Author: Magadh

Magadh is a teacher, writer, and musician based in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the co-editor of A Thousand Trivialities, a blog devoted to punk, metal, and alternative culture. When not writing or attending shows, he can usually be found cursing at his television during Arsenal matches.

Politics in the United States is no more corrupt or crazy than anywhere else. Certainly there has been no shortage of scandals (from Teapot Dome to Watergate) and systemic corruption (Tammany Hall, Chicago up to and including the present day), but one needn’t be an avid student of history to find similar sorts of things in any the major industrialized states one cares to study. (More…)

It’s been just over 40 years since the Trilateral Commission issued their landmark report, The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies. Although the commission (which still exists) has become, in practical terms, fodder for the paranoid fantasies of fringe groups like the John Birch Society, in the 1970s, it was not always so. (More…)

A former academic colleague used to complain that people who wrote about Heidegger invariably ended up writing like Heidegger. This is not entirely fair to Heidegger scholars (although not entirely unfair either). Peter Trawny’s recently translated Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy affirms the legitimacy of both complaints. This is, in fact, the first of Trawny’s works that I have read in translation and, oddly enough, it is the one that I feel like I understand the least. (More…)

Tzvetan Todorov’s The Inner Enemies of Democracy wants to use the accumulated wisdom of the West to address a modern problem. In this particular case, the problem is that, although democracy has become the  lingua franca of the West, there are dynamics internal to it that have the potential to vitiate the progress that has been made towards more humanistic social orders. (More…)

Of all the notable literary events of the past year, perhaps none was so important as the release of the complete works of Primo Levi. The three volumes of this edition make available in one place a wealth of Levi’s novels, his shorter fictional and occasional pieces, as well as his more general autobiographical writings such as The Periodic Table. (More…)

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism constitutes one of the clearest statements of what people for better or worse like to call the ‘postmodern condition’. On Fisher’s account, culture in the late capitalist world exists in a condition of stasis, having lost the impulsion to novelty that Fisher imputes to systemic competition with actually existing socialism. (More…)

A few months ago, I stumbled onto Deafheaven’s last record, Sunbather. This is a pathetic admission for a guy who spends a large proportion of his free time searching out new music. But in my defense ,the cover of Sunbather is pink, and I must have been thrown by that the first time I saw it among the new black metal releases. (More…)

Few writers in the Anglosphere have written about the situation of modern capitalism, and its cultural consequences, than British scholar Mark Fisher. Whether in books, in Wired and New Statesman, or on his own blog, Fisher prose cuts to the chase, capturing subtle nuances without feeling the need to drown the reader in verbiage. (More…)

If I may begin with a bit of oversimplification, Slavoj Žižek basically writes two kinds of books: long and incomprehensible, and short and to the point. His Less Than Nothing is an example of the first sort. (More…)

I’d been looking forward to reading ex-Bitch Magnet guitarist Jon Fine’s Your Band Sucks, his memoir of his life in the indie rock scene, for some time. I’d been fascinated with (the stupidly named) Bitch Magnet ever since I first heard Ben Hur in Thirty Ought Six front man Sean Roberts’ basement in Portland a couple of lifetimes ago. (More…)

Several years ago, I spent the night carousing in Prenzlauer Berg. As things broke up after two, I realized that I had stayed out too late – which meant until after the north-south U-Bahn lines had stopped running. In those days, I was living in Neukölln which, for those unfamiliar with Berlin, is a considerable distance. (More…)

The economist Joseph Schumpeter is one the most fascinating and, it is probably fair to say, underappreciated figures of the 20th century. He was a product of a remarkable multigenerational school of economic thought in the last decades of the Habsburg Empire. (More…)