A Prisoner’s Cinema: “Justin Lee’s A Prisoner’s Cinema is a collection of literary horror that declines to soothe. Instead, it uses the genre’s conventions not as a blunt instrument for shock but as a scalpel to dissect the most tormented regions of the human psyche. Here, consciousness itself is the haunted house, a subjective prison from…
LINKS: Hypervigilance; Speed and Politics; Anamnesis
Hypervigilance: “The ability to quickly metabolize experiences and then let them go is a key marker of a healthy mind and body. By embracing the sensation an experience triggers, you let the body have a natural, healthy reaction. A good example is getting into cold water: The shock, the shaking, the tremors can feel too…
Containment Zones
cross-posted at Second Power Photo by Brice Cooper Last month, I floated a concept that energy systems operate through dromology: speed, acceleration, and the accidents they generate. But nuclear power complicates this framework. Nuclear power’s temporal strangeness forces a reconceptualization of how tempo shapes power. My speed-based analysis reveals its limits when confronted with this…
Dromology and the Shape of Speed
cross-posted at Second Power The grid is an accident in motion. Paul Virilio once said: When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Energy is Virilio’s dromology made incarnate: speed and infrastructure fused into a single…
LINKS: Shatter-Zones; the Color of Oil; Recursion Psychosis
Michael Mann — the Only Male Filmmaker: “What is the constant in Mann’s characters? They don’t act like animals about women. I don’t mean that they’re chivalrous, I mean that they treat them like something more than chattels. Who would even want a chattel that’s always yapping? No, you want a woman because….well, you can’t…
Rest in Peace, Brian Wilson
Rest in peace, Brian Wilson. Here’s Ted Gioia describing Wilson in a post called “My 12 Favorite Existential Songs.” Brian Wilson: “Caroline, No” Here’s another angst-ridden “how did I get here” kind of song. Brian Wilson lived in a persistent state of existential crisis when he composed “Caroline, No.” He was the young Kierkegaard of…
LINKS: Psychedelic Espionage; Context-Bound Agents; and Art as the Axis of Meaningful Identity & Spiritual Transcendence
End of the World: “[Master of Kung Fu] is a completely bonkers series of psychedelic espionage stories, starring Shang-chi, the titular hero, who travels the world fighting diabolical villains on secret islands and in sinister HQs, while also meeting beautiful women and waxing philosophical about violence. The three issue run featuring Razorfist, above, is especially…
DISASTROUS AMATEURISM
I had Grok collate my updated draft notes for a screenplay/novel hybrid that I’m creating called Disastrous Amateurism. And the Grok synthesis is really fascinating to me. It didn’t change the tone or direction of anything but helped to sharpen my conception of everything. I’ve shared it below, largely unedited save for the addition of…
LINKS: Vital Hatred; the Open Road; Primal Despotism
A Modest Defense of Hatred: “Where man is denied hatred, and he lacks any objective referent of meaning, he sinks into a lobotomized stupor. In such an age, the alternative to a vital hatred is the Last Man. It is in Nietzsche’s forecast of the logical consequences of nihilism where we see something remarkable—that the…
LINKS: Killing Those Who Would Convict Them of Their Sins; Deep Heuristics; the Values of God
Against Christian Civilization: Paul Kingsnorth critiques the idea of using Christianity as a tool to defend Western culture, arguing that Christianity at its core is uncivilized. Christianity is impractical. Impractical, intolerable, and awful, in the original sense of that word. It is terrifying, and it is designed to kill you. This is because the values of…
LINKS: Heat/Light/Deluge; Places of Peril; the Secular Ineradicability of Evil
Britain Must Go: “There is no justification for continuing to let this regime breathe. The United States has the means, and the duty, to end it, and a motive for doing so. The endpoint of the UK’s current trajectory is a nuclear-armed jihadi state in the heart of the American Atlantic lake. This outcome must…
Twin Peaks: Trapped in an Incomplete Cosmos
cross-posted at Void Wandering My first awareness of David Lynch came via Dune and The Elephant Man in the early 80s, followed by random exposure to Blue Velvet on a premium cable channel sometime in 1987, when I was 14. By then, Altered States and other phantasmagoria had me primed to receive Lynchworld without too much shock. My true Lynchian flashpoint was Twin Peaks, which blew the…