Constant and Uniform Movement Unknown
So, where were we since the last time we saw each other? Right, the rapture and shit like that.... Back in October, in Flashes From Everywhere, we dove into this, and here it is being put into motion since the beginning of the month (perhaps?).
On the latest Stereolab single, we now have an instrumental version of Flashes from Eveywhere, with the new title Flashes in the Afternoon. Once more, this made me think of Maya Deren's film Meshes of the Afternoon, so I thought it could be fun if we tried to have our own little Dark Side of the Moon over The Wizard of Oz experience, by stiching them together and completed by Aerial Troubles, the instrumental version exclusively available on the Japanese version of Stereolab's Instant Holograms On Metal Film as bonus track, and lastly by a third instrumental from their single Spool of Collusion titled Forensic Itch.
Old films... I've mentioned this last May on this blog. The events in Fritz Lang's Metropolis are taking place this year, in 2026.
And the 1984 Giorgio Moroder version that Gérard Legrand talked about during that radio program. (Consult the Anta... Odeli... Uta... (On répète 23 fois) post about that.)
1984. Of course, George Orwell (have you seen Raoul Peck's 2+2=5 ?), but also the West Coast Beat & Beyond or the Zulu Nation...
But the late 1970s and the 1980s brought us movie franchises. I've mentioned it in my movie overview in October (If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream, Pt. 1), and we need to examine a particular timeline by going back to 1987 and the movie Predator. As will be demonstrated in the following video, Predators go back a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
They are not the only creatures linking up with Alien. Ridley Scott has said it, Alien is part of the same cinematic universe as Blade Runner (a title taken from William S. Burroughs). The first chapter of this story was supposed to have taken place in 2019.
For completion's sake, there's this anime series (and a few novels from the late 1990s and a bunch of more recent comic books series after the release of the BR 2049 movie in 2017) expanding the lore but nothing much else of genuine substance.
Here's the short films compiled into one video. We start with the Blackout event, which took place in 2022. Black Lotus will take place in 2032, Nexus Dawn will be in 2036 and Nowhere to Run in 2048...
... leading almost directly to these events:
Many more years after what takes place in Predator and in Blade Runner, here's what's to come:
Next, let's poke the beast some more.
And finally, back to the very beginning of this blog with the Roman suckling.
If you ask me to choose which era interests me the most in that timeline, I could say that stopping everything in 2049 would have been amply satisfying. Sadly, I have to report instead on what's hiding underneath the mania, underneath the ego's delusions and underneath the fear fueling this present universe.
(Those tiny rubber duckies in front of our married couple are everything)
Yeah, that Neue Galerie situation. First of, neue does mean new. Think about the day you'll learn that the german word for "ice" is "eis" (same pronunciation). Are you as surprised as I was when I heard about that Kurt Schwitters painting Friends Ventures LLC deal?
That's right. The Ursonate-performing, Merz-art-producing, Hannover-residing Dadaist & constructivist Kurt Schwitters.
Before the days when art patrons became these painting collectors, treating any purchase as mere money asset to store in duty-free vaults in tax-exempt zones very similar to the offshore accounts concept (making all that money value out of reach for any government to tax it, if you need it spelt out for you), before those days you had people like the Noailles, but even people like the Arensberg or Peggy Guggenheim who were knowingly funding revolutionary artists, and by that I'm not refering to artists who revolutionized art.
(And yes, since 2021, some artists have been animating a neuer version of the FIARI)
Should I even say something about the goon chair, Mr. Perlman (before the name was butchered and turned into a gemstone to build that Perlman Place district in Baltimore generations ago...) alluded to? Alright, let's go... Have you watched the 1996 movie Conspirators of Pleasure by our friend Jan Svankmajer? Well, he had already written about it in the chapter L'avenir est aux machines ipsatrices (The future belongs to the ipsatrice devices) of the 1976 collective publication La Civilisation surréaliste. If not interested in such a machine, there's always going fishing. Do people still even go fishing, or take an in-between light snack during commercials or do we have to constantly be plugged in with the dials set on blast?
But I get it, resisting the temptation of a wonderful fish (although probably not named Torres this time...) requires fortitude, so strapping people to goon chairs just might become a matter of national security.
The capacity for jerking off is just so widespread throughout humanity that... Well, you just love to see it.
But also... Here's a warning to fishermen: It takes more than your cherished bucket hat to win once pitted against a bad rabbit. You could end up not being as lucky.
This month, we are going to get an exposé on White Christian Nationalism by CNN. More and more people are beginning to get vocal about that situation on mainstream and on social media, such as a person like Kat Abughazaleh now running for Congress in Chicago. After what EIS (Enraged Insecure Sycophants) did there with their Midway Blitz (and later in Minneapolis over some allegations of so-called scams by Somalian day care centers - shoutout to our friend Sa'ad Hassan of the Ottawa Surrealist Group) she just might win. But it's fun when you have Christians responding to these Christian Nationalists. Remember, that CNN documentary is not even available yet and the backlash over it already breaths.
So I guess now is the time to truly get into that GamerGate shit. Here are the basics.
It was so simple to protect gamers rights. You just needed to leave a trail of Reese's Pieces back into the pornfield. You know the saying: "If you build it, they will ..."
So, let's go watch behind the scene. This is going back to the beginning of this blog with the JPEG Raw album by Gary Clark Jr. with this video directed by Martine Syms. She directed two music videos for this album and we have seen her elsewhere reading the Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.
By the way, if you also have watched Queen & Slim, we are probably thinking about the same thing after watching that previous music video.
I mention this because we saw and know that Thomas Paul Anderson directed several music videos and approached Junglepussy because he loved her music and wanted to work with her for his latest movie. Our beloved Signifier had a hard time digesting this portrayal of Black revolutionary women (and even more simply Black women in general). Since, many more online commentators and critics have expressed a similar response to the movie, and obviously some even labeled it "A White Men Wet Dream of Black Women Fetishization" and such and such and how problematic the whole thing was. And it also caused controversy when Teyana Taylor was awarded the Golden Globe for best supporting actress.
Obviously, the fact that the movie came out the day Assata Shakur died. Now, come on. To throw out there the idea that this could have been coordinated at all is ludicrous. That said, regarding Junglepussy's rant at the bank. Let's engage about its revolutionary potential. Do you remember about summer 2020, when in August Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released the song WAP (Wet Ass Pussy)? This song was pretty much declared a cultural landmark, a bonafide "Female Empowerment Anthem" and so on. What happens if a lesser rapper than Cardi B or Megan (lesser as in less commercially successful and virtually invisible) has been rapping about the same kind of thing since 2013? If she perceives herself as a revolutionary (as many would, I would guess) with that type of rap material, well, isn't it part of her revolution and how she portrays herself, the persona she engages with? Wasn't WAP also celebrated for shocking prudes within a sociopolitical context too? How would Marx talk about a revolutionary like Junglepussy? He would talk about her as a lumpenproletariat. The bottom of the barrel. As a person like her decided to make a speech, the only person who could have potentially stopped her was preemptively killed by an upper class revolutionary, in this specific case it was by Perfidia Beverly Hills (remember who her parents are in that movie, I'm just highlighting all these ascribed social status). Oh shit, are we entering the allegorical realm? Or should we really want to avoid examining the social ranks of these three characters during that scene? If we are going to analyse this movie any further basing ourselves on which Black person did what to which other Black person and so on, or favorize what a Black woman should have been over the movie's terms, well yes, we are starting on the wrong foot. Let's see what actually took place during that specific scene:
I fully acknowledge the discomfort and fear F.D Signifier has with this movie. What if the movie is misinterpreted and fuels more _____ towards Black women (and all)? Because yes, the movie is quite hermetic and fails horribly on that regard alone, and it's not the only aspect under which it fails but you can't just let difficulties (as media analysis, for instance) render you powerless as a viewer and thus scared shitless about what other viewers might think, or worse, how the movie could be used for malicious purposes. If we were just to observe the nature of the relationship between Colonel Lockjaw and Perfidia, for instance, during that movie, the repression didn't really cared a whole deal about the lumpenproletariat or about the bomber guy. What it wanted was to fuck the Black upper class everyone is relying on and moves with. To fuck it out of perceived potential threat (she's not quite that hated Perfidious Hollywood, but not that far....). But eventually that Black upper class's pussy didn't pop anymore. It never did, and finally moved away. But the repression contributed to give life to a hidden daughter and if it wants to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, the repression has to make sure this daughter never comes to the surface. Who knows what she herself might give birth to someday?
I will not address every details in that movie (because there are truly too many) but I do understand that this ick towards the movie is really just fear (just try to meme anything Perfidia did for another shitty "Gotcha moment" effectively). Among what the movie does really well is mocking the White Supremacists characters and torture and mutilate that symbol of repression throughout, and it's a genuine joy to watch. All the comedic portions of that movie are on point. But it's certainly not a particularly good movie if you are looking for "revolutionary elements". F.D was perfectly right about it being a family drama, ambitiously trying to create something unique by stitching together many shapes and mixing many different flavors and it didn't work that well in the end from a topical point of view, but expressly because it's a very idiosyncratic, chronological survey of most of the political shifts since the beginning of Obama's first term and what should have been but wasn't, with the clocks having been reset back to the beginning for a second shot at it right now. Where's the revolution, one might ask? Other than that, it's a fun watch for all the cinematography aspects, for tension building and viewer engagement and so on and so on.
Wasn't One Battle After Another a music video movie for the era of people looking for signifiers they can chew on until the next content drops? A bunch of singular bars nicely tied into a bow, pretty much like many recent popular rap song? (Too harsh?) You pretty much talked about it yourself all along, F.D. You did a video on Beyonce about yapping on social media platforms. You talked about rap music a lot and how it has changed and how you still hope it says something. And you also dove into this:
What? Oh yeah, what did I mean about Perfidious Hollywood... You didn't really think Paul Thomas Anderson had any idea to make a movie about a character inspired by Assata Shakur and about how much he drools of desire over Black women, did you?
While were here, might as well use this about what is currently going on in Venezuela and Iran with this other Peace Prize recipient.
So... I know, I said there wouldn't be anymore late night talk-show on this blog, but Stephen Colbert having been fired and the show ending in May, might as well enjoy it while it last.
Bye the way, thanks to Michael Burns, too... from the defunct Department of Wisecrack.
So, philosophy... ideologies... What have we learned about how the people during that GamerGate event operated? What did we learn about their methodology to transfer information concerning the big issue? It pretty much was covertly flinging sticky boogers across the room and if it caught you on the arm, you would look at it and get infuriated at whatever you were told flung that at you. It wasn't very much than that, as far as tool goes, was it? An approach to understand the world's evil machinations based on immediate reaction after a very brief low-data input and just escalate the fury from there.
Wait. Are you telling me that all Peacemaker was accomplishing by killing all these people he labeled as peace breakers was like obstinately working 24 hours a day with a bunch of bottles of glue at fixing cracks on a structure that was being transformed by outside forces trying to change it? Acting as foolishly as a guy thinking that by dropping bombs on any country will fundamentally change the ways of the people living there, "forever".
How one-dimensional of him?
I have written elsewhere on this blog that I have never been a gamer, and to be short, I don't have any buying power to begin with. I do own not very much (and what I can get my hands on has been because I wear that pirate hat).
Now, let's go back to 1999. This was a book that made quite a lot of noise at the time of its publication. Everybody was talking about it. I didn't pay attention at the time, finding suspicious anything that reached a certain notoriety. I was quick to put things into the category of unserious, surface level pop bullshit and don't mind about it whatsoever. And it's even also only fairly recently that I've learned that Naomi was born in Montréal. In 1999, I was already allergic to brands and lifestyles since I had left highschool in the mid-1990s. And I still am to this day. I have briefly alluded to it, but it's only during the COVID-19 lockdown that I started purposefully examining mainstream culture more closely.
For the next book, I still haven't read it, but I do have it and it's on the list (can't say which position it holds in the pile). As a teen, I had worked for a while on a story. Set in the future, people were living in huge buildings where they could have access to every books, music records, films and knowledge available, but you didn't stay there all the time. It was mandatory for everyone to work on collectivized food production for a year (and since you don't farm all day, any other maintenance and sanitary tasks were also done), the next year you had to drive or conduct electric vehicules and carry around every travelers you might find on your way who asked you to, because the third year you had to go on a quest around the world to gather random objects from a list and create all sorts of connections and experiences with other people during that journey, and once you had assembled the bundle was when you could spent three years in one of those huge buildings, where yourself could contribute at building knowledge and culture from that point on. Competing or stealing was made redundant, nobody had the same list or looked for the same items and it was a fully cooperative civilization. Anyway...
And now, let's travel to Toronto and meet this guy.
Karen Hao, I don't know where she's from. What I know is that she has worked everywhere. As for the comedian Hasan Minhaj, I watched the first season of the Patriot Act, and I ignore why I didn't continue.
That conversation was interesting, and that Karen mentions Dune is funny. After Denis Villeneuve finished with the Replicants of Blade Runner 2049, he directed Dune. Part One came out the day of my 44th anniversary in 2021, directly on streaming platforms. I was able to find it, so I downloaded it and that's how I celebrated my birthday. Part Three is coming out this December, but years before David Lynch did his version, Alejandro Jodorowsky came first at trying to realize a Dune movie adaptation. He had hired H.R. Giger to design the Harkonnen world and following the failure at financing that movie project, Giger's designs were repurposed by Ridley Scott to make the xenomorph creatures for Alien.
What's a fair trade anyway, Hasan? The Richelieu valley is in the Montérégie region, exactly in the middle between Montréal and Saint-Hyacinthe. Saint-Hyacinthe is home for one of the Institut de technologie agroalimentaire du Québec (ITAQ)'s two campuses. This is the top industry in the region. It was very common to meet seasonal workers, some from South American countries of course, but personally I mostly spoke with workers from the West Indies, such as Barbados or Saint Vincent.
The AI English auto-translation if definitely not nearly enough properly trained for Québécois accent and especially for the expressions, you know... but hopefully you will be able to follow regardless. If you are hopeless, here's complementary information from a film festival in Milton, Ontario.
Claims that corporate profit is a national security matter should suffice to tell you everything you need to know about the type of public responsibility being advocated for. "Our public responsibility has been about armed defense for a while, and we prioritize wealth growth to finance it". You are coercing your Department of Health to conceive its public responsibility to align itself with that threat instead of well-being. To regard your Health agenda as necessiting a component of "national security" leaves public health in the hands of the individuals. I can't even apply any synthesis to that whole Hegelian dialectics thing, after the thesis has been set and the anti-thesis thought about, we are thrown into stupidity.
Makes you wish for the good old days, when the founders signed that famous declaration in Philadelphia and political life wasn't divided by that frustrating two-party system...
History is fun. When do you open tabs about the Locofocos?
What was that famous Jessica Simpson quote again? Would you like some buffalo wings? "No, I don't eat buffalo." Neither did Buffalo Bill and all the others. Accounts from that time report that a permanent stench covered all of the Great Plains daily and only stopped after almost nothing of that species remained worth shooting at. Nobody knew what to do with all these bones laying around all over the place.
This now makes me think back about that Estée Lauder-scented lithium, and perhaps something a bit more constructive could be mentioned.
Or going back to that Titanic stuff, do you know about the heiress of that competing Cunard shipline? Aragon said she was the reason he burnt his manuscript for La défense de l'infini, a would-be super-novel now only owing its existence to salvaged fragments.
Atoms For Peace is also the supergroup of Radiohead's Thom Yorke with the band's producer Nigel Godrich, with Red Hot Chili Peppers's bassist Flea and a few lesser known names - Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M.) and Mauro Refosco (RHCP and David Byrne) on drums and percussions. This music video is directed by Andrew Thomas Huang who has worked extensively with Björk since 2012 and directed one episode of the very interesting series Random Acts of Flyness by Terence Nance (whom was mentioned in the Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto video).
It's now been ten years since the last Radiohead album. Between Thom Yorke's various projects and Jonny Greenwood running his contemporary classical music label Octatonic Records and composing music for Paul Thomas Anderson's movies, they join up in The Smile with the drummer Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet, with Shabaka Hutchings). This is directed by the fine duo of Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña.
And back to that Record Makers video (at the beginning of this blog) with Arpanet.
Let's get some more music in here. This is a benefit album for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty by Bakunin's Bum, the duo of 1-Speed Bike (Aidan Girt, drummer of Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and Norman Nawrocki (string instruments). I'm including the last two songs from that album with the entire accompanying booklet. Released by the defunct record label G7 Welcoming Committee just after the Québec summit of April 2001, an event my work colleagues and I at Moisson Montréal obviously discussed and closely watched.
In this booklet, you will read mentions of the Comité des sans-abris and of the Comité Social Centre-Sud (where the speeches were recorded), two examples of organisms Moisson Montréal supplied while I was working there.
I had VHSed a documentary about that summit when it was broadcast on Télé-Québec. It notably has music by René Lussier, a co-founder of the Ambiances Magnétiques collective.
Protestors were trying to replicate a similar success to what had occured during the recent 1999 Seattle WTO battle.
Prior to his participation in that collective, René Lussier was in a band called Conventum which recorded their second and last album Le bureau central des utopies (Central bureau of utopias) in September 1979 at some private house in the village of St-Damase just south of Saint-Hyacinthe. I was friend with two adopted sisters from Haïti who lived there.
The AM collective has developed close ties with the musician-activist Chris Cutler, who distributes their catalogue via his legendary ReR Megacorp. Lussier has recorded with him and with Fred Frith, and played with pretty much everyone in the experimental and free improv scene internationally, and including playing in John Zorn's "game pieces" like Cobra and so on, I could devote hours to this. Also significant enough to mention, Lussier was introduced to the daxophone by the free improvisor Hans Reichel (a member of the important FMP imprint) whom invented the instrument.
And in passing, Naomi Klein had written and plead for the release of OCAP organizer Shawn Brant in 2007.
Here's a podcast interview with another OCAP organizer, featuring some more music from Bakunin's Bum.
In a similar vein, perhaps you have heard about how mayor Mamdani intends to work on various wealth redistribution plans. Plans such as city-owned grocery stores. You can find many other interesting investigations of that type (price setting by monopolies and the corrupt governmental policies that allow it, for instance) from the channel More Perfect Union.
If you also knew how the food industry works, you would learn that it's a very wasteful business model. Since the capitalist economy relies on maintaining and creating supply chains for profit (instead of managing a domestic need) subjected to the customers selection, everything that can't be sold or that wouldn't pass consumer criterias ("that tomato looks weird, let me put it back down and get another one instead") is usually sent to the landfill. That's where a food bank like Moisson Montréal would intervene and try to salvage what it could (encompassing production surplus and excess crops) and distribute that food to organisms and agencies doing food assistance (food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and so on). Unfortunately, many food companies are also very good at coming up with excuses to not donate their surplus or excess. With claims that it's logistically too difficult to hold on to a few pallets in a corner, that it's imperative they dump these pallets right away, one would have to assume that people are clowns, this is a comedy. It was calculated that about 10% of all that waste could be salvaged. The metrics of what ends up being destroyed reaches high figures. If you know anything about the effects of decomposing matters on the environment, unless you love methane and enjoy that little Greenhouse on the prairie, why would you actively contribute at multiplying these effects? Because an economic philosophy told you so and accords were signed? What, are you having a laugh?
It's just one of those things when I think back at some of the few writings I have submitted thus far for publication. This one can be found in the first issue of Hydrolith. Surrealist Research & Investigations by the independent surrealist publisher Oyster Moon Press. This was written in the early days of my ongoing battle with burnout and depression, and the text is quite rushed and verbose, not successfully articulated and I can't for the life of me remember why I mentioned anything at all about endophasia specifically, but the issues about population displacement and social media are fully there, only what would have been the expression for social media communications back in 2008 other than some more variation of the broader concept of virtual reality? Anyway I could go on but all this to say that I have been thinking about all that stuff for a while as a surrealist and it all needs to be properly examined and expanded upon. Lastly, I believe that thanks to Merl's editing and to her retranslation, we owe her an even better (or at least an improved) version of this text so, merci encore Merl.
But I think Michael has a burning question for us. Yes, Michael... We are listening.
*******
Oooh, thanks for the link Michael. We'll get back to that later but for now we have arrived at the end and it's time for our tradition with the second side of that first new tour single from Stereolab.
Cela peut être sinistre / This could be sinister
Et signaler une fin / And signaling an end
Alors que les bandes enregistrent / As the tapes are recording
L'histoire de tous les lendemains / The story of all future days
Unis en la dérive / United within the drift
Des sillons éblouis / Of dazzled paths
Je veux savoir, je veux savoir / I want to know, I want to know
Où on a atterri / Where we have landed
Dans quel mouvement subit / During which sudden moment
À quel moment on a choisi / In what instance have we chosen
Le petit chat à l'oeil tiré / The small cat with tired eyes
Se fait peur, ébouriffé / Frightens itself, disheveled
Et perdu dans l'horreur du film / And lost in the movie's horror
Peuplé de monstres qu'il hallucine / Populated by monsters it hallucinates
Qu'il hallucine / It hallucinates
L'anthropocène / The anthropocene
L'anthropocene / The anthropocene
Qui hallucine / That hallucinates
Dans quel mouvement subit / During which sudden moment
À quel moment on a choisi / In what instance have we chosen
Je veux savoir, je veux savoir / I want to know, I want to know
Micro-trottoir, je veux savoir / Vox populi, I want to know
Unis dans la dérive / United inside the drift
Des sillons éblouis / Of dazzled paths
Unis / United
La dame au soleil sur le banc / The lady under the sun on a bench
La vieille femme aux cheveux blancs / The old woman with white hair
Crochète un motif dans le vent / Crochets a pattern into the wind
Pour ses enfants, ses grands enfants / For her children, her big kids
Je veux savoir, je veux savoir / I want to know, I want to know
Micro-trottoir, je veux savoir / Vox populi, I want to know
I want to dedicate this entire posting to our friend Ron Sakolsky, and vaguely add that we will perhaps be called upon to band together for a very specific task at some point.
Addendum for March 15:
Before we move on to the Cloud Land, we need first to learn how to tend it with some lessons from our favorite couple.
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