tumble77

“The first thing you learn about insomnia is that it sees in the dark. The second is that it sees nothing.” A quick tour through philosophical history reveals many who believed deep sleep never encouraged deep thoughts.

peterwknox: “This is why I think they are important.”

And so those of us unfashionable enough to point out that the emperor has no clothes—or simply to look for a way to mean what we say and say what we mean, and to ask the same of others—are cowed into not taking any stance at all, for fear we’ll be exposed as irrelevant the ones with no clothes—the last thing anybody wants to be. But the more we worry about how others perceive us, the less we do anything worth perceiving at all. Artists like Wallace and Murphy are crucial because they can save us from this spiral of second-guessing and self-doubt. These artists, who are more concerned with being up-front and unguarded than being cool, represent the current antidote to all this ironic hollowness.

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LCD Soundsystem’s music and Wallace’s books have always resided near each other in a rarefied corner of my artistic universe I reserve for nearly flawless art. It’s a special place we all have for our absolute favorite music, books, and films that we are not just enthusiastic about, but whose secular beauty offers something approaching salvation, inspiration, refuge from mediocrity and grief and shitty days at the office. This is the art that helps us feel a little less alone, as both Murphy and Wallace are on record hoping their works would help people feel. I am sorry to lose Wallace and LCD Soundsystem, not just for the sheer quality of their work, but for their approach to that work, which involved some very conscious steps away from our culture’s pervasive irony and toward a new, refreshing sincerity.

At the root of queer theory is a very simple practice: questioning what is “normal” or normative, complicating any simple framework by asking critical questions about who is excluded and what is assumed. Anyone who has studied queer theory immediately gets how this framework is useful beyond analyses of sexuality, yet those who haven’t been trained as such see two scary words: queer and theory. Depending on the audience, either word can prompt a serious phobia. But that framework does more than answer questions about sexuality; it allows us to interrogate any supposedly stable system.