We recently had the chance to connect with Michael James and have shared our conversation below.
Michael, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: Who are you learning from right now?
Right now it’s a mix of various authors, dead and alive. I’ve been on a non-fiction kick for the first time in half a decade, so I’m being exposed to ideas new and old with regularity these days.
Mostly I’m diving into short political or philosophical works that directly examine various aspects of the post-WWII order – how it came to be, why it might be dying, where we could be going.
A few recent reads :
– “The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism” by Gary Gerstle. This is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in the past 10 years. Impulse buy this one, trust me. It takes you from the dawn of the New Deal order straight up to 2023, and it’s less than 300 pages – compelling and thorough.
– “Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel. Very easy to read, very pertinent to the current moment. Havel was a Czech beer-brewer turned President whom I first became aware of when I was briefly living in Prague. I stumbled across his name on the Velvet Underground’s Wikipedia and read an incredible biography about him. Ten years later, I finally got around to his most famous essay, “Power of the Powerless.”
– “Capitalism and the Death Drive” by Byung Chul Han. Han is a South Korean-born former metallurgist who moved to Germany and became a philosopher. Another quick and interesting read. I enjoyed the book but he does have a bit of a tendency to move on from an idea as quickly as he proposes it. He’ll introduce an interesting concept like “Rebellion is impossible in the neoliberal order because this system is propagated by self-exploitation instead of top-down oppression”, but then he kind of moves on after a few sentences. I enjoyed it, though. It was better than “The Crisis of Narration.” I guess he’s most famous for “The Burnout Society,” but I haven’t read it yet.
– “The Coming Insurrection” by The Invisible Committee. This one has an interesting back story. Look it up, but it’s written by anonymous French anarcho-communists. The French government has technically labeled the book “a manual for terrorism” (you can buy it on Amazon) but my takeaway was that it’s more diagnosis than call-to-action. Their basic argument is that modern civilization has devolved to the point that government is nothing more than crisis management, and that people should stop waiting for society to collapse and accept that it already has in order to take control of their future. Anarchism always leaves me empty-handed when it comes to its proposed solutions, but I’ve realized anarchist analysis/thought is much more interesting and nuanced than I was led to believe. I’ve been researching its history in America and was fascinated to see how much of a hand it played in the last 200 years. Emma Goldman, for example, has the most amazing Wikipedia page I’ve ever read.
Honourable mentions:
“On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder (timely)
“Anarchism and Other Essays” by Emma Goldman (more rhetoric than argument but good nonetheless)
“Warning to the West” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (man can he give a speech)
“Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl (somehow never read it in high school)
“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (I re-read this every year)
&
“Spring Snow” by Yukio Mishima (research this guy, what a trip. His best book to me is “Confessions of a Mask”, so far.)
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Michael. I’m a musician born and raised in California, but most everything that defines me comes from spending my 20’s in Oregon.
I’ve mostly stepped back from promotion, playing live, and releasing music for the past few years as money gets harder to make and keep, and the world becomes more and more expensive. Right now I’m basically stockpiling recordings whenever I can summon the money and time to make them.
My band is called Delving, but I recently started an ambient collective called EBT Brassband and an experimental/electronic duo with Robert Gaar called TV You. I’m working on some solo instrumental music and hip-hop beats in my spare time. I mainly play around Orange County in instrumental duos and trios right now.
Please check out Delving on YouTube and Bandcamp via @delvingmusic on Instagram! (No we are not the psych-rock band from Germany by the same name, but they are great too).
Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I love that Bukowski quote! My parents say I was shy, friendly, and sensitive. I feel like I still am today. I want to get back to being more friendly though. I’ve become a bit more withdrawn since the pandemic.
Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
Every single year and I’m not joking at all.
Sometimes I’ve even begun the process of quitting only to fall back in within a few hours or days.
I’ve learned that it is impossible for me to divorce myself from music.
That’s a really powerful thing to learn about yourself; it means you’ll be fine no matter what if you just keep going.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. Is the public version of you the real you?
I don’t buy into the idea of the authentic self, but I know what you’re getting at.
I think my generation’s obsession with authenticity is a fascinating phenomenon, and I shudder to think about what it could be a response to.
It’s interesting that when you said “public” my brain interpreted it as “online”, because so much of the music world is online at this moment.
How I currently see it :
If you’re wearing the mask society requires of you, you’re still making the choice to express it a certain way.
If you’re acting out of step with your intentions, that’s still a part of your path.
So to conform to the expectations of the question:
Yes, the “public/onstage/online” me is the real me – but with a lot of nuance removed. Certain traits get amplified and others minimized or hidden.
But isn’t that true of every human interaction?
I’ve been through too many radical changes in attitude, thought, and behaviour to ever believe that there is some sort of base level, authentic and holistic self underneath it all. I think we start one way and we end another, and that’s the whole beauty/excitement of our (hopefully) slow ride towards death.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. If you knew you had 10 years left, what would you stop doing immediately?
Working for a company.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.delvingmusic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/delvingmusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@delvingofficial
- Other: https://delvingmusic.bandcamp.com/
Image Credits
Sarah Wainwright
