BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.6

The body is a finite resource, like the planet itself in a framework of industrial extractionism, moulded to time like a second-skin, petering out when and if time shrugs it off to adorn itself in a wave of newly minted skeins; ones without the bitterness of unmet expectations, hobbled dreams, sexual jealousies and the mortifying realisations surrounding youth's currency and it's inevitable recession. But are kids really born happy, spotless, and all the things we sunnily assume about those halflings which by society's measure are literally halflings; as in, by default they have half the rights of everybody else (even less in some countries). The irony is that we worship youthfulness aesthetically, but in it's embodiment only curtail and manage and otherwise belittle it's voice. We only want it available as a fashion, as a tonic, as a revitalising mantra when the gears of adult-life start grinding us down (which are only and ever the gears of society itself, never to be taken as subjective absolutes, as forgivable norms; if only we could let workaday drudgery segue into bomb-throwing radicality because honestly, that strikes me as a more rational response to this world than dejection and resignation and pandemic anxiety; rage ALWAYS seems like rationality to me in a wilfully fractious world). We want youth as a poster, as a psychological refrain to mentally fortify against the onset of decay, which is horribly misconstrued as virality even in a word, 'decay', too many negative connotations bundled up in this word like hurtling towards death (the only inevitability) was somehow shameful. At the very least, make very effort to stopper plug or plaster over the ravages of time, as they're declaratives of that thing we pathologically avoid here in the west; DEATH. So by an avoidance of Death we worship youth but gag it. Because in light of our warped phobia of death Youth is formed as a comparative and distinct virtue; and in this dyad is only acceptable as a utility for those who've passed through into the rapids of life's second act (or something)? Perhaps the more phobic we are of death the more violently we embrace success paradigms which offer a sort-of transcendence of death through the legacy of achievement. And then perhaps there's a relationship between successful individuals and their predations on young bodies, because they're in the realm of pathological death avoidance by pursuing legacy, which also puts them in the ideological mire of youth's (aesthetic) worship. So I guess fucking kids would just feel like a logical arrival point, right? Am I saying that success dialectically arrives people at kiddy-fiddling, as a symptom of a praxis motored by the transcendence of death? Yes. Yes I am saying that.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.5

I think it's important to keep on top of conspiracy theories so that you're better equiped to deflect them from legitimate discourse. In that spirit I've been reading David Icke for a few years now and while his theories of lizard-people and multi-dimensional energy prisons around the planet are fun, they're also telling of certain beliefs about the world that flat-earthers and anti-vaccers and anti-maskers all share in their respective crusades against the tyranny of empirical fact. Obviously this common element is the belief in secret societies influencing events, operating clandestinely while a veneer of fictitious democracy is maintained. Belief in secret societies is perhaps the founding gesture of all conspiracy theory, in as much as a conspiracy is defined as secret coordination behind the scenes. An orchestrated undermining of a mainstream narrative. A movement of synchronised insubordination. In this vein conspiracy isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm sure the authoritarian regimes of the Arab Spring felt conspired against when thousands of pro-democracy. protesters used social media to organise themselves effectively (though sadly the dictator they ousted was merely replaced by another). But David Icke is special in that he characterises governments who may or may not be inadequately executing their promise of democratic rule while merely performing democracy, meanwhile making any decision they please behind closed doors for which they're very rarely held to account; yes, Icke is special because he characterises the failings of a democratic system being incrementally undermined by deregulated market forces and burgeoning corporate super-entities, as reptilian otherworldly overlords. Creating a mythic, a fantastic narrative of vampiric powers versus the mired every-man, a sort of corporate surrealism which Grimes herself has pitched as her aesthetic of the moment (towards which Miss Anthropocene is a kind of thesis). In this way, seeing as it's the aesthetic synthesis of a myriad of timely variables and factors into a coherent (if conspicuously ridiculous) thread, Icke's meta-stories of alien espionage and dimensional saviours are on a par with Art with a Capital A; for me, anyway.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.4

All I wanna do at the moment is play Zelda. Hyrule, which if you don't know and which I feel like a total virgin for even writing about, is the mythical land in which Zelda is set. Thus far Zelda canon is pretty crazy, and there's a lot of time-jumping and multiple threads in a sort of quantum-manifold way, and which there's plenty of YouTube tutorials on so I won't go into so much detail; but from what I can gather (lol, changed my mind) Hyrule was created by three goddesses of creation, one of whom took an especial interest in Hyrule (Goddess Hylia) and bequeathed to it's people the Triforce as an artefact of immense power, the intended use of which was religious awe and general maintenance (or something). But the object through some founding kerfuffle was split into three pieces, one being 'absorbed' by Princess Zelda, a piece representing the sacred aspect of Wisdom; another being 'absorbed' by Link, Zelda's personal knight, specifically the piece with the sacred aspect of Courage; and a third being absorbed by the game's antagonist Ganon, a piece representing the sacred aspect of Knowledge. Why knowledge of all Triforce pieces is demonised in Ganon is ideologically questionable, but then what isn't these days right? At first I thought there was something Garden of Eden about the Knowledge piece of this fallen/wrecked artefact being 'bad', or at least suiting the villain more than the other pieces. Like, I got the feeling it was on par with the sort of propaganda which services centralised governing bodies, of the kind that both Old and New Testaments of the bible love so much (being a transparently religio-political tract, like most monotheisms actually). But then I remembered Buffy the Vampire Sayer season four and how that's about too much money/power tied up in the military/industrial complex, and how the paramilitary Initiative underneath Sunnydale University ends up being wielded by just one person because there's no collective by which her actions could be mediated and moderated; which is ultimately the role other people play in each of our lives. Thus the societal necessity of herd-living, going beyond whatever congenitally transmitted preferences we might have as a species. Society needs us to measure each other against a majority status, which in these hyper-individualistic times seems oppressive, villainous, but which actually (so long as the majority status generally favours democracy) safeguards against any singular individual or group hijacking the whole tiered edifice; like what happens on Buffy season four. In this way Ganon perhaps represents Knowledge centralised within a single individual with no external safeguards to ensure this information isn't wielded destructively. Seeing as entertainment media targeting any mainstream audience, but even more specifically with the younger ones (indoctrination?) tends towards the capitalist edicts of narcissistic curation of Self, and that within these entertainments any thought to the collective is only excusable under the moniker of immediate family or some mutual gain (seriously, watch a recent Disney movie), does Zelda's tentative caution against centralised power replicate popular culture's capitalist realism or does it resist it with something more minded to communistic peer-management? Certainly Ganon can be seen as the infernal endgame of individuals committing to the neoliberal-consumerist propagandising which enamours publics through carefully pruned/glossed medias, pitched as benign by being 'popular'. He is a literal neoliberal monstrosity, assimilating his environment through an increasing technological sophistication which only serves his purposes of domination and pitiless rule. But then what of Zelda and Link? What values do their respective pieces of the Triforce example; capitalist-individualistic, or socialist-holistic? Again, the setting is telling here which makes sense in a game that was released to debut the graphics and gameplay capability of Nintendo's newest gigs. In Breath of the Wild Hyrule is an embodied character, in as much as the Switch console is the first Nintendo platform allowing for richly detailed open world gaming. Traversing Hyrule as Link, meeting all it's different people's in the varied realms without bigotry or disdain (which technically as a royal personage, at least by association, you'd be at liberty to exhibit), engaging with this painterly world which reposnds to you with such intricately programmed interaticivity that it feels, miraculously, actually intuitive. Yes, being set so fantastically leads me to believe that maybe holistic is a better word for Zelda's potentially capital-resistant (vaguely creationist) premise. Not strictly socialist but that and more. But then in Zelda canon the three holders of the Triforce pieces have been battling each other for thousands of years, apparently being reborn over and over to do battle, never reaching a definitive conclusion but sustaining a shifting Hyrulian topography of light and darkness and everything in between. After all, perhaps the dynamic this tripartite theatre best exemplifies is the crisis-dynamic of capitalism itself, in as much as Ganon is the 'villain' which we could here read as crisis/recession/depression, infrequently allowed to surface as the prevailing sacred aspect (like the mechanical boom and bust of market forces). What's more, the goddess whose dominion the Triforce gleans power from presumably has the means to finish Ganon off once and for all (being a goddess), but so far hasn't done so, and we can only surmise actively and consistently chooses not to. What are we to make of this? That Ganon as a villainous devastator of the realm, using proxy Hylian power no less, is in fact a part of the goddesses plan? That the self-sustaining conflict between Zeld Link and Ganon spinning endlessly like a perfectly balanced gyroscope, is itself the divine plan (if there is one) and not an infernal anomaly in it that needs to be rectified? If this is the case then holism and socialism aren't necessarily bedfellows, and neither are holism and neoliberalism necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, perhaps most holism as it's 'popularly' located is frankly apoltiical and, like the Link-Ganon-Zelda trifector, resembles nothing more than an infinitely variable search-engine; or the rabid hypertextuality of the Internet itself. I don't know. Either way I just wanna live in Hyrule right now.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.3

There's so much construction happening at the moment and obviously that's a part of city living, but there's this voice in my head now which stands on recent globally catastrophic events (increasingly frequently this century) which is saying; 'why bother' It whispers this now behind everything I do. When I get out of bed in the morning, when I wash dishes or vacuum or make the bed or read a book, or boil water for another pot of coffee presumably seeking an energy boost for some project. Every little ritualised thing now in my day is underlaid by this creaking skeletal voice, rising up from this crypt of existential doubt and dread (only very recently furbished), and also boredom (of all things), and it's refreshingly consistent compared to everything else right now. Always and ever the same. Why. Fucking. Bother? Like everyone I live in the barely habitable gutter between hope and despair in a rat's nest of junk food and netflix. I see and hear people moving around me, doing things, striving for things, torn between their own motivations and the objective intel around them that the aspirations they had are mostly meaningless now, desires constructed from a world that suicided around April. The new world, which is really just a default setting of morbid uncertainty that those denuded of infrastructural accoutrements already know intimately, those unfortunates that Badiou tallies as the remainders in a less-than-universal equation of Human Rights; yeah, the new world is a winter-garden and those desires and dreams which have motored me and others towards an untenable horizon of affluence are summer strains that will barely seed, and if they manage to sprout at all will certainly wither and die before budding. Lol. Individualistic competition and it's ecologically damning cultures of environmental abstraction/extraction are meeting a wall. My optimism about capitalism's 'end' though is tentative just because it's proven time and again to be a fluidly adaptive beast that can assimilate it's poisons and reconstitute them as strength and merit; even in lethal doses. Whether or not the system regroups beyond this critical moment as a doubly insidious enslaving force (i.e. binding the poor to fixed precariousness and a spiritual shame of themselves despite their circumstances being mostly systemic; ignoring the red-flags of global warming and continuing plunder-for-progress as per the western fable of Growth with a Capital G), depends on these elections, depends on these next few years and whether the holders of the world's wealth are comfortable with both having kids and knowing that inherited wealth won't save them; that in fact the earth will be an arid unliveable ash-pile in the next few decades; that increased and lethally mutated virulence has been a long expected diagnostic of climate-change, that covid is a symptom of rising temperatures which scientists have a morbid hunch (more like an empirically supported forecast) is probably the merest tip of the iceberg. If you're thinking of having kids right now you may as well just take a loaded gun into the delivery room with you and the second it breaches pop a cap in it's head, because essentially going full term is the equivalent only with an arduous middle-man; by 'middle-man' meaning adolescence and if they're lucky a noirishly hardboiled adulthood (but definitely not middle-age lol). Bringing it back to the construction going on outside my window, driving a slow screw into both my temples with it's incessant industrial ambience; I understand it's election year and towards Christmas there's a lot more works going on because council needs to give the appearance of having sensibly spent it's grants etcetera, but Jesus fucking Christ that voice in my head screaming 'why bother why bother' is seeing cycle-lanes and newly smoothed curbs and wondering who the fuck is that for? Like, it's the veneer of planning for the future, of fortifying infrastructure in the most cosmetic capacity because honestly it's gonna get another generation's fair use and then bye-bye. And what's it like to be in high school right now? What does it feel like to be in the middle of formal-ish compulsory training for a world that imploded overnight, no less as a cumulative result of our hubris of which secondary curriculum is a complaisant buffer? Does it feel like those last few weeks of school before the summer holidays when you;re there but not really, when everybody's relaxed and half the school's bunking anyway and teachers might share your smoking spot without batting an eye. Is it like that but a whole year of it, with an additional doom-aesthetic? Are the kids okay or is it giving them ptsd? I guess only time will tell.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.2

I've been reading a lot of Nick Land recently and I know he's something of a controversy because he's been recruited by the alt-right (or his ideas have) since his 'ousting' from academia. But to be honest this is on brand for him. If you don't know Land was a contemporary of Mark Fisher, the Capitalist Realism guy, and if Land didn't invent accelerationism then he definitely mainstreamed it (or took it as mainstream as you can when you're a fringe-cultural-theorist-cum-contemporary-philosopher). By accelerationism I mean the idea that the only way to transcend capitalism is to unleash all of it's self-destructive potential by leaning radically into it's fundamentally suicidal tenets, deliberately exacerbating it's more incendiary systematising to trigger a cataclysm; from the ashes of which a surviving remainder (cyberpunks and occultists?) can create a new world. I first discovered the guy when I picked up a pretty-looking book at the library, recently published; a collection of the anonymous writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which Wikipedia will tell you existed as a cultural theorist collective at Warwick University in England from 1995 to 1997. Land's involvement in the CCRU was minimal, the Unit being more of an online forum for critical exploration of his thinking by alumnis and acolytes. What's even more interesting about the CCRU is how it's contributors have remained anonymous, tying in with Land's narrativising of late-stage disaster capitalism as a faceless force of profoundly omniscient/omnipotent and prophetic annihilation. Hyperstition he called it; the collective realisation of apocalyptic 'hunches' proliferated through a rabidly decentralised media, giving material force and self-fulfilling potential to mere superstition through the internet's connective ability to create swarms (plagues?). Like Land's, the CCRU writings fixate on the eschatological mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft and his subterranean horde of Elder Gods, nightmarish forces which lie dormant in a netherworld but which are slowly waking up. At the time Lovecraft's convention of cosmic horror was a xenophobic expression of his more personal horror at the prospect of immigration in a newly-industrialised (and decentralised) world. This more than anything probably obfuscates Land's work as covertly racist, making possible it's ideological high-jacking by violent conservatives and traditionalists. More than anything this cleaving to Lovecraftian mythology shows capitalism and it's myriad death-dealing flows as abject, as within Land's work capitalism establishes the conditions by which the Elder Gods (a legion lead by Lovecraft's own demon-god-king Cthulhu) finally awaken and unleash unholy retribution on the cultural hubris of the developed world. Even more interestingly, and further bolstering Land's defensive case, racism and the animosities it invokes within Land's eschatological schematic can be read as symptoms of capitalism's self-annihilating potential, in which case (maybe not so defensibly) he can be seen as (ironically?) querying Charles Manson's purge-like Helter Skelter, in which a race war would cleanse contemporary society of it's performative hypocrisies and in doing so hasten it's own end. Perhaps Charles Manson can be cited as the original accelerationist, and Nick Land merely a doe-eyed follower transplanting Helter Skelter's unwieldy motivations in an academic setting. What was infuriating for high-browed academia at Land's work was how it dipped into theatricality, posturing itself as conspiracy only to demonstrate the notion of hyperstitiality (prophetic self-fulfilment) that he cited within entropic capitalist systems. His work took theory and reflexively performed the socio-cultural mechanic it alleged to be critiquing/theorising, INSIDE the theorising. The result was a reimagining of theory as much more plastic, fluid, and dare I say fun, than academia has any right to be. Running wildly with an academic register and extending it's possibilities. By modelling his work as the pseudo-religious writings of a cult, stealing from such academically counterintuitive genres as science-fiction, cosmic horror, and the occult (specifically a cyber-punk Kabbalah), Land presented his idea of capitalist tendencies towards fanciful (apocalyptic/dystopian) world-making by DOING that world-making; so that his critique of capitalism's inherent barbarism retains an extra-dimensional didacticism which more conventionally executed critiques lack. It's a dismantling of a capitalist-mythic (perhaps a counter argument to Fisher's Capitalist Realism), by generating an equally insidious capitalist-mythic. But even without Land's dark whimsies, the Cthulhu Club (a fictitious cult which the CCRU monitor through their collected writings) is still operable as a metaphor for the inherent 'boom-and-bust' of capitalist systems. In a century of capitalist experimentation every 30-40 years produces a crisis, as if on a timer. In the 1930's it was the result of real-time production catching up with unbridled financial speculation (which let's be honest is still a fucking blight), in the 1970's it was the collapse of Fordism, and in the late 2000's it was the implosion of willy-nilly lending schemes around sub-prime mortgages. If anything, Land's schematising of the Elder Gods is as the mythic embodiments of capitalism's tendentious curve towards crisis. So far though, the crises experienced tend to be more Keynesian than Marxist. To explain; economist Maynard Keynes alluded to capitalism being sustainable with just enough fiscal strong-arms to bring us back from ruin at every systemic depression (which inevitably occurs when growth's winners hoard capital), seeing crisis as almost necessary for re-shuffling social relations and replicating market forces in a sturdier and more egalitarian form. Call it a programmed learning curve towards which the fluctuating unemployment levels of any society is a critical barometer; keep the little hand on green or yellow and we're sweet, let it drop below red and the Elder Gods awaken. Marx on the other hand denounced the economic necessity of cyclical crises and urged the working masses (whose labour hoarded capital undermines) to exacerbate the potential for radical rupture in each scheduled collapse. In this way, capitalism's systemic crux potentially affords the means towards substitutes and alternatives. In light of this you could say Karl Marx was the very first accelerationist, though cultural Marxists prefer a more bespoke version with community gardens and genderless divisions of immediately productive labour. It makes you wonder; has anyone even read Marx? I feel like Nick Land actually has; what's more, he presents a radical Marxist playbook which looks a lot like psychopathic scheming against the corporatised state by full-immersion in (satanic) capitalist flows. Sounds fun.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World, vol.1

I used to think cinematic mysteries approximated those of the void, the world, the impenetrability of matter itself, the incorrigible secretiveness of bodies remaining subjectively secretive despite how readily accessible an online MD. I used to think cinematic mysteries could bare similar shapes to the riddles of time and birth and death and the seeming performance of the air itself only pretending to be air. You know? But actually I feel now like I've seen behind the curtain and glimpsed all there is to glimpse, taken all the pleasure there can possibly be in deconstructing constructed riddles and mysteries. That are then honeyed with attractive players and gilded with expensive production values and borne aloft digitally enhanced screens; with popcorn and soda and neutral company. Is this everyone's theatre experience? So cinematic mysteries no longer feel satisfying to me, the convention of the entertainments available which I used to religiously pursue now seem so fucking stale so laughably faded and expected, dropped like palliatives like sedatives; I'm embarrassed to have ever thought storytelling (in this medium anyway) had radical potential. But then I guess that's my personal measure of value, if something has radical potential; a fluid measure seeing as capitalism is so adept at coopting the means of it's demise aimed by dissident hopefuls. Who more often than not cash in somewhere along the way because a comfortable life is a sunnier prospect than misery, poverty, and eventual defeat. No matter how principled. Maybe cinema is only ever as exciting as a mirror, so this dysphoria I'm experiencing could be symptomatic of some other seismic shift in my personality. Navel-gazing is perhaps a suitable cinematic accompaniment. It is after all about window dressing the capitalist individual's psyche, the Hollywood productions anyway. But it's naive to think that 'indie' cinema, whose budgets are still passed through gate-kept thresholds, whose content is still calculated through a metric of manageable (even complimentary) dissidence; it is naive to think, for example the recent prestige-kerfuffle of A24, that independent or alternative cinema which then pitches itself as such is anything but a variation in flavour, as opposed to being emblematic of the weakening of parasitical commerciality's hold on despairing publics. Despairing is right. We are systematically beat down by an ideological accessory to nature's existing cruelties which include the corruption of time, the inevitable loss of being temporally bound beings. Tethering to others in the harrowing flux, for comfort, according to our programming as social animals; only to have these tethers painstakingly un-braided over life's sublimely indifferent march towards oblivion. I used to think cinema was a refuge but now, having proven itself the oppressor through the insidious omnipotence of streaming, the toad nestled in the tree-roots has eaten every last spore and grub, every last possibility of magical renewal of itself, of fresh saplings; gone. Why do I even care so much that cinema seems dead to me; not that it objectively is, just that I'm having a momentary loss of romantic feeling for it. A romantic feeling which for me has historically been very strong. I think it's a sign. From my wider self, from the version of myself that uses gut-feelings and cock-twitches to communicate to my shallower, more limited conscious self; the single-hemispheric management department, the vantage which collates objective materials only and neglects in it's rigid equation all the penumbric deities like hunches and nightmares and excessive horniness. I personally believe there are messages from the divine in excessive horniness. But as a gay man I might be biased. What I suspect is happening is that my higher self is registering that the world is winding down, and cinema being the mirror or lens through which I'd cohere my environment into a legible 'world', now seems defeated by a surplus of information, by a maelstrom of pressurised data. Cinema as an external hard-drive, as a cognitive extender, has reached maximum capacity (personally speaking). Of course, there's always the fact that cinema no longer functions as centrally as it once did in terms of dictating/manufacturing reality. Even before the hyper-connectivity of the Internet and normalcy of personal computers, and way before smart phones, the cinema screen and it's dominant diegesis shifted from ideological strong-arm to a richer discursivity, an increased number of voices producing a greater variety of images/stories/affects towards dynamism, plurality, and other words people use when they want to critically justify watching semi-pornographic 'art'. But cinema's specific diegesis no longer monopolises cultural production in the universally influential way it did for the latter part of the twentieth century. T.v. does that shit now. You'd think approaching ruin as we are on a global scale that television, long keeper of temporal flows what with classical forms being dictated on a nationally broadcast schedule (now freed in a soupy internet time-flux from which viewers can conjure and shelve entertainments at will); yeah, you would think that a medium so wedded to temporal regulation, so enamoured of the 'normalcy' of the five-day work week and it's vetting, would suddenly be exploding with apocalyptic thematics. But it's doing the opposite. I only see shows about life sans pandemic. They are unbelievable at this point. The normal lives they depict are even more fantastical now than they were a year ago; not because of their tailored bodies or effortlessly maintained inner-city apartments or polished quippy dialogue, but because the presumed backdrop of all of these whimsical players and their interactions just imploded. 'Normal life', from this side of 2020? What a fucking fairytale.