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god-whispers · 10 months

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jul 15

week in review - headlines

"behold, I come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me." psa 40:7

Chilling advice for Putin: You can save Russia, crush West, with nukes That frightening document, which published in late June, goes on for another 2,900 words to conclude using “God’s weapon of Armageddon” will prevent – not create – a worsening crisis in Europe.

Col. Douglas Macgregor warns the US ‘may not make it’ to the 2024 presidential election Before moving on to his analysis, in which he argues that due to political and economic conditions that the next presidential election may not take place, the brief video opens with a recently released recording of President Donald Trump.

Pope Francis picks notorious pro-LGBT clerics to participate in October Synod on Synodality As such, a differentiation can be observed between the delegates chosen by their own local churches or bishops’ conferences to participate in the Synod, and those personally picked by Pope Francis.

CDC Has ‘Lost All Credibility,’ Lawmaker Says as Agency Pushes ‘Chestfeeding’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance for transgender individuals seeking to “chestfeed” their infants has some lawmakers concerned that the agency is prioritizing politics before patients’ health.

‘America’s Darkest Secret’: Sex Trafficking, Child Abuse, & The Biden Administration The criminal practice of trafficking and abusing hundreds of thousands of migrant children who cross the southern border is now, thanks to the open-border policy of the Biden Administration, apparently “normal” inside the US:

Church of England Torn Between Liberals Who Embrace Gay Wedding and Conservatives Who Reject It – Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Takes Responsibility for Steep Decline in Attendance The Church of England (CoE) and the greater Anglican community is facing a dilemma: just how much should they embrace gay relationships? Should they ‘evolve’ with the times, or hold on to centuries of doctrine?

Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How ... This period of increased activity, known as solar maximum, is also a potentially perilous time for Earth, which gets bombarded by solar storms that can disrupt communications, damage power infrastructure, harm some living creatures (including astronauts) and send satellites plummeting toward the planet.

World powers in rush to get killer robots on battlefield in AI arms race, as concerns grow they can turn on humans Military forces around the globe are in a covert arms race to develop terrifying new AI weaponry, a new documentary exploring the future of artificial intelligence in battle reveals.

Biblical Prophecy: It Has Never Been More Vital That Churches Teach It, And Believers Understand It It’s not just the convergence of a host of prophetic signs that make it so, but the existential dangers to our lives and livelihood that threaten everyone. I have watched recordings from the World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings during which time the elite talk openly about the need to drastically reduce the world’s population.

Britain Announces AI Rollout for Its Socialized Healthcare System. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and “robotic process automation” to shorten growing hospital waiting lists and ease pressures created in part by mass migration. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claims the reforms will make the socialized healthcare system “fit for the future”.

Canadian health agency includes pro-euthanasia slideshow in pension packages to seniors …Included in the slideshow was text on “expressions of wanting to die,” saying that it could be used to “promote a sense of control” as well as talk of being able to die by euthanasia in only a “day.” British Columbia has seen a 24% increase in medical assistance in dying (MAiD). In total, some 2,515 people died from MAiD in 2022 alone in British Columbia.

This Harvard Professor Believes He’s Found Pieces Of “Alien Technology” In The Waters Off Of Papua New Guinea Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in 2014. Loeb’s team brought the materials back for analysis. U.S. Space Command confirms with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that it came from another solar system.

84% Jabbed Peru Declares Health Emergency After Guillain-Barre Outbreak A health emergency has been declared in Peru amidst a Guillain-Barre syndrome outbreak. Guillain-Barre syndrome is a rare and dangerous neurological disorder, the increased development of which has been linked directly to COVID jabs. In Peru, more than 84% of citizens are reported to be “fully vaccinated” against COVID-19, raising the specter that the country’s embrace of the jab could be behind the Guillain-Barre outbreak.

AGENDA 2030: The USDA Approves Bill Gates Lab-Grown ‘Frankenfood’ Meat As Our Global Society Lurches Ever Forward Into A Dystopian Abyss Phase 2 of the Great Reset continues to go forward quite nicely as key elements of the soon-coming UN Agenda 2030 are locking into place. One of the things so despised by our New World Order masters are things, like food items, that God has created for us to eat and enjoy, are being replaced with disgusting Frankenfood made in a test tube. What’s on the menu in the kingdom of Antichrist? Test-tube chicken, test-tube steak, cricket flour and all sorts of creeping things.

WEF collaborators want to threaten us to ensure compliance with their climate change goals World Economic Forum (“WEF”) collaborators discussed using central bank digital currencies (“CDBCs”) to control what people purchase. Not to be outdone in dictating to the world, “climate change” cultists discussed whether to threaten or incentivise people to “comply” with climate goals. Unsurprisingly, the use of threats was preferred to ensure obedience.

Four in 10 Brown University students claim they’re LGBTQ, confirming massive leftist social contagion and brainwashing When the “LGBTQ” movement began in earnest a few years ago, the globalist left ensured that it infected every corner of Western civilization and society, and now, their effort to tear away huge chunks of traditional values has proven successful. This is especially true on college and university campuses, where fads like this become all the rage and infect entire student bodies.

Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine: “Inducing Lactation May Present More of a Challenge for Transgender Individuals.” — CDC Highlights Stunning Scientific Discoveries From Clown World in Official Handout The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Health Equity Considerations” handout is an exercise of insanity — reminding anyone who’s willing to listen that an “individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed.”

Not Science Fiction: Neuralink Brain Chip Implant To Begin In-human Clinical Study Here is something else that used to be science fiction — brain implants. Wireless chips are being inserted into the brain allowing the person to control devices mentally. This is no longer science fiction.

Iran’s president: homosexuality will end ‘generation of human beings’ “The West today is trying to promote the idea of homosexuality and by promoting homosexuality they are trying to end the generation of human beings. “ He added “The Western countries try to identify homosexuality as an index of civilization, while this is one of the dirtiest issues.”

Did aliens prevent nuclear war? Former NASA astronaut claims they did Mitchell, the sixth man to set foot on the moon, was interviewed back in 2016, where he admitted to being convinced of the existence of aliens and extensively spoke about claims that aliens have visited Earth. In that conversation with the Daily Mirror, he raised the astonishing claim that aliens were responsible for preventing a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union during the peak tension of the Cold War.

forgive me for the length, but it is getting harder and harder to cram headlines from a week into one day. pray. our Lord cometh!

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visuallanguagerhianna · 2 years

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Stranger Artist Research - Craig Raine

Craig Raine is an English Poet born in 1944, mostly known for the rise in Martian poetry, a trend focused on the alienation of the world, society and items. Raine spent his childhoos in a "bookless" prefab in Shildon, a town around Bishop Auckland. They won a scholarship to attend Barnard Castle School, then a direct grant school, where he became a boarder. During his time in education, he wrote "pimply Dylan Thomas" poems, some of which he had sent to Philip Toynbee who was the lead reviewer at The Observer at the time. He was a member at New College in Oxford from 1991 to 2010 and is now emeritus professor. Raine acquired his university education at Exeter College, University of Oxford, of which he received a BA in English.

In 1972, Raine married Ann Pasternak Slarer, a previous fellow of St Anne's College in Oxford. Together, they have raised one daughter and 3 sons, of which take after their parents creative abilities.

Raine taught at Oxford where he also followed a literary career as a book editor for New Review, Quarto and a poetry editor at the New Statesmen. He also became a poetry editor at publishers Faber and Faber in 1981. Raine is a founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté (which closed in 2020 after 60 issues). They have created a range of work, a few examples are; The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984) and more.

I find this poets work really intriguing, especially the piece linked above. For the stranger brief, this really helped me understand the goal of the process. I'm not one who gets into poetry often, but this piece of writing will be my favourite for some time.

However, the stranger brief as a whole, after looking at artists and exploring the possibilities of process during this theme, I would rather go ahead with the index brief. I feel I could find myself looking back to this brief another time, but for this year I would rather go with something I am more comfortable with.

#Artistresearch #research #artist #poet #writing #stranger #alienation

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dispatchdcu · 2 years

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Alien #8 Preview

Alien #8 Preview #alien #bishop #Cruz #xenomorph #MARVEL #marvelcomics #comics #comicbooks #news #mcu #art #info #NCBD #comicbooknews #previews #reviews #Amazon #Aliens #Ripley

Alien #8 Synopsis: BLOOD HARVEST! The xenomorphs overtake the settlement. A last stand is made. A terrible truth is learned. Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson Art: Salvador Larroca and Marc Aspinal Publisher: Marvel Comics Price:$3.99 Release Date: November 10th, 2021 Check out the Alien #8 Preview Pages below Dig into our other Comic Book Dispatch Reviews HERE. Or, if you’re curious as to…

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#Alien #Alien 8 #Alien 8 Preview #comic books #comics #marvel comic books #Marvel Previews #Preview #Previews

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shelvedfilmpodcast · 3 years

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Alien 3 (William Gibson)

The Alien series is one of my favorite movie franchises of all time. Alien 3 is probably one of the more divisive films of the original three. It's on record how difficult the development of this movie was and how there were many different variations of the script. On today's episode we look at the most popular one by the father of cyberpunk, William Gibson. This script has been officially released as both a audio book and comic. Today is a look at the comic book version of Gibson's take on the famed creature feature.

Written By: William Gibson

Logline: After the deadly events of the film Aliens, the spaceship Sulaco carrying the sleeping bodies of Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop are intercepted by the Union of Progressive Peoples. What the U.P.P forces don't expect is another deadly passenger that is about to unleash chaos between two governmental titans intent on developing the ultimate cold war weapon of mass destruction.

We are now on Patreon! If you want to support the show head over to www.patreon.com/shelved and check out all of our awesome rewards and see how you can support the podcast!

Thank you to the Patreon producers: Patrick Hall

Be sure to check out the merch store where you can get some t-shirts and other items! https://www.belowthecollar.com/shelvedpodcast

If you want to send in any questions or comments you can send them to [email protected]. you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram @shelvedpodcast. Be sure to rate and review the show on iTunes. Music: The Jazz Piano - Bensound.com

Check out this episode!

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philomaela · 4 years

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Yesterday I finished book 3/22 on my vikings reading list [here], “The Sea Road” by Margaret Elphinstone. It concerns the life of Gudrid, a figure from the Vinland sagas and describes her upbringing in Iceland and Greenland and later her voyage to Vinland (North America).

This was... a very mixed read for me, in a lot of ways it was an interesting and unique novel, but it had a very glaring flaw (in how it depicted Native Americans) that really spoiled the reading experience for me.

Mostly spoiler free review under the cut (vague spoilers so that I can explain why I didn’t like the portrayal of Native Americans in this book)

I am gonna start of with the good, because that’s what I normally do because it makes me feel less mean. I found the way this novel is structured to be very interesting. The framing device of the novel, is that Gudrid is telling her life’s story to a monk, Agnar, at the behest of a Bishop who thinks her adventures are worth documenting. So, Gudrid is telling her story in first person (though we are interrupted by a sort of 3rd person narration, that’s framed kind of like an out of body experience), but Agnar is the one writing it down for us the reader. He’s writing down all of Gudrid’s words exactly as she says them, which means that the narrative occasionally goes off track as Gudrid goes off on a tangent or gets ahead of herself in the narrative. A little detail I really loved, is that Gudrid will sometimes get tired of telling her story and start talking to Agnar. Agnar, being very committed to his work, writes down everything Gudrid says, but neglects to write down his responses to her. After all, his job is just to transcribe Gudrid’s story as she tells it. I really like when authors play around with storytelling like this, it feels experimental and fun.

Gudrid’s style of storytelling means it’s not a very plot forward book, but it is really effective at creating a really interesting atmosphere. A feeling of... transition kind of encompasses the book, of being “in between”, if that makes sense. We see a society caught in between paganism and christianity, in one case a wife has converted while a husband still holds on to the “old ways.” Gudrid, who was sort of raised in both religions (as she converted later in her childhood), has a very interesting worldview, as she sort of mixes up imagery from both religions. There’s also the feeling of being “in between” life and death, as Gudrid has experiences with ghosts and questions about heaven and the afterlife. There are also interesting discussions around the class structure and gender roles of Gudrid’s society, that I found very poignant.

But, okay... now for the big thing I didn’t like. So... obviously, because this story talks about Gudrid’s journey to America, we hear Gudrid’s view of Native Americans. Now, before we even get to Vinland, as she is alluding to her travels, she describes these Indigenous people in very dehumanizing terms and she continues to use these terms when she initially encounters Native Americans. Referring to them as “demons” and “half-men” as she tries to view her adventures in Vinland through this muddled Christian/Pagan viewpoint. Now, I suppose one could make the argument that this is Gudrid’s own fear of the unknown working against her in the moment, she’s viewing Vinland as “beyond the world” and so anything that resides in Vinland must be alien and frightening, she’s primed to see it through that lens. In fact, Gudrid goes on to have a moment of clarity, when she meets a Native American woman face to face and comes to the somewhat stunted realization that they’re just... people and that her othering of them is unwarranted.

Here’s my issue with this, and it’s not even that Gudrid’s realization is somewhat... basic, because I can see for how this woman, based on her somewhat isolated upbringing where she’s never been exposed to another culture, this notion is a radical one. It’s that... in the story, Gudrid the narrator is dehumanizing these people after she’s had an epiphany about their humanity! Gudrid is narrating the story of her life and she’s not saying, “at one point I thought this” she’s just stating it as fact. She also never even alludes to this realization later on, which feels all the more ridiculous when you tally up the number of times Gudrid goes “whoops, I’m getting ahead of myself, we can talk about this later” with regard to other plot points. It’s strangely done, unnecessary and ultimately ineffective imo, and even though it’s only like 5% of the story, it really made the book hard to enjoy. In the end, the dehumanizing language was unnecessary based on the framing device of the story, so I’m left more upset at the choice to include it than anything else.

#text #the sea road #margaret elphinstone #vikings reading adventure

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thecomicsnexus · 4 years

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DRAWING BLOOD #1-4 MAY - AUGUST 2019 BY DAVID AVALLONE, KEVIN EASTMAN, BEN BISHOP, TROY LITTLE AND BRITTANY PEER

SYNOPSIS

Once upon a time, Shane and Paul Bookman created an indie comic named “Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls”. The comic was a success that ended up becoming a big franchise. Many years later, and inspired by his mentor Frank Forrest, he sells the rights of the Ragdolls to the Kiddiescope network and creates a new publishing studio to champion creator rights. This doesn’t go well and Frank Forrest (who was managing the failing studio) takes his life.

Shane, working on a troubled Broadway musical based in Metropolis (the silent movie), also gets in trouble with the Lithuanian mafia because of the debts of Frank Forrest. He has to make a few millions happen. Fortunately, Hollywood producer Morgan Harbor is doing a new movie about the Ragdolls and hired Shane to work as a consultant, mostly to calm the fans. But he was hired after production started, so he had no say in the whole thing. He gives the little money he gets to the mafia, and arranges with them to have control over the Broadway musical (including casting) as even if it ends up being a train wreck, people will want to see it.

Shane tries to contact his brother to get involved in this new movie for a few bucks, but Paul is very angry at Shane after the way things ended between the two. The next day, Shane is going to NYCC, but when he arrives he discovers all the fandom is outraged after Morgan Harbor announced the new Ragdolls weren’t mutant, but aliens.

Shane uses his power as fan-favorite creator to manipulate Morgan Harbor into admitting he was confused and the Ragdolls are going to be mutant after all.

When things seem to go back to normal and he has to hire the boyfriend of the mafia boss, he discovers that his main actress is in some shady business, just before being kidnapped.

REVIEW

Kevin Eastman appearing in the actual comic helps make the distinction that this is not exactly Kevin Eastman’s story. But it’s pretty similar.

From their mentor (Jack Kirby and even his famous quotes), to Siberia Publishing (Tundra), to Morgan Harbor (Michael Bay), and the kiddiescope network (Viacom) there are many similarities. But it is mixed with other events that happened to different creators. The Broadway musical will remind you of the Spider-man musical, but it also reminds me of that time Stan Lee wanted to be in Broadway (and was, briefly).

But the real fun here is in seeing “Morgan Harbor” not understand the property one bit, and not caring about anything.

There is also a lot more going on that will be resolved in future issues (apparently this was a mini-series, but I understand an issue 5 is coming up). I really hope so, as there are a lot of plots and backstory to delve into.

I am not sure if this project is so interesting for non-turtle fans, but it is well written (by someone that worked in Hollywood) and nicely illustrated. Eastman provides black and white (or sepia) flashbacks, while Troy Little illustrates hallucination sequences.

I am also a fun of stories within the comic-book industry, as there is much more drama happening behind the panels than what we actually get, so this is kind of my type of story.

I give these issues a score of 9.

#drawing blood #kevin eastman #ben bishop #kevin eastman studios #comics #review #indie #2019 #post modern age #tmnt #rrrr #teenage mutant ninja turtles #radically rearranged ronin ragdolls

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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(ESSAY) A Shining Mess: Anthropocene Poetics in Caspar Heinemann’s Novelty Theory

In this essay, Maria Sledmere unpacks Caspar Heinemann’s Novelty Theory (The 87 Press, 2019) as an example of anthropocene poetics, challenging what it means to write about ‘Nature’, being, identity and everyday life in the context of the paradoxical deep-time ~novelty~ of our ‘newly’ fraught geological epoch.

> There’s this John Cage quote, paraphrased in Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager (2003), which goes like, ‘Let the mess shine in!’. I can’t find the quote anywhere else, but such contingency or obscurity feels relevant: where do we find anything in our obsessive mess of discourse? Cage’s quote captures the idea that mess bears recognition as a critical term, a technical concept. Caspar Heinemann’s Novelty Theory, published earlier this year by London-based The 87 Press, is a highly dense poetry collection whose ethos seems to match that of Cage’s. The title plays with all doomsday passé around ‘the end of theory’ and energises this question of explanation, thought and principle with novelty: that is, a carte blanche array of pop cultural reference, paratactic punch, playful registers and ‘millennial irony’. This is a book of the commons, of reversals, conflicted feelings, endless things. Bhanu Kapil’s blurb declares Novelty Theory ‘an anthem for alien beloveds everywhere’. Certainly, Heinemann’s poetry deals equally in intimacy and strangeness, subjectivities and otherness, capitalism and mysticism, leaving a petulant scent of patchouli in its wake. Novelty Theory is an anthem, sure, kissing the winds of extinction: a song of praise for living with contradiction, embracing chaos in the want for order.

> To know yourself as an alien beloved: at once a stranger but warmly held, to be loved but not to be wed to identity. Embracing yourself, your kin and the more-than-human around you as alien beloveds might be a central ethic for living in the anthropocene — not to mention its knotty entanglements of late-capitalism, colonialism and gender politics. I want to suggest that in Novelty Theory, letting the mess shine in is a tactic of what David Farrier (2019) has named anthropocene[1]poetics. Distinct from the established traditions of ecopoetics and nature poetry, anthropocene poetics is less about elegising or celebrating a specific idea of ‘nature’, and more about dramatising the existential conditions of living in a geological epoch distinguished by human intervention within the earth’s systems. Another feature of anthropocene poetics is its conscious situatedness within, response to and divergence from histories of nature writing or lyric renditions of subjectivity through ‘world’. Anthropocene poetics problematises the very idea of self and world, of ‘presence’ itself, while highlighting the material contradictions we experience in everyday life, in relation to late-capitalism as much as ecological crisis (and of course, the twain meet symbiotically). No facet of quotidian existence is off limits: where the nature poem (bear with my crude distinctions) typically looks to the hills and woods, the anthropocene poem might trace the material histories, ethical dilemmas and affective intensities felt in locales of domesticity, leisure and labour. Its setting may well be the city, the internet and the gentrified coffee shop, its registers conflicted, overburdened or charged with the weight of what Timothy Morton (2010a) calls ‘the ecological thought’: this enmeshment and total intimacy with nonhuman entities. I don’t mean to be prescriptive about what anthropocene poetics is; rather, I’d like to explore Novelty Theory as a case study in what anthropocene poetics, as a set of thematic gestures and formal tendencies, might provoke in our readings of contemporary texts, within the developing ontologies, ethics and (con)texts of climate emergency.

> While a broader discussion of anthropocene poetics and its emergent practitioners is outside the scope of this review, suffice to say Heinemann might be situated as part of a generation who have grown up around increasingly mainstream questioning of ecological responsibility, crisis, ethical conflict, identity politics and material precarity. I want to situate Novelty Theory alongside works that split apart the colonial, often masculinist or heteronormative narratives of typical nature writing. We might think of CA Conrad, Craig Santos Perez, Cecilia Vicuña and Evelyn Reilly: poets who work with ritual, lyric unravelling and juxtaposed collage to dramatise the necessary hypocrisies of everyday life in the anthropocene, alongside a sincerity of commitment to improving ecological attunement. Writing that unpicks the colonial, racialised, ruralised, heteronormative and ableist assumptions often present in traditional nature writing. Writing that works with ‘Nature’[2], but often in a state of refusal which shows up the term’s historical uses and abuses. Another recent 87 Press publication, Callie Gardner’s naturally it is not (2018), is a good example of this engagement with ‘Nature’: structurally challenging the existential arrangements and sensory associations we attach to traditional seasons. In the reader’s notes, Gardner reminds us, ‘“Nature” itself is a capitalist and imperialist invention, designed to protect those aspects of the world it does not want to change and to abdicate its responsibility to anything outside of “culture”’. My sense is that anthropocene poetics does valuable work in performatively blurring the pedestalled ‘Nature’ with the elusive ideologies of ‘culture’, exploding the complexities and assumptions held within such prior distinctions.

Nature Poem

> In Tommy Pico’s landmark Nature Poem (2017), the speaker blatantly rejects essentialising associations between indigenous peoples and ‘Nature’, while framing this rejection in the ironic genre politics of a sequence titled Nature Poem:

I can’t write a nature poem bc it’s fodder for the noble savage narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face, I say to my audience.

There’s an explicit ‘audience’ here, the necessity of establishing lyric voice as performance. Anthropocene poetics draws out a processual, reflexive legacy that goes back to Wordsworth, using a kind of dramatic irony to remind us of the speaker’s presence in the ‘world’ of the poem, and all her accompanying dilemmas, commitments and responsibilities around and towards the subject.

> Pico is an American Indian (NDN) poet who situates anthropocenic conditions of sexuality, identity, consumerism and urban space within a reflexive critique of what it means to write a Nature poem. Nature Poem throws up questions around colonialism, indigeneity, essentialism and poetic tradition which challenge ideological constructs of Nature. As Morton puts it, much ecological thinking thus far has ‘set up “Nature” as a reified thing in the distance’ (2010a). Pico’s work explodes such reification within everyday life, showing that Nature is something we ‘do’: it’s an instant message (‘gaia is alive in those pipes’), it’s in the way we relate to objects, to each other, the way we ‘break’, the way we fall or feel or fuck. Eileen Myles argues ‘a poem says I want’ and Nature Poem asks what it is to want anything at all when almost everyone’s trying to identify you with the ‘natural world’ — as, essentially, a backdrop, a static facet of landscape.

> What does it mean to write or read a Nature Poem from the heart of Brooklyn (where Pico currently resides), mindful of fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara’s famous assertion, ‘I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life’. There’s something deliciously liberating about Pico’s punk attitude to eco-clichés: ‘The world is a bumble bee / in the sense that, who cares?’. Anthropocene poetics involves wrestling with a generational nihilism or general air of hipster indifference towards what might be perceived as a useless, dying ‘Nature’. But it also means playfully staging our very immersion in the conundrum of what that Nature might mean: ‘Nature is kind of over my head’, ‘Nature keeps wanting to hang out’. Pico’s casual personification of Nature serves to remind us of the term’s social construction while staging its ideological invention within material, affective and social contexts.

> If it’s difficult, nigh impossible, to actually think extinction, maybe what we need is an ethics of life instead. An amalgamation of Romanticism, physical immediacy, queer desire and the act of a pause becomes, in Nature Poem, the redeemable expression:

Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight

and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades—

This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.

The strange, specific pathos of that line, ‘a kind of nature’. By saying ‘The world is a bumble bee’, Pico plays with the arbitrariness with which we define the world as such, its conflations of scales and agencies. As Timothy Clark (2018) reminds us, a ‘given scale’ is ‘a kind of grammar whose presence is overlooked in our habitual attention to individual things’. What Pico and other poets’ work does is recalibrate our grammar of scale by twisting familiar Nature tropes within the aesthetic and ethical contexts of quotidian life. The moon of Pico’s poem is not dressed up in metaphor but simply there, ‘inescapable’. It doesn’t replace anything else, it’s nobody’s feeling. There’s a lowkey opulence to that sense of urgency. Poetry warrants acknowledgement of the beauty of what’s left of Life. And sometimes that’s as cheap as knowing you can’t cut the moon out of your poem, your night — you probably wouldn’t even want to.

> In response to an Elizabeth Bishop poem, ‘At the Fishhouses’, Farrier writes: ‘Difference persists; in this granular vision, the qualities of the particular (texture, depth, grain) mark the queerness of all bodies in the deep strangeness of evolutionary time and of our Anthropocene future’ (2019). Such ambitious claims for anthropocene poetry can also be applied to a poetics of riff, repetition, modulation, phraseology and collaged register. Heinemann: ‘my drag / persona is called Nature’ (‘Full Moon Leech Party’). What do we wear of what’s over there in the weave of our lines, identities? Where Bishop’s poem connects material detritus — ‘the silver of the benches’, ‘the small old buildings with an emerald moss’ — with deep time, Pico proclaims the violent theory of contradiction and connection: ‘the fabric of our lives #death / some ppl wait a lifetime for a moment like this #death’, ‘just do it #death / Got #death’. Borrowing from the associative, non-linear clusters spelled by the hashtag, Pico renders death a hotspot within the general web of extinction, a pedal note thrumming hypnotically through its song.[3] Repurposing familiar commercial slogans, Pico confronts cultural taboos with a gleeful insouciance. Nature is death as much as Life — a practical fact — and maybe, with an eye to Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004), this acknowledgement is one way out of ‘reproductive futurism’. Instead of ‘the colonial legacy of the future’, its depressing speculative intricacies, just ‘Give me / a minute’ (Pico 2017). Like chill, the world is warming but we’re here and now: let’s talk. The pragmatism of anthropocene poetics, perhaps, is a making of space; not just buying us time but also scattering the seeds with which we might still (in spite of our increasingly precarious lives) nourish ideas, philosophise, interrogate and experiment what it means to live and die in what’s happening — at the scale of the planet and that of the microbes inside us, tweaking our ethical and affective inclinations. ‘[E]thics for the Anthropocene’, Joanna Zylinska argues, should urge ‘a return to critical thinking [...] a reparation of thought’ (2014), wary, of course, that ‘catalogued over bullshit reams, praxis makes nothing happen / to the seeds in snow’ (Gardner 2018).

Pragmatic Opulence

> Heinemann’s Novelty Theory resurrects a dusted signifier, ‘theory’, as a gestural architecture for holding the book’s sprawling morass of impressions, encounters and streams of thought. Like Kapil’s work, a degree of enchantment runs through reems of disaffection or cynicism: where Kapil often references minerals, colour (the pink lightning of Ban en Banlieue) or a quality of light, in Novelty Theory this is held in the ritualistic detritus our speaker returns to — spices and flowers, herbs and teas. Heinemann dares you to critique the value of what might be called twee: ‘the tragedy of it all / lukewarm milky surrender punk upholstery / the bittersweet kettle i needed for this nettle tea’. Acts or artefacts of ritual significantly conduct the order of how we deal with everyday trauma. Heinemann’s poetics has that candied, medicinal quality of internal rhyme: good enough to chew but might (as) well sting. It makes you stop to think, pursuing its own excess. The Nature of Novelty Theory is monstrous, opulent, ‘thick and deeply slimy everywhere’ (‘Theses on Land Masses (After Iain Hamilton Finlay)’). In their Goldsmiths dissertation, ‘FUCKING PANSIES: Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction’, Heinemann argues that poetry itself is a ‘speaking through flowers’, and in being so

the consequences of communication are non-linear, cross-pollinated and dispersed, the eternal and cyclical affectively and effectively meeting to produce models of life which could be described as pragmatically opulent.

Pragmatically opulent seems to me an extension of Cage’s imploring to Let the mess shine in!, albeit situated within genuine political and bodily struggle. Pragmatic opulence is a strategy for queer survival but also world-making, a way of ‘produc[ing] models of life’ within pressurised social systems. It problematises familiar symbolic objects as kitsch synecdoche for some Natural paradise over there:

Nature in the sickly pine air freshener fighting its discrete privately commissioned battle against the zombie economy of life, the shape of the pine tree as futility. (‘Theses on Land Masses (After Iain Hamilton Finlay)

There’s something sickly, abject even, about the landed associations of pine forests, the deep ecology of a dark green wild. The air freshener hangs limply, ‘fighting its discrete’ war against life eating life. The shape of this Nature is useless; it’s not even beautiful. It isn’t life so much as a cheap, deified logo, as pre-millennial passé as your uncle’s old air freshener. What we need is a more eclectic ambience.

> Throughout Novelty Theory, Heinemann’s poems fly between forms: jagged lines that read with the transient glaze or aphoristic charm of a text message, block stanzas, a travel diary, all-caps and extravagant use of punctuation — particularly the slash and the exclamation point, marking moments of undecidability, rupture or dramatic emphasis. This variety comprises a non-linear, variable and maximalist poetics of play, subversion and flourishing within the everyday contexts of late-capitalism and the anthropocene. It shows the necessity of confronting these contexts with a queer sensibility, if we recall Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic definition of queer as ‘the open mesh of possibilites, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically’ (1993). To queer-read Nature, like gender, is to work with that ‘open mesh’. For Heinemann, that seems to demand a kind of pragmatism and opulence, a stylised critique of real conditions, their desires and demands.

> I want to trace what kinds of pragmatic opulence are found in the life of Novelty Theory, aware that in naming a book of lyric poetry Theory, Heinemann is surely inviting us to question the very division or frisson between life and theory, voice and world within contemporary existence. We might describe the whole book, in fact, as a kind of theoretical or speculative world-building. The poems engage in acts of redress or recontextualisation, kind of anthropocene camp: ‘I actually think capitalism is quite a beautiful word and look forward to appropriating it to mean something like spring dawn sunshine ladybird sex’ (‘Travel Diary Summer 2016’). Throughout Novelty Theory, Heinemann has this radical ostentation that blithely redefines the things it challenges: poetry as active world-making, ethics as poiesis, chipping away at fixities to let forth what’s glowing, proliferating and strange underneath. In a recent Zarf review of the book, Gloria Dawson notes the collection’s ‘wit, bratty polemic, and knotty etymological adventuring’ (2019), which seems about right. What happens if we took the capital out of capitalism and made it a five-syllabled evocation of sticky, butter-fingered summer afternoons? There’s a childlike quality of vivid bricolage to Heinemann’s craft. What if this revamped capitalism itself was a knotty, queer ecological utopia, a stubborn arbor of vines, a mesh of delicious instants, or is this just sheer sly irony on Heinemann’s part? We have to sit with that contradiction, swinging our legs over the verge where conflicts might connect.

Mystic/Mesh

> Back to Sedgwick’s idea of the ‘open mesh’. Queer ecology, for Timothy Morton, is the manifest ‘mesh’ of all life-forms: ‘a nontotalisable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically every level: between species, between the living and nonliving, between organism and environment’ (2010b). Queer ecology would be some kind of intersection between nonessentialist views of gender, sexuality, biology and evolution more generally. Novelty Theory stages this enmeshment through its lateral poetics of interwoven association, its registers of irony, darkness and play. Its speaker’s identity coyly thrown around like laconic copy from a Tinder profile: ‘i’m a leo moon dickhead w a gay agenda’ (‘according to wikipedia i am in the “initial struggle for success” phase of my life as bruce springsteen’s life’), rewriting Linnaean systems or evolutionary rules via casual astrology patter. The mysticism that runs throughout is part of Novelty Theory’s disjunctive world-building, its problematising of distinctions between inside and out, dream and reality, virtual and actual. Take the Borgesian tenor of statements like ‘All land is fictional, that is both the problem / and a potential source of the solution’ (‘Theses on Land Masses (After Iain Hamilton Finlay)’). The critical thrust of Novelty Theory is its mycelial ability to expose the undercurrents and assumptions of everyday life within late-capitalism and the attendant anxieties of the anthropocene. Often this takes a surrealist twist:

a thousand constellations held in a single double stomach romantic service station burger king the wormhole could be anywhere (‘A CHEMTRAIL IN CURVED AIR’)

This collapse of scale, the inside and out, is highly symptomatic of anthropocene poetics. It’s easy to read the poems of Novelty Theory alongside, say, Morton’s idea of hyperobjects as ‘things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’: with characteristics of viscosity, nonlocality, nonhuman temporality and interobjectivity, hyperobjects usher us into ‘a new human phase of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness’ (2013). There’s a kind of sublime here which takes David Hockney-esque Americana or pastel suburbia and transplants it through the ‘wormhole’ of environs and spacetimes enmeshed by ecological relations, ethical patterns and constellations of cause and effect, showed up to us in the twenty-first century as though by x-ray. You are what you eat, and here it’s infinity. Elsewhere, however, it might be ‘the banal / constantly flowing cappuccino of existence’ (‘another empty threat to disappear’). Wherever we look, Heinemann puts a decadent rip in your Cath Kidston jacket, lets the fantasy flora free, wears the countryside as highbrow punk with pocket-knife irony.

This One Weird Tip

> Speaking of infinity, a word on the internet: an obvious theme and modality within Novelty Theory. ‘My anxiety levels get up and stay hard for hours with this one weird tip’ (‘Travel Diary Summer 2016’). The masculinist, ambient-porno imperative to ‘stay hard’ is here conflated with anxiety and the suffusing presence of internet ads offering impossible, faux-sage advice with ‘this one weird tip’. I wonder if this is also a dig at deep ecology, whose commitment to embracing wilderness and environmental immersion often comes off with a stinky, viagra-macho flavour. Getting deeper into the book’s web, conspiracy theories are cited with the kind of exuberance that weaves their dismissal as nevertheless somehow essential to a broader resistant narrative: ‘recruit, recruit, recruit! i WISH that the queen waws a lizard’ (‘the only reason i was abducted by aliens in kathmandu in 1994 was that in 1994 i went to kathmandu to be abducted by aliens’). There’s an ouroboros sense that you get eaten, or at the very least bitten, by the narratives you pursue online — or indeed in any virtual mode (including poetry — see Ben Lerner for more on ‘virtual poetics’). You could call it meme poetics wired up to the trembling motherboard of lyric. Who or what gets charged and when. Where did they get those minerals? What if I won’t turn on tomorrow?

> The hyperconnected consciousness enabled by our online lives is also manifest in Heinemann’s playful intertextuality. Every other line seems to reference or code a cultural trope, to cite some other poem or tradition. ‘No value / just pina coladas’ (‘according to wikipedia i am in the “initial struggle for success” phase of my life as bruce springsteen’s life’) weirdly took me back to William Carlos Williams’ ‘No ideas but in things’. Maybe that’s a clickable blink that activates poetic lineage, extends the song of Heinemann’s polemic under the deep canonic sea. Sometimes they play with aphoristic or supplementary modes to ‘tack on’ a certain message or dramatise a violent fact (i.e. extinction), forcing you to hold all declarations in the bewildered, hyper-stream adjunctive mode of email, IM, browsing: ‘p.s. imagine a world without wild life’ (‘Travel Diary Summer 2016’). There’s a psytrance version of a New York poem in ‘If you think pigeons are too common to be beautiful don’t call yourself a communist’, where a salutary coke is poured for Frank O’Hara and the streets become the stage for contradiction, Picasso’s dog, pain and ‘The slobbering ecstasy of now’. Psytrance because this is a collection of ecstasies achieved with your tongue firmly lodged in your cheek, your jaw gurning hard with each stream of detail, flash, repeat. Syncope. Like Nat Raha, Heinemann has weaponised the grammar of breath to speak vulnerability and power within and between each jagged line, strikeout, blank or marked delay, caesura. A catalogue of bodily pleasures and social conundrums, unsolved ethical dilemmas in the modernist canon: ‘I am a Picasso dog / Picasso was a misogynist / but it’s okay, dogs have no gender’).

Sentient Excess

> Anthropocene poetics often stages its own conditions of production. There’s a turn between inside and outside, a questioning of representational agency. For instance, in Ash Before Oak (2019), a diary of survival and gardening reminiscent of Derek Jarman’s iconic Modern Nature (1991), Jeremy Cooper’s gloomy protagonist muses, ‘I ask questions of the mole I’d do better directing at myself’. What do we put upon the more-than-human that really we want or demand from ourselves? How do we write in this space of curiosity or lack? In Novelty Theory, awareness of the body’s contingencies, its material traces and hormonal surges runs throughout. With some degree of irony, Heinemann maps the kinds of everyday precarity experienced by the millennial freelancer onto the broader precarities of climate crisis. Maybe it’s not to write from curiosity but anxiety. At one point, Heinemann even dramatises the real-time of ‘writing’ in relation to the body’s nervous arousal:

i fill the keyboard with all my leftover skin shit, same as the next hoarder of sentient excess some just trade it all in for gold just like that all gone in the blink of an eye the world vanishes and reappears and vanishes and reappears so many times every minute and yet i am still so scared every single time don’t fucking stop (‘I like scaffolding as much as the next attempt to create order’).

‘Sentient excess’ sums up a lot of Novelty Theory. Sentient because Heinemann’s speaker is highly reflexive but also human: a bundle of nerves, hormones, skin and bones, pleasure and pain. Writing the world is a fort-da process of vanishing and reappearing, it has a kind of sexual imperative that mingles pleasure and pain, presence and absence — ‘don’t fucking stop’. Desire is terrifying but we just can’t help it. The world is a virus, flashing upon your screen. And then again it just is your screen. It’s in the code. It’s a form of capital, ‘gold’, and writing is its supplement, the unfinished gesture towards holding, structure, containment. The keyboard generates worlds, bears our traces in time. Heinemann’s poetics are lucid, striking, high-retina. Let the mess shine in.

Millennial Hell or Heaven

> Novelty Theory is a book of a certain generation: it challenges the affects of ‘millennial existence’, both riding on and unravelling the assumptions put upon us. It’s a cheap cliché to say choice makes us miserable, but now the imperative is to choose to be happy. In ‘Depression Calculator’, Heinemann chiastically quips: ‘i can’t be ideological about my happiness even though happiness / is entirely ideological’. In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed writes: ‘Happiness shapes what coheres as a world’, it can be used as an affective tool for ‘redescrib[ing] social norms as social goods’ — for instance, in the phrase ‘domestic bliss’. This quote from ‘Depression Calculator’ mirrors the guilt I feel in trying to write about the anthropocene while, say, being in a joyous state of mind, feeling loved or inclined to a state of play. The point is, we shouldn’t have to choose one or the other. Who benefits when the capitalist guilt-machine shames us into recycling, taking the heat off the wider environmental abuse of toxic corporations? When Heinemann writes of ‘the hollow surface of liquid soluble anxiety’ (‘visualisation…’) I think of Morton’s description of the ‘chocolate layer’ of ‘shame’ that coats ecological awareness, a ‘dark-sweet’ quality within its depression. Grief, shame, depression: in confronting the anthropocene, these are the affects we ‘melt’ into with a degree of both pleasure and suffering. Is there relief? Novelty Theory is a good exercise in working through such contradictory affects in relation to everyday life, as well as the praxis of writing about the anthropocene from the p.o.v of an actual, breathing person — who takes the days as they come, who both suffers and thrives but doesn’t necessarily claim this as their sole identity. Who doesn’t assume a set, heteronormative route to happiness and human flourishing. Who dwells upon a ‘tender verge’ (‘another empty threat to disappear’). Is this what a queer form of staying with the trouble (speaking with Donna Haraway here) looks like?

Post-Vaporwave Poetics

> One thing to love about Novelty Theory is its conflict of registers. Unlike a whole tradition of ‘serious’ ecopoetry, the book invokes the tropes of current anthropocene discourse in a parodic manner which nonetheless falls upon sincerity:

the forest’s infrastructure is devastated by Dutch elm disease, which is not the point it’s just also happening in the world near the point outside the harsh city limits of the point is everything that constitutes the periphery leaks into the centre, the centre is undeserving of the bioluminescence in the centre of the octopus (‘visualisation: you are a small shark in the aquarium in the office of the CEO of a nondescript corporate body in a mid-80s postmodern swirl carpeted disaster zone where all the glass is cleaned except yours, the day is broken with elevator music but you don’t know this is what this is. You are nibbling on some plankton and waiting for communism and you write a poem on the discretely moulding moulded glass of your aquarium. the poem reads:’).

Riffing off the ‘tentacular’ thought of Haraway et al, Heinemann evokes a grandiose vision of arboreal devastation as one ‘point’ among many that slide between the centre and periphery of the everything that is the anthropocene, or indeed extinction. Heinemann asks: for who do we write this kind of poetry, what is the instrumental ‘point’? If we pursue that imperative, do we just end up with ‘make narrative fate again’ and surrender our agency to the forces of (Manmade, Trumpian, triumphant) history? If Dutch elm disease is a hyperobject, somehow it also leaks, viscously, into the ‘bioluminescence’ emitted from another life-form surviving deep within some other element, thousands of miles away. And let’s not forget that in this poem, the addressed reader is ‘a small shark’ encased in a 1980s corporate office environment.

> You could say this is a post-vaporwave poem, where office hauntology evokes sympathies between trapped animals and trapped human-animals (what if the aquarium was just your computer, what if plankton is all we can eat in the future-past, what if we all became (loan)sharks in the credit extinction, trying and failing to eat what’s left on the Darwinist food chain of neoliberal survival?). We’re asked to visualise this poem, experience it in a medial, meditative way: it’s clear there’s a dark ecological poetics of attunement here, a staged duration. Heinemann plays with the temporal confusions of the anthropocene and prods our susceptibility to a certain pastoral nostalgia with lines like ‘like most people, the earth just gets hotter with age’. The earth as a (excuse me) ‘bod’ is one way of figuring, literally, the existential dilemma of the anthropocene as a man-made decimation of earthly systems.

Requiem for Sustainable Theory

> By no means has this been an exhaustive review of Novelty Theory, let alone this thing I’m calling, after Farrier, the poetics of the anthropocene. With its Matthew Welton-esque marathon titles, Heinemann’s book has the air of a James Ferraro track: all cut-up, glitch and ambient late-capitalism set to the tone of a slick, surreal sublime. Yet there’s something freeing in the all-too-real dreamscapes of Heinemann’s poetics of anthropocenic disorder, millennial anxiety and conflicted desires, inclined to banality. The low-caps ‘i’ that jumps across the collection like a dissident pro in poetic parkour refuses essential identity and makes room for incident, contingency: a more fugitive and less hubristic lyric. What forms of tenderness are at stake here? How might we flip an ‘Adorable pastoral avant garde’ (‘Theses on Land Masses (After Iain Hamilton Finlay)’) into something useful? What is the ‘point’ in everything, and moreover who will look after the octopus as it wraps its tentacles around the world so grossly? Where do we situate anthropocene poetics in relation to ecopoetics, consciously or otherwise on the part of the poet’s intentions, given that the godfather of ecopoetics Jonathan Skinner suggests the form is a ‘site of converging, intersecting practices and is most politically useful [...] when it keeps as many of these frictional nodes as active as possible’?

> Perhaps anthropocene poetics is unique in presenting a degree of situatedness within ‘avant-garde’ traditions, which historically bear a more urban resonance (although with the anthropocene, of course, such distinctions of urban/rural are broken down in the mesh of everything). Writing of their book We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) in relation to Novelty Theory, Isabel Waidner notes: ‘Relationship with the historical avant-garde: complicated’ (2019). This ‘shared investment in, but disappointment with, the promises of the historical avant-garde’ (Waidner 2019) — whether Situationist dérive or Dadaist collage — is felt throughout Novelty Theory: not as a roadblock in literary history so much as a set of what Waidner refers to as ‘portals’. Think again of Sedgwick and Morton’s invocations of the mesh. Anthropocene poetics needs to be something that queers, dis-identifies, labours and exposes everyday strangeness; it needs to let fall where we stand while also holding us. It needs to be a shining mess. It needs life and death, irony and sincerity, collapse and creativity, journey and destination, work and play. It needs to not choose but somehow continue to dance, seduce, weave theory and upset the representation of what comes before or after, because image is power: ‘i’m regressing again / but all i hope is when we picture the end of the world / we end the picture of the world’ (‘Ferocious Lack Harmony’).

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara, 2010. The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press).

Clément, Catherine, 1994. Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Cooper, Jeremy, 2019. Ash Before Oak (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions).

Dawson, Gloria, 2019. ‘On Caspar Heinemann’, Zarf #13 (Glasgow: Zarf Poetry).

Kapil, Bhanu, 2015. Ban en Banlieue (New York: Nightboat Books).

Farrier, David, 2019. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep-Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Gardner, Callie, 2018. naturally it is not (Sutton: The 87 Press).

Haraway, Donna, 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press).

Heinemann, Caspar, 2017. ‘FUCKING PANSIES: Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction’, academia [online]. Available at: <https://www.academia.edu/32408905/FUCKING_PANSIES_Queer_Poetics_Plant_Reproduction_Plant_Poetics_Queer_Reproduction> [Accessed 29.7.19].

— 2019. Novelty Theory (Sutton: The 87 Press).

Jarman, Derek, 2018. Modern Nature (London: Penguin).

Morton, Timothy, 2010a. The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

— 2010b. ‘Guest Column: Queer Ecology’, PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 2, pp. 273-282.

— 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

— 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press).

Pico, Tommy, 2017. Nature Poem (Portland: Tin House Books).

Retallack, Joan, 2003. The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 1993. Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press).

Zylinska, Joanne, 2016. ‘Photography After the Human’, Photographies, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 167-186.

[1]Against its general usage in academic and news discourse, I deliberately de-capitalise anthropocene to recognise the term’s assimilation into a broader cultural vernacular, whose shifting interpretations bely the insistent fixity implied by a capitalised proper noun. With anthropocene, not Anthropocene, we are working with a pliable term whose definitions are open to critical resistance and semiotic play. We are figuring out the definition of the anthropocene through practice, rather than accepting a totalising framework which suffers from a similar hubris around species as that which underlies the anthropocene ‘condition’ or ‘cause’ as such. I follow Joanna Zylinska in thinking of the anthropocene as more of ‘a thought device that helps us to visualise the multiple event of extinction — but also to intervene in the timeline of the extinction’ (2016).

[2]Following Timothy Morton (2010a), I will occasionally capitalise ‘Nature’ to, as Morton puts it, ‘highlight its “unnatural” qualities, namely (but not limited to), hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery’.

[3]Notably, Pico’s Poetry Foundation profile describes him as a ‘karaoke enthusiast’.

Novelty Theory is out now and available to buy here, via The 87 Press.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published 7/8/19

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t-urbulence · 5 years

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Best Albums of 2018 but it’s chill this year (6-1)

Hello and welcome back to the Decisions I’ve Elected to Make. We’re picking up from number six because this is where shit gets real.

6 Twenty One Pilots: Trench

*shocked gasps*

I know, I know, but listen.

It’s fine.

If I’m 100% honest with myself I’d say I expected better. (God, I speak like sixth place is anything to sneeze at, oofh.) But to be honest anything that’s not Vessel can’t have my heart, okay. Vessel is the golden standard and probably nobody can touch that ever. Which is bad, I know it’s bad to want a band to do something they’ve done really well once before, all over again. And I knew they wouldn’t and I shouldn’t even want them to which is why I accepted Trench as it is.

In my review (don’t let me fool you with these links I haven’t written a lot of reviews at all, I just happened to write some of these) I mentioned the strong lyrical themes and the instrumenting to be the core strengths but also mentioned how even though the concept is neat and I appreciate the boys being this imaginative and creative, it can also be alienating because you shouldn’t need to read a fuckin’ book to be able to enjoy a four-minute song, right? Still, this album is good and I love it, please don’t send me to music hell.

My favourite songs: Bandito, Cut My Lip, The Hype

5 Years & Years: Palo Santo

Shit, talk about hard to follow debuts, amirite?

Years & Years had one of the strongest debuts I can recall in recent years. Communion was just so incredibly complete you would never guess it was anybody’s first attempt at an album. And because I’m a pessimist I tried to keep my expectations low. Sanctify was okay, Palo Santo (the song) was okay but it was If You’re Over Me that put my mind at rest and convinced me Olly & Co. know what they’re doing. (I’m reading back my review I actually called them Olly Alexander & Co. in the review too omg I’m sorry Emre and Mikey, I know your names, I promise.) And I found this album more lighthearted and despite the themes (religion, sexuality, guilt, queerphobia, you know, the hits) way more upbeat. I’m not going to say it’s better than Communion but it’s definitely not worse.

Years & Years is a band with a huge personality. They make a genre that’s easy to get lazy in sound colourful, exciting, captivating, and like the biggest party that you can’t miss out on. They’re both modern and nostalgic for a musical era they weren’t even alive in.

My favourite songs: All For You, Hypnotised, Here

I can’t choose between the next two so I’m going to write their summaries and then decide which one is fourth and which is third.

4 Panic! at the Disco: Pray For the Wicked

Panic! has always been a hit or miss with me. I either love their albums to death or I don’t care much for them at all and it fluctuates quite regularly. With Death of a Bachelor being my favourite record Brendon ever released I found it unlikely that anything he can do after this could dethrone it. And I was right, it didn’t. But it made a damn great job of trying to.

I think Brendon to be one of the most talented songwriters, vocalists, and performers of the current generation and I’m not exaggerating. He’s amazing and he doesn’t half-ass anything he does even though he has such a stable following that would just gobble up anything he puts out. And I appreciate that. Pray For the Wicked is like Brendon; strong, whimsical, colourful, a little all over the place, but full of passion and emotion. It’s exactly what the pop scene needs in these... *looks at charts* *looks at news about fucking celebrity beefs that nobody should give two shits about* trying times.

I also wrote a review of this one.

My favourite songs: Roaring 20s, High Hopes, Dancing’s Not a Crime

3 Fall Out Boy: MANIA

God this album’s been coming for so long it’s easy to forget it only came out this year. And weirdly, I was so sure this would place lower than Pray For the Wicked. There’s not a lot separating the two though. I guess where I like fewer songs more on PFTW I like more songs less on Mania? I don’t fucking know, let’s just say I did maths to calculate this or something.

In my review, tut-tut (that is a little off because the edition I listened to for the first time had the tracks in a slightly different order so... oops?), I said that I’m glad Fall Out Boy stopped giving a shit and I think that’s a theme for so many of these albums on this list, or at least so many of the bands I enjoy doing this where they just stop worrying about trying to appeal to new audiences and just doing their own thing. Fall Out Boy has been so many things before that nothing is out of the comfort zone for them. They are veterans, are you even kidding me, they’re a goddamn powerhouse and all that energy comes across on this album so well, it’s just insanely strong. It also definitely beats AB/AP for me even though I love that album as well.

My favourite songs: Heaven’s Gate, Hold Me Tight or Don’t, Bishops Knife Trick

@ jesus @ god please forgive me for what I’m about to do.

2 Editors: Violence

I’ve done this a few times before where I know technically an album is better than the other but the emotions surrounding it are just different. The best example to this was in 2014 where I put Troy Baker’s Sitting In the Fire in first place against Sia’s 1,000 Forms of Fear which is just a flawless and brilliant record from beginning to end. But listen to me...

Emotions okay?

Besides, Editors and I go way back, they know I love them. And so here we are, after the sixth album they still haven’t had a #1 album with me. Which is not true, they’re always #1 in my heart but this year was just like this, you know?

Here’s a review of Violence but... I don’t feel like I need to talk more about them. I just love them so much. They’re just, my life, you know? At every turn, at every event and happening, they’re just there. Their music, their presence, the memories I made because of them, the people I’ve met because of them. They shaped me and my life in ways no other band has or will. So I’ll just leave this quote here and go to bed. Or not cause I’m not done with this list yet.

“People are always talking about how dark we are, and I always get asked where that comes from. And it’s a question I have to dance around, and I have done for years. But I do know this: The people who like this band, who come and see us play and buy our records, they don’t finish an Editors CD or come out of an Editors concert feeling sad. People connect with those little glimmers of hope that are in those songs.”

My favourite songs: Violence, Cold, Nothingness

1 Why do things like this happen to good, god-fearing christian girls like me is all I wanna know...

Just kidding, I’m not scared of god.

I didn’t want to write any more about this album (it’s called Love Yourself 轉 'Tear' by the way) or BTS as a whole because anyone who’d be interested in reading about why I love them so much understands already so I don’t feel like wasting my breath and I’m not going to but I’ll say this much: the amount of happiness BTS’s music brought me since I got to know them five months ago is unmatched. This year, at least. I remember in 2015 when I got to know twenty one pilots and thought to myself: holy shit, experiences like this, bands like this you just don’t come across every day. To me, at least, these moments are few and far between which is why I want to treasure and honour them whenever they happen.

They just make me happy and their music fucking slaps. Next question!

My favourite songs: Outro: Tear, Anpanman, The Truth Untold, Paradise

Yeah. Yeah I’m pretty sure that was three songs. Good.

#best of 2018 #tia's best of 2018

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Reinvents Sara Lance (Again)

https://ift.tt/3gMpRsE

This Legends of Tomorrow review contains spoilers.

Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Episode 7

Legends of Tomorrow has always been the weirdest member of The CW’s Arrowverse line-up, a largely fearless series that’s unafraid to engage in downright bizarre and occasionally wacky storytelling even as it explores deeper and more difficult emotional truths.

After all, few shows are brave enough to sideline one of their leading characters when they don’t have to –Supergirl’s decision to leave Kara Zor-El in the Phantom Zone for half its final season is a glaring example of the many ways such a move can go wrong even with the best of intentions – but Legends just goes for it, stranding team captain Sara Lance on an alien spaceship hundreds of light years away from her friends even as it uses her absence to explore larger truths about both who she is and who she’s becoming.

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The search for Sara has been the driving force behind Season 6 thus far, introducing new characters (Spooner, Gary’s alien ex Kayla), allowing new team dynamics to flourish (Hellstar forever!), and giving Ava Sharpe the chance to step forward as a leader in her own right. “Back to the Finale: Part II” is a wildly entertaining homage to the Back to the Future franchise that illustrates the utter ridiculousness of time travel as a narrative trope, even as it provides fun meta commentary on Sara’s disappearance and allows us to see her lovely, heartfelt proposal to Ava unfold in something close to the way it was supposed to have gone down the first time. (Had she not, you know, been abducted by aliens.)

But Sara’s long-awaited return to the Waverider also serves as yet another origin story for a woman who’s faced death and resurrection at least half a dozen times over the course of her run in this universe. That she’s now a half-alien hybrid clone that may or may not be functionally immortal at this point is just the icing on the cake.

After all, Legends of Tomorrow has always been a show about identity, and the things that make us who we are. Zari Tomas and Zari Tarazi may be two very aesthetically different versions of the same person, but they share the same basic soul and many of the same traits and desires. Ava may be one of hundreds – possibly thousands – of a group of clones that look just like she does, but she’s still managed to claim her own individual identity. And Mick Rory may be a former criminal who thinks humanity, in general, is garbage, but thanks to Sara, he still found something bigger than himself to believe in anyway.

These are the sort of complex philosophical questions humankind has struggled to answer since the dawn of time: What makes us human? Are we defined by our natures or our external circumstances? And to what extent can we choose the people we become?

Is it Sara’s love for Ava that makes her human? Is it her capacity for sacrifice or her love for her friends that defines her? How much of what is technically “Sara” – her body, the very specifics of her DNA – can be taken away before she becomes someone or something else? These are the questions that Season 6 is now uniquely set up to explore, in ways that the Arrowverse hasn’t truly tried to wrestle with before.

Legends of Tomorrow Reveals the Dark Secret of Sara Lance

By Jim Dandeneau

Legends of Tomorrow Goes Disney to Reveal Dark Truths About Ava

By Jim Dandeneau

Comic book history is full of clones – after all, they’re easy ways to have your cake and eat it too, narratively speaking. Kill off a major character and mine all the drama of that death, without losing their presence in the world of the story. And thanks to Bishop’s handy dandy upload of Sara’s consciousness into what is essentially the alien cloud, it’s very possible that the White Canary could, at this point, actually live forever. But that doesn’t mean she’s the same woman she was when this story began.

Sara Lance’s journey has been one of the most complex and satisfying of any character’s in the Arrowverse to date. It’s hard to believe that the shallow girl who once ran off with her sister’s rich boyfriend is now the badass commander of a squad of time traveling misfit heroes, let alone once roamed the streets of Star City as a vigilante, headed the League of Assassins, or was named the Paragon of Destiny. Sara’s been through it and her evolution into a confident, capable leader has been a joy to watch even as it’s hit more than its fair share of snags and setbacks

Perhaps we should have known that Sara had become too comfortable, too stable in her identity and sense of self for Legends to resist shaking the status quo up for long. The revelation that Sara Lance, as we knew her, died in Bishop’s lab is certainly shocking, but is it any more surprising than her quiet conversation with Spooner that reveals she fears that her time as a hero – and of happiness with Ava – is just another phase in a life that’s been full of more than her share of reinventions and reversals?

But the heart of Legends of Tomorrow has always been the story of Sara Lance, and the revelation that she’s dead, cloned, and now spliced with alien DNA is just another (admittedly incredibly weird) step in her journey. After all, alien clone Sara wants to marry Ava just as desperately as her 100% human self ever did, and her decision to try and stop Bishop came at the cost of her own alien DNA-free future. Because making hard choices is what heroes do, and no matter what form her body may take, Sara Lance has the heart and soul of a hero. Where her journey takes her next – and how her new alien hybrid status affects that story – is anyone’s guess. But for the first time in a long time when it comes to this character, I am really looking forward to finding out.

The post How Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Reinvents Sara Lance (Again) appeared first on Den of Geek.

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dispatchdcu · 3 years

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Alien #6 Preview

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Alien #6 Synopsis: IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN! Epsilon Station is losing its orbit. Gabriel Cruz is losing his son. Can anything be saved? Parental Advisory Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson Art: Salvador Larroca and Inhyuk Lee Publisher: Marvel Comics Price:$3.99 Release Date: August 25th, 2021 Check out the Alien #6 Preview Pages below Dig into our other Comic Book Dispatch Reviews HERE. Or,…

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#Alien #Alien 6 #Alien 6 Preview #comic books #comics #marvel comic books #Marvel Previews #Preview #Previews

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girlsbtrs · 3 years

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The Five Best Songs in Movie Scenes, According to a High School Senior

Written by Jennifer Moglia. Graphic by Laura Cross.

As a girl who was born in the 2000s, lived out my childhood in the 2010s, and turned 18 years old in the year 2021, all forms of media have played a huge role in my experiences growing up. From movies and TV shows to all different types of music to YouTube videos and social media creators, I’ve spent a large portion of my life watching other people do things, whether it was acting, singing, playing an instrument, or even just reviewing makeup products on Vine or TikTok.

However, one of these mediums has stood out from the rest; movies (or as the nerd in me would like to call them, “films”). As a freshman in high school, I decided to try to start watching more movies when I realized that my favorites consisted solely of Disney cartoons and the occasional cheesy rom-com.

Over the years, I’ve practically exhausted Netflix and Hulu’s libraries, bought a ridiculous amount of DVDs, and my Letterboxd diary has just reached 200 films (shameless self-promo, you can follow me there @happilyjennifer). When watching movies, especially ones that I’ve never seen before, I always try to pay attention to the music used in each scene - not the instrumental score, but the specific songs used to highlight pivotal moments.

The right track can make a sad scene heart-wrenching or a happy scene exhilarating, a romantic scene fairy tale-worthy or a death scene absolutely traumatic; a particular song can elevate a key scene in a film, making it that much more impactful. So, without further ado, here are my five favorite uses of songs in movie scenes, from films I’ve seen throughout my 18 years.

Honorable Mention: Heroes by David Bowie in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

Some might be shocked at this scene’s placement in the “honorable mention” section due to how revered it is, but that’s almost why it lands there. This film and book have both been overhyped to death as a coming-of-age staple for as long as I can remember, and for that reason, I was underwhelmed when I first read and watched it.

However, I don’t think it should suffer because of its reputation, which is why I simply couldn’t pick a numbered spot for it. Standing alone as a scene, without any of the praise, this song and movie combination is absolutely breathtaking.

The visual of Emma Watson’s character Sam standing up in the car with Patrick and Charlie, her arms outstretched as the trio zooms through the tunnel to the city, is a visceral experience. Charlie proclaiming that he feels “infinite” is the cherry on top - he finally feels free, free from any past trauma or current stresses or general pressures of being a teenager.

It’s a beautiful moment, and it’s made iconic by the addition of Bowie’s hit song. The pairing of Heroes with “Perks”’ instantly recognizable “tunnel scene” is unforgettable.

5. God Only Knows by The Beach Boys in “Love Actually”

As a member of “Gen Z”, you won’t be surprised to hear that my attention span is not the best. That’s why, at times, “Love Actually” dragged a bit for me - I felt that the two-hour and 15-minute runtime was just a little much, especially with so many different stories to keep up with.

Despite all of that, though, I think that the ending practically saves this movie. The words “one month later” flash across the screen, and we are brought to Heathrow Airport, the place that David, played by Hugh Grant, spoke of at the beginning of the film.

We’re reminded of his opening sentiment, that whenever he’s feeling down, he thinks back to watching families reuniting at the gates in this airport, and he instantly feels better. It’s a perfect opening to a film about love, and calling back to it makes for a perfect ending.

The viewers see each of the film’s stories wrapped up neatly with a bow, particularly helpful for people like me who practically forgot about some of the characters by the time the two-hour mark was reached. What really makes this scene one of my favorites, though, is the very end of it.

As the lyrics “God only knows what I’d be without you” repeat and start to fade out, we are taken away from our characters and the screen now shows real families reuniting in Heathrow Airport, not actors. The clips form a collage and then, ultimately, a heart, before it all fades to black. True human connection can warm even the coldest of hearts, and this classic love song by The Beach Boys is the perfect soundtrack to these heartfelt moments.

4. Fooled Around and Fell in Love by Elvin Bishop in “Guardians of the Galaxy”

Throughout my middle school and early high school years, I knew more about Marvel movies than I did about my family or the material I was learning in school. I saw “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in theaters five times, skipped my first spring formal dance to see “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” in 3D on opening night, and even had a personalized Iron Man sweatshirt that I wore nearly every day.

The Marvel franchise that utilizes music, or at least recognizable music, the most is definitely the “Guardians of the Galaxy” series. Chris Pratt’s character Peter “Star Lord” Quill’s mother made mixtapes for him while she was still in his life, filled with pop music from the 1970s-80s that she listened to when she was younger.

Titled “Awesome Mix Volume 1”, Quill becomes attached to it as it was one of the only items he had left of his mother after they were separated. The music that she shared with him becomes a key piece of this movie as well as its sequel, from Baby Groot swaying in a flower pot to “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 to Star Lord completing a mission while Redbone’s “Come And Get Your Love” plays through his headphones.

My favorite use of a classic song in a “Guardians” movie, though, is in an interaction between Quill and his love interest, Gamora. The two are bonding over their unusual relationships with their parents with Quill talking about how music connects him to his mom, pulling out his tape deck and headphones.

The dynamic between the two characters here is hilariously adorable, as Gamora explains that she doesn’t believe in music or dancing, which appalls Quill and leads to him explaining the plot of the movie “Footloose” to her, applying it to the people on her planet. He then takes off his headphones and puts them on her head, allowing her to listen to “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”, though she doesn’t quite appreciate the moment, talking over the music about how the “melody is very pleasing.”

I’m a sucker for awkwardly cute couples and the mini enemies-to-lovers storyline between Star Lord and Gamora gives me butterflies every time; I can’t help but giggle when Quill goes in for the kiss and Gamora immediately pulls a weapon on him. The use of such a well-known love song makes this moment that much sweeter.

3. Where is my Mind? by The Pixies in “Fight Club”

Yes, I realize that I’m automatically breaking the first rule of “Fight Club” by even listing it here, but I had to. This is a movie that countless people (men, countless men) had told me to watch for years, and I finally caved about a year ago out of “quarantine boredom.”

While I don’t praise this film as much as others do (men, as much as men do), I can certainly appreciate the influence that it has had on the world of film at large. There’s a lot of commentary on consumerism, violence, individualism, and the concept of masculinity packed into these two hours, even though many people (you know what these parentheses are about to say: many men) miss all of that and just watch it for the fight scenes.

The scene I chose from “Fight Club” as one of my favorites uses of a song in a film is the ending, which includes “Where is my Mind?” by The Pixies. The Narrator (Ed Norton) has just shot himself, effectively killing his alternate personality of Tyler Durden, and his love interest Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) has been kidnapped and brought to him by his Project Mayhem workers.

Marla is horrified upon finding The Narrator in the condition that he’s in and learning that he’s the one who put himself in this situation, or at least he thinks so. All he can offer to her is to say this: “I'm sorry...you met me at a very strange time in my life.” This is when the buildings start to fall.

All of the explosives planted by Project Mayhem begin to detonate, exploding and imploding as Marla and The Narrator look on, The Pixies’ hit playing softly in the background. She looks startled at first, before relaxing and allowing him to take her hand, and the two watch the city crumble to the ground with “Where is my Mind?” as the backing track; it’s masterfully done.

2. Everytime by Britney Spears in “Spring Breakers”

I want to start this section by saying that I’m fully aware that this scene shouldn’t work, let alone be beautiful, and the same could be said for this movie as a whole, but for some reason, there’s something captivating about “Spring Breakers” and the renowned “Everytime” scene. Netflix first suggested this movie to me as a freshman in high school (complete side note: Why, Netflix? What was okay about suggesting this to a 14-year-old?), and it has stuck with me for years after.

The way that “Spring Breakers” sugarcoats itself in its marketing is almost a microcosm of its themes and storyline. The neon color schemes and promos including former Disney Channel stars Selena Gomez and Vaness Hudgens hide a story of four girls on their spring break consumed by crime, drugs, and murder, and this scene exemplifies that perfectly.

After Gomez’s character Faith gets scared and goes back home, drug and arms dealer Alien (James Franco) takes Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) to a strip club where they meet his rival, fellow drug dealer Big Arch. Alien arms the girls with shotguns and pink ski maks adorned with unicorns (hello, symbolism!), and they gather around the piano next to his pool to listen to him play.

Franco’s character begins to play Spears’ hit “Everytime”, the girls singing along, before Britney’s original version takes over, playing as a montage of the group participating in multiple armed robberies plays out on the screen in slow motion. The juxtaposition of the soft, feminine song with the violent crimes being carried out sums up this entire film in a nutshell; I strongly believe that this scene helps this film earn its title as a masterpiece.

1. Young Blood by The Naked and Famous in Disney’s “Prom”

Giving the top spot to a movie that most people probably haven’t seen could be seen as a bold move, but I’m telling you, this movie raised me. I have such a vivid memory of seeing it in theaters with my mom when I was only eight years old, dreaming about the day that I’d get to dress up and go to my own prom; pretty crazy that ten years later, I’ll be attending my high school’s prom in a month, and I still think about this movie often.

I identified with Aimee Teegarden’s character Nova Prescott heavily when I was younger, the star student who always wanted to be the best and do the best, quickly turning into the obsessive perfectionist who doesn’t know how to have fun and let go. Thomas McDonnell’s portrayal of Jesse Richter, the bad boy with a soft side who introduces Nova to a whole new world, has always tugged at my heartstrings.

The scene in this movie that has stuck with me for a decade now comes when Nova and Jesse are starting to work together to plan and decorate for prom while also started to develop feelings for each other. Nova is stressed that another school’s theme is too similar to theirs and that they will be upstaged, to which Jesse says, “let’s see how starry their night really is.”

The pair hops onto Jesse’s motorcycle and sets off to visit the rival school. As they take the ride, indie band The Naked and Famous’ song “Young Blood” plays in the background, the upbeat chorus and “yeah yeah yeah”s perfectly framing Nova’s change of heart towards Jesse.

They sneak into the other school to check out their decor, only to be caught by the police and taken home by their parents. Nova’s father snaps at Jesse, and while the girl she was at the beginning of the movie would have agreed with her dad, she doesn’t; in fact, she defends Jesse, and apologizes to him for her parent’s behavior the next day.

In addition to being one of my favorite coming-of-age movie moments, this movie also introduced me to The Naked and Famous and the album that this song is on, “Passive Me, Aggressive You”, which has become one of my favorite records of all time (listen to Girls Like You and Punching in a Dream and you’ll be hooked). As I mentioned earlier, the right soundtrack can make a romantic scene a million times more magical, and that’s exactly what the use of Young Blood does here.

#jennifer moglia

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