Teaching Heidegger and Playing Punk Shows
I’ve been teaching an intense summer course on Heidegger’s Being and Time at UC Berkeley. We are now half way through the 6-week term. I have been recording the lectures, and will share them when I get the chance to edit and prepare the files. Along the way, I need to teach myself the software for doing so. Being a beginner makes the work of editing video rather painstaking, error-prone, and slow, but such is the phenomenology of skill acquisition!
As practice, I made this 12m video. It is an overview of Heidegger’s way of doing ontology (studying being) by way of phenomenology (studying the experience of being). Check it out and let me know what you think by leaving a comment on the YouTube page! Share it with a friend if you find it useful! Also, please subscribe to my channel while you are there. I’ll be adding more videos to it as the future arrives.
Teaching Being and Time to passionate first-time readers at the very university where I first read and fell in love with the text myself is a delightful ordeal. The preparation and delivery of the course is also heartily contributing to my philosophical reservoirs of material for my ongoing Heidegger series in these pages.
Here are a few other photos of some of class time chalkboard scribblings:
Punk and Nihilism
Beyond teaching Heidegger, I’ve been busy practicing and performing with two of the punk bands I play in, REALISTIC and VEXXYL.
For me, punk is a ragged, ear-splitting expression of philosophical ideas I find in Heidegger and (especially later Heidegger’s philosophy of technology and nihilism) and Nietzsche. Punk is a response to and a manifestation of the nihilism of our technological age. The following are a few brief tidbits regurgitated from a larger project on “Punk and Nihilism” I’ve been working on in fits and starts over the past couple of years.
Technological nihilism is the historical condition where the drive to optimize, predict, and control becomes the dominant way of relating to the world, each other, and ourselves, treating questions of meaning, purpose, as just further technical issues to be solved through greater efficiency, optimization, or acquisition.
But people cannot tend to what matters while trying to optimize and control it, and the punks certainly know that.
Punks find joy in self-organized activities that mainstream commonsense finds useless, playing unlistenable music in a sweaty little rooms or dingy, jagged backyards with friends. Intense involvement in their punk scene activities gives punks a basic stand and orientation in life. They have a sense of direction, a sense of what makes life worth living, a connection to something bigger than themselves, a furtive touch of the infinite.
Within the punk scene, we create fragile, fraught bubbles of belonging, spaces where meaning, absurdity, outrage, joy, creativity, and community can momentarily flourish despite the tragic drift of the broader world. Punk often functions as a quasi-religious gathering, offering temporary transcendence and existential redemption from the tragedy, drudgery, and injustice of everyday life.
At the same time, punks continually fret about what punk even is in the first place. What really counts as punk? Who counts as punk? What are we even doing? To be a punk, is for punk to be an issue for you.
Yes, punk is also shot through with factions, occasional violence, damaged people and other seedlings of its own ongoing ruin. It is shaped by the "three Ruinous Rs": Resentment, Resignation, and Righteousness. The 3Rs can trap punk’s participants in their forms of hopeless, nihilistic withdrawal.
Even so, punk is a clearing in which to experience and rejoice in life’s beautiful and plentiful contradictions. Rather than simply being a rebellious youth culture, punk also functions as a repository of marginal practices and “disclosive skills” (skills for building and sustaining local worlds) that resist the dominant logic of optimization and technological solutionism pervading our culture while harboring possibilities of other ways of being and caring.
REALISTIC just played our 5th show. It was a ridiculously fun, energetic, and inspiring outdoor backyard show at a place called Oakland Secret, packed with young punks. We played with four other bands, including local legends, FALSE FLAG, who came to rightful local notoriety a couple years ago after pulling off a show on a BART train, and have continued to play prolifically and build up a scene of younger bands and punks in San Francisco.
Here is a video of the full REALISTIC set on July 20, 2025:
My newest band, VEXXYL just played our first show this last weekend at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland. We opened the triumphant reunion show for a celebrated Oakland punk band of the mid-00s, STORMCROW (with whom we share a guitar player, the ripping Nathan Smith), and the place was already packed with friends and other eager crust punk enthusiasts.
My friend Jimmy runs an exciting and multi-faceted local label called Transylvanian Recordings. One the awesome services he provides for our scene is good-quality snippets and video recordings of bands he sees and supports (check out his YouTube channel!). Here is one full song he captured of the VEXXYL set:
My Being and Time course goes for another intense 3-weeks, during which my posts here will likely continue to be more sparse than usual. I will share more videos of my lectures as I get them prepared, and will be sharing an extended companion piece to my recent “Notes on Care” (with David Spivak, my colleague at Topos Institute) sometime over the next couple of weeks, cross-posting it with the Topos Institute blog.
Thank you B, juxtaposing your philosophy class with the punk videos....to good