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…
Tag: art
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…
Remembering Michael Murray
Before we get too deep into 2025, I’d like to take a moment to remember a dear friend of this blog, Michael Murray, the publisher of the literature and art website Galaxy Brain. Michael passed away in 2024, which shocked me — I had no idea he was ill. I only knew him through Twitter,…
Security in the Void
Recently I started looking deeper into Ernst Jünger, per the writings and discussions of some IRL friends, one of whom characterized Jünger as the rare breed of author who could write without subterfuge. And from another friend’s Instragram post this summer as he visited Junger’s home in Germany: Jünger was a strong candidate for most…
TUESDAY LINKS: Windswept Drama; a World on Fire; the Sound of God; Death on the Installment Plan
Frontier Cities: “Like many other moments in American history, we find ourselves at the advent of a technological innovation era that has the potential to significantly increase human freedom. We must grasp it. America must, as it has for centuries, set out toward that goal. We don’t need to colonize Mars, we don’t need new…
Money, Ever-Living Fire, and the Way of Angels
cross-posted here Maverick has a great piece at Man’s World Online examining cryptocurrency’s role in the evolution of money and its potential to concretize abstract ideas about freedom and truth. He looks at the work of classicist Richard Seaford along with Costin Alamariu to map the links between coinage and philosophy. “The pre-Socratics and the Socratics inherited a thoroughly…
weekend links: parabolic chiasmus; consumer pathologies; computing reality
Computing Providence: “…PKD had the best interpretation of the I Ching in his novel The Man in the High Castle, where the I Ching is a tool to ‘compute’ whether something has reality (or is reality).” Into the Psychozoic: “The Psychozoic dawns when we start to take responsibility for developing metis with the psychosphere; when…
WEEKEND LINKS: Eschatological Narratives; the Direction God Gave Us; Hyperstition
Ferociously, naively, obsessively, maniacally, explosively, fetishistically devoted pic.twitter.com/hoEryPQAHM — tundranaut (@tundranaut) June 21, 2024 Allow Artists to be Artists: “…art must be tethered to something more concrete than simple ‘honesty.’ A sea of free-floating atomized individuals speaking their truth does not a culture make. T.S. Eliot, in his treatise Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,…
𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: aestheticized violence, life as a work of art, undiluted trust
Aesthetic Violence: “The Left seeks to demonstrate that it can hurt you; this is what encourages lockstep compliance. If this claim is not contested, then the extant Leftist narrative prevails. This was the situation in 2020 when COVID locked much of the country in their homes and riots broke out in the wake of the death…
WEEKEND LINKS: Breaking Points, Nightmares, Lying
Aging is No Blessing: “Twentieth-century science doubled the life expectancy of Homo sapiens, but our health still declines at nearly the same age today as it did in 300 BC. We’ve learned to keep chronically ill adults alive, and made some welcome progress in maintaining health. But in 2024, we’re about as likely to develop the diseases of aging—like cancers—if…
ẅ̴͍é̷̞̲͐e̵̺̊͜ķ̷̥́̃e̸͎̣̼͂n̴̬̄d̸̡̈́ ̴̯̲̠̈́̾ĺ̸̯͎̯̈́i̷̻̼̚n̸̰̲̽̈̍k̴̖͆̊s̴̤̓̄: Pastoral Beauty; Entropy; Overkill
Beauty Is Not Just in the Eye of the Beholder: “It exists at the intersection of biological, cultural, and individual factors. It is much more malleable than we think. And what we find beautiful is broader than what is publicly expressed.” How Nature Became the Environment: “…while [Aldo] Leopold sought for balance between the lethal…
ШԐЄҠԐИD LЇЙԞS: Waiting for the Barbarians, Strange Gods, Death Masks
COUNTER-CURRENTS: “[Robert E. Lee]’s bronze head was ripped from his body, his face was peeled from his head in the form of a death mask, and then it was super-heated to the point where it glowed…” HOW TO MAKE ART in NORTH KOREA: “[Laibach] are very, very unashamedly flirting with totalitarian aesthetics and the philosopher…