some other creature as DJ, some of the creatures female, some of the creatures male. But there was a Website where I did once see a picture of a bearded guy who I thought was Joecel.
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CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/days-of-future-posts-nov-3-2026
