* (restored)
—-

 

If somebody who’s never heard us says to me, ‘Oh you play in a metal band, I know exactly what you sound like,’ I can say in all confidence, ‘I’m not sure. I’m not sure that you do.’”

– Mårten Hagström, guitarist for Meshuggah

 

 

Meshuggah formed in Umeå, Sweden in 1987. In 1995, their second full length record, Destroy Erase Improve, completely reinvented the genre and is generally considered to be a masterpiece. I agree. When I first heard it in 1999, I knew I had found something really great. They have continued to produce extremely wonderful, innovative and confounding records ever since. They are one of those bands that I truly love but had never seen live, until February 5, 2009, when they played Slim’s in San Francisco. I went with my friend Niko Wenner, guitarist for Oxbow, which also happens to be my favorite band. So it was sort of perfect storm of my overly-enthusiastic fan-boydom. What follows are some blurry photos I took at the show, some of my own thought about Meshuggah, photos of the band taken by other people, clips of Meshuggah playing live, and some bits of interesting writing about the band.

 

 

“There’s as much rhythmic obsessiveness and intricacy in the relentless polyrhythms of Swedish metal maestros Meshuggah as there is in Reich or Ligeti – with the difference that Meshuggah use the supreme technical sophistication and overpowering volume of their 5-in-the-time-of-4 patterns to serve rather different expressive ends: Terminal Illusions as opposed to Different Trains”.  – Tom Service from guardian.co.uk

 

 

It’s like a post-millennial, metal portrait of the collapse of one’s mind, the words and images adding the final blow to what is an all-out assault of a composition. Monstrous, prodigious, apocalyptic, “I” is quintessential Meshuggah, and some absolutely vital 21st century metal. – Adrien Begrand – Popmatters.com

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I’m going to imagine that my neighbor wasn’t banging angrily on the wall but rather accidentally bumping into the wall in his Play Therapy induced gyrations. I love coffee, but if it’s something you should avoid, do. It’s my only drug now (unless cigarettes count), so I’m all in. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I was going to ask you what in the world you meant by that, but, after the ensuing little mess, I’m going to leave it alone. ** Bzzt, Hey Quinn! Ah, remind me/us when your piece on Brontez goes up, please, or I’ll surely find it if you forget. They do say that illogical self-directed stuff like that — you’re the exact opposite of a burden and failure, sir, guaranteed — is explainable as childhood detritus, and, as kind of too expectable as that solution seems, there does seem to be some truth there. But, yeah, that kind of go-to self-doubt is hard to negotiate. Been there myself, obviously. It does seem to get easier to give yourself credit when you get a little older, for whatever good that observation does. Great about your story still-in-progress and the pitch. Stuff like that is your way free, probably. Saw all that East Coast snow on the news. Ah, so pretty. We’re still with a 6 pm curfew right now and basically no enter/exit France rules, but if we don’t get quarantined again maybe as soon as later this week, I’ll be shocked. Things are okay, but people are stressed and fed up with the pandemic. I think the big reason France hasn’t locked us down already is that there is guaranteed to be huge civil disobedience in the streets if they do. Take care over there. ** Dominik, Hi, D! Happy the post made what you think might be good suggestions. No, I don’t know that Ian Brady book, or that it existed. i didn’t know he wrote, if you mean the Ian Brady. Huh. Good move re: my love. And of course your love rules and I’m begging for it. Love that sucks the entire pandemic into a small building far, far away somewhere whereupon Yayoi Kusama sculpts it into an Infinity Room and donates the proceeds generated by the huge crowds going to see it to the Dominick Perfect Life gofundme page, G. ** brontez purnell, Hi, Brontez! So cool of you to come in here. It’s redundant to say I love your book, but I’ll say it anyway, or I guess I mean ‘did’ say. I’ll write to you at FB when I’m outta here. Much respect! ** Bex Peyton, Hi, Bex! Very happy you came back! My pleasure about the post, of course. Yes, I’ve read ‘The Devils’. I loved it. I think New Juche is amazing and kind of can’t do wrong. What did you think? Awesome, it’s great to connect with you too. What are your classes? What do you do, or what do you most like to do? Happy Tuesday! ** wolf, Wolfmeister! Well, yeah, I agree that assuming I can possibly know what other humans feel is a gross generalisation, and I hate generalisations and when lazily make them like the plague. Interesting, I guess, that I felt privileged enough to go there. Interesting to me, I mean. It sucks that if we didn’t generalise sometimes our brains would likely explode from overactivity. Well, you know, they say language is why we can think we understand each other. How it can clarify and how it can make things mysterious or confusing. I can sort of believe that, being a language nerd. I don’t know. I’m just tripping. Super happy that I was able to accidentally beef up your book pile. What would a blog, mine in particular, be without a roaming wolf, you in particular. xo. ** Alexandrine Ogundimu, Hi! It’s so nice to meet you, or I guess ‘meet you’. Thank you so much for coming in here. I really loved your book and everything I’ve read by you so far, really, and I’m excited to read a lot more. I hope you’re doing well through the whole covid hell. Much respect to you! ** jackson howard, Hi, Jackson. David’s Black, as Sypha said, but … yeah. Thank you for coming in here. And, since I think you are the person who sent me Brontez’s book, thank you very, very much for that. It was huge boon, obviously. Take care, all the best. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Can you identify the point or reason why/when you transitioned from a trangression-interested Sotos, etc. reader into more of an avoider of disturbing things? Just curious. Realise it could be an impossible question. I still don’t have ‘Hate’. Michael owes me a copy. I love ‘Sentimental Education’, as you know. ** Misanthrope, Ah, so Rigby’s a bit of a slave type. That makes a strange kind of sense. Ha ha. I would trade my weekend for yours lickety-split. Power chords! Maybe today’s post will be of help. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. Thanks! The bookclub thing is really nice, so I recommend it. It’s nice with ours also because three of the participants are both really old friends/comrades of mine from back when we were aspiring young writers together as well as being great writers. So there’s lots to talk about even when thoughts on the assignment lags. Yeah, maybe the classes needing to occupy you is a good thing ultimately. Such weird days. Being focused can feel exciting, to me at least. The huge snowfall is dreamy from way over here where snow has pretty much broken up with Paris. My Tuesday: I need to work on that assigned thing. So I”m going to force myself to. Otherwise … ? How were your 24 all in all? ** liquoredgoat, hi, Douglas! Great to see you, buddy! The books you want to read are really worth reading, which I didn’t really need to say even, I guess. How are you? Are you working on anything that excites you? xo. ** chris dankland, Hey, Chris! I … guess I’ll let your post be a surprise? Why not. Good you’ve gotten the vaccine, or the first half. I’m counting the unknown minutes until I qualify over here. France is being stingier than where you are. Oh, dude, if I had had to do Zoom classes when I was in school, I would have done what I already did — skim everything and fake it — but to a much worse degree, and, yeah, surely blow off the classes as often as possible. It kind of amazes me when I hear of students actually doing the Zoom classes devotedly. Congrats on weed’s new local legitimacy! I didn’t realise you aren’t really involved in xray now. It does seem to be going great guns. It feels really alive and key. Big up to Jennifer. As I said up above somewhere, we’re on tenterhooks over here. Right now stores are open but no cafes, restaurants, bars, museums, theatres. 6 pm curfew, which is a huge drag. Threat of a third quarantine hanging over everything and maybe restarting as soon as late this week. It’s okay, but people here, who have been so diligent and good about the restrictions for the last year, are really fed up and stressed. But, for now, we’re alright. Same to you vis-a-vis your morning, pal! ** ae, Hi, a! The thanks are entirely mine. I’m using WordPress now, and a supposedly cool host, and they swear the blog is my property and they won’t fuck with it, but we will see. I’m okay. Trying to make myself work on something I need to work on. But good. Huh, I don’t know DistinctivelyDionysian. I’ll go look at the site. It sounds fascinating. I hope they survive. I’ll see if I can score as back issue or something. When do you think you’ll hear back from the press about the collaborative poetry + illustration zine? Fingers stranglingly crossed if you need them. If I ever get to your neck, I’m going to invite myself over for dinner somehow. Jeez, yum. I only ever went to that one Sikh restaurant, mind you, but, wow, it was amazing. The Golden Temple of Consciousness, it was called. And it lived up to that name even. Thank you for the link.That’s fascinating, isn’t it? Excited for the package, thank you so, so much! How was your day? Are you under the famous pile of snow? ** Right. I decided to restore this old post by Blendin aka the artist Brendan Lott. It’s old enough that Blendin may well have moved his enthusiasm onto a different Metal band by now, but no matter. He made his case, and it stands. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.

‘Riot Grrrl saved my life. Reading those zines when I was a teenager saved everything. Man, I was in Alabama. And in The CD Version of the First Two Records, Kathleen Hanna was saying, “There’s no such thing as a gender analysis without a race and a class analysis. There’s no such thing as a race analysis without a gender analysis.” It’s before we started using the word intersectional. In my head, there was this trifecta of identity and what it means to be someone, but this felt so 3-D. When you’re fifteen and you’re a faggot and people are fucking with you, and someone’s like, “Being told that you’re a piece of shit and not believing it is a form of resistance”—it was really fucking rad. Riot Grrrl basically taught me that I didn’t have to kill myself. It really helped.

‘When I was in tenth grade, I had a teacher who said, “Gay people are a genetic mistake.” I hadn’t come out, but I knew I was gay. I wrote Kathleen Hanna a letter about it and she wrote me back. I still have the letter to this day. She was like, “Yeah, it really sucks that people are acting that way, but you’re going to get through it, you’re going to be fine,” and she sent me the first Le Tigre CD.

‘Before I moved to California, I lived in Indiana for a little bit. There was a band there called PANTyRAiD, who toured with Le Tigre, and I got to dance for them at their shows. At one show in Chicago, Kathleen Hanna started talking to me, and it was the first time I’d met her; I was beyond awestruck. She was like, “Hey, I remember you. Didn’t you send me a letter one time?” She told me she had saved my picture that I sent her when I was sixteen and used it as a bookmark for years. I always thought that was really, really sweet. That’s when I thought, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.’ — Brontez Purnell

 

Brontez Purnell @ Facebook
The Provocations of Brontez Purnell
Brontez Purnell Is Everything
BRONTEZ PURNELL & THE OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS OF SEX
Buy ‘100 Boyfriends’

 

Brontez Purnell 100 BOYFRIENDS
FSG Originals

‘Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine.

‘Armed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.’ — FSG

Excerpt

Me and all the rest of the boys on the block had learned a very trash and burn style with sex: no guilt, no morals, no new boyfriends. It was the rule.

Every once in a while two of us would pair up and monogamy about it while the rest of us talked shit: “Not cool, not anarchist—hoarding all that dick like that—sexual capitalist!” (We said shit like this.)

Sometimes the need for normality would pinch me in the ass. Some new young thing I was dating would seem like a good idea and I would go wander off in bliss with him for awhile, but under no circumstances could he meet my slutty best friends. They would all fuck his brains out, for sure. I would look at the little chicken and think, “The second I wife him he’s gonna fuck all my friends,” or “Actually, he’s probably already fucked all my friends,” or, the even more precise realization, “Wait—I’VE FUCKED ALL MY FRIENDS.”

(I wanted to go bathe in penicillin.)

It was a peculiar coven and we kept the circle open. I had many “brothers.” I often called on Nathan on nights when I couldn’t scratch my own itch. Nathan lived next door. I had fucked him for five years. His name was Nathan Alexander Carmichael. He was a white boy. (Hence the name Nathan Alexander.)

We had fucked each other so much that sex at times felt like scraping the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube that had shot its last load two paychecks ago. We had to re-invent our fuck buddyhood. The world moved so goddamn fast—it was all bills heartache and defeat—those moments of tenderness sometimes had to be engineered.

We did terrible things to each other. It was exciting.

It was his turn to top. He made all the rules; for this session we sat on a clean white bed sheet naked in his room, across from one another. We were only allowed to talk through text messages. He texted, “Let’s pretend we’re Boyfriends and make love.”

“Ok,” I texted back. He moved to my side of the bed. “Only I can speak now—lay on the floor.” He bound my hands and feet together with suspension ropes and blindfolded me. He left the room and I heard him set something down on the floor, heard him rubbing his hands together. He put something under my nose. “Smell,” he said. It was basil. He had to have seen me smile. He put another object to my nose—it was a cloth of some sort with Terre d’Hermes on it, his favorite cologne. I couldn’t feel my body anymore.

“Open your mouth,” he said, and I did. He put a piece of cake in it. He rolled me on my back and undid the cuffs on my ankles. He pulled my legs up and wrapped them around his hips and entered me. “I own you,” he whispered. He forced a pillow on my face and began to fuck me, hatefully. Within a minute he was done. He put a blanket over me and laid on top of me. He rubbed my lips with his fingers and kissed me gently. He lifted up the side of my blindfold and exposed my left eye. I saw him wink at me. I was freed.

I put my clothes on and walked out the door. I turned to see him standing in the doorway, waving at me. I looked at him and saw the same thing I saw when I looked at my right hand: a life line, running strong and clear through the center.—

Extras

100 Boyfriends Mixtape (The Demo) by Brontez Purnell

Interview with Brontez Purnell

 

 

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‘During her teenage years, Fini suffered from rheumatic conjunctivitis, which forced her to have her eyes bandaged and to live in total darkness for two months. She later recalls that this experience really helped to develop her imagination and to conceive complex visual imagery in her mind. The need to bandage her eyes may also have also inspired a later love of being masked. By the age of seventeen, Fini was already exhibiting her portraits in Trieste, and frequenting the artistic and literary circles of the town, where she was generally considered highly intelligent (she had read Freud before she turned sixteen) and sensitive.

‘In 1931, she moved briefly to Milan and then to Paris where she became acquainted with Carlos Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico; both became profound influences on the aspiring young artist. By this point, Fini was an ambitious 24 year old, with, as art critic Sarah Kent writes, “a gift for friendship – people loved her warmth, intelligence, and beauty”. It was at this time that she met Max Ernst, who became her lover and introduced her to the Surrealists, including Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Henri Cartier-Bresson along with many other painters and writers of the group.

‘Fini quickly became an integral part of the Parisian art scene and social circles. She became known for her eccentricity, flamboyant personality, and particularly theatrical ways of dressing. Art critic Sarah Kent says, “She would dye her hair blue, orange, red or gold and attend private views and parties dressed as a man, or wearing nothing but white boots and a cape of white feathers”. During this time, she was also exhibiting her work in Parisian art galleries – one of her first exhibitions was at Christian Dior’s gallery that was run by Dior before he became an acclaimed fashion designer.

‘Throughout this time, Fini also worked as an accomplished portraitist (painting portraits of many celebrities and visitors to Paris, and especially of her friends including writer Jean Genet, actress Maria Casarès, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, and the socialite Hélène Rochas) as well as an illustrator, illustrating Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare, and often donating her drawings to new emerging writers. Besides being generous, she was talented, glamorous, and often perceived as being profoundly controversial. Art critic Catherine Styles McLeod describes her as “magnificent, perturbing, mocking enigmatic, terrible, and compassionate”. Art critic Joseph Nechvatal further enhances her colorful existence in that he writes, “her wild lifestyle, open bisexuality, and infamous ménage à trois relationships shocked even the Parisian café society”.’ — The Art Story

 

Leonor Fini Site
Leonor Fini @ goodreads
Eight Drawings
Book: ‘Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini’
Buy ‘Rogomelec’

 

Leonor Fini Rogomelec
Wakefield Press

‘Originally published in French in 1979, Rogomelec was the third of Leonor Fini’s novels. All the qualities of the paintings for which she is famed can be found in it: an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear. This novella’s ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec—where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers—and moves through a waking dream involving strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary, and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the “the celebration of the king” is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec’s Gothic ruins. This first English translation includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella’s original publication.

‘Born in Argentina and raised in Italy, Leonor Fini (1907–1996), concluded a rebellious youth with a move to Paris and a career in painting. Her six decades of work as artist, illustrator, designer, and author bore close ties to the Surrealist movement, but though the Surrealists saw her as one of them, she herself never identified as a Surrealist. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire as opposed to objects of desire, and was groundbreaking in its explorations of mythology, androgyny, death, and life as Mannerist theater.’ — Wakefield Press

Excerpt

Extras

Angels of Anarchy: Sphinx – Leonor Fini and Surrealism

Leonor Fini

 

 

______________

‘The morning meant hangover and strong coffee, juices delivered automatically from the smoothie bar Elena preferred. They lived together in a loft in Brooklyn Heights, no mortgage just yet because the question of children still hung in the air.

‘They had met at a reading given by Colson Whitehead where a coked-out V, the opener, stumbled through one of his better stories and Elena, bored, beautiful Elena, was intrigued by his delivery. They hooked up several times, usually fumbling after drinks, and he accompanied her to more than one event, but while the initial spark was there it was somehow clear that their relationship had no future. V was a dirty kid from Indiana, no money to speak of, living in a sublet in Bushwick with an even-tempered young couple and an app development wiz, while Elena had her own place (the loft) and put on her own shows in outerborough galleries, and had a trust fund courtesy of her father’s copper mine in Argentina.

‘It wasn’t that Elena was shallow, more that Elena didn’t want to engage in anything resembling a serious relationship with someone not serious, and the truth was that V was simply a mess. None of his work had taken off, and as a person he was more interested in partying than living. And while Elena could party with him, she had explained multiple times that she didn’t just want someone to do drugs with.

‘“I like you a great deal,” she said in perfect, accented English. “Sometimes I even think I am in love with you. But I cannot be with you, because of how you are.”

‘So one day, filled with a Gatsbian passion to make Elena his, V sat down and wrote a novel. The entire process, fuelled with illicit adderall and pot after pot of strong coffee, was completed in ten months, an insane amphetamine trip through his own memories. He mined his relationships, his great passionate love affairs, his pathos, all that had befallen him in the brisk 27 years of his life.’ — Alexandrine Ogundimu

 

alexandrine ogundimu
Alexandrine Ogundimu @ Twitter
‘A RASH OF SUICIDES’
‘COYOTE’
Buy ‘Desperate’

 

Alexandrine Ogundimu Desperate
Amphetamine Sulphate

“What’s a decent price for coke, should he stop doing coke, should he kill himself, had he ever been raped, why did he only want to fuck straight guys, what would happen if he jumped in front of a train, and the ever present question of what the fuck he was doing in New York?”

‘Considerations of self erasure are impossible if you are never really there. The writing has an exciting brutality and has me hungry for more. Highest possible recommendation!’ — Adam Hudson

Excerpt

Extras

SANGUINISTA

EMOJI FIDGET SPINNER

 

 

______________

Audrey Szasz is a London-based writer and poet. Her experimental narratives weave exotic prose-poetry with surreal imagery and transgressive satire.

‘Audrey Szasz is a deviant genius of surreal and perverse image-play; her subversive imagination shocks and thrills in equal measure. She may well be the strangest and most disturbing new writer now at work in Britain. If she was in France she would be fêted.’ — Todd Swift

 

~~ z u t k a ~~
szasz_audrey @ instagram
AS @ goodreads
‘Invisibility: A Manifesto’
Buy ‘Tears of a Komsomol Girl’

 

Audrey Szasz Tears of a Komsomol Girl
Infinity Land Press

‘Tears of a Komsomol Girl is an experimental concept novel based on the real-life crimes of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who was finally executed in 1994 having been convicted of murdering 52 people between 1978 and 1990.

‘​USSR, Rostov, 1980s. Arina, a young girl — insolent, obnoxious, but most importantly musically gifted, poses as the ideal student — upstanding, hardworking, and a member of Komsomol — the Soviet Union’s Communist Youth League. Fantasising unrealistically about becoming an internationally famous classical violinist, and yet simultaneously behaving as cynically and hypocritically as she can, Arina uses her Komsomol duties as a pretext for strutting unsupervised around town of an evening, fraternising with soldiers and Party bureaucrats alike, compulsively lying to cover her tracks. And yet her sleep is punctuated by obsessive and oppressive dreams concerning a certain killer who’s been on the loose for years — a ruthless, sadistic and thoroughly vicious opportunist referred to in rumours as Citizen X, the Rostov Ripper, or simply Satan — a monster who brutally slays children and adolescents having assaulted them at knifepoint. As the killings become ever more tortuous and frenzied, and the number of innocent victims tragically swells, it’s only a matter of time before Arina finally crosses paths with Satan, and her nightmares turn into a reality.’ — ILP

Excerpts

Extras

Audrey Szasz // Marquis de Sade // Cut-up of Justine

Audrey Szasz // Have You Seen This Girl?

 

 

______________

‘Any art that co-operates with the prevailing ideological structure of power can be subsumed under an ‘aesthetics’ (Vichnar and Armand, 2017). On this principle, the association of the avant-garde throughout its history with a generalised anti-aesthetic bears within it broadly political connotations of economic and class antagonism, traceable to its origins in the militant revolutionary discourses of the nineteenth century across the political spectrum. Yet the notion of a specifically proletarian or working-class avant-garde is rife with paradox – stemming firstly from the fact that, historically, it has been the avowed function of the avant-garde to affect revolutionary class consciousness in the first place, and secondly from the necessity to contest precisely those ideological forces seeking to legislate the meaning of work and its role in political ontology.

‘Though having evolved in direct symbiosis with market capitalism, the avant-garde – in its militant, anti-institutional phase – emerges from an adversarial stance towards the ‘abstraction’ and ‘impoverishment’ of labour in the production of cultural surplus-value. In refusing the industrial work ethic as alienated and dehumanising – and l’art-pour-l’art-isme as its mystification – this emergence (from Blanqui and Bakunin to the Situationists and Arte Povera) manifests as a form of radical counter-work, one which sought to circumvent what Nick Land has called ‘the rage of jealous time’ and ‘matter’s positive effacement by utilitarian society’ (Land, 1992: 65). In doing so it salvages notions of usedness and uselessness (as determined by the capitalist work ethic), and entropy (as later delineated in cybernetics), for a critical affirmation of the art (or anti-art) of everyday life. Land draws on Georges Bataille’s concept of general economy and ‘expenditure without reserve’ (Bataille, 1991: 21ff) to posit such a counter-work in a virulently antagonistic relation to the logic of surplus production. ‘Expenditure without reserve’ opens within cultural labour the space of an ecstatic chthonic function, through the purging of normative social desire. This radical potential can be understood as the means of avant-garde art to affect contradictions in the instrumentality of Power (capital), in such a way that Power itself (in its mechanism of desiring-production) is caused to dissipate in a histrionic effort to re-normalise and re-commodify.’ — Louis Armand

 

Atelier Louis Armand
VAMPYR (AN EXCERPT) @ SELFFUCK
Louis Armand @ Twitter
HANS FALLA AND JANINE PAULETTE DISCUSS VAMPYR BY LOUIS ARMAND
Get VAMPYR here

 

Louis Armand VAMPYR: A Chronicle of Revenge
Alienist

‘An anti-novel of the end times, set in the heart of Golemgrad under the spell of the CORVID-69 pandemic & an apocalyptic Corp[orate]=$[tate] terror apparatus…

‘The mirror is empty. Surely this is a sign? The error is too consistent & gigantic to be ignored. One moment, History is there, replete, like cinema. The next: Void. Where purpose was, now doubt, trepidation. Something must be to blame. We are not speaking of merely vulgar misunderstandings or an emotional ambivalence. Every disappearance can only be considered a murder, caused by a hidden hand. A crime of violent omission. These accusations demand an energy of response, not bands of superstitious dilettantes. The world is not a psychoneurotic disorder. Those still living have good reason not to feel safe from the revenges of the dead, even w/ a sea dividing them. Their taboos are as a mirror held up to a guilty conscience. Originally, all of the dead were Vampyrs. Yet we do not come from the past, but from the future.

‘A fiery half=moon low over Plague City 4:00a.m. A hole in the eastern sky. This clustering of timeframes in the phase=horror of pandemic. Catastrophe’s just another word for the future catching up w/ you. Within hours the entire city was in lockdown. Funny how we get dark cyberpunk dystopia in the newsfeed, when in reality everything’s falling apart because of incompetence. The quote uprising unquote died of apocalypse fatigue. GPS = General Paralysis of the Sane. Every posthumous affordance has its trolls. They expected to discover the complete vocabulary of extinction before words dissolved into nonsense. Transcendence w/ a humxn face. An emoji covering the void.’ — Alienist

Excerpt

In front of a landscape of erasures, a darkness that engulfs everything. (There was a border they didn’t always let you see, but you still knew you had to cross it.) This is the key to the game. Life stands under orders to retreat to the Quarantine Zone. Positioned outside the game, the adversaries pretend they’re only imaginary. Il n’y a pas de hors=jeu. Stated otherwise, existence of strategy doesn’t automatically confer a “tactical” advantage. There are, for example, two types of mask: those that are worn openly & those worn in secret. >the chill of sodden paper stuck to the neck glued smooth over eyelids force=fed between cracked teeth a papier=mâché of endorphined suffocation inkblotted gagging mute to dream of surfaces & air when all is a red pulsing of the eyelids turning black the blood in the ears bile in the throat welling up w/ sudden ferocity like a fountain pen from a jugular to scrawl its immodest encyclopaedias. Like Miss Muffet, you watch in sick fascination as the giant blowfly sucks the brains out of the itsybitsy spider. “There is a great danger threatening the task of emancipation, which isn’t an excess of ideology, but the opposite: an insufficiency of ideology in the direction of the task itself.” Immense relief from breathing (after all). They are selling oxygen in bottles. First degrade, then ration, then commodify. THE ONLY FUTURE WORTH ANYTHING IS ONE THAT PAYS! (“Virtuous & meek means lead to nothing!”) You’ve seen this coming but weren’t always prepared to believe it. An alibi only gets you so far, the real art is in convincing them of everything you say. Palinodes of complacency. Trocchi: “Protest is based on the assumption that social behaviour is intelligent: the hallmark of its futility.” What if everything to be accomplished, & the means of doing so, were self=evident? [An inevitable invisible insurrection?] Yet nothing cld be less clear / i.e. further from the truth (like a point on a Möbius strip returning to itself “as the crow flies”). >in place of “landscape,” write “geometry.” Perhaps before proceeding further we shld define what is meant by a distance: being the magnitude of an anomaly between two frames of reference. “She looked in the mirror but her reflection wasn’t there [wasn’t where she expected it to be.]” ¿Somewhere inside the mirror time had slowed down? The virus integrates an error into the system, which propagates until the error IS the system [the system “fails”] [or until it evolves a different system].[1] Q: Is the virus a “revolutionary” force? At what point does it renounce revolt? At what point does it dissimulate? i.e. by precipitating collapse, does the virus in fact strengthen the hand of e.g. the I=L=L=U=M=I=N=I=S=T conspiracy? “We must restate the problem of Evil upon new information.” [Every demon serves a master, but not only a demon may kill its master.] Once more back in the realm of false consciousness & instinctive dread, where G.O.D. alone maintains the Supreme Good in perpetual tumescence. To the extent that sublime revolt lives, grows & develops over the course of History… Does violence so quickly lose its attraction, when all it does is pay a salary? [A riot must also be a deconstruction.] Note, to be inscribed on every mirror: KNOW THYSELF / KNOW THY ENEMY. Thus are we all creatures of speculation. Yet who wld be the logos fallen among those deprived of speech? image among the blind? vaccine among the terminally sick? And if the virus itself wld send the image=cancer consuming the world into remission? [i.e. by debilitating global kapital], or only appear to, while in reality accelerating the cancer’s spread under a regime of inoculation [i.e. against whatever remains in the cancer’s way]? Or: if it participates in the regeneration of the world it destroys like an active supernatural force? Or: if though it represents a step towards a new world, it must still be excluded from this one? One crisis washes the hands of the other. The opportunism of love or tenderness: an open secret in front of the camera. Always the hope of future antagonism. (In the end there will be only the sound of dollars crying themselves to sleep at night.) Even when the lights have finally gone out, our task is more fraught & uncertain than ever, & the enemy is everywhere.

[1] >memory: discontinuity / a zone of inconsequentials? [political memory: power vectors that have expired?] >nostalgia: an image returning to its starting point after its reflection has already flown the coop?

Extras

Trailer

Louis Armand, VAMPYR – PMF 2020

 

 

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p.s. RIP Goddess Bunny, Sophie, Clayton Eshleman. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, David. It’s part of my novel, not a poem. It was indeed hard for me to read. It’s a very personal and emotional novel, very different for me in that sense. Anyway, thank you very much for the kind words. ** Dominik, Ha ha, that’s true, I hadn’t thought about that. My favorite? Oh, hm, that’s hard. I like raven too, I like obeyyourlastOrder too, I like TransphobicTrans. (I think I have a weakness for long hair). Yeah, I wish mushrooms didn’t start evil, but, yeah, it’s worth it. That was a good poem, right? lolokaythen doesn’t need to attend the workshop. Love, drunk, sitting on your couch, telling you the secret to winning anyone’s heart in a slurred voice that you can almost understand, G. ** Misanthrope, I have to agree with you. Deciding what someone can handle is just a wee bit authoritarian, dude, ha ha. But roll as thou rolls, golden rule. Thanks about my reading thing. Our govt. here seems to like to announce things on Thursdays for some, I guess, French reason, so it’s tenterhooks until then. Your weekend flew by? ** JM, Hi, J. Thanks about the reading and the slaves. I did see. I wish I could see that top hat performance thing. Duh. I haven’t totally finished Damien’s book — it’s a biggie — but it’s great, yeah. Best with all the things you’re doing. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, very sad about Sophie. Their stuff was really fresh and sharp. A real tragedy. Thank you about the reading, my bud. Oh, and I almost forgot, thank you for the heavily banging new episode. I liked it so much my neighbour banged on wall! ** Bex Peyton, Hi, Bex Peyton. Welcome! It’s very nice to meet you. That’s so true, what you wrote, and so beautifully put. Thank you a lot. Hope I’ll get to see you again. Take care. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Yeah, of course I was thrilled to see that P&P reference. Trust me, such things are very few and far between in the wider world of slave profiles. Thank you so much, buddy, about my reading. That means a ton. Yeah, early September is what they tell me. Did they release the cover? I’ve seen the mockup. You good, writing, holding up, staying safe, etc., etc.? ** Sypha, I only saw the new Coil book in your Facebook post about it, so I’ve only seen the cover or whatever. It sounds very thorough. I’ll try to get it. Thanks, James. ** wolf, How does one best say hello to a wolf? Hm. Well, whatever that best approach  may be, this very sentence is attempting to do that. Okay, understood, and you know animal stuff much better than I do, for sure. I wasn’t meaning to say they don’t feel a thing akin to love. It’s just that, for me, I resist deciding/assuming that what they feel when they do things that seem to be generated by an emotion that resembles what we human call love is so precisely love that I can just name it that and think that I understand what they’re doing. For me that feels lazy or something. I just don’t feel that I’m in a position to understand their emotional lives and motivations. It’s my way of showing them respect, I guess. I can totally see that that might be just me overthinking and being weird, but there you go. Ultimately that thing you say we can agree on is definitely a way of thinking that I totally agree with you about. And I like thinking of myself as meat with a heart. Sexy. Ha ha. How are you? How are you dealing with the viral shithole stuff? Miss you. Big love. ** Steve Erickson, I know I shouldn’t envy your blizzard, but I do, sorry. Yes, yes, it’s a true loss that Sophie won’t be here to evolve their clearly distinct talent and work. Terrible thing. The gig I saw was Moor Mother singing/talking/etc. with a guy on a laptop and a percussionist. It was very wandering and textural and quite dynamic. She has great presence. I didn’t know the material she was performing. ‘The Extra Man’ sounds like something that could well be on one of the ‘illegal’ sites I have bookmarked. I’ll go look for it today. Thank you! ** chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Sight for sore eyes, my friend. And funnily timed since I just restored an old guest-post by you that’ll be launching here a week from today. Thank you so, so much about my reading. Aw, that’s so nice of you to day. Really, thank you, buddy. I think it was an especially wack bunch of slaves, and, as always, it’s just luck of the draw. How are you, man? How’s every little thing in your life? xo. ** Brian O’Connell, Hey, Brian! Thanks a bunch about the posts. My weekend was alright. Saw a friend, saw some art, did the Zoom bookclub thing with my US writer friends, finally started getting my brain into a writing assignment. Not so bad. Glad you liked the ‘AP’ movie. I like it too. The star of that film is an old friend of mine, and he’s so good in it, no? How are your classes and everything else going? Are you doing in-person classes or still just Zooming and stuff? Enjoy your parcel of snow. Envy. Just rain and rain here. Hugs and love! ** Bill, Yes, I think they might have a wee bit wackier than the average. But I don’t know why. Luck on the blog’s part. No, my novel is out in September. Early-ish September unless something changes. I haven’t checked worldscinema.org in weeks. I need to get over there and join you in your rich cinemaphiliac life. ** Okay. I’ve got five, count them, five books to recommend this month. (Two of them are quite short). Have a look and see if any of them seem like things you might want to similarly ingest. See you tomorrow.