A review of 120 Days of Sodom: Honey Boy, Love and Mercy, Succession, Nxivm, Hannibal, The Office, and Familial Concentration

 

Keith Raniere, Cult Leader of "Nxivm"

Yes, we're vulnerable. Reporter Barry Meier said the Nxivm story stuck out because it showed how people are always vulnerable. I think the extent to which we end up in situations like Nxivm or Jonestown speaks to our existential fuckedness. It's a family matter, I think.

In "Honey Boy"(2019), Shia Le Bouf plays an abusive father figure raising a child actor, the story being Shia's childhood biography.  Remarkable in the film, I think is a discussion of where the power lies in a father/child relationship, as the child actor wields a "per diem" (an envelope stuffed with cash the kid earned, which the dad wants for strip clubs) and technically employs the abusive father, a technicality which becomes more significant as the child ages.

"Love and Mercy" (2014) had a similar treatment: a therapist harangues and abuses a multi-millionaire depressive artist, who has slid into the therapist's legal clutches. These kinds of situations are not unknown for rich people. 

There is a kind of diffusive, tentative chaos among the rich, if HBO's Succession is as real as it feels. A young distant cousin of a powerful mogul manages to step into the mogul's family, half by accident, and half by dumb resilience. 

Consider what it feels like to move from one conception of power into another. We are always able to wield the valued props of our power's position. These props, wielded by Keith Raniere for example, don't amount to much. A childhood of awards. Some real skill, like martial arts, or volleyball. A degree and years of education.

Yes, they make you into better people: successes. Keith Raniere I think has many successes. But these achievements are fundamentally empty to the extent that they do not guarantee much about the people or the situations these empowered people are in and draw people into.  

Jonestown's communist bona-fides* are another example: not enough to guarantee much. The lives we lead are the proof of their roots; changing the way people live was Keith Raniere's oestensible goal. 

Which is absurd, and what is sad, is the over promise // under-delivering of these cults. Overpromise on bona-fides, under-deliver on results. At least, long-term results. Obscure the meaning. I'm reading 120 Days of Sodom; there's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. Which is why Keith's branding scheme was, in essence, pointless. (ed: he coerced women to ritually brand each other with his initials)

*

There's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. What it amounts to is a coercion of sexual sensation by any means necessary. Inflating their sexual needs in such a way, through exhaustion, eventually deprives 120 Day's "libertines" of the usual libraries of sensation and thus they choose to employ more and more depraved methods to stimulate themselves.

The libertine's pleasure is very close to nothing at all-- the lives of at least 30 people are suborned just for the joys of about four people in 120 Days of Sodom.  It is possible to see the book as a story of a massive amount of waste. Of course this perspective equivalizes human life with garbage; tho this is the perspective of the book's libertines. They view the lives of others as a tremendous barge of garbage which they the privileged may pluck from at will, like seagulls.

The Marquis De Sade's philosophies on life, be that as they are for a version of sexual liberation which concludes the lives of women are pointless but for total subjection, are never convincing to me. I feel that they are arguments the times give context to: conditions are repressed, better to open up then to play slave to god and husband. Ofc the destiny of the women who "open up" is quite bad. 

This brings me back to Keith Raniere. He I think offers propositions similar to Sade: an alternative life to the mainstream-- a life of scientific building blocks for taking control of ourselves and the world. Let me provide some context.

Indie Game Designer Porpentine reviewed the NBC series Hannibal: 

I think a lot about fellow indie game designer Stephen Murphey's essay on Robert Walser, and this quote in particular: (which Porpentine quotes in her standout essay Hot Allostatic Load):

"The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one's role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside." - text sourced here

The dream of human existence is to live a life which is external with no internal living, no warm meatbag slip-and-creak of nerves, guts, digestive systems, psychological troubles, etc. etc. I think, in a way, the mafia sells this identity to its members; "our way", Cosa Nostra, Omerta, an alternative system of control. These of course designed to isolate people and turn them into bodies/soldiers/corpses.

There is no PURPOSE beyond concentration for those who wish to establish something like what Raniere or Jim Jones had, or what Sade imagined, or what Porpentine saw in the story of NBC's Hannibal. I think, in some ways, there is no purpose to FAMILY beside concentration. As concentration is the bringing of people closer together.

Intimacy *is* the goal of the "libertine". "I wanna be married and have 100 kids so I can have 100 friends. And no one can say no to being my friend." A quote from Michael Scott** of NBC's "The Office".  I see the same sort of impulse in Sade's libertines, who with total impunity curate an entire society.

This! Is the point of Raniere's brandings: the (attempted) creation of a society/social truth/identity. I see a similar impulse in the serial killings as depicted in Mindhunter's Ed Kemper:

"You know, women were initially indifferent to me. They weren't interested in sharing. My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me. Not even our cats, when I was a kid. The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They're still with me." 

Ed Kemper, as depicted by Cameron Britton in Mindhunter

A ritual designed to inflict a social truth (the absence of the victim in our society) and a personal pleasure (the memory of a victimization).

I've been studying true crime as an interest for about a year, and I'll admit today that I am fascinated in social situations organized by selfish people. Like Keith Raniere's brandings or Ed Kemper's killings, the point is to create a social reality (scarred or dead victims) as a means to supplement personal experiences (the memories of the murders/ a support network of subordinates).

This was, ultimately, what Jonestown became about. People in charge manipulate societies purely for personal experience.

I think we all have, to some extent, some desire and ability to appeal to society. I think we all have the desire to live an external life, a vicarous imagining of our experience which would supposedly comfort our internal routine suffering. This externality includes opportunity. A person who is famous is widely thought to be so comforted-- an assured external persona, filled with opportunity, is thought to comfort our internal life. An imagined ideal life that includes prospects and opportunities.

Dealing with the future: proposing a revolutionary change in the future: changing your self through practice to create a future, better self. The future stretches out endless and fairly unknowable. Contrast that with the past, which we pretend to know. 

I think, in that imagination of our past, our identities rest.

*Angela Davis was fooled too-- we are all vulnerable, I think!

**These words spoken by the character Michael when he was a child, filmed in an interview with a puppet on a fictional children's tv program, "Fundle Bundle". Episode 18, Season 2. 

deliverance by james dickey reviewd

deliverance is about as much as honest trying to get you into the body of a 1950 or I guess 1970s ad executive man's man like on the cover of Man's Conquest below. It's pretty much exactly that situation. But it's done honest and well, bc it it's quite openly sexual and advances that sexuality, like the guy pisses himself while he's climbing up a rock: "The urine in my bladder turned solid and painful, and then ran with a delicious sexual voiding like a wet dream, something you can't help or be blamed for." and all the prose and shit about the river's all well written that being said my eyes glaze over river descriptions. and the advancement of the rape scene is very fast.



It's also very OSR/DND bc members of the party get killed off, very suddenly, quite lethal, skill challenges, "I have to go kill this one guy, if I don't kill him he'll get the drop on us, I have only this one night to do it" (wholly paraphrased), definitive single attack rolls, climb checks, a hobby taken seriously...

thirty-four reviews

eric andre.

boiling point (1990)

/psychological realism doesn't have much credo and yet I find a definite gap between some director's ambitions and other's. Credit to the filmmaking practices which honor "the dreamy look" or heighten the everyday boredom we all face.

old forester bourbon

originally I thought it had a nutty taste but now I'm not so sure. all whiskey starting to taste like soda to me. tried "angel's envy" at my friend's wedding and it was like, not top shelf? but it had that tasty burn with the flavor in the high notes

dead man, jim jarmusch

my friend (roommate) kept going gaga over the textures in this film, her friend too, talking about how black and white movies often the filmmakers want to bring out the textures, three or four textures in this film, linear, floral, feathers/hair, and a weird beehive one she couldn't place

edward saint albee's "alice"

I just bought this because it was cheap and signed by the author. the bookstore I bought it from was the fence for theft from the library system I work at.

heaven can wait 1948

old style of gentleman which was a sexuality in this face and lips, delicate and gentle. kind of winning presence you immediately feel like you could trust. don ameche takes this trust and abuses it

the paintings of zak smith

I mentioned this in my "frostbitten and mutilated" review but I don't care for portraits drawn from photographs. it's dumb to say that considering how do I know what is, and what isnt, drawn from a photograph. I usually miss the appeal w.e.

squidbillies-- seasons 2&3 are good

tommy tone "bad to to the tone"

listened to this uhh twenty three times

wigle's rye whiskey

rye tastes like flowers and shit but wigle's is good enough to stay appealing. although I hate rye I can get it

stonecutter volume 5

good

kero blaster

bosses are good played 1/2

bayonetta

hate how the scope of the game narrows to be about this generic classical architecture + industrial setting especially since at the beginning it promises to be world-hopping

simpleflips

what's the appeal of simpleflips? he's sorta rotten at the core and always on the verge of falling over. he's not that good despite being talented. watching him is like someone trying to renovate a too-old skyscraper

tfue (a twitch streamer- simpleflips too -ed)

I keep thinking of david foster wallace's tennis youth in "infnite jest" who have nicknames and have a sort of pecking order eaten away by sheer athleticism, that there's something worth pursuing... comradely sort

communism

talked to some maoists who might see this. afai can tell viewing the cultural revolution in a mostly positive lens is bleh, seeing anything but all the usual negative patterns of communism in the great leap forward is eye-and-ear shutting. plus all the stuff about stalin and like, didn't the bolsheviks establish a secret police almost immediately??

did some research on the movement, learned maybe for the first time that some topics are wide enough to encompass several international views. that being said I feel 48% confident that these maoists are relying on conspiracy theories to wipe clean the slates of their heroes

anarchist coffee down the street

it's actually called "artisan's coffee house". zeke is friendly but the coffee's never been good, and even the good stuff, although the chai is to die for I've heard

kraynick's

best bicycle shop in pittsburgh epicenter I wonder if it's the case that as an artist your job is to go find a budding community and sit over it like a fat toad sharing criticism and free talent

barry lyndon

not actually all shot in natural lighting kinda ruins the movie once my friend john told me this. that being said though:

--the scene with the german farm wife
--the scene where barry throws the glass at leonard rossiter
--leonard rossiter is so hype
--the natural-lit scene with the english flag, like the second scene
--steven berkoff


the duelists 1977

fantastic but the ending sucks

johnny depp

johnny always gives the movie something to work with albeit it's often wasted. that's all there is to say

drive (the movie)

I didn't have much appreciation for the film outside the kissing scene and the opening, however in retrospect I like some of the settings, like the pizza shop, I like bryan cranston although he's underused, and I retroactively like oscar isaac because he's my crush

annihilation (the movie)

there's only two good parts, the first scene where natalie portman is grieving, and then the videotape near the end where oscar isaac is talking to his double. I like the interior of the lighthouse, I like jennifer jason leigh although she didn't save the end

the hateful eight

"quentin taratino can just shit out good movies" - the red letter media guys, paraphrased

el topo (already reviewd, albeit this review was written before the previously published review -ed)

quite excellent and jodorowsky gives a fucking excellent performance especially in the last 1/4

fellini satyricon

I watched the opening of this movie like the first forty minutes that my free trial of wondershare file converter managed to convert every third day for about a month

impressionism about anthropology and history is the way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

the cook the thief the wife and her lover

I watched the first forty minutes of this film an awful lot, too. fellini satyricon just stays really fucking good the whole movie though and this film only knows how to do 2 scenes

the rum diaries (2011)

this movie only knows how to do three scenes and it just vacillitates between three: johnny depp is doing something, aaron eckhart says "sea of money", amber heard blue balls johnny

aaron eckhart

kind of our george clooney if george clooney had to retire

ex machina (2014)

think about this all the time. not bcause of technology but bcause of oscar isaac weird sexiness he imposes on "domhnall". "I put a port in her and if you fucked her she'd like it". modern male tech sexuality dominance stuff like who else doin that???

the tech industry's full of nerds

guardians of the galaxy vol 1-- bad

a woman under the influence (1974)

a bunch of good scenes and can't give enough credit to how it was filmed, handheld with an attention to and somewhat sloppy focus. think about gena rowlands gesticulations. stopped at the 2/3 point never got around to the end

eric andre show

in the eric andre show, isn't he filming himself grabbing at people's genitals or getting his staff to do that? if you watch the series as I have there's a lot of eric reaching for people's genitals or his staff doing that to irritate the guests/people.

lamentations of the flame princess- good but my developing dm style, the harsh stuff, is drawing criticism... is an instadeath trap so inappropriate?

luke kennard's "cain"
Luke Kennard is FUCKING AROUND with this one. "31 anagram poems [of] Genesis 4:9-12". around each of these is a frame of red text transcribing a fictional DVD commentary. can't figure these out

wuvable oaf: blood & metal

wuvable oaf is good and queer baby

marquis de sade's "juliette"

somewhere within this tome is the chapter wherein juliette goes to visit kinda a bluebeard guy who has a castle full of human furniture. read that excerpt in andre breton's anthology of black humor. can't find that part

twenty three reviews

twenty three reviews


new star wars:

the last jedi was how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. as in global warming. the exact connection is hard to tease out - I saw a dark sun behind the real one, riding my bike back home. actually it was a streetlight


neo turf masters golfing:

not much a game vis a vis gamefeel, it’s not Wii Sports Golf, but everything is narrated with a high-energy sounds like vietnamese woman and there’s the pixilated golf swings. it’s weird to see the direct ancestor of Mausland which you had forgotten about


Wii Sports Golf

The putting on this is insane. you have to hold the controller pointing down, it turns out. even then there’s this tiny band of sensitivity out of the whole controller’s movement that responds aggressively and makes you fling the ball off the green. other than that, this game is one of my favorite friend negging tools, for one, but there’s also a demure peace.


infinite jest:

the real “killer diller”, IJ, is like the only book I can read as if it were TV. I remember reading this four years ago and thinking “wow, I bet this is the first step I’m going to take into a world of talented authors” and like, noooooo. You’re gonna give me a reading recommendation for Neal Stevenson and my face is gonna drip off my skull. IJ is the only book I can read as if it were TV


DCC rpg (dungeon crawl classics)

sadly, the most beautiful book in the OSR (old school revolution-- the renaissance of tabletop role playing games) is also bland and sad, much like stonehell (see below). there’s sort of no surprises left


Stonehell dungeon

both this and DCC are written in like, boring fantasy prose (I already said this)


Black Books

I mostly watch Bernard Black to try and pick up on the psychopathic funny bits he does, yelling at people as a sense of humor, most british comedy shows like the IT crowd with just a touch of funny prop use make for good shit


the nintendo switch

the design of the switch is innovative to the point that the vocabulary of video game controllers hasn’t caught up yet. It’s “joy-con”, not “controller”and when I say “hold the controller like this and press this button” it can be confusing especially since the buttons aren’t labelled to work on the individual joy-cons, those are referred to positionally, a position which only fits if you hold the device the right way anyway. ok, so the main screen thing is the “console”, right. if you have the joy-cons attached to the console its the “console, with joy-cons attached”. If the joy cons are separate, they are “separated joy cons” or “individual joy cons” or just “joy cons”, there’s a sort of abstraction that bleeds from the procedure and is associated with the visual language on screen telling you which buttons to press- it’s the “left” button, when you hold the joy con up? down? you hold it in the seperated fashion.


Doll Doll Doll

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s music. I think something awful got transmitted to me about killing children, like maybe the “cool” side of it? I was like, oooh, child killing is edgy and cool, ya know, like as an edge-of-society thing. maybe society’s edge is somehow linked up to our inner sense of passion? hell ya


Doki Doki Literature Club

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s like a pop culture sensation jump scare game, but like I knew cute high school people who’s cuteness was a facade for intense psychological disorders, and DDLC does not really derivate from real-ass problems people have. Maybe also something like the snare of anime portraiture does me every time, psychotherapy


Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy

I don’t have anything new to say, except the throughline of frustrating drops away pretty easily and then it is just a tight mouse-platforming game, which will still insist that it’s about frustration. Especially of interest is Bennet Foddy himself playing Getting Over It, and him making the exact frustrated sounds f/x live that he put in the game.


it’s also fucking funny


Devil Daggers

Nice to see perfect things, in every way perfect, that do not assume and merely create a relationship, a weld

welds your brain to your hands, is conspicuous in perfect, as: every part takes up the exact minimum of space, has nuance, tesseracts, makes sense, is obvious, every part refers to every other part: a game about shooting skulls in hell on a stone ledge where if you get hit once you die, high score is 8 minutes 13 seconds, the instant of your death your score is submitted to a complete & international scoreboard.

what occurs to me is that sense of interconnectedness, every part taking up the exact minimum spare to approriate and flair every other part, with an overall vision that complements the thing, is in itself a seamlessness reminiscent of hell. which says good things for hell, honestly


yoon-suin: 

reading this book and oestensibly running it made me realize I shouldn’t use content that I don’t love, in my tabletop rpg games, because then I’m gonna be playing pretend about some stuff I’m not that invested in, and it’s all gonna seem trite. Despite the relatively strong prose and composition, I basically have no interest in the orientalist adventuring the book offers. as with DCC above


vornheim:  there’s a sense I get with a couple lamentations of the flame princess products of a greater project condensed and foreshortened, like I feel vornheim with all the praise it gets is only 64 pages long and the cover which you’re supposed to roll dice onto is pretty small. I feel the same way with Veins of the Earth, maybe, and probably with A Red and Pleasant Land both which I dunno how much I trust the terrain generators thereof. It’s too hard for me to launch a ARAPL campaign what with the geography and endless rooms-- I always imagine some huge procedural generation engine to handle it all for me

I usually want game books to provide, in easy reference, original, interesting content, which is easy to use, not work-intensive.  this is not true for AR&PL and Veins where it’s a campaign book where you have to assemble all the pieces; you have to manage a caves environment/ endless alice-rooms environment (both: dramatically different from normal terrain & therefore possibly much harder to describe), and provide some sense of direction, maybe. Both books are kinda bestiaries with a set of environmental goals added, and some tools. for other people that’s maybe enough but for me it’s a challenge to put it all together. I’m doing it right now with Veins and although it’s rewarding it’s also a responsibility.

but back to vornheim, what is there ?really?to recommend vornheim? a lot of people use it. there’s 2 dungeons, some rules for moving about a city, a bunch of nouns in tables, and a more general sense of what vornehim is supposed to be like. but uh “complete city kit” I don’t know I just don’t know what’s it’s like or what you need or even if my players would like a really high-concept city environment to work with. I feel like you can fit everything you need to know on a page. But I do use the noun list ofdifferent professions.

I wish there was kinda a more comprehensive understanding for how to run this just like AR&PL where there’s soemthing vital that remains unsaid. too vague of a criticism. “advice on running a city” too Idk. that all being said I actually feel yoon-suiin is an easier zone to run


maze of the blue medusa:

I’m glad this book has eclipsed into a “rare book”, it’s pretty suited up to be, and like a monumental breath of life into rpgs in general for the most part

like the writing and concepts and very especially layout are enough to present a pristine experience reading this

running it: I don’t like how glossy the pages are and the room shapes are impossible to convey that easily, then again if I just drew them out it would have been fine

also this crowded megadungeon doesn’t always have great dungeon ecology sense relative to zak’s pictures, and patrick’s writing, and the walls and secret rooms, these not always making sense  (maybe a plus, it’s supposed to be crazy). like a witch is supposed to be guarding a room with trapped rune-doors, but there’s another untrapped door off to the side away from the witch so...


edmund’s letters to nabokov:

bought this in the vain attempt to acquire nabokov’s writing re: lenin, at least more than the “bucketfull of milk with a dead rat at the bottom” remark. you’d think I have to read nabokov’s novels to learn what he thinks about communism but I just want the straight dope, son. anyway this book is mostly discussion of russian grammar.

it’s odd I think how hard it is to narrow in on that perspective of like post wwii thought on communism, or at least solely in my google search era capabilities


the killing of a sacred deer:

playful like “the lobster” but has more of a fire under its butt and is a little less dreadful. a sacred deer? the fun part is Barry Keoghan talking like a loon to distressed Colin Farrel


cuphead: Dont deal with the devil

fleischer bros animations have attack cycles if you look

I beat the robot boss with a hack

when I first saw this game I thought the huge, cartoony animations would blow out the gamefeel but playing it it’s tight, tight tight. there’s a certain versimilitude you get when all the sprites are the right size and have good rhythm and it’s especially impressive seeing this in like, the most expansive visual/audio project I’ve ever seen in a video game


caveblazers:

procedural roguelike jumpy games, spelunky, programmer art’s junky, arrows for arrows wasd but the double jump’s funky, mild and wild the game takes a while and I never beat it, seeing as I run out of steam about 45% of the way in, bombarding everything with my super powerful bombs

suffice to say it’s a good game, it’s got perks,probably every design trend since 2000, pretty well done, used to play it all night


hearthstone:

good and fun and yeah I got to hone my mana curve down to one stone, managed to get up to the point of facing combo decks before I went “oh, right” and turned that shit off


breath of the wild:

a series of overlapping & shallow resources, which have the advantage of being easy to refill, and easy to deplete. your horse can die, your weapons explode, but you can make about an infinite amount of food, but if you get in combats where you lose most of your heart meter in one hit, you’ll burn through it all quickly. so you can pick up up fairies at the fairy fountain without it feeling overpowered; sure, they’ll prevent you from dying but you’ll keep on getting hit.

that being said combat does sort of taper off in difficulty reltaively, fast but there’s still that consistent ability for it to surprise you with a couple different enemy types, or all your damage dealing weapons have been depleted, and you just wanna kill this 300h bokobkin for some reason, or you find yourself with an ice spear pushing frozen dudes off cliffs because you don’t wanna wear and tear your normal weapons. at this point in my game all I’m using is elemental arrows because normal arrows are too expensive

but it turned around when I realized hearts weren’t the only thing, it was also _navigation_, which the game takes seriously enough! there’s a couple points where you’d wanna use photos, or the map-stamps, or you have to look at photos and try to match it up and that all encourages wandering around, and thus more random encounters, and therefore more grinding up against the various resource-meters

90% of the art for the game though is not good, but oddly what it is that’s nice is the landscapes, “wild”, huh, which are gradually ruined by giant red laser beams that shoot across the sky the more you complete the game


super mario oddessy

main point of this game is the ass-end opens up like 900 more stars which you’re supposed to collect, it’s all in reference to super mario 64 albeit again it’s that fucking linerarity problem, in sm64 it’s like they didn’t know what level design was exactly so they just experimented and in oddessy it’s all boss battles with rabbits

fuck this fucking game man the colors are so bad and they got that dumb loop of music and like ⅗ of the levels are swimming levels damb… but you can pose mario and take HD pictures and share them and Peach has a different classy outfit for each zone


the relentless picnic podcast

in their earlier days there was the thought, bc of the election, that there was some boundary that had been crossed, and these were exciting times. but things kinda picked up in this wonky-no-worky fashion, all the crisis bled out. I remember the “id queen” episode of this podcast and it became clear that there was this sort of fascism donald was the head of. a feeling of stunned wakefulness in the company of learned friends. but then it kinda drifted off, like everyone did, there wasn’t something so super-insightful as you’d think there’d been, at least, not practically; I’m just worried/notworried/worried


la decimma vittima

the conception of sci fi maybe used to be philosophical and cooly so. what changed it I propse was an obsessive attention to detail, or any kind of fixation on reality. but really reality happens when you let go, when the guidance of things is allowed to exist and not hammered down; you can compare la decimma vittima to the star war prequels, or star trek original to the rest of star trek


overall conclusions: kiling children and satanic material has more to do with inner wellness, RPGS: pick two: [easy to run, good original content I want to run, consistent internal sense], the switch doesn’t have any good games, ultimately a life of pursuit of game-objects is unsatisfying and wears down your eyes

Ninth Post

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO REVIEW

PART 1: THE METAPHYSICS

Saunders has a good premise: the voices used by civil war documentaries to read letters etc. are ghosts, who float around and have their own objectives re: their dead stories

So he (Saunders) can intermingle ghost-speak with actual civil war quotes and it's all peachy

Combine this with the pathos of Lincoln with a dead kid and you're good: this is the first half of the book

PART ii: GHOST KARATE

George Saunders doesn't know how to do the second half of a novel-length book, so he has the ghosts physically struggle with one another over the soul of dead Willie Lincoln

So the documentary-voice thing is used to display action scenes between metaphysical entities

Thus "ghost karate": we're seeing spiritual beings interact combatically as if they had physical constraints

But the wider issue is, why are we seeing this? Why aren't the concerns of the living as they ripple out thru the dead the focus? It's premises is to be a story about grief... Saunders falls back disastrously into physical struggle (between ghosts)

Simillarly the resolution of all the ghost's stories is missing something, I guess it assumes that I love these ghost characters

What I love is the Lincoln guy who isn't in La La Land and is dealing with real historic grief, the props of spirits being a means to creatively interact with that humanity

Basically the metaphysical premises is forgotten and wasted

PART III: WHAT SHOULDA HAPPENED

We should have seen Mary Todd Lincoln's death also and the compounding f/x on Abe

I don't know why the whole action had to happen in one evening... Feels rushed and overpacked

Instead of physical action resolving all this (we need to push the boy-ghost into  lincoln's body) there should have been some larger spiritual resolution*

*there was a spiritual resolution also, but I'm saying there shouldn't have been a physical one; the spiritual resolution should have brought the overall resolution

Lincoln's crisis of conciousness re: the civil war should have been played out over a longer timespan to have more development(??)

Saunders shouldn't have mistaken his characters for cute personalities who all need a beginning middle and end and instead have used them provisionally, as per their usefulness**

**the book is actually shockingly amateur at times because of this: story becomes about cutesy ghost character arcs instead of... something better like the mind of lincoln... or idk the war

PART IV: I CONCLUDE WHY I DON'T LIKE GEORGE

George Saunders is a master of putting prose together

With a few simple strokes he constructs interesting and familiar character settings

So: a civil war grave of ghosts, civilwarland (in bad decline), even the mind of a wimpy kidnapper

Famously he is able to put corporate culture pop psychology in the mouth of slavers... "Satirist" indeed...

But he doesn't have the heart to write 2 stories for one novel... he can only write "one story"

Like the telling of a joke, all the characters here conclude at the punchline... there is no "second act"

So "Lincoln in the Bardo" is an extremelly excellent novella with like a reptillian no-worky second book. I would call it a shame but I love to tear down authors. I'm a monster. 2 stars

eighth post

thirty reviews


fury (2014)

weak tea saving private ryan... biggest obstacle was the music score, really terribly obvious german marches and like strings amping up for the big fight... I prefer my war films to be nonplussed but this one had all the gore and some of the randomness of s.p.r. but also some pro-cynical warrior stuff incl. a hasty last stand/blaze of glory... biggest challenge was reconciling brad pitt's human rights abuses, a goal which is forgotten by the end of the film. Biggest and best scene is the middle one which is like 10+ minutes of an awkward/traumaticdinner between tom cruise and his kid and two captured german woman, basically the closest scene to being real social commentary, although this too sort of "trips over its own dick" when the kid and one german woman have sex and brad pitt is like "let them, they're young and alive" like that's supposed to be super salient. Did not watch end of film past "setting up for the blaze of glory by deciding we're all gonna die" scene.

shadow of the colossus

I first thought this game was, itself, an internal representation of the PS2 hardware. it is like a tech demo. You get the feel with wide open tracts of space with no functionality that this is like a tech demo, and the fact that there are little lizards you can shoot kind of adds to that feeling of limited or "test" functionality. By completely skipping over all the modern design trends of 1,000,000 little things to do we're instead left with an anthropology piece, the details of a culture long dead which are exposable only by conjecture. I felt like I was physically inside a realm of data.


the lobster (2015)

salient point here is that all the characters talk and act like they’re middler schoolers in a recital. Connects with metaphysical nature of the movie as parable about modern dating-- except existential bcause all relevant actors in the morality play spin off to their own consequences. At least the play seems half-interested in preserving its own moral lessons, hopefully to preserve the existential void at the center of it which bespeaks the childlike innocence of pursuing love, both deadly and salvative-- this why the middle-schooler-y speech(?)

top gun-

hellish bcuz trapped in military scenario, not real air force but an air force school, where the psychosocial tensions of the various characters get played out by cat-and-mouse games involving targeting reticule shots and bouncing and incomprehensible real fighter jet photography. Only comprehensible shot thereof is famous “middle finger” scene where Tom Cruise is flipping off opposing Russian fighter pilot while inverted above his cockpit. Also Tom Cruise pursues Kelly McGillis into a ladies bathroom to pressure her for sex.

apocalypse world (rpg)

combat is always bad bcuz designer Vincent Baker refuses to recognize combat-as-sport while all players everywhere know of literally no other mode of play. A.W. is good at builiding little post-apocalypse socities and then breaking them apart. However as the destruction is waged so too do the rules break, along the lines of “Fronts” and nefarious player advancement. Mbasically you get a cool little custom character sheet with checkboxes to fill out and then the GM asks you a bunch of questions about your sex life. Would be better if the MC (the GM) themself would get more hostile as play preceded (?)

space channel 5

Really good rhythm game, gogo eighties, immaculate aesthetic, taught me how to shame-walk-dance

tomb raider original version

achieves same sense of “quiet time” that 1.000.000 modern AAA games break apart with literal arrows on screen showing you where to go. Is much better once you find the “walk” button (you must depress this to walk and not tumble off edges). Is in MoMA, I’m pretty sure.

Basically all the simplicity of Doom or Quake levels, the library thereof being entirely compended by the common, “map design” being once a commoner’s art akin to shoemaking or coopery. You can see the sense of “place” in all these places, composed as they were mostly by a few polygons and some textures, even as they are death/doom metal alien traps. You wander through a winter cave for a while and it’s silent. Keen sense of exploration weirdly offset by 90’s obscene videogame “sex-crime” fiction aesthetic of cutscenes, glowing 3d-rendered bulbous adolescent fantasy.

the chronicles of amber

sex fantasy books from my youth. surprisingly did or did not hold up? at one point the author comments on what is obviously an ex-girlfriend of his, describing someone who gets crazy and cult-following after dating the main character.

Not really at all as powerful as Orson Scott Card’s “maps in a mirror” short story oddysy which is EXTREMELY HOT and BIZARRELY TERRIBLE, AS IN “PUBERTY AWAKENING” t.m.i

dan hoy: the deathbed editions

dan hoy poems: obviously an act of theory, more than practice, as like how would you get off on these? not super credible. But! The presentation of the book itself is so cool, perfect heft etc.

porpentine's "girl detective"

realllyy good that the girl detective dies. begins to resemble fantasia where characters are intermixed and played off each other. all for the description of the sensorium which porpentine seeks to oblige (?) porp said she was comfortable if everything she did was termed as porn, so…. this it, especially admiring guro or filth/sewage aesthetic.

house (1977)

another one of my “adolescent horror/sex” pieces, “house” is notable for being widely panned by its Japanese critics upon release. It’s there in the canon though bc the children of Nippon widely turned out to see it, an unprecedented cinematic achievement. As for being for children, the movie follows six young japanese teens who eventually get messily dismembered by a haunted house. Notable bcuz like most children’s movies there’s an element of “picnic” to it, every significant piece clashes against all the others, very punk aesthetic as well bcuz as the creator said it’s supposed to be a “cinematic reality” where the special effects aren’t designed to seem real so much as to “highlight the hard work of the crew”. So like during the martial arts scene you can see the strings lowering the hat; or like during the piano chomping scene; just google “house 1977 piano”.

the plot against america

phillip roth goes as far as to actually simulate via novel how potentially the united states could have gone fascist in 1942. Well, he almost simulates it, at the very last moment (after years of build-up) he backs off and has the Lindburgh presidential family de-escalate and America joins the war after all (on the right side). This book is immensely disappointing even for probably subtly translating the american jewish family experience on the wider immensely tragic tensions of the time-- behind every scene in the book is the reader’s knowledge of the then-unknown holocaust.  

ghost in the shell original edition vs. new?/

original edition ghost in the shell is kind of a cult film for even it’s sorta-excellent animation. “cult” because the quality isn’t consistent and the timing is sort of off and it’s clearly just the first part of a larger story. I mean american made ghost in the shell will fully abandon the plot in favor of whatever, I hope takeshi kitano’s o.k.

nicolas winding refn

people have ideas about “drive” so it’s like the intelligence of refn sorta applied well which takes a big miss on “the neon demon” and shows its own kinda joie nihilism in “only god forgives”. I mean the visual style of each film is really _not_ breathtaking except of course yeah the first scene from “drive”, many of the subsequent scenes, but like the message I keep getting (the credit sequence from demon was also _really_ good) is that there’s sort of base primality of man he wants to expose, the gravity of which I miss completely. Sure there’s x, y, and z but there’s also Ryan Gosling dragging a dude by his head, his fingers scooped in the maxilla, the image of which is enough. It’s about positioning the reader’s emotions or WHATEVER but it’s just the placid generation of these images, which is enough.

Although followup: the scenes of models bathing in blood in “demon” isn’t really awesome so I guess there is an ability to distinguish between the images that doesn’t seem contained in the films--- you see a photo album and you like some.

blood meridian

one of those important realms of history is ultraviolence and seeing the limits of horror practiced as a way of answering the dead part of your brain which requires those ideas. I sound emo here but understanding the role of the american army as a territorializing (controlling justice) force in 1887 makes america make _sense_ in a way it didn’t to me before. Like if you need to interrogate the role of mass violence and guns, as I do, plus some application to my dnd games which often become about similar acts of horrific terror.

we did porn

zak sabbath of OSR fame, who made several rpg tabletop books that I enjoy a lot, describes his experiences in the porn industry as an actor. Zak is a total knob-end (note: this review reflects my opinion at the time written and may no longer reflect my current opinion, in which I am not so settled on zak's status as a "total knob-end" pw 9/15/18 nope, he's a knob end 2/22/19) in a way such as that I the reader have to deconstruct his knob-end-ness a lot because I can’t rely on the usual labels (=sexist, racist) (sexist -pw2) to describe his male knob-end-ness. There is a lot of fatphobia in the book though, people are regularly criticized and characterized as monsters by their weight, so uh, point for me I guess.

Zak is continuously trying to do a Hunter S. Thompson   thing which does not profit bcuz unlike Thompson Zak  does not obliterate his own ego. To wit; Thompson stands in his own horror fearlessly calling out his paranoid/schizo responses to everything while Zak usually is the hero of his own narrative. But however at the end Zak admits some of his own deep-set fears about the morbid danger many of his friends are in, people who glance off society, and in that bit we get some of that rare “authorial humanity.” Other than though there is a whole lot of moralizing and advice-giving which turned me off.

turns out I was right! - 2/22/19

The Story of The Eye

essential Georges Bataille “erotic” adolescent death ficiton, at times mostly exploring a few fetish ideas. Widely banned or whatever but fuses that triggering youth pain experience with craziness and legit erotic fiction. Kind of like playing around at the edges of what porn scenes can be, the feeling is of everything being especially set up to be an erotic tale but is also legitmately tripping on its own pathos.

Kathy Acker

“blood and guts in high school” was good again because it had awful youth sex stuff. I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with this; oh wait, yes I do, it’s because kids ,like in the movie “Kids” (1995), flip society on its back, have incestual relationships at least in fiction that EXPLAIN everyone’s trauma and expose for me a world I always wondered about. You can’t get to the real meaning of your high school aquaintences until you know a lot of them were drinking every morning. Or like just getting away from society’s prescribed noitons, you knowww??? That’s ART!!!

That’s what “Blood and guts in high school” is mostly about except for the poetry which “was bad”.

Delta of Venus

related to above but erotica from Anais Nin who was able to fashion up some west-bank fiction which explores ppl’s sexualities back in those days. Really powerful or whatever. Mostly as a sort of short story collection, notable for me as a flip book for sex scenes, kind of dangerously written. IDK

Eunoia

Christian Bök’s book of chapter-length poems each of which makes use of exactly one vowel each is exactly what it sounds like. The execution is chilling and I wanna prescribe to Christian’s dead-seeming personality (from what I’ve heard). More or less without moral.

The Red Pony

John Steinbeck writes a scene where Jody, a 10 year old, has to watch his steed executed, and then later has to watch a mare executed by brain-hammer so it can successfully deliver Jody’s new baby horse. Later in the book there’s a parable about education wherein a hermit coded-gay man raises a child that in his hermit-ness leads his fellow schoolchildren into new realms of imagination, later to have his and his hermit father’s life destroyed by the PTA.

The Cornelius Quartet

WEIRD Michael Moorcock four-books I got through two- about an enigmatic James Bond-type who trolls reality constantly in search of his dead incest-sister. Basically notable because the metatextual elements come in without explanation to interrupt the first novel’s normalish spy story, there’s a lot of querulous free love, and a lot of seventies tabloid moralizing. In the last book apparently it all turned out to be the fantasy lives of some London doxies, so as to create the “vertiginous imagination” of the common folk or whatever.

Almost Transparent Blue

Ok, TAO LIN wrote a review of this book, the review thereof, and especially his other review of KOKO THE TALKING GORILLA, influenced me in writing and what could be possible in a critical piece. A.T.B. is the story of some japanese hedonists not dissimilar from the characters in Story of the Eye except they’re older. They host an orgy for money, beat each other up. Mostly notable for the fact that the perspective is punk rock moral-less and sensorium-diving set of descriptions. For that reason and for the post-script which tries to reconnect with the characters (the book is auto-biography(?)) you get the sense of the sincere hedonist and thus the cnxn to everyday life, human universality etc. Also new perspective on Japanese life near a military base.

how to write a thesis

Umberto Eco lays down the rules for actual graduate study, hopelessly inapplicable to real such study, but notable because he urges people who don’t want to do the work and just get the certification to plagarism.

coeur du lion

“Ariana Reines” collection of sorta ex-boyfriend-y poems. Notable bcuz they seem pathetic, as in deserving real pity*, like she inspects her own sincere desire for the return of this asshole-y guy. A person who seems exactly like the kind of man-child widely maligned by feminist ppl today, me included(?). Sort of this inner life.

taipei

TAO LIN’s novel which is starkly boring. Notable also that TAO LIN was abusive to his ex- which is part of why Alt Lit “was violently dismantled”. His ex- isn’t in this novel, it’s more of the Megan Boyle relationship, but uh mostly notable bcuz it follows a strange kink where it bends at the end. The first part is all ceaseless reptition of drugs and emotionless descriptions of other people’s emotions but then it gets halfway emotional at the end? Why would someone want to read this (review)??

Walter benjamin: The Arcades Project

a collection of the deceased philospher’s notes preceding a never-completed magnum opus re: the paris arcades, essentially proto-malls with brothels added. Totally worth buying a copy and fer instance paging thru the chapter on gambling and prostitution which is full of wise witicisms on both, along with quoted paragraphs (also wise). Mainly a sort of library text, available as pirated .pdf . I used to be able to turn to any page and find something cool but now I strangely have lost that ability… I think it’s due to the lighting in my apartment.

Borgman (2013)

film about an “alp” which strangely enough “Alf” of “ALF” fame was also I am assuming based on-- it’s that distinctive nose, and the fur**. This “alp” is a dude like a German homeless guy who slowly insinuates a family with his evil nonsense presence. It’s sorta cool but sort of a big jerk-off because the big reveal of “Borgman”’s character really is that he’s just an “alf”. I mean I had to google what an “alf” was after the film, trying to figure out what the movie was about, and it turns out it’s just straightforward “alf”-ness.

holy motors (2012)

“Leos Carax”: vignettes following incomprehensible French logic; each vignette is good, some are stunning. Why? Mostly bcuz they are little insights into aspects of film narrative, stories that are told into the real physical actors in additon to projected thru the screen into the audience’s brains. Like this implication that the author follows the work except told longform as a movie.

it follows (2014)

MY FAVORITE CHILD/SEX/DEATH movie out since 2014!!! Why is this such a theme??! I think it’s because we’re all hung up on teenagers, our teenage years. Anyway this film is a serious attempt at rendering the fears of adolescence into a monster movie, but done with the postmodern modesty that I need wherein the characters are embodied in actual persons so the costs feel real and not horror-movie-scripted. The mysterious monster is such so we can have that half-morality play feel that “the lobster” has. This movie trades off on frenetic orgasm-end for instead a mysterious and settled dread, like a married couple has.

*not condescending pity if that makes sense

**took a look at this, I’m maybe just making it up.

seventh post

UR DUDE WROTE A BOOK IT SLAP HARDER THAN ANNA KARENINA SCOOP DAT https://t.co/HidHlZq9Ar

— KOOL A.D. (@veeveeveeveevee) December 30, 2016

"OK" by Kool A.D.: A Review 

 "o.k" is about a good a book as kool a.d. says it is
like I dunno, I could read "ok" and only questionably "anna karenina"
probably if I invested the time and energy and attention span "anna k." would be a better read but it's unlikely/impossible in this stage of my life

I only really picked up "o.k." due to kool a.d. possibly occupying the zeitgeist and the writing reminding me of other alt lit efforts. "O.k." is definitely alt lit, K.A.D. often talks about being like other alt writers in the texts, shouts them out. It also has the same kinda pattern of vignettes, none of which have much conflict in them, just sort of portraits of a paradisaical life style. There's one exception where Kool A.D. has to to do a one day jail stay and it's kinda striking how it departs from the rest of the book. But at the end of that chapter MUHAMMAD X (that's the character's name) is back with his magical family.

This book had a medicinal effect on me. It's 100 chapters and I would usually sit down and read one or two and the spiritual wisdom they imparted would be real. MUHAMMAD X takes deep yogic sleeps when doesn't have energy, the continuous message is to calm down and relax, but he also indulges in drugs a lot and shoots cops. There's a pure strain of thought here (hesitant to use the word "pure" but...) which continually projects infinite peace. It's probably like a book from the seventies.

Basically I would say I was surprised by the book exactly being what I needed in my chaotic unhappiness. It was a joy to read and I was able to pick it up and get through it unlike most other books. I did not feel stressed.