a welcome strange
Welcome to Hella Immaculate, I love you.
We can make a world of vital art free of corporate dorks by directly supporting artists. Joining my Patreon is the best way to support me. Even $3/month validates me an unhealthy amount.
You can also send a friend the most popular edition of this newsletter or the funniest episode of my afterlife podcast.
Things Making Me Feel a Part of Life, For Better or Worse
Visualization. My Window Sessions are morphing into meditations, without me getting too legalistic about exactly which style of meditation I’m practicing and if I’m MAXIMIZING it. I’m pleased and grateful for that. I’ve been still listening to that SZA song and imagining light filling my body through the front of my head from chin to crown, which I picture as the face of a flower. It’s tight!
Reading science fiction. I never thought of myself as a sci-fi nerd, but gobbling up Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has me remembering how much I loved Ray Bradbury in middle school (staying up late nights the summer before 8th grade reading Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes). I haven’t had this much fun reading a book in a while, so if you fuck with vaguely spiritual, questionably utopian futures run by aliens who look like The Devil, I recommend it as much as Oui Ennui did to me!
Facilitating conversations. I’ve led a few really good discussions recently, both teaching my own classes and for DSA in a course/book club on Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts, a book about labor/community organizing. It’s such a joy to feel mastery creating these vulnerable, intimate, generative spaces.
Remember that audio description course I took? Well, I made my first resume in a looong time to apply for an AD gig, and more importantly, I created a sample. Since a lot of people took interest in my mention of audio description, you might like this silly little 2-minute Tim Robinson sketch I added description to. Doing this stuff continues to add structure to my day (reaching the end of Survivor’s 40 seasons also helped), which is a welcome strange.
THIS WEEK ON MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
I’m continuing last week’s break for one more week. I’m recharging quite a bit, and I’m excited to make some small but meaningful changes to the podcast and this newsletter that will make them both even better.
A QUESTIONS FOR YOU
Re: the aforementioned changes, I’ve put together a lil questionnaire to help tweak this newsletter. If you complete it, I will make you a mix playlist with a theme of your choosing! Truly no pressure, but hearing from HI readers is one of the highlights of making this thing, so I think you’d have great input on making it better.
Wamp Wamp (What to Do)
Read about the PRO Act. I never thought I’d be interested in labor policy. I still find it very dry, but holy shit is the PRO Act far-reaching, e.g. a huge step toward a Green New Deal. Join me in learning how to pay attention to the boring, important work!
Donate to Chicago Community Jail Support (or your local jail support!). CCJS is a daily, on-the-ground, volunteer-run mutual aid project providing direct aid—phone calls, warm clothing, snacks, drinks, PPE, safe transportation home, and emergency housing—to anyone released from Cook County Jail.
I donated $5 and made it recurring monthly. Reply with what you donate to any jail support project, and I’ll report our total next week.
Celebrate! Last week, we donated $60 to the National Network of Abortion Funds to remove barriers to abortion access for people who need abortions.
LET’S CHOP IT UP
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May I Play You a Sound?
Harry James’ Buy the Numbers is an album of drums and piano I discovered on Bandcamp recently. Harry James Brenner Jr. is a Chicagoan, and the album’s making-of notes boost its magic:
Brenner performed and recorded Buy the Numbers on his own in a series of after-hours sessions at Chicago’s venerable Shape Shoppe recording studio/loft (RIP), constructing his tunes one take at a time… his methods were strict—no punching in, no manipulation, each song completed in a single night…
“Kid Icarus” has the feel of an early-in-the-process, pre-digital-bloopery Radiohead demo, like a shaggier version of something from In Rainbows. I played chunks of the album for a class during free-writing, and it shook loose some great stories!
Beautiful motorcycle,
DM