INTRODUCING THE BAD SIDE
July 22, 2025 at Montez Press Radio
This program, part of the series Stand Up Fall Down: The Irony of Politics and the Politics of Irony.
Anyone who’s spent more than ten seconds on the political Left has had to look disappointment and defeat in the face: to see how hope flips into delusion, how mobilizations get stalled, how even the most rock-solid philosophical certainties evaporate into thin air. This is true for the movement of History as much as for the dash through streets. In our attempt to keep pace with the relentless present, it can feel like things are happening too fast (while certain other things remain painfully slow). A taste for irony, then, may be key to thinking and acting politically, in our era, or any era.
So these five hours of programming will investigate irony as history, history as irony. We wanted to examine how struggles recur, how conflicts rhyme; how events form a rhythm or pattern, only to break off abruptly or reverse course completely. (Irony is a fundamental feature of both tragedy and farce.) Failure, strategy, betrayal, dialectics: there are many ways of thinking about the basic, freakish fact that in the real world, contradictions emerge in motion—in other words, with the passage of time.
This summer marks the fifth anniversary of the George Floyd Uprising. This year is also ten years since the Baltimore uprising for Freddie Gray and sixty since the Watts Rebellion, an event seen by many as marking the final phase of the Civil Rights era and the birth of Black Power. And this last anniversary comes as the people of Los Angeles, terrorized by immigration raids, are once again rising up against the armed racism of the state.
Riot anniversaries: that was the prompt we gave to two of our favorite musicians (in fact, before the current mobilization against ICE) who were free to interpret the theme as loosely as they wished. The results are “Answers Will Vary,” a new mix by Bobby Beethoven, and the two tracks that make up “Voyage to Atlantis” by 7038634357. We also asked the Houston-based collective Otabenga Jones & Associates to let us use the audio from their sculpture “We Did It for Love,” installed in the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2004. The piece was a single flipped-over police vehicle placed in the middle of the gallery. Playing on the car’s radio are the six tracks that we’ve borrowed for this program: a sonic collage which features samples taken from the Watts Rebellion.
Other segments include a selection from the New York War Crimes, the publication put out by Writers Against the War on Gaza; an interview with the philosopher Alberto Toscano; and a reading of Bertolt Brecht’s “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” an essay from 1935.
The centerpiece of our program is a long conversation between six student militants from last year’s Gaza encampments and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the organizer, Marxist geographer, and founding figure in US prison abolition movement. Our own ironic reversal: gather a bunch of students banned from campus and/or brutalized by their own schools, and let them have a class with the best teacher we know.
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Otabenga Jones & Associates
We Did It for Love
In 2004, Otabenga Jones & Associates presented the sculptural installation “We Did It For Love,” comprising audio playing from the speakers of an overturned police car, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. These six tracks, modeled after Prince Paul’s album skits, collage police radio from 1965 Watts Rebellion with popular music, political speeches, and exploitation films. Otabenga Jones & Associates was a Houston-based artist collective active from 2002 to 2017, its members include Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert A. Pruitt.
Tracklist:
1. love addictions
2. we did love
3. the love above
4. more love 11
5. love we did
6. lover deluxe
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore + Student Militants in the Palestine Solidarity Movement
The Palestine solidarity movement forms the centerpiece of our program. Last September—that is, almost a year ago—we published “Summer’s Over: A Note on Politics and the Campus Movement,” an essay that attempted to assess the advances made by the shocking profusion of Gaza solidarity encampments at colleges and universities across the US. We wrote:
"This spring’s movement, then, represents an advance beyond the 2003 mobilization against the invasion of Iraq. The marches of two decades ago remain the largest in world history. In the US, they were an appeal—a symbolic, democratic, stirringly popular appeal, issued by millions before the fall of the first bombs—to the state architects of the devastation. Against the profit-seeking slaughter, a mural of dissenting citizens; against the crusade to uproot Saddam, the slogan 'regime change starts at home.' This moment is different. It draws on different groups, proceeds from different premises, avails itself of different tactics, and arrives at a time of spirited (if embattled) left militancy on many fronts. And the particular placement of Palestine—meaning the Palestinian people’s steadfast resistance to elimination, in spite of the overlapping constituencies bent on their demise—has compelled a new generation to come face to face with the urgent, essential paradoxes of building an anti-imperial politics within the belly of the imperial beast."
This summer we reached out to a few participants in encampments around the New York City. The six students we gathered have faced suspension (sometimes more than once), official censure, rescinded admissions, and real physical violence. For this segment, we invited these young militants to have a conversation—really, a one-time seminar—with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the veteran organizer, Marxist geographer, and founding figure of the prison abolition movement. The goal was to trade lessons and reflect collectively about that moment’s trials, glories, feelings, and facts.
In preparation for this session, Gilmore asked them to listen to a recorded lecture based on an essay she wrote about Stuart Hall, and to read “A Short Organum for the Theater,” the 1948 theoretical work on dialectical theater by Bertolt Brecht. In keeping with the theme of the series, this was our own ironic reversal: gather a bunch of students banned from campus and/or brutalized by their own schools, and let them have a class with the best teacher we know.
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Bobby Beethoven
Answers Will Vary
Riot anniversaries: This summer marks five years since the George Floyd Uprising. This year is also ten years since the Baltimore uprising for Freddie Gray and sixty since the Watts Rebellion, an event seen by many as marking the final phase of the Civil Rights era and the birth of Black Power. And this last anniversary comes as the people of Los Angeles, terrorized by immigration raids, are once again rising up against the armed racism of the state.
This was the prompt we gave to Bobby Beethoven; the result is a new mix, titled “Answers Will Vary.”
* * *
Riot anniversaries: This summer marks five years since the George Floyd Uprising. This year is also ten years since the Baltimore uprising for Freddie Gray and sixty since the Watts Rebellion, an event seen by many as marking the final phase of the Civil Rights era and the birth of Black Power. And this last anniversary comes as the people of Los Angeles, terrorized by immigration raids, are once again rising up against the armed racism of the state.
This was the prompt we gave to 7038634357. The result was “Voyage to Atlantis.”
Tracklist:
7038634357 – Intro (Voyage to Atlantis)
DJ Screw feat. Big Moe, Big Shawn, Black, Big Floyd – Freestyle (Voyage to Atlantis)
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The Bad Side
Interview with Alberto Toscano
We sat down with the philosopher Alberto Toscano to talk about his two most recent books: the first an analysis of the resurgent right, the second a diagnosis of the contemporary left.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis examines the re-emergence of far right political formations. What does this tell us about the hypocrisies of liberalism and the limits of our political vocabulary? How to best to make use of the legacy left by historical antifascisms—from the Frankfurt School to Black Power? These questions are also taken up, albeit from a different angle, in Toscano’s Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum. In chapters on communism, radicalism, reform, the Left, Prometheanism, the people, resistance, transition, dual power, leadership, and freedom, he addresses the contemporary “unmooring of the names of politics.”
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Writers Against the War on Gaza
Readings from the New York War Crimes
A reading of “Proof of Existence,” published on October 7, 2024, in the New York War Crimes, the broadsheet put out Writers Against the War on Gaza.
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The Bad Side Reads Bertolt Brecht
A reading of Bertolt Brecht’s “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” from 1935.