Jay Babcock
LightNews LightNews
banner
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Jay Babcock
@jaywbabcock.bsky.social
1.5K followers 300 following 2.2K posts
Semi-educated guesser. Unknown genre. LANDLINE: jaybabcock.substack.com Past: Arthur Magazine co-founder/editor. babcock dot jay at gmail dot com
Posts Replies Media Videos
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
More...
Q: So do you think the W.T.O. protests were part of something larger and wider that’s just beginning? Mani: I’ve always dreamt of it. I still have dreams now about people storming open the gates of Buckingham Palace and fuckin’… Old women with their shopping trolleys pickin’ up Van Goghs and gold pieces and shit. It’s gotta come. It has got to come. Otherwise we’ll just carry on getting downtrodden and rolled over on. People are getting pissed off. It’s a worldwide thing. We’re all on the same boat, aren’t we? Mani: For 20 years it’s been a war against the working class. Bobby: Systematic warfare, man. Mani: Margaret Thatcher declared war on the trade unions and the working class in general. Well you can only take so much shit, can’t ya? One day, it’ll burn… [deep laugh] And I’ll do my fuckin’ bit.
November 26, 2025 at 5:30 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
The interview was conducted in early March 2000 in NYC. The Diallo verdicts had just come down.
Q: You got here in the wake of the Diallo verdict… Mani: It was excellent to see people gettin’ on the streets and doin’ something about it, man. Them fucking four guys should have been lined up and shot with fucking 41 bullets each. Bobby Gillespie: Totally disgusting. M: Don’t people learn lessons from Rodney King and all that shit? Don’t they learn lessons anymore? Q: So what’s to be done? M: What do you do? Go and start burning police stations down? No, here’s where you start: fucking someone should take out that Mayor Giuliani. Someone should fucking whack that motherfucker.
November 26, 2025 at 5:30 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
More from my 2000 conversation with Mani (RIP) and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, orig pub'd in Mean magazine

#xtrmntr
Q: You got here in the wake of the Diallo verdict… Mani: It was excellent to see people gettin’ on the streets and doin’ something about it, man. Them fucking four guys should have been lined up and shot with fucking 41 bullets each. Bobby Gillespie: Totally disgusting. M: Don’t people learn lessons from Rodney King and all that shit? Don’t they learn lessons anymore? Q: So what’s to be done? M: What do you do? Go and start burning police stations down? No, here’s where you start: fucking someone should take out that Mayor Giuliani. Someone should fucking whack that motherfucker.
November 26, 2025 at 2:58 AM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Q: So do you think the W.T.O. protests were part of something larger and wider that’s just beginning? Mani: I’ve always dreamt of it. I still have dreams now about people storming open the gates of Buckingham Palace and fuckin’… Old women with their shopping trolleys pickin’ up Van Goghs and gold pieces and shit. It’s gotta come. It has got to come. Otherwise we’ll just carry on getting downtrodden and rolled over on. People are getting pissed off. It’s a worldwide thing. We’re all on the same boat, aren’t we? Mani: For 20 years it’s been a war against the working class. Bobby: Systematic warfare, man. Mani: Margaret Thatcher declared war on the trade unions and the working class in general. Well you can only take so much shit, can’t ya? One day, it’ll burn… [deep laugh] And I’ll do my fuckin’ bit.
November 26, 2025 at 2:55 AM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
November 24, 2025 at 8:01 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Reminds me that I really need to get this 2000 interview online, even if I have to key in every word. Will work on it this morning.
Photograph of right hand page of opening spread of my 5-page interview with Mani and Bobby Gillespie from Mean magazine (May 2000), featuring photography by Ira Cohen.
November 23, 2025 at 2:41 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
November 21, 2025 at 8:51 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
November 21, 2025 at 4:44 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
I love this. Football is so deep.
November 21, 2025 at 2:10 AM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Jason Pierce and Pete Kember, 19 November 1965 - ∞
November 20, 2025 at 3:38 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Link in profile. A cavalcade of cheering videos featuring the usual suspects: Screaming Lord Sutch, Lancelot Layne, Martin Stone, Motörhead, Jacques Cousteau, David Arora + David Fenster, Iain Sinclair + Chris Petit, Elaine May + Mike Nichols, Chris Eliott, Syd-era Floyd, ac/dc, Sumerian lyre, etc.
November 18, 2025 at 6:55 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
November 14, 2025 at 3:39 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
This sentimental old softie still associates this time of year with the album that utterly bewitched him at age 17, in 1988. I know every non-word.
November 6, 2025 at 2:26 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
They've achieved the "Let them eat nothing" point in this shitshow. #FullAntoinette
At one point during the hearing, Tyler Becker, a lawyer for the Justice Department, argued on Friday that the shutdown was “not an emergency,” even though roughly 42 million people were at risk of losing benefits imminently. The comments met sharp resistance from lawyers representing cities and nonprofits, who charged in court filings that the White House had “needlessly plunged SNAP into crisis” by refusing to act while it still had time. “Where there are appropriated funds available, benefits have to be furnished,” Michael Torcello, a lawyer representing the groups that sued, said during a hearing on Friday. “And in this case, appropriated funds are available.”
November 1, 2025 at 12:23 AM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
“Four in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed a genocide,” said Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, citing Washington Post polling. “There’s a disconnect between that number, and the view of American Jewish institutions, where even the most liberal places have leaders that have refrained from calling this a genocide. People who feel committed to Jewish life have no choice but to create new Jewish communities.”
October 30, 2025 at 4:24 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Wow! Gina Birch of the Raincoats is the opening act for a bunch of Devendra Banhart's upcoming shows

www.instagram.com/p/DQcGkbVifjV/
November 8 - Utrecht, NL - Le Guess Who? November 10 - Paris, FR - Le Trianon * (low tickets) November 12 - London, UK - Union Chapel * (sold out) November 14 - Brussels, BE - Church of Our Lady of Laeken * (sold out) November 16 - Geneva, CH - Antigel Festival (evening with) November 17 - Bern, CH - Mühle Hunziken (evening with) November 20 - Valencia, SP - Teatro La Plazeta * (low tickets) November 22 - Madrid, SP - Teatro Lope de Vega (matinee!) November 24 - Braga, PT - Theatro Circo * (low tickets) November 25 - Lisbon, PT - Teatro Tivoli * *with Gina Birch!!!
October 30, 2025 at 4:16 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Yes A1, I suppose that is what the documentary focuses on.
Benito Mussolini: Italy's Greatest Evil : You can watch this title on Apple TV+ and Prime Video, with the title suggesting a focus on the negative aspects of his rule.
October 26, 2025 at 5:11 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
incredible still. (middle fingers obscured)
October 24, 2025 at 6:30 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
GM Daniel Naroditsky, suddenly dead at 29. Wonderful online teacher of chess. Paragon of fairness and goodwill in an increasingly harsh world.
October 21, 2025 at 1:56 AM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Looks promising!
October 18, 2025 at 2:30 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
This.

www.neverhungover.club/p/thanked-th...
At risk of stating the obvious, One Battle After Another is borderline inconceivable. It’s insane that Paul Thomas Anderson directed a big-budget comedy-action movie; it’s insane that said blockbuster is in any meaningful way indebted to a Thomas Pynchon novel; it’s insane that said movie’s plot revolves around a betrayal made by an obvious Brace Belden analogue; it’s insane that the Best Picture frontrunner depicts ICE raids and extrajudicial killings as the bored trappings of a horny and resentful Nazi cabal; it’s insane that, like, my dad is at the movies watching this right now. And so, while no, of course One Battle After Another is neither politically radical nor “revolutionary,” it is something far more compelling: a propulsive, expertly-crafted thriller about the pain and joy of loving people in a time where evil has conclusively won the day.
October 17, 2025 at 12:09 AM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Brightening reality with two recent photos of her majesty Poison Ivy, via 'Haunt of The Cramps' fb account. The

(The gentleman is American photographer and music video director Rocky Schenck.)

www.facebook.com/hauntofthecr...
October 14, 2025 at 11:43 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Respect.

yalereview.org/article/wild...
In September 1976, Peter Matthiessen took me aside at a family wedding in Seattle. He was forty-nine and at the acme of his ambidextrous literary powers. Far Tortuga, his finest novel, about a doomed voyage of turtle hunters, had been published the year before, and his next book, set in the Himalayas, would be The Snow Leopard, his finest work of nonfiction. I had mentioned to Peter that my wife and I were headed for Vancouver, B.C., on a short vacation. Looking at me meaningfully, my uncle said that while we were in Vancouver we should go to a private screening of a film that he would arrange for us. The brief footage, he explained, showed a sasquatch or what was believed to be a sasquatch walking in the woods of northern California. I was surprised, for I had no inkling of his interest in Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot: the large, hairy, hominoid creature reputed by some not very reputable people to lurk in the forests of the Northwest. Sensitive to scoffers, Peter had told almost no one about his fascination with Bigfoot. Indeed, he could have told me, but did not, that earlier in the summer, while driving in the backcountry investigating reports of Bigfoot, he’d seen a tall, bipedal figure run across the road and disappear into the trees.
October 13, 2025 at 3:41 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Ha! Matthiessen was a Bigfoot nut!?

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/b...
[Biographer Richardson] goes even deeper — this is one of the biography’s astonishments — into his obsession with Bigfoot. Matthiessen chased this mythical creature for most of his life, hoping to find him or her in the Everglades (the “Swamp Ape”), Nepal (the “Abominable Snowman”), on Indian reservations and elsewhere. He fell for Bigfoot frauds; he convinced himself he’d caught a glimpse of the creature; he posed for photographs in which he mimicked its arm-swinging walk in the short and grainy Patterson-Gimlin video, the Zapruder film of Bigfoot lore. His last wife, Marie, would cringe when he brought the subject up. William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, to which Matthiessen was a regular contributor, finally said to him, “If there are three things I do not believe in, and have no patience with, they are U.F.O.s, the Loch Ness monster and this ‘Bigfoot.’” Richardson is excellent and nonjudgmental on this material. He wonders if Matthiessen “was less interested in solving the mystery than he was in brushing up against mystery itself.”
October 13, 2025 at 1:32 PM
jaywbabcock.bsky.social
Proper track list
1. Spirit of God 01:14 2. Jesus Has To Be #1 02:47 3. I’m a Lord Jesus Man 02:57 4. ADHD Meds & Starbucks 01:36 5. Rock and Roll Was Stolen From God By Satan 01:14 6. Prepare for the Times of Famine 01:19 7. Television Soap Operas Battles 01:22 8. Do You Love Him? 01:09 9. Taking Up Serpents (and It’s Alright) 03:16 10. Maybe I Won’t Do What I Say I’d Do 00:22 11. Don’t Worry It’s Just a Snakebite (What Has Happened to This Generation?) 05:12 12. Just a Few More Miles (I’ve Got No Reason to Quit) 04:06
October 12, 2025 at 3:11 PM