Happy 2020!
(for some reason this meme has caught on, and I think it's hilarious—it reveals the farcical fragility of our consensus reality)
This year, I think I would like to rant a bit more on this blog, for the purely personal reasons of having a way to organize the reading & thinking I'm doing in a typically internet-y/disorganized way (i.e. starting off reading a New Republic article about AMLO and ending up watching a Vox video on China's border with Hong Kong), keep a living "history" of things I encounter on the internet, and to write more.
What I'm up to: sitting in my friend Rosie's house in Somerville listening to the playlist of ambient music in this Noisey article, still recovering from our New Years festivities a few nights ago.
What's also up: the government is still shut down because of Trump's wall tantrum; Elizabeth Warren announced her presidential exploratory committee on nye; still waiting to see if the gilets jaunes movement will pick up with the same gusto after the holiday hiatus and if it is a movement with a future; AMLO announced that he has no property or wealth to demonstrate his transparency; and the usual neoliberal shenanigans all over the place, I guess.
"Resolution" is a tricky word, with versatile applications: as a noun for a firm decision or the act of solving some problem; as an adjective ("resolute") to describe someone with the resolve and tenacity to make things happen; in music, it is the movement from discord to harmony, the relief of tension with the movement to consonance and closure.
Of course, we are most familiar with this word in the context of a "New Years Resolution:" some personal promise to change something in your life that is not working. The scope is individual, and often merely things we feel we should do for some vague reason (societal pressure!).
I've been reading & thinking about this quote from Fredric Jameson: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Perhaps we can resolve to resolve this conundrum together.
