Hi. Well it was a pretty stupid year. Here are some highlights:
1. Beto almost vanquished Ted Cruz from my stupid state of Texas in the U.S. Senate.
2. The new Low album - Double Negative. If you’re waiting to get it, why? This is a beautiful record and will mark an artistic breakthrough that the next occupants of earth will study for millennia to come.
3. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She and Beto are the future of our so-called democracy, if there is a future. Green New Deal or 6th great extinction. You choose.
4. William Basinski/Lawrence English - Selva Oscura. It is a mind altering trip you really must take. If you’ve stopped eating acid because you’re unsure how it will interact with your anti-depressants, this is the record for you (us).
5. Carol of the Tubular Bells - it’s a Christmas song that I recorded with David Yow, Ohmme and many other Joyful Noise greats. I can put my own music on here! Fuck y’all!
6. NOT! I REPEAT NOT child prisons on the Texas/Mexico border. This is truly a hideous chapter in our history that will have ramifications for decades to come. Yes, this is on us.
6 1/2. The viruses currently mutating that will wipe out our destructive species allowing the earth to heal. Like Angela from Xiu Xiu said, we don’t deserve this beautiful planet 🌎. Or the meteorite that is careening our way.
7. Everyone in The Resistance. You protested. You voted. Finally there are starting to be women and brown and black people in our goddam government. Good riddance Anglo scrotum hate bags.
8. The memories of my mom, Norma Ruth. She died in 2017. She was the greatest person ever. She taught me kindness to people and animals. She was a bit of a pushover. I had to learn toughness on my own. She was shrewd and skeptical, but never cruel. I have a lot of heroes living and dead, mostly women, but she is my number 1.
9. All the music that was made this year. With the exception of a few posers who would never get laid otherwise, music making is a truly high calling. All artists are non-profit. It’s the worst paying job in the world. If I don’t like your music, like Congelton said, that’s on me. If you are making the art that YOU would want to see, hear, taste, touch, read or fuck, it’s good.
10. Not! I repeat NOT the time I fed my thumb into the table saw. Although it didn’t really hurt. It happened so fast. It took months to heal.
This is what it looked like. Now it just looks like a thumb. Nature’s miracles never cease to amaze. How did my thumb remember how to grow back? I didn’t really even have to do anything. I just ate plants and with time my cells made it back into a thumb.
Thor Harris
