Liars are the greatest US(ish) group of the C21st & it was a joy to write about Drum’s Not Dead for its 20th birthday, a record of beauty and violence that explores the mania of the human mind shifting between states of anxiety and creativity. On @thequietus.com:
thequietus.com/opinion-and-...
"I'm not in denial, I'm in open rebellion" damn that quote goes hard
Trypanohyncha ocellus & the Xenomorph are the Pinky & the Brain we deserve
Not really a surprise that machine learning (not AI) is having problems when faced with complexity
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Copypaste
Randomly decided to watch Star Wars in Japanese. Seemed appropriate given how much of an influence Kurosawa was on the films.
Did not disappoint.
Because life was bereft of meaningful experience before AI, thank goodness 😂
Going to start calling it ‘Assisted Intelligence’
Owen Hatherley on the Manic Street Preachers:
‘With any teenage obsession, you can usually date the exact moment the spell is broken…’
newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
Lichens by Clark Ashton Smith Pale-green and black and bronze and grey, In broken arabesque and foliate star, They cling, so closely grown Upon the sombr stone, That one would deem they are As much a part thereof as teh design Is part of some old porcelain from Cathay— Some vase of Tang or Ming, Patterned with blossoms intricate and fine And leaves of alien spring Exempt forever from the year's decay. Old, too, they seem, and with the stones coevalv Fraught with the stillness and the mystery Of time not known to man; Like runes and pentacles of a primeval Unhuman wizardry That none may use nor scan.
"humans are by nature political animals, whose freedom can only be realized and maintained through collective self-determination—or what we call democracy. Communism is the aspiration to take this democratic ideal as seriously as possible and is, as such, a vision of freedom" @sorenmau.bsky.social
Photo of a wall from a sidewalk plastered with several repeating memes - the Shiba Inu doge dog with caption "it's not the dept of government efficiency", picture of dollar bills with "it's lining their pockets", and several of Musk and Trump saying "it's not budgeting" and "theyre not saving our tax dollars". One with a cracked egg saying "it's not about lowering your costs"
seen in the Petworth neighborhood of DC
“Modernism came before the Atom bomb; Brutalism came after, inspiring monuments with the will to endure of a nuclear fallout shelter.”
#whitneymallet
open.substack.com/pub/whitneym...
I really enjoyed Anora, hysterically funny. But Sam is spot on in identifying the uneasiness and troubling qualities underlying the not quite Cinderella story of Ani. There’s something in the final scene that doesn’t quite sit for me with ‘the obvious reading’, that there’s another way to read it.
Ahead of the Oscars and in general awards hype season is worth revisiting this from @helmetgirl.bsky.social on Anora by Sean Baker
lareviewofbooks.org/article/unde...
Now we just need Rowdy Roddy Piper to come save the day with his magic sunglasses
That old analytic / continental philosophy chestnut
a message from ubuweb, a digital archive of text, film, television, and avant garde media that says: “UbuWeb Founded 1996 February 1, 2025 A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It's now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.”
ubuweb remains one of the great inspirations in my life and work. their curatorial return is such great news.
the work of trustworthy knowledge sharing takes many forms and we can’t be afraid when the method must change. to make cultural touchstones visible is to change cultural imagination.
DEI ex machina
@elkeschwarz.bsky.social lol
Great conversation between @paglen.studio and @joshuacitarella.bsky.social Paglen defining psyops capitalism: “I’m going to manipulate your mind and extract value from you”
University of Chicago Press, The Iliad of Homer, Lattimore translation… printed in Croydon 🤷🏻♂️
Benjamin Noys: “Can we think any other moment than the present moment? ... If we can only think the present moment, that moment is now a prison. We live in a perpetual present that constantly mutates but never changes.”
“…when we consider the degree to which the technology of writing contributed to our linear understanding of time, why wouldn’t this age of neural media enable us to experience time differently? Why wouldn’t it enable us to experience a new level of “the real”? Perhaps it already has.”
“What if a generation of writers grew up with nobody to criticize them?”
And, re the birth of the book review: “‘A crowd of literary men found employment in writing about books rather than in writing them… and the literature of Criticism became a power.’ This power was instantly corrupting.”
I’m with Kara: “cinematic pastiche meets high-concept movie pitch to Hollywood executives, a stunning Human Centipede of art and commerce”
