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katewagner.wehwalt.net
kate wehwalt forever
@katewagner.wehwalt.net
36K followers 2.3K following 8.1K posts
Unheil-bringer. architecture critic @thenation.com
my blogs are https://late-review.com and mcmansionhell.com

she/they
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katewagner.wehwalt.net
not making this up
February 1, 2026 at 7:00 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
It’s a derivation!
February 1, 2026 at 12:24 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
yeah
Thus, it is not enough to say that Sieglinde, after Wotan and Wotan’s own shadow, Alberich, is the most structurally important character in the Ring. The Ring is Sieglinde and Sieglinde is the Ring. This is because, in Sieglinde, one can find the first complete expression of the all-bond, the all-idea, the bond of violation that unites the cycle from beginning to end, the bond which, for its women and for its allegorical woman, the earth, is the bond of rape. Even Siegmund, whose sense of self has been destroyed to such an extent he forgets or represses his own name, and Siegfried, who is coerced by way of the magic potion in Götterdämmerung into the dual state of both victim and perpetrator fall along this same spectrum of violation, of the stripping, through humiliation, of personhood.
January 31, 2026 at 8:06 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
January 29, 2026 at 3:27 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
the way in which this is true and drives me insane
January 28, 2026 at 10:43 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
It is precisely at this level of specificity that the Ring often falls apart. The existence of so many little ironic puzzles, "errors" and musico-thematic conflicts within the motivic system drives and has driven so many generations of both listeners and scholars genuinely mad.2 The Ring can even be said to be anti-indexical in its messy imperfection. So much of the effort of the taxonomists, much like those who went out into the bush alongside Darwin, is reflective of a desire for domination over something that insists on retaining its own mysticism. At the heart of this frustration is the unambiguously modernist urge to eradicate ambiguity. Most of the ambiguities within the cycle, from the flaming embers of its open ending to the several small mysteries scattered throughout, many of which go unanswered, are in fact integral to cycle's own stability as an enigmatic but dialectical whole. They are the reason the Ring is one of those rare works that is so broad that nearly all analyses of it, should they be reasonably argued and sufficiently self-contained, are valid, and hence, why, 150 years later, we keep having the same arguments at scales both infinitesimal and structural.
January 28, 2026 at 3:42 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
getting a lot of use out of this image
Götterdämmerung Wikipedia page
January 27, 2026 at 3:30 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
You can find me on upscroll here btw
January 26, 2026 at 1:59 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
January 24, 2026 at 9:27 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
that's right baby
January 21, 2026 at 10:42 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
he mad
angry little schnauzer type dog in a red sweater
January 19, 2026 at 8:34 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
real
January 19, 2026 at 5:02 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
this book is the real deal however
January 13, 2026 at 7:56 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
why do I get these weird ass spikes in my hrv
January 13, 2026 at 4:28 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
my favorite books of the year
The magic mountain by Thomas Mann Agathe by Robert Musil Hölderlin selected poems and fragments William Gaddis Agape Agape
December 31, 2025 at 5:56 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
And sometimes he looks like this
December 30, 2025 at 11:35 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
yooooooooooooooo
December 29, 2025 at 9:19 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
YOOOOOOOOOOO
December 25, 2025 at 3:00 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
“global symbol of freedom”
December 19, 2025 at 2:09 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
gaza before and after the genocide supported and facilitated by the united states
December 19, 2025 at 12:48 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
That’s quite literally the opposite of what I’m saying. I say it right here:
December 18, 2025 at 10:05 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
Many, especially in younger generations, see through this posturing. They have watched wide-eyed as a genocide that would otherwise be swept under the rug by the manufacturing-consent machine was televised to them in horrific fragments on Instagram Live, and they know, in the simplest terms, that things are not the way they should be. Every day, it becomes clearer that the symbolic order needs to be remade, not preserved. The world of the twentieth century—much less the earlier ones—is no longer our world; its benevolent institutions have been stripped bare, and its malevolent ones have been given more ammunition than ever. The dreams of social equity and even environmentalism that so often powered modernist thinking have devolved beyond historical disappointments into a series of never-ending nightmares. The future of federal architecture, if we are going by what is actually being built at scale by the US government, appears to be the prison, the wall, the climate refugee camp.
December 18, 2025 at 2:59 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
For those who understand architecture as a symbolic project, a practice that aims to express and concretize an ideological vision—especially of the future—Trump’s Winter Palace tack-on is more interesting and begins to make more sense. Unlike the left and especially unlike liberals, the right has assembled for itself an aesthetic program, an answer to what the future should look like, slopified as it may be. Indeed, like all fascists, its broader program is to aestheticize politics itself. (One must here remember the difference, articulated best by Godard, between the liberal idea of making political art and the socialist idea of making art politically so as to not fall into the same trap.) In short, conservatives understand that the project of politics is nothing short of remaking (or unmaking) the world itself. One would think that after all their handwringing about racism, discrimination, and exploitation, liberals, too, would come to the conclusion that the symbology of such a nation no longer appropriately serves its purpose as a shared cultural icon or identity, that it has been undermined by an irreversible rot. For a moment, it almost looked like they were there. In 2018, Andrew Cuomo, chasing an angry Democratic base, went so far as to say that America “was never that great.” Seven years later, when the bulldozers plowed into the former site of Al Gore’s tedious salons, he was gunning for a Trump endorsement and pitching himself to Curtis Sliwa voters as MAGA lite.
December 18, 2025 at 2:59 PM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
I keep seeing things like these and wanting to (elaborate morbid proposition relative to my dread)
December 18, 2025 at 1:42 AM
katewagner.wehwalt.net
The ugly truth is that there is an overwhelming preference among well-to-do urbanites for the city to be a frictionless playground for consumption, where, much like in the Garden City, the undesirable elements, from the poor to unsightly but necessary infrastructure, should be relegated, almost as punishment for the bad planning of the past, to the same suburban periphery so recently disavowed. This is impolite to say, yet empirically rather obvious. And, much like Disney World itself, this new law and order of "peace through building the right thing" is reinforced by surveillance, by the ever-replicating doorbell camera. And, like Disney World, it is kept alive by an invisible system of logistics and logistical labor, by the navy blue vans we watch drive by without a second thought. These antisocial beliefs are defended by the very U Chicago idea that the wealthy economically enrich cities rather than socially impoverish them. Like every theme park, one must arrive at the gates with the proper fare.
December 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM