a nice place to be
Hey
Tonight's a wild night. I'm on the couch with my homie. Everyone's going through something. It's humid as fuck out and like 80 degrees in Philly on October 10th. I get nervous walking from my house to my homie's house when I think there is a pervasive wet mold smell along the whole block. A moment later I'm like o maybe it was just that one house. I got nervous because in my stories, the world is flooding and stinking and molded over, and we're all sick. Sick and holding on to one another. You know how i do.
real quick: NEW YORK. I'm gonna be up this Thursday night for a Mask Magazine reading at Honey's | 93 Scott Avenue in Brooklyn | starts at 9:30. I'll have gear.
I got an email tonight that a story I wrote got some love in this review on BITCH.
1 - lol bitch media idek
2 - damn yo i wrote mad other stories and my crew & other poor broke working too much people wrote mad other stories and this is the power of press lit scene hustling on a diff level than i've ever known
3 - trust that all the knowledge passed on in this colonizer history of ours, ruled by western science paradigms, is that of the rich. great thinkers, great minds. who gets remembered. who is forgotten.
anyway, this is decent:
M. Téllez’s story “Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance,” about a reptilian alien from Mars and their human girlfriend, is a masterpiece. It’s a challenging parable about how the good intentions of white liberals can dehumanize or even destroy those they seek to ‘save.’ As Inri, the story’s main character says, “there is nothing on Mars that is as aggressive,” as the “good intent” of white liberals.
author's commentary: inri isn't a reptile. replace white liberals with queer white radicals who to-date are still uncritical about their whiteness and keep asking for instruction & consuming critical media by authors/artists of color rather than looking inside themselves, their class position/access to wealth n resources, and their ancestors.
i wrote this rant about being mixed and white passing a while ago. every time i write about this it feels incredibly unseemly, but i reread the rant the other day and felt like it was worth sharing at least to those of similar or resonating positions.
me and my main squeeze went to the midnight showing of the new blade runner movie on opening night. we both wore leather. i knewwwwwwwww this movie wasn't gonna be shit. i knew from the trailer. the desaturated everyone-is-white-in-2017s-version-of-the-future.jpg looking bullshit. jared leto plays a villain worse and more grating than that fucking one-eye dude from english dub yu-gi-oh! there's gratuitous violence against women. there's lol WHERE people of color who aren't idealized-east-asian looking jawns. this wired review is pretty apt. me and my boo walked out the theater at 2:40 too. the movie had been on for over two and a half hoursI. THE MOVIE FEATURED RICK DECKARD IN A TRI-BLEND TEE AND MEDIUM RINSE DENIM. The movie was tired. Donate your money to Happy Birthday Marsha instead of paying to see this trash blade runner shit.
Btw if you hadn't heard by now, the Marsha P Johnson doc on netflix is bullshit theft from Black trans women's work. Fuck that stolen movie.
Here's a few sour morsels from this distraction/addiction silicon valley article on the guardian that all fit right in with my tumblr dystopia tag >>>>
(in a thought, upper class land owning privileged class assholes build terror machines and believe in capitalism as some sort of natural order ugghhhhh)
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
“One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
The same forces that led tech firms to hook users with design tricks, he says, also encourage those companies to depict the world in a way that makes for compulsive, irresistible viewing. “The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”
Since the US election, Williams has explored another dimension to today’s brave new world. If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?
“The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ability to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions?
“Will we be able to recognise it, if and when it happens?” Williams replies. “And if we can’t, then how do we know it hasn’t happened already?”
at the end of last month Alex and I went up to give a guest lecture at Parson's School of Design. Incoming masters of design students. Our lecture was titled AGAINST EMPIRE. It was "cool" to teach but also gave me a bereft and abject sensation, like wow these are masters students at parsons and we're just now introducing doubt into some of their mindsets???
cutlass made us a super litty powerpoint and one of the slides used a screencap from sailor moon crystal, the 2014 manga-faithful remake of the sailor moon anime. honestly a great way to teach some kids about empire and mythic heteronormative/ownership-style romance. themes of service/loyalty, the rightness of benevolent empire, unquestioned enemy motives (they just terrorists), etc. all lie under that super pretty and happy beautiful femme love & support surface storyline.
after the class one of the students (maybe a TA?) asked what anime we were watching, and after some head-scratching (wtf have i been watching – don't tell this kid kemonozume cauuuse...) ~ i told them KAIBA. Kaiba (watch out – popups) is already like a decade old and everyone trans n insurecto leaning i know fucks with this anime. it's my favorite length – 11 or 12 episodes. it's about bodies. memory. dystopia. classwar. love and desire. shout out to the fairmount homie for being like, yo i been watching every other anime the Kaiba director did, and that's how i got started watching kemonozume. probably shithead misogynist film students will love kemonozume like it's rare and so pulpy and japanese, but fuck them. kaiba is very different from that one.
the other anime i kinda wanted to recommend was psycho-pass (a play on the word "psychopath" in 日本語). psycho-pass is about SIGH – A COP (kaiba is about an insurrecto) – but kaiba is also about predictive policing in the realm of social control by real-time mental health regulation.
and this is from IBM's public relations research website
In five years, what we say and write will be used as indicators of our mental health and physical wellbeing. Patterns in our speech and writing analyzed by new cognitive systems will provide tell-tale signs of early-stage developmental disorders, mental illness and degenerative neurological diseases that can help doctors and patients better predict, monitor and track these conditions.
so.
you know.
get your spirit strong and your tactics realistic.
i urge you to stop fucking around (you know who you are) and get with the program. all these movie plots ae from OLD movies written and produced by MEN for HOLLYWOOD.
SCIENCE FICTION UNDER EMPIRE BEGETS DYSTOPIA
Keep that in mind.
Wikipedia entry on 1987 film, The Running Man
Plot: In 2017, after a worldwide economic collapse, American society has become a totalitarian police state, censoring all cultural activity. The U.S. government pacifies the populace by broadcasting game shows where convicted criminals fight for their lives, including the gladiator-style The Running Man, hosted by the ruthless Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), where “runners” attempt to evade “stalkers”, armed mercenaries, around a large arena, and near-certain death for a chance to be pardoned by the state.
Wikipedia entry on 1975 film Rollerball
In the film the world of 2018 (referred to in the tagline as “the not too distant future”) is a global corporate state, containing entities such as the Energy Corporation, a global energy monopoly based in Houston, which deals with nominally-peer corporations controlling access to all transport, luxury, housing, communication, and food on a global basis. According to the tagline, in this world, “wars will no longer exist. But there will be… Rollerball”.
The film’s title is the name of a violent, globally popular sport around which the events of the film take place. […]
Rollerball teams, named after the cities in which they are based, are owned by the various global corporations. Energy Corporation sponsors the Houston team. The game is a substitute for all current team sports and for warfare. While its ostensible purpose is entertainment, Mr. Bartholomew, a high-level executive of the Energy Corporation, describes it as having a “distinct social purpose”: to show the futility of individual effort.
Wikipedia entry on Super Sad True Love Story (2010) by Gary Shteyngart
Plot: The son of a Russian immigrant, protagonist Leonard (Lenny) Abramov, a middle-aged, middle class, otherwise unremarkable man whose mentality is still in the past century, falls madly in love with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American struggling with materialism and the pressures of her traditional Korean family. The chapters alternate between profuse diary entries from the old-fashioned Lenny and Eunice’s biting e-mail correspondence on her “GlobalTeens” account. In the background of what appears to be a love story that oscillates between superficiality and despair, a grim political situation unravels. America is on the brink of economic collapse, threatened by its Chinese creditors. In the meantime, the totalitarian Bipartisan government’s main mission is to encourage and promote consumerism while eliminating political dissidents.
Wikipedia entry on 1973 film, Soylet Green
Plot: The 20th century’s industrialization leaves the world overcrowded, polluted and suffering global warming due to “the greenhouse effect”. In 2022, with 40 million people in New York City, housing is dilapidated; homeless people fill the streets; many are unemployed, the few “lucky” ones with jobs are only barely scraping by, and food and working technology is scarce. Most of the population survives on rations produced by the Soylent Corporation, whose newest product is Soylent Green, a green wafer advertised to contain “high-energy plankton” from the World Ocean, more nutritious and palatable than its predecessors “Red” and “Yellow”, but in short supply.
Wikipedia entry on Feed (2002) by M.T. Anderson
Plot: The novel portrays a near-future in which the feednet, a huge computer network (apparently an advanced form of the Internet), is directly connected to the brains of about 73% of American citizens by means of an implanted device called a feed. The feed allows people: to mentally access vast digital databases (individually called “sites”); to experience shareable virtual-reality phenomena (including entertainment programs, music, and even others’ memories); to continually interact with intrusive corporations in a personal preference-based way; and to communicate telepathically on closed channels with others who also have feeds (a feature called m-chatting).
The setting of the novel is depicted as ecologically devastated. Natural clouds have been replaced by trademarked Clouds™, implying artificial replications due to atmospheric pollution. Bodies of water have become acidic and toxified. Human sexual reproduction appears to be no longer possible through natural means. As a result, women undergo in-vitro fertilization and have their children custom-designed.
The corporations responsible for the feed have immense power and even run the school system, which is now known as School™. Throughout the book, corporations appear to hold the true power in United States, leaving the president virtually helpless as the Global Alliance, a coalition of other countries, begins contemplating war with the U.S., due to the worsening worldwide effects of American mismanagement of the environment.
anyway...
o shit i made the C U NEXT TUESDAY planners for 2018. click pic 4 link.
some recently closed tabs 4 the curious/bored/compelled >>>>
https://thebaffler.com/latest/zucktown-usa-tveten
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win
https://itsgoingdown.org/organizing-prisoner-class-interview-iwoc/
https://intercontinentalcry.org/amazonian-forest-peoples-counter-mapping-ancestral-lands
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/sci-fi-fantasy-and-the-status-quo
https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/05/30/deep-learning-on-aerial-imagery/
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mono-no-aware/
ok i have to go to bed i have therapy in the morning.
take care of yourself
feed yourself
bathe yourself
rest / pause / act
be kind to yourself
till next time
monk