Brent S. Sirota @BrentSirota Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@ktrappe

@pennekampster

@turbo_overkill

@Quice_

@Luyanda_s_

@Farhanapatel17

@Mikey_Brite

@tylerkingkade

@SamarFudah

@peachybobamilk

@expatorii

@cynosure010100

@_chazu_txt

@jahorne

@ShesBasedBabe

@ren_gojo_

@TheUFL

@RepostRegramApp

@_markgallagher

@itsAliceWonder_

@Thug_Morales

@irislxy8

@mahimahi

@100Normalhuman

@norareinachula

@hol_sweetsimple

@hellmoneypod

@LT91CB97

@Juriana_disko

@ToddVousGuette

@realKatiendas

@BaardsenDa18789

@AmbKattan

@SamerGhani

@realsamantra

@Helen_Barnard

Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

The Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle is why we can't have parody anymore. These people simply cannot be outclowned.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Targaryen restorationism, like most restorationism (Jacobite, Bourbon, &c) tends to be more sentimental than ideological. It offers no substantive critique of the existing social order, only a moral complaint expressed as political nostalgia. #GoT

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

8 years

I was against the war in Troy. Ask Hannity. And Helen was maybe a 6. She wouldn't have been my first choice, believe me. #TrumpBookReport

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

selling nuclear secrets is also an extremely early 90s kind of treason so it totally tracks

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

The GOP collectively decided that the risk of getting made fun of by the president plainly outweighed that of contracting COVID. Taking any kind of precaution was thought to make Trump look bad. And so here we are.

southpaw

@nycsouthpaw

4 years

Video of the ACB announcement event on Saturday at the WH featuring Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who has now tested positive for Covid-19. via @bubbaprog

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

22 days

Ok, here's a genuine question for something that I have been struggling with: what does 'futuristic' music sound like today? Not retro-futuristic, not the 1960s or 80s conception of the sound of tomorrow. An actual projection or imagining from the present we are currently in.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

Dem despair this morning seems to stem not from absence of Biden victory (which still seems likely) but the absence of some grand reckoning, some (to use Jacob Taubes' phrase) "apocalypse from below" which would set all things right.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

1 year

Everyone's focusing on the moral decrepitude of 'unfortunately or fortunately' and not the sheer cosmic weirdness of 'the last million years.'

Republican Voters Against Trump

@AccountableGOP

1 year

Trump defends his comments from the “Access Hollywood” tape in his taped deposition: Trump: “Historically, that’s true with stars…If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

John Kelly, literally, as dril tweet: you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to him'

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Ok I'm up early so I suppose we should talk about #GoT . And since such a large portion of the episode dealt with the question of succession, I feel like we are justified in taking a final look at the politics of the show.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

It took mild criticism of the monarchy by a woman of color to turn the whole of American conservatism into throne-and-altar tories.

Aaron Mehta

@AaronMehta

3 years

The Heritage Foundation is hosting a 3/25 event titled "The Crown Under Fire: Why the Left's Campaign to Cancel the Monarchy and Undermine a Cornerstone of Western Democracy Will Fail" Because undermining the monarchy has never been a part of American democracy, apparently.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

The checkerboard Trump Pence signs partly covering the filthy garage door. Just astonishing.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

who did this

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

As in Black Panther, we are supposed to be shocked when a "good" monarch gives way to a "bad" monarch, when the natural response is to question the legitimacy of hereditary power altogether.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

Randall Flagg energy

Joe Kovac Jr.

@joekovacjr

4 years

“We are the people who dreamed a spectacular dream. It was called ... Las Vegas.”

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

It's a good time for everyone to brush up on the reigns of the first two King Charles.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

RIP Jon Hassell. The arc of his musical career, from Stockhausen through Terry Riley's In C to his collaborations with Eno, his work on Talking Heads' Remain in Light, his own incredible 'fourth world' records, is the story of music in the late twentieth century.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

The idea of using abolitionism to establish Daenerys' radicalism never made any sense. After all, slavery is already illegal in Westeros. (Slave trading is why Jorah Mormont was exiled in disgrace.) So what does she offer the Seven Kingdoms? Her goodness.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

In contemporary American political religions, only violence sacralizes. We impart holiness to things by imagining them to be under assault.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

A student in my class described deism as "God going out for a pack of smokes and never coming back."

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

In the books, remember, the movement represented by the High Sparrow was much closer to Savonarola or Luther, a religious protest with genuinely transformative social implications. In the show, it was played like the Investiture Controversy as a clash of church vs. state.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

So here's my take: the political resolution of the narrative was so unsatisfying because the writers did not have a clear sense of what was politically defective in Westeros to begin with.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

1 year

Again this is trying to create ideological stakes where there just aren't any. Three quarters of the House GOP caucus voted against certifying the election--including Kevin McCarthy.

All but two McCarthy defectors in House are election deniers

The tally reflects the degree to which Republicans who reject or question the 2020 results dominate the GOP caucus.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

Aspiring politician says families with two working parents aren't "normal."

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Everyone knows kings are really made not born, but the artificiality of *all* political arrangements eludes them.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

For your autumn headspace, I've compiled *five hours* of the densest, dankest post-Bitches Brew fusion grooves the planet has to offer. @aquadrunkard

Absolute Sons of Bitches: Global Fusion Grooves, 1970-1977 : Aquarium Drunkard

In the smoking aftermath of Miles Davis's landmark Bitches Brew, musicians across the planet tried to come to grips with its dense, freaky, electric grooves. Aquarium Drunkard scoured the globe to...

aquariumdrunkard.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Her heel turn becomes so load-bearing only because her spotless character was really the entirety of the case for her restoration. Once that was compromised, everyone began looking for a "better" claimant, rather than imagining a different system.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

absolutely worthwhile use of your one precious unrepeatable life.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

And this makes the supposedly shrewd and far-sighted Varys's politics look so capricious and one-dimensional in the end. He too only believed in Daenerys's personal goodness, until he found someone better and began plotting accordingly.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

This is like a punishment out of Greek mythology.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

It is not just the ability to inflame longstanding culture war flashpoints, but to pointlessly create them where none existed before. It was a small point of pride to live in a country where not that long ago there was a near-universal consensus against drinking Liquid-Plumr.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

In the absence of a Reformation or a classical republican 'Machiavellian moment,' Westeros remains trapped in the antechamber of political modernity.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

11 months

"You are no longer the Lord's chicken" had one resplendent week at the top before being displaced by "Cracker Barrel has fallen." Sic transit gloria mundi.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

This is absolutely what is happening right now.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

But this right here flubs the political diagnosis of Westeros: the real problem of the Seven Kingdoms is feudal anarchy and weak governance. Over-mighty subjects. "Breaking the wheel" requires more government, not less. A stronger crown, not "emancipation."

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

Last night, the Hawaii GOP dropped an eight-tweet thread arguing that a thinly secularized blood libel mythology and bloody, Turner Diaries-inspired "day of the rope" revenge fantasies are rooted in patriotism and should be accepted as legitimate elements of conservative politics

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

"The Baratheon-Lannisters are venial usurpers and things were better under the good old kings."

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

There's no deliverance from politics. No epiphany of some truer, better, redeemed America. On the other side of election day, there's just more politics.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

The ascendancy of the IPA absolutely correlates with America coming to hate itself.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

Jonathan Allen

@jonallendc

2 years

One White House official lamented a sense of strategic drift and said that “everyone’s resigned” to Democrats’ getting thwacked in the midterms. “It feels like there is a wave coming and no one is doing anything to stop it,” the official said.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

So far I've heard John John, Dale Earnhardt, Michael Jackson, Robin Williams. With Trump at the center of this cult, it becomes clear that it is about the resurrection of a late 20th century cultural world in which these people last felt at home.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

And when they can no longer conceal that she's doing more or less exactly what she set out to do, they immediately re-code it as tyranny -- a word that was used repeatedly last night. Again, because we can't root for stronger government.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

And once this would-be Caesar is assassinated, we get . . . an elective monarchy, occupied by a man with no spouse or heir. As if the problem this whole time was a strong crown rather than a weak one.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

If we accept the late medieval setting of the story and the source material, however remote, of the Wars of the Roses (Lannister/Lancaster vs. Stark/York) then the political problem of Westeros should have been the independence of the aristocracy.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Alternative thesis: Westeros being an island (?), or at least having no dangerous geopolitical rivals on its borders, does not need the systems of revenue extraction and military mobilization that absolutism entails, and so can persist with its weak aristocratic constitutionalism

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

21 days

We are extremely rich in lost futures, but poor in actual ones. Every knows how to sound like Perrey and Kingsley or Vangelis's Blade Runner soundtrack or early Detroit techno, but it strikes me as rare to hear something new today and describe it as futuristic.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

Sgt. Prepper's

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

1 year

Thinking about Jimmy Carter hanging out with Cecil Taylor right now.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Who can all sit around congratulating themselves on their salvation from what in the end was obviously coded as the terrifying "oriental despotism" of Daenerys Targaryen.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

weird

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

Fifty years ago today, this album was released. It has meant more to me than any other. (Mati Klarwein’s gatefold album art is still astonishing.)

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

PS. I did actually like Arya sailing off to discover America, since the vaunted "age of discovery" was really rooted in the same feudal crisis as all the baronial wars and peasant uprisings of the late 14th and 15th centuries.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

They might well have gotten a victory. But they are griping because they wanted an exorcism.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

The political resolution of the narrative is to formally transform Westeros into a weak, elective monarchy (like Poland) where the crown is more or less entirely subordinated to the landed aristocracy.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

6 years

Fuck everything about this.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

This is really cool. Library music is compelling not because it was high art, but because as pure commodity, unburdened by the obligations of art, it simply had to sound exactly the way capitalist society wanted to hear itself.

Iconic library music label KPM has digitised its entire catalogue of over 30,000 recordings

.

thevinylfactory.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

But the writers, assuming our instinctive liberalism won't allow us to root for absolutism, continue to frame Dany's program as liberation.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

21 days

There has obviously been a complete atrophying of the utopian imagination, and this seems to have been especially severe in music. The future doesn't even 'sound like' anything anymore.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

marking the cause of death as 'spite'

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

You must read @willsommer 's unbelievable two-parter on the real world Q underground. A sprawling Pynchonesque cast of desperate American losers, grifters & fugitives manifesting their imagined persecution by the deep state by turning to crime and violence.

QAnon Promotes Pedo-Ring Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Stealing Kids.

The far-right fringe group infamous for promoting nutjob conspiracy theories about pedophile rings has moved on to criminally meddling in child custody cases.

www.thedailybeast.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

The mighty Pharoah Sanders turns 81 today. Pharoah and Shepp are the only players from Coltrane's landmark album Ascension still with us.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

The real American theology is antinomianism: the elect are not bound by the law. History, science, statistics, fate, common sense, these are only for the unregenerate.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

Setting democracy on fire to keep a man who has no interest whatsoever in doing the job in power.

CNN Breaking News

@cnnbrk

3 years

Trump appears to be skipping a side-event at the G20 virtual summit focused on pandemic preparedness. The President has just arrived at his golf course in Virginia.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

And as the breakaway of the North suggests, this just reinforces the feudal particularism and decentralization plaguing the kingdom(s) to begin with.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

7 years

Anything less than the headline JA RULAG ARCHIPELAGO is a total cop-out.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

This always struck me as a weird Americanism. We are asked to root for her because she is an abolitionist -- the idea being that no one would get morally or politically invested in a would-be royal absolutist.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

This seems like a good description of Westeros: the ruling dynasty was displaced by a coalition of ambitious noble houses. And the new usurper king, uninterested in governance, presided over a long period of political drift and crown indebtedness.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

From this perspective, the Targaryen restoration was supposed to stand in for the coming of the Tudors: strong, centralizing Renaissance monarchs who systematically reconstruct royal power and break the independence of the nobility.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

1 year

Imagine being a Jacobite for the former local news anchor.

Drew Savicki

@DrewSav

1 year

The Kari Lake War Room account and friends are having a normal one today.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Ok, fine. But the political rise of Daenerys Targaryen in Essos was framed in radically emancipatory terms--"breaker of chains." She's John Brown, not Henry Tudor.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

ok so we all agree this record is stunning, right?

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that he believes he came up with the phrase 'Age of Enlightenment'.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

It's Miles Davis's birthday, so here's 'Rated X,' which was recorded in 1972 but basically anticipated whole genealogies and permutations of 1990s electronic music. It literally took decades to fully digest what Miles was doing in the early 70s.

Miles Davis - Rated X

From 'Get Up With It'

www.youtube.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

21 days

Reminds of the Terry Eagleton line: 'the future for the well-heeled will be just like the present, only more so. One's deepest hope is that nothing momentous will ever happen.'

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

Me, a Jersey guy, living in the South: Ok, everybody needs to knock it off with the stereotypes. The South:

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Sir John Fortescue's Wars of the Roses-era treatise De Laudibus Legum Angliae famously named this problem "over-mighty subjects," meaning a nobility whose wealth and military power rivalled that of the crown.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

When the history of Gen X is written, we will have to grapple with the ways ironic detachment and free-floating disaffection eventually resolve themselves in authoritarianism.

CONSEQUENCE

@consequence

4 years

Nirvana's Krist Novoselic praised Donald Trump for his "strong and direct" law and order speech: "He knocked it out of the park"

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

1 year

For You Following

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

To celebrate Herbie Hancock's 80th birthday today, here's about fifty Herbie bootlegs -- including some absolute gems from the Mwandishi and early Head Hunters eras.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

6 years

Ok I've now gotten my favorite course evaluation comment EVER: "The stereotypical history teacher in movies that everyone loves. History teacher who studies religion; wouldn't be surprised if he was searching for the Lost Ark on the side."

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 months

To elevate your Monday, I've got nearly four hours of deep space jazz for you over @aquadrunkard . This is your gateway to the stars.

Light Pollution: The Roots of Ambient Jazz : Aquarium Drunkard

As Aquarium Drunkard recently reported, ambient appears to be the shape of jazz to come. The newest new thing is cross-pollinating with electronics and minimalism, new age and drone. But even these...

aquariumdrunkard.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

In late medieval Europe, the demographic and economic fallout from the Black Death left this stratum grasping and dangerous, squeezing its peasantry and ever pressing for more lands, titles, offices. Crowns that could not satiate these demands often fell prey to them.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

How many of you will go full Proust at the mere sight of that blue tin of Royal Dansk butter cookies?

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

American Water is a perfect record and may well have been the finest of the decade. It opens with the line: "In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection." Every weirdo, bullshit artist & aspiring intellectual I knew heard themselves in it. Rest in peace, David Berman

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

This is a front-to-back perfect record. Dreamy, sweet, mildly psychedelic and soulful. Every song sounds different, but they all cohere absolutely seamlessly. Rest in peace, Gal.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

What is so incredible about this extraordinary @JeffSharlet piece on the 'Cult of Trump' is the almost complete absence of anything resembling politics in it. An imagined conflict with Deep State, pedos, media, liberals, demons has eclipsed the political.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

A study in American alienation.

‘The storm is here’: Ashli Babbitt’s journey from capital ‘guardian’ to invader

The 35-year-old veteran once supported Barack Obama, she said on Twitter. But that was before she became a devoted follower of Donald Trump and QAnon.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Niece called me by my first name and I instinctively responded, "I didn't go to six years of uncle school to be called Brent." Now her and my daughter are grilling me about the details of Uncle School and I think I'm in too deep

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

It will never not be funny to me that one of the most ostentatiously Christian companies in America has been functioning like an Indiana Jones villain.

Matt Ford

@fordm

3 years

Inbox: DOJ seizes the Epic of Gilgamesh from Hobby Lobby

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

dear god this is unbelievable

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

I continue to believe this is some kind of collective anterograde amnesia and these people have not made any new memories since 9/11.

Ben Collins

@oneunderscore__

3 years

The QAnon people are walking up to random people they think are dead celebrities in Dallas today and introducing themselves. So far they have seen "Robin Williams" and "Dale Earnhardt." They now think JFK Jr. will reveal himself at a Rolling Stones concert tonight.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

Do you keep counting the stack of exams/papers to grade as if the number will somehow miraculously turn out to be less than you thought?

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

3 years

This is the American apocatastasis: the end of history never ended and we can watch Mrs. Doubtfire again.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

A perfect three-sided gem. Stunning from every angle, but different.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

4 years

This certainly feels like a metaphor.

Wesley Morgan

@wesleysmorgan

4 years

Autopsy of bald eagle confirms that loon stabbed it in the heart with its beak

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

8 years

Man, this anti-McCain ad.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

7 years

1799.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

I guess I never realized Zoot from the Muppets was supposed to be Gato Barbieri.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

2 years

one of the last of the old gods. rest in peace.

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Brent S. Sirota

@BrentSirota

5 years

Anyone remember the name of that political ideology that promised to deliver us from the atomizing and destabilizing effects of market forces while preserving traditional cultural and racial hierarchies?

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