Every day feels like the same day, an endless smear of Sunday and Wednesday. It’s two-thirty in the morning, and a caravan of motorcycles and dune buggies are growling up First Avenue, their engines rattling the windows. Another heatwave is settling over the city. The coronavirus continues to burn through America, breaking records in eighteen states. In Portland, federal troops are tear-gassing citizens and kickstarting a vicious loop. The White House wants to jam the airwaves with images of angry protestors, broken windows, and fire in the streets until the suburbs are too scared to think. One hundred days until the election.
I put on William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, hours of compassion that bleed through the grit and grain of decaying tape. “Our world is in a bad feedback loop right now,” Basinski said a few years ago in an interview. “We’re at a point right now where we need to get rid of some bad feedback loops and it’s happening. It’s not gonna be pretty, but eventually things will resolve.”
This might be the year the loop finally and truly breaks.
