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…
Tag: God
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…
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…
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: 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…
MONDAY LINKS: Moving Through the Threshold of the Psyche; Inventing the Future; Disappearance of the Diminished Creed
Celluloid Caesar: “So, is Megalopolis a miraculous comeback to Coppola’s 1970s quality? No. Of course not. It’s absolutely as horrible as everybody says it is.” Make California Red Again: “The future is still invented in California and its influence on global culture remains critically important. California remains one of the most naturally beautiful places on Earth,…
A Cosmos Without God
Daniel Miller recently posted a piece on IM-1776 that’s deserving of high praise. It’s a provocative assessment of how the decades-long aftermath of World War II resulted in the gradual transformation of the West into something increasingly sinister. This transformation annihilates any posturing about the West (and perhaps America specifically) being an “anti-fascist” prototype. The…
Everywhere, Nowhere, and Now Here
Excerpted from Second Power Last month I attended the Nowhere Summit in Ecuador with several friends, old and new. Alex Petkas provides a good description of the event here: Technological, political, and societal change are happening at an alarming rate. There are huge, asymmetric opportunities for network-institution builders that simply did not exist 5 years…
MONDAY LINKS: Seraphim; Harmonic Interludes; and Aloneness
And Suddenly Things Change: “Everything that can break is breaking: stock markets, bond markets, the galaxy of derivatives — bets on this and that, which will never be honored. Banks are next. Gold and silver are hanging in there for dear life just now, because they’re actually worth something.” Biblically Accurate Angels — Christianity’s Undisputed…
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…