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Fishboy wound up peddling dope in the Projects, just like the Dealer knew he would. He’d sit out on a busted bit of playground fence listening to ratty old cassette tapes on a stoneage Sony Walkman one of the Project kids had swapped him, waiting for the business to rock up. He was the only peddler anyone knew who arrived early, like he was the one hungry for a fix & not the kids, which in a manner of speaking was true. He even had the sales pitch down to a fine art, like the product wasn’t already selling itself. Let it be known he was only in the biz on a short-term basis while he searched for renewed creativity, him being an incog rockstar on the down-&-out, or the up-&-up, depending on how he was inclined to spin it at any given time of day.
An extract from Glasshouse by Louis Armand.
Apart from soccer players, the two biggest sports stars for kids like me in the UK in the early seventies were the boxing heavyweights Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper—even if they were eclipsed in my schoolboy milieu by the likes of footballer Bobby Moore. I also used to see a teacher at school who was a black belt in karate practice his katas; unfortunately our Christian fundamentalist headmaster who had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp— and as a result had an aversion to anything from the east—wouldn’t let Mr Beach teach us how to break bricks with our bare hands! As a kid I watched the Batman TV series so it is probable I was exposed to Bruce Lee’s guest appearances as Kato before I learnt he was the ‘king of kung fu’.
An extract from Stewart Home‘s new book on Bruceploitation. Boom!
You stay on the outside and become a mirror for the others — and they don’t like what they see. But this is all discrete. You just become the Sonderling, the weirdo. It would be wonderful if we could be thankful for a job, and still see where this job becomes cruel, inhumane, hilarious, idiotic, not well constructed, underpaid, too exhausting, etc. and then speak openly about it.
MH interviews Heike Geissler.
In The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer states, “In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.” Three Nails, Four Wounds, accelerates time through memory, the “Photograph(s) may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print” and the speed of the shutter becomes “an explicable nano-flash of consciousness that looks to us like a transition between two significant points of entry and exit, but is merely an accident in infinite nothing” as is life.
Steve Finbow on Hector Meinhof‘s Three Nails, Four Wounds.
The idea of level encourages scientists, on the basis of nothing, to formulate the idea of dependence of everything on the minutest stuffs, because a level system admits of natural bottoms and tops. And while there is no reason to resist the idea that any number of things depend on the minutest features of the universe, why (by the very same token) should we insist upon it? In any case, it requires an argument to maintain any sort of dependence thesis, whatsoever its content. That is my fundamental argument against levels. By holding out the model of levels in advance of any argument to that end, we smuggle in some profound prejudices.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mariam Thalos.
Our years spent in school are those which undoubtedly shape our understanding of the world we live in, and what we learn is integral in informing our thinking and behaviour. But what we learn can be just as important as what we don’t. The absence of queer themes from the classroom, and often the sanitising or policing of sexuality as a topic entirely, directly affects the acceptance of queer people in society. The school curriculum has built an enormous barrier to constructing a system of pedagogical values which promote tolerance and inclusion. As it stands, it only works to deepen the social divisions that we pick up on from an early age, and to disallow queer people from seeing themselves reflected in the content that they engage with in the classroom.
By Elliot Ramsey.
The essence of the book lies within its own existence, the heft of the ‘book thing’ is equivalent to the ideas held within. I would have been happy if Repeater Books had drip fed the reading public with four books of 200 pages over a period of time but they have published a monster upon which we can binge, within which we can wrestle with Marxism, accelerationism, jungle, the Cthulhu Mythos, late-stage capitalism, Batman, Acid Communism and a host of other issues relative to life, culture and politics in the 21st century. Sometimes, Fisher writes like Michael Bracewell shot through with Marx, like Roland Barthes listening to breakbeat hardcore, or like a radical Geoff Dyer infused with the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft rather than D. H. Lawrence.
Steve Finbow reviews Mark Fisher‘s posthumous collection, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 – 2016).
For the most part, we’ve given up any expectation of being surprised by culture — and that goes for “experimental” culture as much as popular culture. Whether it is music that sounds like it could have come out twenty, thirty, forty years ago, Hollywood blockbusters that recycle and reboot concepts, characters and tropes that were exhausted long ago, or the tired gestures of so much contemporary art, the boring is everywhere. It is just that no one is bored — because there is no longer any subject capable of being bored. For boredom is a state of absorption — a state of high absorption, in fact, which is why it is such an oppressive feeling. Boredom consumes our being; we feel we will never escape it. But it is just this capacity for absorption that is now under attack, as a result of the constant dispersal of attention, which is integral to capitalist cyberspace.
An extract from the late Mark Fisher‘s posthumous collection, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 – 2016).
All of Dávila’s stories can be read as arcs of disenchantment—her characters discover that their imagined freedoms are actually more suffocating forms of captivity.
Darren Huang reviews The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila.
In January of 1988, I was in Nicaragua, in Estelí, a pro-Sandinista city. Ostensibly, I was there for an intensive Spanish course, but of course you don’t go to a country at war to learn a language. Estelí was battle-bruised, with bullet holes in the sides of the rough cement buildings, potholed roads, open sewers in the street. There were shortages of food, of toilet paper, of medical supplies. Everyone had stories about the violence that marked the final years of the Somoza dictatorship and the relatives and friends they lost to that violence. The earliest days of the Sandinista revolution seemed a reprieve, a time of relative peace even as the country lay in ruins, but violence spread again as the US provided arms, training, and money to the Contras in the civil war. Reagan is going, the revolution is continuing, read the banner at our language school. We even had a party to celebrate.
By Linda Mannheim.