Weird Catastrophe by Kody Cava

The internet was a mistake.

It’s not just that online life has been privatized and controlled by powerful, unseen forces. It’s that it’s very structure is antithetical to what is innately human, to what connects people, to the only things that really matter in this fleeting existence. We, all of us, are being forced into an increasingly inhuman world, told it is progress, and nobody is counting the costs.

I am asking you to count those costs with me. Please.

For those who don’t know, prior to the pandemic, I spent my entire working life in the technical side of the live entertainment industry. This was primarily as a lighting designer for theatre and as a scenic carpenter, welder, and rigger. But more generally, I worked as a jack-of-all-trades event technician. These are the people who set up and run the sound and lighting equipment for all the live shows you see. They handle costume and makeup changes for performers. They repair the props. They build the sets. They fly the scenery. They call the cues. They ride the tour bus from city to city. Some are unionized and some are not. Often, they’re just scraping by.

Over the years, I have grown troubled by certain aspects of theatre which often go without mention, even, or perhaps especially, by those who make their primary living from it. This episode of Weird Catastrophe is an examination of how live theatre in America often fails to live up to its storytelling potential and how we can produce better shows and improve working conditions for those who give their labor to this silly endeavor.

If you'd like to support the creation of more work like this, you can subscribe to Weird Catastrophe here: https://weirdcatastrophe.substack.com/

This episode is a response to pro-Israel arguments made by Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari in the midst of Israel's ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.

Weird Catastrophe by Kody Cava is a reader and listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at weirdcatastrophe.substack.com

The case against Henry Kissinger as an indictable war criminal has been amply demonstrated for decades. And yet he died a free, comfortable, and highly lauded man in the West. He should have died by the hangman’s noose. The fact that his millions of victims were robbed of this justice is yet another crime against humanity. The fact that we in the West did not bring Kissinger to this justice is a source of forever, unwashable shame. We do not deserve forgiveness. I’m not sure what exactly can be celebrated here.

Weird Catastrophe by Kody Cava is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at weirdcatastrophe.substack.com

The particular details of any case such as George Floyd's are largely, unfortunately, immaterial to the response such cases provoke in the society at large. A healthy society would be able to deal with single instances of injustice such as these on their own terms. We do not have a healthy society. These uprisings happen because there is a permanent underclass in our nation, the social contract has been broken, and the power our state exercises over us is illegitimate. You cannot expect an unjust system such as ours to deliver justice, neither for a killer cop nor for the person he killed. Our criminal justice system is too perverted to ever deliver anything resembling justice with any kind of consistency. When it comes to the rule of law and our faith in it, consistency is key. In America, there is no such thing. It doesn’t take a saint to cause the explosion, just an inexorable accretion of deep indignities and the right person in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that person could be you. We are, all of us, dancing on kindling. You don't fix that danger by arguing against matches. You clean up the kindling.

This episode of Weird Catastrophe is an examination of Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice. Our society is not able to comprehend people like Aaron Bushnell and their actions because we have totally spurned the ability to be morally serious people, along with the vulnerability, earnestness, and humanity which this requires. When someone like Bushnell comes along and lights themselves on fire, they indict the whole of our broken society. I am telling you, if for nothing more than our mere survival, let alone moral integrity: We cannot ignore the messages of people like Bushnell, as much as we’d like to. They are the vanguard that says, either do something about this, or we will all continue to perish.

Thank you for listening. This article was originally published by Salon.

Weird Catastrophe by Kody Cava is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What hope is there for a society that is hell-bent on perpetuating its insane imperial ventures? The United States, through its powerful propaganda machine and its cruel, coercive economic system, churns out generation after generation of fresh canon fodder. This episode of Weird Catastrophe is an examination of how our militarized society works and what its deadly implications are. Thank you for listening.

There is a deep nihilism in America today. Nihilism is not a kind of mopey cynicism or depression or edgy lifestyle. Nihilism is an ultimate separation between what our values are and the means by which we can assert and affirm those values. When no value can be truly honored or protected in either the political or the private life, and when our political and private lives converge and subsume one another so that neither can remain sacred, then everything ceases to have meaning. A person can have a pretty damn good hedonistic time in a nihilistic world. But it means nothing. Right behind the hedonist’s back is an insatiable darkness that is being nourished by precisely the same thing that is drip-feeding them pleasure. That darkness can be deadly. This deep nihilism has infected America’s political system, stem to stern. This episode is an examination of that broken political system and how we may alter its course.

The novelist Russell Banks, who died recently at the age of 82, made a life out of bearing witness to the forgotten, and of recording memory for the sake of survival itself. Author of "Cloudsplitter," "The Sweet Hereafter," "Continental Drift," and many other works, Banks has left an enduring literary legacy. This is an appreciation of his work.

Dessa, the eternally rising hip-hop artist from Minneapolis, takes a turn for pop with her new album, "Bury The Lede." This is my review of the album, seeing how it compares to her previous work.