Month: April 2021
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Marxism As Commodity
The proletariat screams, but their cries are muffled by the plush cushions of capitalist comfort. Marxism, once a revolutionary fist raised against the iron cage of capital, has become a trendy t-shirt slogan, a badge of rebellion ironically displayed on iPhones assembled in exploited factories. The critique of the bourgeoisie has been co-opted, repackaged, and…
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SIGN AND SYMBOL
MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 3 “Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.” Umberto Eco Art allows for…
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Selling Out
You dig? Selling out ain’t about empty shelves. It’s when the product pimps you, the consumer, to the real score. They don’t refine the sugar, they refine you. Dumber, twitchier versions of your former glorious self, slavering for the next dopamine drip, the next gaudy trinket. You dig, selling out ain’t about empty shelves. It’s…
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Leaving Flatland
“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”― William S. Burroughs Feels like leaving Flatland. In addition to the usual three spatial co-ordinates, these notes have an extra label, which can act like a co-ordinate along space time. By tracking all four co-ordinates together, we map out in real time how a music moves in four dimensions. When…
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Earthquake Weather
The sky’s the color of a week-old margarita, the kind with the mystery fruit chunks floating like half-digested dreams. It’s earthquake weather, folks. Can feel it in my bones, a low rumble like a bad batch of mescaline kicking in. The air hangs heavy, thick with the stench of something fundamental shifting beneath our feet.…
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All Rebels Sell Out And All Right Hand Men Defect
They all turn state’s evidence, man. Every last one of those righteous bastards who howled at the moon about revolution, about tearing down the chrome-plated temples of oppression. Give it a few years, a taste of air conditioning and a decent spread at the country club, and their righteous anger curdles into lukewarm gravy. They…
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Aliens in the Cave
In Werner Herzog’s documentary film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” he explores the discovery of the Chauvet Cave in France, which contains some of the oldest known cave paintings in the world, dating back over 30,000 years. Herzog draws a comparison between the experience of exploring the cave and the hypothetical discovery of extraterrestrial artifacts, in…
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Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu structure
The poem “Spring Dawn” by Meng Haoran is a wonderful example of the Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu structure, a narrative framework commonly used in various art forms including manga. Let’s break down how each of the four lines contributes to the poem’s structure: Ki (Introduction): This line sets the stage by introducing the speaker waking up late on…
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Transreal-CyberPunk
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A Solution in Search of a Problem
A chrome-plated roach scuttles across the cracked vinyl reality. It drags a spool of ticker tape, its message a writhing serpent of nonsensical code. This, chums, is the solution. A problem-eater, a glitch-gobbler born in the reeking underbelly of the machine. But the world spins on an axis of human misery, a jukebox of anxieties…