To the White people in the room I would ask, What do you mean by unity? It's a word like others that gets tossed around in public relations statements and mission statements with the assumption that everyone knows what the word means—as if we have all agreed. Oneness of purpose. The inclusion of all. A… Continue reading On Unity
My sense of faith, in the secular sense, is tested by my odd sense of careerism. Too often concerned about success, I become frozen by whatever Big Idea I'm chasing at the time and neglect the ordinary, plugging-away-at-it work I should be doing. If I were to have faith that actually doing the work would… Continue reading Slow Writing 2
Red Wheelbarrow: The Podcast and the new issue of Botticelli are online! Check them out here. Things, as you know, got weird this spring. But over at CCAD we managed to get through it, buoyed as always by our incredible students. Usually there's a year-end show called CHROMA, a big to-do, campus-wide. And usually our… Continue reading Red Wheelbarrow and Botticelli
I've been trying to find a way I can help those in need, so I've decided to open my vaults! The first release is GHOST TRAIN: LIVE 2013, an 8-song set of me, solo, recorded in January 2013 at Eric Nassau's annual house concert, The Chocolate Party. Give it a spin here. You can listen… Continue reading Ghost Train
The special issue of Black Magnolias dedicated to Prince is here, live and alive, and you should read it and buy it if you can. My essay, "How the Exodus Began: Prince and the Black Working Class Imagination," is ridiculously long and I'm grateful to editor C. Liegh McInnis for believing that all those words… Continue reading Black Magnolias, Prince, and the Black American Working Class
I moved from Cleveland to Columbus in 2002 for grad school...and to play music. I'd always felt more kinship to the musicians I knew down here, many of them transplants from nearby Delaware, than the folks I knew up north. The Cleveland "scene," for bands at least, was dominated by industrial and metal; down here,… Continue reading The Columbus Anthology
The "presentism" diagnosed by Douglas Rushkoff in his book Present Shock has now, in this shelter-in-place era of COVID-19, revealed its most neurotic symptoms: near-total absorption into the endless stream of news and commentary, mental fluttering without end, and yet, a near-total inability to say anything. Or to write anything. For me, at least. Setting… Continue reading Slow Writing
The majority of this site is in place, finally. I'll be redirecting my Nothing Has Been Done Before site here; it doesn't make any sense to keep two websites going with so many overlapping purposes and resources. All of the book resources have been transferred here. I hope to get more photos and music uploaded… Continue reading Getting There
One of my recent goals is to have more of a presence at Goodreads, and so it makes sense to write some reviews. When they concern my own book, I'll post a link here at my site--which is what I'm doing tonight with Michael North's Novelty: A History of the New. It's an off-the-cuff review,… Continue reading Brief Review of Novelty: A History of the New
My new new column is up at PopMatters: "Kanye West: The Iconoclast Gives In." Go there now! So, yeah, the essay is about exactly what you think it's about: how newness has led Kanye astray. (That's what you were expecting, right?) Unfortunately it's not exactly an artistic newness, which is why it's taken him into… Continue reading PopMatters Updates
Robert Loss 