Have you ever played Snakes and Ladders? I mean REALLY PLAYED? The Ventroliquist and the Snake has set a new standard for Hermetic notation of what I can only assume was a perverse, one-person session of the common board game gone harrowingly wrong.
HE’S JUST A FUN GUY is the FU equivalent of a Y2K era cooking show. As with all media that comes under the intense scrutiny of Shem, however, it has been cruelly and directly INVERTED such that all that was banal, helpful, distracting, and low-stakes has become a SARDONIC, PAINFUL, NOISY, ALL-CONSUMING WAGER… And one that smiles back. Highly recommend to any neo-flagellants for clearing out distracting thoughts of joy or ease.
The Bone Scriptures read like a para-funerary papyral fragment dug up in the desert of the real, containing some vaguely unsettling implications with regards to the exact nature of its authors. Certainly this forms either a scrap, or worse, the WHOLE of some heretofore unknown Book of the Dead (™), certainly the grimmest on record now. For whereas most Books O the D focus on the optimum staged transition from body to bones, this text seems to imply a HOSTILITY between states, an actual screed against the flesh from the clean ones. The theodic implications are disturbing, to say the least.
The ever-relevant ROMONDE CONTRERAS brings us another platinum-wriggling “news???” report from wherever and however. A rather Ballardian Terminal Beach scenario in keeping with current events (or should we say, prefiguring them?) The black iron prison, cages within cages, hierarchies of ghouls… So many taxonomies of disrepair! And yet somehow there is as always with ROMONDE a kind of cosmic buddy-cop relief in just seeing the guy screaming in action, if only to the void.
FLOOD SACRIFICE strikes me as either a proposition for a scientific study, a guerilla marketing piece for a suppressed new wave album or Charlie’s Angels derivative action series, or maybe even an invigorating bit of Chaos Magic slapped onto an esoteric point of a tube station wall.
Finally, in a bit of very practical Home Advice (or even perhaps a “life hack”) Shem gives us a tried and true methodology for Banishing and Cursing the spectacular from our quotidian writhings. I for one can attest to the efficacy of this practice, not only hygienic but in fact a much needed form of PEST CONTROL against the most odious of invasive species. Well sprayed, Shem!