Another Clever, Psychedelic, Ridiculously Amusing New Album From the Versatile Curtis Hasselbring

For all his noir overtones, trombonist Curtis Hasselbring is a funny guy. He’s played spy jazz and seriously straight-up jazz, but he’s also a distinctive guitarist and multi-instrumentalist with purist taste in early 80s new wave and no wave rock. In keeping with his cinematic style, he’s most recently been working his Curha project, which these days has become a one-man band outlet for his most satirical, cartoonishly psychedelic side. He’s bringing those songs to the small room at the Rockwood on April 12 at 8 PM.

Just the titles of the tunes on his latest Curha 3 album – streaming at Bandcamp – are a dead giveaway. The opening track is Seeing-Eye God, a carnival-of-souls organ theme built around a prowling boogie-woogie piano loop. On one hand, it’s unusually dark, compared to the stuff on the other two Curha records. On the other, it may be have real-world relevance, considering how the surveillance-industrial complex went warp speed in the months after March, 2020.

Hasselbring keeps the organ, adds an enigmatic guitar lead and what sounds like pizzicato violin over the vaudevillian drum machine loops in the second track, The Gravity Games, a wryly anthemic new wave chorus popping in and out unexpectedly.

Bee Alley is a Residents-style exercise in variations on a goofy bass-synth loop with an unexpectd, um, Americana-ish detour that’s too good to give away (hint: lusitanos). Boulevard of the Avatars is even funnier, a crazed but very carefully orchestrated mashup of blippy motorik sounds, an adventure theme and trippy Tom Tom Club minimalism with just a hint of genuine menace. Hasselbring also distinguishes himself here on baritone sax!

The funeral parlor Casio makes a brief return in Badly Supervised Seance. Rode on an Airplane Last Night – now THAT’S a even scarier, huh? – has Hassselbring doing a brassy big-band intro and outro around a goofy, dubby, strutting theme, a rare moment where his trombone takes centerstage.

He assembles a surreallistically textured trip-hop layer cake with A People Mover, then builds a marionettish promenade out of tinkly music-box timbres in Library of Infinite Calamity.

Then he breaks out his guitar again for Three Weird Sunsets, the missing link between George Clinton and 80s oddballs Renaldo and the Loaf. He closes the record with Everyone You Know, which could be the theme to a Martian sitcom about Jamaican Rastas in the 70s. Dare you to make it all the way through this album without smiling.

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Sit & Die at Otto’s on March 2

Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Co. aren’t just the Spinal Tap of pre-rockabilly Americana. They saved this blog’s publicity stunt.

They probably would have volunteered for the job if they hadn’t already been chosen for it…as a plan B.

Whether you get the trio’s innumerable inside jokes – many of them references to impossibly obscure artists or cultural memes from the 1950s and before – they’re as deadpan hilarious as they were when this blog reviewed their show at Otto’s back in September of 2011. That’s where they’ll be this March 2 at 8 PM.

Sit & Die’s shtick goes way deeper than cornpone humor. Much of what they do is a parody of artists who indulged in it, both lyrically and musically. And they’re as much of a Fringe Festival theatre act as they are a band. They wear matching vintage outfits complete with bowties that would make Dr. David Martin proud. Frontman/lead guitarist Michael McMahon (brother of the brilliant Amy Rigby) will typically launch into a joke, bat the dialogue to guitarist Mike or bassist Garth, and as the night goes on and everybody gets more liquored up there they’ll start to go off script. If they’re doing multiple sets, the last one is the one to catch.

Considering how long they’ve been together – this blog’s owner first saw them at Union Pool around the turn of the century, when they were a shockingly serious, straight-ahead oldtime C&W act – they’re tight as a drum (which they don’t have). Like a lot of acts from the cd-and-myspace era, their studio work isn’t well represented on the web, but as you would expect from such an amusing crew, there’s a ton of stuff up at youtube, including their mid-teens ep At the Brooklyn Beefsteak.

This one opens with Song of the Beefsteak, a vaguely Italian ditty whose main joke is the backing vocals – no spoilers. The musical joke in Say Mister Is That Your Cow, a western swing tune, is a pedal steel (again, no spoilers). The innuendos are a little more obvious and less outright cruel in Bop-A-Betty. The last track is Eat Drink & Be Merry My Friend, where McMahon shows off his flashy 1954-style fretwork.

And their Reverbnation page has Dig That Cazy Monkey, which is sort of a Bill Haley spoof but also an anti-imperialist broadside.

Over the years, New York Music Daily has crossed paths with Sit & Die – as their fans call them – many other times, under many different circumstances. Most importantly, there was that 2011 Otto’s show which enabled this blog to maintain a streak of writing up 23 concerts in 23 days, which ended nine days later with a new record of 32 consecutive days of concert coverage.

There was another very welcome Sit & Die show at Otto’s a couple of years later during a particularly lean period, where the band basically brought dinner. Tthey’ve been known to hand out bags of salty snacks along with period-perfect 1950s style stage props and unusual dollar-store finds.

Stealing a Halloween Playlist From a Reliably Hilarious Source Here in Town

Thanks to Daisy Moses for making New York Music Daily’s job a lot easier today. Her Substack page is one of the most entertaining places on the web. She’s a native New Yorker who writes in a faux Minnie Pearl vernacular, but beneath the cornpone persona is a ferocious intellect. Her crime scene analysis of the mysterious death of Anne Heche went viral a couple of months ago. And she’s funny beyond belief.

Her taste in music runs toward the retro. Since she loves Halloween as much as this blog does, today’s next-to-last installment in the annual, October-long celebration here is the playlist she just put up today, which you can spin here. She’s got something for everybody: 50s cartoon stuff like the Zanies’ Mad Scientist and Nervus Norvus’ novelty hit, Transfusion; Zombie Walk, the Magics’ alternative to the 60s dance crazes; a Scottish murder ballad, and punk era favorites by the Cramps and Siouxsie & the Banshees.

And the obscure songs are killer. Check out Sheldon Allman’s lounge lizard parody Children’s Day At the Morgue; folksinger Oscar Brand doing The Hearse Song; The Cannibal Song, by franken-crooner Thurl Ravenscroft, and Stinky Picnic‘s If You’re Dead, a folk noir counterpart to Maria Gallagher’s version of the Clash classic The Guns of Brixton.

More Savagely Funny Protest Songs, Plandemic Parodies and New Videos From Turfseer

In the spring of 2020, it didn’t take long for songwriter Lewis Papier to get wise to the plandemic. He was outraged – as more artists should have been. So he and a rotating cast of hired guns – who were no doubt overjoyed to play his savagely satirical, often ridiculously funny songs – worked steadily on a series of singles. Recording under the name Turfseer, he would eventually put them up at Soundcloud as a whole album, Scamdemic Songs, in the fall of 2021.

This blog discovered them through Mark Crispin Miller’s invaluable News From Underground feed this past February, when there were a grand total of 33 songs on the playlist. It has since grown to 44! What’s more, there’s a growing collection of videos at Turfseer’s youtube channel, which mysteriously has not been censored. There’s at least one seriously LOL moment in all of them. If you’re bummed out by the prospect of more restrictions and endless doom porn, do yourself a favor and clipgrab these gems before they disappear. Watching the playlist for the first time, there was already a Youtube lethal injection propaganda pop-up ad in place by the third video. Then it disappeared…but sure enough, it was back for the song 1984 Is Here.

As a songwriter, Papier has an erudite grasp on a ton of styles: ornate art-rock, classic country, Beatlesque pop and more. The first of the videos is the Trust the Science Rag. ‘”You must refute and persecute all those who disagree,” Papier insists, over a rollicking piano tune. The video is a particularly apt Fatty Arbuckle/Buster Keaton silent film edit.

Is that one of the Chinese “big whites” spraying an empty bedroom with nameless toxic dust in the video for the darkly orchestrated, ELO-tinged Church of the Pandemic Mind?

The Virus Is My God, a southwestern gothic spoof of Covid true believers, has an irresistibly funny faux spaghetti western plotline: the devil is in the details!

The juxtaposition of the Salem Witch Trials and plandemic imagery in 1692 Was a Very Good Year, another ELO-esque gem, is spot-on. Sheeple University is a doctrinaire, churchy faux-Christian pop parody of wokester extremism: “Learn to bully, throw a fit, just obey and submit.”

The Commandant is one of the most chilling of the big art-rock numbers, with visuals to match: “We invented a monster that you’ll never see, how do you like that you’ll never be free?” O Holy Roman, another art-rock anthem, is just as metaphorically loaded. Turfseer’s insight into historical basis of plandemic brainwashing runs deep, underscored by the eerie folk-pop of The Ballad of Typhoid Mary.

Just Too Good to Be True, a country song, reflects the wave of deaths that followed the 2021 kill shot rollout. Another one from this past summer, You Didn’t Recognize Me, is a gorgeously bittersweet Amy Rigby soundalike, but with one of the most sinister undercurrents in the playlist

The most inspiring number on the original playlist, Forever Freedom Brigade, pops up in the middle of the videos. The Emperor’s New Clothes reflects the despondency that swept over the world before the freedom movement started growing toward critical mass.

Once in awhile Turfseer’s parody extends to music as well, as with the operatic spoof Vaccine, My Love; One Trick Pony, where he makes fun of lite FM piano pop; and In Toba Tek Singh, a searing Bollywood tale of the ravages of plandemic-induced poverty. The musicianship is strong all the way through: once in awhile there’s a sizzling solo, like the big guitar break in My Way Or the Highway Disease.

The playlist ends – at least at this point – on an optimistic note with a country song, Dawn of a New Day. And that, folks, is today’s installment of this month’s ongoing, daily Halloween celebration, which continues through the end of October. There will be more of the macabre, or at least something like it, here tomorrow.

Jace Maxwell Releases the Most Cynically Entertaining Protest Song Album Since March of 2020

“This album was written during the fake Covid 19 pandemic. It is a protest against all the abuse I and many others suffered for our choice not to be injected with an experimental drug. The album is a thank you to all those brave people who said NO,” says songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jace Maxwell. Being Australian, he’s especially brave, considering how brutal lockdown restrictions there have been. Here in New York, a court threw down the unelected Governor’s unconstitutional concentration camp regulations. Australia started sending their citizens to concentration camps in 2020.

Maxwell’s eclectic tunesmithing chops match his bravery as he covers a wide range of styles, from 80s gothic rock, to bleakly cinematic soundscapes and metal. And beyond the sheer catchiness of the songs, the album is a cruelly vivid, sometimes savagely funny chronicle of the plandemic. Song after song, Maxwell refuses to comply.

The most amusing number on the record – which Maxwell has generously made available as a name-your-price download at Bandcamp – is Tony Says (Follow the Science), a parody of Faucism set to goofy, squiggly new wave synthpop.

Otherwise, the individual tracks typically focus on a specific aspect of the plandemic, from the initial lockstep reaction to the Wuhan bioweapon, to the fullscale assault on human rights, to the lethal injection rollout. Maxwell peppers his songs with sardonic samples, from Biden’s feeble “pandemic of the unvaccinated” recitation, to Pfizer ingredients and more. There’s as much history here as there are hooks.

Maxwell builds the album’s rainswept overture, The Fall of the Rebel Angels around a spoken-word passage about EcoHealth Alliance conspirator Peter Daszak‘s bizarrely pedantic attempt to cast the famous Brueghel painting as a portent of zoonotic viral spread.

The sarcasm immediately rises to redline over an icy New Order clang in Turning the Lights Down, an offhandedly chilling portrait of tyranny reaching a slow boil.

“Cover your face and check on your neighbor,” Maxwell instructs over a slinky death disco groove in You’ve Got the Fear: the lyrical jokes are too good to spoil.

He evokes a plaintively drifting mid-90s Church spacerock ambience in Please Leave, a distantly harrowing hospital protocol murder tableau. Then he hits his distortion pedal for Run for Your Life (Cytokine Storm), a grittily industrial-tinged faux-authoritarian stomp.

As the slowly swaying indictment What the Hell Andy? unfolds, Maxwell revisits the sad affair where the courageous Dr. Tess Lawrie called bullshit on how the lure of Gates Foundation money derailed a crucial ivermectin research study.

Safe and Effective is a menacing, dystopic motorik instrumental, with a break that speaks to the effectiveness of propaganda, rather than rushjob genetic modifications. The next track, IgG4 is a succinct explanation of the mechanism of “mortal antigenic sin,” as Dr. Paul Alexander calls it. Maxwell goes back to heavier and even more troubling science in Superantigen, a later interlude.

The sarcasm rises to critical mass again in Damage Control, a menacing, strutting mashup of Gang of Four and early 80s XTC. These Are the Days is not a Natalie Merchant cover but a guardedly hopeful, Bowie-esque minor-key wake-up call.

Maxwell shifts back and forth between regretful late 70s Bowie and Rammstein, maybe, in Blame and Lies, a telling and ultimately heartbreaking chronicle of the lethal injection campaign’s mounting toll. The album’s final cut, The Left Has Become the Right is not a political broadside but a bitter reflection on how meaningless party affiliations became when we’re all being deplatformed and depersoned. “Would you please close the Overton Window, I’m getting quite a chill,” Maxwell sneers.

As an indelible musical portrait of a grim time and place, this ranks with the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist and Phil Ochs’ Rehearsals for Retirement. Get this album, if only for the sake of validation. It’s one of the best rock releases of 2022.

The Attacca Quartet Play Outdoors This Month. and Stagedive Into Punk Classical

Quick: name the New York string quartet who’ve played for a larger live audience than any of their peers. Obviously, that’s kind of a trick question since those groups typically all share a circuit of intimate spaces best suited to that repertoire.

Some of you might be surprised to find out that the answer to that question is the Attacca Quartet, who were invited by Jeff Lynne to open for the Electric Light Orchestra at that group’s Manhattan appearances during the mid-teens. What may have endeared them to him is their dedication to material far outside of standard repertoire, as well as their fondness for unorthodox venues.

One unorthodox space they’re playing this month is Madison Square Park, where they’re holding down a three-week Wednesday evening residency starting on July 13 at 6 PM and continuing with shows on the 20th and 27th. While they tackle a vast range of material from 21st century works, to art-rock with songwriter Becca Stevens, all the way back to Renaissance composers like John Dowland, they also have a punk side. And a punk classical album, Real Life, streaming at Spotify. It’s possible they may air some of that one out in the park.

The album’s shtick is string quartet arrangements of EDM themes. They’re simple and repetitive and obviously weren’t originally conceived for any kind of close listening, let alone much of a shelf life. To call their insistent riffs and endless whoomp-whoomp rhythms minimalist would be giving them too much credit – and the quartet seem to get that. This is closer to the early Kronos Quartet at their cheekiest, or Rasputina, than it is to, say, the fluffy orchestral versions of RZA or J Dilla themes that have been staged in recent years.

Cellist Andrew Yee seems to relish the chance to dig in hard on the low end, whether with his bow or his fingers. Violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni and violist Nathan Schram are most likely playing their parts straight through rather than simply looping them. There is also a percussive component, which seems to be electroacoustic: it’s not clear who’s on the drums.

The quartet have the most fun when they’re ornamenting the sound with saucy glissandos, pizzicato flickers, mimicking the sound of a backward-masking pedal, or building hazy ambience before the whoomp-whoomp kicks in. There’s a drifting, summery interlude which looks back to 70s disco, as well as moments of sheer chaos and a woozy, wallowing tableau. This is a gimmicky record, but it’s fair to say that these versions will outlast the source material. And you can do the punk rock dance to most of it.

The Best-Ever Playlist on This Page

Today’s playlist is a murderer’s row of singles. Just for starters: a deviously subtle new video for the best song of 2020, and a new electric recording of the best song of 2016. There’s about half an hour worth of music here, plus some funny visuals. If you know this blog, you know the drill: click artist names for their webpages, click titles for audio or video.

Karla Rose’s allusive, slinky serial killer parable Battery Park topped the charts here in what was a pretty nightmarish 2020. She’s got a new video for it: see if you can spot her!

Another noir-inspired artist, LJ Murphy earned the top spot for 2016 with his cruelly prophetic Panic City. It was mostly acoustic then; it’s an electric scorcher now.

We live in perilous times, and Grace Bergere offers a more metaphorical take in A Little Blood, one of the most offhandedly chilling songs of the past several years.

Mark Breyer made a name for himself as sort of the Elvis Costello of powerpop and janglerock with his long-running studio project, Skooshny. And he keeps cranking out sharp, jangly anthems as Son of Skooshny. His latest is Runs in the Family: imagine the Church at their lyrical peak in the 80s..

Atlanta band Faithless Town‘s roaring slide guitar-driven protest anthem New World Order has a great newsreel video: protestors battling SWAT teams in Europe in the summer of 2020, images of the Lockstep tabletop exercise and Event 201, and plenty of usual Davos suspects.

Amy Rigby was not idle during the lockdown here in New York. Here’s her hauntingly hazy cover of the Bob Dylan classic Not Dark Yet

From the anonymous protest songwriter known as POTP – the same guy responsible for the viral video Bill Gates Sings – here’s Vaxx in the Cradle, sung to the tune of the old Harry Chapin hit. Beyond the snarky jokes, it’s amazingly well-crafted – it even follows the plotline of the original. “This song has Emergency Use Authorization to be deployed far and wide in the effort to stem the epidemic of infant experimentation.”

Loosie‘s No Future is the catchiest, most anthemic thing the band’s ever done, with a wistful Lynchian edge. A scruffier Sharon Van Etten, maybe?

You might know Mike Adams as the scientist in the lab coat who founded Brighteon, home to innumerable good censored videos. Want to know what video is at the very top of the search page today? The full stream of the Plandemic II documentary!. But believe it or not, Adams also has a history as a rapper. Check out his hauntingly prescient 2010 video Vaccine Zombie, which has resurfaced courtesy of the consistently brilliant and provocative Midwestern Doctor Substack page.

Moirai’s Völuspa is a starkly gorgeous recreation of an ancient Icelandic dragonslayer myth. Is this classical music? Folk music? 21st century minimalism? Maybe all of the above?

Let’s close with some funny stuff. First, click and scroll down the page for a 45-second tv ad for Oomph’s new “human meat plant based burger” via Jeff Childers’ indispensable Coffee & Covid. Reputedly the jury’s out on how it tastes compared to genuine human flesh.

And here’s a meme from cartoonist Anne Gibbons: a spot-on take on the FDA’s self-declared “future framework,”  where if they get their way there will be no more safety trials for any pharmaceutical products.

Singles for Early June: The Theme Is Laughter, More Or Less

Been a long time since there’s been a collection of singles on this page. In celebration of how we managed to make it through May without losing our collective sovereignty to the WHO, and that all the concentration camp proposals died in session in the New York State legislature, here’s a bunch of songs, a couple of snarky videos and a meme to keep our spirits up. Click on artist names for their webpages (a couple of these are anonymous), click on titles for audio or visuals.

This one just came over the transom today thanks to the irreplaceable Mark Crispin Miller’s News From Underground. Bill Gates Sings! At :41 “I identify as a medical doctor!”

Muzzleboy reads a book on German history in the 1930s! Sometimes a meme is really worth a thousand words.  Screenshot this and make it your screensaver maybe?

El Gato Malo reminds us, in a minute 41 seconds, how in the fall of 2020 all the Democratic candidates were railing against the “Trumpvax.”

Sage Hana offers a creepy, dystopic mini-movie about what bioweapons may be waiting for us this fall courtesy of the sinister Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Genius animator Ken Avidor has launched his Unjabbed short video series about freedom fighters in a postapocalyptic future, which have been banned from Vimeo. Thanks to Steve Kirsch for grabbing these and saving them for all of us

Here’s a real subtle one. In the stately chamber pop cadences of Matter of Time, Lydia Luce wants to know, “Who’s gonna grow food for the masses?”

Here’s another subtle, drifting pastoral pop number: Meadow, by Emily Tahlin. “The meadow stretches out for miles, I have come to hide.”

Let’s wind up today’s playlist on an upbeat note with Rebecca Day & the Crazy Daysies doing their Americana tune Old Jeans Blue. “A shot of Jim and a sixpack in and I can’t pretend.” Scroll down to the middle of the page for the video. Thanks to Tom Woods of the absolutely essential Tom Woods Show (a guy with great taste in music too) for the heads-up on this one

Martin Wind’s New York Bass Quartet Have Irresistible Fun Beyond the Low Registers

Bassist Martin Wind‘s new album Air with his New York Bass Quartet – streaming at Bandcamp – is sublimely ridiculous fun for those of us who gravitate to the low registers. Like most members of the four-string fraternity, Wind and his accomplices – Gregg August, Jordan Frazier and Sam Suggs – are heartily aware of the comedic possibilities that abound in the F clef. Yet Wind’s arrangements here are as erudite as they are irresistibly amusing. As party music, this is pretty hard to beat. And to Wind’s further credit, he uses pretty much the entirety of his axe’s sonic capability – there are places where these guys sound like a cello rock band or even a string quartet.

They open with a sotto-voce, tiptoeing four-bass arrangement that sticks pretty close to a famous Bach piece that a psychedelic group from the 1960s ripped off for the most-played radio single in British history. Then Wind and his merry band make low-register bluegrass out of it – and guest Gary Versace comes in on organ as the group pivot to a lowdown funk groove. The solo, of course, is for bass – that’s August doing the tongue-in-cheek pirouette.

The third track, a Beatles medley that starts with Long and Winding Road and continues with an emphasis on the chamber pop side of the Fab Four, is even funnier, considering how artfully Wind weaves the individual themes together.

They do Birdland as a clave tune, and then as funk, with Lenny White on drums and Versace on organ again: again, no spoilers. Matt Wilson’s suspenseful tom-toms and Versace’s misterioso organ simmer beneath a surprising plaintiveness and judicious solos all around in an epic arrangement of Charlie Haden’s Silence.

Wind’s first original here, I’d Rather Eat is a hypnotic, rhythmically pulsing, judiciously contrapuntal piece that brings to mind cellist Julia Kent’s more insistently minimalist work. The group’s gorgeously bittersweet take of Pat Metheny’s Tell Her You Saw Me has the bassists plucking out piano voicings, plus Versace on piano and accordion.

Wind’s other tune here, Iceland Romance is a tango with surprising poignancy but also several good jokes, They bring the album full circle by revisiting Procol Harum – woops, Bach. Whether you call this classical music, or the avant garde, or jazz, it’s an awful lot of fun.

Wind’s next gig is with Wilson’s great Honey and Salt quintet at the Saratoga Jazz Festival on June 25. And Verrsace is leading a trio, from the piano, at Mezzrow on June 15 with sets at 7:30 and 9. Cover is $25 cash at the door.

Singles For the Second Week of May: Mega-Laughs and Some Creepy Stuff

Been awhile since the last collection of singles on this page: with so much more happening around town these days, it’s been harder to keep an eye on the rest of the world. Today’s self-guided playlist has about 25 minutes worth of music and a ridiculously funny thread to wind this up. As always, click artist names for their webpages, click titles for audio or video. Suggestion: download the Brave browser to avoid the hassle of having to mute the ads in the youtube clips.

In what is fast becoming a time-honored tradition, let’s open with one of Media Bear‘s signature snarky plandemic-themed cover songs. This one, mRNA is one of the funniest of the bunch. It’s a remake of YMCA, the big 1970s disco hit by the Village People. “Hey man, if you do not comply, contact tracers they will be stopping by…you must learn how to kneel, comply with the Green New Deal.”

Thanks to John C.A. Manley, author of the novel Much Ado About Corona, for passing along Martin Kerr’s smart, funky, sharp chamber-folk hit Little Screen, probably the only song ever to rhyme “creative” with “sedative.”

You don’t need to read the news today, it’s mostly lies
If you wanna know you’re not alone,
Get your fingers off your phone,
Get up out of your comfort zone and improvise..

Chillantro, by Miranda & the Beat is a cool minor-key fuzztone surf b-side that the band bravely put out in the ugly depths of May 2020…and sank without a trace

Let’s slow it down but keep the Lynchian ambience going with Natalie Saint-Martin‘s 2nd Place. It’s minor-league Hannah vs the Many – an understudy’s lament set to a phantasmagorical piano waltz

Tantalos, by Kuhn Fu is eight creepy minutes of 21st century cinematic big band jazz built around an allusive, macabre guitar loop. Dig that pregnant pregnant pause at 3:20!

Former Turkuaz frontwoman Nicky Egan‘s This Life is twinkly, vampy oldschool 70s soul with clangy guitar and echoey minor-key Rhodes piano

Check out this very subtle anti-lockdown video for Belgian pop star Angèle‘s latest single, Libre. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is just bimbo synthpop – watch the costume change after the second chorus. She’s sick of falling into “Les pièges de fous….libre libre, crois-moi ça va changer (“The lunatics’ traps – we’re free, we’re free, believe me this is gonna change.”)

Just for the record: this is a diehard anti-social media blog. Elon Musk is a creep, and Twitter is not a place you want to be found, ever, unless you want to be surveilled. That being said, here’s Eugyppius – one of the best Substackers out there – on the benefits of Zoom versus real-world academic conferences. The thread just gets funnier and funnier