Astra Taylor | |
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 Taylor in 2014 | |
| Born | September 30, 1979 |
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| Relatives | Sunaura Taylor (sister) |
Astra Taylor (born September 30, 1979) [1] is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. She is a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work on challenging predatory practices around debt. [2]
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia, [3] and was unschooled until age 13 when she enrolled in ninth grade. [4] At 16 she abandoned high school to attend classes at the University of Georgia; at the university she studied Deleuze and Guattari under Ronald L. Bogue. [5] She has described herself as a "teenage Deleuzian." [6]
Taylor enrolled at Brown University, where she attended classes for a year before dropping out. Reflecting on her decision to leave, Taylor stated "Why had I felt compelled to enroll in an Ivy League school, to excel by the standards of conventional education and choose a 'difficult' major, instead of making my own way? What was I afraid of?" [7] Taylor completed a Master of Arts in liberal studies at The New School, though stated that she ultimately "wearied" of academia. [8]
Taylor has taught sociology at the University of Georgia and SUNY New Paltz. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, including Dissent, [9] n+1, [10] Adbusters, [11] The Baffler, [12] The Nation, [13] Salon, [14] and The London Review of Books. [15]
Taylor is the sister of painter and disability activist Sunny Taylor, [16] and is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. [17] She joined Neutral Milk Hotel onstage for a number of shows in 2013 and 2014, playing guitar and accordion. [18] She is a vegan. [19] She lives in New York. [20]
Her book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction at the 2024 Governor General's Awards. [21]
Taylor was active in the Occupy movement and was the co-editor of Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette with Sarah Leonard of Dissent magazine and Keith Gessen of n+1. [22] The broadsheet covered Occupy Wall Street in five issues over the course of the first year of the occupation and was later anthologized by Verso Books. [23] Taylor is a co-founder of Debt Collective, a debtors' union fighting to cancel debts. [24] [25]
Taylor has resisted the label "activist" in her writing [26] and advocates organized movement building, which she says is a necessary supplement to activism which makes it more durable and effective.
She is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America [27] and on the Progressive International council. [28]
Taylor occasionally performs with her husband's band, Neutral Milk Hotel.
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)"The People's Platform" should be taken as a challenge by the new media that have long claimed to be improving on the old order. Can they prove they are capable of supporting a sustainable cultural ecosystem, in a way that goes beyond just hosting parties at the Sundance Film Festival?
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The Elephant 6 Recording Company is a loosely defined musical collective from the United States. Notable bands associated with the collective include The Apples in Stereo, Beulah, Circulatory System, Elf Power, The Minders, Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal, and The Olivia Tremor Control. Although bands in Elephant 6 explore many different genres, they have a shared interest in psychedelic pop of the 1960s, with particular influence from bands such as the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Zombies. Their music sometimes features intentionally low fidelity production and experimental recording techniques.
The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."
Neutral Milk Hotel was an American band formed in 1989 by musician Jeff Mangum in Ruston, Louisiana. They were active until 1998, and then from 2013 to 2015. The band's music featured a deliberately low-quality sound, influenced by indie rock and psychedelic folk. Mangum wrote surreal and opaque lyrics that covered a wide range of topics, including love, spirituality, nostalgia, sex, and loneliness. He and the other band members played a variety of instruments, including non-traditional instruments like the singing saw and uilleann pipes.
Jeffrey Nye Mangum is an American singer, songwriter, and musician who gained prominence as the founder, songwriter, vocalist and guitarist of Neutral Milk Hotel, as well for his co-founding of The Elephant 6 Recording Company. Mangum is characterized for his complex, lyrically dense songwriting, exemplified on the critically lauded album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, as well as for his public image as a recluse associated with his extended periods of musical inactivity and minimal press interaction. An article published in Slate described Mangum as the "Salinger of Indie Rock." In 2023, Jeff Mangum received a Grammy award nomination for "Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package".
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is the second and final studio album by the American band Neutral Milk Hotel, released on February 10, 1998, by Merge Records. The album is predominantly indie rock and psychedelic folk and is characterized by an intentionally low-quality sound. Traditional indie rock instruments like the guitar and drums are paired with less conventional instruments like the singing saw and uilleann pipes. The lyrics are surrealistic and opaque, exploring themes that range from nostalgia to love. An important influence for the album was The Diary of a Young Girl, a book of writings from the diary of Anne Frank.
On Avery Island is the debut studio album by American rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, released on March 26, 1996, by Merge Records. At the time, Neutral Milk Hotel was a solo project of American musician Jeff Mangum, who recorded the album with producer Robert Schneider from February to May 1995. On Avery Island is an indie rock and psychedelic folk album, with a lo-fi sound.
Kalle Lasn is an Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor, and activist. Near the end of World War II, his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent some time in a German refugee camp. At age seven he was resettled in Australia with his family, where he grew up and remained until the late 1960s, attending school in Canberra. In the late 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Over the course of twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. He currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Laura Carter is a multi-instrumentalist musician from Athens, Georgia. She is able to play the clarinet, keyboard, percussion, violin, guitar, drums, french horn, and Zanzithophone.
n+1 is a New York–based American literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, essays, art, poetry, book reviews, and short fiction. It is published in print three times annually with regular articles being published online. Each print issue averages around 200 pages in length.
Matana Roberts is an American sound experimentalist, visual artist, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, composer and improviser based in New York City. They have previously been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and a member of the B.R.C. Black Rock Coalition.
"Holland, 1945" is a song by American indie rock group Neutral Milk Hotel. It was released as the only single from the band's second and final studio album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in October 1998. "Holland, 1945" is one of the album's louder, more upbeat songs, featuring overdriven and distorted guitars. The song also showcases fuzz noise on all of the instruments, a quality created by producer Robert Schneider.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw is an American folk duo from Albuquerque, New Mexico, currently signed to L.M. Duplication. The band consists of accordionist Jeremy Barnes, who was previously the drummer for Neutral Milk Hotel and Bablicon, and violinist Heather Trost. The music is inspired by Eastern European, Turkish and Balkan traditions, and is mostly instrumental. They have released six albums and have toured internationally. The first four albums and an EP were released on The Leaf Label and afterwards on their own label L. M. Duplication.
Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Previously, she was Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
The discography of Neutral Milk Hotel, a Ruston, Louisiana-based indie rock group, consists of two studio albums, two singles, two extended plays, two compilation albums, and three demos.
This is a list of writings published by the American author Noam Chomsky.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a left-wing populist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial District, and lasted for fifty-nine days—from September 17 to November 15, 2011.
The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement is anthropologist David Graeber's 2013 book-length, inside account of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Graeber evaluates the beginning of the movement, the source of its efficacy, and the reason for its eventual demise. Interspersed is a history of democracy, both direct and indirect, throughout many different times and places. In contrast to many other evaluations of OWS Graeber takes a distinctly positive tone, advocating both for the value of OWS and its methods of Direct democracy. The book was published by Spiegel & Grau.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation. She is a co-publisher of Hammer & Hope, an online magazine that began in 2023.
David Graeber was an American anthropologist and social theorist. Unless otherwise noted, all works are authored solely by David Graeber.
