16 · Recommendations
Pointers, not endorsements. Things that have done useful work on the operator’s thinking, or made the surrounding world tolerable to spend time in, or refused to flatter their audience. No affiliate links, no paid placements, no rankings. Inclusion here is not a co-signature of everything the named party has ever said or done; it is a flag that something specific in their work warrants finding. The lead anchor below is Have a Nice Life’s There is No Food; the rest follows.
01 · Media
Audio, music, podcasts, longform broadcast — the ear-only and the slow-watch.
Featured · Have a Nice Life
The unofficial video’s pacing is the right vessel for the track — long enough to let the song get under, slow enough to refuse spectacle. Click to open the in-page theater player; or watch on YouTube directly.
Iannis Xenakis — composer
Architect-trained Greek-French composer; stochastic methods, granular textures, mathematical forms applied to orchestral and electroacoustic work. Album: [album link]. The piece “Éveryali” in particular: [track].
Luigi Nono — composer
Italian post-serialist; political conscience embedded in late-modernist procedure. [listen].
Krzysztof Penderecki — 1972
Cluster-mass dissonance applied to the cello’s upper register; sustained sections where the instrument becomes indistinguishable from the surrounding texture. [listen]
Jóhann Jóhannsson — 2016
Late-career chamber-electronic record from the Icelandic composer; “Pile of Dust” in particular for what it does with the descending-line motif over the closing minutes. [listen]
William Basinski — 1980s/2001+
Tape-loop decay studies. “Cascade” and the related “Please This Shit Has Got to Stop”; the loops corrode in real time while looping, and the corruption is the composition. [listen]
Laurel Halo — 2023
Ambient-jazz/chamber crossover; slow drifts that refuse to resolve in either direction. [listen]
Stars of the Lid — drone
Slow-cycling string drone; the piece does the opposite of build, in roughly nine minutes of patient subsidence. [listen]
Angel Olsen — 2014
From Burn Your Fire for No Witness. Spoken-sung over circular guitar; the song is structurally a lullaby that refuses to comfort the listener it has put to sleep. [listen]
Swans — 1991 / 1996
“Love Will Save You” from White Light from the Mouth of Infinity — the rare Swans track where the title is the argument. And the album Kill the Child: [full album].
Giles Corey — 2011
Dan Barrett (Have a Nice Life) solo project. The self-titled album — particularly “No One Is Ever Going to Want Me” and “Haunting Presence” — is the most unguarded thing in the operator’s rotation. [listen]
Navicon Torture Technologies — power electronics
Leo Sabatto’s vehicle; PE/death-industrial with a vocabulary closer to clinical despair than to scene-aggression. [listen].
Korn — 1996
From Korn. The track most often skipped, for good reason; whether or not the band intended it as confession is beside the point of what it does to the album’s structure as a whole. [listen]
Otep — 2002
From Sevas Tra. Nu-metal era, but the title-track-class metaphor here lands harder than most of the genre’s output of that decade. [listen]
Grouper — 2008
From Liz Harris’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. Tape-saturated drone-folk in muted vocal-and-guitar register; the album foregrounds the medium’s decay as part of the song’s structure. [listen]
02 · Film
Long-form moving image that refuses the consolation arc.
Pier Paolo Pasolini — 1975
Pasolini’s late-career indictment of fascism rendered through Sade’s catalogue of cruelty. Frequently cited as “extreme” by people who have not actually watched it; its discipline is in how patient and bureaucratic the cruelty is, not in spectacle. [where to watch]
Gaspar Noé — 2002
Reverse-chronological assault. The structure makes the viewer carry the weight of violence before being given the context that might soften it, which is the point: in time-forward life there is no softening to come either. [where to watch]
Elem Klimov — 1985
What war does to a boy’s face, frame by frame, over two hours. There is no anti-war film that does not somehow make war look interesting; this one comes closer than any other to refusing the trade. [where to watch]
E. Elias Merhige — 1989
Silent, contrast-shredded, filmed on stock cycled through multiple printing passes until the grain itself becomes the subject. A creation myth with no consoling premise. [watch]
Béla Tarr — 1994
7-hour-19-minute black-and-white epic adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel; long tracking shots, peasant-village setting, slow-time as form. [where to watch]
03 · Books
Long-form text that did work on the operator’s thinking. Some via agreement, some via productive disagreement.
Marquis de Sade — 1791
The systematic catalogue of suffering that virtue cannot rescue itself from in a hostile world. Read for the structural argument, not the spectacle: every other moral system Justine encounters is a transactional fraud that requires her ruin to remain coherent. [buy]
Friedrich Nietzsche — 1886
The polemic against the moralists who never had to defend their priors. Useful for the same reason an opposing brief is useful: it makes you say out loud what you actually believe rather than what your tradition says you believe. [buy]
Charles Baudelaire — 1857
The forerunner that refused the consolation arc a century before refusal became a literary genre. Read in any decent translation; the prosody loses something but the structure survives. [buy]
Octave Mirbeau — 1899
Colonial-bourgeois cruelty rendered with botanical patience. Mirbeau understood, before most of his contemporaries, that the aesthetic refinement of cruelty is not an alternative to violence but its sublimation into a discipline. [buy]
Plato — ~399 BCE
Four short dialogues that compress what happens when the legal-political machine notices someone asking the wrong question loudly enough. The argument from the Apology for the examined life carries; the resignation in Crito and Phaedo is the harder read. [buy]
E.M. Cioran — 1934
Early Cioran — the lyrical insomniac phase before the aphorism set in. Read this if you find late-Cioran’s polish too studied; the early book still has the raw insomnia of someone who had not yet figured out how to make pessimism elegant. [buy]
Thomas Ligotti — 2010
The closest argued case for antinatalism made in horror-philosophical register. Ligotti is at his strongest where he is least metaphysical — the chapters on consciousness as a malfunction, and on the comedy of acting normally, do load-bearing work. [buy]
04 · Sites
Web destinations worth keeping in a bookmark folder. Often run by one person; rarely SEO-optimised; never advertising-dependent.
Power electronics / label
Annihilvs Power Electronics’ archive and label catalogue. Self-published, self-distributed, no mediation. wehavealwaysbeenhere.com.
Band / direct catalogue
MSW from the band Hell (Salem, Oregon) selling direct. Bandcamp/big-cartel storefront rather than label-mediated. loweryourhead.bigcartel.com.
Independent label
Have a Nice Life’s home label. Tagline “No Fun. Not Ever. Since 2005.” survives every redesign and stays accurate. enemieslist.net.
05 · Groups
Organizations and resources operating in adjacent space. Linked but not affiliated.
Antinatalist advocacy
Nonprofit advancing antinatalist philosophy through outreach and education.
Antinatalist organization
Antinatalist organization centered on public outreach and visible street action.
Web resource
Independent web hub collecting anti-procreation arguments and resources.
Reference manual
Reference manual on end-of-life options compiled by Philip Nitschke and Fiona Stewart.
Advocacy organization
Voluntary euthanasia advocacy organization founded by Philip Nitschke.
Child-safety nonprofit
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children — clearinghouse for cases involving missing or exploited minors in the United States.
Reproductive healthcare
Reproductive healthcare and sexual-health education organization operating across the United States.
Think tank
Effective-altruism-aligned think tank focused on animal welfare and policy questions arising from sentience.
06 · Work
Individual essays, papers, posts, lectures — the unit of recommendation here is the piece, not the body of work.
Lior Sukenick — bioethics paper
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. Argues for ethical and legal frameworks around end-of-sentience decisions; tracks how the sentience criterion reshapes the existing end-of-life debate.
Paper
Placeholder.
07 · Art
Visual work — painting, photography, sculpture, mixed — outside the moving-image bracket.
Gustave Doré — 1861–1868
Wood engravings, originally published in three volumes (Inferno 1861, Purgatorio + Paradiso 1868). Doré’s cross-hatched plates have shaped the visual imagination of Dante’s afterlife more than any single text-edition; widely reused and rarely surpassed.
Joel-Peter Witkin — 1976
Gelatin silver print. Early work in Witkin’s hooded-figure register, before the later baroque tableaus.
Cindy Sherman — 1977
Gelatin silver print from the 70-image Untitled Film Stills series (1977–1980); Sherman as housewife paused at the kitchen sink, glance over shoulder. MoMA acquired the full series in 1995.
Cindy Sherman — 1977
Gelatin silver print from the same series; Sherman as pin-up archetype reclining, towel and scarf, mid-narrative cue.
Cindy Sherman — 1979
Gelatin silver print, later in the same series; bathroom interior, towel-draped figure, tiled wall.
Andres Serrano — 1984
Cibachrome print, ~70 × 100 cm. Collaboration with Leon Golub (cardinal in red robes alongside a bound, blood-marked figure); predates Serrano’s Immersions series and Piss Christ (1987).
Joel-Peter Witkin — 1986
Toned gelatin silver print, ~37 cm square. Severed arms cradling a skull on a tray; collected at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Joel-Peter Witkin — 2007
Toned gelatin silver print. New Mexico tableau in Witkin’s late register; the retablo (Spanish devotional panel) tradition refracted through his constructed-photography vocabulary.
Theologian (Lee Bartow) — 2010, album cover
Cover artwork for the first Theologian full-length (Crucial Blast, 2010), Bartow’s continuation of his Navicon Torture Technologies project; geometric octagon framing a mandala-veiled figure.
Joel-Peter Witkin — 2017
Toned gelatin silver print; female-portrait variant referencing the Cocteau/Beauty-and-Beast figure, in Witkin’s late register.
Sissisters (Pat Murch) — cassette, album cover
Cover artwork for a harsh-noise cassette release on Tobira Records; Pat Murch’s long-running Sissisters project in the LA noise scene.