Arjan Brentjes’s film “Sad Beauty” finds an unexpected source of solace in the age of ecological despair.
Tag: art
Man dressed as the Joker injures 17 on Tokyo train
A man dressed in a Joker costume and brandishing a knife stabbed at least one passenger on a Tokyo commuter train before starting a fire, injuring passengers and sending people scrambling to escape and jumping from windows, police and witnesses said.
The Tokyo Fire Department said 17 passengers were injured, including three seriously. Not all of them were stabbed and most of the other injuries were not serious, the fire department said.
The attacker, whom police identified as 24-year-old Kyota Hattori, was arrested on the spot after Sunday’s attack and was being investigated on suspicion of attempted murder, the Tokyo metropolitan police department said Monday.
The attacker, riding an express train headed to Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, abruptly took out a knife and stabbed a seated passenger – a man in his 70s – in the right chest, police said. Injury details of other 16 passengers are still being investigated, police said.
Police said he told authorities that he wanted to kill people and get the death penalty. Nippon Television said he also said that he used an earlier train stabbing case as an example.
Witnesses told police that the attacker was wearing a bright outfit – a green shirt, a blue suit and a purple coat – like the Joker villain in Batman comics or someone going to a Halloween event, according to media reports.
A video posted by a witness on social media showed the suspect seated, with his leg crossed and smoking in one of the train cars, presumably after the attack.
Tokyo police officials said the attack happened inside the Keio train near the Kokuryo station.
Television footage showed a number of firefighters, police officials and paramedics rescuing the passengers, many of whom escaped through train windows. In one video, passengers were running from another car that was in flames.
NHK said the suspect, after stabbing passengers, poured a liquid resembling oil from a plastic bottle and set fire, which partially burned seats.
Shunsuke Kimura, who filmed the video, told NHK that he saw passengers desperately running and while he was trying to figure out what happened, he heard an explosive noise and saw smoke wafting. He also jumped from a window but fell on the platform and hurt his shoulder.
“Train doors were closed and we had no idea what was happening, and we jumped from the windows,” Kimura said. “It was horrifying.”
The attack was the second involving a knife on a Tokyo train in three months.
In August, the day before the Tokyo Olympics closing ceremony, a 36-year-old man stabbed 10 passengers on a commuter train in Tokyo in a random burst of violence. The suspect later told police that he wanted to attack women who looked happy.
While shooting deaths are rare in Japan, the country has had a series of high-profile knife killings in recent years.
In 2019, a man carrying two knives attacked a group of schoolgirls waiting at a bus stop just outside Tokyo, killing two people and injuring 17 before killing himself. In 2018, a man killed a passenger and injuring two others in a knife attack on a bullet train. In 2016, a former employee at a home for the disabled killed 19 people and injured more than 20.
ARTICLE: https://abc7.com/tokyo-train-stabbing-joker-attack/11187717/
Xen – The Zen of the Other the Audio Drama
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
Buy Digital Album $6.66 USD or more
Xen: The Zen of the Other is a work that follows one man as he attempts to find his way through the jumble of modernity that envelopes us all and threatens to strangle us in its “Tentacles Longer Than Night.”
Cast into a world where the liminal overlaps with the world of paranormal /philosophical speculations, Ezra Buckley struggles to keep his head above water long enough to pluck a jewel of wisdom from the crown of a forest spirit.
In a world devoid of rites of passage, Ezra finds himself on his own as he is confronted with the very real prospect of having a life-changing, Liminal experience in the woods of Big Sur, if he can survive it.
Is it even real?
Is it the legendary Watchers of Big Sur phenomena or something else?
Xen is a work that confronts the questions of identity, modernity, life, the other, and the place for rites of passage in the modern world.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
credits
released October 29, 2021
Xen: The Zen of the Other
Written by Ezra Buckley. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that’s a real name or not.- thepsychopath.org
Background information by Cameron Whiteside, if that indeed is his real name.- whereiscameron.wtf
Produced by P. Emerson Williams- pemersonwilliams.wordpress.com
The voice of Joseph Matheny performed by himself- josephmatheny.com
The voice of Ezra Buckley performed by Chris Gabriel aka memeanalysis- memeanalysis.com
The voice of Ralph performed by P. Emerson Williams
The voice of Tiamat performed by Anna “Maiya” Young- www.godmonsters.com
The voice of Racoon 1 performed by Iskandar Sakut abn Mayu (aka Eian Orange of Z(enseider)Z)- eianorange.zenseiderz.org
The voice of Racoon 2 by performed Deb Petrochko – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)
The voice of the waitperson performed Missy G – afieldofred.wordpress.com
The poems of Ezra Buckley read by Joseph Matheny
Xen: The Zen of the Other- Copyright 2021 Joseph Matheny
All Rights Reserved
A Danish Museum Lent an Artist $84,000 to Reproduce an Old Work About Labor. Instead, He Pocketed It and Called It Conceptual Art
The museum said it will eventually want its money back, but the artist, Jens Haaning, has no plans to acquiesce.
A Danish artist was given tens of thousands of dollars by a museum to reproduce an old sculpture. Instead, he pocketed the money and called it a new conceptual artwork.
Take the Money and Run is the name of the piece by artist Jens Haaning—as well as a rather straightforward description of it.
For its current exhibition, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, lent Haaning 534,000 kroner ($84,000). Per their written agreement, the artist would exhibit the banknotes themselves, effectively recreating a pair of artworks he made in 2007 and 2010 that represented the average annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane, respectively.
However, when the museum opened up the box containing Haaning’s piece, they found two empty frames. The banknotes were absent.
Influencer Society and Its Future
Swallow the Ted pill on Unabomber stan TikTok
“HELLO FELLOW TRIBE MEMBERS.” The friendly greeting is superimposed over a familiar image of a rust-colored A-frame cabin with a green roof. Below it, a teen waves and strikes poses along with the on-screen text while percussion music plays in the video’s background. “Some of my beliefs: unga bunga > ooga booga. the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. anti civ CHAD. i cannot wait to tear down some power lines with you guys!”
Of all the contemporary internet’s innumerable hovels, few are as bewildering as the shambly shanty of Tedpilled TikTok. There, content creators meet the platform’s trending memes in a densely ironic effort to elevate Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Through song imitations, dialogue reenactments, reaction videos, voiceovers, and dances, TikTokers broadcast the incarcerated terrorist’s views about the necessity of dismantling industrial society through property destruction and murder.
Using the hashtags #tedpill, #tedk, and #tedkazcynski—which have collectively garnered millions of views—the Tedpilled place photographs of the Unabomber in “duets” with other videos, creating a counterpoint between Kaczynski’s views and the supposed excesses of influencer culture. With the Wombo.AI, they face-morph Kaczynski into goofily singing songs about Fortnite. Elsewhere, shaggy anarchists riff on the #DontBeSurprised trend—in which TikTokers share images representing their hopes and dreams with the text “Don’t be surprised if one day I just . . . ”—juxtaposing the peppy indie-folk song “Go Down On You” by The Memories with pictures of Ted Kaczynski standing next to his off-the-grid cabin. Light-hearted jokes about personal body counts and depopulation fantasies coexist alongside more earnest defenses of anarcho-primitivist politics.
To swallow the “Ted pill” is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
It’s a strange, if organic, world. It blurs the line between the hyperbolic adoration of online stan culture and a critique of the same, all unfolding in the vernacular of the young and extremely online: Ted was right. Ted is daddy. Ted is a based God. In one since-deleted video, a mop-topped kid mouths along to a hip-hop song and points to a text bubble reading, “the Industrial Revolution lowkey be cringe,” followed by a string of emojis. Another entry in the canon is labeled “ted is so fine i’m sorry”; in it, a doe-eyed teen who has superimposed herself over a photo of a young, fresh-faced Unabomber sits in front of the stars-and-stripes while lip-syncing the Counting Crows “Accidentally in Love” (originally composed for the motion picture Shrek 2).
To swallow the “Ted pill” is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It is to reject modernity, agriculture, and civilization itself. It offers a dystopian diagnosis of modern life, embracing a utopian fantasy of some prelapsarian state-of-nature. More paradoxically, Ted-pilling means using TikTok—a culturally dominant, globalized, Chinese-owned social networking techno-bauble—as a means of agitating for a radical political philosophy that is, among much else, vehemently anti-technology.
Episode 55 – Peter Grey and the Two Antichrists
…and the lord spoketh, and more episodes of SittingNow Radio were bestowed upon the people. The people were annoyed though, because they’d asked for Playstation 5’s all-round, but hey, they get what they’re given amirite
This week Ken and Ulysses Black sit down with the amazing Peter Grey Occultist and co-founder of the excellent Scarlet Imprint. We talk to Peter about his new book ‘The Two Antichrists’, Scientology, The Future of the Occult, Why Magicians should be looking to space, and not to the past, and a whole host of other weird goodness.
https://sittingnow.co.uk/episode-55-peter-grey-and-the-two-antichrists/
For more Peter Grey, check out our SittingNow TV episodes
Main theme by Simon Smerdon (Mothboy)
Music bed by chriszabriskie.com
Peter Grey Bio:
Peter Grey has spoken at public events and conferences in England, Scotland, Norway and the United States as well as closed gatherings. These have included Occulture, the Occult Conferences in Glastonbury and London, Treadwell’s Bookshop, the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle, the Psychology, Art and the Occult conference in London, Here to Go II in Norway, the Trans-States conference in Northampton University and many Pagan Federation events. A long term supporter of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in his native Cornwall, his work on the witches’ sabbat was first given at the annual Friends of the Museum gathering. His work has also appeared in numerous small journals and collections, such as The Fenris Wolf, as well as online. His collected writings, from 2008–2018, are published in The Brazen Vessel (2019) with those of Alkistis Dimech.
His Lucifer: Princeps (2015), is a study of the origins of the figure of Lucifer; he is currently writing the second part, Lucifer: Praxis, which addresses working with the fallen angels of the Enochic tradition and their transvection into the grimoires and modern practice.
How David Foster Wallace Used Compromise Aesthetics to Sell Infinite Jest
Rachel Greenwald Smith on the Treacherous Common Territories of Literary Culture and Capitalism
Ardor characterizes Anderson’s tone, but it also becomes a value in and of itself in her editorial work. “I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by putting in things that were ‘almost good’ or ‘interesting enough’ or ‘important,’” she writes in this particular issue. “There will be no more of it.”
Against “good poems” she wants to publish capital-A Art, art that goes beyond simply being the best version of itself. Notably diverging from Poetry magazine’s Open Door policy, Anderson believed that truly great art was not a matter of individual quality; it was a matter of ferocity of commitment. She wanted art that could knock a person over, art that “uses up all the life it can get.” She invokes the modernist credo “art for art’s sake,” but in an avant-garde reversal insists that this means not a retreat from the world of politics and history but a commitment to it. “Revolution is Art,” she explains. “You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modelled by the sea.”
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://lithub.com/how-david-foster-wallace-used-compromise-aesthetics-to-sell-infinite-jest
The Body, Biopolitics and Covid, The Night Forest Journal Issue 4 – Call For Howls
A howl erupts from the body, out into the world. From the flesh of the animal howling, its musicality rides the air, unseen but undeniably there.
A cough or a sneeze releases tiny particles of a disease named Covid-19 from the body, a presence that can ride upon the air and infect those who cannot see it, or deny its presence. It is not a friend to those animals it makes its host – perhaps it has become a friend to authoritarian governments however? Or has it been a monkeywrench in the machine, undermining political-narratives and creating issues for the state? Perhaps neither? Perhaps both? We do not pretend to know, with any quality of definiteness.
We know that we encounter the body as beautiful. We feel a desire for the bodily presence of living beings. If eroticism is assenting to life up to the point of death, as Bataille defines eroticism, there is an erotic quality to our life-desire. What does desire, eroticism, or love mean amidst a pandemic? Is this space that we find ourselves in the best or the worst space for love poetry? Again, we do not pretend to know.
For the fourth issue of The Night Forest Journal, we are asking for submissions on the body, biopolitics and Covid-19. As with previous issues, we will accept poems, essays, short stories and visual art for this project. Suggested areas of focus are –
Health and wellbeing
Bio-medical authoritarianism
Love, sex and desire in the pandemic
Free-love during lockdowns
Conspiracy and the art of seduction
Medicine-person praxis
Vaccine passports and (micro-)nationalism
We will publish up to 3 submissions from each contributor, but will consider any submissions sent to us. There is no limit in length of poems or essays. Submissions can be sent to us via nightforestpoetry@gmail.com or via our social-media presences. The deadline for submissions is the winter solstice 2021.
Dark Mountain: Issue 19
Our nineteenth book revolves around the theme of death, lament and regeneration.
With escalating reports of species extinction, the loss of habitats, and now a global pandemic, many people are waking up to the grief and loss that have threaded through the work Dark Mountain Project since it began. During a decade of descent, the books have appeared like small arks bobbing on a dark ocean, containers for creative work that mourns both ecological and cultural collapse and celebrates the beauty of a vanishing world.
LINK: https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-19/
Our core question we took with us as we began this voyage: How can we face and properly lament what has gone?
Shrouded, like a moth inside its cocoon, this collection sets out to hold ways to collectively mourn the loss not only of our fellow humans, but the wild world that has always succoured us. Our forebears knew the effect the dead have on life and the importance of grieving, of keeping the dead close. Our task was to find the words and images that mark the loss in ways we might have forgotten but still lie deep buried within us: how we might, like Caroline Ross, fashion our own Grave Goods out of deerskin and bronze, occupy the Houses of the Dead as in Fawzia Kane’s poems, and bear witness as Stephanie Krzywonos does, watching a penguin walk to its death in the arid Antarctic interior. How we can encounter the currents of the mythic beneath the ordinary world on a South Dakota highway as Samantha Wallen reminds us in The Death Mother.
The book has been created as a memorial by 60+ artists and writers, a gathering of testimonies from people and places, grief walkers and haunted lands. Ringed by the ashes of the burned forests of Australia and the Americas, entwined with the now-vanished tree roots of Deru Anding’s native Borneo, it enshrines the broken bones of dead creatures, reconfigured in ceremonial staffs by Jim Carter or intricately observed drawings by Kathryn Poole, the fallen feathers of the gyrfalcon, the wren and the black grouse, the testimonies of ancient grains and antediluvian fossils, wreathed by leaves of roseroot from Greenland and milkweed seeds from Ontario, the sharp scent of Mexican marigolds that light our way to the Underworld.
Words and images to take with us as companions into the dark…
Night Forest Journal Issue 3
The world has been a strange place since the release of the second issue of our journal. This strange quality has permeated near all aspects of civilisation, in more ways than we could articulate here. In a very long book, the philosopher Schopenhauer described poetry as being greater than history, as history can only account for a generalised description of the world (re-presented at a distance), while poetry articulates the experience of living in a moment, as the experiencer seeks to express ir. So, while these words are not a generalised totalising narrative of the experience of being in the world, they are expressions that these individuals wished to articulate, of their experience of this strange world.
This announcement is not for just one release, but for two. Alongside the release of our third journal, we are releasing a collection of poems written by Phen Weston and Julian Langer. To all of those who have contributed to the journal, we are sincerely grateful to receive your words. To all of you who may read these collections, we hope you find some beauty in these works.
Click to access night-forest-poetry-issue-3.pdf
LINK: https://nightforestpoetry.wordpress.com/2021/04/24/night-forest-journal-issue-3/