A new project on the web, Two Bricks, is a sort of work-in-progress for sharing different people’s writings from across liberation movements.
There’s more to come, but for now you can read a letter of solidarity from Amu Gib to the Ulm 5. You can also read a short poem I wrote last October whilst waiting to go inside HMP Foston Hall for a prison visit.
I’m excited about this project. Go give it a follow wherever you plug yourself into the various circles of algorithmic hell.
One year ago today. It is strange to have said nothing at the time, on a site where almost every life event has been documented, in one way or another, for almost twenty years.
I kept a diary for the first four months or so, but every time I go back to it, I realise how raw everything was, and how vulnerable. Already, some of the first few thoughts written down by mid-afternoon on 26th August 2025 captured everything there was to say. It all started as it would tend to go on:
I am heartbroken, and for the first time in a very long time, I’m worried about what I might have to say, what I can say, what I should say. My immediate feeling, on hearing the news, is one of isolation. Perhaps it is a feeling also mirrored, or perhaps a camaraderie with their fellow action-takers is giving them strength – I hope the latter.
I wish I could be with them.
No longer willing to keep lying in bed refreshing my phone, I get up at midday and walk over to the local pub where I work a few nights a week, knowing my boss will be there. I want some company.
When I am halfway there, my phone rings, showing an unknown number. A man tells me he is calling from a custody suite in Staffordshire. He passes the phone over.
During the few short minutes we were allowed to speak, they say only that they were safe, and that they love everyone. All things considered, they sounded tired but in high spirits, like someone on TV who had just run a marathon, full of pride, providing a quick comment, but longing for rest.
They said they’d call whenever they were moved again, but I don’t know when that will be. I don’t know what they’ve been through or what they’re going through. But I know that I love them and I am proud of them.
Nothing else written down feels material. It is all raw scrambled eggs, sieved through the relentless onward march of time, grasping onto any passing sequence of words to see if they might bring about a lasting sense.
The sensation of looking back at the diaristic outpouring is like taking an old roll of film to the chemist, anticipating jogged memory, epiphany, revelation, clarity. Instead, you are presented with 35 sheets of light leaks and blur.
Back in December, there was a co-determination to say something. I went back to it today. It seems as true and worth saying now as it was then:
On November 28th, we were discussing Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, which they had read inside and felt deeply moved by. “We were never meant to survive”, Lorde writes, speaking — at least in my interpretation — to the softness that nourishes existence, set across from solid death.
What survives in the fossil record is that part of each being already tough. We dig up bones, shells, exoskeletons that are already hard in life and hardened further after it. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will be chicken bones and irradiated concrete. The soft parts disappear, whether in an instant or over time.
What enables our survival in the here and now is precisely all of that activity that will not be registered in the fossil record. What enables our survival will not itself survive. It’s how I feel looking at the archive of prison correspondence amassing around me. Our poems, letters, and drawings are inconsequential when viewed from the perspective of a much larger struggle. But aren’t they all the more beautiful for that? Isn’t this archive all the more precious in its fragility? Isn’t it a humble accrual of all that helps us to survive this?
It is precious, and in being so precious, we sometimes find ourselves wishing to share it. But we can’t. We cannot bring ourselves to share the softness of this experience. It is too precious to share, and to do so might even be cruel, since it has the potential to lead others astray from hard reality. There are no words for how inhumane prison is and how difficult life has become. There are no words to describe the efforts made to sustain some beauty within it all regardless. But more than that, there are no words because it is not yet history.
The announcement of a new Phoebe Bridgers album arrived with dread for me. I knew I’d end up listening to it, but I didn’t know whether I’d really want to go back to the place I associate with her sound.
I enjoyed Bridgers’ 2017 debut well enough when I eventually heard it, although its second half begins to slump. Punisher, by contrast, took a while to grow on me. It was widely heralded as the pandemic album, but to my virgin ear, it was a collection of quiet and unassuming pop-rock songs that seemed to float passively on the surface of a shared malaise.
In 2020, I initially thought “Motion Sickness“, from 2017’s Strangers in the Alps, fit the zeitgeist far better than anything from the new record. It was an inescapable earworm during that year’s September — my last month in lockdown London before I fled back north. I didn’t know why I was moving away, but it felt inevitable. That inevitability was nauseating. It meant leaving all of my friends behind, and I soon came to regret it, retreating into self and writing a book about it. Appropriately, my ex and I broke up on the night I returned from a writers’ retreat, completed manuscript in tow.
The last selfie taken in the lift of my Deptford apartment block, London, 2020.
Prior to that rupture, I wrote about the hold Bridgers’ music had on me in a moment of transition. Along with Microphones in 2020, it had an autofictional quality that reflected the concerns of the first book I’d published as well. (“Autofictional” in the true sense of using the personal reflexively to question its veracity.) Everything was knowingly ingrown and twisted, but so was the world during the pandemic.
I later read that Phil Elverum (of the Microphones) heard a lineage between Bridgers and his own style of songwriting. “Poetry works better when you are grounded”, he told Pitchfork, citing Adrian Orange and Bridgers as examples of songwriters who use lyrical detail well. Grounding oneself was precisely the challenge of the pandemic years, and so the Microphones and Bridgers were perfectly aligned, both to my ears and to the times.
The more I came to appreciate this quality, the more Punisher came into view. As I assume was the case for many, the more time I spent with it, the more I felt pulled in by its subtleties. It warranted a level of attention that the pandemic had painfully delivered to all things. To this day, I am left with countless memories, achingly vivid, of listening to the album whilst driving around the West Yorkshire countryside, still adhering to social distancing. That was the situation Punisher came to soundtrack perfectly: a distanced sociality, all romantic mishaps and the dread of known endings; planting one’s own feet firmly on the ground was both necessary and nauseating when everything else felt wildly up in the air.
Two years later, in 2022, I was one-year single and living in Newcastle. Two tickets bought for a Bridgers concert in Manchester for my ex and I almost a year earlier were used by myself and a new friend, Sarah. It was a heat-fucked haze of fainting students, and the sight of one young woman wafting herself cool with a copy of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red struck me as the sort of hyper-specific detail saved from cliché by its own nicheness; the sort of detail that could show up on a Bridgers-esque song one day.
And then it was over. A year later, I pivoted out of the melancholy and never looked back. Bridgers fell out of regular rotation as the world opened up again and I found the energy to re-engage with it.
Phoebe Bridgers in Manchester, 2022.
When new single “Lost Boys” dropped in July 2026, I felt indifferent towards it. Like “Motion Sickness” and “Kyoto” before it, the song felt like the classic Bridgers lead single — a ballad given the rock treatment to break up the subdued monotony of its neighbours. I felt indifferent towards it as more of the same.
But this past weekend, when the rest of the album dropped, I stuck it on my phone right before a four-hour trip to and then across London. I had it on repeat the whole way. Like Punisher before it, Lost Weekend rewards close attention. But rather than her grounded lyricism being the primary pull, here it is the production that is so gorgeously ornate and delicate. It adds a panoramic depth that complements her songwriting. (The muffled, diegetic sounds of a New Years’ Eve party on “The Governor’s Waltz” are a highlight, for example: a detail once again jarring enough to add depth rather than strafe into cliché as it probably should.)
Initially resistant to the pre-release hype of the music press, it is hard to deny it. But it has surprised me nonetheless. With reluctant anticipation, I did not expect a new Phoebe Bridgers album to fit well into the present. At least for me, feeling that her music was fatally tied to the pandemic, the world is sp clearly different to the languor of six years ago. It is no longer Punisher‘s moment. As a result, it is not a record I still listen to. It remains stuck in the moment of its release. Thankfully, Bridgers is not in her Punisher moment any longer either.
Lost Weekend, then, resonates far more than expected. Or perhaps not. I used to think that my personal affinity with Bridgers’ music was largely an age thing — she is just two years younger than me. That’s not to say this proximity in age offers any more meaningful insight into her approach, but I do recognise Bridgers as someone of my own generation. In that, her development resonates profoundly. The “voice of generation” label is apt, and on Lost Weekend, she sings like the archetypical grief-riddled thirty-something.
But that grief — the defining emotion of her back catalogue — also comes into sharper focus here. She continues to decorate this universal emotion with personal details, but there is even more weight here. Previous reckonings — whether with her past naivety in relationships with older men (“Motion Sickness”), attending the funerals of acquaintances (“Funeral“), or random acts of violence viewed at a distance (“Halloween“) — captured that stomach-churning feeling of not fully understanding the world one is in. There is a morbid curiosity attached to this lack of understanding, of course, with Punisher‘s album cover depicting the alienating wonder of looking up at the heavens as an out-grown kid gone astray whilst trick-or-treating. It makes her earlier songs wonderfully adolescent. But they also carry the added weight of someone in their late 20s; not quite a teenager anymore, but no less shellshocked by early adulthood.
Lost Weekend hits different. It is record by someone older, more grounded, more discerning, but who has also seen a lot more of this nonsensical world. Whereas previously her songwriting wandered naturally into melodramatic fiction, now the details slip into a more affectionate hyperbole. For example, “Bobby” — a soaring love song, presumably written for partner Bo Burnham — bristles with private humour when she sings: “And if you didn’t like either one of my friends / I’d kill them, I’d kill them”.
These details are catnip to showbiz gossip columns, but they are integral for the moments of respite offered across Lost Weekend. Although her grief is still palpable when Bridgers sings about her dead father, and lingers when she slides into a more reflective resolve in referring to her cancelled engagement to Paul Mescal, what is most refreshing are those moments where Bridgers plants her feet more firmly in the present and recognises that she is happy.
These panoramic qualities of Lost Weekend — the full scope of human feeling is packed into its 50-minute length — are all wholly intentional in this regard; the track “Panorama” makes that clear enough. But the ways in which she delivers this is genuinely awe-inspiring. The album is undoubtedly her most “cohesive”, as many reviewers have been keen to note, but it is far from linear. Its fugue-like meandering through memories and emotional states has a kaleidoscopic quality I would more readily associate with a Virginia Woolf novel. The peaks and troughs are no longer simply a way to break the potential monotony of her persistently wistful tendencies; they are waves that feel more naturally tidal. “Water’s gonna flow in either way.“
I feel gratitude. A new Bridgers album resonating as deeply as it has with many was not on my cards for 2026. We have been living through a period of pop introspection that feels caged by its own interiority. I had suspected that her latest offering would compound a misery I’d much rather escape from. But Bridgers has instead shown that it is still possible to write a blockbusting record in 2026 that offers a panoramic view of an artist’s emotional landscape. Many might make an similar attempt, but given all there is to feel in the present, the results would most likely be a soup. If Lost Weekend feels no less soupy at times, it’s hard to deny its deliciousness.
Lost Weekend also arrived at another apt moment for me personally — again, the last thing I expected. I have returned to an old routine of travelling down to London every two weeks, enjoying short weekends away rather than living out of a suitcase as I have for much of the last year. It is jarring to return to a older, more relaxed but still familiar routine whilst nothing is or ever will be the same again. “The way it used to be is not the way that it is.” But there is still joy to be found in that as well. Sometimes, interruptions can be welcomed.
This weekend’s plans were scuppered by ill-health, and so the lost weekend was spent entwined in bed or on a sofa watching TV for hours on end. It was needed, and Bridgers’ panorama was projected over everything, circling my inner ear. It lent an unsuspecting clarity to everything.
The present is no less aflame with stress and grief, and the drought bedraggling the south of England compounds the sense of futility are exhausts all attempts at fighting fires. But it is heartening to ground oneself amidst all of it and land on that deceptively simple acknowledgement: despite it all, I’m happy.
That is not a reckoning I expected Bridgers’ typical melancholy to soundtrack. Nevertheless, it does so perfectly.
Crossing London by train, Amu’s parents and I chat merrily on the way to the quiet commuter town of Ashford.
The summer heatwave has not yet abated. Everywhere, grass has browned due to a “flash drought”. I am looking down at the dust kicked up by my feet, half wanting to apologise to the grass that’s been through enough, when Amu’s Mum points out the sign that reads HMP / YOI Bronzefield. We are already here.
Turning a corner, I recognise Bronzefield immediately from photographs and videos of protests during the hunger strike. My first thought was “Foucault was right” — a constant internal mantra when I was a frequent visitor to HMP Foston Hall. I have not had that thought in a while. All prisons are amorphous institutions – each one is different, with its own nuances, rules and regulations; each also echoes every other institution you can think of.
Bronzefield is “modern”, at least to my eyes — deceptively so. It reminds me of a library, a port, a hospital. It has all the generic fixtures of some sort of government building or public service. The irony, of course, is that Bronzefield is run by Sodexo, a private company, and has an entirely anti-social function. Like all prisons, it is an abomination.
For the next few hours, I will not be able to stop myself from comparing HMP Bronzefield to HMP Foston Hall. I became so familiar with the latter, visiting once a week (sometimes more) over a six-month period. That experience changed something within me drastically. I became accustomed to it, and then suddenly, I didn’t have to be there anymore.
The last time we were there was 27th February 2026. A bail hearing was held at the Old Bailey, throughout which I held my breath. When the judge proclaimed that bail was to be granted to the Moog 4, Nic – one of the four’s prison support buddies – and I went directly to Foston Hall, jumping on the first train to Derby from King’s Cross. We arrived in the evening – the first time I had been outside the prison after sunset – and stood in the rain for two hours, waiting for their release.
I recall this anecdote for Amu’s parents as we wait to enter the visit hall. The staff at the front desk are all smiles and far more personable than their northern counterparts. But we all know how much this system plays with the emotions of those doing whatever they can to support the incarcerated. I tell them about how the prison kept phoning me on that wet February night, repeatedly seeking confirmation that I was there to pick up Juno. Each time, they would offer to open up the family centre, so we weren’t stood out in the rain. They never did. After two hours, I was soaked through. It felt like one final ‘fuck you’, one final gaslight lit.
At Bronzefield, everything feels so much more relaxed. The waiting area is like that of a modern hospital (compared to Foston’s decrepit, underfunded atmosphere). But the sullen faces of other visitors are a familiar sight. The searches are also nowhere near as invasive as I was once used to, and the staff seem far less high on their own power. My photograph and finger prints are taken on entry, and perhaps it is for that reason that they pat everyone down more lightly, rather than stopping just shy of a cavity search, as they did in Derbyshire.
Bronzefield’s visit hall is enormous, like a sports hall at an inner-city school. The ceiling is high, the chairs are comfortable, the tables large. We are spaced out from other prisoners’ friends and families. Screws are not breathing down our necks. The staff are not heavily uniformed, with keys and handcuffs clattering on their waistbands. There is a café, which sells real food and serves real coffee. I can pay for it with a bank card, instead of a bag of loose pound coins.
There are first-timers, like myself, who muddle up the protocol. I arrive into the hall roughly five minutes after Amu’s parents. I suddenly realise that they don’t know what I look like. We’ve never met in person before and have only spoken a few times on the phone.
Clearly, I don’t look like many of the other visitors. Amu points at me immediately from 25 metres away and grins from ear to ear. When I arrive at their table, they give me a big hug, and flatter me: “I only realised before you arrived that I didn’t know what you looked like. I just said to myself I’ll look out for the person who looks really cool.”
It is an exchange that reminds me of the first time meeting Alan in Foston Hall’s pre-visit holding pen. Alan with the cool clothes and the amazing hair dyed three or four different colours. I think Alan was the first person to say hello that day – I felt shy – but we laughed at having already clocked each other with a look that said: “Eccentrically dressed queer person? You must be here to visit a direct actionist…”
The two-hour visit flies by, as they often do, with all four of us talking politics like we’re sitting in a pub on a Saturday afternoon. It’s a delightful visit, but I am caught off guard by how deflated I feel when it is over. Whereas visitors were the first to leave at Foston Hall, it is the prisoners who stand up first at Bronzefield. Amu is nonchalant about it all. We’re just friends, and new friends at that, but I feel an urge to linger and drag out the goodbye.
A range of emotions surge up in me like bile. It’s like there’s a wooden box in my stomach, which I haven’t opened in a while, and when the door opens to let the prisoners back out of the visit hall, the draught blows off a layer of dust and reminds me that the box is there.
My body had forgotten what it is like to have the journey in and out of prison be a part of its routine. Amu is not Juno, but my body does not know how else to respond. There was no hard goodbye, no lingering embrace, no stolen kisses, no tears, no heartfelt reassurances, no repeated I-love-yous. The only thing that remains the same is the deeply held wish that these rotten institutions would crumble. I wish they would free them all.
It is only on leaving Bronzefield that it really hits me. We talk about the prison system for some of the walk back to the train station. Prisons are not places that hold deviants; they are themselves deviant. We talk about the lack of any clarity on the rules, the arbitrary nature of its regulations, the way that you never end up talking to a staff member with any of the responsibility or authority you expect. Everything is always someone else’s job. Every problem is someone else’s problem.
I remember Deleuze’s essay on societies of control. Yes, Foucault was right, he says. But not only do enclosures echo each other’s modes of operation, they also echo each other’s crises:
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure — prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors — scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.
In light of these new forces, disciplinary structures have given way to more controlling structures. If Foucault was right about how all enclosures echo each other, then Deleuze was right when he emphasised that modern society is less about discipline than it is about control. After all, if British prisons were disciplinary institutions, you would expect the rules and regulations to be concrete and hard, demanding obedience. On the contrary, no one knows the rules, no one will tell you the rules, and the rules are always subject to change. That is control.
William S. Burroughs’ “The Limits of Control” is the key to Deleuze’s argument. I think about it often as well:
I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder — you use it … All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations.
When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will, motivation and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally.
It is telling that England so often remains the prime example for writers concerned with these sorts of contradiction, as the laboratory for imperialist control:
All modern control systems are riddled with contradictions. Look at England. “Never go too far in any direction” is the basic rule on which England is built, and there is some wisdom in that. However, avoiding one impasse they step into another. Anything that is not going forward is on the way out. Well, nothing lasts forever. Time is what which ends, and control needs time. England is simply stalling for time as it slowly founders.
The same contradictions of control, if unfettered, give rise to fascism always. Fascism, Burroughs notes, is similarly a kind of total control that may well undo itself, but also capitalism, which is more generally a measured system of control. “Force, once brought in, subverts the power of money”, he writes. Capitalism is expansionist, and when it can expand no longer in terms of its ideological advance, it turns to militaristic expansion and the cycle of warring over territories, where brinkmanship — another kind of controlling gesture — gives only the illusion of expansion. One step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back…
Burroughs argues that “no modern industrialized country has ever gone fascist without a program of military expansion. There is no longer any place to expand to — after hundreds of years, colonialism is a thing of the past.” This is only half true. The reality of colonialism’s end is felt in all attempts to newly colonise space as the final frontier. Here on earth, colonialism continues to flirt with its own impasses when concerned with the brinkmanship of markets. New technologies arise, which demand new space and new resources to be developed. Old territories are emptied and then reoccupied. Lines shift across maps in accordance with new demands.
Israel is an exception, perhaps — the final, truly colonial endeavour. Those who oppose it or expose it find themselves in control’s rotten core. It is not for nothing that these enclaves of apartheid and militarism are so often referred to as “laboratories”; techno-colonialism prefers to conduct its experiments out of sight, in far-flung places that lack scrutiny, covered over by layers of neoliberal propaganda. Soon enough, their new methods and technologies of control return to us. Those who would dare draw the public’s attention to this secretive system are tellingly locked away out of sight for years.
Burroughs concludes:
I don’t mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary. A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course. It is encouraging that some behaviour modification projects have been exposed and halted, and certainly such exposure and publicity should continue. In fact, I submit that we have a right to insist that all scientific research be subject to public scrutiny, and that there should be no such thing as “top-secret” research.
By the time we reach the station, we have all descended into silence. I reflect on how difficult it has been to regain control of my own life, not knowing what to do with it now that the pressures of supporting someone incarcerated are less demanding. But there are, of course, many others who need support — not only prisoners, but also those who continue to find themselves on the front lines of prison support.
So much has changed for us, although it is hard to see that change sometimes. This time next month, it will be one year since Juno was first arrested. That means it will have been six months since they were bailed. The time spent outside has passed far quicker than the time inside. Those first six months lasted forever. The six months after have been a blur.
For all that has changed, I realise that I still have so many feelings left unresolved. Proximity to prison is a trauma. It is very different to the experience of being inside. In fact, not knowing what the world is like on the other side of the heavy locked doors is part of the ordeal. I am not yet over it. The system’s disarray infects each person who comes into contact with it. On leaving Bronzefield, I realise just how disarrayed I remain.
Amu Gib is an amazing writer and thinker. Their incarceration has not stopped them from working. Hidden out of sight, they undertake their own research projects, exploring what they call a “material literacy”. They write in a manner that is post-structuralist without the explicitly philosophical baggage. They understand how structures intersect, and how objects are promiscuous. Indeed, matter becomes a vehicle for linking life- and death-machines, blurring all lines between nature and culture.
Amu is chlorophyll. “To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others”, Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus. Amu slides across processes of production and sifts through what is lifeforce and deathforce. Mechanisms of control and domination are made more visible in the process of writing photosynthetically.
Amu and I recently started working together on their materialist writings. I have been transcribing and editing some of what they write, in order to find a home for it on the outside. The first text we worked on has been published by the Landworkers’ Alliance. You can read it here.
