Light in the Darkness: “The sun is low on the horizon all day long now, and darkness creeps in like a home invasion of your mind. Demons descend through a red and black sky and no help is on the way. Our country is so mentally hog-tied trying to unravel the twisted events of just a few years past that it has no mojo left for rationally anticipating the events of just a few years ahead. Have you ever felt more alone?”
Propaganda Made in China: “If the news of the few last weeks in the Middle East inflamed in you one way or another, congratulations: you now know what propaganda feels like. There is no knowledge to be gained there, other than that…lessons can be extracted from the observation of world events, but they rarely have anything to do with the world itself.”
The Joker Cycle: “In every iteration of the character, the Joker’s superpower is insanity. [Alan] Moore’s work imagines him as a failed comic who can’t cope with the grinding demands and bitter disappointments of normal life. By surrendering to insanity, he attains liberation from the pain and misery of being a loser. The Dark Knight includes a running joke about how the Joker got his scars: throughout the film, the character offers multiple, conflicting versions of the story. The truth doesn’t matter: the Joker dissociates from trauma through psychosis, and in the process turns into a kind of god.”
The Red Hand Files: “We are obligated to make our best attempts to become the thing we wish to be, otherwise we forever remain the sorry consorts of our own defeat.”
The Rose of Sound: “Under the influences of Sound. I will call up the sum of my influences, and I will be a place of confluence. I will haunt the dead landscapes of my ear canals, which mimic in form both the deadzones of Anthropocenic destruction and the classical rivers of the dead. I will stand in the rush of Sound. I will be as a rushet in the inlet, wearing a cap of wires, a cap-o’-rushes, da capo, where the Sound washes, beneath the weathermap of acoustics and neurology, biological sound and cosmic Sound. I will be the place Sound arrives to, and through contact with the stuff of me I will amplify it, I will change and redirect it. I will reel-to-reel. I will reel and persist. Move as close to the Rose as I can get. Novitiate of the Rose of Sound.”