There are still plenty of remarkable “digital artifacts,” as I thought of them while I was combing through Ukrainian social media posts for Black Square—for instance, a Kyiv rockabilly musician posted a video of himself in his fatigues, crouching in a hallway, singing a song he wrote about Javelin missiles set to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”
Perversions of Historical Memory
Sophie Pinkham, interviewed by Lucy Jakub – https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/03/12/perversions-of-historical-memory
Reading these lines absolutely breaks my heart in a way Jeff Tweedy and Wilco and Capitol Records could never do. It’s funny and sad duality conveys just how messed and artificially fraught the Russian invasion of Ukraine really is. All Putin need do is tell the troops to pull out and this misery has at least slowed down a bit instead of continuing to rise along some asymptotic wall going to infinity. Every individual Sophie Pinkham mentions is a novel and essay unto themselves, universes dwell there. The only upside is the misery and despondency of barrel bombs and endless destruction of buildings/apartment blocks hasn’t reached the scale of Syria. Let’s hope it doesn’t ever get that far.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 