Charles Mudede

Me, a scarf I lost last year, the autumn I always long for during summer, and Jose Rizal Bridge. By: Christine Marie Larsen. For: The Seattle Review of Books, which, sadly has been on an indefinite hiatus since 2019.

On the set with the subject of Robinson Devor's Suburban Fury, which premiers at New York Film Festival @thenyff . The woman who tried to kill Gerald Ford back in the day is looking at one of the film's writers.

If that's true, maybe ghosts know something the living don't. Yet imagine having all that time on your hands and being unable to turn the pages of a book.

The city as memory. Do not remove. Juniper Blessing.

I just found a letter I received in 2008 from a childhood friend: …If you are the Charles Mudede I think you are, we were childhood friends attending a small elementary school in Sharptown, MD. I remember your father, mother and sister. I also remember the sad day you and your family moved away to Zimbabwe in 1981. I watched from my parents’ home as the VW Bug your father drove carted all of you away. I was in tears because you were one of the best friends I had at the time. I think we were huge Star Wars fans at the time…

Tickets now open to all! ARCADE's first partnership event with Shibuya HiFi, hosted by Charles Mudede - tickets are very limited. Do not miss out on this one-time event! link in @arcade_nw bio

From a lecture I prepared for a conference (Democracy and AI) at Yale, December 2025. Scene from Eagle Eye (2008): A supercomputer, Autonomous Reconnaissance Interrogation Analysis, ARIA (which looks like the future of Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, TIDE), is processing the data and presenting interpretations—is it a terrorist camp or not? The supercomputer thinks it's not; the Secretary of Defense agrees with this assessment, but the macho president believes inaction is worse than action and orders a military attack. SecDef follows orders. Missiles are fired at the village. Everyone dies. The dark heart of the movie: It turns out that the president made a huge mistake: the missiles did not kill terrorists but civilians. ARIA, which has been programmed to place the safety of Americans above all other concerns, rightly decides that the president is a greater danger to national security than terrorists, and comes up with a plan to eliminate him and his cabinet and place the more cautious and rational Secretary of Defense in power. The key twist: The plot turns the rational computer, which has a female voice, into an evil computer. Why? The movie never offers an explanation why the computer is evil. It's not exactly HAL 9000; it never loses its mind or has a meltdown. Sure it's killing innocent people to reach its goal, but so did the president. And, more over, the computer's goal is to protect citizens; the president's is protect his career. The theory: Eagle Eye is one of the most intriguing films of the 00s, and @slavojzizeks analysis of it gets to its dark core—a core that's far darker than the one in The Dark Knight: Even if the president is wrong, even if he has blood on his hands, we must still support him and his dangerous war on terror. My conclusion: What's politically more powerful: AI that's wrong or AI that's right? Eagle Eye points to the former. This means it has a stronger political charge than its opposite, which in fact diminishes the political. This reading casts a grim shadow on the status and function of politics.

Suzanne Guerlac: "Echoing Bergson, Simmel affirms that... time becomes 'unreal' only when 'past, present, and future are separated with conceptual precision' by the grammatical tenses of language. In [Remeberance of Things Past], it is precisely by blurring the 'conceptual precision' of these limits that Proust gives us the time of life."

This summer I'm reading texts related to a new book, The Invention of Science, that confirmed my suspicion that the enlightenment was not captured by capitalism but made it possible. But all of these ideas are a mess right now. This summer I'm also leaving a program I began last summer, which involved reading anything understandable about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The result of that program? I can say this with some confidence and, sadly, with little clarification (that will happen in a future theoretical essay for @e_flux ): At the heart of the matter, to live, as we do, and surely anything else alive in the universe, is to live by feeding what will kill us all, entropy (the increasing disorder or, better put, the unstoppable growing uniformity of the universe). Our very existence, which is a form of borrowed being, dissipates the nonequilibrium, the exceptional order of the universe, the order the universe abhors. And there are no conventional physical laws broken by this bizarre arrangement: To be alive is also to be one who helps the universe and you/all become nothing.

NASA: "The panoramic view of the universe portrays the assembly of galaxies over 12 billions years of cosmic history, depicting that buildup over a wide range of wavelengths with unprecedented sharpness and depth. The farthest galaxies in the compiled image date from a time when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was less than 1 billion years old, while the closest galaxies emitted their starlight 12 billion years later."  I'm surprised that this kind of information doesn't make us implode, give up, stay in bed forever. So much time, so many stars, so much space. It reduces the hard reality that's in front of your nose to something that's far beneath the status of the faintest phantom. What keeps us going? Whiteheadian faith: "To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality..." A person who has this kind of faith, which is not religious faith, sees in all of this time, stuff, and space the depths of his/her being. What it is that Hubble is seeing is only who you are and will ever be.

The novel that most directly speaks to the critic, that defines, describes his/her function, mission, purpose, is Heart of Darkness. The narrative of Conrad’s short book is the narrative of any work of criticism. Marlow’s journey to the core of the colonial world has its double—its secret sharer—in the critic’s journey to the core of a work of art. That core is never apolitical. That core is always its truth. Upon reaching the point from which the work (a system of associations) radiates, glows, derives its power or aura, the critic must ask this: Does it liberate or does it enslave? It’s one or the other. At the core of the colonial world, Conrad found an oppressor, Kurtz; at the core of other works, the critic might find the opposite: a liberator, a Moses, a Christ, a Muhammad, a Marx, a Tubman.

Charles Tonderai Mudede #WhatIamReadingNow ____________________ 📚Read in full on our blog 🔗 Link in bio ____________________ Biography Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born American cultural critic, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is the Senior Staff Writer of the Stranger, a lecturer at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University, and has collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which ‘Police Beat’ and ‘Zoo’,premiered at Sundance, and one of which, ‘Zoo’, screened at Cannes, and the most recent of which, ‘Suburban Fury’, premiered at New York Film Festival. (‘Police Beat’ is now part of MOMA’s permanent collection.)Mudede, whose essays regularly appear in e-Flux and Tank Magazine, is also the director of ‘Thin Skin’ (2023). ____________________ Images courtesy the writer ID in ALT text Follow @mudede ____________________ What I am Reading Now… invites Black practitioners and practitioners of colour to share, with a preface, a selection of five readings that are shaping their current thinking, research and practice. #DJCADCommunity #DundeeUniCulture