What should my next video be about?

IT'S POLL TIME. Let me know which topic you're most excited about. Multiple choice is enabled!

1) There’s an Italian movie about Friedrich Nietzsche called Beyond Good and Evil (1977) that I’d like to talk about simply because of how bizarre it is. This would be more of a fun video, less theoretical and more biographical. The movie portrays Nietzsche as being a lot more sexually active than he probably was in real life, and also as a closeted gay man, which I could use as an opportunity to talk about Nietzsche’s sexual life, and the debate around whether he was gay or not, as well as his strange relationship with his sister and his drug use, which the movie depicts.

2) In my video on post-punk I only mentioned industrial music briefly, and this would be a kind of sequel in which I discuss it more in-depth, talking about the effect the industrial landscape had on industrial artists. I would probably cover not just British industrial, but also the German and American scenes. I would especially focus on the influence of the modernist art movement known as futurism, and the way it prefigured industrial music already in the early 1900s, with Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises. I would also discuss the political divide within industrial music, which included both left-wing and fascist elements, just as futurism had both a socialist strain and a fascist strain.

3) In Vilnius, Lithuania where I was born, the district of Lazdynai in the 70s was considered to be the crowning jewel of urban development in the entire Soviet Union, upheld as an exemplar of modern socialist living. It was even awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize in 1974, which was the first time the prize was given to an entire residential district. For all the criticisms you can make of the Soviet Union, its post-war urban development was indeed impressive in many ways, and allowed for great architectural projects that have been largely impossible under conditions of privatization. It's a district I'm quite fond of myself and I think it would make for an interesting video topic.

4) This is the topic I'd have to spend the most time researching for, both because I've only read a little bit on it and because there's a lot of different musicians to cover. Like with all aspects of culture, the Soviet Republic post-revolution was a centre of great experimentation, not only compositionally but in terms of musical equipment. Various electronic instruments were developed and experimented with, with the Theremin being the most popular one but only one of many. During the Stalin period, although artistic experimentation was pulled back in favor of the state-imposed standards of socialist realism, some interesting electronic instruments continued being developed.

Since people seem especially interested in my videos on political history, I came up with two new topics on that category, specifically on the United States:

5) Very few people know that in 1877, thanks to radicalism imported to St. Louis, Missouri by German immigrants, Marxists took control of the city of St. Louis for about a week amidst a workers' strike, before being defeated due to their inability to spread the revolt. Sometimes called the St. Louis Commune, it was the only time Marxists were in power in an American city, and it was also part of what is considered to be America's first general strike, the Great Railroad Strike. Though it was very brief, it still seems like an important event in America's labor history, and it's probably not an accident that it's so seldom talked about.

6) During the Great Depression, because of the drastic rise in unemployment, socialists and labor organizers focused not only on organizing workplaces, but organizing the unemployed as well, helping them get financial relief, food, and housing, and engaging in direct action and leading demonstrations. Hundreds of Unemployed Workers' Councils were formed. Unemployment is not disappearing anytime soon, so this kind of organizing seems relevant and useful to learn from, especially as a way of preventing the unemployed from becoming scabs, strikebreakers and reactionaries.