MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: Uncategorized

  • Foster Wallace vs Burroughs/Pynchon

    Back in the day, before the American Empire went full-blown batshit crazy, Foster Wallace – bless his tortured soul – was all high and mighty, scoffing at Burroughs and Pynchon’s warnings about a fractured, paranoid future. He was yapping about some kind of manic-depressive hedonism that would outsmart Burroughs and Pynchon. They were prophets of doom, raving about a schizophrenic,…

  • You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

    Scratchy vinyl of reality spins a warped melody. You clutch a deuce of queens, heart sinking like a stone boot in a fever swamp. Chalk it up to rotten luck, another cosmic raspberry. But hold on, insectoid tendrils of possibility start to writhe. You think you’re beat, flatlined by misfortune. But the gremlins of fate, those bug-eyed tricksters with joy buzzer…

  • Value

    Value, man, that’s a roach motel on the information superhighway. A flickering neon sign in a concrete jungle, luring you in with promises of fulfillment. But step inside, and all you find are dead ends and hollow echoes. It’s a virus, see? Infects your circuits, your meat, your whole goddamn reality tunnel. Makes you chase…

  • Expanded Universes and Auteur Theory

    Sharp, you dig. Extended Universes are like psychic Skinner boxes, man. These sprawling narratives, with their intricate lore and endless franchises, pump out rewards – character arcs, epic battles, fan theories that bloom like digital peyote. We get hooked, wired right into the pleasure circuits. Deeper we delve, the more enmeshed we become in their…

  • 1977

    The California sun beat down like a cracked egg, 1977. The air, thick with dust and desperation, hung heavy over the smog-choked sprawl of Los Angeles. A psychic miasma, a thirst that went deeper than the parched earth. The California sun, a bleached-out skull in a cloudless sky, beat down mercilessly. 1977. The land, parched…

  • Fascism in America

    A Delirium Tremens of Manifest Destiny (in the vein of Burroughs, Deleuze & Lacan) The American Dream curdles into a nightmare of self-inflicted wounds. This ain’t no Eurotrash fascism, this is homegrown psychosis. Racism, a cancer burrowing deep, birthed on stolen soil, a symphony of genocide conducted by the pale hand. Militarism, a chrome-plated phallus…

  • Social Sciences

    Lee slammed the diner fork onto the chipped ceramic, a discordant clang echoing through the greasy spoon. Reality shimmered, the chrome coffee pot morphing into a bulbous insect head for a fleeting moment. He muttered to himself, voice hoarse from too many cigarettes and nights spent chasing ghosts. “Social sciences,” he rasped, the words tasting…

  • This Is Company Town, USA

    Man, the American Dream’s gone nova, folded in on itself like a malfunctioning piece of government surplus. We ain’t a nation, we’re a company town, a sprawling, neon-lit megalopolis called War Inc. Stars and stripes just another corporate logo, the bald eagle a mascot airbrushed on a goddamn bomber America. Land of the free, home…

  • Flesh Marketplaces

    Flesh marketplaces, neon throbbing, ideology the brand new roach motel. Lives tumble through, chewed up, spat out, addiction to narrative coherence. Flickering neon signs advertising BRAND NEW LIVES in lurid colors. Faces like mannequins, smooth and interchangeable, plastered with the latest VIRTUEWARE. Enter the Ideological Adjusters, in mirrored shades hustle through the streets, scalpels glinting…

  • American Addiction

    Buckle up, cowboys, for a word-gasoline joyride through the smoldering wreckage of American influence. Uncle Sam’s monocle hangs cracked, a relic from a bygone era of cultural imperialism. We’re past the point of reruns, baby, stuck on a fuzzy broadcast of a bygone dream. We’ve been coasting on fumes for decades, a chrome-plated Cadillac with…