My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/7/20 "Where Do You Go From Here: Part Nine"

"Where do you go from here?/Make up your mind./Decide/Where do you go from here?" Woke up to videos of massive rallies across the US. In Philly, the sheer amount of people flooding the Ben Franklin Parkway was stunning. They don't get that kind of crowd on the Fourth of July. Mayors are announcing that their police departments will stop using tear gas for 30 days. It feels like victory. Until you learn that the department has used up all its tear gas and it'll take 30 days to resupply. Small changes are happening, victories are being won--Frank Rizzo no longer curses the streets of Philadelphia and the Marines have banned the Confederate flag--but, as I said before, I'm worried this will lead to complacency. People might start imagining the work is done. In that context, it's somehow good that the police remain actively monstrous--it keeps people in the street demanding change now. -6/7/20. "Where Do You Go From Here: Part Nine" from Where Do You Go From Here (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/6/20 "Let Me Go"

"I’m tired of the mirror/I’m tired of the window/I’m tired of words/And numbers too/I get blues in the city/And down on the farm." Where is the place for me? I tried to step away from the news today, but got contacted by a friend instead about everything going on. Talking to them made me realize I hadn't bought any music on Bandcamp on the special day where they donate the full purchase to the artists. And that's a pathetic thing to highlight. They were contacting me about their city preparing for another wave of protests and I was thinking, I haven't been listening to new music for a while. Literally hours before the first protests broke out last week, another friend introduced me to the term "hedonic adaptation"--our tendency to get used to anything. One of the reasons I'm keeping this journal, listening to all this Jandek, is to avoid complacency, to take time every day to reflect that this isn't normal, but even Jandek is just becoming background noise. -6/6/20. "Let Me Go" from Chicago Wednesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/5/20 "The Duality of Self: Part One"

"Strange the mind is seeing one thing/And the body another /Move the body sight to the mind image/The timeless work." Being witness to state terror is exhausting, but imagine living through it. I am living through it, though. Despite being in Korea, I'm still bound to the US, still looking behind me to see how it tries to pull me back. I'm in a liminal state of exclusion: not quite an exile, not quite a refugee, and neither would allow me to divorce myself from what's happening there. However, I'm not there, and the relative clam and normalcy of daily life here feels schizophrenic. Things are not okay, the world is on fire, and everywhere I go feels calm and normal. Daily life is gaslighting me. The pandemic's shadow still touches everything. The produce section at the supermarket keeps getting rearranged to mask the removal of bins and declining selection. -6/5/20. "The Duality of Self: Part One" from Toronto Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/4/20 "Don't Go Out"

"Don't go out don't go out/It's only flowers and trees/people and machines/buildings and despair." In talking to my students about the police riots in the US, I started telling them not to go. That they can't go to the US right now is obvious--the pandemic is still on, the country has no plan to handle it, and no healthcare system even if it did. I'm telling them not to apply to college there, that things will not be better by fall 2021. And it sound alarmist. It feels alarmist. I think I'm being understood as saying the police will still be rioting in a year-and-a-half, and I don't mean that. Instead, the systems that have made this moment happen--police impunity, their co-ordination with white supremacist groups, and the racialized violence that is the bedrock of our nation, like the compete absence of anything resembling a healthcare system, will still be present next year, and it's not worth risking. -6/4/20. "Don't Go Out" from Canticle of Castaway (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/3/20 "The Lesson"

"I married control/How else to keep from sleeping in the fields and streets/When the shock and despair returns as it does/I watch it and use it and learn from it." I'm seeing articles in the Korean press about the police riots in the US and they're doing the propaganda work of shifting the narrative: are protesters just ignoring COVID (cities are shutting down testing centers to punish protesters), why are Korean-owned businesses being attacked (because cops won't provide protection in minority neighborhoods), how does looting protest racism (when these businesses called cops who kill black people to arrest black people)? It's not complicity nor are people lamenting the destruction of their livelihoods wrong to lament that, it's indicative of how ingrained white supremacy is even in non-whites. Black people are being murdered, and the reaction is, "how dare they make that my problem." -6/3/20. "The Lesson" from Bristol Wednesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/2/20 "The Crushed Image"

"I know how to leave everything/I just wanted to say be prepared/for a smashing close/to all the years we knew only sleep/in the shadows that dream these shadows." Vigilante gangs from the white neighborhoods of Philadelphia marched to Center City today with baseball bats and golf clubs. People with clear violence in mind were met with open arms by the police, putting the lie to any claim that the police are trying to maintain peace. When I lived in South Philly and would go on my regular run through deeper South Philly, I'd always see the "Blue Lives Matter" Neo-Nazi signs come out after each and every murder committed by a cop. When a member of the Philly PD was outed as a Nazi--shirtsleeve tattoos and all--the signs became more prominent. Now those people have what they've always wanted, their own Kristallnacht, and they want to make sure everyone sees. -6/2/20. "The Crushed Image" from Camber Sands Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/1/20 "Painstakingly Critical"

"I’m painstakingly critical/Not just of the world outside/I criticize myself/And do damage unto me." Since leaving the US I've worried that I turned my back on my family and friends, abandoned them to their fate. I'd been an activist, a journalist, a teacher, and a union organizer, but when fascism dropped the mask and Nazis openly marched in the streets, I left. I've been worrying about how the eugenic ideology of the administration would play out with COVID and then I woke up Sunday to pictures of Philadelphia on fire. Every time I open social media I see new videos of police driving into crowds in ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks. I had to explain to my colleagues what was happening, and I don't have the words. How do you translate "police state"? How do I tell them the administration grew up envying Soviet-style oppression? I don't have the words in my own language. -6/1/20. "Painstakingly Critical" from What Was Out There Disappeared (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)