STATEMENT OF INTENT
This is me writing about living through the end times.
Therefore it could have been written at any point in history.
I hope from wherever you’re reading this that you’re at safety or at least got a few ideas on how to get out of trouble. My best wishes to you.
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PAIN IS THE FUEL WE BURN ON THE JOURNEY.
WEAPONIZE DISTRACTION
SURRENDER.
PREPARATION ABOVE HOPES
BREATHE.
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I’ve been throwing sketches away.
I know it’s bad luck for some writers: what seems like shit is just fertile soil that needs to be tapped into, rewritten, oriented, re-focused.
I just don’t think what I wrote was good or necessary.
It’s a big word: necessary.
I think (not in any complex ways, mostly brain-rumbles) a lot about necessity these days.
About time running out, about projects i won’t get to finish and the ones i haven’t started that I need to get to.
I think about that quote from Mann’s Heat :
“don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
It’s disgusting how enticed I feel at this idea.
Being able to evade the world completely, running out of this one and into another, turning away from your life.
As a runaway myself, I know there’s no escape from what has hurt you, what touches you is in you. Even with very potent boundaries, one can’t escape contamination; all that matters is what effect such contamination has on the [host].
The interesting part of Deniro’s advice is “willing”.
His advice is specifically framed around agency, not necessity. It’s not that you’ll need to do things, it’s that you will need to be willing to do things. You ought/need to have will-power, that’s the core of the advice : will-power over your life, your belongings, you need to have the will to erase the cluster that surrounds your “self” in order for that self to survive what life will throw at it. (of course within the context of the movie, that self is the money making self, the criminal escaping justice self, it’s the self as a vessel for greed.)
I’ve stopped fantasizing about will-power a while ago, maybe because its absence in my personal life pushed me to find other things to rely on. I make schedules and plans instead, I draw out maps for what I need to explore and sometimes it’s successful.
I don’t think I can do anything I haven’t planned in advance, even breakfast, but I always doubt these plans, either too vague or too precise they let the door open for hopes or fears, both of which are the ruin of any act of mindless action. One starts to hope too much and disappointment will destroy them, one starts to fear potential futures and the Will of Distraction will take a hold of them, One becomes intelligent in stupid ways, finding clever justifications for procrastination, rationalising bad habits through ideological pathways and leakages, finding great and convoluted reasons to not do what they should be doing to have the life they need.
Even me writing this is an act of procrastination, weaponization of fear and distraction as a means of reaching out to unknown people out there.
If you’re going to cry at the sky, make it a song, right ?
If you’re going to tear at the grass with anger, make it an arable soil,
if you’re going to kill desperately, kill a billionaire, yada yada yada.
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I’ve seen terrible things and I think you should too :
“the long way means more die the long way means we forget the long way means loss”
(via cyborgmemoirs, reminded to me by the current too-much-ness of everything)
http://www.thegreatunfriending.com/handbook/(via TxgenMeyer who’s doing great things of her own)
“People talk about fight or flight, they don’t talk about freeze”
(via themselves, the realest)
(can’t remember who recommended it but i am recommending it right now)
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Rant-corner aka where i alienate half of my potential readership with my stupid ramblings :
Capeshit/superproducts
™ : In 1941, the company that would become known as DC comics (National Comics Publications/NCP) filed a lawsuit against Fawcett Comics over the appearance and attributes of Captain Marvel,
alleging that it was a copy of NCP’s property : Superman
The lawsuit went to trial in 1948 and by that time Superman had become different, its socialist leanings smoothed out by the need for more fantastical adversaries than slumlords, abusive husbands or fascist dictators. (At about the same time the two creators-Siegel and Shuster-of the character filed a lawsuit against their employers for ownership of Superman as well as several stolen/unpaid character and story ideas.)
From 1938 to 1948 Superman has gone from leaping over buildings to flying above cities, from deflecting bullets to tearing open titanium, stronger, faster, bolder, with new found x-ray vision and the ability to withstand atomic radiation.
The messianic protector from another world becomes as a god on earth about at the same time as a rival god-patreoned superhero product is under pressure to cease publication.
Captain Marvel gets on the silver screen before Superman, and its product generates sub-products at a faster rate : Captain Marvel has Captain Marvel Jr. and Miss Marvel and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, all aimed at sub-markets of the superhero comics market : Funny Animal comics, “Young girl” comics and Young Adult comics. The Superman brand can barely keep up with its lonely Superboy and an animation serie dedicated to the main hero.
In 1951, the court ruled in favor of NCP and Fawcett comics had to pay consequential sum of damages as well as stopping publication of its flagbearer character.
The twenty years that followed saw comics go through its share of legal battles but eventually DC comics licensed the rights to all of Fawcett’s properties and in 1973 :
Anyone who doesn’t have faith in the comics industry can look at this and shrug (I know I do) and all of this development would be dramatic and ironic if the narrative wasn’t solely centered on capital’s movement, of course there are countless horrible stories in and around the comics industry : all the nameless penniless colorists, all the failed artists who never got their share, all the labor exploited and never paid for, after all it’s an american industry, suffering is not rust on the side of the machine, it’s the oil in the gears.
I guess what I wanna pin down is that Superhero products exist and function as an autocannibalistic continuum, ouroborosing itself continually: shitting and eating its own body, only ever so slightly ingesting/internalising elements of the outside so as to change its shape a bit : its movement stays the same, its function stays the same and eventually who it touches, and why, stays the same too.
The function of a superhero product is to sell more superhero products.
Fans know this. Because since the 1960s when Stan Lee was slipping references to spiderman beating up kraven in a story where spiderman was beating up the vulture as a way of saying “better keep up with our product because it sure ain’t gonna wait for you” :
Engineering brand fidelity with brio, comics doesn’t give a damn if you’ve stopped reading mid-run, it’ll go on, the snake’s gotta eat.
Now the movie adaptations are doing the same : Have you watched all the MCU’s recommended viewing before watching the latest opus? too bad, let’s hope you can keep up with this story anyway.
The difference being that comics operate on a month to month temporality, movies require years to be released. They have to either last in the mind of the public or be released in a serie so as to occupy the audience long enough for the company to release others, parallel to that are sales of derived products: toys, figurines, video-games…
Each movie a trailer for the next, slipping references here and there, narrative interconnectivity becomes the metric for quality over actual storytelling and moral discussion, exploring somebody’s life story is only a vessel for empty spectacle, what matters is if you were entertained, not if you were touched, not how you were touched.
They are rollercoasters. They are amusement parks, that’s ok, we all want to let go sometimes and watch a simple, easy movie. That’s ok. That’s normal.
The problem is not their presence, it’s their hegemony.
This is not the result of bad business practices, there’s no such thing as bad business practices, because the only viable incentive of business practices is the accumulation of capital, for these conglomerates a bad business practice would be allowing complex, difficult to market art to exist alongside easy movies. Exits need to be closed-off.
This is not a bug, nor a problem, this is a feature of capitalism. It’s a feature of treating culture as a commodity, what sells will sell more and if it doesn’t then one has to eliminate all other options so as to make what sells into what will sell more.
The product finds the way to exist within a continuum that requires it to sell more and more, by creating sub-products, by exploiting brand-fidelity, by making customers into unpaid workers : fandom culture is one big recruitment pool for marketing departments, why waste your time making ads when you can simply hint at a gay ship in a blockbuster movie and ask the fandom public what it thinks of it, watch social media numbers pile up as people fight over who’s more likely to end up with who, and that’s without getting into otherkin drama(we won’t).
The only thing that emerges out of it is the company and its product.
A product that is soul-less, not because there was no person behind it but because a corporation’s hold over its creation means that the (interchangeable) creators’ intent will always be re-oriented so as to serve one function: to sell.
That’s not to say they’re useless or that you can never learn from them, just that you won’t find anything more complex than puerile appeals to flat emotionality, neoliberal propaganda or sometimes reactionary sensibilities.
Stories that are empty enough that you can stare and fill them with what you need and want, all surface and no depths, a bad mirror, “parallels” are invoked by some as proof of artistry when these parallels are in fact just an exemple of formulaic, empty storytelling and stylistic cowardice (it’s not a parallel if it’s just a repetition of what’s been done before).
Let’s create something safe and sound: a superhero movie where the good guy beats up the bad guy and maybe there’ll be a moral about talking to your dad at the end. Let’s make paste, interchangeable, fungible, different product same formula always and ever, let’s make stories with menial differences to touch different markets but let’s keep the same intent, function, model and goal. Let’s also make stories that are advertisements for the next story, let’s make a movie that tells you that the worst/best is still oncoming.
Edging a mass audience into submission.
To me, Superhero movies are fast food: easy to order and digest, i’ll think about them once in a while but you can really just eat them while doing something else and to be honest they leave me unfulfilled. (also they rely on invisibilised labor and inhumane treatment of staff under the guise of familiarity, a façade of humanity from a business that only cares about your money.)
People have mistaken the things that bind superheroes as archetypes to what makes them interesting : the internal technicalities and the circular motion of superhero temporality, the eat-shit-repeat cycle, the continuity-masturbation that turns to collective self-flagellation when a fanboy notices a mistake, an error, a technicality and is shut out by the let-people-enjoy-things crowd.
No wonder the best superhero stories are always the ones that try to do away with conventions, what’s called by fans and creators of the form deconstructions and reconstructions (no link to Derrida).
Even then, Watchmen is about comics, not about superheroes; Planetary is about pulp, not superheroes; Kurt Busiek’s Astrocity can be said to be about the interstitials of habitual superhero stories: the personal moments of living in a world where you could be dating a superhero or where someone you know might be killed in a crisis. It’s about the ordinary folks living in an extraordinary world, but is it about superheroes?
Is there anything to be done with superheroics?
I don’t know I’m just ranting.
addendum : the marvel method was the fordification of the comics creation process and allowed stan lee, in the fog of the invisibilisation of labor, to make himself up to be a genius author-creator when he really just had a bombastic personality and good marketing ability for himself.
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Listening to :
Moor Mother - Analog fluids of sonic black holes
Godspeed You Black Emperor - ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!
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I’ve become more than I’ve done, this decade. This is the decade where I left things behind and they came back to reach inside, this is the decade when I’ve built tools and mecanisms to try and be with others rather than on my own. I’m still building.
I’ve become and I’ve escaped a lot, I’ve started things and plans and I guess I’m afraid it’s all for nothing, after having been without anything solid to rest on for a while now.
I used to float through that Robert Anton Wilson-ian agnostic cool of whatever happens happens, it’s easy to stop caring if you’re at remote view, if you’re not really in your body and mind. It’s harder to admit that you’re not separate from what’s going on, there’s value in that cool but it should be a tool, not a lifestyle.
It’s easy to think change is either good or bad or just complicated and it’s none of your business anyway when you’re not the one taking part in it. It’s all so easy when you’re not rooted in something and just floating from here to there, keeping your agnostic cool as your consciousness phases through levels of discourse.
I’m not making predictions for 2020, I’m making plans. Because predictions are recipes for failure. Even when they fail or are outran, plans can be rewritten on the fly, plans can be discarded, that’s why i’m making several.
Remember that in the end we’re the only certain thing we have, and even that is a bit flimsy so keep the keepers around and don’t pay attention to the useless voices. Work and plan, don’t believe hopes or fears, just look at what is and plan for what could be.
Also, hydrate.