Scoop of the century! Scoop of the cerebellum! FU strikes again while the iron is hot and brings us an impossibly relevant interview with a most eloquent genocidaire—who says art and science don’t never mix? It was incredible to see the sheer haphazard negligence of her artistic statement, considering the magnitude of her crimes, how nonchalantly committed she seemed to the enterprise. She reminds me of a sort of Ultra-Bathory, the supreme architect of Dame Cruelty, a schemer and a dreamer and a narcissist to boot. So refreshing to see a real DEAD VOICE in the arts!
And a special nod towards the resuscitation-interview as a source of inspiration for us all. An artform almost lost to science, but salvaged at the last second by animation aficionado Shem. In Philip K Dick’s Ubik, corporate bodies are kept in a delayed state of decomposition, a half/life, which allows their former employees to commune with them… Albeit at the hallucinatory level of the Bardo. “How do you know you aren’t dead already?” Asks Burroughs. Shem’s answer is to interview dead killers, a solid triplication of the paradox.
There is a sort of polaroid on page 5 I recommend you deeply avoid.
The Dreamgutter map of Hypnagogic Lands is a welcome addition to the great classics of “inner geographies”. It’s right up there with the historical “maps of love” by Chauveau et al… Albeit decidedly more sinister! I could see vistas of new sciences here, topographies and geologies and heat maps taken to excess. There is a certain anatomical, sinewy texture to the dream geographies on display here, which aligns perfectly with the bizarre bio-architectural horrors outlined in the brief descriptions. We could very well do a doctorate on each.
Keeping up with the cryogenic on-ice dead guy revival theme, this month’s Romonde invokes the emergence of some entity, referred to as “someone” or the “coffin dweller”, from an icy coffin thing, challenged by the (variously spelled?) Scrapwriter aka Scapwriter, who makes the case for its survival and is uh, unceremoniously countersignalled. I take this to be an UNMETAPHOR for a situation NEVER YET FACED by any living writer or creative. The key word is “yet…”
Turn on your scamcorders…
“…Spiralling down into the dark depths of determination…”
I should also take this opportunity to thank Shem for the extremely cogent adaptation of the ELECTRIC SCREENPRISION MANIFESTO. I don’t think a text has ever gotten a more faithful adaptation to the silver screen. Shem has the uncanny ability to pry the shape and sounds of one’s associational nightmares straight from the greymatter, and leash it with no big deal to the source text. If this is the treatment I got, imagine what he would do with Anne of Green Gables!?
And finally, a delicious “digestif” in the elegant and compressed Canticle of Chrysalis. I infer from the title that this is what those damn teenage caterpillars are muttering to themselves as they undergo metamorphosis. Equal measures gnostic and toxic. HOW QUAINT!